The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  I hatch a thought as I cross the Manasquan bridge and near the 34 cut-off: to stop at the Manasquan Bar for a beer and a piss in its nautical, red-lit cozy confines. Years ago, with a cohort of fellow divorcés, I would drive over from Haddam once a month, just to get out of town, seeking night-time companionship and large infusions of gin and scotch that always sent us back into the dark to Hightstown, Mercerville and home with a better grasp on our griefs and sorrows. A quick re-savoring of those old days—the rosy perpetual indoor bar light and beery bouquets—would, I’m sure, extend the good feeling I’ve concocted. But a piss is what I really need and a beer is not, since a beer would just require another piss sooner than I now consider normal (hourly). Plus, any venture into the swampy vapors of time lost—no matter how good I’d feel—could prove precarious, and make me late for Wade.

  Instead then, I take 34 straight inland, north through suburban Wall Township, which is not truly municipal or even towny, but dense and un-centered, a linear boilerplate of old strip development, skeins of traffic lights and jug-handles with signage indicating Russians, Farsi speakers, Ethiopians and Koreans live nearby and do business. A cellular tower camouflaged to look like a Douglas fir looms up at an uncertain distance above roofs and fourth-growth woodlots. The Manasquan River winds past somewhere off to the left. But little is discernible or of interest. It is actually hard to tell what the natural landscape looks like here.

  I pull in for my long piss at a Hess station across the avenue from Wall Township Engine Company No. 69, where a Thanksgiving CPR clinic’s in progress on the station-house apron. Burly firefighters in black-and-yellow regalia are demonstrating modern resuscitative techniques on plastic mannequins and on citizens craving resuscitating firsthand. Cheerleaders from the Upper Squankum Middle School are running a five-dollar car wash at the curb. Inside the station house, so the sign-on-wheels says, selected items from the Hoboken Museum’s traveling Frank Sinatra collection are on display, along with a DNR exhibit entitled “What to Do When Wild Animals Come to Call.” A handful of citizens mills around on the asphalt—tall and skinny Ethiopians, with a few smaller Arabs in non-Arab sweaters—all having a perusal of the pumper rig and the hook ’n ladder, stealing nervous glances at the female dummy the firemen are working on and taking leaning peeks in at the Old Blue Eyes display. It is all a good civic pull-together, even if Thanksgiving’s a quaint mystery to most of them and business is poor hereabouts. Rich soil is here for municipal virtues, though the philosopher would never have planted them in Wall Township.

  At Garden State Exit 102N, it’s half past noon, a cold November sun shining high. The Queen Regent implosion is scheduled for one, and since I haven’t answered Wade’s calls, he’s likely to be fidgety and cross. In my view, oldsters with virtually zilch to do should squander their hours like sailors on shore leave, but instead end up hawking the clock and making everybody miserable, while us working clods would like to throw our watches in the ocean (I don’t own one).

  When I pull up, Wade is seated on the curb under the yellow awning of the Fuddruckers, which appears to be out of business, along with the empty sixties-era mall just behind it, whose long, vacant parking lot awaits reassignment. Wade starts theatrically tapping the face of his big silver and turquoise wristwatch and scowling when I wheel in beside his ancient tan Olds. I should’ve been here yesterday, or at least two hours ago, and now I’ve jeopardized his day.

  “Did you get lost in Metedeconk?” he says, struggling up onto his tiny feet, getting his balance on the blue disabled sign. Metedeconk represents an insider joke I know nothing about.

  “I did,” I say through my window. “They all asked about you.” I stay put behind the wheel. The warmer inland air carries a seam of dry cold as traffic swishes noisily on the Parkway.

  “I know who asked about me, all right.” He’s shuffling—bowlegged, stiff-hipped, arms slightly held out like an outrigger. Wade says he’s seventy-four, but is actually over eighty. And though he’s dressed in youthful sporting attire—baggy pink jackass pants with a semaphore pattern, sockless white patent-leather slips-ons and a bright yellow V neck—he looks decrepit and shabby, as if he’d slept in this outfit for a week. “We’re going in my vehicle,” he growls, eyes fixed on the pavement in front of him as if its surface was tricking around.

  “Not today,” I say, cheerfully.

  Wade is a menacing driver. He regularly runs stop signs, drives thirty-five on the Turnpike, barges through intersections, leans on his horn, has his turn signal constantly on, shouts religious and gender epithets at other drivers, and, because he’s considerably shrunken, can barely see over his dashboard. He shouldn’t be allowed near the driver’s seat. Though when I’ve counseled him, during our monthly lunch at Bump’s, that it’s time to hang up his duster and ride, his blue eyes snap, his teeth clack, his foot and knee tremor starts whapping the table leg. “So are you volunteering to drive me? Good. I’ll let you drive me—and wait for me everyplace I go until I’m ready to go home. Sounds perfect. Do you think I like to drive?” He has his point. Though I often think that death will come to me not naturally, but by being backed over by some stiff-necked old lunatic like Wade in front of the Marshalls in Toms River.

  I sit my seat, shaking my head, which is certain to piss him off.

  Wade pauses between our two vehicles and glowers at me. “Mine’s all rigged up.” Meaning his car seat’s shoved up, his hemorrhoid donut’s strapped to the extra cushion, the radio’s tuned to a hillbilly station he likes in Long Branch, and the beaded back supporter that helps his arthritis is bungeed to the driver’s side. For years, Wade worked as a toll taker at Exit 9 on the Turnpike and believes repetitive stress plus exhaust fumes degraded his skeleton and compromised his immune system, resulting in shrunkenness and unexplained night pains. I’ve explained to him he’s just old.

  “I’ve got a wife and children to think about, Wade.” I’m waiting for him to get in.

  “Hah! The missing wife. That’s a good one.” Wade knows all about my marital hiatus, as well as my prostate issues and most of the rest of my story, which he takes no interest in unless he can make a joke out of it (his own prostate is a memory). Due, I believe, to an occasional mini-stroke, Wade also sometimes confuses me with his son, Cade, a New Jersey State Trooper in Pohatcong, Troop W. And at other times, for reasons I don’t understand, he calls me “Ned.” This kind of impairment could pass for useful disinterest, I’ve thought. So that if Wade wasn’t occasionally ga-ga and didn’t yak your ear off, I’d get him certified to Sponsor fellow seniors out at the Grove, the staged senior community where he lives in Bamber Lake, where they hold weekly wine tastings, senior art openings and jigsaw puzzle contests, and boast gold-standard tertiary care, in-house cardiac catheterization, their own level-one trauma center, with six class-A hospitals a twenty-minute ambulance ride away, but where Wade says the oldsters are always looking for something extra.

  Wade has given in to riding in my car and has crawled into his Olds to retrieve his brown-bag lunch and his video cam so he can eat while the Queen Regent falls in on herself and also get the whole thing on tape for public exhibit. At the Grove, he says, he’s an A-list dinner guest and much sought after by the ladies as a raconteur.

  “We’re all better off to get over our pain,” Wade says in a muffled voice inside his passenger’s door. He’s referring to my absent wife. He’s on his hands and knees, fishing for something on the floorboard and making Frankenstein noises, his pink-pants ass in the air. I would help, but it’s part of our compact that he never needs help. I stare glumly in at his inflatable hemorrhoid donut.

  “I think you’re a walking advertisement for a long life,” I say, though he can’t hear me. I could just as easily say, I’d like to string you up by your ankles and put a stopwatch on how long it takes your head to explode, and it would mean the same. Wade’s not a proficient listener, which he credits to having had a full life and a reduced need to take anything in anymore.

&n
bsp; “On the other hand.” He’s grunting, backing out, hauling his sack lunch and his Panasonic. “I’d kill myself if I wasn’t afraid of the fucking pain.” He stands up on the Fuddruckers’ asphalt, facing inside his car as if I was there instead of behind him. He’s become an odd-looking creature, after being pretty normal-looking when I first knew him. While his hands and arms and neck are dry and leathery as an alligator, his small head is round and pinkish-orange, as if he’d been boiled. He’s fashioned his white hair into a Caesarian back-to-front comb-down that makes a bang, which—depending on barbershop visits—can be a simple-sad oldster fringe or else a Beatle-length mop that makes him appear seventy, which is how he more or less looks now. Add to this that when he takes off his glasses, his blue left eye wanders off cockeyed, that he wears a big globby hearing device in each ear, is an inexpert face shaver, plus always gets too close to you when he talks (spritzing you with Listerine spit), and you have a not always attractive human package.

  When I first knew Wade, sixteen years ago, he lived in the suburb of Barnegat Pines, with his now-deceased second wife, Lynette, and son, Cade. I was then lost in hapless but powerful love for his daughter, Vicki—an oncology nurse and major handful of daunting physical attainments. It was three years after my son died, and one after my divorce from Ann, a time when my existence seemed in jeopardy of fading into a pointless background of the onward rush of life. Wade was then a level-eyed, crew-cut engineer and truth seeker. He’d seen confusion in life, had looked the future in the eye and gotten down to being a solid citizen/provider who understood his limits, maintained codes and was glad to welcome me as a unique, slightly “older” son-in-law candidate. My present take on Wade comes mostly from those long-ago days. I didn’t see him at all for sixteen years and only refound him four months back when Cade presented me with a speeding ticket on my way back late from the Red Man Club and I noticed the ARSENAULT on his brass name plate. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…I ended up calling Wade because as he wrote out the summons, Cade—thick-browed, fat-eared, wearing a black flak jacket and a flat-top—said that “Dad” had become “like a pretty sad case” and “maybe wouldn’t last a lot longer” and that they (Cade and Mrs. Cade) had “pretty much our own lives up in Pohatcong, kids and whatever,” and didn’t make it down to visit the old man as often as they should. “Things like that are too bad in a way,” he observed. And, oh, by the way, that’ll be ninety clams, plus costs, plus two points, have a nice day and keep ’er under fifty-five.

  I ended up rendezvous-ing with Wade at Bump’s and reaffiliating. And in a short while, I managed to reconcile Wade years back—frontier Nebraskan with a trim physique and a Texas Aggie engineering degree, with Wade today—orange-skinned, obstreperous bang-wearer and sour-smelling, weirdly dressed crank; and, by the force of my will, to make a whole person out of the evidence. Aging requires reconciliations, and nobody said getting old would be pretty or the alternative better.

  What Wade and I actually do for each other in the present tense, and that makes putting up with each other worth the aggravation, is a fair question. But when he’s in his right head—which is most of the time—Wade’s as sharp as a Mensa member, still sees the world purely as it is and for this reason is not a bad older friend for me, just as I’m not a bad younger companion to keep him on his toes. We share, after all, a piece of each other’s past, even if it’s not a past we visit. We also like each other, as only truly consenting adults can.

  Asbury Park, which we pass through and where I’ve done some bank work, has unhappily devolved over the years into a poverty pocket amidst the pricey, linked Shore communities, Deal to Allenhurst, Avon to Bay Head. Those monied towns all needed reliable servant reserves a bus ride away, and Asbury was ceded to the task. Hopeful Negroes from Bergen County and Crown Heights, Somalis and Sudanese fresh off the plane, plus a shop-keeper class of Iranis for whom Harlem was too tough, now populate the streets we drive down. Occasionally, a shady Linden Lane or a well-tended Walnut Court survives, with its elderly owner-occupant tending his patch while values sink to nothing and the element pinches in. But most of the streets are showing it—windows out, mansions boarded, grass gone weedy, sidewalks crumbling, informal automotive work conducted curbside, while black men wait on corners, kids ply the pavements on Big Wheels, and large African-looking ladies in bright scarves lean on porch rails, watching the world slide by. Asbury Park could be Memphis or Birmingham, and nothing or no one would seem out of place.

  “One in five non-English speakers, right?” Wade’s watching out his window, fingering his diabetic’s Medi-Ident bracelet and looking abstracted. He’s infected the interior of my car with his sour, citrusy elder-smell—mostly from his yellow sweater—that mingles with Mike’s stale Marlboro residue from last night, making me have to crack open my window. He shoots me a fiery glance when I don’t answer his non-English-speaker non-question, pink tongue working his dentures (his “falsies”) as if he’s warming up for verbal combat. Wade is of a generally conservative belief-base but wouldn’t vote for dumb-ass Bush if the world was ablaze and Bush had the bucket. He grew up poor, lucked into A&M, worked two decades in the oil patch in Odessa and views Republicans as trustees for keeping government on the sidelines, out of his boudoir, the classroom and the Lord’s house (where he’s not a frequenter). Isolation’s the way to go, keep the debt below zero, inflation nonexistent, blubbety-blubbety. Any kind of sanctimony’s for scoundrels—hence the hatred of Bush. Smiling Rocky was Wade’s hero, though he’s voted Democrat since Watergate. “Housing’s leveled off. D’you read that?” he says, just to make noise.

  “Not where I live,” I say.

  “Oh, well of course,” Wade says. “Being what you are, you’d know that. That’s the kind of stuff you’re the expert in. The rest of us have to read about it in the papers.”

  At straight-up one o’clock, the day’s turned warmer than in Sea-Clift. A pavement of gray clouds has streaked open up here to reveal febrile blue out over the ocean we’re approaching. The day no longer feels like the day before Thanksgiving, but a late-arriving Indian summer afternoon or a morning in late March when spring’s come in like a lamb. A perfect day for an implosion.

  The Queen Regent sits opposite the boardwalk and the crumbling Art Deco convention hall—home to luckless club fights and poorly attended lite-rock record hops. Noisy gulls soar above and around the Queen’s battlements, where she stands alone on a plain against the sky, as if the old buff-colored hospital-looking pile of bricks was occupying space no longer hers. Though even from a distance she’s hardly an edifice to rate a big send-off: Nine stories, all plain (and gutted), with two U-shaped empty-windowed wings and a pint-size crenellated tower like a supermarket cake. A previously-canopied but now trashy glassed-in veranda faces the boardwalk and the Atlantic, and a wooden water tower with a giant TV antenna attached bumps above the roofline. Once it was a place where felt-hatted drummers could take their girlfriends on the cheap. Families with too many kids could go and pretend it was nice. Young honeymooners came. Young suicides. Oldster couples lived out their days within sound of the sea and took their meals in the dim coffered dining room. Standing alone, the Queen Regent looks like one of those condemned men from a hundred revolutions who the camera catches standing in an empty field beside an open grave, looking placid, resigned, distracted—awaiting fate like a bus—when suddenly volleys from off-stage soundlessly pelt and spatter them, so they’re changed in an instant from present to past.

  All around the Queen Regent is a dry, treeless urban-renewal savanna stretching back to the leafless tree line of Asbury. Where we’re currently driving were once sweller, taller hotels with glitzier names, stylish seafood joints with hot jazz clubs in the basement, and farther down the now-missing blocks, tourist courts and shingled flophouses for the barkers and rum-dums who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl on the pier or waltzed trays in the convention hall, which itself looks like it could fall in with a rising tide and a breeze. Today it is all a PROGRESS ZONE
! a sign says, with LUXURY CONDO COMMUNITY COMING!

  Wade has his silver Panasonic up and trained tight on the Queen Regent through the wide windshield glass. His is the awkward kind you peer down into like a reverse periscope, and operating it through his bifocals makes him crank his mouth open moronically and his old lips go slack. He seems to believe the Queen is about to go down any instant.

  “Drive us around to the front, Franky. What’re we doin’ over here?” He flashes me a savage gaping grimace. The V of Wade’s yellow velour sweater, under which is only bare skin, shows his chicken chest with sparse white pinfeathers sprouting. I’ve seen Wade naked once, in his “flat” in Bamber Lake, when I arrived early for dinner. I haven’t gone back.

  A tall cyclone fence, however, has been stretched around the Queen Regent, razor wire on top to discourage souvenir seekers and preservationist saboteurs who’re always around looking to monkey-wrench a decent implosion. We the public can’t go where Wade wants us to, or, in fact, get within three football fields of the site, since Asbury Park police and a cadre of blue-tunicked State Troopers have rigged a traffic diversion using cones and Jersey barriers and are forcing us off onto (another) Ocean Avenue and away from the hotel entirely. We can both see where a crowd of implosion spectators has been marshaled into a temporary grandstand the imploding company, the Martello Brothers—FIREWORKS, DETONATING, RAZING FOR PASSAIC AND CENTRAL JERSEY—has put up behind another cyclone fence at the remote south end of the Progress Zone, across from another big sign that says THIS STREET ADOPTED BY ASBURY PK CUB PACK 31. Some land—I’m thinking, as we follow Ocean Avenue toward the Temporary Parking—is better off with a few good condos.

  “You can’t see a fucking thing from over here.” Wade’s twisted in his seat, straining to see back to the Queen Regent, his throat constricted, his voice raised a quarter octave while he forces his Panasonic up to his bifocals in case the whole shebang goes down while I’m parking. “It might as well be the White Sands Proving Ground out here. What’re they afraid of, the goddamn peckerwoods?” Wade never cursed when I first knew him and was wooing his daughter like Romeo.