State by State

by Matt Weiland

  My friends’ parents were commercial artists, college professors, unsuccessful actors, mid-level advertising executives. Everybody seemed to have pretty much the same amount of money. We all vacationed for a week or two a year in the same place: “Down the shore,” on Long Beach Island, where about ten or more families would rent or share cottages and bungalows in close proximity. The parents would hang out and the kids would play together. New Jersey summers smelled of beach grass. You had to get up close to smell it, lie down in it, but I did a fair amount of that; either playing with plastic army men or hide and seek as a small boy, or, somewhat later, incompetently prodding the nether regions of equally inept girls. The two-family houses or single-family cottages with outdoor showers and crushed seashell driveways smelled musty when we’d first arrive—happier after a few days: of suntan oil and salt air, sun-bleached wood, the sea, the floors tracked with sand.

  When the exterminator truck, spraying for mosquitoes, would come down the block, making a slow U-turn at the beach end, belching white, chromosome-damaging fog from its tank, all the kids would spill out of their houses to chase along in its wake.

  There was miniature golf, drive-in movies at Manahawken, an amusement “village” with the obligatory “pirate ship” and “ye olde waffle shop.” There were thrill rides and clam bars, fish houses where breaded, deep-fried things were dunked and made golden by the ton. Tumbletown was a field of trampolines in the enticingly named yet somehow forlorn Surf City—a community of five-and-dimes selling inflatable rafts, cheap plastic flip flops, sweatshirts, and the comic books we all needed to survive. There were townie bars, smelling of stale beer, and the shabby, inevitable motels and efficiencies of another time. I was—and remain—curiously fascinated with such places, one time dream destinations with names like the Mermaid, the Neptune, Spindrift, Bide-A-Wee, Ric’s Shore Club, the Rip Tide, Sea Spray, and so on; their names in aquamarine neon, the odd letter missing like a lost tooth. (I don’t remember, specifically, any of these names. But I’m sure they existed.)

  Barnegat Light was crowded, working class, with numbered streets, each ending at the beach, lined tightly on both sides with houses.

  The towns of Loveladies and Harvey Cedars, next door, had relatively vast empty spaces between modern, beach-fantasy dune residences with porthole windows, swimming pools, and decks on stilts. We didn’t know anyone who lived in such places. They might as well have been moon-men in their enormous, slowly migrating sand-ships—which, when the hurricanes came, would often end up in the bay.

  But we knew the squeak of sand against the ear, when half asleep on a beach towel. The comforting rumble of Atlantic waves, breaking against the jetties, the pleasures of stolen cigarettes, steamer clams dripping butter, summer corn, funnel cakes, and finger-fucking.

  Was I happy?

  I must have been.

  In Leonia, some houses were shabbier than others, but there were comfortable constants. By and large, adults seemed smart. Working in, and living so close to Manhattan, we shared the same tastes, lived the same life of the mind as our neighbors. This meant hard-bound copies of Horizon and American Heritage magazines. Big, brainy libraries with the serious writers of the day heavily represented: Tennessee Williams, Albee, Updike, Bellow. Lush picture books. Naughty stuff like The Olympia Reader, Henry Miller, Lolita (of course). It meant film night at my house, when my father would come home with two projectors and two films: an action film for the kids upstairs, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or a Bergman film for the parents downstairs. There was music. There were always books. For the kids, there were Classic Illustrated Comics, molded plastic army men, and the Johnson Smith Catalogue.

  It was the perfect match, really. Bergen County, New Jersey, with its wooded areas, swamps, rubbish dumps—and easily transversed backyards—and the Johnson Smith Catalogue—the veritable motherload, the Source, and inspiration—for generations of juvenile delinquents. Antique long before we were born, the same, timeless advertisements for the Catalogue beckoned us from the backs of our comics as they had those who came before, summoning us to a tantalizing smorgasbord of destructive behaviors: arson, peeping, sabotage, vandalism, humiliation of our peers, every variety of vicious prank, urging us to acts that today would be called terrorism. Fantastically realistic plastic vomit, itching powder, various foul-smelling substances, magic tricks, these were only some of the “come on.” Within the ancient pages of the Catalogue, one found smoke powder for bombs, wrist rockets, waterproof fuses. What could one do with those? It didn’t take long to figure out. And the lurid pictures of the guy with the X-ray glasses, gaping, tongue out at a female colleague? Apparently, spying on women without their consent was something every red-blooded kid who didn’t want sand kicked in his face (like the other ubiquitous ads of the days’ comic books) did.

  Add illegal fireworks—the gateway drug for aspiring fuck-ups—and one evil brainiac (every neighborhood has one) and you’ve got a recipe for fun.

  Which is to say, Leonia was a paradise. So much to choose from. Up the steep hills at the top of the town was a few-acre wooded area called High-wood Hills, where we could run wild, build forts, pick trash, and set off fireworks. In the opposite direction, below the abandoned rail station, were the vast “swamps,” where we could detonate more serious explosives, perpetrate relatively harmless acts of arson, and wallow in the chocolate pudding-like mud that, on reflection, was no doubt loaded with heavy metals …

  My local brainiac was Steven—a lonely kid who lived down the block. We never saw his parents. Steven knew how to build motorcycles out of lawn mower engines and pilfered frames. He taught me and my friends how to make rockets by painstakingly jamming match heads into drilled-out CO2 cartridges, packing them in tight, priming them with a waterproof fuse from the Johnson Smith Catalogue (natch), and launching them from homemade mortars made from copper pipe. Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, presented no challenge to Steven. Rubber cement, we learned after much experimentation, made a wonderful substitute for napalm. But gasoline thickened with dishwashing detergent was cheaper, available in volume, and closer to the real thing. Fireworks culture—a sort of prequel/training ground for the drug culture ahead—consumed all of us. In fact, many of the same disaffected young men with unsavory family connections who made the trip to Chinatown or had someone do it for them, went on to supply the recreational substances of our teens. But until that time, it was all about the juvenile delinquent’s hierarchy of desire: firecrackers and cherry bombs and yes … yes(!!) ash-cans!! … and the legendary (“So powerful one a them blew Tommy Precoppio’s brother’s hand clear off!! It’s a quarter stick a dynamite!!”) M-80. We discussed the various properties of these pyrotechnical devices with the same breathless tones we would later employ paging through the Physician’s Desk Reference. (“Oooh … Parest 400’s!! Black Beauties!! Nice!!”) We started with the routine melting of molded plastic army men and the burning and immolating of other toys, but quickly graduated to burning and blowing up vast tracts of Meadowland. I shudder now to remember the “test chamber” I built in my cellar, out of an old milk delivery box lined with insulation material. I’d actually light fireworks, often inside bottles or jars, drop them into the box, and sit on the lid, thrilled by the powerful but muffled THUD, the lid hopping and bowing out beneath me. It’s a fucking Jersey miracle I didn’t get my young ass and nut-sack full of shrapnel.

  There were consequences if you fucked up too bad—as when Steven eventually burned down the grammar school. There were two options for “troubled” or “incorrigible” children: “Juvie” (Juvenile Hall) or the “Pines,” Bergen Pines Psychiatric Hospital. No small number of my little friends spent time in one or the other. Steven certainly did. He topped his midnight strike on the grammar school by (it is said) killing his father. I have fond memories of him: awkward, bespectacled (of course), with a bowl haircut, a seemingly empty Tony Perkins Victorian house that smelled of cabbage and sinister Eastern European foods, old clothes—and an
instinctive desire to burn down the world that predated by decades the Sex Pistols and the Dead Boys. He was a magnet for blame. If anything burned down or exploded anywhere in the town—even of natural causes—the cops always visited Steven first. Saint-like, he bore all our sins on his shoulders.

  There were, however, no consequences for anyone, it appeared, once I changed schools. When I was in fourth grade a relative died, leaving my family just enough money to pack me and my brother off to private school in the larger and much wealthier Englewood. Whereas Leonia had taught me that if you blow up the wrong thing at the wrong time—or break the wrong window—you could end up in Juvie, Englewood quickly taught me that one could—with the right absentee parents—careen thoughtlessly through life without a care. Smash the new car? No problem. Hit and run? Oopsy daisy! Assault? Off to “Non-Traditional” school for you, young man! My new friends all had tennis courts—and, seemingly, no parents. They lived in vast, luxurious empty houses, manned only by expressionless maids and Sherry-sipping nannies. Unused swimming pools, antiques-filled living rooms, cellar rec rooms where anything was permitted. My new friends smelled of nothing but fresh laundry, soap, and money—with the occasional background whiff of marijuana and cigarettes. The few from my town who carpooled from Leonia to school with me, I only now noticed, smelled of bacon and the cooking odors of normal family kitchens. To my eternal, burning shame, I dropped them soon after realizing this. It remains, very likely, even all these years later, the very worst thing I have ever done.

  Life in my new school opened up, initially, a larger world. My new friends, as soon as they turned seventeen, got cars, of course. I never owned one myself, I was a passenger for my teenage years. And though cars meant we could expand our horizons exponentially, I think, in some ways, they shrunk.

  The car became a living room, moving in predictable patterns up and down New Jersey’s routes, highways, parkways, and interstates. We cruised, endlessly, movement a destination unto itself, smoking weed and looking out the windows with fear, contempt, and bemusement. Any sense of superiority we might have felt was tempered by the gnawing certainty that it would soon be us on the other side of the glass. The passing used car lots and furniture stores of Route 17. The diners and malls of Route 4. The tree-lined darkness of the Palisades Interstate. The high speed, multi-laned Route 80, that, somewhere after Paterson, tempted one to just keep going. There were favorite parks (Alison Park in Englewood, North Bridge Park in Fort Lee) in which to hang out. Favorite eateries (Hiram’s and the Plaza Diner in Fort Lee, IHOP in Teaneck, Jann’s in Paterson, Wolfie’s in Paramus). And, of course, the neglected rumpus rooms of a friend’s absent or alcoholic parents—semi-psychedelic drug dens, usually decorated with carpet remnants, found objects, souvenirs from older siblings’ trips to Morocco, Day-Glo posters. There would be a bong, or a chillum, or a Turkish water pipe—and a drum head to clean seeds. There would be a can of Ozium to kill the smell. A stereo and record collection, invariably including the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach or At Fillmore East and Dark Side of the Moon—this was obligatory. If hallucinogens were involved, King Crimson might be added to the mix.

  We became a transient, loosely associated conglomeration of tribes, coming together only for school and the occasional house party. One tribe to a vehicle, always moving mindlessly, instinctively, like sharks—in search of drugs or food or escape from boredom. A few tribes might converge, briefly, in parking lots, garages, cellars, a disused athletic field, but good would rarely come of it. And our hunting grounds always ended at “the Bridge.” Across that, one was on one’s own.

  A normal New Jersey childhood.

  Watching any of a hundred films over the decades since, I realize, maybe the whole world looks like New Jersey when you’re young. The predictable arc of alienated teens in suburbia. Looking back, I try to distinguish what was uniquely New Jersey about my childhood? What didn’t look like every other Linklater, Spielberg, Kevin Smith film? The joke is over, really.

  I realized this on a book tour a while back, waking up in Austin or Minneapolis or St. Louis, at yet another anonymous chain hotel. Not knowing where I was, I threw open the drapes and looked out the window, desperate for orientation. Where was I? How much longer did I have to go? Beneath me, an endless and grimly predictable sequence of Victoria’s Secret superstore, McDonald’s, the Gap, P. R Chang’s, T. G. I. Friday’s, Chili’s, Home Depot. Mall after mall separated only by a strip mall or mini-mall, stretching out to the horizon, where another glass-covered cityscape clustered perhaps around a shopping district. I could have been anywhere. I could have been in New Jersey.

  NEW MEXICO

  CAPITAL Santa Fe

  ENTERED UNION 1912 (47th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From Mexico, “place of Mexitli,” an Aztec god or leader

  NICKNAME Land of Enchantment

  MOTTO Crescit eundo (“It grows as it goes”)

  RESIDENTS NewMexican

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 3

  STATE BIRD roadrunner

  STATE FLOWER yucca

  STATE TREE pinyon

  STATE SONG “O Fair New Mexico”

  LAND AREA 121,356 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Torrance Co., 12mi.SSWofWillard

  POPULATION 1,928,384

  WHITE 66.8%

  BLACK 1.9%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 9.5%

  ASIAN 1.1%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 42.1%

  UNDER 18 28.0%

  65 AND OVER 11.7%

  MEDIAN AGE 34.6

  NEW MEXICO

  Ellery Washington

  Shortly after my tenth birthday I was nearly struck by lightning. It was mid-May, 1975, and I was watching my two older brothers and their teen-aged friends attempt vague impersonations of Art Williams and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the tar-paved basketball courts behind Saint Bernadette’s Church in Albuquerque. The afternoon had been warm and dry, the temperature around seventy-five degrees. Typical central New Mexico weather. By a quarter past five, when my brothers and I had finished our after-school chores and regrouped with the others at the courts, the once-bright blue sky was shaded with darker, rust-tinged hues.

  In Albuquerque, violent flash floods and sudden lightning storms were commonplace in the spring. Our parents warned us never to play in the long, flood-prone arroyos, and always to keep an eye out for sudden changes in the sky. That afternoon, however, my attention was so fixed on my brothers’ game that I’d ignored the rapidly growing thunderclouds. Even if I’d noticed them, I would never have returned home alone; I was much too infatuated with my brothers to ever leave an event where they actually tolerated my presence. Besides, until that moment, the mortal danger posed by flash floods and lightning strikes was entirely anecdotal—we’d even walked half a mile through an unpaved arroyo on our way to play ball that day.

  Then, suddenly, the hair on my head stiffened, I was momentarily blinded by an intense flash of blue-white light, and a thundering crackle filled the entire court. We were stunned. Awed senseless.

  When my sight returned, I looked up toward the clouds. They weren’t drifting directly overhead, as I’d expected them to be, but instead had settled in two wide columns that reached down to the base of the Sandia Mountains, some five miles away. Off in the distance, ranks of electromagnetic bolts played a beautifully menacing game of flashes and strikes, exchanging frequent charges between the denser masses of humidity. The fact that a single charge had broken with the others to strike the ground less than ten feet from me only reinforced its significance—there was no mistaking it, the strike had been an act of God. My eldest brother was the first to speak. “Man!” he shouted. “That was so bad!”

  Then, all at once, everyone started talking.

  “How did you stay so cool, little man?”

  “Maybe little man’s not so little after all!”

  “Wonder what the others will say when they hear about this!”

  My brothers and their friends had mistaken my paralytic shock for stolid st
rength, a quality they’d never imagined existed beneath my timidity.

  I had always been awkward—too skinny, overly polite, bookishly shy. To make matters worse, I was one of only three black kids at Collet Park Elementary, my family the only black family in our upper middle-class, largely white and Hispanic neighborhood. As first-generation black New Mexicans, we played no part in the state’s celebrated tricultural heritage: Spanish, Indian, and Anglo. And while in urban centers across the country African-Americans were taking to the streets, my mother was at home sewing her own dashikis and teaching us the Black History lessons we weren’t being taught in school. I felt completely outside, isolated, until that fortuitous strike.

  In the New Mexico of my childhood, plaster statues of the Virgin Mary cried actual tears, mud from pits in dying mining towns healed the afflicted, and the face of Jesus appeared on a white flour tortilla, each miracle inspiring passionate pilgrimages to places like Chimayo, Lake Arthur, and various villages throughout the state. Such stories were frequently featured on the evening news—lending them media-bolstered credibility—simply because of the stir they caused in the local population. Moreover, in many rural communities, centuries of cultural mixing between New Mexico’s highly dramatic form of Hispanic Catholicism and Navajo, Hopi, Ute, and Acoma religious rites had created an almost South American sense of mystical realism in everyday life. Even in Albuquerque, even in a scientific family, I was susceptible to the tales of a wrathful Christian god and vengeful Indian ghosts—to hear the neighborhood teenagers tell it, our entire block had been built over a desecrated burial site, putting our families at risk of being tomahawked to pieces by dead Apache warriors every night.