Not many – the official estimate hovers around 300 people, little more than a pilot light in terms of the on-season population – but enough to keep the bars open through September. The Starboard won’t wind down until Oct. 3, when they’ll stage a lavish 50th Anniversary party. That same weekend, bars and restaurants up and down Route 1 will host 150 bands as part of the Dewey Beach Music Conference.

While summer in Dewey is sweet indeed, there’s a sense of can-we-come-out-now? when Labor Day wraps up. Of course, any real of relief is immediately buried under the vitriolic snipe-fest of municipal elections, but for those who choose to abstain from gladiatorial politics, Dewey has a lovely shoulder season to enjoy. The water’s still warm, even if the mornings are a bit nippy. But isn’t that why we have hot toddies?

She called. The server, as it turned out, was a competent saleslady.

He got a grainy voicemail from Hillary at Jimmy’s Grille, telling Stan to come out that Saturday. Curious but skeptical, Stan bought a new shirt and marched up the steps to Jimmy’s, a pavilion-style chicken joint. Ever the wingman, I flanked him.

Nursing another Corona, he panned the room. “That her?” he asked.

Short, brunette, typically tanned. “Sure,” I said, not really caring. It might be funnier were it not.

Bottle in hand (as if it were an explanation), he approached the server, who awaited a drink at the end of the bar. “Hillary?” he asked.

She laughed immediately – whether she recognized him or not, she recognized what was happening. No, she said. Danielle. Reading Stan’s frown, she apologized. They just thought he was Hillary’s.

I asked her to clarify.

Apparently, Stan’s napkin joined dozens of other numbers on a corkboard on a kitchen. At the end of the summer, the sirens of Jimmy’s rang their suitors. Stan was either Danielle or Hillary’s, the server said, but now she recognized him.

Stan smiled and bowed slightly. Silly him. He took it like a gentleman, and returned to his Corona without complaint. It was a good joke, he admitted. After a few beats, I decided to reassure him.

“She is pretty,” I said with a shrug, hoping to at least reassure him that his tastes are well-calibrated.

He laughed, sort of – it was kind of a hmph, a grunt.

“Labor Day weekend,” he said smiling tightly and shaking his head. “Where’d it go?”

Nonetheless, drinking on The Lighthouse deck at the zenith of Labor Day weekend, he became an object of conquest for three girls. They sent the prettiest among them – skinny, chinless and bitter-looking – to fetch his shirt. Bargaining ensued.

Loud Shirt’s friends started discussing exchange rates. What was fair – one shirt, one bra? He’d have to wear the bra. No no no, sell high, one shirt for two bras. Miss Bitter tossed looks to her friends, looking for a sacrificial bra. No luck – just sour looks.

The capitalists lost interest. I watched Loud Shirt disappear into the crowd. I could see the neon angelfish even through the thicket of polos and joke shirts.

Alan Henny photo

Unless Dewey Beach commissioners don grass skirts and lead a conga line down Route 1, last Saturday’s water rescue wins Summer’s Strangest by a long shot. Rachel Decenzi, a 30-year-old from Media, Penn., was naked, imperiled, and screaming for help – in about four feet of water.

Just look at the photo. This doesn't end well.

Local police scanner enthusiast Alan Henney was on-scene, and chatted with Jason Kilmer of Olney, Md., Decenzi’s would-be savior. Kilmer said he was standing on the dock of the Rusty Rudder when he heard a cry for help. Sensing perhaps that this was his moment, Kilmer stripped down and plunged into the waist-deep water. When he waded out to Decenzi, he said, she was clearly unstable, babbling manically.

"I tried to get her to tell me where she came from and what her deal was,” he said. “All I got from her was that her name was Rachel."

He didn’t succeed in baiting her back to shore. By this time, Rudder staff had alerted Dewey Beach Police. By the time Sgt. Cliff Dempsey and Seasonal Patrolman Andrew Street arrived, Decenzi had retreated further into the bay. The tide caught her pulled her west.

“All of a sudden, she was out far enough that we couldn’t see her anymore,” Dempsey said.

A boat from Bethany Beach Fire Department was en route, but Dempsey said the ebbing tide forced their hand. The officers stripped down to their pants and hopped in the bay, wading out until they had to swim.

Dempsey and Street found Decenzi sobbing about 300 yards offshore. The tossed a rescue ring over her head and  pushed against the tide on the return swim. Dempsey said they were trudging onto shore when the Bethany boat arrived.

A Rehoboth Beach was examining a hysteric Decenzi when she attacked him, forcing exhausted and exasperated Dewey cops to arrest her. After a brief medical and psychological examination at Beebe Medical Center, a Justice of the Peace committed her to Sussex Correction Institute in default of a $2,500 secured bond.

Police didn’t say whether Decenzi was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Dempsey stressed that the dramatic swim was fairly run-of-the-mill, so far as bizarre water rescues go.

“It’s nothing special,” he said. “It’s something anyone would have done.”

Still, he said, it’s a hell of a way to wrap up the summer.

“End it with a bang,” he said, sounding none too sad to close the book on August.

Over omolottes, Tony told me about his day. Six days a week during the summer, he wakes up at 3:30 a.m., brushes his teeth, and drives to Rehoboth. There he trades car for tractor, chugs to Dewey and starts combing the sand for garbage. After an hour and a half, the horizon softens to brown, then to gray, then a soft, even blue. Weary partygoers and yoga enthusiasts crest the dunes to witness sunrise.

“Sunrise is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever come across,” he said. “I can see why people get up to see it.”

Around 6 a.m., he said, the dog-walkers appear, often unleashing their dogs to race along the high-tide mark. Some run laps around his tractor, barking at the growling diesel engine.

At 8, caravans of families carrying umbrellas, coolers and bags stuffed with buckets and pails trickle onto the beach, reserving a spot and decamping for breakfast in town. The kids love the tractor, Tony said. They jump and shout and wave, grinning at Tony’s one-man parade. Tony smiles and waves a paw back.

“The kids go nuts,” he said, chuckling. Pat and Mike Graze, Pittsburgh residents, watched their son fall in love with Tony’s tractor.

“My son, who is 5, looks forward to getting up and onto the beach to see Tony driving the big orange tractor and waving to all the children, much like a parade,” Pat wrote in an email. “We have been home for over two weeks and Max still talks about going to bed early to get up and see his friend Tony.”

At 9, Johnson dumps his cargo of ice cream cups, derelict towels and freeze-pop wrappers and returns the tractor to Rehoboth. He has the rest of the day to spend with his daughter – and maybe, he said, take a nap.

It’s late August: hurricane waves at the beach, back-to-school specials at Wal Mart and occasion for one last heroic bender in Dewey. How are you ending your summer, and what drink should be sweating in your hand? Hit the jump.

Humor me, and sort yourself into one of these categories:

A. The Multipurpose Partier: Hey, you didn’t come here with an agenda – you came to have fun. The What you’re drinking is most often determined by what’s on tap, or what’s on special.

B. The Deep Roller: Damn that recession – you just had to give up the timeshare on Block Island. While you’re slumming it in Dewey, you’re sure to specify that you want Ketel in that vodka-and-tonic, and Patron, please, for those tequila shots. Drinks are on you.

C. The Liberal Arts Debaucher: The unspoken addition to any beverage is a twist of sarcasm. Your drinks oscillate between the austere – double Turkey, yes, I said Turkey, as in bourbon, you have that here? – to the ironic – I’ll have your finest Bud Select, please. You think of Faulkner when you drink brown liquor, and Greene (or any Brit author, for that matter) when you drink gin. When “Sex on Fire” comes on, you just roll your eyes. You liked Kings of Leon when they were cool.

D: The Beer Snob: Dogfish Head is just 10 miles up the road, and damn it, you didn’t come here to drink Coors. You rattle down your list of preferred craft beers, starting with Anchor Steam and ending with Magic Hat No. 9. You don’t settle for an “import” actually brewed and bottled in Chicago – you find another bar.

E: The Drinker: Is it over 5 percent alcohol-by-volume? Does it come in a cup? If the answer is ‘yes’ to one of the two, it goes down your throat.

Assumption No. 2: Different drinks correspond to different months of the summer, depending on weather and/or individual dramatic arcs. Types A and E may drink whatever, whenever, but type C may save the martini for later in the summer, when he may need something to steel his English-major heart against the reality of unemployment. Still with me? Sigh. Let’s proceed.

June
First blush of summer. Optimism abounds.
A. Rum-and-Coke (rum: rail)
B. Vodka-and-tonic (vodka: Ketel. Don’t believe the Grey Goose hype)
C. Gin-and-tonic (gins 1, 2, 3: Tanquray. 3, 4, 5: rail)
D. Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA
E: Bud Light

July
Juices heated to roiling. Try to keep up.
A. Corona Extra
B. Ketel-and-Red Bull
C. Whiskey, straight (whiskey: Jack, or whatever. Sub in Wild Turkey for bad nights)
D. Bells Two-Hearted Ale (What? I said Bells. Never mind. Ever hear of Anchor Steam?)
E. Bud Light

August
Torpor. Malaise. Fear and loathing and hangovers. Everything is sticky.
A. Nothing (you’re gone – back to your family, back to your job, back to school. You got out while the getting was good)
B. Patron, straight (shots, bought for pretty girls who already know you’re not to be trusted)
C. Martini (“Fine,” you tell the bartenders . “Tell you what. Just give me cold gin in a glass.”)
D. Dogfish Head Shelter Pale Ale (it’s the only other one they have)
E. Bud Light

...punctuated, here and there, with shouts from the twenty-somethings partying in the pool adjacent to the conference room. Through the blinds, I saw a few bellies cannonball into the chlorine. Once, a chant of "Ole, ole ole ole" punched through the wall, almost triggering flashbacks of Running of the Bull.

I saw only a few attendees turn their heads to glance out the window. Did they even hear? Or were they immune by now, the party-clamor just background noise?

I wasn’t the only one witnessing Tiananmen, Dewey Beach: Lt. Billy Hocker’s unmarked lit its blinking snow cone-colored lights, pulled a sharp U at the light and pulled abreast the jaywalker, who was now heading at a clip for the Cork’s entrance.

She didn’t make it. Last I saw, she was bending to place her can of Coors Light on the ground. Doubtless, dozens of jaywalkers were at that moment strutting across the highway. But as any Dewey cop will tell you, rules are rules.

Though I couldn’t help but root just a little bit for the girl who stopped traffic on Route 1 – and waved like a pop star.

In the wake of last week’s cover article, a few residents accused me of embellishing the hedonism and alcoholic intensity of the Dewey Beach nightlife. I was indignant – I was there, I wanted to say, like a Vietnam vet. I saw things.

I stopped going to Dewey for a reason. It stopped being fun. But I wonder if my perspective wasn’t colored, a bit. Did I forget that, during the summer of 2007, Dewey Beach was my best friend?

With my senior thesis looming that fall, I found a cushy job sitting in a booth, selling tickets for fishing headboats. Easy hours – most of my shifts started in the early noon. Plenty of time to read. And suck down a gallon of ice water.

Nearly every night, the question was not if, but when I was going to Dewey Beach, and which bar.

Certain nights were delegated to certain bars. Tuesdays belonged to Northbeach, where dollar night gave the bar the singular distinction of being fiscally responsible. Wednesdays found me at The Starboard, where I could drink gin and hear Laura Lea and Tripp Fabulous play songs I listened to on the way to middle school. Thursday – The Rusty Rudder for Love Seed Mama Jump, on the deck, no cover. Friday, Saturday – everywhere.

And I loved it – I loved it in the hazy, half-drunk way your heart gloms onto a pretty brunette in a sundress, imagining only possibilities. I would get quiet sometimes, staring out at the bay, feeling a warm, brackish-scented breeze blowing from inland. I would get frankly and unapologetically sentimental.

Dewey was nothing but kind to me. I was never mugged, bounced or overcharged. I always had a backseat to stagger into, and I always woke up in a bed, not a holding cell. Crowds didn’t crush, they teemed; bathrooms weren’t disgusting, they were shabby (and yes, for those disputing few, there was piss, vomit and broken glass on the floor. It was there. I saw it. And if that doesn’t warm some distant part of your heart, you should be ashamed).

I think it was the throat-closing reality of graduating into a recession that hardened me to the Dewey nightlife. I can’t toss around my debit card as lightly as I used to. I have trouble psychologically immersing myself in the crowd. And around closing time, there’s the certainty of a hangover to smother my bonhomie.

But that isn’t Dewey’s fault. I’m learning to wear my Dewey Veteran status like an old shirt with sentimental value, holes in the armpits and half the stitching undone – with good humor, and without resentment.

Grumble as I may about ubiquitous disposa-pop, there’s good music to be had in Dewey Beach. The Bottle and Cork brings an increasingly diverse string of performers every year – Old 97s, George Clinton and Citizen Cope, to name a few – and every Wednesday night, Laura Lea &Tripp Fabulous rock The Starboard.

Enjoying the Dewey music scene is, in essence, a study in what makes a good cover band. Like a good Italian dish, all it takes is the elegant combination of simple ingredients.

Get kinetic – or, as House of Pain said, jump around. You’re reheating decade-plus-old hits that weren’t masterpieces to begin with, so don’t expect your audience to patiently appreciate your craftsmanship. Lean into it. Strut a little. Laura likes to lean on her mike and bend forward into the crowd – watch, imitate.

Embrace the pathos. Singing Blink-182 reveals not only your age but your adolescent bad taste, but who cares? Everyone else is singing along, so stoke their nostalgia. Change up a riff or two but stick to the simple arithmetic of a 90s rock anthem. Pump your fist and shout “Na Na Na Na” like the rest of us. When Tripp Fabulous started playing “All The Small Things,” I actually laughed – then sang along.

Love the town. The one surefire thing you have in common with your audience – besides the Bud Light at your feet – is location. Laura’s been playing Dewey for seven years, but you can’t expect to have that kind of cred. Give the town a few shout outs, but don’t go as far as to signal your “homies on Dagsworthy Avenue.” Trust me, my friend, you have no homies on Dagsworthy Avenue.

Get sentimental. When your audience is more than a little tipsy, add some depth to your set by busting out Oasis’ “Wonderwall” or, as Tripp Fab did, Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper.” Get heavy. Get deep. And when you’re done, take a break so the audience can get drunk.

Love what you do – above all, play with some heart. You can’t fake it, not even with a crowd of flagged freshmen. Talking to Laura between sets, she knows why she plays The Starboard every Wednesday. She doesn’t even have to think.

“You see those bumper stickers where it says ‘Dewey is a way of life?’ It’s true,” she says. “We do this because of them, the Dewey crowd. They make it so easy.”

I asked him what the occasion was.

“Oh,” he said. “Little drug interdiction.” He sounds like a little leaguer shrugging off a home run.

Then he’s off, down the hallway to get Judge Scott Bradley on the horn.
The police department was busy, for a Thursday, and waiting to talk to Dempsey felt like waiting for a dinner table at a popular restaurant. When he breezed back into the room, he said,

“Wanna see something?”

“Sure,” I said. Last time he asked that question, he showed me a consumer-model taser. It was shaped like a pager and made a terrifying snapping sound. This time, he grabbed a yellow baggie from a desktop. “Atlantic Books” was printed across the front. Dempsey fished out a nugget of tin foil.

“Sniff it,” he said. “Promise, it won’t hurt you.”

I peeled back a few layers of foil and uncovered what looked to be a candy bell, made from white chocolate flecked with something black. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed.

“For the life of me,” I said, “this is Hersey’s Cookies and Cream.”

Dempsey grinned widely, eyes electric.  “Magic mushrooms,” he said.

I’ve heard “Sex on Fire” in Northbeach, The Starboard and the Rusty Rudder, screeching from PAs and howled into microphones. You haven’t seen the power of alcohol until you’ve seen a full dance floor caterwauling the chorus to Kings of Leon’s turgid hit played on acoustic guitar.

Certain songs seem to be unshakable from the set lists of Dewey cover bands and DJs. Hit the jump for a brief digest of sonic cliché and sing-along nausea.

“Crazy Bitch” by Buckcherry
Confession: I’ve never had sex in the bed of a truck. Also, I’ve never had sex with someone missing one or more teeth. Should I ever, I expect this song to be playing.
The problem with “Crazy Bitch” is that when it comes on, many girls on the dance floor think she’s the titular Crazy Bitch. This leads to: excessive hip-thrusting; uninvited sashaying whilst beckoning naughtily; clawing the dance partner’s back during the “scratches all down my back” line. Popular during summer 2007, I learned to take a bathroom break after the first chords of Buckcherry’s ode to meth-fueled sex.

“Read My Mind” by The Killers
A synth-fueled love letter to small-town glory, drippy with nostalgia – really, this song was written for thick summer nights, making it was a cover band staple within weeks. While Sam’s Town was a wash, there’s a certain sincerity in “The stars are blazing like rebel diamonds, cut out of the sun / Can you read my mind?” to which the rum-drenched mind is extremely receptive.

“Radar Love” by Golden Earring
Dewey burnouts call cover band Love Seed Mama Jump corny, hokey and over-the-hill. Even if there’s a kernel of truth in that, you won’t see a harder-working band in town. Love Seed has been doing their Rudder gig for longer than I can remember, and “Radar Love,” the enduring legacy of Dutch foursome Golden Earring, is one of their cranking signatures. When you’ve played a song hundreds of times, you’re going to know its crescendos, hooks and bridges reflexively. Regardless, Love Seed frenzies newcomers and multi-summer fans alike with their cover of “Radar Love,” which I’ve seen stretched past 10 minutes.

“Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey
I didn’t used to hate Journey. I do now.
“Don’t Stop Believing” is a song that everyone thinks is about them and their friends – how they ferret this out of the lyrics I’m not sure, but on Dewey dance floors, the opening measures of this song cause 20-something girls to glom together, shriek and stomp their J.Crew flip-flops. I actually witnessed a girl in a terrycloth strapless sing “streetlights, people” for the entire goddamned song.
Misanthropy, song fatigue, gin malaise; whatever the reason, Steve Parry’s voice makes me want to throw myself into Rehoboth Bay.

“Had a guy, gotta clean it up,” he shouts over the hose.

Inside the station, a shortsleeved paramedic tells Lt. Billy Hocker that he didn’t glue the wound shut, since it’s on the elbow and it would just rip open again. On the holding cell monitor, a man sits with his hands cuffed behind his back, one arm bandaged from bicep to forearm.

I ask Hocker what he’s in for.

“This guy?” Hocker says. “Urinating in Route 1. Oh, and propositioning a 13 and 17-year-old.”

Seasonal Patrolman Michael McDowell said the man, a Smyrna, Del. resident in his 30s, ambled off the sidewalk near New Orleans Street and Route 1 and started peeing into the highway. Soon thereafter, a vacationing mother said he slurred a few lewd comments towards her daughters, aged 13 and 17. By the time McDowell caught up to him, he was getting kicked out of The Starboard.

When he resisted handcuffs, McDowell took him down. It was his squirming, McDowell said, that cut up his arm.

“This is the same guy who tried to spit in my face in January,” Hocker said. A series of low thuds snapped the officers’ heads to the holding cell door.

“Great,” McDowell muttered. “Now he’s headbutting the door.”

“I got it,” Hocker said.

In the space between Hocker’s barrel-shaped upper body and the door, I see the man’s face, bleary-eyed from an early hangover and marked by a shining red cut under the left eye. McDowell says that’s where he hit the sidewalk, and recited the takedown again, this time footnoting the play-by-play with his legal authority for slamming the guy. His eyes flick to mine to make sure I understand. He’s nervous.

When Hocker walks by, McDowell starts again, from the beginning. Hocker cuts him off with a shoulder-slap.

“Don’t worry,” he reassures the seasonal. “You did good.”

Eventually, the guy’s friend, a bulldoggish Special Operations Response Team (SORT) officer, shows up to take him home. The SORT officer thanked the Dewey cops – the guy in the cell is his best friend, you see, and he’s been having some problems, some real issues. The Dewey cops lower their heads and nod. It’s Dewey Beach. Who doesn’t have issues?

“I couldn’t believe it,” McDowell said later. “They were walking around smoking a joint, like it was Europe or something.”

The pair in question were a 14 and 15 year-old from New Castle County, Delaware, passing a joint with complete disregard for McDowell, standing in uniform and in plain view. McDowell watched them pass, and in disbelief, fell into step behind them. The 14 year old took a toke, passed the joint and let loose a plume of heavily herbed smoke.

McDowell cleared his throat and ordered the kids to stop. The 14-year-old spun on his heel in full-on stoned shock; the 15-year-old, an unreadable slate, dropped the joint down the front of his pants and said, “What.”

McDowell was cuffing the 15-year-old when he began to fidget, shifting his weight onto one foot, bending a knee and wiggling in what could only be described as a shimmy. McDowell uncuffed one hand and let the kid fish the joint from his drawers.

Recreating the dance, McDowell alternates between hip wiggles and prancing. Thus was born the Dewey Shimmy.