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    I never won, but it didn’t dim my enthusiasm for Dynamite— or, for that matter, Bananas. I dreamed of working at Mad magazine, certain that it was a laff a minute. All I wanted for most of my life was to join the magical world of magazines. The problem, of course, was that I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to go about it. During the summer of my senior year in college, I got my toehold with an internship at New Jersey Monthly magazine, where I fact-checked articles on “The State’s Best Subs.” If I had more cojones, I would have then set my sights on a job in New York, the print media capital of the United States, but in my suburban Jersey bubble, New York seemed as far away as Canada.
    Plus, I loved my home state. Ah, Jersey, God’s country! New Jersey in the eighties was my lotusland. We lived in a preppy, upper-middle-class town with immaculate sidewalks, but at the end of the day, it was still situated in New Jersey (unofficial slogan: “Parts of it are nice”). If you’re from Jersey, you can wear all the preppy clothes you want, but no one will mistake you for a Bostonian. You may have carefully built up a sophisticated veneer, but eventually your Garden State origins are going to surface like a herpes sore. Maybe your nails are just a millimeter too long, or a “Yeah, right?” slips out when you agree with someone. It could be the moment when your hostility rises after hearing the Giants maligned, or—my recent roots-affirming situation—when someone cut me off as I was driving on the Garden State Parkway listening to Bad Company on WDHA, “New Jersey’s own rock station,” while munching on a chicken parm sandwich. I sped up to tail them and screamed “Fuck you!” with my mouth full of half-chewed food.
    Our town’s ethnic mixture was Irish and Italian, and the town was occasionally rumored to be a Mob enclave. There were always whispers about the Badaraccos, the family that lived up our street. Frankie Badaracco was in my sister Heather’s class. During recess one memorable day at her elementary school, Frankie was horsing around with a dirt bike. Somehow he managed to jam his finger in the spinning spokes of the wheel, where it sliced cleanly off and flew into the grassy expanse of the schoolyard. All of the kids, baffled and terrified by the sudden vulnerability of the loudmouthed Frankie, stood motionless, as if in a game of Freeze-Tag.
    One kid managed to break free of his hypnosis and pedaled his bike frantically to the Badaraccos’ house down the street. A few minutes later, a car roared up and Mr. Badaracco whipped out of the front seat, slamming the door. He strode toward us, holding up a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill between his thick fingers. “A hundred dollars for whoever finds my son’sfinger,” he shouted hoarsely. The kids, relieved at having something to do, threw themselves into this gruesome version of an Easter egg hunt.
    Years later, Heather was in a Hoboken bar, being chatted up by some guy.
    â€œI’m from your hometown,” he said. “I’m a few grades below you.”
    She squinted at him. “No you aren’t,” she said. “It’s a small town. I would recognize you.”
    â€œI can prove it,” he said. “I found Frankie Badaracco’s finger.”
    What wasn’t there to like about New Jersey? I never understood the jokes. I loved piling into my friend Janet’s Chevy Impala with my friends and driving down the Garden State Parkway to the Jersey Shore, our perms brushing the ceiling of the car, all of us wearing Original Jams shorts and Esprit T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves. We’d load up with diet Cokes, baby oil for tanning, gum for chomping, and a boom box with cassette tapes of the Police and Prince, and off we would go to Bradley Beach in Point Pleasant, which only cost a dollar to get in. Then we’d oil up and