The 11:55

On the last ferry home you either shape up, ship out, or pray to God you sober up

I saw the best minds of my generation arguing with sixteen-year-old deckhands, wandering around with no sense of direction, blacked out, and clawing through their pockets for their ferry tickets.

“I swear it’s in here somewhere.”

It’s the tail-end of a Saturday night on Fire Island — a small strip of land off the south shore of Long Island that’s inhabited by rich boozy 20-somethings and their parents’ credit cards. Only accessible by ferry.

On a hot summer night young people pile on boats and flock to the beach-themed bars to get away for a little while. Enamored by the charm of a beach town closer than the Hamptons, they pay $18 for a watered-down drink in a plastic cup and pay no mind to it at all.

It’s great in theory, and if you have the money for it — spending your whole day on a walkable island, live music on every corner, you could spit fire on a hot summer night.

The theory comes to a dead stop a few hours after the sun sets. You close your eyes for two seconds and suddenly the night is over. Anywhere else, you can call yourself an Uber and be home within the next fifteen minutes. You can lay down in the backseat of someone’s car as the spins take over your head and you pray to the deities that you’ll never drink again.

That isn’t the case tonight. However far you live from the ferry terminal, go ahead and add another forty minutes of torture for yourself. It was a great idea a few hours ago to crack open a drink on the boat ride over, but now you feel it on its way back up.

It’s almost midnight on Fire Island, and you and the hundreds of other people waiting on this dock have to find a way home.

This is what the last boat back to the mainland looks like.

By the way everyone’s scrambling to make it onto the 72-ton ferry, you’d think it was the last chopper out of ‘Nam or the final lifeboat off of the Titanic.

It’s a mixed-bag crowd – a combination of underage drinkers, feral 20-somethings, families with young children hoping to blend into the madness. They’re pushing past each other within the confines of the roped off line, eagerly stumbling forward in hopes of making it onto the dock where the boat will be pulling in shortly.

It’s set to pull in at 11:55 PM on the dot. The chaos begins around 11:45 and ensues well into the early morning. As the minute hand approaches the hour, more and more heads peer out to the water — a green light in the dark finally signals that salvation is on its way.

Maximum capacity for the ferry is 396 and not a single man, woman, or child more. If you’re traveling with your husband and you’ve found yourself passenger 397, don’t be shocked when they close the gate right behind him. You’ve got about thirty seconds to pick your jaw up off the dock before he smirks and waves at you from the Great South Bay — at least one of you made it out of ‘Nam.

Welcome to the jungle. Getting on that boat becomes a deadly game of survival — it’s every man for themselves once it pulls in. You either shape up, ship out, or pray to God you sober up.

“PLEASE HAVE YOUR TICKETS OUT AND READY,” the deckhand yells over the crowd. His words mean virtually nothing to the distorted eardrums of the passengers to be — everyone is either so intoxicated they’ve lost hold of reality or have lost hearing from the blaring music in the bars.

Making it onto the boat is one thing — congratulations, you’re one in four hundred — now you better pray you can find a seat. Or a garbage can. Or both.

To get on, you can either show the mobile ticket you’ve paid for on your phone or the physical ticket you hope is still at the bottom of your pocket. Prepared to deal with a moving ship of nearly 400, the young deckhands have little to no patience for anyone trying to barter their way on.

Phones are dead. Screens won’t load. Pockets get turned inside out.

“Download the app and step to the side,” one of them gestures for a young couple to move over until they can get their bearings. “You’re not getting on without a ticket.”

As I step up to the front and show the poor kid my activated mobile ticket, I overhear a small gasp from the young girl. “My phone just died.”

Making it on feels like winning something. It isn’t.

Walking on the ferry you’re immediately taken out of the tropical fantasy you had been indulging in all day. The bright fluorescent lights flatten everything. The lower level, brightly painted blue and white, blinds your eyes in contrast with the dark sky outside. Once your eyes adjust to your surroundings, the echoes of the loud conversations quickly take out your hearing.

When the boat engine starts it only worsens the noise levels. Suddenly everyone is shouting over each other or yelling at someone, but you can’t hear a thing anymore.

Throughout the next thirty minutes, you will, at some point, lose all of your five senses.

A young boy slowly staggers towards the trash can at the end of the aisles, hands clutching his stomach. In this situation, the logical assumption would be to lift the lid and stick your head into the garbage, not what transpires instead. In an attempt to, for some god-forsaken reason, stick his head THROUGH the door of the garbage can, the poor kid ends up vomiting ON it.

Downstairs is an overstimulating alcoholic nightmare, so I weave through crowds of confused passengers and make my way up top. You can either shiver from the cold wind of the bay, or suffer at the hands of lower level.

Upstairs isn’t any better. Right off the bat there’s a girl throwing up off of the railing. The wind is whipping her hair all over the place as she sloppily ties it up. I pray for anyone directly downstairs and what they may be seeing from their windows right now. A few feet away from her a guy taps on his friend’s shoulder and points, “beware of Ms. Overboard Discharge.”

Elsewhere the underpaid teenagers in navy deckhand shirts are walking the packed aisles collecting more tickets. One stops on a teenage boy furiously fumbling through his wallet to no avail.

“I can’t find my ticket.”

You can buy one on your phone.

“My phone’s dead.”

If you can’t pay now, I’m going to have to take your drivers license until we get back to the mainland.

“Bro the bouncer took my fake and my real is at home — I’ve got nothing. Can’t you just let this one go?”

A pause.

I’m gonna need you to give me one of your shoes.

Wherever you sit, you’ll be surrounded by lively, spirited, not-at-all wholesome conversations.

“I just saw my high school ex’s new wife get her fake taken.”

“Oh my God, I think I spent over $600 tonight.”

“Yeah the deer bit me but I’m not bleeding — oh fuck is that a tick?”

“Where ARE YOU?” A girl yells into her phone while her spare hand blocks the noise through her other ear. The cold wind whips through our hair, I wonder how she can hear anything at all.

“Oh my God.” Her friend seated next to me puts the pieces together in her head. “We left Danielle on the island.” Her mouth is wide open, her eyes are blank.

Whoever Danielle is, I pray the sand isn’t too cold for her to sleep on tonight.

Across from us a young girl is passed out and sprawled across an entire bench. The five people standing around her look at the poor thing with nothing but drunken fury — that was supposed to be their seat.

Stragglers sit wherever they can — on the floor, on top of each other, the poor deckhands look down every two seconds so as not to step on someone’s hand.

A woman abruptly sits down next to me, rattling the bench as she scooches in. “My kid — can you hide him under your jacket?” She gestures to the oversized sweatshirt on my lap, “my ex is downstairs, if he sees us I think he’ll kill me.”

There’s a seven-year-old kid army crawling under the seat. Next to him, a dead fish.

Hating the irony, I toss her my hoodie and stand up. I’m really not looking to be on an episode of Dateline or have my byline be recorded in a police report.

“I GOT PIZZA!” My head violently snaps in the opposite direction. A tiny bleach-blonde girl is holding a large open pizza box over her head, parading it around whilst singing about her new treat. “Whooooo wants a slice? I gotta slice-a pizza!”

Blissfully and sloppily marching down the aisles, she has no idea that the melted cheese and red sauce are fully dripping off the box and down her back. She’s wearing an all-white outfit. It looks like a murder scene.

We’re almost back at the mainland now, but I think I’ve seen enough of what the upstairs looks like. On my journey to the staircase, I pass a buff security guard who puts out a girl’s lit cigarette with his bare finger, someone in an inflatable pineapple costume sleeping on the floor, another boy throwing up off the railing, and a young couple exchanging phone numbers over their passed out friends.

His shirt is tattered and missing its sleeves while her sunglasses remain glued to her face. A match made in Fire Island Hell.

Traveling back down to the lower level, it’s hard to even get downstairs with all the passengers sitting on them.

The loud whirring of the boat engine comes to a stop, no longer drowning out the conversations being yelled across the aisles. Faces perk up, heads that were once bowed against the seats begin to rise.

“Babe get up,” a girl nudges her best friend whose head is slumped on her shoulder. “We’re home.”

We’re docking on the mainland. Congratulations, you’ve made it out of ‘Nam.

But can you find your way home?

They rush the exit in hordes. Some staggering, some pushing, others falling behind. It’s like watching the animals leave Noah’s ark — two by two, but no method to their madness.

In the massive parking lot of the ferry terminal, girls line up outside their bathroom while boys go in and out of theirs like a revolving door of washed-out testosterone. Typical.

Two police cars are waiting on the sidewalk, waiting for anyone bold enough to drink and drive.

The sound of liquid hitting the pavement grabs my attention from the other direction. Two guys, probably in their early 20s, are standing directly next to each other with their respective fingers down their throats. A third friend, red in the face, gently turns both of their hats towards the back of their heads. The male version of holding your friend’s hair back over the toilet. Boys being boys.

Large groups of people walk by these two degenerates as if it’s nothing, as if casually pulling trig on concrete is a casual occurrence.

“GET OUT!” A girl’s voice yells. The backseat to what I’m assuming is her car is open and she’s pulling the legs of someone clearly immovable. “Your car is OVER THERE IDIOT, this is MINE!” The immovable legs, which now belong to a lanky ginger, finally start to move and slowly make their way of out the vehicle. She slams the door behind him and immediately gets in herself, he hasn’t even found his own car before she’s out of the parking lot.

Seeing the police cars to his left, he also chooses to sleep in his backseat. Smart choice.

Deciding the line for the bathroom isn’t worth it, I make my way out of the terminal and onto the street. But not before I catch the tail-end of one more worried conversation -

“Did they catch a water taxi?”

“Nope. Missed it. They’re walking five miles to the lighthouse and calling an Uber.”

“Oh God, do you think they’ll get back okay?”

“I think we’ll be lucky if only one of them drowns.”

The ferry terminal lies at the end of a long residential street called Maple Avenue. Imagine planning an island getaway just to black out, miss the whole thing, and wake up in suburbia.

Full groups of friends are lying on top of each other on the small patches of grass that sit between the sidewalk. Unbuttoned shirts, missing shoes, sunglasses still on to shield themselves from the harsh streetlights. It’s almost endearing the way they’ve all collapsed onto each other, like toddlers during nap time.

Not a single ounce of shame exists on Maple Ave.

Ubers, taxis, and disgruntled parents are lined up in a chaotic sprawl on the street. They honk at each other as they swerve in opposite directions and at the groups of people jaywalking right in front of them.

The couple from before passes in front of me. They’ve ditched their friends and she now has her hand wrapped around his sleeveless arm.

“Where do you wanna go now?” She asks shyly.

“There’s a bar up the street that’s still open,” he smirks. “We could use a drink.”

She laughs at his obvious joke like a newborn being tickled. He tucks a strand of her ratted hair behind her ear and they head off down the long sidewalk. I wonder what happened to their friends — once passed out on their laps but now probably tucked in the backseat of an Uber or bartering with the bleach-blonde for a slice of her pizza.

The pair don’t let go of each other as they make their grand departure from the washed-up chaos. Stepping through a mine-field of passed out party-goers, vomit, and a handful of scattered sneakers, they make their way to the next destination.

Wherever that is.

This is a typical end to a typical night on the island. Or the start to a very early morning.

It’s past one, by six the ferry will set sail again — carrying over a new wave of people that will find themselves sprawled across this very lawn.

Out here nothing really ends, just resets.