Fourth of July Sale! 🎆
Get 30 percent off an annual subscription. Plus, an ode to lost magic places.
Good Lord, what have I become? Did I just actually put a fireworks emoji in my headline? Indeed I did. I hope and pray that it’s the last time I ever use an emoji. I sincerely apologize for sinking to that level. But a man has to find a way to command your eyeballs in this glutted, attention-jockey economy, even if I generally prefer the more muted Robert Frank approach. (See cover photo, above.) Frank captured all the glory and sadness of his present-day America. And we’ve only experienced more of both, since.
But forget all the melancholic minor notes. I have good tidings of great joy. I’m taking a breather for the next week-and-a-half or so. (That’s not the part you should celebrate, so if you are, keep it to yourself.) It’s summer/Independence Day, and I have family to see at sun’n’sand locations. And besides, I need to get away from the news/internet, which has been stalking me like a jilted lover since January 20. But rather than leaving you barren in my absence, I have two gifts for you.
The first is a 30-percent-off-sale, now through next Sunday, July 6. What that means? If you are a free rider, now is the time to pay up so that you don’t sustain cranial injuries running into a paywall ever again.
If you enjoy these scribblings, you should know that I’m not doing it for fun, but for a living. Even if it’s fun living. But enough about me. What’s in it for you? You will get the full, uncut Slack Tide every week, which includes nudity. (Of the mental variety. As in, my thoughts laid naked before you.) Plus, full access to the comments section, where I regularly engage in intercourse with readers. (Of the conversational variety, pervert!) A lot has changed since 2021, when I first launched this thing of ours. But one thing that hasn’t is our rock-bottom prices. Just as on Day One, it’s still five dollars a month, or fifty bucks a year. We are still undercutting 4/5ths of the other Substack bestsellers. If you’ve already availed yourself of that deal, then congratulations, lucky person. But with our 30-percent-off-sale, you can now get a $50 annual subscription for a mere $35 (for the first year). Do I really need to do the math for you? That’s only $2.92 a month. How little is that? Try this experiment: walk into a bar with $2.92, attempting to numb your pain, and see how far it gets you. Maybe a charitable barkeep will pour you a half an ounce of rail whiskey with ice. And not that artisanal, oversized block ice that hits you in the face and dislodges your dental work, either. Ice chips. Like the kind you find in an outdoor freezer at the local fillin’ station. Whereas $2.92 a month here will keep you drunk – on my precious, carefully crafted words! For the entire year! (Apologies for the metaphor if you’re in recovery. Don’t fall off the wagon on my account.)
Caveat: This offer is for new subscribers only. Existing annual subscribers cannot cancel and re-subscribe to get the deal. Substack doesn’t allow it, sorry. It’s out of my hands. So don’t try to, and then complain to me when it doesn’t work. (I’m on vacation, and won’t hear your cries of anguish.) But an existing annual subscriber can buy a 30-percent-off gift subscription for somebody else, which I encourage you to do. Why hoard? Don’t be selfish. You’re better than that. As J.C. said of Slack Tide: “Go and make disciples.”
My second gift, so this isn’t just a mere sales pitch, is an old piece I still feel affection for. (Screw politics and all the present dysfunction — I’ve had enough of both, and imagine you have, too. So let’s go a different direction, and give you some much-needed rest.) This is what we used to call a “Casual,” back at my former magazine, which we ripped off from the old New Yorker. It had to be a no-exceptions one-pager, which meant that whatever you were doing in print, you had to get it done in 800 words. So this was a capsule sketch I did of a local legend named Vera Freeman, who owned Vera’s White Sands restaurant, about a half an hour down the road from where I live. She’d set up a throwback Tiki paradise in the marshlands of southern Maryland. There was nothing like it before, and there won’t be anything like it again. It is our duty to notice such things while they still reside among us. Here’s the piece, called “Freaky Tiki”:
THERE AREN’T MANY GOOD PLACES to get lost anymore, but I know of one near where I live. It’s deep in southern Maryland’s Calvert County, past the steamed-crab stands and empty tobacco barns, which are fast losing ground to tanning salons, “Embroid Me” shops, and other strip-mall abscesses. Just north of Solomon’s Island, where the Patuxent River feeds the Chesapeake Bay, you’ll see the sign for Vera’s White Sands restaurant.
It’s large and pink, with palm trees, and features the white-haired proprietor, Vera Freeman, in an exotic gown and Isis-like headgear, holding a martini glass. She looks right out of old Hollywood. And in fact, she is, sort of. The former aspiring dancer, who lived next to Hopalong Cassidy and fraternized with Bing Crosby, came here from there in the ’50s, along with her late husband Doc, a real estate tycoon and “optometrist to the stars.”
On St. Leonard’s Creek, they set up a marina/restaurant that doubles as a Polynesian paradise, albeit one that’s now down at the heels. Her incongruous Taj-Mahal knockoff of a house sits across the restaurant’s weed-strewn parking lot. Her Silver Cloud Rolls Royce is under a tarp, and she no longer swims in the oval indoor pool set in the marble floor of her living room.
The restaurant is a quarter full on a good night. Still, there’s something about it. I have my young kids convinced it’s “the magic place,” though admittedly they’re easy marks. The little suckers also believe that Santa hibernates in an igloo, and that I can remove my thumb with remedial-magician sleight-of-hand. But this time, I’m not so sure I’m lying.
Perched on a bluff overlooking the creek, Vera’s is an overgrown Tiki hut, gleaming in the conch-shell pink that lacquers Vera’s lips. Outdoors, banana trees compete for space with Easter Island statues, Tiki totems, and the shell of a 487-pound man-eating clam, billed as the largest ever recovered, from the Philippines to Borneo.
Walking through the Tiki-headed doors is like falling into another dimension, a living Gauguin painting. It feels like a place where Tahitian nymphs should take your order in coconut-shell bikinis, where Captain Bligh and Don the Beachcomber could become drinking buddies over Mai Tai’s, where sacrificial virgins are cooked in volcanoes, preferably with a pineapple and mango-chutney glaze.
My kids squeeze into a booth that is a thatched cabana. They jam leis into their water glasses and stick drink umbrellas in their ears, while my wife and I watch blue herons pick baitfish out of the marsh. The sun sets perfectly through the panoramic windows, as if it were on the payroll. The food is entirely beside the point. The stuffed shrimp tastes like a scoop of dough. And the crabcakes look like they’ve had chemotherapy, suffering by comparison with those at Stoney’s in nearby Broomes Island, which are the best in Maryland and, by extension, the world.
But the cocktails are tall and strong. I order the “Mystery Drink,” a coconut-and-something-or-other concoction. Under questioning, my waitress refuses to give up the goods. “That would ruin the mystery,” she says. And mystery is what the restaurant turns on. It’s a place that reveals itself slowly, with every corner, from the leopard-skin bar, to the Peacock room, stacked with artifacts and curios from Vera’s world travels: an 8-foot Kenyan giraffe, a South Pacific fertility goddess with ruby nipples, a mermaid canoe made out of seashells that hangs from the ceiling, Bamboo Room tables fashioned from the hatches of old sailing vessels and inlaid with pieces of eight.
Vera’s is so awe-inspiring it prompted house piano player Sharon Marman to “leave my job as a budget analyst to pursue my dream of music and selling Mary Kay.” Sharon plays some Beyoncé if a prom party comes in, but mostly she sticks to the old tunes, since “that’s what Miss Vera wants.” Vera’s general manager and all-purpose valet, Dr. Selvin Kumar, who hails from India, has even cast his sentiments into Song-of-Songs-like acrostic poetry: “Virtuous Everlasting Royal Aquarius.” (Kumar also self-published a biography of Tom Parran, a favorite regular and limo-company owner.)
When I interview Vera, who wears an ornate gown and gold-coin headpiece, she won’t disclose her age. But time’s ravages leave her unable to finish many of the stories she’s often told. She’s also driven to distraction by an armored knight standing in the corner, which she brought back from Barcelona. Vera is convinced he’s moving. “Did you see that?” she says repeatedly, as she eats caviar off Ritz crackers, while sipping her patented martini (just olives and gin).
She’s not scared, but impishly delighted. So I check it out to humor her. Unless there’s a midget squatting in the armor’s greave, the knight, in all likelihood, is staying put. But as Vera adjourns to take a nap, I tell her I’ll keep an eye on him anyway. It’d be a sin to ruin the mystery.
Postscript: Vera went on to that great Tiki Hut In the Sky a little over a year after I wrote this. Her restaurant still exists under new management. And the food is actually much better, now. But it looks totally different/modern, and although they kept some of Vera’s personal curios around for a while, all of them are now gone. It ain’t the same, or anywhere close. RIP, magic.
Bonus Tracks: Here’s a Fourth of July song I love. From Tahlequah, Oklahoma’s own Turnpike Troubadours, doing the “The Bird Hunters.” I don’t hunt, and never will, unless they start making birds catch-and-release, like the fish I so often manhandle. As a friend of mine’s dad used to say of ducks, and why it was hard to shoot them: “They’re too much like puppies with wings.” And technically, the Fourth only gets mentioned in the back third of the song. But this tune has so many dog references, and so much fiddle goodness getting sawed off throughout it, that it’s pretty much a no-brainer recommendation.
If you need a more on-the-nose Independence Day song, you can’t go wrong with the late, great Billy Preston’s version of “My Country Tis of Thee.” Not for nothing did they call him “The Fifth Beatle.” And I generally liked him better than George or Ringo, and on some days, when he let Yoko wreck the band, even more than John.