Sex on the beach can be a good thing. At least, it was a good thing for me. It’s so hard to surprise yourself in the arena of pokey-pokey after you’ve had it a couple times. It may blow your mind in new and exciting ways until you’re 50, but there are not many chances to reclaim the wonder and mystery of the act that cease to exist the moment that the ripping of a zipper turns anticipation into memory. I know that I’m forever trying to recreate the hot excitement of that first drunken kiss in a bathroom stall, or the sweetness of a peck on the cheek and a whispered “call me tomorrow” that you believe is sincere.

Then you find yourself sneaking away from your boyfriend’s family reunion to go back to your motel room to get the lube that you will secret across a black Long Beach Island expressway onto the five square feet of beach that are between flood lights, and far enough from the ocean so that the tide won’t drag you in, and yet removed enough from the dune grass that you won’t find the signs of limes disease on the underside of your ansil adams.

I crave spontaneity, but I tend to prefer it on my own terms. I like surprises, and I like change, but I like both best when I orchestrate them. It’s easy to lapse into “Once in a Lifetime-lite” ramblings like “This is not my beautiful laptop!” and “where does this hangover lead to?,” but if the trappings of my settled life fell away from me tomorrow I’d be left sitting against the proverbial blank green screen with no fancy dance moves or rear-projectors to make the whole thing look graceful.

That’s why sex on the beach is good for me, but in the way that vitamin c or getting enough sleep is good for me. I like the slight surreptitious element of it. Or should I say slightly elemental surreptitiousness? According to the movies no one ever plans this act. The waves lap at their ankles and the starlight gets into their brains and soon they’re rolling around as if sand feels great on one’s rectum and condoms are just one unit of a condominium. But in reality all that dreamy scenery and exposure to the outdoors actually comes only as a reward to a surprising amount of preperation.

“Don’t get too close to the edge of the blanket, you’ll drag sand on it! Don’t let the lube fall over. Is someone coming? Ok, just be quick. Faster! Ok, not that fast. There we go.”

The key element to this is that my partner in crime (either public indecency, tresspassing or both) was my boyfriend. There are things you can share with your boyfriend that you can’t with anyone else. Gone is the thrill of the hunt or the mysteries of the first. You lose the possibility of this, this exact sensation of euphoria, is going to continue unaltered for the rest of my life. You lose the right to not know what exact hours of the night that someone farts in their sleep.

But you gain sex on the beach. You gain the comfort to step into an unknown stretch of footing at a time when you can’t see anything but a lit cigarette or the barest glint of moon on waves in a place that would drown you if you tried to go there now. You gain a barest breeze over parts of yourself that have never felt that kind of air before. You gain lying on your back with your eyes closed, or focused on the glowing braille of the big dipper, because there is no reason to be scared of anything with your present company.

Though I’ve never had luck with palms or tea leaves, I swear that at that moment I saw my future in the stars. I can’t say that it burned like a fabulous yellow roman candle, but it was safe and certain. It might still  involve mosquito bites and lonely afternoons and more uncertainty than a blind man trying to read matzoh, but it was anchored in sex on the beach, and all that comes after it.

The look of “well, we tried that” and the giggly scramble shake sand out of underwear and find shoes and try not to look sheepish to the lone late-night jogger that catches you ascending the wooden stairs back into civilization, or whatever approximates it in a New Jersey beach town. Taking one final shower before a judicious application of aloe and trying to get some sleep. Knowing that there are probably thousands of gay men all over the world having sex under a pier or in the woods, or somewhere so crazy that you’d need two maps to find them,  but also accepting that they won’t get to cuddle afterwards. 

This was a year ago. And I’m writing this from my apartment in DC. As I was walking my dog at the corner of Columbia and Ontario about an hour ago, a woman stopped me and took a look down at my canine charge.

“What a pretty little thing!”

I’m used to that reaction. I’m also used to telling people my puppy is moving in to lick them, and not bite, and to explaining that she’s 5 months old and is probably a coonhound/lab mix but that we don’t know for sure. So when people on the street abruptly shift tones when saying “Can I ask you a question?,” I don’t know how to respond. The inflection was too serious for “Can I pick her up” and the asker too well-dressed to be hitting me up for bus fare.

“Why does she have so much death in those little dark eyes?  She’ll probably die tomorrow if you don’t get some of it out.”

I nodded politely, my stock response to statements that make no sense.

“The good lord wanted me to tell you that. Have a good day.”

The sun glinted briefly off the shades of her own night-black sunglasses and she was gone down the street. And now my heart is still beating. I’ve parlayed one scenic fuck into an added year of certainty in my life. Until then, I would actually have told you that I had a lot fewer things to worry about. But now could my puppy die tomorrow? Will the world end in a middle eastern conflict, or my relationship disintergrate because of that final time that one of left the toilet seat down? 

You eventually have to drive back to the city. But if you’re really lucky, you’ll find enough sand in your shoes and your suitcases, your ears and arpmits and the corners of your eyes, that some will stick around and be there to irritate your skin, to provide one pleasant distraction in what is so often an otherwise ordinary life.