Myrtle Beach

The first thing I did when I found out I was moving to Myrtle Beach was to look up the state income taxes. Seven percent! South Carolina has the highest income taxes in the South. This in a state that has been solidly red for decades, and after witnessing the economic miracle that is Tennessee.

The second thing I did when I found out I was moving to Myrtle Beach was to see if they had a minor league baseball team. They did: the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, which in 2010 were a Braves affiliate, then later, a Rangers affiliate, and now, a Cubs affiliate. Everybody knows that minor league baseball is the nectar of the gods. I go to a lot of minor league baseball games, eating sausages and catching foul balls.

Myrtle Beach is at the center of what is collectively known as the Grand Strand—the fifty-mile-long stretch of beach stretching across both Horry and Georgetown counties. To the south is Surfside Beach, Murrells Inlet, and Pawleys Island. To the north is North Myrtle Beach and Little River. To the west is Conway, where I moved to in 2010, out in the country, among the cotton fields and the mobile homes. Conway is hashtag #TheSouth—there are street festivals with Christian music and parades for Jesus. There are still vestiges of segregation, and you don’t have to look hard for it—in Conway, it persisted well into the seventies. Conway is also home to Coastal Carolina University, though separated from the downtown area by a body of water. Myrtle Beach is culturally very different from Conway. Myrtle Beach is hashtag #TheCity, with gay clubs and Indigenous People’s Day and more relaxed, liberal attitudes towards just about anything. Both are located in Horry County.

To understand Horry County is to understand why things have turned out the way they are. Myrtle Beach is poor, with a per capita income of $32,600 a year. Conway is poorer. To the south, in Georgetown County, incomes are significantly higher. Horry County has always been lacking for resources, going back over a century. The land is bad—full of clay, and unsuitable for industrial farming. Georgetown County was home to the enormous rice plantations and the wealth associated with them. So Horry County has always been fertile ground for subsistence farmers, hucksters, and conmen—a culture unlike any place in the world. If someone comes to you with a business opportunity in Myrtle Beach, there is a very good chance that it is a scam. You might also notice, while driving through Myrtle Beach, that it’s not very nice. There are cheap signs, cheap storefronts, and cheap buildings. The hotels along Ocean Avenue are reasonably new, but those were erected by giant, faceless corporations. The restaurants and attractions are artisanal, run by the aforementioned hucksters and conmen. Wages are low, but so is the cost of living, and correspondingly, the living itself.

There is a great deal of crime. Property crime, mostly, though there have been a couple of high-profile murder cases in the last ten years, mostly involving missing girls. There is a district in downtown Myrtle Beach that has among the highest density of crimes committed in the country, mostly muggings and such. The south side of Myrtle Beach is particularly dangerous, where a headless body washed up not too many years ago. Yaupon Avenue is home to all the streetwalkers; every few months the cops will come and round them up and post their mugshots online. In 2011, they arrested a prostitute with a glass eye, who became known as the ”Zombie Hooker,” which was publicity that Myrtle Beach didn’t need, but probably deserved. For a time, the town had a burgeoning erotic massage parlor industry, 15-20 of them, and they got so popular that Myrtle Beach was on the receiving end of sex tourism—people were driving in from all over the state to get a massage with a happy ending. The city government wisely decided not to bust them all with SWAT raids and dogs, and instead hired a private investigator to visit all of them and document what he found. Armed with this information, the city declared them all a public nuisance, and closed them, but word got out that the city paid some guy taxpayer money to go around and get happy endings. He died abruptly, so we never got to hear his side of the story. Probably from too many happy endings.

If that wasn’t seedy enough for you, there was the incident where a stripper and a strip club patron at Derriere’s brought young children into the strip club and had them perform sex acts on each other. Myrtle Beach had twelve strip clubs at the time, and in response, the city passed a flurry of ordinances that were too expensive for most of them to comply with, and eight of them promptly shut down. Myrtle Beach has spent years and vast amounts of resources trying to position itself as a family-friendly destination. For the most part, it has succeeded, and I can tell you this because it is impossible to go out to eat at a restaurant during the summer without it sounding like kindergarten recess. People vacation in Myrtle Beach because it is cheap, and not to be classist, but the types of people who visit Myrtle Beach are the types of people who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. Myrtle Beach has a lot of riffraff, but imports them from elsewhere as well. I avoid Myrtle Beach, especially during the summer. Sure, I have an office there, but I live in Pawleys Island, the high-rent district to the south, and travel to and from work via pneumatic tube. Once I finish building my house, I will likely never have to go to Myrtle Beach again, except to get a haircut. I will be happily living in a bubble.

As for culture, well, if Myrtle Beach was in New York Magazine’s approval matrix, it would be lowbrow and despicable. I have experienced this first-hand, trying to get DJ gigs. There is a very large nightclub here called Club 3001 that has four rooms with as many dancefloors—a Top 40 room, a country room, a live music room, and a dance music room, though the dance music room is really just dance remixes of Top 40 songs. Notably, it does not have underground house and techno. There is the Carolina Opry, if you’re into that sort of thing. There is Dolly Parton’s Pirates Voyage, where you can eat chicken parts out of a plastic bin while watching pirates dancing and cavorting. Pirates Voyage during Christmas is a hoot—Jesus is there, along with some camels and the Three Wise Men, to go with the pirates and the sea lions. Occasionally a ventriloquist will come into town. We see a lot of Jeff Foxworthy. There is one comedy club (formerly two), which only allows family-friendly acts. Don’t get me wrong—there are a lot of things to do here, but there is no classical music, no opera, no avant-garde music, no avant-garde art—nothing highbrow whatsoever. This, in a town of 200,000 people in the summer. Eastbound and Down did a pretty good job of framing this in the early 2010s, a fact that the city was not keen to advertise.

Shopping is a particular concern of mine. I do nearly all of my shopping in New York or Miami. There are some middlebrow Tanger Outlets, where I have gotten a pair of sunglasses and underwear at the UnderArmour store, along with a couple of pairs of Adidas kicks. Banana Republic was located in the upscale shopping center here known as Market Common—and went out of business. Too highbrow. There is a Southern Living store there that sells Live, Laugh, Love signs that continues to thrive. The upper classes in Myrtle Beach—and there are some, as there are anywhere—typically wear polo shirts with pleated khakis, ostensibly from the Haggar outlet. People wore pleated pants so long in Myrtle Beach that they went out of style and eventually boomeranged and came back in style. There is one place to buy a Rolex in the entire Grand Strand, at a jewelry store in Pawley’s. You can get a Breitling or a Tag Heuer at Reeds Jewelers in the mall. The mall, by the way, is a CBL property—a mall real estate investment trust that is the owner and operator of B and C malls. You can tell the quality of the mall by the number of kiosks in the walkways selling animatronic barking dogs and hand lotion. There is a Hot Topic, and a Spencer Gifts, right next door to each other. The two department store anchors are Belk and Dillard’s. Dick’s Sporting Goods does a brisk business, selling overpriced baseball gloves to Little Leaguers. There is a Starbucks. Myrtle Beach is not a Starbucks town, but a Dunkin Donuts town, which suits me just fine.

But Myrtle Beach, and the Grand Strand more broadly, has an underground city. Living among all the riffraff are some of the kindest, most thoughtful people you will ever meet. A good measure of character is if you would let someone house-sit for you. House-sitting requires a lot of trust—you’re going to let someone into your house and trust them to feed your pets and not go through your stuff. There are a lot of people in Myrtle Beach I would let house-sit for me. In New York, not so much. In New York, I would come home to find a stranded credit card and cocaine residue on the coffee table. Relationships here are built on trust, not transactions, and it shows in the way that people treat each other. So no, in spite of the unsavory and unpleasant parts of Myrtle Beach, I would never go back to living in adversarial New York. Myrtle Beach has everything I need, without the assholes.