A return to the state of grace


Bless me Father for I have sinned against the state of New Jersey. It’s been 32 years since I last confessed that New Jersey is where I’m from. Even my wife doesn’t know the extent to which I’m from New Jersey.

But something happened recently, something profound. The power of Hurricane Sandy combined with the gale-force gallantry of Bruce Springsteen who finally hugged his greatest fan and political nemesis Governor Chris Christie. It all jogged loose a repressed memory of mine. Not really a “memory.” What is it? Let me think. ... 

What I may be trying to say is I desperately need to go public, arm in arm, with my long-forgotten first love: New Jersey — the place where I last wore diapers and first kissed a girl.   

New Jersey, they took me away from you — those parents of mine — and plopped me down in coastal Massachusetts in time for eighth grade. I arrived prepackaged in that distinctive South Jersey accent — war-der (for water), tawk (for talk) — and it played no small role in why I was pushed around and humiliated in front of my new fellow eighth graders.

Out of sheer survival instinct, I Judas-kissed South Jersey goodbye in my mind. Sayonara cheesesteaks, Philadelphia Bulletin, and boardwalks. I played dead while my peers pinned me down to extract my r’s from cars and bars and stars. I would go on to root for Larry Bird even though I kept my Julius Erving newspaper clippings hidden away in a tin box. I would deliver The Boston Globe and even befriend the red-headed boy who lived in the lighthouse.

But where am I from? The answer had always stumped me — and plagued me. You have to be from somewhere, otherwise you must painstakingly construct from spare parts your own authenticity. You have to be from somewhere or you’re a ghost; you slip in and out of your own skin without anyone ever noticing.

In truth, I'm from an alphabetical fraction between points A to B: a lonely, hardly hospitable land I call New Jersachusetts. While I was in high school, the zoning laws of New Jersachusetts called for complete and utter self-pity and no further construction beyond the circumference of my upper torso. I would spend my teen years at point B, feeling like a foreigner who begs for spare change in the byzantine streets of my classmates’ life-long shared experiences. I would think about all those friends I once had at Point A — now going to proms together, and smoking pot together, and seeing concerts at the Spectrum together, and living like the broken heroes of a Springsteen song — and I would wonder if they remembered me. Pity, I say.

As the teen years gave way to the 20s and my boots wandered the country, as I formed friendships with holy saints and fellow eccentrics, a choice had to be made. Where was I from? I couldn’t explain New Jersachusetts, so I picked my poison and settled on this myth: Well, let me tell you where I’m from — a tiny salt-soaked fishing village on Cape Cod Bay where men still have anchor tattoos, and I would spearfish lobster and work on draggers and the Red Sox rule and you wouldn’t last a day there, buddy.

“Really? That’s funny because you don’t have a Massachusetts accent.”

Doh!

New Jersey, please understand that Massachusetts was merely a misbegotten mistress. Denying you is like denying my heart contains a left ventricle. My mind wandered from you like a prodigal son from the merciful father. I broke our covenant made upon my birth. Embrace me now even before I can utter a full confession. Embrace me like Bruce Springsteen embraced Chris Christie the other day, the two drawn together in shared tragedy. Whisper “Thunder Road” in my ear and make it all better.

I’ve seen the aerial footage of your busted up barrier islands. Somewhere down below, in Sea Isle City, two blocks from the boardwalk, sat the sun-kissed row house owned by my late grandparents. When I was a boy, the house was preserved in a soothing brine of seaweed, sea salt and taffy. Into dusk, my grandparents would sit on the front porch in creaky-old rocking chairs back when grandparents sat on creaky-old rocking chairs on front porches. They’d rock in unison like two skiffs on a heaving sea of memories that weren’t all good. In old age, they wordlessly agreed to secure themselves to each other for ballast.

I spent sunburned summer days there. Seven years old, I couldn’t take my eyes off that beachy billboard set tall against the sky above the T-shirt stand. The billboard had that iconic Coppertone ad of the blond, tanned, pigtailed little girl whose bikini bottom was getting tugged at by a black terrier — the result of which revealed the cute little girl's preserved little white tush.

My sister Jennifer and I earned and then cashed in our skeeball tickets for toy spiders and ballerinas and Army men. We ate lemon Italian ices, and we’d ask the lady at the fudge shop if we could try “some samples.” It all happened down there, but down there has been shoved over there by a deadly hurricane, and now down there is nowhere, but it’s closer to home than New Jersachusetts.

In our inland home of Wenonah, everything was postcard perfect like the town in “The Truman Show,” only it was real. Oh, Wenonah, don’t get me going or I’ll flood New Jersachusetts with tears — tears as sanctifying as those of Chris Christie after Bruce’s embrace, and as sad as the now-skeletal boardwalks that once burned our bare feet.

But can I stop myself? Last year my siblings informed me that someone started a Facebook page called “You Know You’re from Wenonah if …” . My old buddy Michael Morgan, now living in Virginia, wrote a long account of a recent trip back to Wenonah he took with his children. He visited the tiny town library and posted a photo of the Hardy Boys’ book The Secret of the Caves. In the photo, his finger points to a name on the sign-out card. It’s my name (my name!), written in my careful, fourth grade cursive. I've never been so careful. There it is: Proof that New Jersey still holds claim to me.

This week I’ve been wandering the streets of New Jersey by means of Google Earth. I want to go back in person. I want to say I’m sorry to my former self as I spend a day, from dawn to dusk, walking gingerly upon its streets, haunting the home that haunts me.

Leave it to the lone resident of New Jersachusetts to long for a place at the very moment it’s been blown to smithereens.

But what can I say? I’m from New Jersey. Sue me.




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