THE WILD WEST OF NEW JERSEY
(When I was young, wasn't marred by intellectual affectations and adored the open road)
THE WILD WEST OF NEW JERSEY
by
David Gottfried
In my adulthood, I learned all the things that one was supposed to learn about suburbia and highways and the free and open spaces outside of our urban areas. I learned that they were vacuous, culturally stifling, uniformly philistine and bereft of imagination. However, if I think back to my youth, and I mean my early, early days, when I wasn’t ashamed to discuss episodes of “The Beverly Hillbillies”[1] as if I were recounting Shakespeare, I remember that I loved Suburbia.
As I said in earlier chapters, the basement of our building was a stinking mess. But truly the whole of the building was sub par. It was a tattered, moderately decrepit house, that was not for the poor yet most decidedly not for the middle class. It was a lower middle class abode in all respects, perhaps a cut above the home that Ralph Cramden of “The Honeymooners” had in nearby Bensonhurst, and it had all the amenities of such edifices -- heat and hot water when the fickle furnace was functioning, a motley crew of ghoulish insects which seemed more integral to the building that its plaster and wood, the aforementioned deep and ugly “basement smell” of fermenting garbage and dead animals which, on occasion, made their way up to the first and second floors of the building, and the occasional rats and mice which were a source of terror that most of us never seemed to overcome.
The soot and dirt adhered to the walls as firmly as a coat of fresh paint. The dark and cavernous basement was more frightening than the haunted houses situated in the amusement parks of Coney Island. Nevertheless, just as some people play on tennis courts, and some people play on baseball fields, my friends and I played in the basement.
Now this was not an especially squalid or constricting pastime. Whereas grass on a playing field presented the monotony of an unctuous smiling green, my apartment house’s vast and dark basement was teeming with artifacts of every grim and morose shade of the color spectrum. There were plenty of beaten up pieces of mauled and barely identifiable machinery that rotted in states of dismal metallic grey. There were old rugs and drapes in scandal ridden scarlet. There were brooding mounds of dilapidated furniture of morose, fecal brown. I was young, but in the basement I could glimpse the rot of my elders and become privy to the excrement of their lives.
Many of the people in the building were quite old and their apartments were tombstones to the past, dreary dumps of religious relics, photographs of dead loved ones, of dust so thick and deep it seemed a new citified form of soil. With its dust and its vermin and its ceaseless soot, the apartment building seemed to be an incubator of asthma and allergies, and given my own Father’s demise from asthma, my Mother and I always waited for the ominous day when I would be stricken with the wheezing and breathlessness of the ailment. Indeed, I developed phobias of all respiratory ailments after My Father’s death. When I heard about Tuberculosis, I was captivated by its especially ugly sounding name, and it made me think of tubes entering my chest and strangling my lungs like snakes. And, when I learned of its association with Urban want, my fear knew no bounds. I practically began to imagine that I saw Tuberculosis germs wafting in the dank, apartment house air, waiting to take me away.
And so when I turned on the television set and saw situation comedies like “Leave it to Beaver,” and was introduced to a world where no one lived in an apartment house but everyone lived in his very own home – with a mommy and a daddy and dog named Spot – I fell in love with suburbia. Indeed, to me a cozy suburban home seemed more beautiful than even the august apartment buildings on Park Avenue, where no matter how rich and expensive the furnishings there would always be a certain overcast hue of funereal, urban gray. The apartments might be rich, but there were still screeching cars on the street, foul urban smells of exhausts and smog and snobbery, and no backyard one could call one’s own.
Every so often, I would endure Suburban life, for a day. Every so often we would visit our more fortunate relatives.
Where they lived never seemed precisely clear to my female relatives who had a sense of direction that was curiously stunted in a way that made them unable to fathom anything other than a New York City Subway map. However, there was one thing we all knew: We lived in Brooklyn. The suburbs of Long Island lay to the East. And going to see one’s relatives meant traveling far, far to the East. Long Island’s direction almost became conflated with Jerusalem, and the desire to be seated at the Eastern, or front wall, of the synagogue. The further to the East we traveled, the richer the suburbs were, or so we falsely imagined (We traveled there with such infrequency that we had no real understanding of where anything was.). And so our Eastern pilgrimages, to Jewish relatives, often on Jewish holidays, were our own latter day re-creations of ancient Hebrew pilgrimages to Jerusalem on Passover.
As I said, the females in my family had no conception of where they were going. They only knew they were going “way out,” as in far out to the Eastern fringes of America. When they were asked where they had gone, they would proudly declaim “way out,” as if this were some mark of religious virtue or distinction. The particular town that they traveled to did not register, of whether they were on the Northern or Southern shores of Long Island they were oblivious, and any conception of miles traveled was completely beyond their comprehension. Indeed, to actually quantify the miles traveled, and to find that one had only traveled a paltry twenty-five or thirty miles, would shatter their illusions of gallant crusader-like expeditions to the Holy Land. And so all particulars were omitted as we brashly and proudly proclaimed that we were going “way out.”
I, however, wanted to know where we were going, and to differentiate myself from my female relatives, I found it a point of masculine honor to know where we were going, and so I studied the maps. I was reading maps before I was reading books.
My study of maps served to confirm everything I learned on “Leave it Beaver” and “Dennis the Menace” and other glorious sit coms. In the map I had, the entirety of New York City was colored the same, in a sort of grayish white, almost like the grayish white of Candida fungus, or of stale bread. There was no reason to mark the world of eight million toiling proletariats with color or distinction. However, everything to the East of the New York City Border was a glorious kaleidoscope of colors. The map gave every little town, no matter how puny or oddly shaped, its own glorious color to revel in. And so there was Green Great Neck, and Purple Valley Stream, and Orange Lynbrook and Vermilion Rockville Center. The map was a slew of candy drops of colors, and each town was a candy to suck in your mouth. The towns themselves often bore very pretty shapes. Some of them, plainly, were meant to be cough drops. Other towns could be gingerbread cookies. All of these towns, anointed with their very own flag of color, had the pride of individuality we in New York City lacked.
The names were also proud, or pretty, or elegant. The South Shore town of Lawrence would have only been a mere “Larry” in Brooklyn. And then there was Malverne, which melted in your Mouth like M & M candies and sounded so much like Malibu. Some of the towns were simply beautiful women, like the town of Rosylyn. Other towns were succulent fruits, such as Westbury. But of course some towns were forbidding and evil, such as Babylon, which was of course East of Israel and perhaps a sign of an excursion gone too far.
Of course there always was a touch of evil which mingled with the delectable wealth of the Suburbs. The wealth of some, by definition, meant the enforced poverty of others, or so I implicitly understood given my Mother’s Marxian orientation. And I quietly seethed when I thought of my Mother’s afflictions; she worked much harder than the fortunate denizens of Long Island, who thought they were engaged in robust work when they lit the fire for a Bar B Q, played a game of golf, or drove the car to their spacious supermarkets.
This sense of evil became truly palpable when my Mother’s car rode on a highway which, I learned, was called “The Southern State Parkway.” In my febrile and richly associative mind, the name Southern State proved that the rich snobs of Long Island were in some way in sympathy with the Southern States of this Nation whose governors and sheriffs, at the time I was young, were assaulting black children with fire hoses and keeping them from entering School. And the name sounded so lavish and beautiful and slightly wanton, giving you the opportunity to drawl over the first syllable in “Southern” and providing a bit of alliteration to make the name memorable. The name of the highway and its environs were as rich and dissolute and haughty as Scarlett Ohara or Elizabeth Taylor or any actress playing the part of a Southern woman of means and malice. The highway’s beauty added to its mystique: It had the curves of a voluptuous woman, but its overpasses of what seemed to be heavy, immense stone made that woman unapproachable, like a goddess of Rome or Greece. Indeed, the majestic heft of those stone overpasses, and the formidable power they evoked, made me imagine that they were built by legions of slaves, like the slaves who had held Elizabeth Taylor aloft in the film version of “Anthony and Cleopatra.”
I also sensed evil when I witnessed the special forms of witchcraft, but very beautiful witchcraft, these rich people practiced. The reception halls, for Weddings and Bar Mitvahas, were always filled with mesmerizing fountains of colored waters. And the halls of colored waters were so huge and grand. I was awed and enchanted by the massive space, the money that could buy land and land enough to build a building so big that it housed a reception hall fit for a coronation, and the numerous Rococo ornaments that bespoke a world of kings and queens and caviar.
Quite frankly, everything seemed beautiful in Long Island. I could not differentiate between the artistic, and the pretense of being artistic, because where I lived everyone had given-up on any semblance of grace and beauty in living to begin with – we were too embedded in eternal dirt and roaches to make what would be a futile attempt. And so even the silliest designs and fabrications, the attempt by a woman to be chic (And she of course pronounced the “ch” in chic like the “ch” in chicken) by augmenting her home and her person with all sorts of superfluous baubles and adornments, seemed beautiful because they strived to be beautiful, they were polished and clean, and they weren’t embedded in Brooklyn dirt.
And so the most commonplace things seemed beautiful to me simply because they were clean and airy and spacious and new. Homes that sported the finest formica and plastic and linoleum all looked marvelous to me, and decidedly rich. Everything that was colored gold was gold, even if they were nothing but Hanukkah candies wrapped in cheap foil. Aluminum foil might be aluminum foil in Brooklyn, but in a house with a lawn and a backyard and Versailles furniture, it was alchemized into Silver foil.
I was in love with Long Island and its space so much that I soon became in love with cars, the tools to take me to Long Island. Although a car in Brooklyn or Manhattan was eternally ensnared in traffic jams, in Long Island a car was transformed into a Chariot when it drove at a commanding 65 miles per hour on the aforementioned, aristocratic Southern State Parkway. And when it was a Cadillac with its top down, on a sunny day, and it was all white, it seemed as gallant as a prince at a ball, as martial as a knight from the Round Table, and as sexy as the television show “Seventy Seven Sunset Strip.”
As cars became beautiful, so did everything associated with them. What might have seemed greasy and dirty and a source of respiratory distress in Brooklyn – gasoline, oil, fumes and automotive exhausts – became an elixir on Long Island.
I loved pulling into gas stations in Long Island – so much more spacious than gas stations in the City, as everything was more commodious in the suburbs – especially on a Sunny Day, so I could walk on the gravel, all around the gas station, that made that nice cornflake crunching sound of an All American super-sugared cereal of strength. In these friendly suburban gas stations, petroleum and all of its by-products seemed like the perfect thing to clear your sinuses. On a sunny day in July, the heated oil seem to vaporize and steam into your nose like good Chicken soup, and on a cold day in December, the exhaust pipes were better than our apartment building’s heating system, and the carbon monoxide emissions had a gently tranquilizing effect. Besides, the guys in gas stations all looked so healthy and rugged, carrying around all sorts of heavy, prodigious equipment. The aura of health in gas stations, the sauna of gaseous fumes and the muscularity of heavy labor, proved that public school gyms were unnecessary. I was so enamored of all things automotive and macho that my graduation from college, with the highest honors, was eclipsed in importance, in my mind, by my replacement of my car’s starter -- all by myself -- two months after graduation.
As I learned to love cars, and the pungent potency of musky gasoline smells, I became more interested in where cars could take me. And soon I found that Long Island was but a tiny fragment of this country and that if I made an about face, and followed the sage admonition to “Go West Young Man,” I would find what America and Cars were all about, I would find the vast expanses of the glorious west, and in the prairies and the hills, in the Rockies and the wilderness, I could get a glimpse of what it was like in Cowboy times, so stunningly portrayed on “Bonanza” and other fine documentaries.
And so I discovered, with my Mother and My Grandmother, the Wild West of New Jersey. This was a state that always smelled. The entire Northeastern portion of the State is one endless succession of all sorts of chemical plants, and refineries, and factories, and dumping sites for the mineral, animal and vegetable refuse of millions of people in the Northeastern megalopolis. This wasn’t the West as it appeared in Bonanza, and there were no menacing Indians to be found, but there was a sense of industrial menace, of enormous cylindrical towers of petroleum that seemed ready to explode and murder you if you said one false word, and this sense of terror, along with the rancid and queer smells from myriad toxic dumps, was bracing.
New Jersey contained a great highway for traveling, a highway that at night became beautifully sparse of cars as one traveled to the South and West and further from the congestion of New York. This was the New Jersey Turnpike, and although my acquaintance with it finally made me realize that I was not going to encounter anything that bore a resemblance to the West, that I was far from the American West and that any associations with Bonanza were impossible, I realized that it afforded another sort of joy, a suburban pleasure more pleasing than the pastel colored communities of long Island.
The New Jersey Turnpike made Long Island appear to be a pale imitation of the Suburban spirit. It meandered for miles and miles until it reached the Delaware Memorial Bridge and, having touched the border of slave-holding Delaware, and rubbed-up against the hem of Scarlett O Hara’s gowns, made Long Island’s Southern State Parkway seem positively Bostonian. And the New Jersey Turnpike offered something else. It offered all the grandeur of a William of Orange. In addition to coursing through a State that sported various “Orange Towns” as if it were sunny Florida – New Jersey contained the towns of West Orange, and East Orange, and I don’t know but I wouldn’t doubt that there is a North Orange or even a sweet tangerine – the turnpike itself was beatified by the color orange as it was liberally sprinkled with a succession of Howard Johnson’s.
The Howard Johnson’s chain was the most magnificent distillation of the suburban dream in the American imagination. It was a land of sherbets and ice creams in chirping sweet colors of the rainbow that tickled your taste buds in the Spring and Summer. It was a succulence of shakes, and the Motherliness of grilled cheese, macaroni and cheese and other lactic pleasures invoked the Mother Mary of the Suburban religion, Mother June Cleaver of “Leave it to Beaver.” It was the motel of American holidays. It was glimmeringly clean and anti-septic. It gave you the heftiness of paternal Hamburgers, and the soft caresses of Maternal ice creams, and it made you a protected child.
With all of its gloriously colored ice creams, shimmering with colors more enchanting than Crayola crayons, Howard Johnsons were multi-colored Jewels, and the turnpike they sat on was an automotive necklace adorning the goddess of American suburbia.
Of course, as I said, this is what I believed when I was young, but I was taught to know better and believe that the turbulence of congested New York was a higher form of life. But after leaving Brooklyn, and moving to the very heart of New York, to Manhattan and its pressure-cooker buildings of roiling emotions, I just want to eat grilled cheese sandwiches and watch “Leave it to Beaver.”
[1] Once I chastised my Mother for her lapse in etiquette occasioned by her pig-headed failure to watch the Beverly Hillbillies. In several episodes, Hillbilly Granny called the elite and fastidious Rene Drysdale, “ReeNee.” Rene Drysdale would indignantly shoot back “the name is “ReNay.” Because my Mother failed to watch the program, she called a prominent member of the synagogue, Mrs. Rene Saks, “Reenee.” I was mortified.