Rocket Fuel (Fresca, Coors Light, and Milagro tequila dumped in a vodka bottle), Ketel and Red Bull, Jameson, BBCs (“rum, milk, liqueur, and Kahlua” with bananas tossed in a blender), Transfusions (“Welch’s grape juice, ginger ale, and vodka”), Endless Summers (“vodka mixed with crushed grapes”), Fireballs (something involving whiskey). “If it wasn’t a beach day in Montauk, you got shitfaced.” “If it was a beach day in Montauk, you got shitfaced,” we’re told. It is rather “a summer camp for adults,” in the words of a co-worker.Īnd that means drinking. The house, in Hither Hills and a bit of a time-warp job, what with its maroon shag carpet and shelves full of vinyl records and magazines from the 1970s, is dubbed the Hive, and although 30-some people would make use of it across eight weekends that summer, “This is NOT a share house,” the agreement all parties must sign defensively asserts. “Most housemates fell into one of three buckets,” he writes, “the girls, the finance guys, and the gays.” At this point in his life, “You’re in a bucket of your own,” a house captain tells him. The author’s difficulty in this regard is that at 27 he was just then coming to terms with his attraction to men, making this a coming-out story as much as it is a coming-of-age one, despite that summer’s “delayed pursuit of more adult concerns.”
“Everyone finds love in Montauk,” Kirsten, a friend from his college days, says. He’s saved from his urban loneliness, indelibly depicted though it may be in “Out East,” his new memoir, by an invitation to join in a summertime share house across the “moon-dipped isthmus” of Napeague to where “the beaches were sweeping and majestic, and the town had a surfery charm.” It was a balm for anxiety about his life’s lack of direction - his love life, that is professionally he had a plum job in publishing - about his inability to connect with someone on a deeper level, about his sexual identity, no less. Every night for two years, John Glynn would lull himself to sleep watching Netflix episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” his laptop propped on a pillow.
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