There's Plenty of Room at the Duneside III

I’ve never really taken the boy anywhere, well not anywhere other than his grandma’s house and Garden City. We are so blessed to have inherited a beach house—passed down through three generations—that we’ve always just high-tailed it to the coast whenever the opportunity to vacation presents itself. And the fact that the beach house would not be vacant Labor Day weekend did nothing to quell our urge to splash in the surf, so we decided to carve out a new adventure. OK, so we went to the same beach, but this time we’re renting a tiny one bedroom condo. Baby steps. Maybe some day we’ll choose an entirely new destination. I can safely say that we will not be returning to Duneside III, room 202.

We drove down late for two reasons: I was hoping for some peace while Silas slept (have you ever traveled with a four-year-old?), and I wanted to miss the migrating mass of wide-eyed humanity making one last dash to the beach before the unofficial end of summer. No luck there, as we became the caboose of a fifty-mile long train thanks to a nasty pile up near the dreaded Conway bottleneck. An hour and twenty minutes of sitting still in the truck afforded me the opportunity to surf the full glory of Myrtle Beach’s still distant classic rock stations, and I heard “Hotel California” no less than three times. Some dance to remember, some dance to forget, indeed. Thankfully, Silas slept through the whole clusterf*ck, and by 1:30 a.m. we were living it up at the Duneside III. They haven’t had an air freshener here since 1969, and you can actually see puffs of thirdhand smoke emit from the furniture when you lower your haunches.

Duneside III is nestled a shell’s throw from the Kingfisher pier and Sam’s Corner, a 24/7 greasy spoon that, along with the pier, form the epicenter of what used to be a sleepy little family beach town. Rather than kingfishers, or any type of fishers, for that matter, the pier is home to a pair of watering holes, one at the base of the structure and another at its termination, way out over the breakers. An endless stream of vacationers traverse the pier as if walking to its end and back is their own personal pilgrimage to Mecca. A full moon, wreathed in a halo, keeps watch from a nearly cloudless sky overhead, but, at the very limit of my vision, an occasional flash of lightning fills in the endless, black stretch of ocean with a fleeting boundary, the distant horizon. I don’t think the rain’s headed our way. Waves approach in a series of tiny detonations set off by the shearing of the pier’s pilings. But the tranquility of this scene is ungraciously interrupted by “live music” in the form of a sort of dueling banjos of bad cover bands taking place on the pier, which brings us back to “Hotel California.” Now I’ve heard it four times in the last few hours, but never quite like this. And, I hope, never again quite like this. I think there’s an unwritten rule that no band shall ever cover “Free Bird.” That would be blasphemy somewhere on about the same level as diddling the preacher’s wife in church, on a Sunday, during the service. And if we were going to construct a top ten list of songs that should never be covered, “Hotel California,” while paling in comparison to “Free Bird” in terms of its rock anthem awesomeness, would at least make the top five.

The band closest to the beach, and to my position perched on the balcony of Duneside III 202, is mercifully taking a break to blow the meager contents of their tip jar at the bar, allowing me to hear Bob Segar’s “Turn the Page” wafting in from cover band #2’s position out over the Atlantic. The band on break played the same thing not 15 minutes ago. And this, too, is a song that belongs somewhere on our list of songs not to cover, as your local everyday-ordinary-average-run-of-the-mill cover band probably cannot relate to the concept of “playing the star” or being “strung out from the road.” Later, a painfully long drum solo is punctuated intermittently with the snap of bottlerockets. Their whistling blasts make me flinch every time. In my mind’s eye I see a chubby bleach blonde emerging from Wings with a new thong. She will don it for her stay on the back of her boyfriend’s crotch rocket, clinging tightly to him as he pops wheelies up and down Waccamaw Drive, and Myrtle Beach’s annexation of the sleepy little family beach of my youth will be complete. I just hope I can sleep through it.

I smoke the day’s last cigarette by lying down in bed.