![]() ![]() ![]() You walk by the house but never catch any celebrities better than Jim Breuer, Gov. You read the news your junior year that MTV’s vaunted beach house that symbolized the carefree, school-free days of youth would be setting up in Seaside that year instead of more exotic locations. You watch MTV make its slow, nefarious invasion that starts innocuously enough with a few interstitial video show intros shot at Water Works or on the boardwalk in the early ‘90s. Years later at midnight, rip up the dune grass and some of the adjacent fence for good measure to build a bonfire with friends on the beach because you’ve run out of stuff to do in this town and need somewhere to talk about how you can’t wait to leave. Be the only Boy Scout in your whole troop to volunteer to plant dune grass on weekends to prevent erosion. Learn to body surf with your dad and get hooked on the rush that would force you to pick up a surfboard by high school. Be saddled with the responsibility of telling people later in life that people around there are not really “like that” because the characters they’ve seen on MTV don’t actually live there, that people around there are actually mostly like your dad, a hard-working guy who spent his days managing a men’s clothing store, spent his nights watching HBO and took his kids to the beach on the weekends, always leaving the house early enough to beat the tourists, who thought the boardwalk spectacle was about as interesting as the Burger King at the mall. Your dad tells you about things you don’t really remember but will cite later in life when describing the real Jersey coastline to inlanders: the heydays of Asbury Park before its only claim to glory was dancing with the ghosts of young Springsteen, back when the merry go round had real brass rings you were supposed to grab even though you were too scared to ride anything more than the stationary horse, before the fire leveled the amusement pier and snuffed out the whole economy, before the Stone Pony closed then reopened, then closed again. You dig up what is probably your first memory and it’s an image of you and your dad clinging to burlap sacks throwing yourselves down a bumpy plastic slide with a thunderstorm brewing overhead and the ocean churning angrily under the Point Pleasant boardwalk. You never say things like “down the shore” or actually call it the Jersey shore unless you’re in a moment of desperation and the list of clues you use to indicate your origin has struck out.
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