I don’t expect the last stop on my travels to be Newark, New Jersey. I have basically anticipated spending zero hours of my life in Newark, New Jersey; outside of Newark International (somehow EWR in airport code, which both makes onomatopoeic sense and not really any sense). Camden is several feet away from Philadelphia, and in six months of Philly living I’ve set foot in Camden once, while jogging, and turned right back around. New Jersey is spillover: that’s its function as a geographical unit. The huddled masses yearning to afford rent near New York, with a few sadder boroughs surrounding Philly. Granted, there are hills near NYC stocked with the mansions of those too wealthy to anymore handle the daily life of a city; but who still want access to the Met. Those seem luxurious; but in their way, kind of sad too. New Jersey takes unusual shit for a state, and as near as I’ve been able to tell, it deserves it.
I end up in the vicinity of Newark because I fly in to EWR from Lisbon. But I end up in real, actual, non-EWR Newark because the Bolt Bus lied to me. For those not in the know, the Bolt Bus is a wonderful service that lets you appear on 6th Avenue in lower Manhattan, after departing Philadelphia two hours before, for about 10 USD. It’s got big leather seats and free WiFi and is just, really, a magical little experience for a religious child of the suburbs raised to believe that bus travel was both unsafe and probably a sin. On the flight into EWR, I see an anonymous romantic comedy whose climax prominently features the Bolt Bus, and I barely keep from cheering.
Now that I am excited to sit on the Bolt Bus, and have written its praise, the Bolt Bus decides to fuck me sideways. Before I departed for Europe, I tried to book tickets. But Bolt’s website said sorry, they didn’t book more than a week in advance. So I checked the schedule for the day of the week I’d return, and made a note. In the EWR terminal, as my phone sputters back to life, I find that there is no Bolt Bus today. I call.
“We’re sorry,” says the chipper woman on the line – the one they make in a chemical plant, I think, to answer these sort of calls: “We don’t have service from Newark to Philadelphia on Wednesdays.” This is cool, because that’s exactly the sort of fucking service they had two Wednesdays ago.
I’m annoyed, but not particularly frightened: there are plenty of trains making passage from EWR up and down the Northeast Corridor. Unfortunately, these trains, on this notice, cost not too much less than my flight from Lisbon. (I am learning that people in the Northeast conceive of money in a way that sometimes doesn’t have much to do with money.) So I check my other options, and come up with Greyhound, from Penn Station. (Not the Penn Station in New York.)
(Aside: there are a lot of Penn Stations.)
(Aside to the previous aside: should that be Penns Station? I forget how grammar works, sometimes.)
I wait for my Uber outside. It’s bitterly cold; wind cutting extra lines in my fleece and slipping inside. That’s the only layer I brought with me for springtime in southern Europe. I need to remember, as a child of Florida living northward during a global era of irregular weather, that winter is never truly dead till June. Fuck.
The wind wasn’t playing on the way in, either: it’s gusting at or over 45 mph, says the ubiquitous airport CNN, which I recall as near the allowable limit for commercial flying. I think: now that I’m back in America, I can look forward to a guy about my age telling me how fucking stupid I am for not knowing it’s actually 50 mph; and why do you not use knots, bro?
It’s good: I’m back on home soil and I’m already angry again at someone I’m imagining. Ah, to be young in the age of Trump! Of course, it’s not his fault, really: if we weren’t all so angry here, screaming at straw men on the internet, a crazy angry person who screams at straw men wouldn’t have been elected. (Also, I’m shivering in my fleece with a sore back and broken heels: I am not that young.)
This to say: coming in on 45 or whatever mph gusts is a pretty raw experience for a nervous flier. I aspire to be one of those dead-eyed travelers who sip wine and read the paper as the plane drops and wobbles in a storm. I am not one of those people. I clench the seat rest and breathe deeply. I’m listening to Can on the flight, and as the gusts really start clawing at the fuselage, the band is kicking up some barely comprehensible, 7-minute cloud of sonic anguish. I turn off the music. The plane groans and creaks, and even the stewardess in the seat across from me looks pained. She grips her seat once, which gives me consolation that I’m not maybe that much of a coward, but also that we’re definitely going the fuck down if the professional passenger is afraid. The plane feels like it’s ice-skating, but also falling through the ice.
We survive, though. Every time there’s a bad flight and you survive, you immediately forget about the 40 minutes of terror. You think, “Do they have Chipotle in this airport?” and act like you’ve never been scared ever. (I write “you” when I mean “me,” because I am scared about like a lot of shit.)
Now down on the ground, waiting for the pickup, I remember that it was at least warm in the plane. All these years later, the part of the Bible I relate to most – the part that feels really, quintessentially American – is when the Israelites get broken out of slavery by dark murder-magic (OG God killed at least as many people as he created), get a little hungry one day, and yell, “Fuck this! In Egypt, they at least fed us slaves!” (“Give me liberty, if it’s comfortable, and if I can have it and other people can’t, ‘cause honestly I find that kind of amusing and self-affirming; and don’t even fucking talk to me about death; I do Crossfit, and I will outlive the goddam sun.”)
The Uber comes and drops me at Newark’s Penn Station, and if the flight didn’t end my vacation, the sight of Penn does. This morning I stood in Cais do Sodre, all glass and tile. The trains were clean. Hell, in Shanghai, a filthy city if you step one block off the approved tourist areas, the trains were spotless. Penn is sticky, humid inside, and smells like stale popcorn at best. The way to describe it – the word summarizes the station – is “smeared.” The smell itself is smeared across old floors. It’s like walking in gum, or in burnt Starburst. It’s like that; but it also, depending on where you step, is that specifically.
Mirrors are not always kind. I railed against Shanghai for the sins I see now – for the misery a moment away from the approved tourist areas. And here, with New York a moment away, I realize I’m simply not in the approved tourist area. The thing I hated about China was the militant, perpetually agitated theater: Potemkin villages, but also Potemkin schools and social badges of merit and businesses and fucking Potemkin culture. America isn’t like that – we’re not really that into theater. We don’t pretend: we ignore. Don’t like Newark? Don’t go there. See? Not so hard. You never have to think about it again. Wait, you live in Newark? Sounds like a personal problem. We’re busy revitalizing scenic downtowns in midsize American cities.
There are people in sleeping in bags and wearing bags; stuffed into corners or prowling outside. They’re just about all men. They’re just about all black. They ask for things, and I ignore them. It’s very cold out.
I stop in to the Greyhound waiting room. I ask for the fastest ticket to Philly, and the man behind the counter tells me it it’s going to be just an hour till I board. “Arrives at about 11,” he says. It’s half past five. New Jersey is, like, not that big.
“Eleven?”
“Yeah, it’s a four hour ride. Well, four and a half.”
“Is there something that is not a four hour and a half hour ride?”
He checks.
“Yeah, there’s the 10pm bus. Gets you in to Jefferson at midnight.”
Newark! I have always loved you. I just don’t say it enough, you know?
I pay and fight my way through the wind outside. I have a vague notion of seeing the waterfront park Google says is in the neighborhood, but it’s too cold for anything other than fraternity pledge rituals and planning survival. Which is important: Newark seems to be composed at least half of back alleys, in case you need a quick spot to murder. I hold my fleece tight around me, until I can’t feel my hand and need to switch.
“You ain’t cold?” Asks a girl on the street. She looks like she’s early high school; her friends are flanking her. They wear jackets, like smart people.
“I’m fucking freezing,” I say.
They think this is a riot.
“Is there a good spot to eat?” I ask.
So I end up at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, of Newark New Jersey. I learn from Wikipedia that Dinosaur is a local chain and biker bar, which was not a combination of things I expected. This location takes up the better part of what was probably a shipping warehouse. The roof is two or three stories high. Brick and wood. (I reflexively think of exposed brick as hipster, but that’s not right since it’s so ubiquitous now – really, the style is just yuppie and even suburban; which, given the age of the original hipsters, maybe makes it hipster after all.) I sit and order. And order again. I’m in Newark till ten, anyway.
My server is Filipino, which gives us something to talk about. That something is, “I love your country so much; are you scared since it seems to be dissolving into wanton violence and Chinese invasion?”
I say it almost this bluntly, and he brushes it off. “People there, I tell them: you are becoming too American. ‘Everything is terrible!’ I just visited: it’s fine. Everything is great.”
He’s short and heavy in the shoulders. Big smile, which I think they issue with the Filipino passport.
“I was just there. My father died. So I went to see everyone, you know? And they’re being silly.”
“Sorry,” I say to the first part.
“I wanted to stay for the funeral,” he shrugs, “But I have to work here, so.” He is polishing a glass when he says this.
He’s exactly half right: Americans – suburban and rich Americans especially – are fucking afraid of everything. But thousands of people are getting shot in the head without due process in his country, and instead of ignoring it (which would make the whole thing especially American), the government of the Philippines is encouraging the assassinations (which makes the whole thing about 10% [including the White House] American). There’s a problem here, a very human problem, which is hard to figure: If you panic over everything, you get a hysterical populace that essentially doesn’t believe it can die and actively fights against human warmth (good to be back in the States!). But if you are completely relaxed and content, never watching your six, some dictator or other is always waiting for a chance to try out street assassinations and secret police, just to see if he likes the test drive, you understand. The trick seems to be to panic a little, always, just in case. I order another beer.
The TV is tuned to the MSG Network. I can’t really fathom this conceit: “Is the part of the broadcast you like best when they show blimp shots of the stadium?” And I don’t. I can’t imagine, in Philly, tuning in to the “Lincoln Financial Field Broadcast Network.” (LFFBN!) But lo: the MSG Network. Arena-specific programming. And it is exactly that, today: There’s a documentary – sort of – counting down the “Top 100 Moments” at the Garden. It gets very weird when they make it to the 9/11 Benefit Concert (#1, of the Moments), because they’re all celebrating how well they mourned, by celebrating. I remember that Moment: Bruce Springsteen played “Born to Run,” and Middle East peace was achieved.
The next show is an interview-laden history of Wrestlemania I. There are somber, slow-motion, color-desaturated clips of large men in tights hurling other men in tights. The interviewees look very deathly serious, and their faces fill the screen. There are men in these clips who motion aggressively – some of them did in the ring, desaturated clips remind us – and wear their own heads like bags: wrinkled, gnarled, pink, and bulbous. I glance at my beer. I don’t want to know that this is what happens to your face at the end of it. The angry older men on the TV are angry in a proud way I’m familiar with; angry in the way that got us our current president. The pride comes in being angry, the right way: in demonstrating through ferocity of speech and posture that yours is a righteous, ass-kicking anger. (Why be angry? How ‘bout I fucking punch your teeth through your head? Huh? Does that make you angry?)
I’m familiar with the anger because I went to an Evangelical church, of some form, for most of my life; and because I’ve met my own father. I’m also familiar with it because I was very into college football for the years during and immediately after I attended college. College football coaches love to preach about toughness and resolve. When they say that the other team “wanted it more,” they actually mean that koan of inanity. There’s an idea, laid like brick in the American façade, that a growling, resolute statement of resolute-ness is a core virtue of life itself. Because really, son, you have to hit these other sons in the head so that the university can make a cool billion; that’s how you learn to be a godfearing family man. (Every time a college football coach gets caught with a prostitute/mistress/child prostitute, it’s my personal national holiday.)
I always liked the spread football coaches: the ones who let their quarterbacks throw it 70 times a game and ran up silly scores. These coaches started in out-of-the-way schools, and beat the larger schools regularly, for years, with players about a quarter of the mass of the big schools’. They were derided, when they started, for scoring too many points: it was considered morally wrong to score so many points in a football game, because you then weren’t sewing virtuous fiber that can only be woven by running the tailback, after the fullback, through the A gap for 2.5 yards. The pushing and shoving and growling weren’t part of the game: they were the game; the reason you played football at all. Points were incidental.
Eventually, the spread coaches signed large contracts with bigger schools, and used massive, tanker-sized players to execute the same ideas, and wiped the smaller schools off the face of the earth while scoring all the points the smaller schools used to score for themselves. But the anger still persists, in cries about “good, old-fashioned football,” which reliably means the refs let the receivers get mugged for their watches on the way down the sideline.
Here, in a documentary about men pretending to be angry for cameras, I see the actual anger. And I see these bloated, sun-faded carcasses of the 70s talking through their great glories, which they made up by talking as if the talking was doing. These men aren’t wrong when fear that the Left, broadly speaking – that amorphous coalition of liberal, pussy-ass snowflakes – is trying to replace them.
It’s 9:30, finally. I walk back to Penn and wait in the cold. The Greyhound is the bus all those angry, godfearing men warned me about: It’s stale inside. The seats are ripped and stained; I don’t know with what. The passengers are those who had nowhere else to turn (well, those people and one motherfucker who was betrayed by the Bolt Bus). Their clothes are dirty and piled irregularly over each other. Different people haggle with the bus driver for different reasons – trying to get something out of him, but also maybe trying to have a conversation. It’s a sad group and a sad ride. I stare out at the yellow lights of the highway, smudged by these dirty windows.
What happened, in all of this? I spent money I don’t really have to go travel gorgeous places, sometimes in the name of family but sometimes in the name of Finding Myself – of Needing a Break or Taking a Minute to just Be Present in [Various] Moment[s]. I used famous parts of the world as props in my own stage play about myself. I did this, I will tell the first attractive woman who asks, because I’m an adventurer. But I’m not: I paid for luxury services and experienced luxuries, in very safe and predictable parts of the world. I had almost the opposite of an adventure. And I had it to feel better about myself. In this way, I don’t know that it’s so much different than a long night drinking at El Bar.
I think that, to be a little cruel to myself. (It’s a hobby; what can I say?) But I also know the difference: Lisbon and Rome are deeply, deeply beautiful places. And that’s the thing that really strikes on a tour of the forgotten Northeast, from Newark to North Philadelphia: this chunk of country is brutal and ugly. Half-repaired highways and crumbling streets; low, slate clouds and dying neon “Open” signs. In the beautiful places I’ve just left, the people accept good life as good life: you can talk about something other than what you saw on your computer that week; you can do something other than fight for your position on the treadmill. I’ve seen so many pretty things in so few days that the grunting concrete reality of my home is crushing. I feel like someone I loved just died, but I can’t quite remember their face.
I also know the difference between a drink around the corner and traveling someplace new: Changing scenery is a luxury, and it is oversold by secretly materialistic would-be spiritualists, the kind America mints in factories. But traveling does change and expand you. Or it can, anyway. This time, I think I was inflated, more than expanded. When I landed in Newark, the air got let out. I don’t think I’ve changed. I spent nine days traveling back to the same place. I’m still here, lonely, living in a nowhere room in a cracked rowhome. I still don’t know what happens next, and it still terrifies me.
I was happy out there, though. I really was; and I know the difference because happiness doesn’t come cheaply or commonly to me. I’m happy a few times a year. Usually. And I was happy in Lisbon, and maybe too happy in Rome – so overwhelmed to see my family that it made me realize that I’m probably doing this all wrong: living life by myself, for no one, and hoping for something I’m usually too frightened to articulate, for the fear speaking it will dissolve it.
Is that a good thing to learn? That these profundities – beautiful cities and reflective leisure – are the things that make me happy? I can’t afford those things. I’m not sure I deserve those things. I make fun of my parents, and my parents’ generation, for treating travel and satisfaction generally as luxuries of the weak and corrupt. But I was taught by these people, and I believe them: you’re not really supposed to be happy, I think. I don’t think it like you would if you were writing a paper – I don’t cite sources and calmly argue the point. I believe it, in my soul, in the spot I used to reserve for vague notions of a vengeful yet fair God: I shouldn’t be happy. Not that this is a danger on the last Greyhound to Philly.
The bus pulls into Jefferson, and I order another rideshare home. It is not lost on me, as I tap the large purchase button, that between Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and my Uber fares there was little difference in cost between the train and the Greyhound. The car finally pulls up. The house is very small – I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it’s too small for four people. I trudge up to my room. The stairs feel like they’re about to snap as I climb up. I lay down my things, shower, and crumple in bed.