Tom De HAven's Jersey Luck

reviewed Patrick J. Lambe

I was going through the stacks at Brookdale Community College looking for a history book called Jersey something or other. I had just completed a report on New Jersey for a class and had to come up with one more quote to reach the minimum quote allotment. I was looking for something short, a sentence or two that I could squeeze in at the bottom of page three, (the only page with enough space to fit the required quote—this was before computers were common and there was no way I was going to re-type even one page on an electric typewriter). I didn’t really care if the quote was relevant, just as long as it fit.

I came across a book called Jersey Luck by Tom de Haven. It must have been mistakenly shelved in the history section of the library. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first exposure to any type of noir writing. I picked it up along with the book I was looking for and walked back to one of the library desks. I copied the required quote, along with the copyright information etc, into my notebook then popped open Jersey Luck.

I got about halfway through before the library closed. It was too late to check it out, so I resolved to come back at a later date to finish it. By the time I got back, the book—which I had assumed would be re-shelved into its proper area—was gone. I checked back every time I returned to the library, but it was nowhere to be found. Perhaps it had been re-shelved into a more obscure section of the library, or maybe someone did what I should have done and grabbed it for my own, because it’s one hell of a good book.

Fortunately Al Gore invented the internet, allowing me to order the now out-of-print book online from a used bookstore nearly eighteen years later.

Jacky Peek, working in a dead-end job, shooting Photostats and putting on weight, is having a mid-life crisis at the age of 20. His feelings about his life can be pretty much summed up by his relationship with his father. ‘We were pretty fond of each other, but it was nothing special.’ He’s tired of his middle-class suburban New Jersey lifestyle, and sees a way out when he meets Catherine on a trip visiting a friend in Atlantic City.

It’s love at first sight when Jacky witnesses her picking up a knife off a display stand and slitting open the shirt of the guy who is harassing her. She then steals the knife as she is being questioned by the store detective.

He runs into her again, when she is stealing a ring from the boardwalk tourist store his friend’s older brother is running. She tells him about her plan to rob a bank in Jersey City that she’s working at. He’s enthusiastic at first but has his doubts about doing a bank job. Catherine begins to have doubts about him when he panics after leaving a magazine in a car they have stolen together.

The novel jumps ahead a year and we see Jacky enjoying his new life in Jersey City, hanging out with lesbian delivery women, playing stolen video games with his ex black panther/sometime thief friend Malcolm, smoking pot with his partner Stag and his hooker girlfriend Florence. He’s moved into the type of neighborhood where the landlord has a crew of carpenters take out the windows and doors of his apartments when the rent is late.

Jacky and Stag have a job where they deliver bundles of newspapers at night. They make the bulk of their money dropping off ‘specials’ along their route for Saul Weitz (Catherine’s Uncle) and his Korean assistant Yolk.; The ‘specials’ consist of drugs, counterfeit money, pirated Encyclopedias from Hong Kong, and dead cats as a warning to some Haitian drug dealers that are moving in on Saul’s territory.

Jacky’s one regret is that he didn’t help rob the bank with Catherine. She did it with one of his friends, Tommy Squittieri—a reporter for the Jersey Journal—and they disappeared; though it’s rumored that Tommy’s back in town, looking to turn himself in.

Jacky’s life changes a second time when he refuses to drop off a gun to Anita ‘Neestie’ Fortunato, described by her best friend Camille as ‘not a full-fledged airhead, but she’s got a lot of space’. He becomes obsessed with Anita and earns the enmity of her tollbooth collector husband Anthony—the reason she was trying to buy a gun in the first place.

The book is full of offbeat interesting characters. Steve is a ‘faded hippy, and a recent Nazi convert who had a wife and a bunch of kids with funny names like Godzilla and Frodo’. Stampman’s mail carrier sack is full of booty pilfered from the main post office, where he worked, sorting. He’s ‘always telling you about new (UFO) sightings someplace in the world, and about aliens known collectively as the Men in Black. He said often that his life’s dream was to be whisked off in a UFO, and I believed him.’ He buys his cigarettes, and anything else he can purchase, with stamps.

Neestie fixes Jacky up her best friend, Camille, trying to get him to leave her alone. Camille works at a travel agency. She likes to travel but she’s too chunky to be a stew, ‘not fat, just a little chunky’. She writes poetry, ‘heavy stuff about circuses and shadowy streets’. She’s ‘done more stuff than most girls. Sexy stuff I’m talking about. Tons more than Anita, I’m sure. But you know something? I’ve never gone grocery shopping with a guy. Now that would be kinky.’

There are some hilarious situations, including a showdown between Anthony and Jacky at a nudist colony. They are thrown out by the aging nudist because ‘fighting is a non-nudist behavior, you assholes! You’re setting a bad example’. Nesstie tells Jacky ‘you made me feel naked there, you know. And you’re only supposed to feel nude.’ Jersey Luck reminds me somewhat of Jason Star’s Tough Luck. They both feature typical young men who chose some kind of criminal activity to extricate them from the boring, directionless life they are leading, oblivious to the consequences that should be apparent to men with a little more experience. Mickey from Tough Luck and Jacky from Jersey Luck are at opposite ends of the struggle though, with Mickey trying to save money and go to college, while Jacky has turned his back on the middle-class values of his upbringing, giving up college for a half-assed street life. Of course, it doesn’t turn out right for either of them. If it did, it wouldn’t be noir.

De Haven’s descriptions of Atlantic City and Jersey City in the late seventies are accurate and nostalgic, for me at least, because both cities have changed considerably in twenty-five years. Jersey Luck was written right after New Jersey legalized gambling and the novel catches some of the early energy and moral ambivalence that gripped Atlantic City in the last couple of years leading up to 1980. Jersey City in the seventies was a grittier city than it is now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a cesspool, but one with islands of gentrification that have eliminated much of the world depicted in Jersey Luck.

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Copyright © 2004 Patrick J. Lambe

Read an extract from Patrick Lambe's Carlisle's Marker

PATRICK J. LAMBE lives in the wonderfully corrupt state of New Jersey where he works as a telephone technician and writes crime fiction. He is also an artist whose work has appeared in numerous art shows. He just had an innovative idea: if you can have a casting couch for the movies, why not books? Like most of his innovative ideas he’ll probably forget about this one when he sobers up.
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