Travel Diaries #35 - Myrtle Beach
I never really wanted to go travelling, and in retrospect, that's exactly why I ended up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
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The Path of Least Resistance
I never really wanted to travel.
In the summer of 2009 myself and five friends from college set out on a journey to America for a few months, for a so-called ‘working holiday’. I’d just turned 21 two days before we flew, the proud owner of a new passport which would allow me to purchase alcohol.
We had J1 working holiday visas, given to students from various countries to legally work in the US before returning home at the end of the summer to continue studying. The official purpose of the visa is “for students from around the world to experience the culture and society of the United States and to offer a better understanding between nations.” In practice the J1 summer had become a rite of passage for students who want to spend a summer getting pissed up abroad.
Typical jobs sought included anything which provided money for booze, and to some extent rent – though the stereotype of pennywise students sleeping 15 people in a two-bed apartment on a variety of couches, blow-up beds and empty beer crates was one that had long entered the lore of ‘doing a J1’ to the point where it was not just accepted, but expected and embraced – so most of the money went on booze.
Typical destinations included obvious centres of American and western culture like San Diego, Chicago, New York and Boston. Guided by sense and the Irish ancestral instinct for making a few pound in a foreign country, others honed straight in on where the money is, and work at upscale restaurants, golf courses and resorts in the holiday homes of the rich like Montauk, Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.
Our destination was somewhere more off the beaten track, though where the desire to ‘do something different’ is usually either an attempt to leave one’s own world behind and immerse oneself in the new and undiscovered, for us it was simply the path of least resistance that none of us had ever heard of until someone suggested we go there. Our destination:
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
J1 Summer
To this day, whenever I’ve told an American acquaintance, friend, stranger, colleague, customer or family member that I once spent two and a half months in Myrtle Beach, their response has been a disgust-reflex grimace, either barely concealed or deliberately exaggerated, and one of two short questions:
“Why…??”
Or even:
“How…?!”
‘Dirty Myrtle’ as it is sometimes called, is a beach town on the coast of South Carolina, on a stretch of coast we learned was colloquially known as the ‘Redneck Riviera’. It has a reputation in the States as a prime Spring Break destination, where American students come to ‘party’ for a week every year, and has all the things you’d have in a typical beach town: a beach, the ocean, the sun, cheap bars and restaurants and unwashed masses of people from around the country who come there to drink and fornicate the pain and tedium of the other 51 weeks of their year away.
It wasn’t my first time abroad, though it was my first trip to the USA, a place I’d heard of from TV shows and movies. We landed straight into the steaming hot raunch of America’s Deep South. It was hot, and it was humid, the furnace blast to the face as you walk out of an air-conditioned airport lingering for the summer and enveloping us in its murk from the off. My first impression on our first few innocent strolls down one of the city’s suburban blocks: it was just like the movies.
We arrived during Biker Week, a Myrtle Beach tradition wherein gangs of bikers take over the boulevard that runs along the beach in all manner of crazy modified vehicles. Bikes with six wheels or bikes that looked like two bikes welded together or Harley Davidsons on stilts went up and down and up and down the street near our apartment. Pickup trucks crawled along the streets, the driver drinking a bottle of Bud Light, six of his friends sitting in a paddling pool full of water in the back of the truck, also drinking Bud Lights, country music blaring from the speakers. Large fuzzy bellies and mullets, in beach bars obese tourists shovelled hot dogs slathered in chili sauce and liquidised cheese into their mouths and faces, weed was smoked freely on the streets, and locals with handlebar moustaches and Confederate flag tattoos told us that Black Biker Week would be happening the following week, and warned us that this is when people tended to ‘get shot’.
We stayed in a motel complex called Rainbow Court, on the wrong side of the tracks of town, so to speak, and ramblings around the neighbourhood would have us coming across discarded needles, pools of blood, rubbish and people who looked like they might abduct and murder you. The six of us in a crappy little two-bed apartment in bunk beds, we knew no better and cared little as to where we were, and in our cramped quarters with barely functioning kitchen, as far as we saw it we were just fulfilling our duties to the time-honoured tradition of the rites of passage of the J1 summer by living in a shithole and behaving accordingly.
Mostly we didn’t know any better.
We weren’t alone – around a hundred other Irish students from various cities and colleges around the country had had the same idea as us, and presumably the same indifference to travel and exploration of American culture. Groups of 2 and 4 and 10 and all the other numbers of people filled the other apartments and rocking chair porches overlooking the swimming pool, and vending machine and wire fence that comprised the total facilities of the central courtyard. Over obligatory watery American beers introductions were made, which in Irish culture involves telling where you’re from, what the population of said town or village is (there are no cities in Ireland), and then trying to name as many people from the other person’s town as you can make any sort of tenuous link to, whether you actually know them or not, or have just recognise their name. Invariably, you each know one or two, and you might be related to each other. Inevitably, drinking games and awkwardly intoxicated attempts at romantic union – ‘shifting’ as it’s called in rural Ireland - ensued. Thus began – and continued – our J1 summer.
We weren’t that much interested in travelling at all.
Cultural Integration
We all set about looking for jobs, adopting the local muggy shuffle up and down the sun-split boulevard with handfuls of printed resumes, sweating profusely in humidity that would drown a cat and zero conditioning for it – I’d never been somewhere so hot. It wasn’t hard to find somewhere that would take you on at minimum wage, many were readily hired and employed for anything between 3 months and 3 hours at the local ‘theme park’ a few blocks away, which was more like a stationary carnival, or the water park across the street. Others found precarious seasonal jobs at parking lots, boardwalk bars and diners, convenience stores and parlours selling ice cream or henna tattoos.
I got a job as a cleaner at the water park. This involved walking around in a concrete environment painted a brilliant white colour that reflected all of the heat of the sun back onto me, with a crappy little sweeping brush made of twigs like something you’d see in an old Looney Tunes cartoon (I’ve found over the course of my life spent in North America that they actually use these shitty brushes everywhere – they are useless and demoralising tools) and a little red receptacle. There’s nothing to clean, really, in a water park, and I spent hours sweeping up dust and the odd bit of stray litter, which never amounted to more than piles of dust or sand or a fluttering sweet wrapper, or a cigarette butt which had floated over from the designated smoking area, which also sat in the bare heat of the sun. These shifts over the hottest eight hours of the day for $7 an hour were amongst the longest days of my life, time moving backwards, my brain dissolving in the heat. Music blared from tannoys with an interminable playlist of at-first quaint but later debilitating country music, a repetitive selection of songs which alternated between weepy ballads about women and pickup trucks and dead dogs, to rousing anthems about cold beer and fried chicken, to white boy country rappers harping on about all the pussy they were going to slay, while I swept small piles of sand into the dustpan and dumped them in the trash can, walking as slowly as possible partly just to give myself something to do. I began to understand that the reason people talk and walk so slowly down south is because of the heat, the kind of heat where you have to whip your t-shirt off and fan yourself with it whenever you sit on the toilet, though regular trips to the bathroom were also just something to do. In Ireland we use the word ‘miserable’ to describe weather that is wet, cold and dark; this was the first time I’d heard it used to describe weather that was wet, hot and bright – it worked just as well.
At lunch time we were fed from the in-house fast-food counter, itself a swimming pool of grease and plastic that served barely edible chili dogs, fries and the local delicacy funnel cake, which was a deep-fried donut type concoction covered in powdered sugar and dipped in chocolate. It was the favourite dessert, and it seemed, starter, main course and palate cleanser of the terminally obese who populated and frequented the city and the water park. I’d never seen anything of the sort. Even before departure to the US, Dublin airport has a mini-terminal for lounge for pre-clearance of American visas, where the average weight of individuals jumps by about ten or twenty stone, and they’re not carrying the extra ten or twenty stone of a rugby prop or sumo wrestler, either. All of the overweight is bad weight, it looks different to that of even the largest of people anywhere else. It is formed of folds and waves of dried fat and cellulite and funnel cakes, stomachs growing on arms and thighs, the people eating the funnel cakes looking like the thing they are consuming and devouring whole, like when you see couples who look like each other, or owners who look remarkably similar to their pet dogs – everywhere are people who look like the pies and cakes and burgers they’re feasting on. Did they choose the burger or did the burger choose them? Did they always look like that, has feeding on sugary processed shit made them look like sugary processed shit, or has looking like sugary processed shit made them seek out the treat they resemble? Or have they developed in a kind of symbiotic relationship, the chronically unwell and their chronically poisonous snacks developing little by little, slowly radicalising each other with fine-tuned personalised algorithmic adjustments tempting them ever further down the cake aisle, or into deeper recesses of the armpit of Walmart, so that after a while all they know is this, and their body craves nothing else, rejecting the very thought of nutrition itself - “Ah ain’t eatin’ no fuckin’ SALAD” – their engorged and suffocating spirits positively scream. It’s bad enough for health and mobility purposes, but it seemed to also have quite the effect on the individual’s cognitive and emotional functioning as well, the early onset of diabetes slowing the pace of their step and the gait of their southern drawl into a roll, along with the muggy sweat of the Deep Fried South.
But who were we to judge? We slept all day and drank all night – there was even a song to that tune about the J1 life, by Irish pop mediocrities The Coronas. Wallowing in our own filth and stale beer, in the early afternoon we’d arise from our hovels, and lurch down the street, marvelling at cultural phenomena like those great big hoarding signs displaying all you can eat oyster buffets, Walmart ‘orange juice’ which contained 500 ingredients and a disclaimer that read ‘*contains no juice’, and chalk outlines on the footpath of people who’d been shot outside Wendy’s, to subsist off the latest $3 special at the Subway sandwich place a few blocks away, saving money on nutrition for beer money. 40 oz bottles of mouldy malt liquor and tall cans of an alcoholic energy drink with names like ‘Four Loko’ or ‘Jungle Joose’. Every night we’d congregate in an apartment or on a porch – 5, 10, 20, 50 of the wider Irish group – to play raucous drinking games, talk loudly about things we knew nothing about and try to shift some girl who was from a town a two-hour drive from your home back in Ireland, with maybe the chat-up line of being a friend of a friend.
“Work is the curse of the drinking classes” – Oscar Wilde
It was always a highlight of the week when someone got arrested, for various innocent misdemeanours like mild public intoxication or pissing in an alleyway. The punishment would often be an overnight trip to a local jail cell, and a slap on the wrists. A group of lads from Dublin got arrested en masse one night for enjoying a case of beers by the roadside between Rainbow Court and the 11th Hour; they spent the night in a jail cell before a court appearance in the morning, where they’d been advised to plead ‘Guilty’, and suffered no further punishment nor fine for ‘Time Served’. They looked back in it fondly as the most fun they had all summer. One poor lad, a timid and unassuming chap from a southern Irish county, was picked out of a group one evening outside a bar and handed three separate charges: public intoxication, drinking out of a red plastic cup (in public), and littering, for trying to discard said cup on the street when the cops arrived. Three strikes and he was out: they hauled him straight to County, wherein he was stripped, hosed down, deloused and given an orange jumpsuit, spending the night in a cell with a guy who told him he was in for domestic abuse charges, and given he’d just been released from a prison stretch for manslaughter, would probably be going back in again.
The Irish lad got a bollocking from the judge and a $900 fine.
He remained gainfully employed though, his friends stumbled upon a local life-hack though in the aftermath: they had to inform his workplace that he wouldn’t be in that morning – that’s quite alright, they said, with a rare compassionate understanding for a no-show. It turned out that this seemed to be a perfectly acceptable and ordinary reason for missing a work shift in Myrtle Beach and no further punishment or reprimand would be forthcoming. And so it became standard practice for big drinkers who were running late or were rapidly losing interest in their jobs to get their friends to ‘call in’ for them – not ‘call in sick’, but ‘call in jail’.
God help them if they’d ‘been partying’ – an offence which usually led to instant dismissal, and growing resentment of ‘them damn Irish’.
As the summer crawled on a slow but chronic toll was taken on all by the heat, malnourishment from the local fast-food supply, and socially acceptable and encouraged alcohol abuse, growing numbers at some stage either lost, or lost interest in, their jobs. Many walked out after a few days, some returned to Ireland, or moved on elsewhere to a more appealing region of the US. They’d had enough. Though a loyal band of Myrtle Beach die-hards were committed to staying the course.
We did sometimes venture out from our increasingly inbred Irish community to interact with our environment, though usually just to take the piss out of them. A series of ‘hilarious’ and ever-taller tales was concocted about our home country to tell to unsuspecting, earnest and genuine Americans.
“Leprechauns are real”
“They’re an endangered species”
“We don’t have electricity in Ireland”
“There’s no Tuesdays in Ireland”
“The government gave the leprechauns jobs as street sweepers, but they had to take the brooms off them ‘cos they kept fighting each other with them.”
And so on, and so forth. The sort of mimetic jokes that appear to be spontaneous examples of divine wit, but on our return home to Ireland we discovered that these pranks have been told by immigrants and visitors to America for generations.
Hulk Hogan versus The Magician
We spent much of the summer in a five-block radius that contained our homes, our workplaces and a local bar called The 11th Hour, leaving the odd time to go to a nightclub a taxi ride away. We rarely even went to the beach, which was two blocks away. Apart from scores of barely legal and totally wasted Irish students, the bright smoky pool room down the back of the 11th Hour was populated by a cast of shady characters straight out of True Detective, who’d try to sell us bags of weed.
One of these characters we knew as Merlin The Magician, who used to work as a magician on the boardwalk. His routine consisted of various tricks with handkerchiefs, packs of cards, pairs of dice, a shitty little plastic wand and other tools of the trade. He frequently made mistakes with his tricks, and would supplement his income by selling drugs at bars around town. One night at closing time he appeared on our porch back at the motel with a bottle of whiskey and a bag of kush, one toke of which sent us all delirious. Everywhere he went he wore his magician’s hat as if it were some sort of prosthetic attachment, and he had quite a knowledge of Irish culture, in particular the Travelling community for some reason, which he’d clearly learned by heart over the years from the annual influx of Irish tourists to the very place we were staying in. With his claims of his alleged Irish ancestry and heritage, his ever-changing stories and the general air of ridiculousness that be brought to every interaction, he was blatantly a con-man.
The Magician lived in pitiful enough circumstances in a small motel room somewhere in the vicinity. Someone ended up there at some stage and was forced to witness him putting on a show of sorts, bare chested and sweaty but still wearing his ubiquitous magician’s hat, doing a performative workout routine of pushups and dips, and a deadly serious but pathetic sword routine with a blade he kept hidden concealed in a cane, before dishing out the ten-dollar bag of weed they’d come to purchase from him. Another time someone thought they’d got the wrong apartment when the door opened with a gun pointed in their face, though they were waved inside by Merlin in the background.
Another character plying the same trade as Merlin (selling weed, not practicing magic tricks) began to frequent the bar, most likely alerted to the hordes of naïve tourists who congregated there. We knew him as Hulk Hogan due to his resemblance to the wrestler and All-American hero, down to his bandana and handlebar moustache, his garb including yellow singlet, and his bulging and probably steroid-enhanced muscles. One night he got in a turf war of sorts with The Magician, over their respective rights to peddle their shitty wares in this shitty bar in this shitty part of this shitty city to shitty people like us. Hulk Hogan was rushing around the bar, barging into assorted groups of drinkers and pool players, telling anyone who’d listen that he was looking for “that damned Magician”, and that he was a “cage fighter” and he wanted to “fight him in a cage”.
He found him outside, and despite the Merlin’s claims that he was going to “kick that other guy’s ass”, he absolutely did not, Hulk Hogan having an advantage over him of about a foot in height and 70 pounds in weight. Hulk Hogan took one clean smack at the little fella, knocking his magician’s hat clean off his head, and knocking out his four front teeth. The Magician – whose real name was Justin – sat on the ground a pathetic sight, scrambling for his teeth on the footpath through a blinding mixture of blood and snot and white stuff gushing from his nose, tears from his eyes, sobbing. An assortment of bags of weed and pills also sprung forth from his dislodged magician’s hat – it turned out this is what he used to keep under there – and he hurried to reclaim these too. All of this happened in front of a dozen students, who cheered the whole scene on, and a couple of police officers who witnessed the whole incident. The last we saw of them they were being cuffed and led away, the officers informing us, in that bewilderingly forthright and nonchalant, matter of fact and pleasant way that Americans seem to talk about strange and momentous incidents of violence, brutality or tragedy, that Hulk Hogan was “gonna be going away for a long time.”
We never saw him again.
The Magician was back in the bar again some days or weeks later, proudly showing off his nice new set of false teeth.
Karmic Travel
At the end of the summer we left Myrtle Beach with heavy hearts, broke, malnourished and with minor chronic liver damage. The wider group dissolved and everyone went their separate ways, as did ours. I went travelling with one of the lads, as did many of the others. We spent a week in Boston, where we saw some sights and went drinking with other friends from home who’d spent a summer in a real-life living city. One night we got tickets to Fenway Park, to see a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees – the equivalent of seeing Manchester United versus Liverpool in the Premier League – where we sang the anthems of English football hooligans with the names changed, and were told off for swearing by fellow attendees. I’d had too much to drink though, and was forcibly ejected from the stadium before we’d had a chance to take our seats.
In New York we stayed with my actual real-life American cousins in Brooklyn, where they tried to show us some of the genuine culture and life around Williamsburg and Brooklyn. Little did I know that all my favourite bands at the time were from there. By day we dutifully got the subway into Manhattan, to Tick the Sights Off the List: we walked around Central Park for too many hours, visited Times Square, got an elevator up the Empire State Building, walked around Lower Manhattan and saw the Statue of Liberty from the shore.
It was probably the most boring four days of the whole summer.
We just wanted to be back in Myrtle Beach. The conversations in those few days of walking around Manhattan consisted of nothing but reminiscing and debriefing from the still-ongoing summer. While we were there we lived in a constant state of knowing just how much we loved every day of it, every morning filled with unfathomable energy to get up and attack the day in exactly the way we’d attacked the previous day, and the day before that, with no desire to break out of the sweaty bubble we’d found in our Irish enclave abroad. The innocence of youth never taking us out of the bizarrely-present state of bliss we found in the simplest and most pathetic of things. No call to adventure heeded nor acted on, just blissful contentment to exist in our own little Shire away from Home.
It had been a form of purgatory, and although we knew quite quickly already that we could never go back there, we loved every minute of the grim, sweaty holiday. We’d made friends for life – some even their future wives – in this bizarre alternate universe we’d made a temporary home of, this place that greeted us every day with a real-time existence in an American reality TV show. Not only had it been just like the movies, but it seemed to me that the Simpsons was more of a documentary than a cartoon.
While we may have thought we were somehow above the Redneck Riviera and its residents and visitors, more sophisticated, more intelligent, better than all the obesity and lack of education and the crime and the squalor and the outrageous interactions with ridiculous people, but coming from the rural west of Ireland, and with no intention in our hearts but the cheapest of thrills, in retrospect Myrtle Beach was just the very first example of a powerful and eternal lesson I would learn time and again from every holiday, trip, journey and travel experience I would ever have from then until this day:
For better or worse, and through everything you perceive as a good time and a bad, every up and down, every moment of triumph and situation of pathetic embarrassment, every life-changing event and torturous period of stasis and inertia, every symbolic death and rebirth, every traumatic experience and every fleeting moment of oneness with God and your Self, for every journey you embark on in life whether in foreign lands or the relative safety of your own home, whether you’ve chosen to be there or ended up there by what seems like an accident of fate or circumstance, whether you’re aware of it at the time or only years hence or never at all until the day you leave this earth, one thing will always remain constant in travel:
you get the trips you deserve.
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Raucous writing, complemented by the blistering anti-weather of being Down and Out In Myrtle Beach, erudite trenchant indictments hidden in between the lines of a story recounting a once but never again series of expat misadventures (in a town where there's a beach but nobody goes there), with an anti-climactic ending of by the numbers tourism in the "Big Apple". Often mad, never boring, true to your site's ethos. Such great stuff, Gavin.