Guidos, Parkways And The Smalltime
Growing up on Long Island is an experience that can only be understood by those who've gone through it. The concept can't be grasped any other way. Trouble is, people on Long Island are, for want of a better term, completely fucked up. When they descend into the depths of their fucked-up-dom, they'll tend to want to take you with them. And if, in adulthood, your western horizons continue to be bounded by the northbound lanes of the Cross Island Parkway, they'll do just that.
What made being a teenager so especially bizarre, as I learned after attending NYU (a community brimming with the excessively wealthy and tragically hip) was that while most kids - from Grosse Pointe to Tacoma, from Los Angeles and Bethesda - endure teenage years during which blondes have more fun, jocks score in every sense of the word, and Matheletes remain socially invisible (or Asian), the teenagers of many New York and New Jersey suburbs can, like myself, vouch for a wholly different experience.
It's more complex than you'd think.
