Arle spends $10 on a shark tooth necklace at a souvenir shop across from our rental. It is basic as far as these things go. You don’t end up with a high-end shark tooth necklace from a joint like this one. This is a monster place/ the size of a basketball gym/ and it is heaving with cheap overpriced junk.
But Piper is 8 and he likes sharks. And he wants a shark tooth necklace.
I stand hidden in some semi-aisle between Ocean City, Maryland decals and magnets watching the whole thing go down. I notice Arle’s soft-spoken way with her kids; I notice that she doesn’t ever come over the top of the ring like Sgt. Slaughter like I do with my kids a lot. Not that my way is bad or whatever, hers is just different.
Piper slides shark tooth necklaces between his fingers testing them out. His mind is inexperienced and purer and he sees things so different than I do/ or even than Arle does. I watch like a seahorse hiding in a coral cave. I watch with vested interest because I really dig this a lot. When I was a kid buying a coral necklace or a shark tooth necklace at the shore was a big deal. And apparently it still is. I forget these kinds of things. Down here surrounded by all of this commercialism and all of these eateries and all of these holes in the ground begging for you to dump some dollar bills in them/ speaking to you like some kind of American beggar who knows that you know that- in order to truly fulfill your empty spaces- you are going to need to burn through some fucking money. Fast and loose.
But then along comes the unexpected. The smallest moment that requires some loot but that also seems… and this is hard for me to admit after a few days in the land of shitty $14 crab cake sandwiches the size of a slider… but this moment seems worth it. These necklaces, at $10 a pop, they seem worth it.
Not because they will last a long time. Nothing lasts long in the hands of an 8-year-old boy, mind you. But that’s kind of the point too, since life folds in on itself, collapses backwards upon its own mirrored image at the best of times. And so whatever necklace Piper ends up choosing, eventually it has to disappear. Or break. The cheap piece of rawhide snapping as he’s bouncing on the trampoline. The tooth itself breaking into several shards some night in the not-so-distant-future, in the bathtub, for no real apparent reason. A tooth in the mouth of an actual shark can endure a lot of wear and tear. I mean, think about it. It digs into fish. It slices into other sharks who come around looking to start shit. A shark’s fucking tooth, dude. It’s like one of the most radically badass things in the natural world, you know? You could go downtown today and march into the tattoo parlor and take a free Prime out of the mini-fridge and tell the painted man or woman that you want to make a statement with a shark tooth tattoo on your lower calf and they would know exactly what you are taking about. Hell, they have probably already done a couple shark’s teeth this week already.
But once a shark tooth leaves the nest of the shark’s own jaw, man, that’s when everything changes.
That’s when everything gets really strange for everyone. For the shark. For you. For the kids. For the truck drivers and the pilots and the disassociated 19-year-old chick at the check-out counter. For me.
For Piper.
For everyone, whether we know it or not.
I have no idea where they get all of these teeth. But it’s probably not pretty, right? Let’s be up front about all of this: the long road from the shark’s mouth to one of the spinning racks at Johnny Dune’s Beachcomber General Store cannot be all that smooth. Especially for the goddamn fish.
Google it and I bet there are whole essays about shark tooth necklaces but who has the fucking time to read that, you know? I don’t have time for the facts, for the science. This is America for chrissakes. I will make up my own story on the fly and I will present it to you as truth and you will believe it because, well, America.
The shark lives in this kind of roped in area of what is technically ‘the ocean’ but come on. As the sun rises above the horizon and cuts through the sludge of the city smog, a skinny dude on a bike rolls up to the edge of the bird shit mud sand and hurls hail storms of cheap dog kibble from a plastic cup. I don’t know where this is off the top of my head. I’m thinking India? China? Is that wrong of me? Is that culturally inappropriate to thrust those countries and cultures into the crosshairs here when I have no clue what I’m actually talking about?
I don’t know. It could be. I’m not denying it. But at the same time I like those places (even though I have never been there and never will be probably). But at the same time when I close my eyes and imagine a young guy on a small motorcycle or a moped or an old beach cruiser pulling up to the water and chucking dry dog food at a throbbing trapped mass of three-foot-long sharks whose destiny is to have their teeth yanked out of their weird heads with a pair of rusty pliers (by a little kid??!!): I picture India. Or China. I don’t know why. It must be systemic. I know it could easily be somewhere else. What do you want me to say?
Also: am I wrong?
Either way, I picture this dense blood orange sun bleeding through the gauze of the sky and Piper’s shark tooth is still in the mouth of the unlucky son-of-a-bitch who will, someday soon, be unknowingly, and more notably: unwillingly, connected with me and my people across the world via the “magic” of summer vacation.
What kind of sharks are they? Jesus. Who knows. Probably some off brand of Pacific shark, if I’m going to guess. Something none of us has likely ever heard of let alone seen. The Pacific is creepy. The Pacific is Godzilla AF.
Possible names of the kind of shark where the teeth come from (with swift judgements on the name itself):
Bubblenose Shark (interesting)
Mango Shark (meh)
Red Shark (boring)
Pacific Nay Nay Shark (okay… okay… I’m listening)
Official Shark Week Shark (fuck off!)
Gettysburg Shark (talk to me!!)
Lime Soda Shark (I like it)
Miniature Toy Shark (meh)
Sad Shark (there we go/ we have the winner)
A roped-in netted tidal pool prison of so many Sad Sharks that it almost appears as if there is no water in there. Only sharks on sharks. Sad Shark City.
Maybe someone dumps in a used plastic jug full of some kind of questionable vitamin every now and then to encourage tooth growth. The whole thing must smell like ass. Like rotten seawater sardine guts.
Once, a Greenpeace guy shows up in the night on some kind of righteous bender. He is from Nebraska by way of California. Shaggy hair, flashlights, nylon stocking mask. He attempts to cut the netting holding the sharks prisoner by sawing at it with a Rambo knife, but almost right away he puts a big gash right into his own hand. In that meaty bit between his thumb and his trigger finger.
The sharks are contacted by the first few drops of his American blood and they go apeshit. As expected.
Sad Sharks are not that big and rarely are they ever recorded attacking human beings, but where there’s a will there’s a way, you know. And these puppies, all cooped up and mental like they are, they don’t give a rat’s ass about what’s what. They sink their fated teeth into Bryyan or Chadd or Riccoloa or whatever the hell his name is and they eat his skinny ass in a monstrous display of rapid annihilation.
It’s like a movie except no one is watching. There are no security cameras at this place of business. No alarms or any of that kind of western bullshit. There is only the bloody egg yolk sun in the sky that never seems to rise or sink. It is just always there/ oozing through the bandage/ permanently embedded in the sky at 7:33am.
In the morning, there is nothing to see. The kid on the bike comes and yawns as he throws the dog food at his uncle’s Sad Sharks. They roil the surface same as always. There are no bones floating and no sign of anything weird having happened overnight. There is just a single floating shark tooth bobbing at the edge of the mud sand. It is a rare sight, a tooth that comes out on its own. The kid picks it up and carries it back into the shack. He tosses it in a small bowl of teeth to be cleaned and then packaged for shipment. Some will go to Japan. Some will go to Germany. Some will go to beautiful ladies. Some will go to ugly old men.
The one the kid rescued from the morning feed will go to Ocean City, Maryland, USA.
It still has a tiny bit of Greenpeace dude’s DNA on it.
Arle buys it for Piper because, for reasons even he cannot explain, that is the shark tooth necklace that speaks to him most.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
