As I start this post, the news is spreading that Clarence Clemons, saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, has died after complications from a stroke. While I was no Springsteen fan, Clemons was a genuine icon, the type you don’t see come along very often, so RIP to him. That said, I can safely aver that none of the characters in my novel Hard Lessons would be more than glancingly familiar with his music.
Here’s the thing about New Jersey. I was born here. Aside from a few years spent living in Illinois and on Staten Island as a small child, I grew up here. But when I see it through the filter of American pop culture, I don’t recognize it.
Jersey Shore? I knew a couple of self-described “guidos” in high school (class of 1990), but nobody nearly as cartoonish as Paulie D or The Situation. The Sopranos? Again in high school, I knew twin brothers whose father ran an independent garbage hauling company. But he was honest, absolutely not connected in any way. Know how I know? Because their older brother worked in the stockroom with me at a Barnes & Noble store in Springfield. That’s just not the New Jersey I grew up in.
The town I grew up in was a quiet suburb of tree-lined streets, small to decent-sized houses, and a general trapped-in-amber feeling. It was a lot like Pleasantville, or a Steven Spielberg movie. Kids rode their bikes back and forth to each others’ houses unsupervised and helmet-free; every Fourth of July, our street was barricaded at both ends for a block party; the town council resolutely refused to allow fast food restaurants in, the only exceptions being a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Baskin-Robbins.
The city I live in now, where I’ve lived for nearly 20 years, is very different. It’s much less white than the town I grew up in. There are some long-established ethnic subgroups—Portuguese, Jewish, black, Italian—and they’re holding onto old neighborhoods, but most of the newer people are Latin immigrants, many of them from Colombia, and they’ve made their presence felt, even become dominant. One of the main drags paints its center line red, yellow and blue, the colors of the Colombian flag, and there are a number of stores in town with signs in Spanish and smaller text in English below.
The New Jersey I recognize speaks Spanish, and English with an accent. And while the pizza here’s better than New York pizza (yeah, I said it), the empanadas are even better than that. The music isn’t Springsteen, it’s salsa, or reggaeton. And that’s the New Jersey I wrote Hard Lessons to portray. I hope people will read it and realize that New Jersey is a much more complicated place than they may have believed it to be.
Praise for Phil Freeman:
“What separates Freeman from the analgesic hipster crowd is
unbridled enthusiasm for his subject.” – Jason Pettigrew, Alternative
Press
“Freeman is not shy about calling bullshit on things he thinks are
wrong, nor about naming names of those he thinks responsible.” – John
Kenyon, PopMatters
“[Freeman] is a critic and a reporter all in one.” – Brian Gilmore, JazzTimes
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