Amazon bought my hometown. Another Amazonification of an American town, not headline news, not news at all at this rate. A proposed three-million square-foot fulfillment center on part of the 250 acre property that makes up the old horse race track, my town’s one and only historical landmark. “America’s Favorite Playground”, as it was once dubbed, the Atlantic City Race Course was host to thousands of thoroughbreds and hundreds of thousands of sports betters. A 1966 postcard I found on eBay describes the race track “most picturesque”. Mays Landing, my hometown about 20 miles away from the actual Atlantic City, serves as a perfect locale for Amazon’s next fulfillment center, according to the mayor, being right off the nearest interstate and local airport. The fulfillment center will be a place that fulfills Amazon orders, centrally, I assume, which I also assume means jobs. There are arguments brewing against this fulfillment center, mostly about traffic disruption, but most are delighted at the prospect of wealth returning to an impoverished town. This is according to my town’s lively Facebook group—“What is happening in Mays Landing?”—that I peek into every now and then, just to see what’s up.
No one is expected to keep up with the Atlantic City Race Course. No one is expected to even know of its existence. I only know because I grew up across the street from it.
Some facts most would probably not know about the Atlantic City Race Course. Grace Kelly’s father, a renowned Philadelphian and Olympic rower, founded the race track in 1946 to much success, and Grace was frequently attending races with the Prince of Monaco on her arm. Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope were once both shareholders. Alfred Hitchcock filmed a movie on property (not a well known one but I have just added it to my Letterboxd watch list). In August 1969, the track hosted the Atlantic City Pop Festival, a 3-day music festival headlined by Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and B.B. King, among a lineup of dozens. Over 100,000 people attended. The Coachella before Coachella. This happened exactly two weeks before Woodstock, so it was also the Woodstock before Woodstock. Joni Mitchell! Mama Cass! Little Richard! Hippies bare-naked in the woods, in my town, across the street!! It’s all so cool and so remarkably unknown to history.
The early 1980s were the beginning of the end for the ill-fated racetrack, as Donald Trump and the casino industry ushered in a new era for the area that took patrons away from the thrills of the thoroughbred to place bets elsewhere. Its last race took off in 1998, more or less, and the facility continued on as a simulcast betting venue for the remaining seventeen years of its life, before shutting down its doors for good in 2015. Its permanent closure was “due to continuous business decline in the industry, the current regional economic climate and the absence of alternative revenue opportunities”. Years leading up to the recently announced Amazon conquest, the racetrack’s property has hosted township flea markets, innocent teenage vandalisms, construction expos, a questionable circus group inconspicuously passing through town, innocent teenage drug deals, probably, but it has mostly stayed untouched as it rapidly decayed to time. This new proposition from Amazon, this “exciting prospect” as they are campaigning, happens more often than not in American towns. I cannot say that I oppose the plans, the job opportunities, the wealth, the truck traffic, the noise, the capitalism. It is objectively good for any town to get jobs when in a desperate state, trapped in a casino economy slowly folding onto itself (Trump’s Atlantic City was always a looming harbinger for Trump’s America). As the Trump Taj Mahal (real casino name) and the Trump’s Castle (also real casino name) went bankrupt whilst bordering states started to relax their own gambling laws, allowing for more casinos to populate outside of Atlantic City’s gambling epicenter, the local economy quickly tanked. When I visit my home, which is not very often, the local billboards I will pass are either for online sports gambling, car accident litigation, or mile counters to the nearest funeral home (which way, South Jersey man?). The current mayor of my hometown calls the proposed Amazon warehouse a “shot in the arm for the area” which to me is suggestive of an ailing, junky-ridden hamlet village eager for its next fix. A nice, patronizing public statement will surely help the mayor’s campaign to be Amazon’s next trusty regional manager, if he is interested, I am sure.
Today at the Atlantic City Race Course, the grass is overgrown, the horse stables barely visible between the weeds and thorns and abandoned vehicles left over the years. Every single window of the main grandstand’s fixture has a broken lesion, from a stone, or a brick, or anything that could be thrown at it from a distance. It’s hard to ignore the massively large “PITA” graffiti atop the grandstand’s tower, nestled between two graffitied cocks and a sweet graffitied “Bre + Ethan” arborglyph tucked next to the left cock. Centered on the tower’s brick wall is the racetrack’s old emblem, “Atlantic City” written in circular text, except letters are rotated or dangling or missing so from far away it looks more like “Atlantis”—the irony isn’t lost on me. It is the tallest structure in a twenty mile radius, overlooking the Pine Barrens, and my childhood home.
The main grandstand building is alive but dead, its tower adorning a blinking red light as if it was on a ventilator. I suppose it should not have to stop until the plug is pulled, that it has a right to keep blinking. I’m reminded of news I read recently, a Saudi prince, nicknamed “The Sleeping Prince”, who passed away after being in a coma for twenty years from a car accident. His family kept him in an induced coma, confident in his return to full health and consciousness. In 2019, he moved a couple of fingers and they posted a video of it on Instagram. But he never woke up. I am not sure if his story is one of hope or one of tragic denial, or both, or neither. The article showed a picture of him, laying there in his intubation, looking frozen and beautiful. No broken lesions, no graffiti, no PITA. I feel for his mother, his father, those that didn’t give up on him. I question my own family, if they would give up on me. I think about what else they’ve given up on.
*
My partner Anthony and I get to see Atlantic City Race Course during our Fourth of July visit to my mother and stepfather. Passing the course grounds as we approach my street, I recall the time my older sister took me to throw a rock at one of the windows, in the middle of the night, as bored sisters come to do. We found one in our three-acre backyard, a once idyllic horse pasture where our childhood gelding, Max, spent his days munching on the zoysia grass and dragging sanddust with his hooves. We located a rock from under one of the planks in his stable and ran across the street upon the night’s first wail of our stepfather’s snoring. Our attempts failed several feet short, and by the fifth try I told her I needed to use the bathroom. She called me a loser and we walked back home. I really was not a loser and I genuinely wanted to break glass. I wanted to touch the building. I wanted to be a cock graffitied on the wall.
Snapping out of thinking about graffitied cocks, Anthony and I pull into my childhood home’s stoned driveway. I notice the overgrown, cacophonic weeds popping out between the stones, making the driveway appear a part of the larger, also overgrown, front lawn, so it is just one massive overgrown strip of land in front of the house, with a slight trail of tire tracks, not unlike the racetrack across the street. In the center of the overgrown yard, camouflaged in the grass, stands a sun-faded Bernie 2020 sign. Our Camry is greeted by a colony, or perhaps an entire civilization, of cats. Cats and kittens and old matriarchals and an adopted skunk have seemingly infested my yard. We park our car at the very edge of the driveway, near the road, having the foresight to avoid accidentally running over a kitten on our way out.
I come to find out that my stepfather, a retired Atlantic City casino neon sign bender, has let a local cat colony find refuge in the yard. They sleep and poop on the backyard deck, once a freshly wooden planked pavilion of summer birthday parties, barbecues and Saturday morning sunbathing. I remember during the first week with the deck, still without railings, southern New Jersey had its biggest meteor shower in recent history. Me, my sister, her best friend and my plush cat named Meow slept outside in the summer heat with our sleeping bags laid out in a row on the raw-sawn planks. Watching the stars fall down on our yard, on our horse, on our pillows, on our cheeks. Morning glories would eventually find their way onto the deck, enveloping its wooden rails in a beautiful array of natural color and warmth. An umbrella table, chairs with the cushions you see in JC-Penney catalogues, our west highland terrier suntanning, lambchop spread eagle style, on the edge of the steps. Birthday parties with Carvel ice cream cake, summer dinners with bowls of cut pineapple, so many hummingbirds. A backyard deck can be American excellence if you let it. But no, this deck once baptized with meteoric blessings was now covered in stale and soggy cat shit and dry food.
We take cover inside the house for a couple hours, away from the overwhelming disarray of the yard. Later returning to the back part of the property, my stepfather has tasked Anthony with assembling a plastic picnic table that he and my mother got on sale at Sam’s Club for $119.99. He lost the memo during the purchase that assembly was required. As Anthony screws and hammers and clanks with far more effort than a Sam’s Club picnic table is worth, I dive into deep inspection on this peculiarly disrupting bamboo forest that appears to have overgrown at laughable intensity in the backyard. It’s spreading at demonic speed into the former horse pasture and the white oak fence my father had built for my mother that protected it. A housewarming gift from when they first moved in, an artifact of times before the divorce. Once two identical fenced fields, perfect squares with perfectly cut green grass for grazing, and for my mother to take long, admiring gazes out of the kitchen sink window. In between these two fields, the freshly wooden stable, where my sister would hide paraphernalia, or where, at night, I would pick ticks off my horse Max with fervent delirium, as if he wasn’t already perfect, as if a good night’s sleep depended on a meticulous undoing of parasites. Given Max had passed last February, he was safe from this newfound parasitic bamboo now in front of me, looking to encumber every inch of his pasture. I see another colony of cats peeking their heads out of the bamboo like an arcade game waiting to be bopped. In the Jersey Pine Barrens, bamboo is an invasive species. And watching it, in horror, behave quite invasively—the bamboo forest’s next victim looks to be my neighbor’s yard. The dog that lives out back will probably need a mandatory evacuation alert in one month’s time. My stepfather had planted one tiny bamboo shoot five years ago, a gift from one of his weed dealers, he says, ignorant of its intrusive nature. Ignorant that its thick foliage would steal the sun from my mother’s plants. Among them, her roses, passed from mother to daughter, again and again. I can’t find them here now, in the yard. I think they have died. I recollect a Chinese proverb on bamboo, something like, “the higher you grow, the deeper you bow”. Something about bending with the wind, times they are a changing, I suppose, blah blah blah, my mind is reeling and I’m getting bit by mosquitos and the cats are rubbing up against my legs and we’ve lost track of the skunk and the Sam’s Club picnic table looks ugly and I can’t think clearly.
I see our hot tub, located in the middle of the property in a once idyllic wooden gazebo garnished in ivy and patinaed bistro string lights. A housewarming gift from when my stepfather first moved in, an artifact of times after the divorce. But it was more a gift for himself – a way to rehabilitate the everyday physical toll of bending neon, and standing nine hours a day while doing so. And when he wasn’t using it, I was slipping in with the gay boys from drama club. Now, it’s been converted into a McDonald’s ball pit. All I can do is hope and pray that it is for my nephews. The aboveground pool, nestled below our deck, has been converted, or perhaps desecrated, into a makeshift art gallery with my stepfather’s retirement doodles on the chlorine-stained walls, no chlorined water in sight. The doodles remind me of the race course graffiti, except the vandalism are lines from Bob Marley, Blues Traveler, Dylan. I read, “The man in me will hide sometimes to keep from bein’ seen / But that’s just because he doesn’t want to turn into some machine.” I read, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” I also read, “We gonna smoke’a de ganja / until the very end”.
I see the swingset in the far backabandoned, rusted and rotted, but I notice the swing itself still sways with a soft pulse, like the moving of a couple of fingers. I go to sit on the swing, wading through the bamboo and warding away the cats. Anthony pushes me for a bit, until the rust dirties my hands. I try to wipe it off on my clothes but the stain remains on my skin. I see the skunk again and quickly run for my life.
Discovering the weeded and birdnested gutters on the house, along with the rotting hardboard siding, were the last straw for me. The house reeks of neglect, in all its former glory, the glory of my childhood. It’s heartbreaking to see your childhood home dying in front of me, to see my family giving up on it.
We were only visiting for the day, and hugging my mother and stepfather goodbye, I settle for an out-of- sight, out-of-mind resolution to this exhausting consternation making me dizzy and out of sorts. We pull out of the driveway after fifteen paranoid minutes of diligently frisking our Camry in search of any kittens with a death wish. Anthony, a subscribed reader to the facial expressions I have been brazenly publishing all day long, speaks up with a stern honesty as I put the car in reverse.
You know this is not your house. You don’t live here anymore.
We drive past the Atlantic City Race Course for perhaps the final time before demolition, before Amazon. Over the steering wheel, between the ten and three of my hands, I take a final look at the horse stables, the grandstand, the cocks, the PITA, with somber admiration. I signal a wave, like an abandoned lover at an airport.
I know that, but I still care.
He replies:
Let it happen.
Keeping a peaceful silence on our drive back to the city, I think of the sleeping prince. I think of our life back in Brooklyn, our own pastures, our own kitchen sink window. My cat, whose personality is not unlike my dead horse’s. I think of what I need to add to my Amazon cart later. I think of my sister, her children and my nephews. I think of the calluses on my stepfather’s hands, from bending neon into the bright script of “Trump Taj Mahal,” again and again and again. And as I think of these things, before I even know it, I let it happen.
