05 July 2000 ~ Red Bank, NJ and Helena's first Starbucks...

I was in the shower the other day, happily lathering myself with lavender Suave shampoo, when it occurred to me that I'd never written about my favorite visit to New Jersey. Since then, I have been obsessed with the idea of telling the story... So... Here we go...

My family had travelled to New Jersey many, many times throughout my childhood. My Grandma Norma lived there, and my dad had grown up there. Sometimes we went to the beaches there, usually one of the ones in Asbury Park. There's a bar in Asbury Park called The Stone Pony where my dad said that Bruce Springsteen used to hang out, but the bar is gone now and nobody really gives a shit about Bruce Springsteen anymore. Oh, and not to mention that your chances of stepping on an HIV-infected hypodermic needle at a beach in New Jersey are remarkably high. Other times, we'd go to The Pie Place. I can't remember the real name of the place -- Something Orchards, I guess -- but it's this marvelous orchard/bakery/food place, and their pies are to die for. Especially the cherry. I was raised on those pies, my friends.

Anyway, in September of 1997, my dad decided to take my brothers and myself to New Jersey so that he could attend some school reunion or another. Understandably, I think, I was not thrilled with the idea of spending time in New Jersey, but what the hell: we were going to stay overnight in a hotel, and that's adventure enough for me.

So, we went. I brought along my bookbag, my tape-recorder/walkman, about forty bucks, a bunch of notebooks (of course), and one or two books about vampires. It was sort of a research project I was doing, I guess you could say.

Things started going wrong right away. First of all, we ended up in a Howard Johnson's. An orange-and-aqua Howard Johnson's. You KNOW it's tacky when it's fucking orange and aqua and nobody even apologizes for the mess. As a matter of fact, it WASN'T a mess; it was INTENTIONALLY orange and aqua. Not that I'm seriously that picky, but my dad *could* have done a lot better than a Howard Johnson's. Especially one out on the highway outside of town.

I'd only thought to bring one cassette tape with me. It wasn't even MY cassette. I'd borrowed it from my stupid boyfriend, Greg. It was his copy of the "Romeo and Juliet" soundtrack. I listened to the first couple of songs over and over for the entire trip, and I will never again hear any of those songs without smelling the inside of a New Jersey Howard Johnson.

For some reason, I want to say we were in Red Bank, although I can't remember. I remember the layout of the town perfectly. I remember passing the biggest Victoria's Secret I have EVER seen ("Damn! That is a BIG-ASS underwear store... Oops... I mean..."), and going over a large bridge that smelled very, very bad... I also remember a Manhattan Bagel at which we ended up having lunch (of course, I got cream cheese and lox on mine, hold the onions...), and a lot of used-up-looking electronics stores. Oh yes... and just before we got to the hotel, someplace right in the center of town, I saw IT... The very first Starbucks' coffeeshop I had ever seen.

Needless to say, I was enchanted. Not with New Jersey, not with the town (which may or may not have been Red Bank), not with Bruce Springsteen or Victoria's Secret, but with STARBUCKS!!! I had heard PLENTY about them, but had never actually seen one. We don't have any in Binghamton, unless you count the new one inside the new huge Barnes and Noble in Vestal. I don't count that.

In the hotel, my father told us to stay put in the hotel, watch TV, do our homework or whatever, and that was IT.

As soon as he was out the door to go have a few beers with his old classmates, my brothers and I gathered in a little group to decide where to go and how to get there.

First, we played Ice Basketball. It's been a family tradition to play Ice Basketball on every overnight-hotel stay, as soon as no parental figures are watching. One of these years, I'm sure we'll outgrow it, but we hadn't by then. Ice Basketball goes like this: Everybody (myself and my brothers, Joseph and John) goes downstairs to get ice from the ice machine. We bring it back up and take turns tossing the ice cubes into the toilet from the very edge of the bathroom. You must stand just outside of the bathroom or you lose a turn or something. Eventually, rather than keeping score, the object of the game ceases to be "get the ice cube in the toilet," and becomes, "get as much ice into the toilet as you can, anyway you can..." Many trips to the ice machine are taken until the toilet is filled with ice cubes. Sometimes, if we're in imminent danger of getting caught, we flush them, but usually, we leave them there, so that when our unsuspecting father goes to have himself a nice leisurely read on the King's Throne, he gets a nice cold draft on his backside.

Okay, it's a stupid game and it's for little kids, but it beats like, playing Doctor or something. If my brothers and I ever have occasion to stay in a hotel together on some family trip when we're in our forties, I bet we'll still play Ice Basketball.

We got bored of Ice Basketball, although we'd played one of our most spirited games ever. We decided to check out the pool. We all changed into bathing suits and ran outside to jump in. Well, first of all, it was the end of September, so the water was fucking COLD. Second, a sign near the swimming pool said "Absolutely no swimming when lifeguard is not on duty." It being well after dark, there was obviously no lifeguard on duty. I settled for hanging my legs into the pool and reading about vampires, until my toes started to go numb, at which point I moved away from the pool and watched my brothers throwing water at each other without actually getting in. Actually, I do think we made John get in up to his waist, and then, fearful of getting into trouble, we bolted back to our hotel room.

There, we found ourselves bored to tears once again. We couldn't get any of the Adult Stations on the TV and I was bored of vampires and Shirley Manson droning "I would die for you, I would die for you..." over and over. Joseph's Game Boy had run out of batteries, and John was just hyper.

"Let's take a walk," I suggested. "We'll walk back into the downtown part and find that Starbucks I saw!" Joyously, they agreed, and we set out for Starbucks.

Of course, we never dreamed that Starbucks would be closed, although I'm sure they were at ten or eleven at night. We didn't end up making it to Starbucks that night, actually, although we made a damned good attempt.

First of all, for anybody who's never been to New Jersey, the highways are fucking HORRIBLE. At ten or eleven at night, hundreds, thousands, of vehicles were still roaring past us. There was a cement median in the middle of the road, presumably to make things difficult for pedestrians. Oh yeah... and there were no sidewalks. Or shoulders. Fortunately, we're all thin enough to squeeze onto the very edges of the road and avoid being smushed. UNFORTUNATELY, we were stupid enough to continue anyway.

We passed a grocery store, some hotels, a dollar store, and a sort of creepy-looking tunnel thing. And then we made it to the bridge. "I think we're almost there," I cried. "Because remember! Just before we went over this bridge, we were in town! And if we just keep going straight, we'll be right in the middle of town and I think the Starbucks is ON THIS ROAD!"

We stood in the middle of the bridge and peered over the side for quite a long time. A huge, brightly-lit hotel was on one side, reflecting off the water. And below us, the water flowed silently off to wherever water goes. Except is REEKED with this odor that would offend your slimiest, dirtiest, trashiest neighbors. The first time I saw "The Labyrinth," with the Never-Ending-Smell Swamp or whatever, I thought of that bridge in New Jersey.

"What do you think that IS?" I asked, horrified.

"Prob'ly people doin' it!" answered John, thinking he was the coolest person in the world.

"How would YOU know?" I countered.

"I dunno!" he laughed.

"John watches people doing it all the time," answered Joseph, trying to be cool and failing miserably.

"Yeah, well what does people doing it smell like, Helena?" asked John. "You oughta know!"

"Yeah!" That was Joseph.

"Nothing, I guess," I replied, straining to remember back that far. It had been about four months, and for four months, I'd been straining to forget. "I guess it doesn't smell like anything. I bet that water smells because it's got raw sewage in it."

Well, THAT got them going again, especially John, the younger of the two. I nearly expected the little dweeb to fall OFF the bridge in his delight about raw sewage, and began hastily making plans to explain exactly what we were doing on the bridge instead of staying put in the hotel as we were supposed to. After having that thought, I decided we should probably keep walking. We left the Never-Ending-Smell Bridge to calmly waft over New Jersey.

We walked a few blocks beyond the bridge. And then decided that if we went any further, we'd get lost. I believe we'd walked about four miles by that point, and it was getting pretty late. We HAD to be back before our father got back from his stupid reunion thingy.

We got back. We almost got hit by, like, fifty cars, but we made it back. In the hotel, we watched "The Craft" on HBO, and I wrote unsent love letters while John cowered at the movie and Joseph drooled over Neve Campbell. (Neve Campbell, isn't it?)

Our dad got back to the hotel around two or three in the morning. We woke up because we'd heard him howl in the bathroom because he'd felt a cold draft on his backside...

"So what're we going to do today?" we asked our dad the next morning. He didn't know. We all showered, packed up our things, and got into the car, prepared to trust whatever "FUN FAMILY ACTIVITIES" he could find for us to do. We never told about our late-night walk; we'd threatened to throw John to coyotes if he whispered one peep of what we'd done.

"Let's get some breakfast, first of all," my dad said. "And we'll get Helena some coffee..."

(I swear to gahd, my dad used to be so cool sometimes... Seriously, he could be the coolest guy in the world...)

He drove us to Starbucks, across the bridge and into town. John, of course, blurted out something about raw sewage as we crossed it, but he covered himself well when I gave him a glare that said "I'm your older sister and I'm glaring at you."

"I wonder if any fish live in there," Joseph tried, not quite realizing that his comment was overkill and we seriously could have gotten on with our lives, forgetting ALL about the raw sewage and the bridge.

"I wish I were a fish," I mused, not quite thinking about what I was saying. "Fish are, um... fish are wet and salty... People are only dry and bitter."

That got a generalized laugh throughout the car, and when I realized how true that was, I opened up my notebook to tear up the previous night's love letter. It was a good love letter too... One to Peter. Instead of sending it to him, I think I might have emailed him my stupid quote about the fish. I don't think he really understood it the way I did. I think he would have had to have been there, RIGHT there, in my head, for that entire trip to New Jersey. I was dating a guy I didn't like, reading up on vampires because my friends kept scaring me and telling me they WERE vampires until I damn near believed them, listening to "Romeo and Juliet" because it was all I had, and thinking unhappy thoughts about how much I hated my best friend. We'd had a fight and weren't talking at that point. But once I was out of the state, once I was away from him and his stupid excuses and that sweet face with the blue puppy-dog eyes and the little-boy hair, I'd ALMOST begun regretting that fight... Until I thought of the thing about the fish. For some reason, the words that came out of my mouth unbidden affected my life profoundly. Peter and I didn't make up for another four or five months.

It was a cool trip. It moved me. As we drove through town (I SWEAR it was Red Bank), I let my mind kind of drift away like coffee swirling around the top of a good, thick cup of Starbucks' best... I felt this sort of psuedo-gothy coolness, which might have been a product of the vampire book, the cassette tape, or the knowledge that I was about to taste my first cup of Starbucks coffee. I also felt more than a little sad and lonely: there was that whole fight-thing going on, and... and you know when you're out of town and not sleeping in your own bed, you kind of just want somebody to hold you in your sleep? Even if you're not used to being held in your sleep? Maybe it's just me. But... I was very alone. And that made the whole trip that much cooler, although you might not understand that. I felt dark and brooding inside, kind of melancholy, and almost as undead as one of the characters in the stupid book I was reading.

...And then we got to Starbucks. My dad said, "You ought to like this, Helena." Then he handed me five dollars and told me to bring him back the change.

My first Starbucks amazed me. I was so impressed. It was a tiny, shitty little place, but it was bright and shining and smelled SO glorious! I ordered a coffee and corrected the girl behind the counter when she pronounced some Italian word wrong; she was talking about some dessert or something. I told her I worked in a coffeehouse. I didn't, of course, but I was caught up in the moment and wanted to impress somebody. I don't think it worked. It took the girl like, ten minutes to get me a cup of coffee in a tall paper cup, so either she worked REALLY hard on that coffee, or she was working REALLY hard at pissing me off.

I paid for the coffee and bought David's Christmas present: a silver travel-mug that said "Starbucks" on it in tiny, italicized black letters. It was sleek and beautiful and had this sort of aura around it that was SO David; it was the kind of mug you'd give to somebody who consistently refers to himself in the third person and would go out of his way to buy "Romeo and Juliet" on video a week before the street date. That may be the best Christmas gift I've ever gotten for anybody. Three years later, long after the tiny, snooty letters have worn off the side and the top is long gone, he stills uses the damn thing.

The coffee was as thick as tar. Seriously, people think that coffee should have the texture of water, and that even strong-tasting coffee is basically just colored water. No. This stuff had a density of its own that was NOTHING like water. It was thick and it was hot and if you don't like coffee, it would have tasted just absolutely foul. I drank the entire thing, savoring the last drops by swishing them around my mouth for about two minutes. It was coffee from heaven. I couldn't even bring myself to put milk in it. I made John taste it and the poor little dweeb nearly choked. Joseph wouldn't go near it.

For all intents and purposes, that was the end of the New Jersey saga. We got bagels later, and our dad drove us around showing us stupid-looking places from his childhood, and if I remember correctly, I think we even drove by the Asbury Park beaches, stopped at The Pie Place (yes, I asked for cherry...), and drove back to Binghamton via Manhattan... Yeah, actually, I remember the Lincoln Tunnel being of particular joy for John. But that was it. It was all about the night at the Howard Johnson's (or rather, walking away from it) and the Starbucks' coffee the next day. I'll never forget a second of it...

Love,
~Helena*

"Dude, if you guys don't shut up, I'm going to IMPALE you." --me, to Joseph and John, shortly after reading up on Vlad the Impaler; Middletown/Red Bank, NJ, September 27, 1997.