Lee Klein: Jrzdvlz

The Jersey Devil, to Kirsch, was a hoot, a story that nicely complemented his third Smuttynose Porter. If forced to excavate something more significant than an anecdote, Kirsch might say that the beast’s composite parts accounted for each of his many stops on his college tour. Or, deeper, the beast was a manifestation of the superficiality that comes from thinking that a compendium of difference is any more interesting than the same thing in the same spot with the same people in the same setting. Or, further, the beast represented something he did not want to confront in himself, and he was happy to pursue it exactly because he knew it did not exist. He had read enough to admire such a quest. A hunt for anything other than a nonexistent beast, in fact, would have been out of the question.

That I could call these men friends seemed a fundamental victory. They invited me along without hesitation, although I was neither architect, chemist, nor educator. They often treated me as though I were a child prone to outbursts at the slightest change in routine. Maybe they noticed I was aging faster than they were. Maybe they suspected something about me, or wondered about my history. But they never let on.

The summer before we set off to hunt the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens, Moss had suggested a trip to Fenway Park to see the Yankees in enemy territory. I went along with Riv and Kirsch but it meant less to us than it did to Moss. The 37-foot-tall Green Monster, the left-field wall, was the best thing about it. Otherwise, seeing the game in its natural habitat, despite all its geometric beauty, the grace and power and slow-rising drama of a pitcher’s duel, seemed overwhelmed by life in the stands, a communal instinct taken to a radical and mostly benign extent. I felt like the crowd might seethe and be used for a purpose other than saluting a blast off the Citgo sign or a ground-rule double around the Pesky Pole in right. In the Bronx, I vicariously fed off Moss’s association with everyone else, and so in Boston, despite wearing neutral colors, I associated myself with the enemy. I exaggerated the row-diness, the heathen indulgence in light beer and peanuts and tube steaks, the whooping for a strikeout of the famous Yankee shortstop, a roar simulating hatred, or maybe this was as real as it got. The stadium was a theater unaware of itself as such, the crowd on stage more than it realized, especially considering the television coverage. All of it was easy enough to spill out from the stands and into the streets, intoxicated, an unruly militia dressed as one.

Maybe such a crowd, with all its individual identities subsumed by the whole, was my Jersey Devil. But that was last year. This year I figured that Moss, Riv, and Kirsch were finally on to me when they asked, having first discussed it among themselves, if I would like to hunt the Jersey Devil on the longest night of the year.

We were at the Atlas in our favorite booth. Riv, Moss, and I shared a cheap pitcher of lager, while Kirsch savored whatever concoction of hops and licorice he’d ordered. It was early June and the Phillies and Yankees played in the new stadium in the Bronx, a simulation of the classic venue where the legends played, a billiondollar mausoleum to the past century of the sport. The interleague matchup was of special interest in New Jersey. The high-def television screen offered clearer-than-reality broadcast. Moss seemed as animated as I had ever seen him.

“Sometime this winter,” he said, pausing as though each pitch required a deeper breath, “I was watching the Devils against the Flyers. Hockey, not my favorite. But it got me thinking. We all heard about the Jersey Devil growing up. Something out in the woods, down in the Pine Barrens. It’d get ya if you got too restless when stuck in traffic on 539 going down to the shore. But I never really knew too much about it. I always pictured a red leprechaun sort of thing, probably because of the hockey mascot.”

He lost track of himself as his attention drifted toward the television. Riv patted the table and said, “So then what?” His back was to the screen. The Atlas wasn’t a sports bar. Only a single television was visible from where we sat.

“So I did some searching, educated myself about it, I’ll send you the links, but the thing I learned is you can hunt it down.”

“How can you hunt down something that doesn’t exist?” I said.

“That’s the beauty of it, right?” Kirsch chimed in. “Like Moby Dick.”

“I’m pretty sure the white whale existed,” said Riv. “But I really only remember chapters about rope and ambergris and that little black boy Pip bobbing in the ocean.”

“Whatever it’s like,” Moss said, “it has a website, hunt the jersey devil dot com: an all-night tour of the pines, a sleepless night walking around, hunting it down.”

“With guns?” I asked.

“Cameras,” Moss said. “You in?”

“How much?”

“A hundred each. From dusk to dawn on the summer solstice. A Saturday. We’ll drink so much coffee we’ll start seeing things in the woods.”

“We need this,” Riv said, and the way he said it, so clear and earnest, I almost offered to pay his way. He needed it, definitely, to distance himself from recent events with Francesca.

I held my pint in the air. “We need this,” I said, and the others said “here, here.” From that moment on there was more to this trip than driving up to Boston last year. This trip would be like a tunnel we entered and afterwards emerged transformed, hearts turned in favor of our more courageous selves.

The rest of the session was spent conceiving glorious ways to catch the beast, what we’d do if we had the chance to encounter and overcome our quarry.

Moss described it according to what he had read online. It was mostly accurate except for my legs, which were not, as Moss said, like an ostrich’s. Things would have been different with ostrich legs. Now that my capabilities for flight were getting shaky, I would rely on speed and power. And because he described the horns, wings, and kangaroo-like torso well enough, I didn’t correct him when he said my feet were like talons.

Whatever Kirsch drank did a number on him. He was several steps beyond us in terms of inebriation. He talked about ensnaring the beast with a mind warp, using Jedi powers, singing some sweet song to soothe the savage beast.

“The only weapon I need.” He held up his cell phone. “I’ll mesmerize the monster with ringtones.”

He fidgeted with the interface and managed to emit the tinny introduction to Beethoven’s Fifth. All our phones were on the table.

It was clear we needed this hunt, now more than ever. I thought it would be the four of us, old friends on a mission, but then Moss’s girlfriend, Corrine, and Kirsch’s girlfriend, Mack, piled into Moss’s Cherokee. Corinne was a lapsed tomboy who erred these days on the side of femme. To see Moss and his mate together was to understand the notion of a perfect match. If “opposites attract” always applied, these two would live on either coast.

They’d met soon after I re-met Moss. Maybe as a consequence of the few times I’d accompanied him watching sports, he realized it was time to dig out of the ruins of a long-term relationship that had ended, I later found out, around the time his mother had fallen ill. All the women around him had disappeared within six months. His world had belonged to them, and then he belonged only to himself. His father had long ago left for south Florida, more interested in the sun than his son, or so it had seemed to Moss. He’d inherited all his father’s characteristics, so perhaps the father understood he’d become redundant once the son returned home to settle and design constructions and maybe raise a Moss of his own.