Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Drive us around to the front, Franky. What’re we doin’ over here?” He flashes me a savage gaping grimace. The Vof 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.