“I guess we should take multiple cars.”
“Fine. You go with David in his car. Sholtz as well. We’ll follow behind in the Golf.”
It wasn’t raining very hard when we left, but I took my umbrella. It was one of those long unwieldy types, with a crooked wooden hook handle. I found it in the pharmacy round the corner. I tossed it in the back of David’s car, with my tie I decided was too uncomfortable to wear for the duration of the car ride.
David pulled up outside the house as I reached the stoop. Sholtz stood waiting outside, his dark suit draping awkwardly across his large frame, silently.
“All aboard to New Jersey,” David called through a cracked window. I took shotgun.
We didn’t really speak as the car meandered through the backwaters of Northwest Philadelphia. When we approached the Franklin Bridge, the silence broke.
“Three lanes to New Jersey.”
“The best part of Camden is probably this structure that takes you out of it.”
“The best part of Camden is that it’s usually far away from me.”
“I wonder how many people have lived and died in this town, never leaving, never hoping to leave. Never hoping.”
“Well, that’s what today is sort of about, isn’t it?”
“Not entirely.”
I remembered this time when you two were arguing over something stupid, in the middle of your open-plan suburban kitchen, and to prove her point, she threw an orange at you. I’ve never seen you as angry as you were that day, and I couldn’t help but laugh. Something about tossing oranges as a means of retort seemed witty at the time.
“Do we have enough change for this toll?”
“You only have to pay on the way back.”
“New Jersey is a gateway drug. They reel you in for free, and then charge you to get out.”
A few months later I gave you a picture she took of you that day she came to visit, when we walked the length of the city twice. You were relaxed and exhausted, sitting in that coffee store that feels it’s all right to rip you off because the owners are nice to everyone.
Eisenhower’s Interstate and Defense Highways may well be the single greatest feat of engineering planned by one man, but he did seem to overlook South Jersey. It’s as if after years of careful planning for the State’s complex new interstate system, the planners just gave up. Phoned it in. Maybe they were just looking for an easy target.
Instead of simply continuing I-95 North out of Philadelphia straight through to New York, five different possible spur roads eventually meet up around the midpoint of New Jersey. The confusing and arduous process of building a massive interstate system in an already populated area left the Garden State unnavigable without a car, or an articulated truck.
“What’s the quickest way through this mess?”
“I don’t know. My schemes always just seem to get me lost. Just follow signs for the Turnpike.”
Over half a century since its completion, the Turnpike is still supported by tolls found at most exits. You get this little white and green card with rounded edges that tells you where you go on and charts how much it will cost you to escape the embrace of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority at the exit you’re interested in. It’s generally assumed to be the duty of the person riding shotgun to hold the ticket and calculate the exit toll. For years this was my job, sitting next to my mother, in front of my sister, on our trips down to her sister’s or my grandmother’s house. It was almost always my mom, myself and my baby sister in rental cars, every summer until college. I never let my sister sit in the front.
David, Sholtz and I slowed into the tollbooth at the mouth of the Pike.
“Take the ticket and find out how much it’ll be when we get off. When are we getting off?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Not today.”
“Totowa.”
“What exit?”
Exit 8A. Just beyond the turn off for Six Flags, and Princeton. Exit 8A used to lead you to Jamesburg, until it became Monroe Township, when the distribution centers took over. Miles of single-story white polygonal boxes; PetsMart, Circuit City, Walmart. They bifurcated the town into Monroe Twp. and Jamesburg when farmers started selling their land to chains that needed to supply their shoppes in Newark, NJ, Newark, DE, Bristol, PA, Nyack, NY, who knows. Corn fields replaced by high fructose corn syrup depositories.
“We’re not there yet.”
“So how do these things work?”
“A combustion engine drives four wheels on two axles. Oh; where we’re going? I have no idea. It might be my heritage’s shielded culture, but it’s not something I’ve really been exposed to yet.”
The group in the Golf had apparently chosen a different spur of I-95 and was calling David to check on our progress.
“Where are we?”
“By Orange.”
“We’re somewhere outside of an orange. I mean, outside of Orange. I don’t know. Is that close? You’re there already? You left after – well, pick up something at the florist that we can all put our names on, and we’ll just meet you at the home.”
He hung up and went back to staring into the middle distance of the grayscaled May morning ahead of us.
“We’re not actually that far away. Once we get off the Turnpike, it’s only a few more miles. We’re going to Clifton first. The home is in Clifton.”
“This is our exit then.”
I-95 to I-280 to Route 3, we were told. If you’re from New Jersey, you know where every major road lies, what it intersects with and where it will take you. Everyone you will have ever known from this state will know this too.
We pulled up to the tollbooth at the Turnpike off ramp, scrambling to meet the required exit fee. Between the three of us, and what we could find under seat cushions and floor mats, we managed to pull together exact change.
“Well, I’m not sure how we’re going to get back.”
“They have banks in New Jersey. We have to get there first.”
New Jersey side streets. Bloomfield Avenue to Allwood Road. Clifton.
None of us knew what to expect from our best friend. His parents, hidden away in some cloister when we arrived, seemed to have delegated him a role which on any other day would have been assumed naturally. The schmoozer, the mixer; friend of everyone. If there was ever a guy to work the crowd, it was he. Even that day his comically thunderous voice echoed through the vestibule of the Jewish Memorial Chapel of Clifton.
“Thank you for coming. I know. I know – it means a lot to me, and my parents. You as well, you’ve all come from so far. Thank you.”
I’ve always made fun of how you dress. I’ve always said something along the lines that there are those who put more effort into their appearance when getting ready for bed than you do when off to a job interview. Whether it’s t-shirts that haven’t fit in a decade, or sideways running Hunter green fleece-lined corduroy jeans that are two sizes too big for you, or sandals patched back together with duct and electrical tape, there was always something comical on your person. Most of your clothes predate when we first met: you operate like a walking, breathing historical exhibit of yourself.
That day was the same. You’d put on the requisite black suit, but the clunky middle-schooler shoes and mid-Nineties inherited geometrically-patterned power tie gave away the fact that you had not thought about new formal attire since your Bar Mitzvah. As ever, clothes were the last thing on your mind.
We shuffled in, finding it hard to comprehend the grey throngs of well-wishers and weeping relatives.
I let the rest of our convoy greet you first, hanging at the back of the line. I was trying to think of something to say, and I didn’t want to say much of anything. The line progressed, your bloodshot eyes and attempted half-smile waiting to greet me. You hugged me. You’ve always been a hugger. I slowly wrapped my arms around you, praying that something of some import would fall out of my mouth before tears came.
“You are a brother to me. I’m here for you.”
Could’ve been worse.
You whimpered and sniffled into my shoulder, “Now I’ve got to live through your sister.”
You pulled back, moving on to some elderly couple who had lined up behind me. Your mother appeared, standing calmly behind you. Someone asked, “How are you holding up so well?”
“Drugs help,” she shrugged.
Your father could hardly speak as he embraced me. I’d never had an adult cry on my shoulder before, or had an embrace made me feel so hollow. The family returned to their cloister as we were told to take our seats.
The death of a child, someone who’d not even made it to college yet, is wholly unlike the death of someone who has lived a full life. Everyone from the town shows up. Everyone they knew in high school. The cops guide the funeral procession. It makes the local papers.
“Unabated fucking tragedy,” one member of the Golf crew said, holding our wreath.
The Philadelphia Convoy took up a few pews. Two more cars of friends we’d not known were coming, had come. They filed in behind us. College kids who could do little more than shuffle in their seats and feel horribly out of place. Friends and lovers of the dead giving speeches about what the dead meant to them. Journal entries read aloud. Torn heartstrings pulled. I kept my eyes closed as much as I could without looking like I was bored enough to sleep.
There will be times in most people’s lives where they will have to bury loved ones, but unless they’re Jewish, they probably won’t have to help.
We were directed back to our cars, to form a train behind the hearse. Limousines first.
The procession lead to a cemetery on a hill. The clouds shifted as we climbed. Muddy pathways interrupting the formality of the occasion. In the new blue sky, we could see clear through to Manhattan’s clustered skyscrapers. Generations of families stored in boxes on a mound in New Jersey. The tombstones appeared to be polished frequently.
We parked at the top of the hill, and proceeded cautiously in our funereal best down a graveled slope to the open site. There were mounds of dirt spread evenly on either side of where the casket had been lowered. Jewish tradition requires that those close to the deceased are to shovel at least some of the dirt that will bury the coffin, so that they are not buried entirely by strangers, poetically adding insult to injury for the bereaved. Uncles and second cousins took up shovels, as if this were nothing new to them. I was passed one by mistake, helping to bury my best friend’s eighteen year-old sister.
You stood in the middle, stoically shifting sod, passing shovels to grandmothers.
I went to the bookstore in West Paterson with you later that evening. We bought more journals. I bought a paperweight copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. We ate cheeseburgers and drove along Interstate 80 until we were too tired to go on.
I fell asleep in the passenger’s seat.
