the king of new jersey

There’s a town to the north on a high hill, and on that hill there’s a prefabricated castle with a high tower from which one can see the entire state. At night it’s really something, with the lights twinkling, those million lives, all those odd wind-up Jersey dreams in glittering fretful motion.

Atop the tower sits a contemplative man on a wicker patio chair. He’s singing along to something, with if not pitch then emotion as his top priority. With raised and gracious hands he conducts Newark landing patterns, toy planes landing on a circuit board, electrons newly glued to New York bonds. The King serenades too the quieter patches of the state, forests mountains rivers roads all headed ocean, ocean. And lo, he is satisfied.

By day he’s a dentist, one of the three best on the seaboard if one takes Mouths East magazine at its yearly word. If on that hill he parks a car more high-performing than his travel regimen requires, if his vacation frequency (if not his retirement) is recession-proof, his sense of typical supper perhaps too much a fancy feast, then it’s for fixing and filling the mouths of every malcontent in the northern third of the state. Had you’d seen what he’s seen, beheld and tweaked hourly the ugly open mouths of a million dis-careful brushers, you might well deserve the same for yourself.

After dark as now the King prefers the allied music of multiple tenors or one Satchmo’s greatest hits, revitalizing stuff when taken with from half to an entire bottle of wine. With the music swirling loud around him and the entire state at his command, it really is a wonderful world, but the lovers also all really do win and then tragically lose each other. (The sadness is amplified when conveyed by three or more tenors; you can picture 6 or more worlds falling apart, in Italian probably, Italian worlds falling apart so it’s even sadder, even more passionate, even more likely to involve multiple lovers per sadness, 9, 27, 81 lovers crying all at once, celebrating their new-found loves and mourning their even more newly broken hearts).

He’s lost both his parents. They were old, sure, but they’re gone, it seems like almost all the rocks he ever knew are gone. From where he sits, on his tower porch on the high hill with a perhaps extraneous final glass of wine, the King of New Jersey can make out the faintest picture of his castle gone to ruin, his legacy only a memory or plaque on someone’s wall or unattended gum.

He cranks the tenors or brings the trumpet into closer focus and looks out to the Atlantic, to where the horizon ends. The sneaky brass or crying overlap of big male vibrato briefly unstick him from time...

…and for a second he’s sitting on his father’s shoulders, looking down into his mother’s glowing hopeful eyes, with the world in ascent, in full bloom, everything a grand opening.