Considering that I grew up in a rural New Jersey town teeming with Nazis, mobsters and squirrel-eating hillbillies, my adolescence was relatively innocuous. Still, I tried to adhere unfailingly to one life-guiding principle: “Don’t get your ass kicked.”
That was easier said than done for a kid who weighed just 138 pounds in his senior year of high school. Who was so skinny, his track and field teammates joked that “the javelin throws him.” Who was so bony his nickname was “McRib.” Avoiding violence was particularly tough in unforgiving central Jersey, where, it seemed, many of my male peers — and some female — would’ve really enjoyed giving me a Garden State beatdown.
In my enlightened burg, local pastimes included smashing mailboxes with baseball bats, rollicking games of “Smear the Queer,” and killing and gutting neighborhood deer. The latter were hung from backyard trees — either as a way to drain blood, dry the meat or warn 8-year-old kids to stop cutting through the yard of this Vietnam vet on the way to school.
It wasn’t riot-decimated Plainfield just down the Watchung Mountains across Route 22. But it was a German refuge where oompah bands reigned and unabashed area bakers proudly showcased cakes celebrating the birth of a certain mid-
century Teutonic fuhrer. (As recently as this summer, the local flea market offered booths filled with Nazi paraphernalia.) Which at least partially explains the puzzled looks and shoulder-numbing blows I received in that circa-1974 lunchroom when breaking matzoh out of my brown bag.
Even so, as many times as our mailbox was attacked — and a classmate’s relative in the waste-management business would turn up in pieces in various garbage bags — it was home.
Summers were less violent, thanks largely to the Jersey Shore, where many formative life experiences took place. My first miniature-golf games. My first encounter with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” My first unprintable acts with a girlfriend. And my first bad-mushroom trip, which helped me formulate another life-guiding principle: Never take psychotropic drugs when one’s only game plan is to lie on a ridiculously hot beach and stare at the horizon.
I got help drafting that last one while lying on the couch of a stranger’s home in Point Pleasant — I’m pretty sure the house was called Hedonism II. She was a regular modern-day Molly Pitcher (a Revolutionary War heroine so selfless she received the ultimate Jersey tribute: a Turnpike rest-stop named after her), and is, to this Garden State native, more characteristic of the state’s populace than the knuckledragging Neanderthals depicted on MTV’s “Jersey Shore.”
That is, excluding Nazis, mafiosos and ornery deer hunters.