In My Mind, I’m Going to New Jersey

Let’s go down the shore. Grab the Coppertone and the beach towels, I’ll fill the cooler with Rolling Rock and some hoagies and a bag of Herr’s Barbecue Flavored potato chips. Did I forget anything? The Kadima paddles? My black bikini? A novel by Agatha Christie? A cheesesteak wit wiz?

Oh wait, I know what I forgot — that between the pandemic and the sheer distance, the only Jersey Shore I can visit now is the one in my imagination.

Fortunately, coming from Philly, I have a lot of Jersey in my memories.

My friend Kenny’s parents had a house in Ventnor, where I lived the summer I worked at Lenny’s Hot Dogs in Margate. Years later, after his father, Mickey, died, the family put a plaque up on a boardwalk bench, capturing a thing that Mickey once said as he gazed out at the crashing waves.

“You know,” he said, “this beach is a good idea.”

Some people I grew up with went to the Poconos or Bucks County or vacation places in Maine (where I live now). But for my family, the only destination was the Jersey Shore.

When I was really little, we stayed in Cape May, with its Victorian mansions and beaches full of clam shells. I remember being so sunburned one day that tears came to my eyes as my mother touched my back. I can still feel the cool of the Noxzema cream she rubbed on my shoulders, can still hear her voice saying, “Don’t cry, this will make it better.”

When I was a little older, we went to Surf City, on Long Beach Island. Some days, we’d ride our bikes to Barnegat Light. The lighthouse there was called Old Barney.

When I was 10, I stood at the edge of a Surf City jetty one day as a hurricane approached, wondering how I was going to survive my life. I stood there watching the crashing waves, trying to come up with a way of solving the insoluble problem of being trans.

Then I thought, maybe you could be cured by love.

Later that night, as the island was evacuated, we drove back toward Philly in a black Dodge Seneca, an amazing car with fins like a manta ray. As we drove away, I looked out the back window at the beach where I’d had my moment of insight. “Don’t worry,” my aunt said. “We’re going to be safe now.”

Eight years later, on the night of the nation’s bicentennial, you’d have found me on a beach in Stone Harbor with my friend Toby and his girlfriend, Sally. Fireworks exploded over the sea before us. Toby was on one side of Sally, and I was on the other, and we all had our arms around each other. This was not exactly what I had in mind, back in Surf City, when I pledged to be transformed by love. But it was close enough.

As a teenager I spent my days in Atlantic City. In those pre-gambling days, it was a spooky ghost town, full of almost-abandoned hotels like the Marlborough-Blenheim overlooking Park Place. The boardwalk, though, was not yet dead, and on a hot summer day you could see someone dressed up as Mr. Peanut standing near the Peanut Store, shaking the hands of strangers. Over at the Steel Pier you could ride something called the Hell Hole. This was a circular chamber that spun so fast you were pinned to the wall by centrifugal force.

At a certain moment of rarefaction, they dropped out the floor.

At the top of the Hell Hole was a circular railing where you could stand and look at the people getting sick on the ride below you. A sign by the entrance read: RIDE OR WATCH, SAME PRICE.

In college I worked at Lenny’s Hot Dogs, next door to Lucy, a 19th-century hotel shaped like an elephant. My friends and I might have strayed out of a Bruce Springsteen song that summer, staying up all night slinging hot dogs and pepper hash, passing out on the beach as the sun came up. One day, tipsy on Mateus rosé, I made out with someone on an abandoned lifeguard stand.

I said, I’m hurt, she said, Honey let me heal it.

It’s a shame the summer can’t last forever. I could easily spend my days watching the saltwater taffy machine spinning that thick goop around in the humid twilight; or playing Skee-Ball; or riding the bumper cars with their sleek graphite floor and sparks raining down from the electrical grid overhead. I could eat an Ocean Liner from the Super Sub Shop; or nosh on an onion bagel with Nova from Lou’s in Ventnor; or just lie there in the hot sun, hour after hour, listening to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on a battery-operated boom box.

So we closed our eyes and said goodbye, to gypsy angel row, felt so right, together we danced like spirits in the night.

Autumn is coming, and with it the most important election of our lives, a chance once and for all to end our national nightmare.

In no time at all, we will turn our faces to all that.

But right now I’m taking a day to remember the crashing ocean, the smell of Noxzema, a fairground organ playing “In the Good Old Summertime,” as horses on a carousel rise, and fall and rise again.

You know, this beach is a good idea.

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