Living on the Edge of the World

New Jersey Writers Take On the Garden State

Irina Reyn, Irina Reyn

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416545637
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Viajes

Mobsters. Big hair. The smelly Turnpike. The poor cousin of its glittering neighbor Manhattan. Could that really be all there is to New Jersey? In Living on the Edge of the World, the best and brightest young writers from the much maligned state answer back with edgy, irreverent pieces of nonfiction paying tribute to New Jersey's unique place in the cultural consciousness. Like a drive along the Garden State Parkway, their stories travel to just about every corner of the state, from Princeton and Hillside to Camden and Hoboken. In "Straight Outta Garwood, " Tom Perrotta writes of the near inescapability of returning to his home state again and again in his novels; in "Exit 15W, " Joshua Braff tells how all roads led back to the Jersey Girl he'd fallen for as a seventh-grader; Kathleen DeMarco takes a nostalgic look at her grandfather's cranberry bog in "The Family Farm"; Jonathan Ames recounts a failed attempt to consummate his flirtation with a boardwalk beauty in "Rose of the Jersey Shore"; and Frederick Reiken offers an elegy to a high-rise in Fort Lee that opens his eyes to a new, dangerous world. A celebration of all that's weird and wonderful about the Garden State -- including Bruce Springsteen, the Nets, the Jersey Devil, the films of Kevin Smith, and Great Adventure -- Living on the Edge of the World will have New Jerseyans everywhere ready to stand and be counted.

A Rumble and
a Scream

CAREN LISSNER

Exit 7A

I sat in the back seat of my car on many hot nights that summer, watching heat lightning flash silently across the sky and wondering how—in the span of a few weeks—I had gone from Ivy League college freshman to homeless amusement park worker.

Each day, I lingered at my job at Six Flags Great Adventure as late as possible, hoping for favorable weather so the managers wouldn’t send us home early. After my shift ended, I repaired to the locker room, changed out of my tight green-and-white uniform, and washed off the day’s sweat in the shower. Then I aimed my used Plymouth Duster at hotels in Freehold, Princeton, or anywhere else nearby that had a dark parking lot where I could motor in, cut the lights, and snooze in the backseat until sunup. While the Town House Motel near Princeton afforded access to a rumbling ice machine on the second floor, the Sheraton on Route 537 boasted a larger parking lot that would shield me from discovery.

My parents were fighting over the terms of their divorce that summer, and it wasn’t comfortable to live with either of them. My mother had just left our native Central Jersey to search for a cheap apartment in upstate New York, and she was moving from motel to motel. Even if she had had a stable place to live, there weren’t many summer jobs up there. But she convinced me that if I lived full-time with my father in New Jersey and not with her, he would be exempt from paying my college tuition. It also became clear that to live with one parent would be a slight to the other. It seemed best to avoid both of them, find a job in a place I knew, and sleep in my car near work. Both of them complained about not having enough money, so I couldn’t ask for any. In retrospect, perhaps, I could have done things differently, but I was only nineteen.

Great Adventure was a known entity. It was five miles from farmy, colonial Freehold, the suburban Central Jersey town where I’d grown up; it paid more than minimum wage; and it employed 3,200 seasonal workers each summer. There had to be a place there for me.

In the past, I had never seen the country’s largest theme park as a source of sustenance. It was where twelfth-graders sneaked for “Senior Cut Day”; where bubble blowers contributed to a piece of unsanctioned, unsavory art known as the “Gum Wall” (so famous was its sordid legend that my fourth-grade teacher once commented in class on how disgusting it was), and where any New Jerseyan under sixteen who wanted to prove himself cool would acquire a season pass and boast of multiple rides on Lightnin’ Loops. For a younger version of me, the park had clutched freedom and wonder in its tiger claws, promising three-scoop sundaes at Yum Yum Palace and a refreshing splash on the Log Flume.

I took the swing shift at Great Adventure, from noon to 8 P.M. I needed the $4.75 per hour to cover car insurance, gas, and food for three months before I could return to college in Philadelphia for sophomore year. If I could survive and get back to my dorm room and my new friends—who, I imagined, were having much different summers than I was—I’d be okay.

My job was at the park’s entrance, among the long row of admissions turnstiles. Visitors would hand me their ticket, pass through the turnstile, stroll through the metal detector, and have their purse carefully probed for contraband by a Great Adventure security guard. Then they’d plunge into the delightful aromas of fried dough and powdered sugar.

My coworkers included retirees from the numerous fifty-five-and-over retirement communities that were (and still are) burgeoning in Central Jersey, as well as college students like me who were home in the ’burbs for the summer. I envied the other ticket takers, as they often seemed happy to get sent home early on slow days, even if it meant lost wages. Their paychecks went to extraneous pursuits like travel and movies, but mine were used for gas and car repairs. Whenever Eddie the Evil Manager came out of his booth and fixed us with his coal-eyed stare, figuring out whom to send home next, I always ducked behind the metal detectors, hoping it wouldn’t be me.

Leaving the park each evening at twilight, I purposely avoided the main highway, Route 195, which runs horizontally from Trenton to the shore, cutting the state in two. I couldn’t bear to be among the suited commuters rushing home. Great Adventure was only ten minutes from the hotels, and I thought that driving slowly on back roads would save me gas. I crept north along the thinnest, spookiest, and most poorly lit thoroughfares possible. Central Jersey was the location of the Battle of Monmouth and various other Revolutionary War sites, and is riddled with ancient horse farms, dilapidated eighteenth-century shacks, and streets still named for structures that haven’t existed in a hundred years. I took Carrs Tavern Road (though I couldn’t find the tavern), Millstone Road (the mill must have been around there somewhere), and Stagecoach Road—the former route of the Philly-to-Long Branch stage. Surrounded by hayfields and darkness, I would climb an incline at fifteen miles per hour, lift my foot off the pedal, and coast downward among sloping hills where I could smell mud and horse droppings.

Great Adventure’s 2,200 acres are situated in the otherwise unremarkable Central Jersey town of Jackson. The location was chosen in the 1970s because it was roughly equidistant from New York (seventy miles) and Philadelphia (fifty-two), and smack in the middle of nowhere. If you head just ten miles north, you are within an hour of Manhattan. But being the slightest sliver south of commuting distance is all it takes to keep a New Jersey town in anonymity. Freehold Township, where I grew up, is slightly northeast of Jackson and thus slightly more expensive, with better schools.

On my fourth day working at the park, I met Owen.

Owen instantly seemed different from everyone else. He had shiny black hair from his unique Indian/Israeli heritage, little round glasses, a 3.4 average at Princeton, and a wry, subversive style of humor.

I would have expected his nascent Princeton education to have propelled him into an internship at NBC or the David Sarnoff Research Center, but instead, he was at the amusement park like me. And also like me, he wanted to be a writer someday. In his free time, he worked on a summer project that seemed to me to be far from pretentious: a humorous novel about coming of age in the ’80s. It was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to write. At school he was majoring in English and Eastern religion.

Coming into work each morning, I wished fervently that the manager would station Owen and me side by side, so we could talk all day. I loved his running commentary. Like any good writer, Owen noticed everything.

“That girl’s hair was this high!” he said to me one day, as a gum-snapping Jersey Girl passed through the gate.

“People say the same stupid thing when they go through the metal detectors,” he observed, groaning. “‘Oh, I better put my Uzi away.’”

I chimed in: “Or ‘I’ve got a metal plate in my head.’”

“Yeah, that’s a good one. Or ‘I left my grenade in my other pants.’”

“‘My bomb is back in the car.’”

Back then, terrorism jokes were actually funny.

Watching people go through the metal detectors was actually the sport of choice for us admissions workers. The security guards with their probing sticks took many guests by surprise, even though a sign warned each entrant that the park was private property and they would be subject to a search. No fanny pack was left unprobed. A female security guard told me that one time, they caught a mother with cocaine, and they had to detain her for the Jackson police while her young daughter sat crying in the office. Other times, patrons would step through the turnstiles, suddenly notice the line of guards, and race back out to the parking lot. Items confiscated while I worked there included marijuana, pocketknives, and illegal three-finger rings.

One drizzly afternoon, I was blissfully working alongside Owen, hoping I could somehow get him to like me, and a tall Rastafarian man approached our gates. Owen and I noticed him at the same time.

The guy suddenly realized the security guards were behind us and mumbled in a baritone, “There’s some shit I gotta get rid of.” Then he backtracked to a garbage pail near the bushes and tossed something in.

After he was gone, Owen volunteered to go check what was in the trash.

Owen returned to me with his hands spread five feet apart.

“A huuuuuge condom,” he said. “Used.”

I thought about Owen at night when I lay across the backseat in the Sheraton parking lot, trees shielding me from the lights. I could hear car doors slamming and weary families getting out. My saving grace was music. I would put on my Walkman headphones, close my eyes, and listen to cassettes of the 1970s and 1980s pop groups I’d grown up with. My tabletop stereo, the one that had gotten me through high school and my freshman year of college, was stored away in the trunk of the car, but at least I had my Walkman. As I listened to the songs, I thought of living on my own someday and not depending on anyone for anything.

Occasionally, if it was a brutally hot night, I would head into the hotel for ice and rub it along the back of my neck.

Sometimes I tried to guess what Owen was doing at the same time. He lived in wealthy West Windsor with his older brother and parents. I figured he was up on his windowsill writing among the eaves, inhaling the cut grass and trying to select a fresh metaphor to describe the garden hose. Was it possible he could ever like me? I was probably far too nervous around him (and all boys) to hope for that. I certainly hadn’t told Owen of my housing situation—and I didn’t know if I should.

During the second week of work, I decided to drive to the middle-class house in Freehold where I’d lived before my family’s downward tumble.

It was a three-bedroom Levitt home with cathedral ceilings on an eighth of an acre, part of a spacious 1970s development called “Contempra at Monmouth Heights” near Route 9. We had a wide, flat front yard that became the de facto site for after-school kickball games. Even the bullies who taunted my little brother at school and the popular girls who turned up their noses at me in junior high participated in a temporary truce during the games, since the social order was different at home than at school. I was one of the older kids on my block and thus had more confidence, so I could boot a kickball clear into the next yard. At school, I was less athletic and was among the last picked in gym. It was amazing how much my abilities improved during the ten minutes I rode the bus home.

Although some people denigrate the suburbs, I thrived there. I biked around pretending to be Harriet the Spy; my brother and I rolled up our pants and inched along the stream at the end of the road, hunting for geodes and frogs. Every street in our development was named for a Revolutionary War site or figure (Ticonderoga Boulevard, Gage Court), and it was there that my brother and I prowled at twilight, mapping our own “battle routes” for Halloween in order to maximize treat intake. Pillowcases were filled to the hilt with Dum Dum Pops and KitKats.

Alongside the local stream, which was actually a waning tributary of the Manasquan River, lay a tiny “pocket park” with a small wooden pavilion and jungle gym. There, kids staged fights, made out, and coated the pavilion with spray-painted graffiti. There were laconic reviews of Van Halen (“VH #1!!!”), sincere decla...