Greetings From... Asbury Park?
The rain came down hard late in the afternoon when Eileen and I were driving south on the Garden State Parkway, headed for Asbury Park, NJ. Being a songwriter, and having been fairly influenced by the work of Bruce Springsteen, I wanted to see this place where he used to hang out, and that he'd immortalized in his early-70s records. I wanted to see where all that great cultural mythology in those songs came from. Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight Forcin' a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July Down in town the circuit's full of switchblade lovers so fast, so shiny, so sharp And the wizards play down on Pinball Way on the boardwalk way past dark And the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open like Latin lovers on the shore Chasin' all them silly New York virgins by the score Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us It's pier lights our carnival life forever Love me tonight for I may never see you again Hey Sandy girl * � Springsteen's persona and music, particularly the earlier wide-eyed songs like "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" had given me a mental image of what this seaside boardwalk and the town around it was like. The Asbury Park in my imagination was fairly urban, romantic and sleazy, with crowds, carnival rides and games. I could picture that restless and pensive young dude leaning against a railing under a lamppost, maybe scribbling lines in a pocket notebook while waiting for that blue jeans-wearing waitress gal to come along and somehow fulfill the promise of the heady night. It's true, though, that this mental image was based less on concrete lyrical descriptions in the songs and more on just the youthful exuberance in the music and the way that it fed my young imagination. I grew up in Southern California and I moved to New York in '97. Eileen's a born and raised Jersey gal. She'd been to Asbury Park when she was younger and remembered it as being somewhat deteriorated, no longer what it once was. A nostalgia-driven road trip like this practically begged for a '66 Dart, a '68 Rambler or even a '70's Camaro. Eileen's car is instead a fairly run-of-the-mill, mid-90s Honda. In the end, though, wheels are wheels and I was grateful for the chance to be out on the road for a change. I'd sold my last car back in California for $450 the day before I left for New York, and my travel has been pretty limited ever since. Unlike my former cars, which may have had plenty of "character", Eileen's car was at least fully road worthy. The rain let up as we peeled off onto exit 102 and followed the signs that pointed us to Asbury Park. We crossed an unremarkable Main Street and headed toward the shore on a narrow residential street with large, slightly run-down Victorian homes on both sides that were mostly hidden away behind the green trees of a wet August. We had Springsteen on the cassette deck, of course, and as we rolled into town the sparse and haunting "Drive All Night" was the song playing. In a moment, we both had our attention drawn to a large, white building that emerged from behind the trees as we neared the end of the block. Eileen pulled the car over and stopped. This thing was a sight. It was a grand hotel, or had been at one time. Its paint was peeled, its windows were boarded up, and the balcony sagged. By the looks of it, I guessed that it must have been sitting abandoned for a good decade or two. We started off again down the street. Emerging from the canopy of trees, we found ourselves driving along the edge of what resembled a huge parking lot, but was actually a ground-down street block with only a few buildings scattered sparsely about the outskirts under the backdrop of the darkening grey sky. This was it ... we had arrived at the legendary Asbury Park shore. This was it? The shells of buildings loomed dark and sad, and there didn't appear to be soul around. I rolled down the window to the light wind and drizzle as we coasted past a sickly blue-green brick building, surrounded by a chain link fence. High on the wall of this building was the faded image of some clown-like character next to a painted-on roller coaster. A string of letters at the top spelled out; " ALACE AMUS MEN " (all that was left of "Palace Amusements"). The Palace is mentioned in the song "Born to Run." Just past that, as we rolled along, was a round structure with large windows and a conical roof that sloped up into an ornate but well faded crown. It, too, was dark and boarded up. Eileen said it used to house a carousel. (I later learned that the carousel had been gone for about ten years, and that it would have been ninety years old now had it not been torn down and auctioned off in pieces. In fact, the video for "Tunnel of Love", shows the partially dismantled carousel in the background as Springsteen walks past it.) Following the road around the block, we were passing a little cluster of not-quite-so-dilapidated buildings on the left, when I spotted a familiar name on a corner awning. It was the Stone Pony. I'd heard about this place. Springsteen had played there plenty of times, apparently. We parked the car near the club and got out. Eileen popped open her umbrella, and we walked through the heavy drizzle to the front doors in our newfound state of mild shock at the desolation and ruin of our surroundings. The side door was open and someone was loading band equipment in, but the front doors under the awning were locked. According to the sign they wouldn't be opening for another half hour, so we decided to go explore the boardwalk instead. As we crossed Ocean Avenue, a passing car honked at Eileen who, in that moment, was a curious vision of skirt and legs sticking out from underneath a black umbrella. Now the greasers they tramp the streets or get busted for sleepin' on the beach all night Them boys in their high heels, ah Sandy, their skins are so white And me I just got tired of hangin' in them dusty arcades bangin' them pleasure machines Chasin' all the factory girls underneath the boardwalk where they all promise to unsnap their jeans And you know that tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag I got on it last night and my shirt got caught And they kept me spinnin', I didn't think I'd ever get off Oh Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us The pier lights our carnival life on the water Runnin' laughin' 'neath the boardwalk with the boss' daughter I remember Sandy girl * We reached the boardwalk with increasing puzzlement about the state of this odd place we found ourselves in. The more you looked around, the more you saw�another shell of a hotel, an abandoned construction site, a closed-up restaurant, a miniature golf course with nothing left but crumbled patches of cement and brick winding through unkept grass. The boardwalk was weathered and wide. The beach was expansive and strangely immaculate. I hadn't seen anything that looked like this since I visited the earthquake-damaged and abandoned downtown section of Managua, Nicaragua. Emotionally, it reminded me of a time a few years back out in California when I hopped a fence and trespassed onto the site of the demolished and deserted Riverside International Raceway where, as a kid in the 70s, I'd spent many a festive Sunday afternoon sitting in the crowded grandstands watching NASCAR races with my dad. To the North, just off the boardwalk, was a little white booth with "Madame Marie" painted on the side. She was the fortune teller mentioned in the last verse of that song, "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)." We walked South on the boardwalk, back in the direction of the carousel housing which we'd passed in the car moments before, and toward another oversized structure which we could see, even from a distance, was burned out and empty. A low row of vacant, locked-up buildings lined the boardwalk between us and the street, effectively cutting us off from anything but the grey ocean to our left and the cavernous ruins in front of us. It was getting dark fast, and as we further committed ourselves to this isolated stretch of boardwalk, I found myself looking often back over my shoulder or craning my neck around Eileen's umbrella to make sure no one was following us. It's a bit ironic that, as someone who feels quite comfortable walking alone well past midnight around the empty streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, I would feel more of a sense of potential danger here in a little Jersey shore town at dusk than in the former setting. Eileen wasn't quite as spooked as I, evidently, because at this point it was she who was more or less leading the expedition down the darkening boardwalk. The streetlamps along the wood railing provided a yellow light by which we could see the building ahead. It was hollow and fragile-looking, with plenty of large windows, many of them broken. This building was connected to another massive one that extended way out toward the ocean, and sat there on the beach all burned-out and hulking. You could see the rain-clouded sky through the various gaping holes in the roof. The quiet was broken suddenly and startlingly by the explosive, mad bark of a dog. The resulting flash of terror was quickly relieved when we saw that the dog, a German Shepherd, was locked behind a chain link fence. It paced and barked menacingly from the cement hollows of an open-faced building marked RESTROOMS, its bark echoing from its "cage" out into the stillness. As my heartbeat relaxed from its false-alarm fight or flight pace and I settled back into a state of mere nervousness, one of the yellow lamps went out. The dog continued to bark. "You ready to go back?" I asked. "No" said Eileen, as she walked on in front of me. High above the big, closed doors that greeted us (or that failed to greet us, rather) were large, skinny letters which read: CASINO. The doors were padlocked and the empty window frames were boarded up so that we couldn't see inside. I wanted to peek inside to see the ghosts of amusement seekers from past generations. Well, maybe you couldn't see the ghosts, but it sure seemed like you could feel them. With this dead-end before us, plus the fact that it was dark at this point and there was reasonably nowhere left to go, we decided to turn back. Our curiosity was not sufficiently satisfied, though, and we knew we had to come back the next day when it was light out so that we could take pictures and further explore the ruins. Sandy, that waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me I spoke with her last night, she said she won't set herself on fire for me anymore The kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of them cheap little seaside bars And I saw her parked with loverboy out on the Kokomo You hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling fortunes better that they do This boardwalk life for me is through, you oughta quit this scene, too Sandy, the aurora's rising behind us, the pier lights out carnival life forever Love me tonight and I promise I'll love you forever Oh, I mean it, Sandy girl * � Once back in the car, we turned on the cassette deck and pulled out of Asbury Park to the accompaniment of Springsteen singing Tom Waits' "Jersey Girl" ...and we went off looking for a place to buy a cheap bottle of wine. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- * lyrics from "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" by Bruce Springsteen �1973
Copyright © 2002 Don Everett Pearce |