When I was a boy, I spent my summers in Rockaway Beach, in Queens, which we called the Irish Riviera. We rented little plaster-board bungalows, whose walls a man could easily punch a hole in. When I was very small, we would stay only for a few weeks, but in later years, we’d take a place for the entire summer. My father would join us on weekends.

My older brother Jimmy and I would spend our days on the beach hanging out, or collecting bottles for deposit money, or sifting sand in the evenings after the day people had gone home. I wanted to find a gold watch or a diamond ring, and though we’d sometimes uncover a dollar bill, mostly our catch consisted of quarters.

My mother worked as a waitress in Curley’s Atlas Hotel, the only classy, non-Jewish hotel in Rockaway. Situated right on the boardwalk at 116th Street, it seemed majestic to me, as splendid as a castle. I don’t know who Curley was. But I became acquainted with Atlas soon enough: in the main dining room stood the larger-than-life statue of a powerful, muscled man crouched down in a kind of genuflection with a giant ball on his shoulders. That was Atlas, holding up the world amid a roomful of tables covered with white linen. Were diners supposed to contemplate his burden as they chewed their steaks? Such thoughts never occurred to me. In fact, as a boy, I had no idea who ate at Curley’s. Not people like us, that’s for sure.

All the waitresses were Irish. They wore plain white uniforms and worked liked slaves. My brother and I would meet my mother after her shift, and the three of us would walk home by way of the boardwalk, before cutting down to the boulevard where all the stores and bright lights clustered.

There is no other experience in my past that comes close to the deep satisfaction those nights held for me. My mother would buy us a treat on the way home. I favored walkaway sundaes and Classic comic books. That very same time in history saw the first appearance of pizza in American life, and my mother would buy us each a slice. With its thick, slightly burned crust barely able to keep the globs of melting mozzarella in check, no pizza has ever since approximated the rich, sensuous pleasure of that primordial delight on the Rockaway boulevard. My mother imparted to us her belief that pizza was nourishment itself: “Tomato, cheese, and bread—not a thing in it that’s not good for you!”

The ocean was a friendly, monstrous presence, especially at night, salting the air so that you could almost lick the atmosphere around you. The sky was always moon-filled, with a circus of fireworks from the orphanage on the boardwalk adding to the celestial performance on Friday nights. By early July, Jimmy and I were tanned, the soles of our feet hardened and burned, our hair turning blond from the sun.

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