My best male friendships follow a pattern of distant closeness all too typical between American men. You can go years without talking, but when you do get together, you haven’t missed a beat.
Playing music for five of our formative adult years, thirty years ago, set in place a love so permanent it has no need to be regularly reinforced or rekindled. A family photo holiday card. A somewhere south of sober group text when the Eagles win the Super Bowl. That’s enough.
So when one of them calls — on the telephone — my first thought is, “Shit, who died?” When Stang1 leaves me a voicemail a few days before Christmas 2023, I call him back with a lump in my throat and a flutter in my heart. After a few minutes catching up, during which my ever-effervescent former lead singer is way too chipper to turn around and drop a death bomb, I start to let my guard down.
Instead, he invites me and Dawn to his daughter’s wedding the following November. I hadn’t seen him since the fall of 2013 — a decade goes by quickly when you’re not counting. We were back east while my mother was in hospice care in South Philly. Stang handed us the keys to his house, 20 minutes over the bridge in Haddon Heights, New Jersey. He’d stay at his girlfriend’s, and his place was ours for as long as we needed. Having a quiet space to decompress made the worst few weeks of my life just a little less terrible.
The last time I saw him before that was at my little brother’s wedding. The last time before that was our bass player Jon’s funeral.
The formally attired wedding will be held near Asbury Park, New Jersey, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Since the last time I wore a suit, I’ve survived a global pandemic, become a grandfather, gone partially bald, completely gray, and gained 20 pounds.
Dawn and I hit the one suit store in our Colorado-casual town. She’s sold on a stylish dark blue number. I’m sold on said number’s stretchy waistband. When we get home, I try on the full ensemble. Cufflinks, white shirt, blue suit, black shoes — I’m as handsome as I’m ever going to get. I walk into the living room and present myself like a proud peacock.
Dawn: I can see your nipples.
Me: In a sexy way?
Dawn: …
I return to the bedroom, take off the suit and quietly Google nipple-hiding shirts for men.
Now, when you fall down the internet rabbit hole that opens up when you type in nipple-hiding shirts for men, you learn a lot of things. At the two-minute mark of my journey, I’ve already spent more time thinking about my nipples than the collective rest of my 52 years.
You learn about Gynecomastia, a hormone imbalance that causes enlargement of the breast tissue. The rare and sometimes painful condition affects — holy shit — between thirty and seventy percent of people with a penis at some time in their lives. If that much of the population has the disease you didn’t know existed three minutes ago, then you definitely have it.
You learn about two-time Philadelphia Flyers Stanley Cup champion and MVP Bernie Parent and his boat, and his body sculpting procedure to address his lifelong Gynecomastia. You learn it affects beer-guzzling net-minders and stockbrokers and bodybuilders alike. But the bodybuilders — who abbreviate Gynecomastia to the much more macho Gyno — are extra cognizant of the condition, perhaps because they spend more time contemplating their nipples than the average Joe. That, and the growth hormones.
To address your extra-perky pecs, you can spend between $4.36 and $39.00 on a nipple-concealing undershirt. There is something called Mr. Nipple, described as a men’s nipple hide and care system — a brilliantly-marketed and lovingly-reviewed box of man-pasties. You learn that runners particularly endorse the product, not due to a higher incidence of Gyno, but to guard against the bleeding nipples endemic to their sport. Good lord.
When I tell a female friend how stressful it is to worry about people seeing my nipples, I get the exact amount of sympathy I deserve. Nevertheless, I persist.
My bandmates and I outgrew name-calling sometime in the Clinton administration. Still, I’m cautious. Any chance at all of being called Nipsey for the next decade is too great a risk. I’ve had more than my share of nicknames.2 I was a smelly kid in grade school.3 I didn’t care much for hygiene or what other people thought of me. I imagine the other kids called me any variety of the names you’d think a smelly kid in the 80s would have, though I never heard them.
By high school, I had cleaned up and blended in such that all anyone called me was my name. Until the last month of my senior year. We were required to visit a makeshift office in the cafeteria to be measured for our cap and gown. One lady wrapped a tape measure around my crown and shouted a number to another lady in the back. She handed me my order slip — the closest thing yet to a ticket out of that place. Clutching it proudly, I sat down with my assigned lunch table mates and looked down at my slip.
“Huh, did any of you get a large cap?”
No one else had. And I was Fathead for the rest of the year. Suits me right.
So I order a size medium of the third-most-expensive nipple-concealing tee shirt on the internet. When it arrives a few days later, I toss it in my suit bag without trying it on.
We’ll home-base in Connecticut with the grandson and his parents. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive door-to-door. We leave six hours before the pre-wedding happy hour starts. Plenty of time. Because New York sits unavoidably between Connecticut and New Jersey, three-and-a-half hours becomes five-and-a-half hours, and we check into our hotel with little time to spare.
Dawn dresses in front of the full-length closet mirror as I duck into the bathroom with my suit bag. I crack open the package of my nipple-hiding shirt for men and pull out a garment that is less a medium and more a slim fit toddler size. I now also realize I neglected to search for nipple-hiding shirts for men with fat heads. There is little chance any of my parts will fit through any of the holes in this shirt.
I weigh my options. I can go to the wedding with just a regular undershirt under my shirt.
Nope.
like Houdini escaping a straight jacket, I can pop my shoulder out of the socket and slide right in.
No, I can’t.
If I get stuck halfway in the shirt, I can fumble blindly through my bathroom bag, find my nail clippers, and slowly clip myself free.
Not enough time.
I’ve come too far and overthought this too much to back out now. The only way I’m getting in this thing is in one fell swoop. Three holes, one shot. I raise the toddler tee above my head, Simba-style, squeeze my upraised arms together like a high diver, weave my hands through the armholes and shimmy the bodice over my forehead. My sinuses fill with new fabric off-gassing as I’m blinded by the white over my eyes. After jiggling and wiggling and praying and jiggling and wiggling some more, I feel my scalp slowly crowning out of the head hole. I’m going to either pull off a flawless no-nips look or make the next dumb ways to die list. My nipples have yet to feel the loving caress of my nipple-hiding shirt for men, but they want this. And I want this. And the bus leaves for the wedding venue in ten minutes.
When my eyes pop out of the head hole and I come face-to-face with the mirror’s reflection, I can fully see the man I’ve become. My fat head might just make it through, but the rest of me is a different story. I’m built like a 1920s boxer — a physique that looks like it was shaped in equal measure by loading crates down at the dock and pounding beers down at the pub. Broad shoulders, short arms, barrel chest.
I was blessed not only with my grandfather’s name, I got his body too.
In the late 1960s, after taking forced retirement, he and my grandmother, having just raised seven children, sell their Kensington rowhouse and buy a modest single home in Wildwood, New Jersey — the go-to summer vacation destination for working-class Philadelphians.
In 1976, after discovering my father’s infidelity, my mother packs my five-year-old brother, three-year-old me and Buffy the dog into her compact sedan and drives east — stopping six blocks shy of the Atlantic Ocean. My grandparents welcome us into their home. In a few weeks, she’ll discover she’s pregnant.
In the spring, when the dusty boardwalk arcades re-open, my grandmother teaches me how to play Skee-Ball and Fascination, a competitive multi-player game where the first to roll their rubber balls up a slightly sloping wooden alley and into a certain series of holes wins a prize.
In the fall, when the people of summer return to Philly or New York or Montreal and the island is returned to its 13,000 full-time residents, my grandfather stands and chats with his co-workers winterizing the Keystone Kops ride on Hunt’s Pier as Buffy and I run around.
In the winter, I walk the boardwalk with both grandparents, past the shuttered-for-the-season storefronts to the charred ruins of a gift shop. The sweet and acrid scent of arson sears into my brain. When I smell that smell — even some fifty years later — I‘m wrapped in those safe and warm winter memories.
On a bitterly cold February afternoon, my mother brings our little brother home from the hospital. My grandfather will live for two more years.
“How’s it going in there?” Dawn quizzes.
“Gooood,” is all I can muster, hedgedly.
Like trying to re-sheath a sausage that has escaped its casing, I roll my fat folds in under the undershirt, inching it down past my ribs and over my belly. Finally shirted, I enjoy a long, slow, victorious exhale. Inhaling proves more of a challenge. Like a Temple Grandin Hug Machine,4 my corset constrictor loves me and does not relent. Whether or not I’ve accomplished anything in my life, I will be remembered as the man who suffocated himself with a toddler tee shirt in a hotel bathroom in New Jersey. And I haven’t even seen the guys yet. Each successive breath gets a little less laborious and a sort of symbiosis slowly sets in between man and shirt.
The fear of Dawn having to cut me out of my undershirt tonight like the hapless victim of a wreck on the highway keeps me from taking full advantage of the all-night open bar.
The wedding is perfect. The bride and groom give every grizzled and cynical soul in the room hope for the future. My remaining bandmates and I pick up where we left off a decade and two and three ago. My nipples keep to themselves.
With six pounds of steak and shrimp in my belly and most of my wits still about me, I undress the way I dressed, without incident or injury. The next morning, we join the intrepid drinkers for the first stop on a bar crawl through Red Bank, then make the 11-mile pilgrimage to Asbury Park. The Wildwood of North Jersey — Asbury Park is best known as the place that gave Bruce Springsteen to the world.5
If you’re to believe the state legislature and the wonks at Princeton, something called Central Jersey exists, and that mythical land lays claim to Asbury Park.
South and North Jersey are separated by an imaginary geographical line through the state’s skinny waist and a cultural line between Giants fans who want to punch Eagles fans and Eagles fans who feel sorry for Giants fans, and also want to punch them. There’s some debate about pork products, too.
Like with our Atlantic City visit a decade ago, I try to temper Dawn’s expectations, but it’s my first time here too, and I don’t know quite what to expect. As we park between the Stone Pony and the boardwalk, two things strike me immediately. First, I love a vacation town in the offseason. It brings me right back to walking the boards with my grandparents, like we owned the place. Second, this city seems not to know that Bruce Springsteen is famous. Scores of places with less substantial celebrity ties have renamed streets and built museums and erected statues to boost their brand and capitalize on the connection.
Springsteen’s 1973 debut album is called Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, and two of his most enduring songs, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) from his sophomore effort and My City of Ruins from his triumphal aughts return-to-form, The Rising, are set in and all about this little seaside town.
But like a lot of things in this state, you need to let your eyes adjust, be in the space, breathe in the air — then you’ll start to see things differently. Next to a tiny shuttered coffee shop is an equally tiny storefront with the door open and neon signs ablaze. The awning bears a name that regular consumers of Bruce Juice might recognize: Madame Marie’s.
Well the cops finally busted Madame Marie,
for tellin’ fortunes better than they do
This boardwalk life for me is through
You know you ought to quit this scene too
— Bruce Springsteen | 4th of July Asbury Park (Sandy) | 1973
In 1932, seventeen-year-old Marie Castello opens the Temple of Knowledge and starts telling the fortunes of those brave enough to enter her space and give her some money. In 1968, a seventeen-year-old Bruce Springsteen sits strumming an acoustic guitar on the metal railing across the boards from the Temple, his back to the beach and the ocean and the world beyond. The two strike up conversations between the songs and the fortunes. The psychic tells the singer he has a bright future. The singer later claims she said that to all the musicians.
As Asbury Park’s fortunes rise and fall, Madame Marie holds steady and stays put. But by 1997 the city is in such ruins, the soothsayer has to relocate her business to a nearby town. Slow and steady revitalization efforts draw Madam Marie back home, and on the 4th of July, 2004, she returns to the boardwalk, telling fortunes until her unexpected death in 2008 at age 93. Current visitors to the Temple of Knowledge might learn their future fate from her granddaughter, Sally.
Two weeks from now, the Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere, will start principal photography here. The CGI team will not have to work hard to make this city look like it’s 1982.
Thirty miles to the north and east of Asbury Park is Perth Amboy, one of only five non-capital cities to host its state’s Liberty Bell replica.6 Founded as a port for new settlers in 1683, the town was named for the Scottish Earl of Perth. Between 1687 and 1702, it served as the capital of East New Jersey, then as the capital of all New Jersey from 1702 to 1789.
In 1950, after touring New Jersey to help sell the state’s $23,075,000 quota in Savings Bonds,7 State Treasurer Walter T. Margetts presents the bell to Perth Amboy’s Mayor, James J. Flynn, who then dedicates it to the Gold Star Mothers of the Garden State.
Contemporary reporting cites a few different reasons why the New Jersey Liberty Bell landed in Perth Amboy instead of Trenton: the town’s early historic significance, the memory of Army Seargant and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Joseph J. Sadowski, and Perth Amboy’s connection to the copper refining industry.8
Every year at precisely 2:00 PM on the 4th of July, New Jersey’s Liberty Bell tolls 13 times.
The most densely populated and deeply dissed state in the union, New Jersey wears its bum wrap like a badge of honor. The third state’s unofficial official song, Springsteen’s Born to Run, perfectly illustrates the New Jerseyan dichotomy. While (like Ronald Reagan) you could be forgiven for thinking of Born in the USA as a pro-America song, it’s impossible to read Born to Run as pro-New Jersey (baby, this town rips the bones from your back …) — and that’s the point, really. Perhaps only after you so desperately try to escape a place can you start to truly appreciate it. The man who made a handsome living singing songs about getting out of Asbury Park made it all of twelve miles away to Colts Neck.
When you’re there, all you think about is getting out. Once you do, all you think about is getting back.
1 There were not many boys’ names available in Philadelphia in the 1970s, so everyone you know is Joe, Tom, Chris, Dan, John, Mike, Kevin or Jim. And you know seven of each. As a result, you tend to refer to people by their last names. I’m an outlier, sort of. I’m a Tom. But given there were already three other Toms in my family when I arrived, my mother named me Thomas and called me Todd. My first nickname was not my last.
2 Todd, Toad, Mamble, Mamblesan, Bam-Bam, Flam Master T, Touchdown Tommy, Tailgate Tommy, Fathead, ArtF@g, Fudd.
3 Lest thee judge my folks for sending a smelly kid to school, a deeper explanation is warranted: Unlike a few of my classmates whose medical conditions presented olfactorily, I had what doctors call Poopy Pants. Catholic school uniform code called for thick, scratchy, blue polyester slacks. I wore them for as little time as possible, getting dressed right before catching the bus and taking them off as soon as I got home, tossing them in the corner of my room. While my grandmother literally did laundry every day, my trousers didn’t hit the hamper on the regular. Repeated wearings, less-than-stellar hygiene and my allergy-induced stunted sense of smell all contributed to everyone but me and my family experiencing my stank.
4 Great band name. Also, a scientific marvel.
5 While Asbury Park could lay the most credible claim to Bruce (if they chose to enter the conversation), it’s far from the only Jersey locale in the Springsteenian universe. If you want to see E Street or Tenth Avenue, you’ll need to visit nearby Belmar. Mahwah, Atlantic City, Freehold, Colts Neck, Highway 9, the New Jersey Turnpike, and the not-at-all-mythical swamps of Jersey also serve as important locations.
6 Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington are the others.
7 New Jersey outperformed expectations, selling 122.3% of quota, ranking 6th in the nation.
8 In 1899, the Raritan Copper Works started production in Perth Amboy. Located along shipping and rail lines and 23 miles from Manhattan, the plant was poised to serve a quickly growing industry. Raritan Copper Works was a subsidiary of Anaconda Copper Mining Co., one of the eight copper companies that funded the production of the 1950 Liberty Bell replicas. While this connection to Perth Amboy is the least poetic and patriotic, I suspect it’s also the most likely reason the town was awarded the bell. The plant changed ownership and transitioned to steel production in the late twentieth century, recycled debris from the World Trade Center into wire bar and closed permanently in 2009.
New Jersey Liberty Bell Replica
Location:
the Public Square
260 High Street
Perth Amboy, NJ 08861
Can I ring it? No. The clapper is missing.
Hours: 24/7 (outdoors)
