With a focus on a gay wannabe television weatherman and his occult-driven family, Matthew Bamberg’s debut novel, Coconut Grove Chronicles, draws upon Bamberg’s real-life work in the 1960s at the National Hurricane Center in groundbreaking cloud-seeding experiments across South Florida.
Marvin, Coconut Grove Chronicles’ narrator and protagonist, worships severe weather. His solid belief in science conflicts with his family’s astrology obsession—and then there’s his secret fear of Anita Bryant, who warned South Florida and the nation about homosexual groomers. The richly layered stories include dilapidated Miami Beach Art Deco edifices smelling of chicken soup among coconut palm trees and white sand beaches.
Bamberg would move to San Francisco, where he earned a master’s degree in creative arts from San Francisco State University. Bamberg later merged writing and photography, focusing on history and social justice. His work eventually evolved into nonfiction, contributing features to publications like the Desert Post Weekly, The Desert Sun, The Press Enterprise and Palm Springs Life.
Today, Bamberg continues his love affair with text and images, penning articles on local and national issues, op-eds for local publications, and resistance poetry on Substack and Medium.
Here is an excerpt from Coconut Grove Chronicles.
Chapter Seven
Sunrise Harbor’s last road — Sunrise Drive, the easternmost corridor running north-south along the bay met only scattered development, a house here and there, but mostly vacant lots covered with Australian pines, perfect for building forts with friends.
The prime spot at the intersection of the bay and the waterway was my solitary heaven-on-earth, a place to sit on the sea wall sometimes in the middle of the night with my legs above the water. I heard the waves brush against the seawall, saw the vast, never-ending bay, and watched snapper swim in the water, crystal clear, among sharp rocks and barnacles.
Eleanor, my practical and stunning mother, had numerous friends with kids in the neighborhood, many of whom I, Marvin, became friends with. Our social life had been centered around fort building. After all, we needed a place of our own. We were around 10 years old.
I just so happened to hook up frequently with two of Jen Gerald’s kids, Roxanne and Harriet. Jen was a single mother and one of Eleanor’s best friends. Her two older girls became my best pals. They lived at the end of Battersea Road next to a sizable chunk of vacant land on Biscayne Bay.
Jen’s large home’s playroom faced the lot on the bay. Roxy, Harriet, and I, and some other kids from the neighborhood, frequently met at the girls’ playroom. The room was large and unique because it had a stage where we put on plays and played with Barbie, Ken, and GI Joe.
Frequently, I’d walk to their house from my backyard Sunrise Avenue home by strolling north through Sunrise Harbor — crossing South and North Prospect Roads to get to Battersea, and then walking to the end of the road to their house and the lot where we planned to build a fort.
Eleanor, my mother, got a phone call early one cold morning from a neighbor that I had been walking by their house barefoot and in long underwear. I had been on my way to the fort on the bay. Why I didn’t dress appropriately, I can’t recall, but when I got home that afternoon, Eleanor had a few words with me, forbidding me to go to Jen’s house for some time.
Around 1966, we decided to build an elaborate fort on the vacant land adjacent to the girls’ playroom.
The designated plot of land we selected for our fort was a few feet from the seawall along the shore of Biscayne Bay. The end of the lot provided an area for fort-building just beyond thatches of Australian pines and coconut palms that shed large branches and fronds that we used as construction materials for the most elaborate fort.
One cool winter afternoon, the girls and I spotted a man-sized chair and ottoman strewn on the side of Battersea Road. “Look up the street,” I shouted to the girls. “Furniture for our fort.”
“Quick, let’s get it before someone else does,” Roxy advised.
“Okay, the fort’s not more than a half a block from here,” Harriet explained and then directed Roxy and me to get on either end of the chair; she carried the ottoman by herself. Every couple of steps, we dropped the furniture and sat in it to rest. The chore went perfectly. We set the furniture by the seawall in front of the fort.
Next, we dug a hole in the shape of a circle to make a pond for the front entrance of our new fort. You didn’t have to dig deep because the bay was only a few feet away. The beauty of our home-away-from-home was that when the tide was low and the water smooth, we went below the sea wall, entered the water in our tennis shoes, and waded around picking up abalone, sea urchins and starfish and handed two sea creatures to a kid on top who would set them in the shallow water of our pond.
After that, we collected stray limestone rocks and sea surface debris covered in barnacles to place in the pond, creating a habitat.
Once finished, we admired the magical water feature, especially the pearly surfaces of abalone in it, so that when the sun hit them, they shone with a pastel rainbow that spread through the surface of the pond’s thin layer of water. Eventually, starfish clung to the rocks and barnacles that we made as an enclosure.
Our fort’s view changed every day with the bay’s sea condition, a tempo caused by the surface of the water and the friction of the moving air above, varying from glassy on calm days, to light chop on days when the breezed fluttered to waves slamming and flooding our fort when lofty gales struck. At that point, we had to move on.
On days where the sun never seemed to set, we built walls of pine and rocks to enclose us in so no one could see us. Our innocence was a time and place that will never come back in Florida, the white sheets of rock with patches of grass and pine stretched from canal to canal under billowing cumulus clouds that grew fierce with updrafts just before the lightning’s white light lit up the sky and the boom of thunder told us it was time to go home.
They taught me about love and marriage, relationships with other boys, and how to survive in school. They even warned of God’s wrath when you do certain things. Without them, as a classroom runt, I’d have never survived.
We gathered at the fort with our friends, making plans to present plays in the neighborhood from our new home, gossiping about our parents and their parents.
I spent most of my time with the girls — Dominique, the girl who lived next door, and her friends, along with Roxy and Harriet, the girls of Battersea Road, and their friends—not because I didn’t like the boys, but because the girls, with maturity levels so developed, had given me most of life’s answers.
They taught me about love and marriage, relationships with other boys, and how to survive in school. They even warned of God’s wrath when you do certain things. Without them, as a classroom runt, I’d have never survived. They acknowledged me even though I was different — smaller, chubby — and with a head full of wiry Jewish hair, which they referred to as Brillo. Brillo, the steel wool-soap-coated product with a pink coating of soap, became my nickname as I accepted the female’s tease, and as I got older, my hair turned wiry. I imagined myself being able to apply Ajax to my head, turn a frying pan upside down, and twist and turn it so I could watch the Brillo do its magic.
By the time I was in the sixth-grade, I invited 10 friends over to my house for a quick swim, and they were all girls, much to my parents’ disappointment. Harry, blue eyes, thinning black hair, a quiet man who always let Eleanor lead our three-boy family pack, didn’t understand, as he possessed only one friend, Frank the plumber. As a CPA in a nonstop tax coma, my guess is he needed a break from all that. The plumber was a perfect fit with Popeye-like arms, and with a wrench, he could assist my father with fix-its, all too necessary for our Concrete Block Construction (CBS) home.
He believed that because I sat around a group of girls in class — they liked me and I liked them — that I would suffer academically and that I might be gay. “Marvin,” he said to me one Sunday afternoon while he was fixing the light with Frank the plumber in front of our house. “I went through that stage. I know what you’re going through.” I hadn’t even the slightest clue about what he was attempting to communicate.
From the time I was 9 until I turned 14, it was all girls, all the time.
When I wasn’t hanging out at the fort, I’d be with Dominique, who had been my next-door neighbor before she moved down the street.
One day, about the time I turned 14, Eleanor had a mango tree for me to plant out front, a job I was anxious to get done so I could meet Dominique at her family’s new home down the street that was just built. I liked that place because they didn’t strip the land and built the house around the Australian pine trees.
After I planted the mango tree, I went inside to let Eleanor know I was going over to Dominique’s house.
Then she asked me about the girl thing. I told my mother, straight on, that I loved girls. I liked their hair. I liked the way they moved. I liked their bodies. And I even liked playing with their hair, combing and teasing it, a 1960s bubble flip hairstyle. I told her that maybe I wanted to be a hairdresser when I got older.
“Over your father’s dead body,” she said. “You meet boys and make something of yourself, join the chess club or a sports team. You make some new friends. You hear me?”
I was distressed.
I was shocked.
I was mad as hell.
I was depressed.
When I met Dominique at her brand-new, organic-looking home, I mentioned how my parents wanted me to have boys as friends. “You mean they want you to be gay?” she said. That was it. End of subject. From that point on, I learned that some conversations get so confusing that it’s best to keep them to yourself.
On my walk home after visiting with Dominique, I had a sense of déjà vu.
One morning before school in fifth-grade, my father, Harry, scribbled in the parent comments section of my report card, shoved it into my chest, and walked out the front door of our house, slamming it behind him.
I stopped for a moment to read a note Harry had scratched with a ballpoint pen: “Please, move Marvin’s seat away from the girls.” My disbelief in what had this Miami boy frozen as if he were in the Arctic.
“No parent ever writes in that space!” I squeaked and stuttered aloud. I stuck the note in between my bundle of books wrapped together with a bungee cord. Flustered, I trotted to Sunrise Park to the horrible lemon school bus that took me to school.
By the time I arrived home, I went straight into my bedroom, lay face down, and thought about boys in a different kind of light.
The be-friends-with-boys dilemma hung over me, a constant, towering cumulonimbus, dark and scary. The next day, Harry visited my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Offard, and asked that I be seated near some boys in every class. When homeroom started, I didn’t hear the first-in-the-morning Pledge that day, but rather, the screeches from desks being dragged across the floor and the pounding of books stacked one on top of the other in preparation for me, Marvin Hammerstein, to be relocated to a new seat surrounded by Tom, Todd and Armando–the roughest and toughest boys in the class. Every class, it was the same thing: a seat near a bunch of goofy, smelly guys who barged about, constantly tripping over my feet during class. The girls far off in the distance winked but were unreachable for a brief chat about their hair, their bodies, yeah, and sometimes, about what’s going on in class. The air of masculinity—the guys surrounding me went down the wrong pipe as I choked and some days gagged when I was near them. The only breaks I had from the boys during the school day were a bathroom pass.
Copyright 2025 Matthew Bamberg.
