“The Jersey Devil lives down in the Pine Barrens. Everyone knows that,” I said, my fresh copy of Weird New Jersey splayed out on my lap.
“Look at this kid. When’d you get so smart, Vito?”
“Is there ever sunshine in this fucking place? I swear, it’s like, always dreary and shit in Passaic County. You were right, V,” said Tank, looking out the window as if we had drifted into a deep unknown. “Where are we going again? What street?”
“Clinton Road,” I said.
“It’s like they skip the summer up here,” said Sonny, who was arranging a potpourri of fireworks by size in the passenger seat.
“Yo, you hear those fanooks (translation: fags) from Summit are starting their appeal this week?” said Joey, looking back at us in the rearview mirror.
“You serious? Just now? That shit happened, like, years ago,” said Tank.
“Cuz, I’d fuck those kids up if they were from Millburn, seriously,” said Carmine.
The back of my neck itched. We had left for Clinton Road straight from the barbershop. We had all gotten the “Brooklyn,” a haircut where the sides and back are faded with waves of spikes on top. Everyone had it, not just the Italian kids, even though it was our thing first. We embraced the name “guido.” It was cool to have a vowel at the end of your name, and the Irish kids and Greek kids and Portuguese kids and Jewish kids would say the same thing my father said when discussing my mother’s lineage: “The Italian, it’s back there somewhere.”
And if you had a sought-after name from Sorrento or Avellino and you didn’t wear a horn and gold chain, and you didn’t have a Brooklyn haircut, freshened up every two weeks, and you didn’t have an Italian flag hanging outside your house next to your American one, and you didn’t have a miniature tricolored flag magnet on the back of your car to match the one outside your house, and you didn’t pronounce it rigawt and mozzarelle, and pasta fazool, and you didn’t take a hunk of bread to sop up the leftover sauce after a bowl of penne vodka or your classic marinara, and you didn’t introduce me as your cousin or cuz or general paisan, and you didn’t cross yourself upon hearing tragic news, and if you didn’t give my Nana a kiss on the cheek when she handed you a box of greasy cannolis… then we were probably already suspicious of you anyway.
We hit Clinton Road as the sun set on the horizon behind the ubiquitous Passaic County fog. The rumor was that at night you could see little pockets of orange burst deep in the forest, either bonfires for Klan rallies or Druids or Satan worshippers. But the woods were so dense you couldn’t see five feet past the curb. Besides a house here and there, no one seemed to live on the road and there weren’t any streetlights either.
“Okay, so it says here that if it’s dark enough and there aren’t any other cars on the road, a pair of headlights will begin to follow your car,” I read from Weird New Jersey.
“Yo, fuck that. If I knew about this shit I would’ve grabbed my dad’s gun before we came on this fuckin’ trip,” Carmine protested. Joey stopped the car and turned off his headlights—I couldn’t see an inch past the car. I rolled down my window and listened to the serenading wildness of the thick wood. “Turn that shit on! That isn’t funny, dickhead.”
“A truck will attempt to run you off the road,” I continued.
“Yo, I thought this was supposed to lead us to Hell or some shit and we’d see the Jersey Devil, not run us the fuck into a river!”
“Yo, Vito already told you the Jersey Devil is down with the Pineys!” shouted Sonny.
“Oh fuck, what the shit is that?” said Joey, looking in the rearview mirror.
Two headlights had appeared about fifty feet behind us, out of the unknown.
Joey stepped on the gas and we tore through the woods as if the gates of Hell were slowly closing at the end of Clinton Road. I began to quietly pray to myself—Our Father, who art in Heaven—as the rest of the car simultaneously screamed “Fuuuck!” holding the note as it crescendoed to climax like an opera.
In an attempt to eliminate the Hell fiend that had been gaining on our tail by the moment, Sonny grabbed one of the firecrackers, lit it with his Zippo, and tossed it out the passenger-side window. But in his moment of death-defying bravery—surely a moment that should be characterized by the better angels of his nature—Sonny had miscalculated (or downright neglected) the laws of physics. When the firecracker left his window, it made an immediate detour and pulled itself right into mine, landing at my feet like an insect that had grown tired and was looking for a free ride.
I had never experienced the shell-shocking explosions of bombs raining down on my position—I had merely seen movies where those wretched souls were hunkered down in the putrid trenches of war-torn Europe—but at that moment, when that firecracker went off in the sedan next to my feet, I got a small taste of the skull-numbing eruption of conventional war.
Tank and Carmine instantly ducked for cover. I cut my prayer short—on Earth as it is in Heaven—closed my eyes, plugged my ears, and curled up in the backseat. The firecracker burned pink, followed by an earsplitting explosion that filled the car with smoke. For five seconds—the longest five seconds of my life—we burned down Clinton Road as a hovering black mass of yelping fear.
The smoke cleared and we pulled onto a rare side street as a white pickup truck sped by with teenage idiots like us hanging out the windows. We sat in silence for a few moments to catch our breath. My ears rang. My heart thumped.
“You guys want to grab some food?” started
