Sorry, Ed, but I just couldn’t leave

By last Friday at 6 p.m., when I drove up to the roof of the Long Beach LIRR parking garage, almost every spot was taken — a few, maybe, by outbound train takers but most by locals like me looking to leave their cars as far above floodable ground as possible. People all over town planned to ride out the storm at home, with apologies to our voice mail buddy, County Executive Ed Mangano, who’d ordered us to evacuate.

The day before, I’d called Ronnie, the manager of the apartment building where I live, the Crystal House on Shore Road, one of the city’s oldest oceanfront buildings. She’d assured me that the concrete courtyard out my back door had never flooded, not even in Hurricane Gloria. My place is maybe 12 feet above sea level, and Ronnie’s claim seemed hard to believe, but she was so casual about it that putting it to the test sounded kind of fun, the most counterintuitive scenario imaginable. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to watch a hurricane come ashore 200 feet away? And how could an ocean that close roused by 75-mph winds not blast my bookcases to smithereens?

On the long walk home from the parking lot, I pass the superstructure for the sets and stages of the Quiksilver Pro New York, the product of weeks of work, now being hastily disassembled. In East End neighborhoods I listen in on random conversations, joining some and starting others simply by asking, “You staying or going?” A guy has scrawled “Kiss my *** Irene” on the plywood he's hammered over his living room windows. Most of those who say they’re leaving are serious and sober, while most of my fellow scofflaws are . . . neither.

I ask a man who looks knowledgeable what, exactly, mandatory evacuation means, and he laughs and says that when you tell the policemen who knock on your door that you’ve decided to stay, “They tell you to write your Social Security number on your arm with a Sharpie so they can identify the body.”

A surprising number of people tell me they were here for Gloria in 1985, and their arguments that the Canals and the West End are more dangerous places to be than the East End sound persuasive. Every conversation ends with exchanges of “Good luck.”