bridge and tunnel
Last Sunday I went back to Edison. It was a total lark--I hadn't even seriously considered it until that morning. The Friday before, I had been eating a bagel with cream cheese on the way to work, and I thought, you know, for all the hype New York bagels get, this one wasn't very good. I pined for Bagel Chateau, the little mini-mall deli where my mom used to take me every day after school, and crisp-on-the-outside-fluffy-on-the-inside bagel halves, and the inch of thick cream cheese in between. And then I felt silly. There's no point in getting homesick when Edison, and by extension Bagel Chateau, is a one and a half hour train ride away. I could go there right after work if I wanted. And of course I didn't. But the thought was comforting.
Then on Sunday I woke up and thought, fuck hypotheticals! Fuck gazing wistfully at my beloved home state from across the river. I needed an actual physical Bagel Chateau bagel and I was going to get one right now. So I dug out my old Middlesex County map, looked up Bagel Chateau on Google Maps (after twelve years it is still there!), and got on the NJ Transit to Edison.
Alas, I got up too late that morning afternoon, and by the time I got to Edison Bagel Chateau was already closed. But it did get me thinking.
Every time I've gone back to Edison since moving to Taiwan, it was to reclaim part of the life I had left behind. It wouldn't be fair to call it nostalgia because it wasn't the old things, like afterschool bagels and Saturday morning cartoons, that I was homesick for; like any Edisonite, I had those things when it was my time to have them, and let go when it was time to move on. What really made me homesick was the new things--the first kisses, the high school dances, the incompetent math teachers. On visits to Edison I never spent nearly as much time around James Madison Elementary or John Adams Middle School, where I had many memories, both fond and unfond, as I did at J.P. Stevens High School, which I never attended. Though I knew that it was going to happen since the day that I moved, it hurt most to see how everyone had got on without me--not out of any delusion that they had forgotten me, or no longer cared, but out of a deep yearning to continue a life that had been so rudely interrupted. I went to their website and watched videos of talent shows and culture week dances, and flipped through my friends' yearbooks, and poked at empty beer cans behind the football field. I wanted to smell the varnish of Chris's rec room, and the spice of Vikram's kitchen, and hear the drunken laughter of past Thanksgivings in front of Alan's TV. I listened, with immense fascination, to Chris and Ed and Vik gossip about people I never met, and evaluate girls I never dated, and complain about courses I never took. I fell in love with everything my friends took for granted, all the little parts of their everyday lives--so much so that I suspect they began to worry about me. Plenty of you know that I have an unhealthy obsession with the year 1996, but I sometimes wonder how many of you have made the connection that what I'm really looking for is 1997 through 2003--six years of my life that I will, quite literally, never get back. Every trip home I have felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a six-year coma, six years in a terrible nightmare fantasy land, coming home and realizing that nothing has changed but myself.
A year ago, when I last spent any significant amount of time in Edison, I was in the worst of my romantic-starving-delirious states. I spoke in a dazed Jeff Goldblum epic-monotone and found epiphanies in every blade of grass. Whenever I had time to myself I wandered dozens of miles across town, alone, and took pictures. Hundreds of them--everything from the Burger King where I had my first Whopper to the rusted swingset Vikram and I used as a goalpost. I wanted a complete photographic record of my childhood in this immortal, pristine Edison, minus me. It wasn't art. It wasn't scanning my photo albums and photoshopping myself out of all the pictures, and putting them in a new album for an installation. It was something I did for me, for reasons I still don't quite understand. And I never got half the pictures I wanted to take. Not even a third. And though I filled two memory cards with them, and swapped them to my laptop and took more, it was never enough. At the Christmas party in Chris's house six months later, people I had never met asked me, "So what brings you to Edison?" and I smiled and said, "I was born here." How many places can you say that about?
Last Sunday, it was different.
There was no romance. There was no nostalgia. Edison was as timelessly beautiful as ever--as much as a suburb can be, anyhow. But, you know, it was just Edison. Not my 古鄉 or the place where I had grown up. It was home. Just home. The town I had read about in the New Jersey Star-Ledger as a child, with its Indian mini-malls and its old ladies walking their dogs on the sidewalk. And I wasn't here to reflect on my past or stake a claim in the life I had left behind. That life, those friends, those people--they had all graduated high school, graduated college, moved out, moved on. No, the life I had left behind was over. I was just here to get a bagel.
Edison. Just Edison. Do you have any idea how good that feels? To be able to take your hometown for granted again, instead of putting it up on some pedestal?
There weren't any buses running from the train station on Sunday (public transit in Edison blows), so on a whim I dialed Vikram's old number to see if he was around. To my surprise, he picked up. Apparently, since he went to college (and is going to law school) at NYU, and a lot of his friends ended up going to Rutgers, he never really left home. He still spends summers and weekends at his parents' house, and despite his eagerness to leave town in high school (I'd lost count of how many times he called Edison a "dump"), Edison has really grown on him since, and he really doesn't see any point in leaving. Between his work and social life in New York, and the community and quiet solitude of Edison, he really has the best of both worlds. I've always found it wonderful that when kids disperse like dandelions after graduating from high school, a few will always stay behind to play guardian spirit. And Vikram, for the time being at least, certainly has.
After a harrowing but exciting hike down unsidewalked Lincoln Highway, where a SUV full of assholes from Rahway swerved to hit me and shouted obscenities as they passed, Vik drove down to rescue me from the approximate ass end of nowhere, and we had dinner at one of Edison's many Indian restaurants. (Edison, for the record, has the highest proportion of Indian-Americans of any town in America--the Metropark train station has billboards advertising Bollywood movies and Punjabi talk show hosts.) It was good to catch up with him again, as it was to remember that home is not nearly as far from New York as I sometimes believe. For maybe the first time since I moved to Taiwan we talked about things other than life in Edison circa 1996-2003; as a lawyer he is deeply familiar with what is going on in America these days. Spitzer's sex scandal, Mr. Series of Tubes's indictment for corruption, skyrocketing gas prices--these are the kind of things New Jerseyans worry about. Enviously, he got a chance to see Barack Obama live in Washington Square Park. Apparently the man is just as big a personality in person as he is on TV.
Also: "I'm not the kind of person who usually hates people, you know, really really hates them," Vikram explains, "but I hate Oak Tree Road on Sundays. That's the only way to describe it, really. I hate it. Hate it."
"What's wrong with Oak Tree Road?" I asked.
"Oh, I don't hate Oak Tree Road," he explains. "I just hate the people who drive on it on Sundays."
"Why?"
"Everyone has the right of way."
I love that kind of joke--the kind of joke that only the people from exactly one place in the entire world would get, but that everyone from that one place would get.
As there wasn't much time left before the last non-late train back to New York, we spent the rest of the afternoon watching Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle on the big TV in his basement. Which was basically like staring into a mirror. Seriously, the reason why a significant number of critics didn't get Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle is because they've never been to New Jersey. That film is New Jersey; specifically, it is Edison. Edison's "Asian Invasion" in the 1980s, in which high living standards and an abnormally competent public education system flooded the town with educated upper middle class East and South Asian immigrants, creating unlikely friendships between the ethnic Indian, Korean, and Chinese communities. A generation of naturalized Asian-American med, law, and compsci students, following the age-old tradition of their white and black friends, spent their early college years smoking pot and going on random trips to Cherry Hill for hot dogs. (You're not really from New Jersey until you've spent at least one evening sipping milkshakes in a dark Dairy Queen parking lot while a bunch of drunk white teenagers on the other side of the lot dance on the hood of their car, just for shits and giggles.) When New Jerseyans see that film together, they are fulfilling part of their modern heritage.
Going to have to go back there sometime. The more I make that town part of the present, the less it is part of my past.