The Lay of the Land (45 page)

“Not where I live,” I say.

“Oh, well of course,” Wade says. “Being what you are, you’d know that. That’s the kind of stuff you’re the expert in. The rest of us have to read about it in the papers.”

A
t straight-up one o’clock, the day’s turned warmer than in Sea-Clift. A pavement of gray clouds has streaked open up here to reveal febrile blue out over the ocean we’re approaching. The day no longer feels like the day before Thanksgiving, but a late-arriving Indian summer afternoon or a morning in late March when spring’s come in like a lamb. A perfect day for an implosion.

The Queen Regent sits opposite the boardwalk and the crumbling Art Deco convention hall—home to luckless club fights and poorly attended lite-rock record hops. Noisy gulls soar above and around the Queen’s battlements, where she stands alone on a plain against the sky, as if the old buff-colored hospital-looking pile of bricks was occupying space no longer hers. Though even from a distance she’s hardly an edifice to rate a big send-off: Nine stories, all plain (and gutted), with two U-shaped empty-windowed wings and a pint-size crenellated tower like a supermarket cake. A previously-canopied but now trashy glassed-in veranda faces the boardwalk and the Atlantic, and a wooden water tower with a giant TV antenna attached bumps above the roofline. Once it was a place where felt-hatted drummers could take their girlfriends on the cheap. Families with too many kids could go and pretend it was nice. Young honeymooners came. Young suicides. Oldster couples lived out their days within sound of the sea and took their meals in the dim coffered dining room. Standing alone, the Queen Regent looks like one of those condemned men from a hundred revolutions who the camera catches standing in an empty field beside an open grave, looking placid, resigned, distracted—awaiting fate like a bus—when suddenly volleys from off-stage soundlessly pelt and spatter them, so they’re changed in an instant from present to past.

All around the Queen Regent is a dry, treeless urban-renewal savanna stretching back to the leafless tree line of Asbury. Where we’re currently driving were once sweller, taller hotels with glitzier names, stylish seafood joints with hot jazz clubs in the basement, and farther down the now-missing blocks, tourist courts and shingled flophouses for the barkers and rum-dums who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl on the pier or waltzed trays in the convention hall, which itself looks like it could fall in with a rising tide and a breeze. Today it is all a
PROGRESS ZONE
! a sign says, with
LUXURY CONDO COMMUNITY COMING
!

Wade has his silver Panasonic up and trained tight on the Queen Regent through the wide windshield glass. His is the awkward kind you peer
down
into like a reverse periscope, and operating it through his bifocals makes him crank his mouth open moronically and his old lips go slack. He seems to believe the Queen is about to go down any instant.

“Drive us around to the front, Franky. What’re we doin’ over here?” He flashes me a savage gaping grimace. The
V
of Wade’s yellow velour sweater, under which is only bare skin, shows his chicken chest with sparse white pinfeathers sprouting. I’ve seen Wade naked once, in his “flat” in Bamber Lake, when I arrived early for dinner. I haven’t gone back.

A tall cyclone fence, however, has been stretched around the Queen Regent, razor wire on top to discourage souvenir seekers and preservationist saboteurs who’re always around looking to monkey-wrench a decent implosion. We the public can’t go where Wade wants us to, or, in fact, get within three football fields of the site, since Asbury Park police and a cadre of blue-tunicked State Troopers have rigged a traffic diversion using cones and Jersey barriers and are forcing us off onto (another) Ocean Avenue and away from the hotel entirely. We can both see where a crowd of implosion spectators has been marshaled into a temporary grandstand the imploding company, the Martello Brothers—
FIREWORKS, DETONATING, RAZING FOR PASSAIC AND CENTRAL JERSEY
—has put up behind another cyclone fence at the remote south end of the Progress Zone, across from another big sign that says
THIS STREET ADOPTED BY ASBURY PK CUB PACK
31. Some land—I’m thinking, as we follow Ocean Avenue toward the Temporary Parking—is better off with a few good condos.

“You can’t see a fucking thing from over here.” Wade’s twisted in his seat, straining to see back to the Queen Regent, his throat constricted, his voice raised a quarter octave while he forces his Panasonic up to his bifocals in case the whole shebang goes down while I’m parking. “It might as well be the White Sands Proving Ground out here. What’re they afraid of, the goddamn peckerwoods?” Wade never cursed when I first knew him and was wooing his daughter like Romeo.

“I’m sure insurance stipulates—”

“Don’t get me going on those shitheads,” he says. “When Lynette died, I didn’t get a cryin’ nickel.” Lynette was Wade’s wife number two, a tiny Texas termagant and Catholic crackpot who left him to enter a Maryknoll residence in Bucks County, where she became a Christian analyst auditing the troubled life stories of others like herself, until she had an embolism, assigned her benefits to the nuns and croaked. I’ve heard quite a bit about all that since the summer, and I consider it one of the fringe benefits of not marrying Wade’s daughter, Vicki, that I missed having Lynette as my mother-in-law. Wade doesn’t always perfectly remember I was ever in love with Vicki, or why he and I know each other. Vicki, however—he told me—has now changed her name to Ricki and lives a widow’s life in Reno, where she works as an ER nurse and never ventures back to New Jersey. God works in sundry ways.

I’ve driven us around to the temporary parking remuda behind the Martello Brothers’ bleachers. Back here are two trucked-in Throne Room portable toilets—always good to find—and several land yachts and fifth-wheel camper rigs, indicating that other implosion enthusiasts have spent the night to get the best seats. I’ve barely stopped and Wade is already quick out and stumping around toward the side of the bleachers, Panasonic in one hand, greasy sandwich bag in the other, not wanting to miss anything, since we’re five minutes late.

The whole setup’s like an athletic event, a Friday pigskin tilt between Belvedere and Hackettstown in the brittle late-autumn sunshine—only this tilt’s between man’s hold on permanence and the Reaper (most contests come down to that). The crowd around the front of the bleachers is exerting a continuous anticipatory hum as I approach. A raucous male voice shouts, “Not yet, not yet. Please, not yet!” An African-looking woman in a flowered daishiki has set up a makeshift table-stand, selling
I Went Down with the Queen
and
The Queen Regent Had My Child
tee-shirts. A large black man has secured the “Chicago Jew Dog” concession and is cooking franks on a black fifty-gallon drum. I’m famished and buy one of these in a paper napkin. Bush and Gore placards are leaned against the fence in case anyone wants to recant his vote. The Salvation Army has a tripod and kettle off to the side, with a tall blue-suited matron clanging a big bell and smiling. There are lots of Asbury Park cops. Everything is here but someone singing karaoke.

When I get near the edge of the grandstand (Wade has disappeared), I can see that the crowd’s being addressed by a small stout man in a yellow jumpsuit and gold hard hat, who’s talking through a yellow electric bullhorn. He’s in the middle of declaring that thousands of man-hours, four million sticks of dynamite, nine zillion feet of wire, brain-scrambling computer circuitry, the services of two Rutgers Ph.D.’s, plus the generous cooperation of the Monmouth County Board of Supervisors and the Asbury Park city council, plus the cops, have made
here
be the safest place to be in New Jersey, which makes the crowd snicker. This man I recognize as “Big Frank” Martello of the fabled brothers. Big Frank is a homegrown Jersey product who, after mastering percussive skills blowing up VC caves in the sixties, came home to Passaic, turned away from the family’s business of loan-sharking and knee-restructuring, took a marketing degree at Drew and went into the legit business of blowing things to smithereens for profit (the fireworks came along later). Being the oldest, Frank sent his six siblings to college (one is a dentist in Middlebush), and little by little absorbed the ones who were inclined into the business, which was in fact, booming. There they thrived and became a famed family phenomenon the world over—a sort of black-powder Wallendas—capable of astounding destructive dexterities, pinpoint precision and smokeless, dustless, barely noticeable obliterations in which buildings safely vanished, sites were cleaned and the craters filled so that the concrete trucks could be all lined up for work the following day.

I’m acquainted with Big Frank “the legend” because his brother Nunzio, the dentist, made inquiries about a snug-away for one of his girlfriends in Seaside Heights. While we cruised the streets, one thing led to another and the family saga got unspooled. Nunzio finally bought a lanai apartment for his honey down in Ship Bottom, and I’m sure is happy there.

Big Frank’s riling up the crowd—about two hundred of us—to a modest pitch, cracking dumb New Jersey Turnpike and Turkey Day jokes, taking off his yellow hard hat and dipping his dome to show us how few hairs his dangerous job has left him, then strutting around arms-crossed in front of the bleachers, like Mussolini. The crowd includes plenty of young parents with their kids in crash helmets, off for school holidays, plus a good number of older couples representing the land yachts and fifth-wheelers, who conceivably honeymooned in the Queen Regent, skating nights on the hardwood floors of the convention hall way back when. There’s also, of course, the inevitable collection of singleton strangees like Wade and me, who just like a good explosion and don’t need to talk about it. All are seated in rows, knees together, sunglasses and headgear in place, staring more or less raptly at a red plunger box Big Frank has stationed on a red milk crate in front of the temporary fence on which is attached a sign inscribed with his well-known motto,
WE TAKE IT DOWN.

From where I’m standing to the side of the bleachers, eating my Jew Dog, I can see the red plunger is ominously
up.
Though no wires are connected. The whole plunger business, I suspect, is a fake, the critical signal likely to be beamed in from Martello Command Central in Passaic, using computer modeling, high-tolerance telemetry, fiber optics, GPS, etc. Nobody there will hear or see a thing but what’s on a screen.

I cast up into the bleachers, half-wolfed hot dog in hand, seeking Wade’s orange face, and find it instantly, sunk in the crowd at the top row. He’s glowering down at me for not being up where he is, with a good view across the Progress Zone to the far away Queen Regent. Wade makes an awkward, spasmic hand gesture for me to get my ass up there. It’s a movement a person having a heart attack would make, and people on either side of him give him a fishy eye and inch away. (“Some smelly old nut sat beside us at the implosion. You can’t go anywhere—”)

But I’m in no mood for climbing over strangers to achieve closer bodily contact with Wade—plus, I have my dog, and am as happy here as I’m likely to get today. The sun at the crowd’s edge feels good, the air rinsed clean like a state fair on the first afternoon before the rides are up. No matter that we’re in a no-man’s-land in a dispirited seaside town, waiting to watch an abandoned building get turned to rubble—the second explosion I’ve been close to in two days.

I wave enigmatically up to Wade, raise my hot dog bun, point to my wrist as if it had a watch on it that said zero hour. Wade mouths back grudging words no one can hear. Then I turn my attention back to Big Frank, who’s standing beside his red plunger box while a skinny white kid with technical know-how, wearing a plain white jumpsuit, screws wires to terminals on top, looking questioningly up at Big Frank as if he doesn’t think any of this is going quite right. In the distance, through the fence and across the three football fields, I can make out small human figures moving hastily inside the Queen Regent’s secure perimeter toward what must be the exit gates. Many more blue-and-white Asbury PD cruisers are now apparent, all with their blue flashers going. Yellow traffic lights I also hadn’t noticed are blinking along the emptied streets. A police helicopter, an orange-striped Coast Guard chopper and a “News at Noon” trafficopter are hovering just off the boardwalk in anticipation of a big bang soon to come. The Salvation Army bell is clanging, and for the first time I hear hearty, sing-song human voices chanting from somewhere “Save the cream, save the cream,” which, of course, is “Save the Queen, save the Queen.” The chanters are nicely dressed (but unavailing) landmark loonies who’ve been forced into a spot outside some white police sawhorses, where they can make their voices heard but be ignored.

Big Frank, through his electric megaphone, which makes his strong New Jersey basso seem to come out of a cardboard box, is spieling about how the “seismic effects” of what we’re about to witness will be detectable in China, yet the charges have been so ingeniously calculated by his family that the Queen Regent will fall straight down in exactly eighteen seconds, every loving brick coming to rest in arithmetically predetermined spots. “Nat-ur-al-ly” there’ll be some dust (none of it asbestos), but not even as much, he’s saying, as a stolen garbage truck would kick up in Newark—this is also due to climatological gauging, humidity indexing, plus fiber optics, lasers, etc. The sound will be surprisingly modest, “so you might want to hire us to renovate your mother-in-law’s house in Trenton, hawr, hawr, hawr.” A Coast Guard cutter is stationed just off the boardwalk (“In case one of my brothers gets blown out there”). Scuba divers are in the water. Fish and geese migration patterns won’t be disrupted, nor will air quality or land values in Asbury Park—a murmur of general amusement. Likewise hospital services. “All efforts, in other words,” he concludes, “have been expended to make the demolition nuttin’ more than a fart in a paint bucket.”

Big Frank stumps heavily off his central master of ceremonies spot to confer, head-down, with the skinny technician kid, plus two other swart-haired parties in red jumpsuits, who look like they might be filling station employees, though for all I know are the Rutgers Ph.D.’s. One of these red-suits hands Big Frank a set of old-fashioned calipered earphones with a mouthpiece attached. Big Frank, hard hat in hand, holds one phone to his ear, seems to listen intently to something—a voice?—coming through, then begins barking orders back, his meathead’s big mouth cut into a downward swoop of anger, his head nodding.