Downbeach, by Matt Overs

Atlantic City never was much comfort to the sensitive soul. A terminus on the shortest possible railroad line between Philadelphia and the ocean, Atlantic City represented the briefest ride between citified restraint and the abandonment of a sensual beach. Its attractions were gawk-worthy spectacles, its prophets were promoters, its wise men were wise guys. In how many other cities in America could you watch a live woman transform into a gorilla before your very eyes, and watch it all year round?

Against all odds, though, people grew up here, on the very midway of the carnival. The lives they lived must count as specialized culture, no less remarkable than the landscape and no less niche than the Paumarí of Brazil.

Haunting Atlantic City

Matt Overs has written their anthropology, like a coming of age in America’s Playground. Though the Gorilla Girl was long gone in the late 80s, when he sets his story, the distant carny’s call will always echo among the population.

Especially for young people. Teenagers Mike Gibbon and his friends Dogg and Dougie live a very teenaged life, with the enhancements only Atlantic City and its downbeach neighbors can provide. They find adults to buy them booze and sneak bottles on the streets, they start fights, they get into scrapes, they attend parties on the beach.

They also haunt the scenes typical of Atlantic City in the late 80s: the old high school, White House Subs, The Baltimore Grill, the casinos, Convention Hall. Atlantic City and its attractions make up the agenda for their approach to adulthood, like a sojourn into the wild kingdom.

This means that, almost inevitably, Gibbon—aka Gibb—will hope to invite a sought-after girl to the Wrestlemania event in Convention Hall. He and Dogg will sneak into the Tyson-Spinks fight. They will meet girls from South Philly. They will traverse Newport Beach, Dorset Avenue bridge, Jackson Avenue, and all the places that would make a realistic Monopoly board.

A picaresque of pranks

Downbeach coheres around no book-length story, unless you consider the drama to be the escapades of a group of young men in anarchic formulation amid a civic circus. Rather, the plot is a desultory picaresque of pranks and capers, as the main characters scheme constantly to avail themselves of all that youth and the city can offer.

They eat fries, they meet at the sub shop, they get refused entry into the Great Adventure fun park. They talk about girls. They talk about boxing (Overs is an accomplished boxing journalist).

They stand agog before Don King and the Donald Trump of a previous incarnation; they admire paintings by Leroy Neiman—all of it evocative of Atlantic City’s casino boom between its eras of bust.

They are shocked and fascinated when Time Magazine trashes the city in a cover article. Gibb, who has lost his mother to the harsh cityscape, can find much to agree with in the story.

“(D)riving around these streets seeing the abandoned houses turned into crack dens, needles and broken bottles strewn all over the sidewalks, crunching under your feet as you walked, this was where his mom spent her time instead of being with him. That was reality, and it was a pain that never went away. If he pretended he didn’t have a mom, it helped. She was a secret shame.”

Clear, direct, and honest

For all the dark austerity of the setting, Overs’s prose is never less than clear, direct, and earnest. It almost takes a knowledge of the locale for granted, so little does the author spend on background or description. His reference to EHT, for example, comes pages before you learn the name indicated, Egg Harbor Township, which in some lights looks like supreme narrative confidence. At the very least it bespeaks a profound knowledge of place.

Nor does Overs wax poetic on a city that might still find its shadowed bard, its poet of the disorderly. We get a straight-ahead coming-of-age story in an uncongenial setting, another volume in the annals of enterprising humanity. For all the grit of the setting, one easily sees through it to the ultimate ascendancy of the human spirit.

Downbeach is a book for all those who were ever curious about the less bright side of the region, the darker propensities of the glittering island. That Overs can tell the story with such panache is a feat worthy of careful study.