In 1984, David Remnick wrote a feature for the Washington Post about the New Jersey Turnpike (which unfortunately, I can’t find online). He called his piece “The New Jersey Turnpike: A Love Story” and it was a paean for the pike. I found the piece well-written but absurd. Who could lavish such praise upon the Turnpike with a straight face? His piece was hyperbolic, as is mine, which is a kind-of Remnick reprisal, if you will. I answer his love story with a more-or-less hate story. A hate story with a theme.
This was an “observational” piece, an exercise in journalistic writing for a writing course, so don’t be offended by the details. It’s less objective fact or strait-laced opinion than a work of writing. This is art, not science. Also, this is an early draft, and will likely be revamped and revised many times.
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In just thirty-two minutes, you can drive from the exit of Broadway’s bustling midtown corridor to the entrance of a less prestigious artery. From the brains of America to its bowels. From its heart to its gut. Veer right. Welcome to the New Jersey Turnpike.
Jammed into one contour of the Turnpike’s 12-foot-wide concrete intestines, it’s hard not to notice the toxicity—the stools of the gritty Gotham you left behind. The slimy marshes are a spitting distance from the precipice of the cigarette-strewn shoulders; they shine a mossy, golf-course green in the September sun, speckled with empty Marlboro cartons and tin Sunoco canisters, tobacco and diesel, the lingering poisons to a fading body. The smoky, gassy smell confirms: this place is Three Mile Island toxic – a cavern of festering bacteria sprinkled over the putrid plains of the polity it serves.
The fertile marsh-land of silt and mud holds recycled beer cans and plastic milk jugs, Anheuser Busch and Kellogg, Madison Avenue’s consumer crap, used and tossed aside. Thrown out and forgotten.
A mid-90s Jeep Cherokee rattles along. It’s a bag of steely, American-made nuts and bolts with enough intra-Jersey miles to round trip this toll road ten thousand times. The SUV of old creaks through the turns of northeast Jersey’s cantilevered truss bridges like a motor home on a dirt track: past Newark and Jersey City; high above the Meadowlands; past the sagging drawbridges spanning the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers; beneath the Britain-bound Boeing jets of Newark’s airport; alongside the nameless, rusting boxcars traversing tarnished tracks; atop the dirt-blackened cement, atop the sand-filled caissons, atop the soft, swampy earth…sinking lower.
The Jeep, a weather-beaten paint shaker of a vehicle, is a Jersey story in itself, with 120,000 miles to its pages. Its narrative is borne out of miles upon miles of trips to Jersey’s branded bastions: trips east on State Route 72 for Beach Haven weekends – LBI, baby! – and north on the Garden State Parkway, to Exit 116, for Coldplay and Springstreen and Dave Matthews Band concerts at the PNC Bank Arts Center – Trippin’ Billies!; of trips south on I-95 for a sunny summer day at Six Flags; of trips west on I-80 for the weekend flea market near the Delaware Water Gap; and trips up and down, along this pike, this roadway that runs past towns of European name but American tradition: Elizabeth, Bayonne, Woodbridge, New Brunswick…New Jersey.
New Jersey– new, better, that was the promise. When the Turnpike was constructed in the early 1950s, it was a promise of better access to the engine of capitalism by which global commerce is sustained. Perhaps, some imagined, with the Turnpike, Jersey’s proximity to New York could be tapped – and its less esteemed neighbor could abscond with some of the ingenuity, some of the culture, some of the power.
But that power can only be seen from afar, not grasped. Travelling north on the Turnpike, New York’s skyline explodes into the purview, eminently visible over the retaining walls that were built to contain the semis and Hummers heading north to the Hudson River moat. Look east, and look high, toward New York—unencumbered by the trash heap below, you might forget that you’re in the throes of its waste.
The piercing rays of sunlight on this autumn Saturday illuminate the massive buildings, with their dizzying turrets and iridescent facades—these blue-hot, skyscrapered fantasyparks of finance that rise so inexplicably from an island of cold rock. They seem to taunt, to position themselves like elder statesmen over the kids on the Turnpike, as if they might be daring doe-eyed dreamers to approach, to join its ranks, to try and conquer The City. But it’s like a bullying bookie in a seedy, Atlantic City casino – because the odds are fixed, and the patron is but a fool for buying in. The draw? To win big, of course. Jackpot.
The Jersey Turnpike is not New York’s Royal Flush; it is New York’s bust, a meek and disenfranchised rounder, hoping for some luck on the river. Day by day, the hands are dealt, and the Turnpike continues to service the house. New York gets the lion’s share even while the Turnpike sells its goods and services, facilitating the arrival of new junkies hoping for a hot hand.
One rest area promises a respite, a dealer change for the Turnpike driver. Here, overpriced junk food is served by unapologetic minimum-wage workers. They grovel, grumbling, a sea of defeated countenances. The dull eyes tell the story of dreams deferred and dreams deceased. Road-weary retirees and scruffy, unkempt middle-aged men carry plastic containers into aged Buick boats and smoke-black Ford trucks– inhaling the calorie-packed sleaze of Burger King and Roy Rogers, Popeye’s Chicken and Sbarro. Tired, beer-bellied truckers scarf up greasy slices of pizza from Sbarro, feasting out of triangular green and red-branded boxes they’ll later pitch from their windows – onto the receptacle below.
Foreign tourists stand out, Kodak cameras draped over their shoulders and fanny packs full of U.S. dollars strapped to their hips. They’re here to catch a glimpse of the American dream, to capture digitally the sublime portrait that the ceaseless American marketing machine has painted for the world. The jubilant Japanese travelers might be fooled by the Statue of Liberty postcards in the gift shop, but they’re in the wrong place.
Others, the more enlightened—some of them, perhaps, defeated Manhattan refugees—proceed to the Turnpike Starbucks. This branch is just forty miles from New York, but it couldn’t be more different from Manhattan. No stilettoed savants, no Ferragamo loafers. No Bowery-dwelling, botoxed beauties or fashion-forward, Upper East Side mommies.
The “baristas” are not the young, educated-looking urban-dwellers one’s used to in New York. Here, a hair-gelled Indian fatso named Nik barks orders to a frail-looking albino girl, Claire. She looks tired and abused. “Grande toffee nut latte with fat-free skim milk. Fat free, I said. That means no fat,” he bellows in a bastardized accent as he snickers. Claire doesn’t feign amusement. She’s new here.
The fixin’s bar is a standalone island of condiments, and it’s crowded with caffeine addicts readying themselves for the next stretch of road. The cylindrical glass sugar container has run dry – the snow white cane powder has been emptied, the sweetness sucked out.
There’s nothing sweet about this place. It’s a runoff of bitterness: New York’s indigestion, America’s acid reflux.
