You want to know what's going on out in the Hamptons this summer, I'll tell you what's going on. The same thing that's always going on, only louder, and with worse parking. The money is obscene, the gossip is meaner than a wet cat, and somewhere in East Hampton there is a bribery scandal that has the locals talking in the kind of hushed tones people use when they know exactly who did it and are terrified to say so in the open air.
Per the reporting over at Curbed, the summer season out east has arrived with its usual assortment of complaints. The renters are furious at the owners, the owners are furious at the renters, and everybody is furious at the share-house next door. The food and beverage situation has reached a pitch of absurdity that even I, a man who once paid eleven dollars for a pretzel at Madison Square Garden without blinking, cannot process without my left eye twitching. One establishment is reportedly moving a glass of grape juice — they are calling it something with a French word attached, but grape juice is what it is — for the price of one hundred and fifty dollars. One-fifty. For juice from a grape. Ralph Kramden could not have dreamed this up on his worst night. The moon was never worth that kind of cash.
Now here is where I have to be honest with you, because I am a professional. My cousin Dominic has a truck. A beautiful truck, almost entirely his, three payments from being fully his. Dominic had what he described to me as a “foolproof angle” — we load the truck with thirty cases of Welch's Concord Grape, drive it out to the East End, and sell it tableside to people who clearly cannot tell the difference. I was going to report the whole thing as a consumer experiment. A public service. Dominic said he knew a guy with a folding table and a linen napkin. I said that's all you need.
Meanwhile, the bribery scandal. East Hampton's got a situation involving approvals, officials, and money changing hands in ways that were not exactly posted on the public agenda. The details are still shaking out through local reporting — names, figures, the specific flavor of favor allegedly requested — but the broad shape of it is as old as any borough anywhere: somebody wanted something built, somebody else wanted something in return, and at some point the paperwork stopped looking like paperwork and started looking like a receipt. That kind of story plays out in Queens, in the Bronx, in half the townships on Long Island. The Hamptons version just comes with better landscaping and a longer driveway to park the trouble on.
The season out there is expensive and loud and the economic vertigo of it — the gap between the people who own the houses and the people who clean them, between the menu price and the wage of the person who carries the plate — is not a new story either. It is the story every summer. It is the story of the shore.
As for the grape juice scheme: Dominic never made it out of Staten Island. Third case in, he realized the truck's refrigeration unit was, in his word, “aspirational.” The Welch's got warm. The linen napkin guy never called back. We are out forty dollars in grape product and one full tank of gas, and the Hamptons did not notice we were coming. They never do.