What I heard when I turned on the rock ’n’ roll station that afternoon was like nothing I had heard before-totally unlike what I guess I wanted and expected to hear: the rock ’n’ roll of the past, with its friendly or mock-menacing, infectious, always sexual, anthem-like, we’re-all-in-it-together lull. Now, that has an unfortunate sound to it, an evangelistic sound-as if I had heard the word of God out there on Route 24, as if, like those people who put bumper stickers that say, I FOUND IT! on their cars, I had been looking for something that was missing from my life, and suddenly here it was! On the car radio! I was driving along that stretch of road, at a point where it rises to a maximum elevation and then falls, giving a sudden vista of the gigantic suburban/industrial plain spreading toward the city, when I turned on the radio and my life was changed. In the summer of 1981, I was driving east on Route 24 near Short Hills, New Jersey, a stretch of new road that several years before had, at a stroke, transformed the leafy suburban terrain of my childhood into a futuristic landscape-that had, at a stroke, allowed for the rapid transit of many lanes of cars between the city, which lay strung across the horizon twenty miles distant, and the newly expanded, transfigured and futurized, mall. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
This article originally appeared in the January 1986 issue of Esquire.