"Two hearts are better than one."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Two Hearts"

There was a camera, and it was ruining my life. The future was arriving at the Jersey shore, announced by a large orange sign with black letters that rose above my windshield: "SPEED DETECTION CAMERAS UNDER INSTALLATION. DELAY POSSIBLE." Such masters of understatement, those traffic guys. I'd moved two hundred yards in the last forty minutes, had been stuck on the Garden State Parkway alongside Bennies and Shoebies who were either hopelessly lost or seriously adrift. I could finally see the road crew in the distance, all four lanes of us watching two guys on scaffolding installing the cameras and flash equipment. DELAY, it seemed, was INEVITABLE. As was the ruination of my life.

Because, in my life, it was not often that I was rushing somewhere to meet the desirable gender, someone you might meet, just say, while drinking beer after a softball game, someone who could actually make the throw from third to first, who would ask to meet me on her favorite beach on the Jersey shore, on the most promising weekend of the summer, in the middle of a drought.

My drought, that was.

This was the famous Year of the Syringes, and I knew that all my struggle might find the beach closed anyway. This was what passed for summer in Jersey that year, for relaxation of a sort, and for hope. This was what one might find at the shore, syringes and needles and odd bits of plastic, instead of the timeless sound of wonder ringing inside a shell from the sea. With a straight face they blamed it all on a shift in the tides.

But now, pinned down, rancor up, morning nearly gone but afternoon straight ahead, I studied a map and hatched a scheme, scammed up a way that, for the price of an hour would take me through the deepest part of central New Jersey and expel me close to Point Pleasant Beach, my goal, my dream, the sands of my desire. And so just past another orange and black sign standing, most likely, for eternity, I crawled off Exit 124, ready to push on, ready to leave everything that ever held me down or kept me back.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK the sign said. I can only assume it meant to cheer me up.

"It's a town full of losers
And I'm pullin' outta here to win."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Thunder Road"

I was alive again, was headed again for the shore, anxious and angry, but happy somehow, happy in about as big a way as you can hope for in Jersey, fighting off cars and construction barrels, all with the windows down and the radio up and promises laying somewhere on a white hot beach.

But first Route 9, and the Perth Amboy traffic circle.

It was full of other Parkway expatriates who had similar ideas, but at least, I thought, on it a person had a fighting chance, which is all you can ask for in a populous state. With everything at stake I straightened up in my seat, asked of my car everything it could give, and more. It was my first car, used; a Jiffy Lube mechanic had said it might throw a rod at any moment, as things are prone to do in places where anger seethes just below the surface. I had a cooler in back, wore an old faded tank top bought on the boardwalk at Asbury Park, such as it was, since nobody gave a damn about the place anymore, the Bennies having moved on to the sordid promises of Atlantic City, the Shoebies having moved onward to the future--- in the meantime, crowding up my road, crowding up my life. Ogling, maybe, my third-base queen. Springsteen was on the radio, of course, on an FM station that played fake seagull sounds between songs, when the announcers talked about him as if he didnít live in a mansion over in Rumson, wasn't looking at property on the west coast, like it was still 1976.

"Hey, ho, rock-n-roll, deliver me from nowhere."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Open All Night"

All complexity in New Jersey springs from two man-made innovations: the jug handle, whereby one turns left by going right, and the traffic circle, whereby one risks everything in order to obtain what simple intersections seem to accomplish everywhere else. This time I was to be tested by the latter, lying before me like a killer in the sun.

I gritted my teeth, meant to push ahead and right, but got shoved to the left by a sausage truck with a beach raft strapped on the back. I yielded, only for the moment I said to myself, and was immediately looking at the rusty bumper of a Ford Pinto. In other words, looking into the eyes of death, and so I again veered left, into the innermost lane of the circle. Pinned down for the moment, but moving.

Forward, sort of.

I went around a few times, waiting for my chance. Then a few more times, locked in by some dynamic of circular geometry and radial motion, faster on the inside, slower on the outside, a thousand other people all trying to get off the same tangential exit. I juked right, politely for a while, then bolder, with muscle, with anger. Then, with desperation.

But even that does not work in the land of the desperate.

Retreating again to the inner lane, to catch my breath and let the muscles in my neck soften, I went around. And around. Each time I entered the fray I was rejected, fought off by everyone else rushing frantically, I'm sure, to something they wanted, needed, dreamt of. Had met after a ball game, for all I knew.

Trapped in a small piece of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, I went around and around, hope fading, bladder building, around in my own orbit, around in the way that hope orbits around our lives, like darkness orbits around light, the way it creeps up with long, cold fingers, creeping, crawling, scratching, while our day, the only thing we really have, wastes away.

All the while the radio played.

"Everything dies baby, that's a fact,
But maybe everything that dies, some day comes back."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City"

I wanted to fall in love that day. I wanted to fight my way through all the traffic and off that circle, blow down to the beach and spend the dusk staring into the eyes of an infielder who would change my life forever, give me reasons to keep going, to slow down, to look up. At least for the summer. Or for June. Maybe.

But this was New Jersey, the way I remember it, a place where the state legislature once introduced a bill to make "Born to Run" the state anthem, a song whose first verse contains the phrases "death trap" and "suicide rap," a song about getting in a car and driving as fast and as far away as you can.

This was New Jersey, and this was my life. And so I did not get off that traffic circle--- at least, not until I had driven around it a few dozen times, and had sat still for entire albums while the motor ran and the automotive congestion unknotted itself, not until I had run out of gas and managed, hours later when the traffic had finally died down, to make it to a gas station to buy a gallon from a surly attendant named Vinny. By the time I returned to the car my dusk had come, and as I filled it and restarted my engine, I purposely avoided thinking about what might have been further south.

In New Jersey, I learned, you learn to just block certain things out.

I pulled away and eased into the outer lane, swung around and pointed home, back north, off the circle and onto Exit 124, back onto the Parkway, about a half-mile south of where I had first exited hours and hours ago. Dreams detached, hope resigned, I hit the open road, driving again, driving forever. In New Jersey, always driving. Sick, angry, I shoved the accelerator, thought of the way she would scoop up a dribbling grounder, moved into the left lane, the fast lane, remembered the beauty of her pivot, faster still, the way the ball would pop in the first baseman's glove. I turned the stereo up, Bruce again, running again, like all the others, faster and faster, away from something as much as towards, my tires zipping with speed, waiting for the night to blur.

When the flash went off.