This Town Is A Sealed Tuna Sandwich: Myrtle Beach, SC

We arrived in Myrtle Beach, eager to fall into the rat trap of vacationing families and students celebrating spring break in a town where everyone, even the most conservative housewife, is off their leash, downing their second strawberry daiquiri and swallowing mountains of fudge until they drop into a diabetic coma. Shocking for its lack of culture and scruples, Myrtle Beach is a place that is as vulgar as it is excessive, Atlantic City minus gambling but with a moral code only existing in the American South.

Our first impression was a sign dictating we had arrived in Myrtle Beach, hometown of Vanna White, America’s silent bimbo. It’s hard to believe a town of 27,000 hasn’t produced someone more noteworthy. But then again, maybe not.

Along with an exorbitant number of outrageous miniature golf locations that spit simulated fire and port-o-potty blue water as you drive past, strip clubs freckle Kings Highway, the town’s main artery, artfully named things like “Secrets”. Ditch the kids, tell your wife you’re going golfing, and come here for a lap dance from a 19-year-old with fake tits and platinum extensions. She’ll never know! You are, after all, footing the bill for this family getaway. You deserve some fun, too!

Myrtle Beach is filled with activities for families where the parents hate their children, mini golf, laser tag, bowling. While the kids scream and chase each other in a soda-and-pizza fueled frenzy, the parents sit back and complain about how they just wish they hadn’t had “that last one,” avoiding their names as though they don’t exist if but for a brief hour.

Every place in Myrtle Beach is aching to take you somewhere else: Hawaiian Rumble Golf, Texas Steakhouse, Cancun Lagoon, New York Deli, Japanese Hibachi. They want you to forget that you’re seven feet deep in a pit and transport you somewhere else. When a town has no discernible culture of its own, the “culture” must be imported. Tourists lap up the ability to circle the world in a single weekend. It’s the closest they’ll ever get to some of those places, not for the lack of funds but instead for their own aversions to adventure. Leaving their resort in Myrtle Beach to check out the local shopping is enough for them.

Other than hundreds of fast food joints, the only places to dine are all-you-can-eat seafood buffets where lines of vacationers form to stack their plates and fill their gullets with crab legs and other assorted items for $24.99. Every aisle is clogged by a mother, pausing to ask her ten-year-old child if they want each item. “Do you want this? Do you want this?” The kid only ever wants chicken fingers and french fries, not oysters Rockefeller. Probably should have just gone to McDonald’s. It would have been way cheaper.

Besides roasting by the seaside, the only other activity in Myrtle Beach is shopping, available at one of the areas five massive malls. Two such complexes, Broadway at the Beach and Barefoot Landing, are situated on docks across what used to be swamps and forestry. Natural habitats for local wildlife have been replaced by Joe’s Crab Shack and Senor Frogs, habitats for a different kind of beast. Every store sells the exact same thing, t-shirts, baseball hats, shot glasses, and Christmas ornaments, all etched with “Myrtle Beach”. An employee at a store that sold Def Leppard t-shirts accidentally let it slip that stores in such complexes are required to sell at least a few items that say “Myrtle Beach” on them. Another store that falsely advertised as selling vintage items and antiques instead sold t-shirts with pro-gun, anti-Obama messages on them, (One Big-Ass Mistake America). When we saw one that joked about rape by a police officer, we scrambled for the door, holding back dry heaves.

The people congregating in these malls are worthy of a zoo exhibit. We saw a woman so red she could have been choking and resembling a stewed tomato more than a human female, plopped on a bench, chain smoking and laughing. A gang of bikers watched as one of their own slithered on a mechanical bull, cheering with each slow gyration and clapping when she finally collapsed into the plush pit. Co-eds on spring break flitted from bar to bar in tutus, plastic tiaras, and lensless horn-rimmed glasses, mouthing the words to “I Want It That Way” and sucking neon green liquor from oversized syringes. They don’t mind that every man old enough to be their father is ogling them as they pass, fantasizing about what they look like beneath the tutu. It’s why they came, and why they’re wearing the tutu in the first place.

The waterways surrounding the outdoor shopping malls are filled with hundreds of enormous catfish, fed by tourists from the dock pellets purchased in a kiosk for 25 cents and the occasional loogie and cigarette butt. The animals swarm the docks, swollen, their mouths puckering as they lunge for specks of food. Even the gesture of a fist over the water, regardless of whether or not it holds food, causes them to stir.

The fish are no different than the people, crowding the docks, begging to be fed and entertained. And God forbid someone should intervene. On a trip to Myrtle Beach in 2004, Alex’s brother Eric made a joke to him about how funny it would be to pop a girl’s balloon with a cigar, a move from The Three Stooges. Her bald, squat grandfather heard the aside and threatened to kick his ass. No one interrupts a Myrtle Beach vacation dad’s good time.

With the spring breakers bellowing Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” humping the air with each syllable of the chorus, we abandoned the over-pomped truck stop that is Myrtle Beach, stopping to feed the catfish one last handful of food.