1001 New Jersey Nights
by Pierre Minar
Time isn’t real. Think about the time between Christmas and New Year’s. Or the four days of Thanksgiving—Thursday, “black” Friday, and the weekend. They’re always the same. I don’t mean similar, I mean the same container that we crawl into every year. Minutes, hours, days, semesters–none of it matters on those two plateaus in November and December. It may as well be songs; let’s say, 1,001 oldies in a countdown by 101 CBS FM, New York’s oldies station, of the purported “greatest songs of all time” in the year 2001, the first Thanksgiving after 9/11.
I returned from upstate to NJ for Thanksgiving’s four-day pause before exams. It was my first sight of the skyline without the towers. I still felt obligated to perform family holiday ritual. So, at the earliest appropriate time, number 996, “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon,” by Neil Diamond, I evacuated their home. I knew it better as performed by Urge Overkill on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. But Diamond’s gravelly schlock accompanied me, lighting a series of Marlboro 27s, as I propelled myself to New Brunswick where the high school friends lived.
By 848, “Surf City,” by Jan & Dean, I was in the back of T’s black Chevy Blazer, on the Turnpike again, the nighttime autumn sky an unnatural glowing gray green purple blue pink. Maybe it was snowing, maybe it was raining. Regardless, the air was swirling with moisture and the only distinct color was the red tail lights of the cars. Central Jersey was decidedly not “Surf City.” I had never surfed, but I understood that songs about surfing were about more than just surfing. They’re songs about psychology, and nature, and submission; the power of the elements to compel us; a reminder that we’re not really separate from one another at all.
At 661, “Duke of Earl,” by Gene Chandler, we were picking up C on acid at the Monmouth Mall for black Friday shopping. The premise of Duke of Earl is simple: the singer is a duke, you’re his dutchess now, and he is going to love you (never mind that both “duke” and “earl” were feudal titles, like saying you’re the President of Manager). Anyway, the unspoken part of Duke of Earl is that he’s not a duke at all. “If only” the singer were a duke, then nothing could stop him. At age 19 in the bedding section of the Macy’s, I thought the Duke had it wrong. I was still too young, too comfortable to understand how having material things might cause someone to love you more. I didn’t feel love in the comfort of my family’s home. Chandler’s success with this song caused him to assume the “Duke” title as his stage persona, dressing in a Dracula/Black-dandy duke costume for decades.
How can you distinguish 1001 distinct works of art in such a superlative way? How did they make this list? It was before algorithms. Did they sort songs into broad categories of 100 and then, within the category, randomize? Whatever the methodology, nothing has ever caused me to listen to the radio so intently. Maybe it was 9/11. A hard need for auditory reassurance. The purple swirling turnpike sky was too warm, too humid for November. Had Cheney already launched the missiles and this was the nuclear fallout? This seemed like a reasonable thought at the time. Or was this the rose-red finger tips of what we now call climate change? The lap of “Oldies” was a place to curl up.
Can you be nostalgic for a time you weren’t alive? Song 581, (Sitting on the) Dock of the Bay, by Otis Redding (unnecessary parentheses notwithstanding), makes me feel like you can. This was Otis Redding’s only number-one hit, and he died shortly before it achieved that status. I’m with B, stopping at the bank in her Honda— the PNC bank in the twin towers on Route 1, the only remaining twin towers in the area. I spent a great deal of this time with T, his girlfriend C, their roommate B, and C’s sugar glider, which C carried, screeching, in a velvet pouch. Nobody was kissing. Expired high school friends in our circle, even the ones who were dating, did not kiss in 2001. As far as I know nobody in New Jersey kissed in 2001. They fucked (even me) but we did not kiss. The group lived in low-slung garden apartments near the Route 1 bridge over the Raritan River; every day was clouds. We’d venture out at night from these apartments filled with Mountain Dew and drugs and explore the wastelands under the highway overpass, the forgotten places in the center of the world.
352, Help Me Rhonda by the Beach Boys. A song about instrumentalizing someone (Rhonda) to help get over a broken heart. But at least he’s honest with Rhonda– “Help me get her out of my heart.” Incandescent Christmas lights inside and outside the house–this was pre-LED, the technology where every bulb is a little iPad rewiring your limbic system. Gaunt cheekbones and hoodie sweatshirts and soft cheap fabrics and trips to the mall to buy nothing but to mock the shoppers for being consumeristic sheep and to shout things like “I’ve got a bomb!” in the dressing room thinking that scaring people who had been scared out of complacency was a joke instead of something that would blossom into the crisis of white fragility a decade and a half later. We didn’t know what was going to happen in Iraq, in Palestine. We didn’t know how long ago this all started.
326, Can’t Smile Without You by Barry Manilow. Of all the friends, T and I were closest at this time. We do not talk today after three apartments and two bands. Back then we wrote songs together, entire pastiche albums with terrible rap lyrics and soundscapes and great bass lines and bad choruses and epic visions for production quality if only we had the equipment.
The number one song of all time according to this gargantuan countdown was Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin. I had heard this song and vaguely knew it was about a murderer, but not much else. It was written in the 1920s by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for The Threepenny Opera and tells the story of a murderer named MacHeath who kills a lot of people with old-timey names like Lotte Linya and Jenny Diver and also has some excellent shark imagery. Darin’s delivery is in the style of lounge singer, which increases the terror. T loved Mack the Knife. I felt disappointed that it was number one, wishing instead for something from the rock era, but T was thrilled. T loved drugs too and was neglected pretty hard by his parents and his dad was an addict and his mom tried to kill herself and they lived with money but they kept kicking T out of the house for no good reason and one of our first times bonding we watched the Simpsons and realized we knew all the words to the monorail song. I loved him then, I wasn’t sure all the ways I loved him but I knew at a minimum it was love. We did not have the tools to say this to one another then or now. I pause to consider why I do not speak to him anymore. It might be that one requirement for my life today is being able to love someone and be open enough to tell them so.
Bobby Darin’s other greatest hit was Splish Splash I Was Taking A Bath. How could one person write those two? It was like George Miller making Babe and Mad Max. I felt a little strung along by this countdown. Were they just trying to get us to listen to the radio for 4 days straight?
When you’re in love, time moves differently too. Looking into someone’s eyes, touching them,your bodies together—this too is a unit of time. It’s the opposite of Thanksgiving. It is wholly present, an ecstasy that erases the source of all human suffering—self-awareness. Thanksgiving-time, by contrast, is entirely out of time. A stacked memory of all previous Thanksgivings, pure ghosts feeling the pain of not being able to go a direction we call “backwards.” Perhaps the acute pain of the holidays that many people report is this—the removal of ourselves from our own bodies to become completely self- and past-observant.
At Thanksgiving this year, I consider whether I know how to love any more clearly than I did in 2001. Maybe a little. Maybe with the type of honesty that lets the singer ask Rhonda for help we can open and get a little closer to one another. And maybe in that movement we can bring the past forward, or the present backward, our at least back into ourselves, and be alive in the small moments of our lives.
Pierre Minar was born in Lebanon and lives in Texas. His work appears in Hobart, Bruiser, Keith Journal, and a chapbook caled Transmissions From My Yearning Chair. He is an able horseman.