Nucci Reyo and New Jerusalem’s Second Great Awakening

One night in maybe 2005 I piled into a colicky hooptie in search of a house party that was being held somewhere near the expired electric car line in Long Branch, NJ. Unlike my usual haunts, this shore city is not a felled industrial-commercial center but a faded resort wonderland for the monocled laudanum fiends of the Gilded Age. The broad shabby avenues stay freckled with harbingers of a sizzling new gentrification stirring in the uppermost part of the old South. Pipsqueak fences slung around peacetime craters bear fliers foretelling automated skypads and gleaming mausoleums for the delicate arts. Halogen coils framing eurotrash boutiques and the pastel sunbursts of restored hotels compete with neon signage toasting bulletproof partitioned takeout joints, conjoined pool hall-pawnshop predicaments, and restless Quisqueyana beauty salons.