Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

Me and my dad, Spring 1974, NYC

Me and my mom, Spring 1974, NYC

I sometimes joke that after I die (many, many years from now) my children will say, with great tenderness, “Remember how old songs on the radio would make Mom cry, like, all the time?” It’s true—I am easily moved by music, easily manipulated by songwriting. If we hear music with our nervous system, mine is wide open to the havoc a well-placed minor chord can wreak on the human heart. But there’s one song in particular that’s been ripping me wide open lately, a song that makes me cry so hard I only dare listen to it when I’m completely alone. It sends me into hysterics…like, rock back and forth and ugly cry kind of stuff. The deep grief I feel when I listen to this song is disturbing, and yet I seek that grief out over and over again. I play the song ALL THE TIME.

The song I’m talking about is “America” by Simon and Garfunkel. Not one of the obvious suspects, maybe? My parents played Simon and Garfunkel a lot when I was growing up, so this song has been in my head to some degree for my whole life, and it never used to strike me in any particular way at all. This visceral reaction to it is new.

When the song comes on, I’m okay at first. The characters are on a bus, they’ve got cigarettes and a kind of pre-packaged single-serving pie that went off the market four years before I was born, and they’re headed off to search for America. Okay fine, lovely. No problem. When the music swells as Paul Simon sings, “It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw. I’ve gone to look for America,” I do start to get a little teary, but that isn’t all that unusual for me with any given song. Something about the way the urgency grows in the music? Something in the insistence of this repetition of looking for America, the sense that the search is ongoing? I don’t know. It moves me.

Things lighten up then, the man in the garbardine suit who’s a spy and all that, and my nervous system thinks that maybe it’s safe, but no. The moon rises over an open field and Simon sings,
 
“ ‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’ve all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America”
 
And that’s it. I’m done for. It’s the empty and aching, sure, but more than that, it’s those cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, looking for America. They’ve come looking for the idea of America, for the promise that was made about America, and they aren’t finding it. They aren’t finding it, and they never will, because it’s a lie.

I cry for that lie every time. I cry for the loss of that promise, which I haven’t believed in a long, long time. I believed it when I was little, though, when I was a child in the back of my parents’ Chevy Nova at night on the New Jersey Turnpike, the car that my dad’s parents gave us when we moved out of NYC. I hear “America,” and I’m back in that car. We’re coming home from either my paternal grandparents in Rockland County, or my maternal grandparents in Schenectady, or maybe we’d been back in Manhattan visiting the family friends who stayed in Stuyvestant Town after we moved away, and we’re driving back home to our shitty New Jersey suburb that I will grow to loathe in just a few more years. It’s dark and I see the taillights of the cars ahead of us on the rainwet highway. My father is at the wheel, the window cracked to let the smoke out. My mother is in the passenger seat, singing along. The black fabric seats that stink of my grandfather’s and my father’s cigarette smoke turn the backseat into a cave on the dark road, a safe, snug little den. My parents are in control, and all I need to do is ride along.

My grandfather was the baby of his family, the fifth child and the only one born in the United States. His parents and older siblings fled the pogroms in Russia. His wife, my grandmother, was also the first child in her family born in the United States to Russian Jews who fled for their lives. My grandparents, born in the Lower East Side, met and married and had my father in Brooklyn, and my father met my mother and they had me in Manhattan, and then my brother as well, and then they moved us to a suburban house in New Jersey with a driveway and a lawn and that whole deal. The American dream, right?

Horrible things have been done in the world in the name of America. Horrible things continue to be done in the world in the name of America. I know it. I know. I’m no patriot. But I grew up understanding that my family fled their homes in Europe and found safety in the United States, and that those who stayed behind were murdered. As a Jew, I grew up with the understanding that America was imperfect, but a place, at least, of safety. I know that that was never the case for many here. But still, somewhere in me is a longing for that promised safety, even though I know that it’s based in a lie. What lingers is a wish that it had been true, and the feeling that the possibility of that safety, that idea of America, is lost more now than ever.

There’s a pleasure in crying to that song, in wallowing in the catharsis of it, because it presses on a very specific wound. I’ve only in the last year or so looked past my long-standing anger at my country to acknowledge the sense of betrayal that rides in the anger’s shadow. What if that version of America that so many of our families came here to find had been real? What if the United States had actually been a place of safety and support and opportunity and equality? What might that have looked like?

As I sit here today, in a country already locked in a cold civil war, with basic human rights under attack… Where healthcare, housing, and the means to feed our babies are commodities to be bought and sold rather than things provided to all because they are needs… Where a right-wing extremist murders people just trying to shop for groceries, and where children are gunned down in their schools, and we have to say, Again?

Again.
Again.

“Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike…” and every cymbal crash is a gunshot.
I was a little kid once, in the backseat of a Chevy Nova on the New Jersey Turnpike, and I felt safe, and I thought that the adults around me had everything under control. I don’t feel safe anymore.

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