I'm Not From the Hamptons

Stories about growing up in the Hamptons, but not, like, "The Hamptons."

Photo by Tara Israel

The Montauk Project

Thirteen years old and we’d get dropped off on the side of the highway, hop the fence and go running into Camp Hero. To the fabled Montauk Projects! A twisting mass of decrepit buildings, bunkers full of rusted, cracked ruins, and enough ghost stories, conspiracy theories and structural decay to burst a thirteen year old head wide open.

This was a place for the youth to smash fifty-year-old toilets, punch through walls, and ascend a dark radar tower with ready-to-crumble stairs and tons of dead birds (some crucified; shit everywhere). It was a place to harness peer pressure, to force your way through darkness and rust, up a tower topped with a skeletal radar dish the length of a football field. You could see all of Montauk from up there if you had the balls to climb the damn thing, and they (the balls) would shrink as gusts of ocean-tinged wind nearly blew you right off.

God forbid the sun would start setting while you were still inside the heart o…