Chapter 1: Orlando
"Dude, totally, you had too . . ."
Paul sidesteps to his right, bounces the ball once, backpedals to three-point range, and sends a high arching shot through the sweltering Florida atmosphere. Swish. His tank-top is Revolutionary-gray and labeled: 5 KIDD.
". . . if you're from Jersey, and you were into music in the eighties or nineties, real music, you went to City Gardens, you just did."
I chase after the ball as it trickles off court into a patch of dry Palm leaves. "I hear ya, man. You know what we should do? We should petition to get a Wawa down here and send it in to the national headquarters or something."
Paul stretches a lanky, farmer's-tanned arm out to snatch my inbound pass. His eyes widen. "Awe . . . man . . . Wawa. Now that would be awesome. I'd kill for a roast beef sub and one of those French vanilla coffee drinks. Wawa kicks ass!"
Paul and I have New Jersey in common, New Jersey and music. We migrated to Orlando for different reasons but located each other via some insidious Garden State pheromone secreted by those who have ingested the requisite amount of gravy fries, hairspray, Springsteen lore, Italian Ice, and Cluck-U. It's a Jersey thing, like when Daniel LaRusso was toting his Mongoose through that apartment complex in Reseda, before Mr. Miyagi taught him to 'sand the floor,' before he had beef with the Cobra Kai, and came upon the old lady who proclaimed, "I'm from Jersey, I got a nose for my own."
Paul is a drummer; I am a singer and guitarist. And while we figure a way to transpose our almost-famous, mid-Jersey rock stardom to our whimsically settled Disney World address, we play a sedentary game of make-it-take-it basketball. We also confer the gridiron legend of LT, ruminate about past muscle cars owned, A-W our O's (Let's get a cup of cawffee. Turn awff that light,) discuss vinyl rarities salvaged from the back left corner of Princeton Record Exchange (Bad Brains live for $1!), and conclude, decidedly, that a 24-hour diner on every corner is the best damn convenience in the history of the fifty states!
For some, New Jersey is a punchline: Toxic waste beaches, big hair, muscle-bound Guidos in their little sister's t-shirt, bad driving, high-school-dropout gangsters, and an endless mirage of 35-cent tollbooths. For others, it's more pristine, living up to its Garden State moniker: Jersey corn, lush Pine Barrens, Atlantic City, Diamond Beach in Cape May, The Hills of Bernardsville, and Duke's Estate. But for me, mostly, New Jersey, my Jersey, orbits my brain's sweet spot with a grungy slideshow of Rock and Roll imagery: The bouncy plywood stage at City Gardens, the Roxy's back alley where I once threw-up into a trickle of gutter water streaming down from Route 27, the burning floodlights at Obsessions, chucking mud from the lawn seats at the Art's Center, the cramped, spitting crowd at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, huddling around my turntable-stereo when WPRB first aired our single, and/or the sparse, disinterested audience playing Craps on the dance floor during our set at Maxwell's. The Jersey I know has the lanky, speed-enhanced heartbeat of Joey Ramone, Bon Jovi's flair, Springsteen's soul, and Sinatra's mileage. If you could bottle its energy, add some fizzy zest, slap on a picture of a busty Italian girl, and sell it in the cooler section of Wawa's throughout all twenty-one counties, it would be more addictive than Heroin.
Later that evening, Paul and I abandon the Palm-huddled basketball court, return to our sandstone apartments for a series of primping ablutions, load a '98 Jeep with amplifier stacks, and drive down I-4 to Church Street Station in downtown Orlando, Florida. As I step to the microphone, Paul seated behind me, twirling a drumstick between middle and ring fingers, shielded by a sea of drums, I realize that I have lost my way. A black and white Stratocaster dangles across my abdomen obstructing the familiar devil-tail J on a red N-J t-shirt. In between songs, the crowd members yell out cover tunes they'd like us to perform. But we play our originals anyway, just to piss them off. We play to an audience of tan-bodied, Spring Break, boy-band-worshiping tourists, in a Corona-themed bar, 1100 miles south of where we belong. . .
back to jerseybeat.com l back to top
ROCK N ROLL ADDICTION by Daniel McDermott
