LAKES
Part I: NORTHBOUND WHORE, Chapter 1
In the winter it's not unheard of to still see some seagulls milling around parking lots and boardwalks on the South Jersey Barrier Islands, but Rolo is shocked at just how many of them are here pecking at the crumbling concrete in the immediate area surrounding the Water Tower. All of them are white-headed, sort of eagle-faced, those big ones that in the summers are usually rarer to see among the hordes of Laughing Gulls, those ones that seem to intimidate all the other waterfowl, and are the most brazen when snatching like funnel cake or french fries out of some overtanned Pennsylvanian's mitts. There're a few up here with him, he counts six, and they don't seem too bothered by his being there. The view from Up Top is incredible, he timed it absolutely perfectly so that he'd see the sun rise with the City fencing in the horizon downtheshore sort of Southwest, the sort of sawtooth silhouettes of the Casino/Hotels and the other newer atomic-bomb-type Water Towers like gravestones and dewy fungi against the pinkening sky, and with each tiny bit of breeze Up Here the Water Tower doesn't really sway so much as vibrates and lets out these pained ancient moans of salt and rust and guano. He's sure he's made the correct decision in coming here, now, with this view and the Gulls and that sort of post-exhaustion euphoria after the considerably arduous task of actually getting here. He had, when his mother had finally fallen asleep the previous night, snuck around the back of the house and uncovered that old plastic-bodied Radio-Flyer knockoff wagon Darlene used to roll him around in with the front two wheels on an axis connected to the pullhandle, the handle that could be titled back into the wagon and used as a sort of steering wheel for the passenger while Darlene or someone would push the thing full speed down the road. He yanked out from the shed the inflatable dinghy, uninflated, one of those detonator-looking inflation devices, the little outboard motor, a full red canister of gasoline he had covertly filled up the previous previous night, his dad's old fishing rod and tackle box, and a little duffle bag with a flashlight and a couple changes of clothes inside, and managed to cram all of it into the plastic wagon, the propellor of the outboard motor sticking quite conspicuously out to the side but seemingly secure at least. One of the major issues with these like post-Soviet children's wagons is that the wheels are usually made of plastic too, and they're fucking deafening on asphalt especially if Darlene gets a really good push off the curb. The previous previous previous night he had an excruciating time completely covering each of the four hollow wheels with a few layers of duct tape, and it's nearly impossible to unroll so much duct tape without making any sound so it's a miracle really that his mom didn't wake up while he was out there. There was still this low but very noticeable rumble as the taped-up wheels were dragged across the driveway and out into the street, so he moved in baby steps to minimize the sound and would only start pulling the thing along behind him at full gait once he was off his street entirely and out onto the sidewalk of US Route 40 headed East past the Former-Wawa—you can tell it used to be a Wawa from the shape of the building itself—past the Mays Landing Diner, closed at that hour, up through all that nothing and Pines and strange houses til he got to the Mays Landing Marina, just downstream from the outlet dam of Lake Lenape [footnote 1], and right up beside one of the big garages shaded all angularly from the orange light of the closest street lamp he pumped and pumped with his admittedly pathetic manual inflation device and the whole inflation process took way longer than he anticipated and he was worried he might have miscalculated his timing here so that he might miss the sunrise, this turned out to be false. He transferred the rest of his stuff to the dinghy, attached the motor and filled it with gas, thankfully a considerable amount was left in the red cannister, and dragged both the dinghy and the wagon down the ramp which is already usually slippery but in this cold air was bordering on icy, and he fell flat on his ass and slid with his vehicles into the freezing water up to his knees. He was wearing waterproof boots so it shouldn't have been an issue but the water had come up so high up his shins that it breached the lips and basically filled up both his boots completely with no place for the water to escape. In a frenzy and using the wagon as leverage he heaved himself to his feet and tumbled backward into the dinghy that bounced like a moonbounce when he landed, making sure to keep his feet dangling off the side to not wet the interior too much, and the wagon disappeared quickly into the black water of the Great Egg Harbor River. In a sort of mid-situp position he had emptied the contents of his boots overboard and taken off his socks. He'd only brought two other pairs with him and he'd already have to break one out, rolling up his soaked jeans and trying to let his lower legs air dry until they were basically numb from the cold and then slipping on the new socks and being very careful not get these ones wet too, and set off, taking him four goes to start up the motor with the pull-string. It was about a 34-mile—which is about a 30-nautical-mile—journey down the calm winding river using only the moonlight in the thankfully clear and nearly windless night at least this close to sealevel, out into the shit-smelling Bay, under two enormous bridges, cruising by Ocean City which at that time of night was all dark and silent, heading then Northeast avoiding the passage out into the Atlantic, and staying within the confines of Great Egg Harbor Bay, weaving in and out of all the big piles of wetland mud and passing under some more bridges there in the watery plane between Absecon Island and the Mainland, these bridges much shorter and ill-maintained, and up through the curvy thorofare denoting the border of Northwestern Atlantic City, past Venice Park and the Windmills, further still all parallel with the Brigantine Bridge and some more weaving around mud piles and swampy knolls and finally out onto the great expanse of the confusingly named Great Bay of Little Egg Harbor, and up and around the Seven Islands which are still mud piles themselves just a little bigger and more solid than the rest, and landing on the Northeast side of Big Crab Island, the largest of the Seven, and having to take off the relatively dry socks for a moment to slip the wet boots back on barefoot while he hopped out of the dinghy and yanked it up onto the shoreline far enough so that it won't be touched even in high tide by the waves, grabbed his belongings and headed straight for the Tower, he could see the vague threat of morning in the form of a dim Baby Blue emerging in the East. It was hell navigating the rough abandoned terrain here especially with all his gear, the fishing rod kept getting caught on these thick stone-like shrub branches that would snap off and almost ring out when they hit the concrete like fallen gambang bars, and once he reached the base of the Tower he was disappointed to find that the first fifteen feet or so of the original ladder had seemingly long since rusted off completely, but luckily some previous visitor had constructed a pretty high-quality replacement rope ladder that swayed all about and caused some truly horrifying creaks and pings in the Water Tower's orange metal when he put his weight on it. He left his things down at the bottom, of course, he plans to find a good spot to rest in one of the less-collapsed buildings on the site, but this climbing of the Tower was absolutely essential and he was cutting it real close with the timing and all. The transition from the rope ladder to the crumbly iron was jarring, and even held real steady to the side of the Tower he still felt as if he was flapping all about in the directionless wind. Two thirds of the way up on the sort of truss there's a wooden platform, presumably put there by whoever set up the rope ladder, and on it is a little ancient foldable Gouldlike wooden camping chair and a portable double-A-battery-powered radio, tuned to 96.9 but without any power left, and a dusty plastic carrier bag from like a Chinese restaurant from the looks of it being held down onto the platform by the seafacing leg of the little chair. It was a perfect place for a breather, climbing up a rope ladder is kind of more labor-intensive than you'd imagine, so he tilted the chair backwards to release the bag and examined its contents as he cautiously lowered himself into a sitting position. A quite old-looking wood tobacco pipe, nothing too ornate or interesting about it, it was well-used, another rather ordinary and unremarkable cloudy chrome ashtray that seemed about as thin as like your big toe's toenail, and a surprisingly shiny mirrorlike penny-colored flip lighter that, when he tested it with nondominant hand clasped over to shield it from the fishy air, it let out this heavy satisfying ping as he flicked open the cover, and the flame literally seemed to roar to life and was like four inches tall and even when he removed the seaside hand out of instinct the flame remained strong in the elevated wind there above the island. Unfortunately nothing else was in there, nothing to smoke, no way to put the incredible lighter to use, but he threw all the stuff back in the oriental bag and stuffed it into his back pocket once he got up from the little chair and nearly tumbled backwards off the thing down onto the waste below, as is what usually happens when you stand up from a chair that's a lot lower than you're used to. He reached for the Tower's Northwest leg to steady himself, and continued on up the original ladder which was all encaged in rust and still seemed somehow to be even more unstable than that swinging monstrosity below, and but finally clambered up over the railing against the round dying basin of the Tower, Up Top, looking sort of Southeast with the Gulls, and breathing in the horrible fishy smell of the island that he only now is beginning to notice. He remembers the smell from back when his Dad had taken him and Darlene out here and this was decidedly different. Deader, is the word he comes up with. And sort of sharper, like almost burning, like worse than bad eggs and milk this wasn't just the regular fishy stench. Perhaps it's just been too long since the last time he was here, definitely too long, he concludes. He stays there until the sun is up hovering low over the ocean. It's changed from orange to white and has become too bright to look at directly, and all the pleasing shadows of the chimneys and metal framings and weeds are shortening and losing all saturation. He takes a labored stroll around the perimeter of the elevated tank, its railing nearing on the ornate, but sharp and tetanus-inducing, so he transports himself with his clothed back firmly against the also quite rusted-out hull of the Tower's head, and shifts himself all crablike counterclockwise around the thing, getting a full panoramic view of the South Jersey Coastline as he scuttles along, and stops around the Northwest side of the circuit facing vaguely in the direction of Mystic and Osborn Islands when he feels a bit of knotted rope clunk him all dull on the side his head. Someone, presumably the one who did the ladder and the platform below, had fixed a thick nautical sort of rope to the side of the tank, attached to a newish metal anchor or bracket sort of thing on the platform, all shiny and free of rust, and the rope has these thick knots for traction every two feet or so. Rolo yanks on the rope leading up to the top of the Tower's dome, and it feels suspiciously secure. At the prospect of a better view and to be truly, uncontestably Up Top, he with little hesitation throws himself onto the rope and struggles up the curved side in a way he'd imagine some mid-century poindexter would struggle on a similar rope in gym class under verbal fire from some thick-necked police academy dropout with a shiny whistle and monochrome baseball cap. He's winded again, positively Up Top, the air somehow even colder and everything feeling queasily more unstable than when he had the luxury of rusted handrails and a hull to lean up against. He feels like he's on the wing of an airplane. The view here is basically the same as it was slightly less Up Top, but it's an achievement nonetheless. The knotted rope is attached to the dome of the tank with another shiny newly-welded bracket and there's no way to untie the thing even if he wanted to. Just as he's about to quasi-repel back down onto the lower platform, he notices a third newly welded bracket with another rope leading down into a small kind of human-sized hole at the top of the tank, and so he goes to have a look, shining his flashlight down into it and it's of course empty apart a big hole down in the middle and the remnants of a fully-oxidized ladder scattered across the basin. Rope seems trustworthy, he thinks, it's the same as the one that led him up here, so naturally he sits down with his legs dangling into the darkness below, wedges one of the knots in the rope up between the soles of his still-wet boots, blisters beginning to form on his cold bare feet inside, grabs hold of the line two knots above and slides off the lip of the hatch, putting his full weight onto the newly welded bracket just like before, only this time it snaps off with a horrifying ping and he plummets right onto his back flat on the interior floor of the pitch-black tank, the only light from his flashlight which rolled all the way to the opposite side from where he currently lays, and the extremely early morning glow just barely creeping through the opening now far above him. The impact shook the whole Tower, and this time he really could feel it sway, and the echo of his initial fall seemed not to dissipate for minutes and minutes as he lay there dazed and possibly internally injured. The old wood pipe in his back pocket sort of jabbed him real good right above the beltline. Once the sun has reached an angle where it could actually directly enter the top hatch and cast a thin column of light diagonally across the tank, he attempts to sit up and is immediately met with an intense shooting pain in his side like he's being stabbed with a long thin knife, so he lays back down flat, and is just barely able to roll onto the side opposite the shooting pain, and fights to get himself up to his knees, at least. Standing doesn't seem to be an option, right now, so he shuffles along on all-fours around the central hole to get to the flashlight, having to pick up and move the crumbling bits of ladder strewn all about, and once there he finds a way to sit with his back up against the inner hull and orbits the light all around the get a better look at the place. He's got a rope, at least, but nothing to attach it to, and the hatch is monumentally too high to reach by jumping even if he were unailed. He thinks maybe he could try to just throw the rope up there and see if it somehow catches on something but that seems extremely unlikely, perhaps he could attach one of those broken bits of ladder to the end of the rope to act as a kind of grappling hook. He strains over to his left to grab one of these mangled bits of metal and with quite little force it snaps and nearly disintegrates in his hand, which doesn't fill him with immense confidence, and leaves a dark orange stain on his palm he's unable to scrub off on the side of his jeans. Something he hadn't noticed in here before he fell is yet another one of those newly welded brackets on the floor beside the central hole, with yet another nautical rope attached to it and leading over a little lip and down into the endless pipe below. He slides on his ass downhill toward the center, almost losing control and falling into the hole itself, but he doesn't think it's even wide enough for someone to fit in, and there's this low dark puddle of water all still around edge of the pipe's lip that's like the same color as the rust so he didn't see it on the slide down and now the jeans are all wet too, not just below the knees. His side explodes with pain as he leans forward and tugs on the rope, and it dangles slowly and deliberately all pendulumlike like there's something heavy tied to the other end way down in the pipe. Locking his feet on the opposite end of the central hole he pulls the rope up knot by knot, the pain in his side so excruciating that he almost doesn't even notice it, and for this moment his only interest is pulling up whatever the hell is at the end of this rope. It bangs on all the sides of the pipe as he hoists it up, and it's one of those huge long duffle bags you see military guys carry around but this one isn't green it's like tan and canvas and on the side in maybe paint is written __________ ____ _______ ______ ____________, which Rolo is entirely unequipped to understand. He scooches away from the central void and unties the rope from the bag's opening, pulls loose the drawstring, and is met with a whole assortment of goodies the likes of which he's never even imagined.
Encircling the multi-story parking garage and exposed ground-level lots of the Atlantic City International Airport [footnote 2] is this winding 2-3-lane road sort of resembling a lasso thrown lamely over the asphalt called Amelia Earhart Blvd., and it's really the only way in or out of the place for non-employees. Naming this airport's only public road after Amelia Earhart seemed an odd choice to Alfie, whose right arm was beginning to get tired from waving his hand over his head. He had been thinking, at that point, for maybe nearly four minutes about what sort of connection Amelia Earhart may have had to the local area or the State of New Jersey as a whole, but came up with exactly zilch, and it actually started to bother him that so little thought had been put into the naming of this road that his hand-waving started to get sloppy. Clearly whoever was in charge of naming the road just picked the most aviation-sounding name he or she (probably he) could grasp off the dome and probably received little or no pushback. How fucking lazy and tasteless, he thinks, that they'd name this road after someone who A) has seemingly no correlation with the words Atlantic City Quote Unquote International Airport other than the fact that she was a pilot (international, transatlantic), and B) quite famously died in a plane wreck and was never found. To Alfie, at least, that second part is pretty much the first thing he associates with that name, the crash and disappearance, and if he were to be departing from this place on an aircraft the last person he'd want to think about would be fucking Amelia Earhart. His right hand was now sort of swaying slowly downward back and forth like a piece of looseleaf paper dropped from a height in windless air, and he unintentionally broke eye contact with Emily about a twenty yards away down past the bag-check between him and the security checkpoint, and she sped up her own hand-waving to call his attention back, and then blew what he hoped would be the last kiss from her palm and then, finally, disappeared around the corner with her carry-on having already taken off her shoes in anticipation. He had been trying pretty hard throughout this rather drawn-out goodbye process to keep his face mostly neutral but leaning more on the side of melancholy so as not to broadcast his wild almost throbbing excitement at the prospect of being left to his own devices for a good while. The ACQUIA is a small one-terminal airport with basically only one airline, so it only took Alfie a few seconds to float from bag-check back out through the two sets of unrevolving double doors to the crosswalk leading to the multi-story garage. He paused by the curb as an older couple on their way to Surprisingly Miami waded past, the man already in cargo shorts, the woman in a thin flapping sundress covered haphazardly by an enormous bright orange sweatshirt with the words J. Arthur and Son Contractors printed across the bunched-up chest. The dress, being gradually consumed by the large sweatshirt as it unfurled itself down the woman's torso—since it had seemingly been removed from, not the carry-on, but the larger clunkier suitcase and thrown on halfway between the parking garage and the entrance of the airport proper in a sort of I-wish-he-had-told-me-how-cold-it-was-gonna-be-today kind of way—flapped intensely in, Alfie thought, a probably Northeastern kind of direction. The man, presumably her husband, walked with all his muscles tightened up and even his face was tight, breathing all shallow through his nose and not turning his head in either direction to avoid all looks from passersby, especially Alfie. The persistent flapping of the woman's, presumably his wife's, floral and partially-hidden sundress seemed to irritate him, the man; trapped in this cacophony of small repetitive noises like the banging of the little clip that's attached to the rope which hoists the american flag against the hollow metal flagpole a ways down Amelia Earhart Blvd. beyond the pick-up/drop-off area, and the squeaky plastic wheels of the woman's hard-cased, four-wheeled, omnidirectional, also-floral suitcase as they rolled alternatingly over the smooth white paint of the crosswalk's stripes and the rough deteriorating ill-funded asphalt between them, and the cheap plastic luggage tag she'd attached to his much older, still-cloth, two-wheeled, partially-unzipped suitcase, knocking itself repeatedly against the telescopic luggage handle as he pulled it along behind him. This is all playful conjecture on Alfie's part, of course. He was then gestured-to by a man in a reflective vest and a big utility belt, the gesture seeming to communicate that the man wanted Alfie to cross the street, but Alfie held up his hand politely and just stood there at the curb breathing in the cool late-January air. There was an extremely bald man standing to the side of the terminal's entrance in some skin-tight sweater and black form-fitting jeans and bright white sneakers with one of those really small carry-ons that look basically like a briefcase but with wheels and an extra long luggage handle to accommodate the case's size, and he was smoking a cigarette in what Alfie considered a rather feminine way, held between his middle and index the jutted out perfectly straight from his fist, the other fingers curled up anxiously tight, and the man was taking sips of the smoke absently as if not even really enjoying it and Alfie walked up to him and blithely asked him if he could bum one and the man looked pretty fucked off but Alfie just stood there with a big friendly grin until the man dug into his incredibly tight pocket to pull out the pack of Yellow American Spirits that had been crushed under the almost geologic pressure between the denim and the man's thigh, and Alfie snatched one from the fossilized pack and said thank you in a kind of childish way, he admits, the way some sugar-rushed kid would say it to a clown handing them a balloon animal or some shit, and he lit it up and started sucking it down and it was nearly halfway through by the time he crossed the crosswalk and gave the vested man a familiar nod. Not twenty minutes before Alfie had managed to find the most glorious ultra-convenient parking spot on the second floor of the multi-story garage right in front of the elevator. He mused to Emily that this fuckin day just keeps getting better and better, a sarcastic verbal slip-up that thankfully didn't really register with her, as her mind was elsewhere and actually legitimately melancholy. He stopped by the elevator and tossed the cigarette butt in that little sand pit trashcan full of other gray and orange butts and decided to take the stairs instead, pulling from his inner jacket pocket the little flask that he had hidden in there earlier in the day and started up the Intake as he went two steps at a time up the concrete flight caked in blackened chewing gum and sticky untouchable railings. These were his first uninhibited sips and drags in upwards of three weeks (i.e. out-in-the-open Intake) because Emily's family had organized an insanely long trip out to the Poconos which he was obligated to attend. Emily's family quite likes Alfie, but they don't really know him at all despite him being with Emily for something like half a decade. They know an Alfie, is more accurate. Cigs and booze don't really have places in Emily's kind of atypical upper class Linwood [footnote 3] family, atypical in that—again, this is some conjecture on Alfie's part, but it probably isn't all that inaccurate—a good majority of families like hers who have lived in Linwood for a serious amount of time are inevitably afflicted with some sort of Winoism or like Xanax-dependency, but to Alfie's utter dismay Emily's family are all basically straight-edge, and straight-edge in that way where you can't even have the odd smoke or beer around them, and not for any like moral or religious reasons or even health reasons, they just don't like the stuff, never have, and throughout this whole neverending Poconos trip Alfie had to keep making covert getaways when they were all asleep to head out to some Bethlehem 7-eleven or something to suck down as many cigarettes as he could and down three or four of those tiny little liquor bottles at the neighboring booze outlet, and would have to wear his thick nondexterous skiing gloves as he smoked and wrapped himself up tight in his big winter coat so the smell wouldn't stick to him, and would stop at like a Sheetz and wash his whole reddening face and rinse out his mouth with some travel-sized Listerine and try to slip back into bed unnoticed. This worked about 80% of the time, according to him, but he usually had a pretty good excuse at the ready should she wake up from the creaking springs of the pull-out couch's mattress. Anyway, he goes on, he thought she'd never fucking leave, and that they'd be standing there 25 yards apart in the lobby of the ACQUIA for eternity, probably having to hire someone to move his arm up and down for him, and but how even that would have been preferable to the previous three or so weeks out in Buttfucklehem PA, and once she did leave he felt this immense smooth heady feeling like he'd taken a drag on some gold-plated Marlboro Red. That didn't stop him from bumming the one from the tight-clothed bald man with the tiny suitcase, but either way he was free, and all previous notions of frustration about having to park in the multi-story garage and not just drop her off in the pick-up/drop-off zone—her suggestion, and under protest by him initially—had now wafted away in the faux-native-american plume just earlier, and this brisk intermediary walk from the terminal, over the crosswalk, and up the stairs to his car served as this sort of symbolic transitory space between the exhausting past few weeks and, in his mind, good times to come. He flew by the unopened elevator and was immediately at his driver's side door in the most convenient parking space in the whole garage save for, he assumed, perhaps mistakenly, those spots that are reserved for the on-site staff like the TSA agents or those stressed-out Spirit airlines bagcheck people, and unlocked it with one hand while taking another gulp from the flask. While he's relating all this to us, I posit that the airport staff probably have their own parking lot entirely separate from the commuters, and that, even if they didn't, I'd doubt that the reserved spots in the garage would be anything but convenient for them. He doesn't seem to think much about what I'm saying, and as I'm saying it I notice that his eyes are drifting vaguely off in the direction of Fraidy sitting next to me at my kitchen table, and eventually lands at the median point between us two, and as my voice reaches a familiar alright-I-guess-that's-about- all-I-had-to-add kind of cadence, his focus snaps back up and he continues on. At this point he was back in the car, speeding down the ramp and out onto the brazenly inappropriately named Blvd. and past the cell phone lot and the Tech Center [footnote 4] and down that short but lonely stretch between federal grounds and the Super Wawa overlooking the big traffic semicircle. Finally some fucking peace, he says. Finally he won't have to dress like a fucking eskimo just to get a little buzzed, he says, and won't have to worry about his debilitatingly wandering eyes, something he had to strain to keep in check especially around Emily's mother. We don't react to this because once he starts up on Emily's mother it's nearly impossible to move on to any other subject, plus I've known Emily and her family a lot longer than he has, so it's just a bit icky all around. Finally, he says, finally he can, or we, rather, he corrects himself, we can all go out drinking without that bitch breathing down my fucking neck about it. Fraidy pipes up. Say Alfie, y'know you don't seem to like Emily all that much, seemingly sarcastic but Alfie answers earnestly. Prince of abject loneliness over here, second only to his adjacent companion, give me a fuckin break, and affirms rather loosely that he has absolutely no intention of cheating on her in these coming months, and that the very thought of not having her in his life is almost vomit-inducing, not for I think any like romantic reason but just for sheer dependance—Emily's Linwood family is pretty loaded, as is the norm, and they've provided Alfie with a pretty cushy do-nothing job at some sort of firm, and he absolutely needed the financial stability to keep up with his spending and also for her to act as a sort of emotional punching bag—and she, and there are a whole host of psychological analyses to be made about her, most or all of which I'm certainly unqualified to make, she seems to need him just as much as he needs her, and but all I can say is that her role in that relationship has always seemed somewhat masochistic and is something I've never been able to fully understand. Enough about her for fucks sake and let's go get drunk, he says, already a bit drunk. A cab is called and while we wait hovering by my front door Alfie suggests we go to, rather than the typical place in Somers Point, one of those expensive bars in one of the Casino/Hotels for once in a celebratory way to which Fraidy seems suddenly and uncharacteristically enthusiastic for a reason I can't quite place. Alfie's suggestion of going to a bar in the City was somewhat facetious as he assumed, in my case correctly, that we wouldn't be into it, but with this unexpected two-to-one majority his face lights up and he seems to tie his sneakers extra tight in anticipation. Hot Damn and Wowee all the way to the cab from the front door, yelling it back at me as I lock it. Alfie sits up front as he prefers to do and I sit in the back with Fraidy. Soon Alfie is making small talk with the driver—small talk with Alfie is considerably more labor intensive for the listener than a typical inane chat about weather or current or past events, he tends to corner people into conversations they cannot easily escape, and hits them with a barrage of questions meant to get at the very heart of whatever matter they happen to be discussing, and he seems to find a kind of sadistic joy in placing someone in a temporary verbal prison of which he is the warden. In this case he's pressing the cab driver about the most expensive item that had ever been left in his cab, and after receiving an answer, requesting a detailed description of the person that left it there, where they were going, who they were with, etc. The only person in this world who seems not to be subject to such intense conversational stress is his girlfriend Emily who, with the whole emotional punch bag thing, if they ever have some fight and they always have some fight, she usually gets the silent treatment which we all envy—and I turn to Fraidy who is gazing absently out his side's window as we turn onto the Black Horse Pike in the direction of the City. I ask him why he's suddenly so eager to go out drinking at a place like this which certainly isn't the norm, and he just kind of brushes it off and says something like gah, come on, live a little, which is an extremely un-Fraidy thing for him to say. I've known Fraidy at this point for like nineteen years and I've come to recognize that whenever he suddenly starts breaking his accepted norms there's probably something pretty turbulent going on up in his head, but before I can probe him any further, Alfie, who despite being intimately engaged in conversation with the cab driver (who is on the cusp of revealing to him the name and address of the woman who had left her jewel-encrusted pendant in the shape of a Yorkshire terrier wedged between the cushions of the rightside backseat on top of which Fraidy was currently slouched) has been listening and momentarily turns his head almost in my direction, still keeping his eyes on the driver, and says something along the lines of fuckin leave the little Martian alone, this is a once-in-a-blue-moon-type of thing. This part of the Black Horse Pike, as it stretches through West Atlantic City [footnote 5], is brown and sad and smells of swamp. It's lined with odd motels and the footprints of former odd motels running parallel with the Expressway and a long-abandoned railway line, and growing on its side all tumorlike is this collection of newish condos in which we all assume nobody actually lives. Travel, Nothing, Holiday, Seabreeze, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Former-Travelodge, Nothing, Nothing, Gas, Roofing, Bay Drive, Economy, Nothing, Nothing, Oh St Joseph, Ramada.
Dale absolutely loves the movie Pink Flamingos and went through absolute hell to paint his and Henry's single-wide to look just like the one from the film. Henry absolutely hates Pink Flamingos but isn't in any like good physical condition to stop him in the act or even just go strip the paint himself. Both their scrips are out basically for like the past two days and they both absolutely need to cop and it's Saturday now so it's their appointment time first thing once Lee opens up Shop so Dale already got the scooter out like real early before Henry woke up like all before dawn and shit and he packed up the subs in the cooler and a big two-literer of pop and when Henry finally did wake up Dale basically rolled him out of bed and wrapped him up in his robe and helped him out to the street where the scooter was ready to go with the packed cooler on the floor below the handles. With great care he helps Henry lower himself in the seat, lifting up his leg to get it over the cooler, and then Dale hops between his legs and sits on top of the cooler with his knees to his chest, and grabs the handles just below eye-level and starts them off out of the park and up Washington Ave. toward Lee's. About the first hundred yards down the road has at least something in the ways of a sidewalk, but it abruptly ends for about 80 yards, starts up again for Dale would say about 350 yards, and then basically the whole rest of the around 1,500 yards down up Washington Ave. is totally free of sidewalks and the pull-off and quote unquote bike lanes they're forced to ride upon are all covered in these huge chunks of loose asphalt and trash and potholes and what with the added weight on the scooter, what would probably be a 30-minute walk takes Dale and Henry upwards of and hour and a half including all the time it takes Dale to dislodge the scooter's wheel from some seemingly strategically-placed hole out by the Masons Lodge or to help Henry back up to his feet and back on the scooter if there's a capsize or etc. They pass under the Garden State Parkway in a glow of orange light and emerge battered but triumphant at Lee's, and ahead of schedule too, Lee ain't even there yet.
I was having this dream it was about like a fishing trip or something that Dad took us on Way Back but I'm really just filling in the blanks, the only thing that's like still accessible in my mind is of the tiny little boat and a big shadowy figure in front of me looking over the side. Just seconds earlier the whole thing was so clear and make-sense but now's just like this vague feeling, and as I push my eyeballs into my skull and try and trick myself out of sleep even the big tall shadow guy turns all fuzzy and sad. The room's cold and damp, and the mold creeping up the walls I hope is dead in this cold, but I'm not sure if that's how it works exactly, does mold hibernate? The mattress, at least, seems to be relatively clean and dry compared to the rest of the house, though I wish I had thought to bring like a sheet or at least a blanket to make another layer inside the sleeping bag which, as I found out last night, is more of a summer-weather item. Sleeping on a mattress with no sheet, specially that one of a stranger, will always give you an icky sort of feeling, no matter how many layers you got, and every time I touch it accidentally I get one of them kind of involuntary shivers up my back like some folks get when they see a cockroach or that guys get when they take a piss for some reason, so I've been told. This mattress up in the third bedroom's the best option by far, far as sleeping goes, as the master has just a rusty bedframe with no mattress at all and the other room across the hall has this long like beige couch or maybe a futon sort of thing with one enormous heavy cushion resting sinking into this shitty flimsy metal frame. The cushion is totally soaked with this greenish brown water because the ceiling above it has this slow constant drip from probably the melting snow on the roof which seems in dire need of replacement, and just looking at the thing you can tell it's heavy as shit. Last night before I went into the fitful sleep I kicked off the boots and left them on the carpet next to the bed, which that this morning proved to be a mistake, and they hardened up and are virtually frozen to the squishy floor. Dad's solution to this problem Back Then was he would in the early mornings he'd head outside in his slippers and with his work boots all cradled in his arms and light a quick fire in that cast iron furnace out in the garage with the thick stainless steel stovepipe like jolting out at an angle through the wall and so he'd tie the laces of the boots on this bungee cord attached to one of the roof beams so they'd hang right level with the firebox, and by the time his coffee was drunk and eggs were ate he'd come back out and the boots'd be all toasty and nourishing enough for him to head out to work. That always seemed such a perfect way to start any day, with warm feet. It's a shame all the utilities are cut off here but the shittiest one is the gas cause downstairs in the living room (or maybe it's a den) they've got this huge like ornate gas fireplace, one of them ones that has fake logs made of metal or rock and are all permanent like you can't take them out of there for shit so even if I went out and gathered a bunch of twigs and branches and shit for firewood (which that there's a ton of outside) the fake logs would surely get in the way and make things way harder. I suck it up and put on the cold boots and head downstairs on stumps and on the way down I stop and admire one of the many patterns of mold climbing up the wall in the stairwell, this one's all puffy and gray and reminds me of one of them big sheepdogs those ones where the fur like totally covers their eyes and you wonder how they can even see anything. This house has two living rooms but I guess one of them is called a den. And I'm not sure which one is which. The bigger room has this giant like double-digit-seating leather couch that's definitely unsittable, all grayed with mold coming up from the floor, and an empty space on the wall in front of it for a serious TV. I remember Bailey back in like third grade at her Mom-Mom's house had two living rooms too and the one that had the TV in it they called the den, so I guess that makes this bigger room here the den but that doesn't really feel right to me. We never had any rooms in our house called a den, and our living room most definitely had a TV in it. I'm deciding now this big room with the enormous couch and the space on the wall for a TV will be called the living room, and the other one will be the den, then. The similarities kind of stop after the amount of living rooms, though, if we're talking about Bailey's Mom-Mom's house and this one, except maybe the kind of pale blue siding, hers had something like that. Bailey's den (though they called that one the living room) had this sort of partly cloudy blue carpet and a couple floral couches and yellow striped wallpaper and this one salmon pink armchair and a couple antique wooden endtables that I think were like passed down a bunch of times and were all arranged around the fireplace which was a real woodburning one but had all this clean white marble like, constituting it, and you never saw any ash on it or nothing like they never used the thing, and behind the couches were these big glass display cases full of little porcelain dolls and dandy men and in the corner was this maybe seven-foot-tall lamp that was always on and had this suspiciously clean brass body to it. I never spent any like meaningful time in that part of Bailey's Mom-Mom's house cause the TV weren't there. Never saw her Mom-Mom or Pop-Pop actually sitting in there and using it either, it was like a museum piece or something you weren't allowed to touch, frozen in time or something, the couches all unsat-on and the carpet still all unflat and bouncy, made you feel like an intruder every time you'd pass through from the kitchen to the quote unquote den. The den in this house makes me feel nothing. And the couch in the living room is starting to make me feel sick. The den here is weirdly void of all furniture, most of it looks like it was pushed into the adjacent dining room all piled up, and it's just completely empty save the fireplace and even the mold seemingly won't touch it, the room. The ceiling in the living room is all slanted and way too high so everything you do makes this big triangular echo and the floor ain't exactly free of debris and fallen bits of drywall and shit and even the clear parts of the floor are this squelchy damp ass carpeting, so it's just loud as shit trying to like navigate. And the couch. There's way too many windows in here to keep covered, too, think I'll be spending most of my time up on the unspoiled mattress. Bailey's living room (though but her Mom-Mom called it the den) was all green and tan and the couches were all tan and brown and covered in Pletzke's fur and like miles deep you felt like you could just sink in and get stuck and her Pop-Pop's lazyboy was sort of imprinted with his shape and the mechanism that'd appear under the footrest when you pulled the wooden lever on the side was always very interesting.
Admittedly I know little to nothing about Armenia or its people but for some reason I'm getting an Armenian vibe from this taxi driver, whose forehead sweat is beading and refracting light all around the cab and is trying his best to ignore Alfie who, despite being aware we've arrived at our destination, is still trying to wring every last drop of information from him regarding Jenny Siegel, the yorkshire terrier woman. Losing patience I lean forward and undo Alfie's seatbelt for him, prompting him to pause, turn his attention to the backseat, and begin the division of currency to pay the man, and Fraidy and I have to open the door for him and basically hoist him out of the cab and hold him back like you'd hold someone in an attempt to break up a fight, and I try to give the driver a sympathetic smile and thumbs-up but he scoffs in a kind of Armenian way, I guess, and peels out leaving us on the Southmost corner of the intersection of Pacific and Pennsylvania Aves., at about exactly the midpoint between the Hard Rock and Resorts Casinos/Hotels [footnote 6]. Alfie suggests we take a vote, but one in which there can be no interference. Something about Alfie is that he tends to fall into a leadership position on any sort of outing just by virtue of his comparatively sunbeamlike disposition and want of booze and substance, and Fraidy and I to a certain extent just go along with whatever he wants to do on nights like this because he speaks with such authoritarian confidence on everything. In high school he convinced the divorced mom of this smarmy kid in our trigonometry class that he was in college and banged the life out of her, his words, in her vaguely bronze minivan during his study hall. He walks somewhat Southeast down Pennsylvania Ave. for a few yards and turns toward an embankment with trees and dead grass lining the perimeter of a vast empty parking lot. He leans down and carefully picks out six chunks of mulch and gives two to each of us and keeps two for himself. I want no funny business, no emotional or psychological manipulation with body language or any of that shit, both of you turn around and don't fucking look at me or at each other. We do as we're told and, mulch-in-hand, forming an outward-facing triangle. Now, he says, now if you want to go to Resorts, put one piece of mulch on your right hand and close it, if you want to go to the Hard Rock, put two. I let out a little exasperated sigh and Alfie warns that even a sigh could be considered psychologically manipulative in this situation. In Alfie's first year of college he majored in psychology, but soon changed to something generic like business, because the classes were so soul-crushingly boring, but mostly because the psych pussy got stale. The air out here ain't that bad considering the time of year, and I've come to prefer this deadness of the City in the offseason, like I'm sure most other permanent residents would agree with, not that I crave their approval in any way. Okay both of you turn and around and hold out your fists, no cheating. The three of us stick the fists out together in the cold and on Aflie's count we turn them over and open them, revealing a total of five pieces of mulch, I had chosen Resorts.
Hour 1: The doorway connecting the living room to the dining room/kitchen for some reason is rounded kind of like a cartoon mouse hole. None of the other doorways are like this, and it's rather infuriating especially because Tucker really wanted to install an actual door there, one of them swinging doors like from like a kitchen to a dining floor in a restaurant, but the exclusively cosmetic half-horse-racing-track-shaped arch at its top has completely derailed that ambition, and anyway she didn't go for the idea when he brought it up. In truth he really just wants to smash the rounded corners out as a bit of fun, and doesn't discount the possibility of him actually doing that in the near future should he get sufficiently sloshed. Nothing really is stopping him now, he realizes, but he figures all will be back to normal soon so he'd better just keep the house as she left it, and maybe he can powerwash the siding and trim back the weeds and all that other shit for when she comes home. Dinner tonight is gonna be a challenge because the fridge is basically empty and all there is is some Cup Noodles and he hates that shit wholeheartedly. He'll just get some fast-food somewhere later on, it's already too late for breakfast and unless he starts feeling lightheaded or something he doesn't think lunch will be too much of a loss. It's about a 30 minute walk to the Diner if he keeps up a good pace, and if he can time it correctly, he'll be there and set up in the recycling bin nearly around fifteen minutes before she pulls in.
Funny thing about Alfie is when he suggests going to one of the Casino/Hotels to drink he really means it in that we don't go to like a bonafide restaurant or club we just head for the lobby bar, which in his mind I imagine is the absolute height of luxury. The lobby bar of the Hard Rock Casino/Hotel is rounded and purple and loud, all the seats around the actual bar have video poker machines built into them, and then there are some other peripheral seats and couches of the same color scheme. Behind it is a small stage on which a band is playing some sort of Huey Lewish sound as a group of old women putter around the dancefloor refreshments-in-hand. Drinks are bought and seats secured, questions raised about the price of the drinks and the overall dissatisfaction, particularly mine, of this whole night that, as Alfie reminds me, is just getting started. This is the fuckin high life man and yeah we didn't have to but that's the point is that we didn't have to and so on but I just try to tune it out, an acquired skill anyone around him for long stretches of time naturally perfects. I'm sipping some vodka lime thing, Fraidy has gin and Alfie has something brown. By the third drink the purple lights of the bar become almost distressingly hard on the eyes so I propose we take a little walk but by this point Alfie had been talking quite seriously with Fraidy about his drug habits (Fraidy's) and all the pertinent details. Their eyes are locked, Alfie pretends he didn't hear me and Fraidy says he'll meet me out there without breaking the gaze, shattered. All shrugs and alrights I head out away from the circular bar and down the promenade and out onto the boardwalk—barren this time of year, this time of night—so I can light a cigarette. Winters on the South Jersey Barrier Islands [footnote 7] are particularly desolate. Some business still rolls through, mostly men in town for some conference over in the convention center or worse, people who actually live here, but it's all only a fraction of a fraction of the summer months which themselves just keep getting shittier and more desperate with each passing year. It's practically a ghost town in the Winter, especially so far up along Pacific Ave. All the other barrier islands, the ones without the gambling and fanfare, take on this eerie silence from like October through May, as the majority of the houses belong to someone either in the Philadelphia Metro Area or one of the Three Places in Florida. A ripe area for home burglary, at its core. There's no one out on the boardwalk, of course there isn't, except but then there is. This woman passes by in a blurry flash of color and I snap my neck to get a full glimpse of her as she glides in through the set of double doors into the Hard Rock. She looked just like a young Elizabeth Lange and wore some crazy kind of futuristic dress or more like a garment that is almost too experimental and avant-garde to properly be able to describe it linearly, like there were so many different facets and interconnectednesses and structural elements that were themselves interconnected and some other elements that were entirely imaginary and were seemingly only implied. I suck hard on the cigarette and it comes loose from my lips and flies straight to the back of my throat. I cough it up like some kind of seabird and stomp it out on the boards below me and run inside after her but she's nowhere to be found, and I just amble about for a while and eventually find my way back to the circular bar, where Alfie and Fraidy are standing leaning up against each other and holding up their wrists and tapping them as if they had watches on. I eagerly tell them about the Lange woman and about the dress and how indescribable it was but they can't really picture it and I get a little bummed out at their subdued reaction to the news. We are all drunk now, I can tell. Fraidy is having to place half his body weight on either Alfie or myself as we wander around the lobby like lost children, and I suggest we all head out to the boardwalk as I was just there and the seawind was rather refreshing. It's a real job getting Fraidy onto the escalator and he can't stop giggling and stumbling over himself. The cold night air blows over us as we step outside and it feels somehow colder and darker than before. Fraidy's giggles slowly die out and the last ones bounce off the Hard Rock and out Southeast in the black Atlantic. We set him down on a bench with his back to the beach and I slump down next to him, Alfie walks in circles in front of us. How's this for a poem? he inevitably asks.
HIGH CLASS, PIT STAIN
LOW CLASS, SHIT STAIN
Fraidy begins to giggle again. He's alive man, just look at him! I say that is shit (about the poem) or something along the lines of that is shit and Fraidy giggles some more. He rolls his head all around on the back of the bench and makes himself dizzy, stopping and looking up at the very few stars visible from right here at like the brightest part of the County. I look up at them too, and they're all sort of jumping about, and I close my eyes and can still sort of see them, and try to think of a poem.
BOARDWALK TALKS
AND WALKS AS IT TALKS
TIL SANDY DEATH SO WALKS
Fuck man, that was really, really shit.
South, down the boardwalk maybe five hundred yards or so from the Hard Rock Casino/Hotel and beneath a bunch of red letters arranged to spell ATLANTIC FAVORITES, Diane and Isaac are stuffing their things back into their old green two-wheeled suitcase as the latching zipperhead had snapped off while in transport between the Margaritaville and this unassuming spot about a block away. One of Diane's plastic crowns is picked up by a low gust and his taking off Northeast sort of back in the direction of the Margaritaville and Isaac stumbles after it, his thick non-slip shoes clunking on the timbers. They're the only ones out there on the boardwalk, it seems, so Diane isn't as embarrassed as she feels she could have been had this same situation occurred in say August rather than January. This doesn't obscure the fact that this night was a failure in many ways, and this zipper incident and now the crown-rolling-down-the-boardwalk thing are only adding to the humiliation they had just suffered. The tassels on the farm girl outfit are now tangled with another one of the crowns, smaller and less ornate than the one that is now just beginning to settle in front of the Funnel Cake House. In fact, of all the crowns in this aging suitcase that she could have chosen to inconveniently fall out and roll down the boardwalk, she would have chosen this one that's all tangled with the tassels, as it was the cheapest and easiest to replace if damaged, whereas the one that Isaac has finally caught up to and is currently bending over to pick up, is one of the pricier VIP items. Isaac hurriedly clunks back to help secure the remaining pieces but there seems to be no way to properly close the suitcase anymore. They come to the resolution that they need something to tie around the suitcase in order to seal it temporarily. Diane suggests they use Isaac's belt but he claims that it would be far too short to wrap around the whole suitcase, and reminds her that he quite needs the belt anyway. Oh, how about that waist thing? Diane looks puzzled. You know that fuckin waist thing that pink thing from the pixie number? and Diane doesn't want to use that at all. Isaac starts to take off his thick black hoodie but Diane tries to stop him, fearing he'll get sick from the cold. He reassures her in a rather irritated voice that he'ill be fine and they only have to make it to the car. She tries once more to stop him and he quickly reminds her that the car is less than a block away and that he can handle the cold and the longer they stand there discussing it the longer he will be out in the cold, armed only with his vaguely yellow shortsleeve polo. She offers up her thick blue sweatshirt, which she expresses by crossing her arms down in front of her and grabbing with each hand the lower lip of the thing, but Isaac waves erratically at her which is meant to express his distaste for the idea. Diane is worried about him, immensely so, about the cold, but she trusts him and allows him to wrap the suitcase with the sweatshirt and tie it where the wrists meet. She thinks, as they round the corner onto Tennessee Ave., that it looks like a mini-Isaac hugging the suitcase as he drags it along behind them. The floor of the Margaritaville had this strange design meant to look like rippling water beneath your feet. Isaac could not get the Jesus imagery out of his head for the whole dinner and it lingers still as he fights to keep the suitcase from rolling over him while they descend the shallow ramp connecting the boardwalk to the Avenue. They are soon at the car which is parked in a dive bar's parking lot, presumably illegally. They are in the valley between Resorts and Bally's [footnote 8] and the wind down there sort of howls in a cartoonish way. Isaac had overtaken Diane as they entered the parking lot, she had slowed her walk slightly to admire the two buildings and parking garage constituting the Resorts Casino/Hotel. In the darkness Isaac fails to see a rather deep not-quite-frozen puddle in the asphalt just adjacent to the car and takes two clunky steps into it. He hisses fuck and steps backwards onto dry land, the freezing puddle water invading his socks. Fuck he hisses again while he rolls up the ends of his jeans. Diane is beginning to think that the rightmost, that is, the beachmost building of Resorts, the former Chalmonte-Haddon Hall Hotel, while retaining much of its pre-depression style, has some elements that seem vaguely Old-World or maybe Egyptian. Diane doesn't see Isaac nor mini-Isaac crouched in front of her and she tumbles over them directly into the black frigid puddle, getting effectively soaked. Fuck. He leans in and grabs her by the wrists and pulls her out of the water. Now she is saying fuck too and they both struggle to remove her thick blue sweatshirt that is now quite heavy and her shirt under it is soaked too and so are her jeans and fuck and fuck. In the privacy of the space between their car and the one next to it, Isaac directs her to strip and wrap herself with his black sweatshirt which he unties from around the green two-wheeled suitcase. He struggles to get the car keys from the small front pocket as she pleads with him to hurry in a frightened shivering voice. Fucking shit, fuck. He unlocks the car and runs around to the front to start the engine while Diane crawls into the backseat clutching the small borrowed sweatshirt around her back. He says he'll try to find something not-too-indecent for her to put on for the time being. She calls out something to him as he's clunking back to the suitcase next to the puddle, and he of course trips and launches himself forward. A combination of the force of impact from Isaac and the sheer zipperlessness of the suitcase resulted in all but two outfits being hurled into the water. The Cave Woman is out of the question, so he chooses Snow White.
1.
The Lenni Lenape (pronounced leh-nah-pay, despite what a good number of South Jersey residents would have you believe) once thrived in basically all of what is now New Jersey and some parts of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they had a particularly wide presence in current SJ. As a sort of consolation for killing most of them and sending the survivors out to Oklahoma of all places, the NJ Stave Gov't likes to name lots of locations and things after them and some of their words, obviously anglicized to absolute hell, which and q.v. APPENDIX 1.1.
2.
The term international, when referring to the Atlantic City International Airport (which, incidentally, is located in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey) is overwhelmingly generous, as the term conjures up images of transatlantic, -pacific, or otherwise long excruciating journeys—the flights from here are excruciating for a different set of reasons—when in reality the only actual international flights provided were to Toronto and those were discontinued years back, so even though the airport retains the International moniker, you can only really go to Mostly Florida or Occasionally Myrtle Beach shoulder-to-shoulder with the hellish wrinkled inhabitants of the Atlantic City-Hammonton Metropolitan Area, statistically on their way to Probably Orlando or More Likely Fort Lauderdale where they flock to whenever the temperature drops to like the low 60s.
3.
From North to South, the Mainland towns directly opposite those on Absecon Island are Absecon, Pleasantville, Northfield, Linwood, and Somers Point. Linwood is far and above the most wealthy and well-kept of these little towns.
4.
The Federal Aviation Administration is obviously headquartered in DC, but the William J. Hughes Technical Center for Advanced Aerospace out in Egg Harbor Township just adjacent to ACQUIA is probably the most important FAA facility in the country, and really the only of its kind, dealing with all sorts of aviation-related research and development, the only other major FAA installation even remotely like it but much smaller exists out in Oklahoma someplace.
5.
Lake Lenape (Mays Landing, Hamilton Township [a], NJ) empties its waters into the Atlantic Ocean via the magnificent and foul-smelling Great Egg Harbor River and its similarly named Bay, comprising much of what separates the local barrier islands from the Mainland. In the old days things and places could be named arbitrarily by any man who happened to get there pen-in-hand. Great Egg Harbor was named as such because the man, pen-in-hand, had happened to have seen some birds on a beach laying eggs when he first arrived, and subsequently the surrounding lands were named Egg Harbor Township. The areas comprising what are now Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ventnor City, Margate City, Longport, parts of Absecon, Pleasantville, Northfield, Linwood, and Somers Point were once all considered part of Egg Harbor Township. Slowly over the years bits and pieces were lopped off EHT as these littler towns began to municipalize until it achieved its current grotesque appearance. West Atlantic City is a small slice of land in the marsh between Pleasantville and Atlantic City and is still considered a part of EHT despite not being in any way attached to the Township itself. This, and a collection of other small piles of mud in the Bay were never made part of these other newer settlements presumably because nobody wanted them.
6.
Resorts Casino/Hotel is the oldest Casino/Hotel in the city, and the Hard Rock is one of the newer ones [b], having taken over the buildings that were once part of the Taj Mahal, built in the late 80s whereas Resorts's oldest building is from like the 20s, and this difference is apparent in their architecture. The Hard Rock's parking garage, for example, is bigger than any one apartment complex in all Atlantic County.
7.
Which are—and not all of these are strictly islands, but more or less are viewed the same way by the public—from North to South: Island Beach, which did actually used to be an island but was connected with Squan Beach (a barrier spit, basically a peninsula but just called something different) to the North in the early 1800s effectively lengthening the spit by about twelve miles and currently contains Point Pleasant Beach, Bay Head, Mantoloking, two offshore sections of Toms River (that was cut up in a similar way to EHT) known as Dover Beaches North and South respectively, and are situated on both ends of the next Borough, Lavalette, then Seaside Park, and then the whole rest of the skinny Island Beach, which at this point is pretty much just a beach, is considered part of the Mainland Township of Berkeley; Long Beach Island which actually is an island and while the whole island used to be incorporated as Long Beach Township, there are four boroughs scattered across it which are completely separate from each other, namely Barnegat Light, Harvey Cedars, Surf City, and Beach Haven, and all of these towns are quite awful and no one should ever visit them for any reason; Little Beach is the only Barrier Island in the State that is uninhabited, and as its name suggests it is quite little; Brigantine Island quite simply is home to the city of Brigantine and pretty much nothing else; Absecon Island is home to Atlantic City, Ventnor City, Margate City, and Longport—the title of city for a couple of those and for Brigantine is up for debate; Peck's Beach is home in its entirety to Ocean City, another place that no one should ever have to visit if they can help it; Ludlam Island which is home to a chunk of the Mainland town of Upper Township called Strathmere, and Sea Isle City; Seven Mile Island which is split almost perfectly in half by the Boroughs of Avalon and Stone Harbor; Five Mile Beach which is home to the cities of North Wildwood and Wildwood, the Boroughs of West Wildwood and Wildwood crest, and a chunk of the Mainland town of Lower Township called Two Mile Beach, which used to be its own island before being joined with Five Mile Beach, which didn't change its name since there was already an island with the words Seven Mile in its name.
8.
There are roughly four distinct clusters of hotel/casinos on Absecon Island, wherein two or more Casino/Hotels are packed closely together [c] and even connected via tunnels and skyways so that the Casino/Hotel-goer need not step outdoors for any reason. The areas between these clusters are largely irrelevant to the goer and to them seem quite sad and empty.
a.
The history of Townships in New Jersey is unworthy of explanation, but they more-or-less serve as the missing link between a City and a County, and most Townships contain several distinct communities within their borders, usually referred to as Unincorporated Communities (UCs) or Census-Designated Places (C-DPs), sometimes both. The reader is warned that because of this rather esoteric system of Townships, many places in New Jersey have two names.
b.
The newest and arguably the final Casino/Hotel to be built in Atlantic City is the Formerly-Revel, opened in something like 2012, and is an absolute monster.
c.
Which at the time of writing are the North Group: Harrah's, Golden Nugget and the Borgata; the East Group: Hard Rock, Resorts, sort of Showboat, and the Formerly-Revel; and the South-Central Group, kind of an exception to the rule, as it just consists of the Tropicana, a cluster all its own.
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