A congressional staffer tried to be more positive: “I like it! It’s like George Clooney.”

Last we checked, however, George Clooney was a man.

No sooner had Whitman unveiled her new look than she dropped her real bombshell: She was pulling out of the Senate race to replace senior Democrat
Frank Lautenberg, who is retiring at the end of his current term.

Whitman was widely regarded as the strong favorite to replace Lautenberg, and the Democrats had been scrambling to find a viable candidate to run against her. But all of a sudden, she was quitting.

Robert Arena of Presage Internet Campaigns, a consultant to the Whitman campaign, told Salon News, “She couldn’t give 110 percent. She couldn’t be the kind of candidate she wanted to be and the kind of governor she wanted to be at the same time. For her, being governor is the best job.”

Still, the news came as a shock to most people — even to some on her staff. When
reports of her dropping out began to leak before she made the official announcement, her office was flooded with phone calls from around the state and from Washington. While her campaigners stressed on the phone that “the governor is indeed busy running a campaign,” the people on the other end of the line began responding, “Actually, she isn’t.”

When the press wanted to delve even further, Whitman’s staff began elaborating on the problems of campaigning, especially the dreaded “F-word”: fund-raising. Even though Whitman had already amassed more than $2 million (which the campaign will most likely return to contributors), her fund-raising schedule had her traveling to dozens of out-of-state events, some as far away as Arizona.

At a time when most people find it difficult to take politicians at their
word, speculation about Whitman’s true motives was inevitable. According to Sherry Sylvester, the chief political writer for the Trentonian newspaper, the rumors run the gamut: “from illness to political scandals to scandals involving her financier husband, John Whitman, to marital difficulties stemming from an alleged fight in which John allegedly stated that she must run and she responded, ‘I don’t have to do anything!’”

While there is no direct evidence of ill health, the rumors that Whitman might be sick are associated both with the bad haircut and a recent trip she took to Nova Scotia on which no photo ops were allowed. One campaign source suggested to Salon News, however, that “she could just as easily have been meeting with George W. Bush, discussing a possible Bush-Whitman ticket” while she was out of sight.

There also has been talk in political circles about her getting a cabinet post in a Bush White House, but according to sources close to Whitman, the more likely scenario involves her seeking the vice presidency — despite her pro-choice position and other political stands that have not played well with the GOP’s conservative base.

According to one campaign official, since it now appears likely that Pat Buchanan will run as a pro-life third party candidate, draining away conservative votes from the GOP, the main challenge to Bush will be to capture the swing vote, the Reagan Democrats. If so, the ideal candidate for this effort would be someone like Whitman or New York Gov. George Pataki.

Whatever her motives for quitting the Senate race, Whitman appeared upbeat after her announcement, and began appearing on all the political talk shows — indicating that she does not exactly consider this an exit from the political arena.

Whitman’s national aspirations may hit a few roadblocks, however. For one thing, there is a disparity between Whitman’s immense national popularity and her somewhat tempered reputation in her own state. New Jersey residents are more concerned about the state’s soaring property taxes — and her move to fund state pensions by floating a $2.9 billion bond — than with any fantasies she may have about becoming the first female vice president.

And the general consensus among journalists following her candidacy is that, when all is said and done, Christine Todd Whitman is just plain tired.

While her upscale upbringing was far from a struggle, and she hails from a political family, Whitman’s electoral experiences have been anything but comfortable. Her first statewide election was a 1990 attempt to unseat then-Sen. Bill Bradley, and she lost.

At the time, Democratic Gov. James Florio was facing a huge backlash from voters after having embarked on a $2.8 billion state tax hike — the largest in American history. Florio’s tax package proved disastrous to the state’s economy, ruining the boating industry, among others. New Jerseyans were fuming, and took the opportunity to take out their ire on Bradley, whom Whitman charged had not done enough to stop his fellow Democrat Florio from raising the taxes.

Nevertheless, Bradley beat Whitman, 50-47 percent.

Whitman next focused her sights on the governor’s office, and launched a bitter campaign against Florio two years later.

But Whitman was not a natural campaigner, and despite Florio’s high negative ratings, she barely squeaked into office, by 49-48 percent.

In 1996, her re-election run was yet another reminder of her weaknesses on the campaign trail. Running as an incumbent, Whitman faced a serious challenge from
little-known Jim McGreevey, a mayor from Woodbridge. The governor barely survived, winning 47-46 percent.

With an electoral record like this (it’s what some of her campaign workers cynically term “the Whitman landslide”), Whitman had to harbor some concerns about running for the Senate.

And there was still the fund-raising question: Did she really want to go from place to place raising an estimated $17 million, in increments no greater than $1,000? Probably not.

Whatever her motives, Whitman has made one group happy by exiting the race. From underdog to mighty dog, the Democrats now think they can keep the Lautenberg seat in the party, with either Florio or former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine emerging as their likely candidate. Meanwhile it is the Republicans who now have to scramble to field a viable contender.

All of which may signal the end of Whitman’s political career in her home state once her current term expires — unless, of course, it turns out that all that speculation about a Bush connection is true, after all.

Actually, things began fairly quietly at the Art Center, a 17,000-capacity shed
off the parkway in central New Jersey. Besides the main stage where the
headliners played, there was a fairly large second setup out on the lawn, with a
canonical festival spread of booths and concessions going out in all directions.
The crowd assembled slowly about a nucleus of serious hard-liners, the “take a
day off work” people, who looked as though they didn’t want to miss a single
thing, say in case Sabbath’s Tony Iommi erupted from backstage, shouting, “Ozzy
is sick! We need a singer! But … does anybody know the words!?” There were a
lot of 30-ish men with blond moustaches — the kind of ruddy-featured balding
guy who looks like his divorce just made the drinking worse. You could see them
all at 17, wild and doomed, but at 30, the doom had come and gone. The few women
looked like they had reasonably intact working-class lives — with kids, and
family to watch the kids, and girlfriends to hang out with while the kids are
being watched. The men looked like they only had a bar to go to, and a girlfriend
with somebody else’s kids. These are the Dudes of Jersey Past, whom punk never
knew. You have to respect them.

The musical program began, as usual, with the small fry. The main stage yielded
up Apartment 26, an unsigned industro-techno metal band with a cool British
(read: postpunk) sensibility. One of the members is Sabbath bassist Geezer
Butler’s son, which explains how the “unsigned” part fits with the “main stage”
one. But better them in the big top than the hiply all-lowercase “hed (pe)” a
plastic hip-hop metalpunk act with lyrics like, “Niggaz hitch a ride white boyz
too/In the car with the hed crew/What ya gonna do/Rollin in the 96 fuck
you.” Woo-hoo. Whatta buncha poo. They use the word “dick” a lot, too.

System of a Down took over the big stage with their grungy agitpunk, to a scanty
crowd. They’ve got a bit of the bitter playfulness of the Dead Kennedys, a little
of the Killing Joke groove, a singer with presence and a loose, catlike
guitarist. These guys are good. But political rock bands, like the French army,
tend always to be fighting the previous war. Singer Serj Tankian on Kosovo:
“We’re not fighting for freedom; we’re fighting for oil profits!” Slipknot take
the little stage. Imagine a noisy metal band with Cali-punk vocals, except
instead of a metal band it’s eight guys in orange jumpsuits and clown masks,
beating on each other. Overheard: “You know, those bands on the second stage pay
to get on there … They sell the space.” Hmm.

During the early part of the day, the most heartfelt performances were being
heard at the karaoke stage, tucked away in a corner of the midway. While on the
big stage Godsmack blared and clattered through a set of whatever you call it
when it’s just a two-chord riff and a guy going Yah! a lot, the karaoke stage
offered a bunch of people doing Sabbath, Guns N’ Roses, Doors and Ozzy songs
really, really well. A large burnout chick belted out a hot version of “Roadhouse
Blues.” A skinny young guy did “War Pigs” as well as Ozzy could in the ’70s.
Cool!

The younger people streaming in seemed like a different breed from the worn-out
mustachioed crowd. Easily a third were female, and easily half of the males were
just ordinary squarish bald guys, with sort of a generic unworry about them,
perhaps from not having been raised to be as dudish as the older dudes, in a
society that takes manly plumber’s sons and warps them out until they live off
bong hits and pray to Satan.

As for Satan, that’s something that was missing from the whole carnivalesque
aspect of Ozzfest. You go to the trouble of plopping a huge, whopping carbuncle
of heavy metal into the middle of a dozen American cities, and you figure it
should at least smell a bit of brimstone, to spook out the Christian in each of
us. Real, full-time Christians might be perennially spooked-out by concerts like
this, but they take it too much at face value. Ozzfest is mostly about fun and
games. There’s (naturally) a lot of stuff to buy, like jewelry and kewl,
oval-logo bumper stickers, and outerwear of various sorts; and there are drum and
guitar booths with merch and star apppearances. It’s also set up with a lot of
to-do stuff, like the karaoke stage, and a rock-climbing wall, and carnival
games, and booths for airbrush body-painting and henna tattoos. But the closest
thing to metal-monster depravity was a couple of girls steering their bare,
airbrushed boobs through the crowd, guarded by a phalanx of sheepish male
friends. Free paint-on bikini tops at the body-paint tent!

Slayer, you can imagine playing in hell. Not just fancifully, the way you’d
imagine something silly or unlikely (like Judas Priest playing there), but with
solid conviction, the way you can imagine Dire Straits playing in Purgatory.
After hours of metal bands had done their meanest on two stages, Slayer came on
with a thunderous whoom and laid the crowd down like matchsticks, killing
everyone instantly. Speed metal is about discipline, since that’s what metalheads
most lack and what impresses them the most — like ghetto hip-hop kids and the
whole rap iconography of money. But most good speed metal bands only achieve a
sort of clattery, robotic precision through lesson-book chops, or through
technological gimmickry — and few ever really learn to play as an ensemble.
Slayer have micronuanced timing, a near-classical sense of horizontal
composition, and ensemble playing to make a conductor expire at his stand.
Cataclysmic, terrifying. Nothing this big should be able to move so fast.

Back in the “gimmicks” department, the highly-touted Fear Factory was pretty
turgid and machinelike. Heavy sampling — drums like a big, loud typewriter. New
benchmark: Could this band play hell? There are no samplers in hell.

Nor turntables, but the Deftones are actually pretty good when vocalist Chino
Moreno quits wit da get-down and opens up into his fine Gothic croon (“Be Quiet
and Drive”). Rob Zombie would rule one of those early-’60s casino-decadent
visions of the Abyss. His music is strictly by-the-numbers — tasty maybe, and
tight, but nothing that a bunch of kids from the karaoke stage and the drum and
guitar booths couldn’t make up on the spot. But whatta stage show. The arena was
packed solid by this point, and the sun went down on a stageful of giant dice,
belching firepots, dancers and stuff blowing up. There were video clips;
banners; huge, flaming Xs for “Channel X” … It makes sense that Zombie quit
the Family Values tour because of its quick turnover times. (“You can’t build a
den of Satan and tear it down in five minutes.”) Without his pyro he’s got a good
CBGBs-grade rock band, but with it, he’s got “Kiss Alive.”

Even Kiss, though, once opened for Black Sabbath. This go-round is supposed to be
Sabbath’s last ever with the Ozzy lineup, and it was a tremendous sendoff — huge
and rich sounding, with all the hits. “War Pigs” led off, and from the first, it
was clear that Sabbath, well, rules for one thing. But also that they’re more of
a hippy-trippy band with all the edges sharpened (like, say, Hawkwind on really
bad drugs) than a mean-ass hard-rock act. Ozzy has no mojo: He’s a gawky,
childlike sort of character whose face shows the creases not of debauchery but of
lifelong confusion. Geezer Butler and Bill Ward still carry traces of the shuffly
syncopation of mid-period Pink Floyd. It’s through Tony Iommi’s scathing guitar
that the band’s essential lopey-mopiness becomes creeping evil. Iommi’s playing
was letter-perfect, and you could hear in it all the elements of grunge-to-be,
but also an awful lot that nobody has ever replicated: the tossed-off trills; the
liquid soloing; the instinct toward the grandiosely perverse that made,
say, “Iron Man” into something entirely different from the whiny Troggs song it
might’ve been. If there’s a lesson in this year’s Ozzfest, it’s that essence
still has something over aspect — whether you’re marking Sabbath or Slayer (or
even Rob Zombie) against bands like hed (pe), or watching the Dudes of Jersey
Past slouch past the young guy smoothies who’ve taken their bio-niche. Or hooking
up with a Carnival of Perversity that promises you serious Mojo but just ends up
painting your boobs purple. Arrive late; keep your shirt on; bring lots of really
bad drugs.

For most of my life, Hoboken was flanked by two
landmarks. Uptown, right on the river, was a tipped neon coffee cup with sequentially illuminating splotches dripping beneath. “Good to the last drop,” it boasted, while the Maxwell House factory below cranked the smell of roasting beans into the air like a caffeine fog. And downtown, right by the Erie Lackawana station, was a large white hand, its index finger ominously pointing downward to a local seafood shack called the Clam Broth House. On it, in big black letters, were the words “Hoboken: Birthplace of
Frank Sinatra and Baseball” — in that order. In a city whose tallest
buildings are churches, Sinatra managed to dominate the skyline.

Hoboken sits on the wrong side of the Hudson River. It’s a place
full of people who live 10 minutes outside of Manhattan but never go
there, the kind of town where you’re buried by the same church you were
baptized into. When Sinatra was a kid, and still when I was a kid, it was full
of tenements. Most of them were burned down by greedy landlords in the
’80s, to make way for condos. And with the condos came the yuppies, and
with the yuppies came sports bars and sushi joints along Washington Street.
But the commuters were interlopers, New Yorkers at heart who just happened
to get a really neat real estate deal. They didn’t understand Hoboken and
its weird little working-class heart, and they sure as hell didn’t
understand Frank. They never ventured off to the side streets and the seedy
bars, the dives where “Strangers in the Night” still wafted every night
from the jukebox like the coffee smell from the river.

Frank was the essence of Hoboken — that’s why he inspired such
fervent love from the denizens he left behind. Unlike his former costar
Grace Kelly, a Philly native from the Main Line who affected society airs
and a posh accent, Sinatra never lost his thick-tongued Jersey intonation
or his scrappy, streetwise style. Instead, it was part of his glory.
It was there, amazingly, in his singing voice. Even as he was wrapping
himself around an elegant Cole Porter tune, he infused the words with an
unmistakable and endearing “fuhgedaboudit” undertone.

We didn’t even care that he never came home again, that after he
conquered New York in the ’40s, he made precisely one visit back to
Hoboken. We didn’t even care how uncomfortable and anxious he appeared at
that single hometown tribute, over a decade ago, when his eagerness to
return to the swank Manhattan comforts across the river was written all
over his face. The city pushed him out of the nest and adored him, adores
him still, Stella Dallas-style, from afar. Of course he couldn’t stay. It
was enough that he took Hoboken with him, that it was there in that golden
voice, in the laconic stance that only fellow urban stoop-sitters
recognize.

We love him because now, even people whose only vision of Hoboken
comes from the seedy exteriors of “On the Waterfront,” who giggle at the
sound of a word as unlikely as Podunk or Katmandu, know something of who we
are because of Frank Sinatra. He may have been loud, aggressive and crass,
but he always commanded respect. And so, by extension, he brought us
respect. To a town so deeply steeped in religion, he was a sign from God,
proof that one could be poor and uneducated and downright low class and
still be touched by grace. He was a big Screw You to everyone who ever
dismissed the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, who thought that nothing important
ever happened on the other side of the Hudson.

Like an in absentia ruler, Frank reigned over the city and the lives
of those in it, the ultimate local boy made good. My friends and I used to dine occasionally at Rizzo’s — a homey Italian restaurant with Sinatra’s alleged Hoboken High diploma proudly displayed on the back wall. It wasn’t until years later that I found out Ol’ Blue Eyes
probably never graduated high school. But that piece of paper wasn’t some
tourist souvenir, some cheap tchotchke used to bring in patrons. It was there for
the locals, a long ago made-up symbol of pride. It wasn’t enough that Frank
was one of the greatest entertainers of the 20th century. On some
level, in a place where “vo-tech” is still a common educational route,
we also wanted him to be a high school grad.

Some time several years ago, they changed the name of the long,
winding street that snakes along the very edge of the city to Frank Sinatra
Drive. It offers the best and most beautiful view of New York
– the city that, physically, is a stone’s throw away, but emotionally is a world away from humble Hoboken, N.J. It’s only fitting that the last stretch of road before Manhattan should be named in honor of the man who most successfully crossed over to the other side. When you’re young and growing up in the shadow of that city, New York seems a kind of end of the rainbow, a place
where dreams come true. Sinatra — even to those of us who still think of “My
Way” as a Sid Vicious song — was the embodiment of that.

When I was a teenager, every Hoboken high school dance ended with
the same song. No matter how long and hard we’d been pogoing to Blondie or
slamming to the Ramones, at the end of the evening, everyone gathered in a
circle and formed one last joyous kick line as the deejay blasted “New
York, New York.” It may have been pure camp, but it also encapsulated our
feelings in a way that even Bruce or the Clash couldn’t. Who better than
Frank, the man from the mile-square city, could sing of little town blues,
of longing to stray? And who better than we, the spawn of the friends and
neighbors he’d left behind, the ones with the same big city dreams, could
dance by the light of the Empire State Building to the same ecstatic prayer?

In the Jocks’ sophomore year, during the first week of February 1987, the shy junior stood up in the school cafeteria and said: “My parents are going to be away next week. I’m going to have a big party. Everybody come.” Mary Ryan’s secret wish was to be popular, to have people notice her. In Glen Ridge people noticed you if you threw a party when your parents were away. But giving advance notice within the hearing of a hundred or so high school students could be dangerous.

The risk was heightened if the Jocks weren’t good friends with the hostess. “First of all, she was a girl none of us like,” Tara Timpanaro recalled. “If someone didn’t like you, they’re not going to have respect for your home.” Charles Figueroa, a wrestler and football player, wasn’t her close friend, but he liked Mary. “She smiled a lot and tried to be nice to you, but people wouldn’t accept it. She had a kind of weak way about her. She tried not to offend anybody, so people thought they could roll right over her.”

There were decorous nonalcoholic parties in Glen Ridge. There were rowdy alcoholic parties. And there were parties that turned violent. Before Tara transferred to Glen Ridge, she “had known for years that Glen Ridge was a major party town. Somebody is always having a party. I can remember my father telling me a guy jumped through a bay window during a party.”

Fights often broke out at parties. But what got the Jocks really mad was being barred from a party. One of the proudest moments for the ’89 Jock clique — a moment that was celebrated in their senior yearbook — was the time they beat up older boys on the lawn of a host’s house in Glen Ridge. The reason for the fight: The boys who lived in the house didn’t want the Jocks at their party. Indeed, earlier in their sophomore year, on October 11, 1986, Kyle and Kevin were reported to the police when they crashed a party, refused to leave, and “had to be forcibly removed.”

Parties could turn ugly when the adolescent partygoers decided they would use the party as a vehicle to hurt, one way or another, the party-giver, who in almost every case was a young woman. These scenes became known among the youth of Glen Ridge as “revenge” parties. The specific reason for the punishment seemed less important than the opportunity to hurt the girl. “If you’re a girl and they don’t respect you and they don’t like you, forget it,” said one of Chris Archer’s wrestling teammates. This wrestler and other Jocks described what had happened to one of the Jocks’ Little Mothers when she drank too much at a party. Like a bag of garbage, the girl was dumped in a closet as the party wound down; the guys locked the closet door and left her confined in the dark to gag on her vomit. Again, the Jocks noted the incident in the yearbook as one of the bright moments of their school years.

Kids who weren’t in the cafeteria when Mary Ryan issued her invitation heard about it soon enough, and word traveled swiftly to students in other communities. February was the wrestling season, and high school wrestlers for miles around were told of the impending party. That’s how it worked. Wrestlers told wrestlers; cheerleaders told cheerleaders in other towns. Why so much excitement? Parties with parents absent were not uncommon. But this one had the makings of something special. For Glen Ridge kids, the big attraction was that Mary Ryan, a tuition student, lived just across the town border in East Orange. They thought that if the cops busted the party, the guys’ parents were less likely to find out. “When you got out of Glen Ridge, you go crazy,” one of the athletes recalled. “There are no neighbors to stop you or tell your mother.”

The other inducement was Mary’s passivity. She was not known as a strong-willed kid, she didn’t have many friends to protect her, and her family was not friends with the families of the Jocks. “If Mary said ‘no,’ who’d listen to her?” Charlie Figueroa said. “She didn’t have anybody who’d fight for her.”

Along with everything else, the timing was perfect. The date set for the party was Saturday, February 14, 1987, Valentine’s Day. That Saturday also fell in the middle of a three-day weekend, Monday being Washington’s Birthday. “It was, like, a party that could go on forever,” one Ridger said.

Instead of on Saturday, the party began spontaneously on Friday, February 13. By sundown every parking space for three blocks around the Ryans’ house was taken. There were kids from Caldwell, Montclair, Bloomfield and Verona. From private schools and public schools, from middle school and high school. There were older guys who had graduated three or four years ago. There were even kids from East Side High School in Newark. There were Jocks and Guidos and Giggers, cheerleaders and majorettes, and even a few “band fags.” There were girls who looked too young to get into a movie alone and some who seemed old enough to be married and have kids. There were kids who brought bottles, and kids who lugged cases of beer on their shoulders, and some who rolled kegs up the front steps into the kitchen.

They all converged on a narrow three-story white shingle house with a semifinished basement and a small balcony facing a nearby park. The location was perfect for a nonstop party. There were only a few other houses on the block, and they all adjoined the park. You could make as much noise as you wanted with little likelihood of interference.

The kids who got there early made for the upstairs rooms. It was the only place where you could hear yourself talk. The ones who arrived by 10 or 11 o’clock wedged themselves into the kitchen or basement. Sixty or seventy kids jammed together, drinking, smoking, and screaming. Mary Ryan had given up asking who the kids were and where they came from. Despite all the kids and booze, there was relatively little damage on Friday night. One guy did take out all the crystal glasses and pitchers in the kitchen cabinets, line them up on the table, and fling them, one after the other, against the wall. But that happened at a lot of parties. It was nothing to get excited about.

John Maher, a student who later would be indicted on a charge of conspiracy in the Leslie Faber case, was working on Friday night. “My friends were saying it was a great party, the best,” he would say later. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. So I made sure I was there Saturday.”

Saturday night, February 14, Valentine’s Day. More kids. More booze. There were so many bodies in Mary Ryan’s house, so many kids jammed into a small smoky space, that they had to open all the windows and the doors. With all the runs to the fridge, the beer couldn’t be kept cold. So they gave up on the fridge, cleared everything out, and left the door hanging open.

They started taking the furniture apart. Within an hour the legs had been broken off everything that was standing — coffee tables, kitchen chairs and table, side tables. A couple of guys got the idea of using a leg from the kitchen table as a battering ram. One-two-three — charge. The leg smashed through the plasterboard, leaving a hole the size of a saucer. Back up and start all over. The hold got bigger and bigger, maybe two, three feet in diameter. Okay, let’s start on the other wall.

Then some people decided that the amputated remains of the furniture were cluttering up the place. In five minutes every tabletop and chair seat had been heaved into the backyard.

One wall was covered floor to ceiling with a bamboo stand to hold decorative objects. The stand had been attached to the wall. “Betcha can’t break that in half,” one Jock challenged another. As if he were working out in the school exercise room, the other Jock stood with his back to the bamboo, his arms raised behind his shoulders. A deep breath and pull. The entire bamboo stand, with everything that rested on it, came crashing to the floor. A few minutes later some guys were breaking pieces of the bamboo over their heads and using them as swords in make-believe duels.

One guy stood in front of the fish tank. Thinking. Then he went into the kitchen and returned with a container of Comet detergent. He emptied it into the tank. A half-hour later another kid saw the fish floating dead in the water. He and a friend carried the tank to the door and emptied its contents into the snow.

Mary Ryan would wave her hand in a futile plea to halt the destruction. But one of the girls would take her by the shoulder and guide her out of the room. “We’ll help you clean up later,” she’d tell her.

Sunday night, February 15, 1987. It seemed as if the whole world under the age of thirty had turned up for the third act at Mary Ryan’s house. Among the new notables were the wrestlers from Glen Ridge. They had been forced to miss the Saturday-night festivities because they were competing in a match. Rock-solid and brimming with energy, they could always be counted on to liven up a party.

It was a true gathering of the clan: Richie Corcoran and Kyle and Kevin; Peter Quigley, his companion, Tara, and Peter’s older brother, Sean; Chris and Paul Archer. They had no problem finding the house. “You could hear the noise from like a mile away,” said one Glen Ridge wrestler. “When you got on the street, it was amazing. It was so cold out and snow was on the ground and there were dozens of kids standing outside. One of the kids I recognized was holding a neon tube over his head and then he smashed it right on his skull. All the lights were on in the house, and you could see people in every window. As I was walking in, part of the frame over the door was hanging down and I almost ran into it.

“There were like a million people in there, all of them drunk. And right away I saw all the wrestlers from the school and I know they can get a little crazy at a party, and I thought, Whew, there’s gonna be all sorts of shit tonight. I kept thinking, I’m walking into a movie.”

Charlie Terranova, one of the Glen Ridge Giggers, stayed about fifteen minutes. “I went into this place and the things I saw I could not believe. I once worked for a construction company, and there were rooms in this house that looked like a construction crew had gone in there with the crowbars and the pikes and just destroyed the place. I just left. I couldn’t stand it.”

Some kids may have experienced a letdown when they surveyed the wreckage on the first floor. Really, what was left for them to do? The people who had been there the first two nights seemed to have exhausted all the possibilities. But, on reflection, it was apparent that they hadn’t. There were two upstairs floors and a basement, and that left lots of unfinished work.

Chris Archer took the basement. People who were there remembered him rushing down the stairs with a can of spray paint in his hand and spraying every wall with painted graffiti. Another Jock, partygoers recalled, charged upstairs, followed by a pack of football players and wrestlers. First thing they did was dismantle Mary’s parents’ bed. One kid had the idea of setting the mattress on fire, but another thought that was a stupid idea since it was a waterbed. Let’s puncture it, one guy suggested, and start a flood. Some guys began stabbing it with a screwdriver and a kitchen knife.

Other kids carried the bed frame to the top of the landing and, using it as a makeshift toboggan, tried to slide down the stairs. But the frame was too wide to make for a level ride. The kids smashed all the balusters that held up the stair rail. Now there was enough room. The guys sat on the frame, their legs straddling the sides, and slid down the slope.

Mary Ryan had retreated upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, where she sat on the floor with another girl and Charlie Figueroa. They heard a roar coming from downstairs and rushed to the door; they saw a bunch of kids charging up the stairs as the boys were sliding down the bed frame. The boys leaped over the mattress and burst in to the Ryans’ bedroom. There, they pulled open the dresser, flinging the underwear, blouses, and other clothing on the floor.

Holding their findings over their heads, they marched down the stairs. “Hey, wait a second,” Mary shouted, fear in her voice. But who was listening? They put up on the mantelpiece all the personal possessions they had taken from the Ryans’ bedroom dresser. Mary sank down in a corner of the room, her knees up against her chest. “She looked to me like she was getting smaller and smaller, like she wanted to disappear,” Charlie said.

Now dozens of kids formed a row, and began snake dancing past the mantel, as though they were performing a religious ritual before an altar. Someone had come up with the perfect description for what was going on. And the snake dancers began to chant it, as they weaved through the room: Ryan’s Wreck. Ryan’s Wreck. Ryan’s Wreck.

It must have got through to Mary that the party was out of control. This had to stop. It wasn’t only her life that was being trashed; it was her parents’ life, too.

Now she saw a boy pick up her cat by the back of the neck, hanging him high for the crowd to see, and then push him into the microwave. She heard one terrible yowl, smelled burning fur. She screamed: “Stop, you’ve got to stop.” Somebody pulled the cat out, but few people were listening to Mary Ryan.

Mary ran up the stairs, rushed into a room, and flung open the window. She stepped outside onto the balcony. It was not very high, ten feet or so above the ground, but high enough so she could hurt herself if she fell. She leaned against the rail of the balcony and peered down through the darkness at the mob of teenagers who had gathered on the snow-covered incline. “Oh, my God, my house, my house,” she screamed. “If you don’t stop, I’ll jump.”

Alarmed, one girl urged her, “Come on, come back in, Mary. Everything’s okay. We’ll go home.” But instantly the sound of her voice was drowned out by dozens of kids chanting: Jump. Jump. Jump. Jump.

Charlie Figueroa, standing in Mary’s bedroom, decided that all this had to stop. He knew that what he was about to do would break the first rule of Jock solidarity — never squeal. Charlie called the police anyway.

At about 11:15 Officers Chwal and Marinelli, patrolling in East Orange police car number 23, got a radio message: “Loud party in progress. Proceed to the scene.” A second police car was also dispatched. When the police got there, kids were still standing beneath the balcony urging Mary Ryan to jump. But they weren’t there for long. As soon as they saw the two flashing reds wheeling around the corner, the kids scattered.

The party was over. “Ryan’s Wreck” had now passed into the folklore of Glen Ridge High School.

East Orange has a lot more crime than Glen Ridge. The East Orange cops weren’t going to spend time chasing a hundred or so kids through the brambles of a park at midnight. But even these experienced cops were impressed by what they found in Mary Ryan’s house and recorded in their report: “The reporting officers noticed the front door wide open and the downstairs in shambles … Further investigation showed the entire residence, three floors, in shambles.”

The two officers called the crime “malicious mischief” and described the “weapon” used to commit the crime as “physical force.” The police detained eleven juveniles, all from Glen Ridge or Glen Ridge High School. These included a boy who would be selected as one of the captains of next year’s football team and another football player, Peter Quigley’s older brother, Sean, who had already completed his football career at the high school. Also held for questioning was James “Tucker” Litvany, a Class of ’89 football player, who would be later cited as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Leslie Faber case.

These youngsters were questioned briefly, their parents were informed and that was the end of that. None of them was charged with a crime. None of them was punished or reprimanded by Glen Ridge High; none of them lost his athletic privileges or eligibility.

Mary never came back to Glen Ridge High. Her parents moved out of their house, and she was reportedly sent to live in another part of the state. A sophomore recalled that one of his teachers heard about the party and briefly discussed it in class: “The kids commented on how drunk people were, how they were breaking things, but how Mary deserved it. Nobody said they were sorry. Nobody offered to clean up the place. And nobody wanted to pay for the damage.”

Two years later the memory of that party remained fresh in the minds of the Jocks and the Jockettes of the Class of ’89. In a section of their yearbook, where each student listed personal highlights, many of them cited their participation in “Ryan’s Wreck” as an outstanding event of the past four years. “It just showed what can happen to a girl when we didn’t like her,” one Jock would recall. John Maher, another Class of ’89 football player, would say years later, “That’s a party that everybody still talks about.”

For that nucleus of sophomore Jocks, this was not a formal initiation rite on the order of their first high school football game. But it was a benchmark experience on their high school years. There had been destructive parties before in Glen Ridge, and there would be others later. But it was under the tutelage of upperclassmen — older, admired football players and wrestlers — that they learned at Mary Ryan’s party how much they could get away with. They also learned that the girls who attached themselves to the Jocks could be as pitiless as they were.

The primary lesson was that a bunch of high school kids could raise hell and inflict tremendous pain without being penalized at home or in school. But the party also taught a more advanced lesson. To one father whose daughter was in the Class of ’89, the boys who participated most enthusiastically at the party behaved as if they were gaining more legitimacy and authority as a group each time they victimized a woman. “If I think back about that period, I can see the group getting stronger, closer, every time they got together and humiliated a girl,” he said. “What they enjoyed in common wasn’t football. This was their shared experience. For them, this was what being a man among men was. My daughter would come home with stories — I’d just shake my head and wonder if they thought a girl was human.”

They have mousy hair, waning in the damaged contortions of old permanents. They have extremely pale skin and wear makeup in unnatural shades of natural brown. They have huge breasts and wear oversized T-shirts bearing cartoon slogans of commercialized vulgarity, along the lines of “I wet myself on the Big Dick waterslide” or “Spring breakers do it from behind with beer.” Their splayed feet, encased in white low-top sneakers, widen like a rubbery V under their large, quivering white thighs. From some matronly gene, they have inherited large buttocks in the shape of wide, flat cubes, but this does not prevent them from wearing extremely short shorts and halter tops that betray thick handfuls of misplaced flesh, nor does it prevent their hunger for mounds of whipped oil, dripping meat and buttery dough.

There is willfulness in their sticky chips of eye. First they want to consume anything they can eat, smoke or drink, then they want raunchy sex with evasive young black men, then television. They speak the loud ranting patois of the confessional talk-show addict, filled with aggressive slang, trumpeting out shameful viewpoints as a badge of raw individualism. Unfortunate tattoos are often involved — greenish-black smears across the ankles and shoulderblades of A Flower or A Design, not reflecting any personal choice. They stride with their massive shoulders jabbing through the air, a walk imitating the rolling threat-gait of the young black men they so crave. Their one concession to femininity is their curly, shellacked claws.

I know where these girls go in the summertime — New Jersey. They are all at Action Park, a Six Flags attraction, thousands and thousands of them.

We sighted them first in the parking lot. All of them were wearing large shorts and string bikini tops that were unable to fully support their enormous young breasts. Their faces were mean and hungry. We shielded the eyes of the children and walked among the barking tribes of white women to the park gates.

I was visiting this amusement park at the behest of a dear friend of mine, who was shuddering his way through a major family obligation that nearly caused his total breakdown within the first hour. We were the day’s custodians of his 12- and 17-year-old cousins. The day proved to be primarily composed of hours and hours of standing like cattle or Auschwitz prisoners in endless lines sliced into shuffling “S” curves by gates of steel, a veritable petri dish of malformed Americans steeped in a terrible Way.

Most straight men on the East Coast are homophobic, and thus shy away from the gyms in New York and the surrounding boroughs. Therefore, most East Coast musclemen are gay, but occasionally you will see a straight muscleman. These are generally the products of either prisons or powerlifting gyms — the latter being the ugly brute brother of the fancier gay gyms, which have penthouse spas and racquet sports and step aerobics on springy, bleached wood dance floors. Powerlifters only want size and strength, not classic male gladiator beauty, and their gyms are generally basement-level boxes of concrete and indoor-outdoor carpeting, with brutish strength tools of iron reminiscent of a slave dungeon for medieval blacksmiths.

Powerlifters want hugeness to be able to lift more and destroy bigger things and people, as opposed to wanting an even suntan all over and oiled uniform striations in their vanity muscle like falling ribbons of smooth cake batter. Powerlifters have hair like steel wool and frightful steroid acne like painful superballs embedded all over their rocky, fanning backs. Their women are the thinner counterpoints of the larger white women. They all have eyes that are too bright from a self-loathing that peels through their being like a constant personal fire drill — an intolerable sonic noise that insists, “Get out! Get out! Get out!” to their personalities. Those personalities are always looking for somewhere else to go, and they find a big garage where they can park them temporarily in the powerlifters, who only require that the girls mate with them and smell like shampoo.

Spending six hours in close proximity with these people is an extremely equalizing experience. No matter what you think about or what you want to do in the world, you are going to stand in the line like everyone else and shuffle among paper cups and dismembered hot dog parts for 45 minutes. Forty-five painful minutes of heat and waiting, all for two painful minutes in which you are strapped into a small rolling box and whipped about in hellish rattling noise and profound bodily discomfort. The raucous laughter one hears on roller coasters is the dysfunctional relationship between mind and body, the body saying, “Danger! Cut it out!” while the mind says, “Shut up and suffer, bitch. I call the shots.”

It costs hundreds of dollars for a small family to spend a day at Action Park. These are hundreds of dollars that could have been spent on dental hygiene or courses in French, but these are seekers of the most immediate pleasure available, in food, love and leisure. They seize the moment, tear off the plastic wrapping, and eat it all in three large bites.

As I wandered about I found myself imagining a slightly more dangerous park, one in which the chances that funlovers would incur severe physical injury or death were considerably higher. Instead of Bumper Cars, this park would feature exciting attractions like a 50-chamber handgun with one bullet. The barrel would be placed next to the head of the grinning participant and a sullen carnie would pull the trigger. The player would have a one in 50 chance of death. If he survived, his family would return home with an enormous stuffed likeness of Tweety Bird made of yellow fun fur and a roll of coupons.

This day is coming. The American Self is low and shoddy, with a morality as bendable, plastic and hollow as a drinking straw, and it contains an inherent nihilistic self-hatred that will eventually demand more actual life-threatening peril in its activity theme parks.

Firetrap ’97! Sink or Swim! Razor Ski! Without doubt, by the year 2000 each park will have its own Happi Morgue.

Bodies will be transported in foam snap-tab containers to the crematorium of the family’s choice. Free sunvisors will be given to the female relatives of the recently deceased, as they stand and watch the MTV monitor over the disposable coffin, fruit chews churning in their open mouths.

Tonight, they will eat barbeque. Tomorrow, the world.