New Jersey Me
Page 1
Praise for New Jersey Me
“Gritty and loud, raucous and real, but still somehow hushed and holy—like a love story told in the blacklight room at the back of a Spencer’s.”
—Ben Loory, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day
“New Jersey Me is, like Ferguson’s poetry, funny and heartsick, breathless and bent. An inspired debut novel and a wonderfully twisted love song to wounded souls in dead suburbs in forgotten corners of America.”
—Brad Listi, author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder.
“In New Jersey Me, the lyrical new novel from Rich Ferguson, there is a roll call of icons and time-and-place markers: Mary Kay cosmetics, Count Chocula, TV dinner trays and cars long since rusted to nothing. Springsteen and Bruce Lee posters preside over the room, mind, and heart of Mark, the wounded and wandering young man at the novel's center. Ghosts abound in this novel, in the form of the men Mark wishes he was—the Bruces—and the men he fears ever becoming—his ferocious cop father, the piggish bully Terry, the disease-riddled father of his secretive best friend Jimmy. Mark roll calls the iconic into existence whenever he faces down the bleakness of his present life, anchoring himself lest he fades to nothing. In prose as furious and rhythmic as freely flowing poetry, Ferguson pinballs his characters between the intractable poles of their lives—death-dealing power plants, drugs, abandoning mothers, futile jobs, and futureless friends—and dares them to find their way out. And you root for them to make it, which is no small feat. It's a tough, raw, and ultimately compelling piece of writing, and it matters that it's found its way into your hands. A must-read.”
—David Rocklin, author of The Luminist
“The perfect mating of poetic noir and a carny barker’s banter. Ferguson’s unique vision sounds the death toll of the American suburban dream as it slowly overdoses in the back seat of a smoldering Chevy Vega. Fiction doesn’t get any better than this, and if did, it’d be illegal.”
—Patrick O’Neil, author of Gun, Needle, Spoon
“Those of us fortunate enough to have seen the legendary spoken word artist Rich Ferguson perform are familiar with his mastery of the language. I’m happy to report that in New Jersey Me, Ferguson’s soaring debut, that mastery is on full display, and in the service of a killer story that has all the cool, soulful flavor of an epic Springsteen deep cut, a “Rosalita” in novel form. (And if you’re from Jersey, like I am, you know that praise doesn’t get any higher than that).”
—Greg Olear, author of Fathermucker and Totally Killer
“Rich Ferguson’s New Jersey Me is an incredibly powerful debut. Ferguson creates a world unlike any you have ever read. This is raw, powerfully moving, darkly funny, and original. The full throttle prose is lapidary in its precision, and unique in its execution. A stunning novel.”
—Rob Roberge, author of Liar
“If you’ve seen him perform it’s no surprise, but for those not lucky enough to have witnessed LA spoken word legend Ferguson in action, his debut novel New Jersey Me delivers the literary version of a manic burst of joyful optimism in what can sometimes be an unfriendly and complicated world. His endearingly eccentric characters lovingly display the humanity all around us, while the story, almost secondary to these beautiful people he’s created and allowed us to know, mimics the internal chaos with which we all struggle—and catches the reader off-guard by offering peace in such chaos.”
—Lenore Zion, psychologist and author of Stupid Children
and My Dead Pets are Interesting
“New Jersey Me is a gripping novel full of heartbreak, awkward sex, and violence. The underlying heart and humor will keep the reader utterly engrossed. Ferguson’s prose is lyrical and gripping. One of the best coming-of-age novels I have ever read. A fantastic debut novel from an amazing veteran poet.”
—Tony DuShane, author of Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk
“A novel rife with Ferguson's sharp, verbal gymnastics that'll keep you locked in and hungry for more as you're driven brilliantly through a beautiful tale of lost souls.”
—Adrian Todd Zuniga, founder of Literary Death Match
“Richard Ferguson is wonderful—his book is playful, grand, and disturbing. His words flow like a new Cadillac driving down Killer Highway 9—“Decked out in a pearl-white blouse, fuchsia skirt, silver high-heeled pumps, and still sporting the remnants of a tan from her last Mary Kay–sponsored vacation to the Bahamas, all she said was: ‘Well? What do you think?’” I think it’s brilliant.”
—Jack Grisham, author of An American Demon and Untamed
“An unforgettable, wild romp through one boy’s coming-of-age. But it isn’t only fun and games, for behind the chimp, the Mary Kay Cosmetics, the two Bruces (Lee and Springsteen), the coffins, the bongs, the booze, and the girl with one leg is a whole lot of tenderness, heart, and soul.”
—Jessica Anya Blau, author of The Trouble with Lexie
“Like one long double live Springsteen LP—if Springsteen had suddenly gone gonzo grammatical magician singing about one-legged lovers and kidnapped chimps, Joan Jett strippers and Mary Kay Cadillacs, the taste of Count Chocula and cigarettes…Ferguson's debut novel burns with big-hearted life.”
—Jamie Blaine, author of Midnight Jesus
“A weary mother leaves her goodbye note by the vodka bottle and bails in pink suede pumps with a Vicodin in one hand and suitcase in the other. Her young son Mark buzzes with adolescent grief that only teens who downed SpaghettiOs, Ozzy Osbourne, and David Lee Roth records in equal parts can understand. While Mark’s mother dreamt of dumpier pastures three towns away, our sharp protagonist hurls defiantly towards loserville. In New Jersey Me, you don’t want to be anyplace else. Ferguson’s easy prose is a sly ride from the flirty Charlie perfumed Cotton Candy girls at the local circus to a motherless place of anxious rage fueled by sadness. Ferguson captures what Joan Didion refers to as “The loneliness of the abandoned of whatever age.” For, in New Jersey Me, we are left looking for clues of how you lose someone: in the old man’s recliner, in the lazy umbrella’s of a mother’s Beach at Cannes print, in a one-legged girl’s heart, in the remnants of puke in the white shag carpet, or in the way she silently stepped out the door."
—Antonia Crane, author of Spent
“In the tradition of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, and the best parts of JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, this remarkable first novel from poet Rich Ferguson is in one sense a classic coming-of-age, finding yourself story in which a young man plagued by soul-crushing small town ennui and a pervasive sense that his family are not really his people struggles to both embrace and transcend his own roots. Being a poet, Ferguson makes full use of his unflinching lyricist’s voice to create a stylized, symbol-rich imagining of this literary archetype as an evocative and darkly witty portrait, perfect in its imperfections, not only of a dysfunctional adolescence but also of a specific time and place in American culture—the hopeful, hardscrabble, self-medicating New Jersey that gave the world Born to Run.”
—Shana Nys Dambrot, art critic and curator
“Anyone who’s ever grown up, had parents, been in love, loved rock and roll, done drugs, not done drugs, heard voices, spoken in tongues, driven too fast, puked too long, heard two hearts beat as one, seen shooting stars over an open road on the way to find themselves will love this first novel by poet and musician Rich Ferguson. I read the entire book with a smile on my face. It reminded me of some of the best novels I read when I was his protagonist’s age, masterpieces by Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey, Ishmael Reed, William Kotzwinkle, and Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s an earworm of a novel,
nesting in your head when you put it down and then singing to you like a siren until you pick it up again. A masterfully painted portrait of coming-of-age in eighties America, of dysfunctional domestic derangement, teenage rage, rabid restlessness, sweet adolescent strangeness. And love. Hopelessly hopeful, soulful, and life-altering love. When I read Rich’s prose I feel like a new language has been invented just for me. Like the best I’ve ever read, I was sorry to see it end but grateful it’ll live with me ’til I die. He paints with his prose in varying styles and from an infinite color palate as your mind’s eye draws across his pages: abstract expressionism, Impressionism, cubism, surrealism, photo-realism, lyrical abstraction. They all meld and become vividly accessible, crystal clear in their detail, drawn with a drummer’s unerring sense of rhythm and time, as Modern Fergusonism. New Jersey Me belongs in the libraries, museums, and concert halls of every seeker’s ever-expanding mind and heart.”
—James Morrison, actor and singer/songwriter
“Ferguson’s poetic prose takes us on a magical ride through adolescence, specifically the time when all you could dream about was leaving home, even if you didn’t have the wherewithal to do so.”
—Jodyne L. Speyer, author of Dump ’Em
“If you want to read a searing account of a hero’s reckoning with a devastating childhood and subsequent redemptive wrenching from a hellish American hamlet, this is not your book. This is no Bastard Out of Carolina, it’s more like Accident Awash in Blackwater—the narrator’s hometown near the New Jersey shore. The hero is not one and his tale of growing up in a drab, industrially polluted town with a somewhat neglectful mom and abusive dad is neither brutal nor harrowing enough to be redemptive, but rather ordinary and even laughable. New Jersey Me is a paean to the everymen and women who live lives, not of quiet desperation but of grumbled quasi-shittiness. How do you strike out from a place that isn’t quite there anymore, surrounded by people whose chronic mantra is to get out? How do you leave parents who never fully embraced or abandoned you? If Huck Finn had to exchange the Mississippi for a nuclear facility’s runoff creek and his BFF Tom Sawyer was a sexually ambiguous basement-dwelling Italian kid with a passion for bongs, Tolkien, and Stevie Nicks, what adventures would they have? Rich Ferguson delivers the answers and then some with down-home wit, plainspoken insight, and a goofy, revelatory lyricism rendered true poetry by its earthbound origins in the armpit of America. This is a vision quest where epiphanies can only be glimpsed from one eye of dilapidated seaside Lucy the Elephant, over an ocean facing the wrong, backward-looking direction, or hinted at, on a littered rainy shoreline with the sun sinking behind America’s western promise, walled off by a wasteland of postindustrial detritus. It’s about insisting on staying in a place that has already deserted you, where you wish you were stuck but are merely adrift. It is the protagonist’s gentle but persistent demand that beauty be accounted for and love confessed to that ultimately sees us through; his story eclipses the hero’s journey and gives us instead a real boy’s passage into actual, fumbling adulthood, all of it to a red hot soundtrack that includes The Clash, Black Sabbath, Nazareth, R.E.M., and of course, The Boss himself."
—Heather Woodbury, playwright and performer
“It isn’t often someone can take on New Jersey with the kind of aplomb worthy of the Boss himself; the impressionistic, secondhand accounts of the place are every bit as legion as jokes about neighborhoods correlating to exits on its famed Turnpike. Which makes what Rich Ferguson has done, in his boldly-titled New Jersey Me, nothing short of a near-miracle: put bluntly, this is as authentic, as lived-in an account, as pitch-perfect a rendering of the Garden State’s special brand of denizens as exists. So dust off your vinyl copy of The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, crack open a cold one, and enjoy Ferguson’s lovely, street-lyrical prose. I sure as hell did!”
—David Kukoff, author of Children of the Canyon
and Los Angeles in the 1970s
“After meeting the stoners, misfits, and pill poppers who inhabit the radioactive, ghost-haunted pages of Ferguson’s debut, you’ll never listen to Bruce Springsteen the same way again.”
—Jim Ruland, author of Forest of Fortune
New Jersey Me
New Jersey Me
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
Los Angeles, Calif.
This is a Genuine Barnacle Book
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2016 by Rich Ferguson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,
Los Angeles, CA 90013.
More from Rich Ferguson at rich-ferguson.com
Set in Minion Pro
ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-96-1
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Ferguson, Rich, author.
Title: New Jersey me : a novel / Rich Ferguson.
Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book | New York, NY ; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-53-4
Subjects: LCSH Bildungsromans. | Rock music—Fiction. | Suburban life—Fiction. | Nuclear power plants—Fiction. | New Jersey—Fiction. | BISAC FICTION/General.
Classification: LCC PS3606.E7265 N49 2016 | DDC 813.6—dc23
This book is for those who've escaped, or those fighting to free themselves from their own Blackwater.
“In those days, there was neither here nor now, only there and the time it would take to reach it.” —Marvin Bell
“Talk about a dream, try to make it real.” —Bruce Springsteen
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
A World of Thanks
Chapter 1
Thursday, May 31st, 1990
Jimmy and I drifted through the circus crowd on a magic carpet combo of weed, brews, Jimmy’s mom’s codeine cough medicine, and the downers I’d swiped from my mom’s medicine cabinet. All around us laughter and merry-go-round sounds filled the air with a lively music. Lion roars and trumpeting elephants made us feel like we’d been dropped into an episode of Wild Kingdom. Stuffed animals were being won, hot dogs and cotton candy consumed. High school girls—with their deliriously sweet scent of Charlie perfume and Double-Bubble bubble gum—hung out by arcade games, flashing teasing looks, taunting us to bet our last quarter to win them the latest Ozzy Osbourne or David Lee Roth record.
“Not bad,” Jimmy mumbled through a mouthful of caramel corn. I agreed.
For a week out of every year, the Wilbur Brothers Family Ci
rcus transformed our little town from its drab and dreary self into a dizzy freefall down an Alice In Wonderland–style rabbit hole. Contortionists, human cannonballs, and fire breathers had us grinning like we were spun on laughing gas. The Zipper spun us until we didn’t know which way was up. Bumper cars allowed us to ram head-on into friends, enemies, and strangers. So what if most of the animals looked like petting zoo rejects, and the workers like ex-cons ready to kick our asses? Even a ride on the Ferris wheel could lift us high into the sky, temporarily taking us out of Blackwater.
That’s all I’d ever wanted—to escape my shithole South Jersey town any way I could. I’d tried sex, drugs, and music. All had helped me break out in some way or another. That evening at the circus, I had no idea that my greatest escape was only weeks away.
Jimmy and I continued floating through the circus crowd, occasionally brushing elbows or bumping into the usual assortment of townies: muscle-teed thugs and Springsteen wannabes, off-duty cops and dull-eyed strippers, the radiated and medicated. It felt like we were all engaged in a strange dance orchestrated by the merry-go-round’s eerie, sickly-sweet calliope music that my weed, codeine, and pill-jangled brain had morphed into beat-heavy, psychedelic space rock. Around and round we went, where we stopped—who knew, who cared? For those few moments, gone were all my past problems: the car crash, the kidnapping, and the rest. Saved Me. Sky High on My Blackwater Ferris Wheel Me.
Jimmy and I continued drifting through the crowd. We ended up in a dirt lot behind the big top. Carnies rushed by, tending to rides, food stands, preparing animals for performances. A stringy-haired, pimple-faced girl approached us, gave us the once over. My Etch-a-Sketch scribbled mess of dirty-blond hair, ripped jeans, Who The Kids Are Alright T-shirt, along with Jimmy’s dark, sleepy eyes, equally ripped jeans, and ratty Fleetwood Mac Rumors tee had us looking less like male-model material, and more like rock roadies in training.
The circus girl asked what we were up to.