The Lay of the Land (46 page)

Conceivably something’s amiss, something that might postpone the big mushroom cloud and send us all cruising back down the streets of Asbury Park seeking substitute excitements. A hush of waiting has fallen over the hurly-burly, and a low hum of individual voices and single laughters and beer-can pops arises. A rich fishy smell drifts in off the sea—contributor, no doubt, to the Queen Regent’s run of bad luck, since it comes from discharge practices long banned, though the pollutants are still in the soil and the atmosphere. From some undetermined place, there’s a high-pitched mechanized
whee-wheeing
in the air, like the ghost of an empty ferris wheel at the boardwalk Fun Zone, where millions idled and thrilled and smooched away summer evenings without a care for what came before or next. To me, there’s good to be found in these random sensations. I’ve made it my business at this odd time of life, when the future seems interesting but not necessarily “fun,” to permit no time to be a dead time, since you wouldn’t want to forget at a later, direr moment what that earlier, possibly better, day or hour or era was “like”; how the afternoon felt when the implosion got canceled, what specific life got lived as you awaited the Queen Regent’s decline to rubble. You definitely would want to know that, to have that on your mind’s record instead of say, like poor Ernie, hearing the thanatologist droning, “Frankee, Frankee? Can you hear me? Can you hear any-ting? Is you all de vay dead?”

Then…
boom, boom, boom, boom. Boomety-boom. Boom, boom. Boomety-boomety!
The Queen Regent is going. Right now. I’m happy I didn’t duck out to the Throne Room.

Innocent puffs of gray-white smoke, small but specific and unquestionably consequential, go
poof-poof-poof
all up and down the Queen’s nine-storey height, as if someone, some authority inside, was letting air out of old pillows, sweeping her clean, putting her in top form for the big reopening. Birds—the gulls I’d seen before, diving, swooping and wheeling—are suddenly flying away. No one warned them.

Our entire crowd—many are standing—exhales or gasps or sighs a spoon-moon-Juning “ahhhh” as if this is the thing now, finally, what we’ve come for, what nothing else can ever get better than.

Big Frank’s staring, startled, right along with us, his big baldy head still calipered, his mouth gapped open, though he quickly closes it hard as an anvil, nostrils flaring. The two swarthy red-suited assistants have backed away as if he might start wind-milling punches. The skinny kid who’d wired the plunger box is blabbing into Big Frank’s sizable ear, though Big Frank’s staring out at the building being consumed in smoke, the plunger still stagily
up
at his feet.

Boom. Boom. Boomety-boom.
Again, puffs of now grayer smoke squirt out all around the Queen Regent’s foundation skirting, and another big one at the top, from the crenellated crown. And now commences a set of larger sounds. These things never go off with one bang, but more like a percussive chess game—the pawns first, then the bishops, then the knights. Whatever’s left stands and fights but can’t do either. At least that’s how it happened down in Ventnor.

Now another series of
boom-booms,
bigger towering ones erupt from the Queen Regent’s core. The old dowager has yet to shudder, lean or sway. Possibly she won’t go down at all and the crowd will be the winner. Some yokel up in the stands laughs and yaps, “She ain’t fallin’. They fucked this all up.” Spectators have begun smiling, looking side to side. Wade, I can see, is getting all on tape. The Grove ladies will love him even more if the Queen survives. Big Frank’s now glaring. I can read his lips, and they say, Fuck you. It’ll fuckin’ fall, you pieces of shit.

Just then, as the Queen Regent is holding firm and the copters are darting in closer from over the water, and some of the Asbury cops with flashers are moving along Ocean Avenue in front of the convention hall, and our crowd has started clapping, whooping and even stomping on the risers (Big Frank looks disgusted in his caliper headgear, and no doubt’s begun calculating who’s gonna catch shit)—just then, as the demolition turns to undemolition—a scrawny, dark-skinned black kid of approximately twelve, wearing a hooded black sweatshirt, baggy dungarees down over big silver basketball sneaks and carrying a plastic Grand Union bag containing a visible half gallon of milk, a kid who’s been standing beside me, letting his milk carton bap against my leg for five minutes as if I wasn’t there,
this
kid suddenly makes a springing, headlong dash from beside me, out across the front of the crowd, and with one insolent stomp of his silver foot whams down the red plunger of the phony detonator box, then goes whirling back past me around the end of the grandstand, darting and dodging through the standees toward the parking lot, where he disappears around a big Pace Arrow and is gone. “Motherfuckin’
boool
shit” is all I’m certain he says in departure, though he may have said something more.

And now the Queen Regent is headed down. Maybe the plunger did it. Black smoke gushes from what must be the hotel’s deepest subterranean underpinnings, her staunchest supports (this will be what the Chinese seismographers detect). Her longitude lines, rows of square windows in previously perfect vertical alignment, all go wrinkled, as if the whole idea of the building had sustained, then sought to shrug off a profound insult, a killer wind off the ocean. And then rather simply, all the way down she comes, more like a brick curtain being lowered than like a proud old building being killed. Eighteen seconds is about it.

A clean vista briefly comes open behind the former Queen—toward Allenhurst and Deal—leafless trees, a few flecks of white house sidings, a glint of a car bumper. Then that is gone and a great fluff of cluttered gray smoke and dust whooshes upward and outward. We spectators are treated to a long, many-sectioned, more muffled than sharp progression of rumblings and crumblings and earth-delving noises that for a long moment strike us all silent (it must be the same at a public hanging or a head lopping).

Someone, another male, with a Maryland Tidewater accent, shouts, “
Awww
-raaiight. Yoooooo-hoo.” (Who are the people who do this?) Then someone else shouts, “Aww-right,” and people begin clapping in the tentative way people clap in movies. Big Frank, who’s stood glaring across the empty Progress Zone, turns to the crowd with a smirk that combines disdain with derision. Someone yells, “Go get ’em, Frank!” And for an instant, I think he’s shouting encouragement to me. But it’s to the other Frank, who just waves a sausage hand dismissively—know-nothings, jerkimos, putzes—and with his two red-suited lieutenants, stalks away around the far side of the bleachers and out of sight. One could hope, forever.

W
ade’s gone pensive as we walk back across the grass lot to my Suburban, a mood that’s infected other spectators retreating to their campers and SUVs and vintage Volvos. Most conduct intimate hushed-voice exchanges. A few laugh quietly. Some brand of impersonal closure has been sought and gained at no one’s expense. It’s been a good outing. All seem to respect it.

Wade, however, is struggling some with his motor skills. How he climbed the bleachers, I don’t know, though he seems a man at peace. He’s told me that after Lynette retreated to the Bucks County nunnery and he’d retired from the Turnpike, he decided to put his Aggie engineering degree to use for the public’s benefit. This involved trying out some invention ideas he’d logged in a secret file cabinet down in his Barnegat Pines basement (plenty of time to dream things up in the tollbooth). These were good ideas he’d never had time for while raising a family, moving up to New Jersey from the Dallas area and working a regular shift at Exit 9 for fifteen-plus years. His ideas were the usual Gyro Gearloose brainstorms: a lobster trap that floated to the surface when a lobster was inside; a device to desalinate seawater one glassful at a time—an obvious hit, he felt, with lifeboat manufacturers; a universal license plate that would save millions and make crime detection a cinch. If he could dream it up, it could work, was his reasoning. And there were plenty of millionaires to prove him right. You just had to choose one good idea, then concentrate resources and energies there. Wade chose as his idea the manufacture of mobile homes no tornado could sweep away in a path of destruction. It would revolutionize lower-middle-class life, Florida to Kansas, he felt certain. He took half his lump-payment Turnpike pension and sank it in a prototype and some expensive wind-tunnel testings at a private lab in Michigan. Naturally, none of it worked. The coefficients to wind resistance proved 100 percent relatable to mass, he said. To make a mobile home not blow away—and he knew this outcome was a possibility—you had to make it really heavy, which made it not a mobile home but just a house you wouldn’t think to put up on wheels and move to Weeki Wachee. And apart from not working, his prototype was also far too expensive for the average mobile-home resident who works at the NAPA store.

Wade lost his money. His patent application was turned down. He damn near lost his house. And it was at that point, twelve or so years ago (he told me this), that he began taking an interest in demolitions and in the terminus-tending aspects of things found in everyday life. It’s hard to argue with him, and I don’t. Though selling real estate, I don’t need to say, is dedicated to the very opposite proposition.

A small plane pulls a banner across the blue-streaked November sky above us, heading north into the no-fly zone now abandoned by the Coast Guard and the “News at Noon” copters.
BLACK FRIDAY AT FOSDICKS
? the trailing sign says. No one in the departing crowd pays it any attention. Up ahead, a black man is helping the Salvation Army woman lift her red kettle into a white panel truck. Several landmark protestors are trailing their signs behind them as they seek their vehicles, satisfied they’ve again done their best. No one’s much talking about the Queen Regent, now a rock pile awaiting bulldozers and fresh plans. Many seem to be chatting about tomorrow’s turkey and the advent of guests.

“What do you hope for, Franky?” Wade has taken a grip of my left bicep and given me his Panasonic, which is surprisingly light. He’s eaten his sandwiches and left the sack behind. My Suburban’s at the far end of the parked cars. Wade intends, I know, to leap-frog on to weightier matters. The reminder of his own end, concurrent with the Queen Regent’s demise, fastens him down even more firmly to the here and now.

“I’m not a great hoper, Wade, I guess.” We’re not walking fast. Others pass us. “I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.”

“That’s a lot to hope for.” His grip is pinching the shit out of me right through my windbreaker. Then he unaccountably loosens up. Vehicles are starting around us, back-up lights and taillights snapping on. “I’m not alive from the waist down anymore. How ’bout you?” Wade isn’t looking at me, but staring toward what’s ahead—my Suburban, which has an altered look about it.

“I’m shipshape, Wade. Fire in the hole.” I’m reliant on Dr. Psimos’s assessment, and on how things seem most mornings. You could say I have high hopes for life below the waist.

“I’ve plateaued,” Wade says irritably. “Left it all in the last century.” He’s frowning, as if he, too, has spied something wrong up ahead of us. The Millennium clearly has different resonances for different age brackets.

“Maybe enough’s enough, Wade. You know?”

“So other people tell me.”

What Wade and I have seen altered about my car is that the driver’s-side backseat window’s been smashed and glass particles scattered on the sparse grass. Below the door, on top of the glittering glass, is a flesh-colored Grand Union plastic bag with the milk carton inside. Though when I pick it up, it’s as heavy as a brick, and on closer notice I discover that the Sealtest carton inside—a pink-toned photograph of a missing teen on the label—actually contains a brick. The carton’s mission hasn’t been what it seemed when I felt it bumping my leg, its little brigand owner awaiting his chance at mischief. Did he sense I was a Suburban owner? Was I under surveillance from the beginning? This is why I never hope: Hoping is not a practical mechanism for events that actually happen.

“Little pissmires nailed you,” Wade snarls, taking in the damage, completely clear-brained, bifocals flashing at the chance to be permissibly pissed off, instantly intuiting the whole criminal scenario. “Too bad Cade’s not here,” he says, “though they probably didn’t leave any prints.” He hasn’t seen the actual culprit, only the virtual one (the real one’s spitting image). “Shouldn’t of stuck that stupid sticker on your bumper.” He scowls, walking around behind my car, assessing things like a cop, his little bandy-legged self full-up with race bile, which makes me angrier than the busted window—and fingers me as a typical liberal. “They probably hate fat-ass Gore worse than they hate shit-for-brains,” he says. (His only name for Bush.) Wade’s mouth wrinkles into a twisted, unhumorous smile of seen-it-all pleasure. “What’d they get? Did you leave your billfold in there?”

“No.” I touch my lumpy back pocket, then peer inside the mostly glassless window hole, trying not to touch a sharp edge. Glass kernels carpet the backseat and floor. Sunlight on the roof has turned it hot and boggy inside. The deed can’t be more than five minutes old. I stand up and look longingly around, as if I could rerun things, set a guiding, weighted hand onto little Shaquille’s or little Jamal’s sun-warmed head, walk with him over to the boardwalk for a funnel cake and some unangrified, nonjudgmental, free-form man-to-man about where one goes wrong in these matters. Possibly he’s a member of Cub Pack 31 and is at work on his larceny merit badge.

Nothing’s present in the backseat but a torn-out
Asbury Park Press
real estate page, a couple of red-and-white bent-legged Realty-Wise signs and the pink Post-it with Mike’s directions to Mullica Road. That seems long ago. Though yesterday wasn’t better than today. If anything, it was worse. I haven’t been in a fistfight today or had my neck twisted (yet). I haven’t been vilified, haven’t gotten in deep with my ex-wife, haven’t gone to a funeral. It may not be the right moment to count my blessings, but I do.