Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.

I thought I was from New Jersey. I mean, if I were to tell you what town I’m from and you looked it up on a map, it would be within the borders of New Jersey. As a matter of fact, knowing where I was from in New Jersey, you’d assume I’d seen and dealt with every stereotype possible. I’ve made every joke about it. Guidos. The smell. The beaches. Sure, I know all of them. But I’m not “from” New Jersey. At least I wasn’t for a long time. But it’s possible that I’ve changed. After 23 years, it’s possible I’m now, “one of them.”

The quote above in italics is from the movie Apocalypse Now. I find it very fitting, as I too would like to tell you a story about a descent into madness - a descent into the jungle. I’d like to tell you about the horror.

Saigon... shit. I'm still only in Saigon... Every time, I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle.

              I woke up Saturday morning staring at my ceiling fan. To say I had a bad Friday night would be a lie; to say I’d had a Friday night that made me want to strangle puppies in front of children would be a lot more accurate. How long had I been asleep? There were those six hours that I know about for sure. I smelled bad, and I’m sure I looked even worse. New York City, that fucking cesspool, had really done a number on me. Horrible decision after horrible decision by people myself and people I call friends had left me feeling like someone had raped me while watching a Carrot top comedy special. I was mostly livid at what I’d done; some of my methods had become…what’s the word? Unsound? My methods had become unsound.

              Earlier in the week, it had been relayed to me that a few kids from school were going to go to the beach for Labor Day weekend and that I was more than welcome to join. Originally, I didn’t have any intention of going. I’m not much of a beach guy. There are parts of the arctic with more color, and I haven’t worked out since 2003. After Friday night I didn’t even want to leave bed for the next three days - let alone face the sun. I wanted to curl up in a ball and potentially have someone deliver me hot wings. I decided I was not leaving my apartment and the most I was going to do for the rest of the day was watch and the Discovery Channel (The world is just awesome!) and porn (boobs are just awesome!).

That’s when I heard my phone buzz.

              It was a text message from my friend Tommy: “Hey I’m going for a run, let me know when you’re coming down.” Me and Tommy had never really discussed me coming down the shore, so the wording of this was a little off. I took my alcohol-soaked mind about 5 minutes to realize that this was not an open ended suggestion; this was a demand, a mission. I was going down the shore. What the hell else was I gonna do?

              I quickly rolled out of bed and after slapping myself around a little bit before taking a shower. At this point I didn’t think much was gonna come out of this trip. A little time on the beach, a few drinks, maybe a trip out to a bar. Despite my early morning malaise the thought of getting as far away from NYC was all of a sudden priapismic. All three of my friends down the shore had significant others and I’d never really been out heavily drinking with any of them. As far as I knew, I was the low grade alcoholic of the group. Any decisions made to drink more than socially would be made independent of them. I ran to the station and jumped on the first train to Belmar. I was headed down the Delta…I mean, Parkway, for better or for worse.

My orders say I'm not supposed to know where I'm taking this boat, so I don't. But one look at you, and I know it's gonna be hot.

              The trip got off to a less than stellar start. After switching about three trains, I was somehow lost less than a mile away from my house. I walked to the information desk and asked the lady when the next train to Belmar was. She pointed at a train, and I looked at her and said, ‘Are you sure?’ and she assured me that yes, she indeed was certain. I don’t think anything pisses me off more than poor service with a smile. If you’re going to be unhelpful, let me fucking know from the get go. Say what you will about airport security, but at least I always know what I’m getting up front (“I said 3ozs of Astroglide only motherfucker”).

              I get on the obviously overcrowded train of people heading all over the place for the holiday weekend. No one bothers making an announcement about where the train is actually going. But I’m armed with the information I got from the smiling information lady - what could possibly go wrong? After about 15 minutes we pull into a covered train station.  I don’t see any signs saying where we are so I asked the two Indian gentlemen standing next to me. Penn Station, they tell me, New-ark Penn Station.

              Good, I’m going in the right direction. So why is it that everyone clears off the train except me and an angry conductor is yelling “no passengers” at me? Well obviously, the answer was because those two guys were actually saying “New York Penn Station.” This, if you didn’t know, is in a different state, the very one I happened to be trying to get very far away from.

              All of this is fantastic news to me, as the next train is not for another hour, and all of a sudden the large iced coffee and egg sandwich I downed in 23 seconds that morning has decided it no longer wants to sit in my body. Nothing is worse than being a hungover sick mess in a very public and crowded place, especially New York Penn Station. I sprint to the bathroom only to see a line out the door. I go for option B and throw up in the nearest trash can. A family of five and a bum gives me a dirty look. Top five lowest point of my life? Yeah…let’s go with top five. At this point, I really ought to just give the fuck up and go home.

              After sweating profusely and several false vomit alarms I finally make my train. It’s even more packed than the first train. The crew headed down to the Jersey Shore is just about what you’d expect: diverse, restless, and utterly trashy. A group of children sit in seats right next to a group of guys downing forties in paper bags. Several blondes in bathing suits are chatting their heads off in the corner while a group of older guys in Ed Hardy t-shirts stare at them and elbow each other. This is my first guido sighting, and it won’t be the last. These ones are fairly restrained right now; soon they’ll be throwing back Ketel One and sugar-free Red Bull before running off to the bathroom to get a couple push-ups in. I hide in one of the seats in hope that my stomach will get back to a somewhat normal level before I get to the beach.

The train ride takes about two hours all told and with about three stops to go I let Tommy know I’ll be there. “Already on my way,” he lets me know. At this point I should introduce Tommy properly. I probably wouldn’t have made it through first year of law school without him constantly pulling my head out of my ass. He’s always doing things like “studying” and “working out” and generally being “responsible.” I’m constantly learning classes two weeks before an exam and getting tanked on Wednesday nights. I invite him out on a lot of weekends and he usually tells me he’s saving himself for one night or another. I usually scoff at this and call him a “belching vagina” or some other remark. Point is, I was supposed to be the more reckless of the two, and a reputation is a reputation. When the train gets into the station I run to the Duane Reade and buy a bottle of Pepto and down about half of it. I couldn’t show any signs of weakness – I had already called Tommy “King of the Gays” that morning because he went for a run.

    The next three days would be spent showing what a little wimp I was in comparison. It was like a 2006 Matt Leinart telling Kurt Warner, “thanks for warming the seat up for me old man.”

    I dove into the car and patted Tommy on the back. He introduced me to his buddy Gabe and drove off.

    "Can't tell you how happy I am to be getting out of town for the weekend? The night I had last night man…I’m just saying, you gotta promise me a good time. No chicken-shitting around. A true Jersey Shore eperience," I yelled up front.

    "I wouldn't worry about that," he laughed. "I hope you're ready to get the fist pump going."

It might have been my mission, but this sure as shit was Tommy's town. 

 If I say its safe to surf this beach, Captain, then it’s safe to surf this beach. I mean, I'm not afraid to surf this place. I'll surf this whole fucking place!

    Belmar is not your normal beach town on the Jersey Shore. The main road looks just like any other stretch of Jersey Coast: expensive mansions with elegant porches and widows walks interrupted only by cheese steak and salt-water taffy shops. But the back blocks are a winding maze of shanties and shacks filled to the brim with mid twenty-somethings. The air was thick with it - a never-ending fraternity row with hide nor hair of an English building. 

Belmar on any given Saturday

I walked into Tommy's beach house into a thick fog of hair spray and techno music. The house was the front of two on a single lot and couldn't have been much bigger than two dorm rooms. A gaggle of girls were hurrying about clamping their hair with straighters while fumbling with their dresses. Not a one batted an eye at us as we walked the 15 or so feet that made up the core of the house. Tommy and his buddy Gabe grabbed beers and we escaped the din of chirping women and aerosol. Within seconds of leaving the door, a group of Tommy's roommates came bounding across the lawn. It was no later than 7, and they were hammered and rabid with excitement.

    They shook my hand and gladly introduced themselves, even giving me a friendly jab or two. These weren't the stereotypes I had expected. These were smart and welcoming kids; I-bankers and consultants, not guidos and Jersey trash. Normal kids that traded in their weekday jobs to go tear-assing around Belmar looking for the shit.

    They'd just come from a place I'd only heard whispers and jokes about; D-Jais. A place so infamous for being "Jerse" its name had almost become synonymous with guidos and the smell of the turnpike. A place that's name had spread like wildfire through the internet thanks to such videos as this:

Yes, that bar. That’s where they’d just come from. And it was a place I feared. It was a place I’d eventually have to see. It was close, real close, right around the corner, actually. I hadn’t seen it yet, but I could feel it. As if the I were being sucked towards it and its techno flowing up into the side streets. Whatever was going to happen, it wasn't gonna be the way they call it back in New York.

We went inside and started to drink. I reached in and grabbed a beer, feeling more welcome than I usually did in new situations - a rare breech of man-etiquette. One of the roommates chided his friend.

“Wooo, you gonna let the kid in the Sox hat drink your beer?”

“Any man brave enough to wear that hat around here can drink from my beer any day.”

              The night went on and I was feeling pretty good. The group grew and grew and the night got hazier. In time I was over my usual stand-offishness and was well on my way to drunk. I was having a good time, not even thinking about the previous night when I heard the question proposed:

“So Tommy, you taking the rookie to D-Jai’s with us?” The look on my face must have been telling.

Tommy immediately recognized my reluctance, “Nah I think we’re gonna take him somewhere a little more his speed tonight. Ease him into it. We can’t have him facing all that Jerse at once.”

“Oh, c’mon it’s not gonna hurt or harm him. Just take him to the bar, Tommy. It’s a good bar - and we all like it. You know how hard it is to find a good bar you like down here. C’mon, don’t you want to have good time rookie?”

“I don’t know man, doesn’t seem like my scene. It’s a guido bar.”

“Guidos don’t puss out! I take it back, no more beer for you!”

              I was saved. The night ended up panning out as I hoped. A good time had by all as we went to a bar a little more my kinda place (even with the Springsteen cover band). Still full of shore trash, but the kind I could deal with. Only notable highlight was the an inquiry I made to a girl I was talking with who was engaging in the standard fist pump when Jovi came on.

“Why the hell do people instinctively dance like that here?”

“Well I think we’d put both up but we have to hold on to our drinks.”

              At some point I crossed over to “infinite mode” (discussed here) and it was time to leave. Somehow I’d lost Tommy, who I would later find out spend a good portion of the evening falling all over various things his girlfriend owned, but took a cab ride back with his friend. As we pulled into the driveway we noticed the house was jammed full of people. I stepped into the screen door but held it open for a girl who was right behind me on the steps. This led to a bizarre sequence of events.

The girls who had been there when I first arrived had apparently come back from the bar and were less than pleased to see a girl who had followed me into the house. So much so that one of them grabbed her by her amply hair-sprayed do and started screaming at the top of her lungs. The level of cat hisses and whistles was loud enough to stop a whole house full of people whose only reaction was to stare at the two young ladies twirling around the living room with a fist full of each other’s hair. They became a whirling dervish of big hoop earrings and dress shoes both emitting noises that you’ve only heard on Planet Earth. While every guy in the room seemed paralyzed by booze and confusion one of the other girls took the opportunity to start throwing haymakers right into the unwelcome girls face. I have seen a lot of booze filled fights in my day, most of them devolve into a lot of tussling on the ground, a few errant swings followed by a crowd breaking it up. I tell no exaggerations when I say we would have needed a panel of judges to determine the winner of this brawl. It took a full 3 minutes before anyone in the room decided that the heavyweight bout needed to end and the girls were separated. While I may have not been totally cognoscente I did determine one thing, I was truly in the jungle. I’d never seen anything like that, I don’t think Steve Irwin ever saw anything like that.

I woke up the next morning actually feeling good. I was on the couch surrounded by beer bottles and bodies all over the floor. I stepped over a few of them and ran right in to Tommy who had just walked in wearing gym shorts and a T-shirt. He was going running. Drinking all night and going running. This was about the clearest example of how far the two of us differed. I didn’t want to run, I want a croissan-wich.

Just my luck, the boys who’d gone to D-Jais the night before were hurting and were ready to go grab some food. We roused some of the people and kicked a few of the various girls scattered about the floor out the front. As we stepped out on to the porch I saw one of the grossest and funniest things I’ve ever seen. Right next to the front door was a large pile of hair. One pile was blonde; one was brunette; the collateral damage from the night before sitting right there bleaching in the Belmar sun. Proof of life. (I can’t believe I didn’t have a camera just to prove this existed. The guys left this here for a few days apparently just to show to people that the fight had indeed happened. It was cornered off with a table like a crime scene).

We walked around the corner to the Dunkin Donuts looking about as ragtag as a group of hungover individuals could. One of the guys was wearing a Duke Lacrosse Jersey with the words “Acquitted 07” on the back which I commended him on. That’s the sort of shirt people expect you to have in Belmar, New Jersey, as I saw nary an eye batted. We walked into the Dunkin Donuts only to run into approximately 9,000 people who all appeared to be in our condition.

“I love the smell of Dunkies in the morning.” The kid in the Duke jersey quipped after a long inhale. “You know, every time you go drinking, could even be for 12 hours. When it’s all over, you can walk in and no one won’t feel better, not one of ya. The smell, you know that coffee and donuts smell. Smells like…sobriety.”

              And indeed it did. Large iced coffee and sausage egg and cheese is enough to get any man going. In 45 minutes I had a beer in my hand on Tommy’s front lawn. Nice cold day, no pressure to go to the beach and no work tomorrow. At some point a girl none of us really knew but somehow had left some of her clothing at the apartment got dropped off after doing a drive of shame from Staten Island. Staten Island!! Look up where that is in comparison to Belmar. If a person you randomly hooked up with drove you from another state to a place you left clothing at that wasn’t a very close friend of yours, you’re supposed to be horribly ashamed, right? Not this girl. No, this bitch with the bumblebee hive haircut chewing gum was upset we didn’t know exactly where her clothing was.

              Trashy girl aside I was feeling pretty fat and sassy. After a couple beers and a few hours back from his run and hanging out with his girlfriend, Tommy suggested we get some burritos, a suggestion that damn near put me over the edge. On our way to the place I let him know how well things were panning out.

“Damn man I can’t believe how awesome this, is truly seeing the Jersey Shore: drinking outside a shack on a lawn, going to a bar with a Springsteen cover band, hanging out with some truly classy, classy broads. I appreciate the hell out of you having me down.”

“I’m glad you’re having a good time,” he smiled at me while parking the car. “But I think we could do better.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Hell, I was thinking about rocking the train home tonight. The girl fight was about all the Jerse I think I can handle in one weekend.”

“You can’t do that. We’ve got plans for tonight.”

“Well what are we doing?”

“Well for one we’re meeting them to go to D’Jais to go to happy hour.”

End part I