The boardwalk is lined with cigarette butts. In most situations, I'd think that it was an ugly way to destroy such a bit of nature by dropping those cancerous beings onto the ground to fill the cracks between each piece of wood, but I find that the dead cigarettes bring character and culture to the pier. Typical of me, to be looking at the ground while I walk as Mom and Sister are conversing about God-Knows-What. I think Mom is talking about how she's noticing how all the black people on the boardwalk are wearing pink, saying that "they stole our style" right before I tell her that it's a free country. Oh, racism, I love what you do to us.

There's also the lights. Those goddamn things are everywhere, lining the buildings and inside the casinos and on the carpets behind the walls, the carnival lights. All of them, blinking, flashing. The sun's already setting and the lights are already on to help blind you and think about how pretty they are. All that energy and electricity, all that time put into the lights for people to enjoy and all we're doing is walking past them, talking and talking and talking. I like the lights. If you arrange them just right and make the colors match in the right kind of way, they work for you. They heal you. You want more lights because the more there are, the more beautiful they seem.

And there are people everywhere. It's like a city. No, it is a city, but that's something you tend to forget when the city is placed right next to a boardwalk and a beach, or when it's so much smaller than the city you're used to entertaining yourself in. There are people, but it's not a community. People are people, people are there. They're never the people of the city because there are too many tourists and too much time to waste on a boardwalk when you could be doing something important. I look down again. Fuck, this boardwalk has a lot of nails holding this thing together. That's probably a good thing, but it's really interesting. The nails I mean. There's so many of them and it's almost sickening how every inch or so, there are a few pieces of metal stuck in between the pieces of wood. Combination: nature versus metal alloy. We have wood and we have iron to please your shoes as you walk amongst our beaches and buy pointless tourist items for only 99 cents.

We're walking for miles, stopping every once in a while at a shop on the boardwalk to satisfy the lack of money burning holes in our pockets with cheap souvenirs. At one store, it's just any other tourist shop, but in the back, there's an NC-17 section where they have pictures of porn stars inside cameras and Masturbating Monkey toys that you would show to your drunken buddies at your next get-together. There's one that I find extremely funny, this stuffed parrot, and it says something that's so incredibly hilarious anytime you walk past it that all you want is to keep swinging your hands in front of the censor it to hear what this robot of an animal is going to say next. Mom wants to buy it but it's twenty dollars, which is too much for her after she's gambled all her money away in the Black Jack room.

"Can I have twenty dollars?" she asks me. And I nod and remind her to pay me back, and she says she will and pockets the bill. And then she decides to get the cheaper version, a smaller parrot that's only six bucks and limits itself to only four, hilarious favorites. She doesn't give me my twenty back, and I suspect she may have ripped me off.

I squeeze the middle. "Squawk! Polly wants a fucking cracker! I said Polly wants a fucking cracker! Give Polly a fucking cracker! Squawk!" And I laugh, but I can't decide if I'm really laughing or forcing it out of myself; I hand it back to Mom, and she continues to press the button in the middle of the parrot's stomach to keep it shrieking out beautiful obscenities.

Next, we head to a 99 cent store. I love 99 cent stores, but at the same time, I absolutely hate them. Any time I walk into one, I feel so cheap and useless to be walking around while meanwhile, I can afford much better products. And then I look at the people in the store, the workers I mean, and they're just trying to get by with selling every product in the store for less than a dollar. Here, the other people in the store are shopping, and maybe it's me being paranoid, but they're giving us looks as if accusing us of not belonging in the store. And then, they look away. And I choose this moment to seize the opportunity and pocket an eyeliner, that, despite being a dollar, is not worth paying for anyway.

Soap. Flower pots. Hats.

Everything is a dollar. And this store has everything.

If you wanted to, you could maybe even buy a life.

I look at the crossword puzzle books. Too big to pocket, so I grab it, I grab a hairbrush, I grab a deck of cards and I hold them in my hands and carry them over to Mom and put them in the basket she's carrying.

"You're paying for that," she tells me.

"You have my twenty," I shoot back and she's silent because we both know what she plans on using that money for.

Coloring books. A package of vanilla wafers. Vases. Store branded Listerine, minus a popular logo to ease the ideals of the shoppers.

I find Sister. She's carrying an empty plastic bag, no, it contains a small something-or-nothing that she'd bought. I laugh at how they'd placed a simple little object inside a bag. And then I notice she's putting random store objects in the bag with whatever it was that'd she previously bought. I laugh a little bit, being that we'd had the same idea. She looks at me, she looks at the stuff nearby in mom's basket.

"Are you planning on buying that stuff?" she asks. I shrug. I take the stuff out of the basket and put the deck of cards back somewhere onto the shelves, next to packages of chips. Sister sighs and grabs the things from my hands and shoves them into the bag after asking me if she wanted me to steal them for her and acknowledging my nod. And then, she continues to gaze around the store as to not arouse suspicion.

Hair clips. Water guns. A battery powered fan, available in black, blue, green. The greatest thing you could ever want, all sealed inside a box.

Everything you never would have thought you'd needed until you realized it was only a dollar. And then you'd realize how much you really need that random object. Who would have thought that coin dispensers for your cabinets would have been of use? You would never think so until you enter a store like this. Until you see the people, until you see the price tag, you would never think to spend your hard-earned cash on something so superficial and pointless. And then, you do it anyway, just because you can. You're able to. Walking out of the store with money in your pocket along with trinkets that you don't need, and you look better than everybody else.

It's priceless, even though it's really not.

I walk out of the store for a little while, my pockets a bit more full than they had been when I walked in, and I breathe in the sea air. Mom says this is the oldest boardwalk in the United States, and for some reason, I know I can believe her for once because she picked up this useless bit of information on a pamphlet or information board of some sort, the ones that are scattered about the boardwalk anyway. And as I'm breathing in the aire del mar, I realize how much I hate this, I hate this feeling. Trapped on a boardwalk. You're trapped outside with the salty air and the ocean right next to you, but you might as well be locked in a closet because that's how trapped you feel.

And not bothering to sigh out loud, I head back into the store to meet my family. Because I can't be outside anymore. Not in the open air, not where you're being teased with freedom when you know you're really not free after all. I see Mom. I walk over to her. She's paying at the cash register now.

"Where've you been?" she asks me.

"I was bored, I went outside," I answer truthfully.

"Okay, we're out of here," Mom says and I nod and turn around to face the store in front of me. Goodbye nail polish, goodbye magnets. Goodbye packages of peanuts. Goodbye coffee mugs with my name on it, because it's all for me, it's just for me.

Sister is casually walking out the store, her bag now stuffed with random objects, mainly make-up and poor, pathetic crap that only looks good on the shelves. The kind of things that look so beautiful when you see them all packaged and stacked together, causing you to buy it or steal it and realize hours later that it was really a waste of your money and your time. I can feel myself smiling as I watch the package of thirty, multicolored pens poking out of the bag and I wonder if there will ever be a time in your life when you will need a colored pen to color something in. God, they even made a yellow one. Not the kind of yellow that was fluorescent and would show up on black paper, the dull kind that really should have been called invisible ink if not for the slight tinge of yellow where, if you angle the paper just right into the light, you can barely read what it says, if you're lucky.

We're walking out of the store now and heading along the boardwalk. When we get a good distance away, Sister pulls my things that she stole for me out of her bag and hands them to me. I'm wearing a giant jacket with giant pockets and I gladly stick them in, pulling out bits of gorgeous pocket fluff as I pull my hands out. I don't let her know that I took my own things from the goddamn place, I'll leave her with thinking that she's the hero for stealing things for me. Because if you steal from the poor, you're a hero because you're cool, you're funnier than everyone else, you dare to do the impossible, the unthinkable, you have a story to tell your friends when you come home from this pathetic city. No, when you steal from a 99 cent store, you would never think twice about it, you would never stop and think that maybe, just maybe, you were the villain.

I don't tell her this. I fumble with my stolen goods in my pocket and keep walking.

I'm looking at the nails in the boardwalk again. It's strange. Such a strange thing, those nails, holding up the entire boardwalk like this. I realize I'd been thinking of this before, the wood and the nails and the thousands of people putting their weight and their feet on this boardwalk, how the wood and the nails and whatever else is lying underneath is holding up people and buildings, it's holding up half a city, but we're all too busy being tourists and shopping for sweet nothings to realize it.

Everybody is here walking, we're all here because we want to look at the ocean, spend our money in the shops, prove that we did something with our lives by going to a place that people only go to when there's no place else to go. They think "I want to say I went somewhere without really going anywhere," so they come here, they come to a place that is as foreign and as homely as any other town. The difference is, they have every excuse to come here because there's a city, there are taxis and bus stops at every corner, there are casinos for them, not just for the sake of winning money, but to come home and tell their friends that they won something. That they had a purpose after all. I went to a casino in a city a few hours away and won some cash without really doing anything at all. I went somewhere and you sat at home watching soap operas. I made two hundred dollars in two hours playing poker, craps, slot machines, and I fucking won and you fucking didn't.

People go away either to get away, or to say they did.

The only difference is, you come here, a place like this, a short road trip away from home that's only an excuse for a tourist attraction, and you're not making anybody jealous. You know that, subconsciously. You can't call it a vacation because deep down in that heart that's being rotted out by cigarette butts and cheap buffets, you know it's not. Because you're not coming here for a nice time, you're coming to escape and you're coming because everybody else in your life doesn't want you to. And then you buy yourself a souvenir, maybe even buy something for someone else who was fortunate enough to not join you on this trip, and you do it because you can, not because you want to, but because you're able to. Because all you ever wanted was a magnet with some dice on it, your name printed in the middle naming the casino that sold it to you. This is your dream. And nobody cares. Not even you.

Because nobody cares about a wooden boardwalk with millions upon millions of nails holding it together.