New Jersey Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  New Jersey is among the wealthiest of states, with a per capita income that was the highest in the United States in 2000; judged by the desolation of its inner cities, it is simultaneously one of the poorest. New Jersey is a microcosm of the profoundly unequal distribution of wealth in the United States generally—within an hour one can drive from the wealthy exurbia of Far Hills and Saddle River to the dismal poverty of inner-city Newark; from the mansions of Princeton to the desperate poverty of inner-city Camden. Within an hour’s radius of Princeton University, the most heavily endowed (per student) university in the United States, with an endowment in excess of $25 billion, are inner-city schools in everdesperate need of funds. Sitting between the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, New Jersey has been by tradition a heavily “organized” Mafia state, as it was at one time a northern outpost of the Ku Klux Klan, with a concentration of members in Trenton, Camden, Monmouth County, and South Jersey. (Officially, the Jersey Klan was disbanded in 1944, but a writer friend of mine, now living in Princeton, recalls her Jewish father being harassed by the Klan in the 1960s, when a cross was burned on the front lawn of his family home in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore.)

  New Jersey has had a rich history of sensational crimes. Still unsolved are the Hall-Mills murders of 1922: Reverend Edward Hall was a charismatic Episcopal priest in New Brunswick, found dead with his married mistress Eleanor Mills, a singer in the church choir; Hall’s wife and two brothers were tried for the murders but acquitted, in a trial that attracted rabid national media interest. Then there is the Lindberg kidnapping-murder of 1932—The biggest story since the Resurrection, as H.L. Mencken dryly remarked. After a manhunt and a badly botched police investigation, the illegal German immigrant and ex-convict Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for having kidnapped and murdered the twenty-month-old Lindberg baby, taken from his crib in the East Amwell country house of the Lindbergs, near Hopewell. (Though Hauptmann was found guilty, the case remains controversial among aficionados of high-profile crime.) In more recent years the “devoutly religious, family annihilator” John List accrued a high degree of notoriety by eluding police for eighteen years after murdering his mother, wife, and three children in 1971; and the charismatic Cherry Hill rabbi Fred Neulander was a tabloid sensation for having commissioned a hit on his wife Carol in 1994. (Neulander was found guilty of conspiring to murder his wife, following the testimony of the hired assassin.) But most New Jersey crime falls far below the radar of the tabloids, as most New Jersey citizens will never merit the hysterical attention accorded a resident celebrity like Charles Lindberg.

  Of the contributors to New Jersey Noir, only Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini take on a “sensational” subject—the assassination of teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared from public view in July 1975 and was declared officially dead seven years later. In Malzberg and Pronzini’s first-person confession, “Meadowlands Spike,” we learn that—possibly!—the late, not-much-lamented teamster boss has found a resting place in just the right corner of the Garden State.

  Based upon an event out of New Jersey history, though much transformed by Bradford Morrow’s gothic imagination, “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” evokes the notorious 1938 Hallowe’en broadcast by the young Orson Welles of H.G. Wells’s terrifying The War of the Worlds, which Wells set in a fictitious “Grover’s Mill, New Jersey” invaded by Martians—unfortunately, residents of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey and vicinity, who heard the broadcast without realizing that it was fiction, panicked and tried to flee. Morrow makes of this serio-comic situation a suspenseful, mysterious, and finally poignant story of an orphaned young man coming of age in the generation following the Martian invasion. (If you visit Grover’s Mill, which is not far from Princeton, you may want to take photographs of the ruin of a water tower allegedly shot to pieces by terrified local residents, mistaking it for a large Martian.)

  Sexual/erotic allure, seduction, and betrayal, the very essence of noir, is depicted by Jonathan Santlofer with such finesse, in “Lola,” that this cautionary tale set in a partly gentrified Hoboken will take the reader by surprise—as it takes the narrator by surprise. An eerie, unsettling variant on the theme is Sheila Kohler’s “Wunderlich,” which unfolds like one of the crueler Grimm’s fairy tales, set in the quintessence of seemingly imperturbable Jersey suburbia, Montclair. The mysterious circumstances of a yet more complex betrayal are investigated in the painfully realistic Asbury Park of “Excavation” by Edmund White and Michael Carroll: significantly, the dreaded epiphany comes on a Hallowe’en night amid campy goth celebrants like a demented chorus in the final act of a tragedy.

  Richard Burgin’s sparely narrated quasi-minimalist evocation of a doomed relationship, “Atlantis,” takes its lovers inevitably to Atlantic City to meet their fates; what is surprising is that, for all its grittiness, revealed with Burgin’s characteristic blend of irony and sincerity, “Atlantis” is still a love story. Newark, synonymous in New Jersey with urban decay, financial collapse, and physical peril, is vividly rendered in two very different stories—S.J. Rozan’s suspenseful “New Day Newark” (set in a ghetto neighborhood) with its unexpected ending, and S.A. Solomon’s suspenseful “Live for Today” (set mostly in the county morgue). Though each story has a female protagonist at peril in her Newark environment, and each story is written by a woman, no two stories could be more unlike.

  Betrayal that isn’t sexual or erotic but related to more purely masculine noir activities like drug-dealing, theft, and murder is explored with exacting verisimilitude in Jeffrey Ford’s surrealseeming “Glass Eels” (Greenwich) with its stunning conclusion, as in Robert Arellano’s “Kettle Run” (Cherry Hill) with its achingly convincing portrayal of teenaged and older “losers.” Jersey City, a place of ethnic diversity as well as long-entrenched political corruption, is an ideal setting for Hirsh Sawhney’s low-keyed pitchperfect portrait of a middle-aged Indian American at the margins of an Indian community, “A Bag for Nicholas.” (Nicholas is a Caucasian drug-user of the “local bourgeoisie” for whom Sawhney’s sympathetic protagonist Shez seems to have ruined his life.)

  The bleak and treacherous Camden of news headlines is the setting for Lou Manfredo’s deftly written story of a young police officer whose moral courage is put to a crucial test in “Soul Anatomy”—as the historic Camden, in which our great American poet Walt Whitman lived, is the setting for Gerald Stern’s elegiac poem “Broken Glass.” (Again, no two excursions into a troubled New Jersey city could be more unlike.) Paul Muldoon’s cleverly satirical poem “Noir, NJ” is set, nominally, in Paramus: the conventions/clichés of noir speed past us in the poet’s tongue-in-cheek rhythms and rhymes, homage to the noir of pulp fiction and Hollywood Bfilms. By contrast, C.K. Williams’s “Newark Black” is a passionate recollection of the poet’s boyhood in the Newark of 1940–1954, an incantation of blackness in its myriad guises:

  Black slush, after the blizzard had passed

  and the diesel buses and trucks were fuming again,

  but you still remembered how blackly lovely

  the branches of trees looked in new snow.

  Robert Pinsky’s “Long Branch Underground” is a sequence of three-line stanzas evoking a lost boyhood at the Jersey shore—Wheel of the tides, wheel of the surf, hot nights. It’s an elegy for Carousel waltzes and polkas … The manic neon chicken in spasms dashing / Into the neon basket, and rising again. Here is a noir world eerily depopulated, as if everyone has died.

  Similarly lyric, dramatically compressed, and delivering a whiplash of a final line, Alicia Ostriker’s “August: Feeding Frenzy” evokes the horrific image of life devouring life—in which “New Jersey” is a microcosm of the vast pitiless Darwinian world that lies beyond our human conceptions even of noir—in the very presence of childhood innocence.

  The mysteriously shunned (male, forty-six-year-old professor) protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Too Near Real” lives a numbed half-life simultaneously in Princ
eton and in Google’s 3-D map in the aftermath of a scandal—(sexual harassment? resulting in the death of a female student?)—and the breakup of his marriage. In a moral paralysis, he travels widely—that is, inwardly, in “virtual” space—returning inevitably to his home where he seems to have discovered (I went up to myself. It was me, but wasn’t me. It was my body, but not me. I tilted the world) the evidence of his own death, by suicide. And my own story, “Run Kiss Daddy,” turns out to be, surprisingly, the only one in this highly diverse collection to be set in the beautiful western edge of the state along the Delaware River: a story in which “nothing happens”—in the aftermath of something very brutal that has happened in the past, of which the (male, divorced, wounded) protagonist dares not speak, for fear of ruining the precarious happiness of his new life.

  In such ways, the most civilized and “decent” among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances—of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Princeton, New Jersey

  July 2011

  PART I

  INNER-CITY NEW JERSEY

  LIVE FOR TODAY

  BY S.A. SOLOMON

  University Heights (Newark)

  En route to her job at the morgue, Jinx walked on JFK Boulevard to the PATH station at Journal Square. It was hot for June, the evening cloud cover an airless ceiling pressing on the street. A grimy storefront diorama displayed mannequins behind plate glass, girls with bald heads and painted-on lashes, clad in cheap, thin dresses. They stood frail against the hard gray light. Commuters hustled by, indifferent to the girls’ orphaned gazes.

  At the station, a man with a crew cut, his florid face glistening in the heat, watched her stride by in her work pants. He spit on the tracks.

  “Walk like a woman,” he said hoarsely.

  The train arrived. She wedged into the car. Sweat trickled down the backs of her thighs. The train labored past boarded-up factories, fossils of a former manufacturing town, brick shells tagged with graffiti (LIVE FOR TODAY) that had migrated from the gentrifying precincts of Jersey City. A trash curd drifted by with the Passaic River, awakened by the recent heavy rains. The Pulaski Skyway reared up like a roller coaster against a steel sky. The kid next to her pointed it out to his younger friend, drawling, “Welcome to Newark, son. Try not to get shot.”

  She emerged to a garbage truck rounding the corner, gears grinding a hard-used complaint, its foul breath trapped in the day’s heat. The Market Street bus trailed it past dollar stores and a recently vacated video rental/laundromat/dry cleaner (Your One Stop Shop), shut down for supplying certain regular customers with special-order baggies in the pockets of their indifferently pressed shirts. She hurried into the institutional building housing the morgue on Norfolk, but clocked in late.

  Downstairs in the autopsy room with its overflow drains set into a tiled floor, Manny was waiting. His skin looked ashen in the watery light. As usual, he was stoned. The first job of the evening (Manner of death: Accident. Cause of death: Acute drug intoxication), a young white woman, lay on the gurney, flame-red hair curling all the way down to the circled A (for anarchy) tattooed atop her livid buttocks.

  Manny’s bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets as he slid the body off the transport. The girl’s doughy bottom succumbed to gravity and she spilled heavily into his arms.

  Manny crooned at her, “Qué linda.”

  “Give her here, Romeo.”

  “No, she’s mine, see the way she looks at me?” He scrolled her eyelid with a practiced thumb. A hazel eye flashed at them.

  “Cut it out, pig.”

  “Listen, you’re already behind on yesterday’s homicides. The way you moon over them, someone would think you’re a little …” He stuck out his tongue, liverish in the morgue light, and twirled his finger over his head. “I mean if they didn’t know already.”

  He propped the body on the prep table.

  “Besides, the cooler’s out again—we called for repairs but you gotta work faster, get me?”

  It did smell riper than the usual ambient odor of decay, bearable (though a civilian might observe a preference for the stronger varieties of perfume and aftershave among the morgue workers, your musks and essential oils) until it reached the no-go level, tripping the gag reflex. Jinx bit her fingers in irritation, shredded cuticles inflamed from the latex gloves they wore to work with clients. Clients was how she referred to them, anyhow. It was respectful. She pinched her thumb and forefinger together and squinted in Manny’s direction.

  “What’s up with that?” He wrinkled his forehead, usually smooth like a baby’s blissful brow.

  “It’s the universal symbol for pot-smoking loser.”

  “Oh,” he said in a mock hurt voice. “What you saying, you gonna narc on me? Damn, they should require it for this job.”

  But he knew her history and knew she wouldn’t snitch.

  “All right,” he relented, “you can have her—but be ready for me at six a.m. sharp. I’m making my deliveries.” He tapped her lightly on the back and she flinched. “Twitchy, huh? You need something to relax you?”

  “Some of us are over that shit,” she snapped.

  “Some of us still got fingers left.” He inspected her ragged hands. “You better double bag those, girl. You don’t know what she tracked in, just because she’s Anglo …”

  She knew what he meant: white junkies like this one were pegged as middle-class, slumming bourgie kids, dumpster divers who observed the niceties of the needle exchange. It wasn’t so much of a panic if a glove finger popped and bodily fluids leaked in (an occupational risk because of the soup of potential pathogens, hep C, and HIV, among other nasties).

  “Who you talking to, Manny? Once a junkie, always a junkie. I know they’re all fools.”

  He shrugged. “All right, blanca.” He heaved the girl onto Jinx’s table, nose wrinkling as a marshy gas escaped the body. “Whoo, she’s all yours. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  He rode the gurney through swinging doors into the fluorescent hallway.

  As a morgue technician, her job was to prepare bodies for autopsy by the medical examiner and afterward clean and prep them for release to the funeral home, or, if there was no family (as was often the case in the county morgue), a pauper’s burial. She also performed clerical tasks associated with the issuance of death certificates and the collection and tabulation of medical information related to the conduct of autopsies, and photographed and fingerprinted decedents upon admittance for verification of identity.

  What Manny meant by “be ready for me” was for the report (with corroborating photos) to read: White female, appears 25 years of age, measures 67 inches, weighs 150 pounds, hazel eyes, short red hair.

  What he wanted was a baggie filled with those luxurious waves of hair. If anyone (there was occasionally someone, family or a friend) noticed, well, what girl didn’t cut off all of her daddy’s pride at least once? It was a rite of passage. Manny had been in the hair trade for as long as she’d been here: shearing likely candidates and selling their crowning glory to wholesalers, who weren’t so choosy about where they got it. Downstream, the chain of custody was even more lax. She’d seen the signs downtown: We sell human hair. She wondered what the customers for wigs and hair extensions would say if they knew their source.

  Probably nothing. Like Manny always says: “All’s fair in love and hair.”

  But lately Jinx had been resisting, making it harder for Manny to ply his wares. It wasn’t scruples on her part, exactly, but something closer to possessiveness.

  Manny, in high entrepreneurial mode, had already vacuumed, disrobing the body, sucking up any loose personal effects EMS had overlooked. She snapped on powdery gloves and the requisite face mask. The girl was surprisingly clean, except for the acrid drops of urine dewing her reddish
pubic hair. Most of them had to be hosed down, were caked with the release that accompanied the terminal event.

  Others, like the teenage male she had prepped last night (Manner of death: Homicide. Cause of death: Gunshot wound, perforated heart. Box #53. Decedent’s race: Black or African American), were smeared with blood and lymph, as coated on departure as they were at birth. She could have fit a fist into the exit wound on his chest. She imagined being sucked down into it, drifting through his exploded ventricles. They would become intimate; he would share his secrets, his final thoughts.

  The antiseptic stung her bitten fingers as she wiped down the redhead’s freckled body. Kind of fat for a user; maybe a first timer. Lousy beginner’s luck. She’d heard there was a bad batch on the street (once a junkie, always). She spotted a pinhole in the glove finger. Irritated at her carelessness, especially after Manny’s lecture, she pulled at the glove to peel it off and her index finger burst through the split rubber, indenting a marbled thigh. At contact, a thrill coursed through her like she’d only ever known on the small end of a syringe.

  Jinx shuffled backward, landing heavily on the one office chair they rolled from station to station to do the paperwork (the county had a terminal budget problem). She crashed into the cooler which lodged the morgue’s transient populace. Her fingers flew to her mouth but, remembering, she spit them out. It’s not fair, is it?—but life isn’t fair—fighting the hunger so hard for so long and now here it is, back again to taunt her, like a sense memory. What’s the message now: better off dead?