On the night of the 4th of July, a few friends and I wandered down the empty beach of Fire Island Pines, an infamous barrier island off Long Island, masks on and chests exposed, looking for something fun to do.
Ideally, “something fun” meant music and people spread out enough to talk and flirt with who we wanted to, but also keep a reasonable distance from whomever else.
What we were looking for never materialized, but we’d heard of another function in the dunes that separate the Pines and Cherry Grove (the Meat Rack).
It sounded like trouble, but we were already halfway there and decided to at least check it out.As the crowd came into view, I felt the strange dissonance between warm familiarity and abject horror, between the thrill of.