This is a view of the beauty and splendor that is Atlantic City, NJ on the 4th of July.  It is a veritable oasis of money being won and lost, dreams being made and destroyed, and seagulls shitting on people carousing on the boardwalk, all while neatly tucked next to a beach that rivals any in the world.  For me, there are only a handful of beaches on earth that stand out from the rest: Monte Carlo in Monaco; Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; Waikiki in Hawaii; Phuket, Thailand; and of course, Atlantic City, but not necessarily in that order.

My family and I have been on our summer vacation this week.  We planned 5 days between Atlantic City and Cape Cod.  Let’s stick with Atlantic City for now.  We’ll get to Cape Cod in Part 2.

We had a good time in Atlantic City.  We had as much fun swimming at the beach as we did walking the boardwalk to see the people.  People-watching may top gambling as the number one fun activity to do in Atlantic City.  The freaks may only come out at night everywhere else, but they spend their days here.

We watched the 4th of July fireworks from the beach and they may have been the best I’ve ever seen in person.  Impressive stuff.  And yet the fireworks still paled in comparison to the show we got on the boardwalk afterwards.  We had about a half-mile walk back to our car and by the time we got there, my brain hurt from the intense visual stimuli I had just absorbed.

In a 15-minute walk, I was subjected to an entire spectrum of bizarre tattoos, indescribable piercings in places that I don’t have places, unforgivable clothing choices, alien hairstyles, eye-raising child-rearing techniques, pungent odors, and a man (I think) who got pissed at me for not moving fast enough, then waved me aside with his long French-manicured finger tips before sashayed away down a side street.  I felt like Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange.

The easiest and most common comparison to Atlantic City is Las Vegas.  That may be true, but I’ll use the movies Twins as my way of comparing the two cities.  Las Vegas is Arnold Schwarzenegger: tall, impressively built, strong as an ox, and regal, all while he’s looking to bang the nearest Honduran housekeeper, of course.  Atlantic City is Danny DeVito; short, balding with a mullet, a larger than normal paunch wrapped tightly inside a pizza-stained wife-beater, all while getting turned down by even the most horrific meth-addicted street walker.

I do wish I could have seen Atlantic City back in the early 1900’s during its heyday.  I picture that more like the Danny DeVito from Taxi.  Still short, loud, and obnoxious, but harmless and funny as hell, all while wearing a bowler hat and trying peek under the all the dames bloomers.