A Love Note to NJ: The Moth Radio Hour

In this hour, stories from the Garden State—a tale of two cities, a sweet summer job, and meditations from the gas station. This episode is hosted by Moth Senior Director and resident Jersey girl, Jenifer Hixson. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: Sidhu Gangadharan becomes a gas-pumping professional. Seeking connection, Marisa Januzzi Thomas gets a summer gig. Christian Estevez feels caught between worlds. Podcast # 1003

• 0:13Speaker 00

  This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hixson. In this show, greetings from New Jersey, a state with attitude. Forget about it.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I grew up in New Jersey and returned as an adult because there is so much to love. The trees, the beaches, the people. Out in the rest of America, there seems to be some negative views of New Jersey. Our knee-jerk reaction might be, "We don't care what you think." But I want you to know, we are the Garden State and so much more than the stereotypes. So many legends have been raised here, from Sarah Vaughan to Frank Sinatra to Cool and the Gang, Celia Cruz, Queen Latifah, Whitney, Meryl Streep, Peter Dinklage, Thomas Edison people. Heck, even Albert Einstein spent 25 years here. And though you may associate her with New York City, technically speaking,

• 1:09Speaker 00

  the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey waters, so we claim her as a Jersey girl, too. In this hour, we'll hear stories by people who've called this great state home.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, which means we have a lot of cars, which means there are a lot of places to fill up your tank. It'll all make sense in a moment when you hear this first story, which was told in New Brunswick at the New Jersey State Theater. Here's Sidhu Gangadhar.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  In the spring of my freshman year of high school, I come home in the afternoon. I exchanged the usual pleasantries with my mom. You know, "How was school?" "It was fine." And then she informs me, "I got the job." Now, my first reaction was, "Hmm, that's great." My second reaction was, "What job?" I hadn't applied for a job. You see, my mom has strong convictions about a lot of things. So as the spring rolled around and I had no real prospects for cash flow, I'm sure that she developed some strong convictions about my lack of motivation

• 2:31Speaker 01

  and she decided to get me a job.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  And thus, I learned that I would be working at the gas station down the road from my house.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  When I arrived at the station, it was a bit intimidating. I was a 14-year-old boy about to work alongside grown men. And being underage, I soon learned that the job description was for me to walk around the gas station and pick up trash and also the poop of two frighteningly large guard dogs. But I didn't stay at that entry-level position for too long. My summer birthday happened, I got put on the books, and I got my official Texaco uniform with the dark gray pants, the light gray snap-button shirt with my name embroidered in red on the chest. And I moved up the ladder to be able to pump gas.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  I used to live in Parsippany, New Jersey, right up Route 287 and the intersection of Route 80. And now that I've moved away, I realize the rest of the country just does not understand how special New Jersey is.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Specifically, that in New Jersey, one cannot pump one's own gas, but you have to leave it up to trained professionals such as myself.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  The owner of the gas station was a guy named Doug, and he was the only adult who insisted that I call him by his first name, which I eventually did, although I found this intimidating. You know, Doug was definitely from tougher streets in Jersey than the ones I grew up in. He was a demanding boss. He didn't call Tower Texaco a gas station, it was a service station. We rented Hertz cars and Penske trucks, we towed for the state police, and we had a full-service garage. We did not have a convenience store. There were two vending machines, one for soda, the other for cigarettes. To build this conglomerate, Doug was very exacting, detail-oriented.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I remember he saw streaks on the glass that I had just cleaned to the front door of the office, and he said, "Listen, if you're not going to pay attention to the results, why even do the job?" And then he spent five minutes giving me instructions on how to fold, unfold, and refold the paper towel to get a streak-free window. Do you know how dirty a tow truck can get?

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I do. Because when I had to clean one, if it wasn't up to Doug's specifications, he would make me clean that entire truck again. One of our jobs was when tankers came in to deliver gas. We had to go up on top, pop the hatch, and look at how much gas was in the tank. Then we would climb down and take this 12-foot-long wooden ruler and put it in our tanks to measure how many inches of gas there were in there before and after the delivery. And that's how Doug knew that we weren't getting ripped off. Now, a lot of the guys thought that this level of attention to detail was ridiculous, and they complained, you know, that he was always riding us. But secretly, I liked it.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Doug had a reason behind everything he did, everything he made us do. And to me, those reasons made a lot of sense. When I started off, I was just working on weekends. And then I picked up some weeknight shifts and sometimes even after sports practice. In the summers, I worked enough shifts to often make overtime. And Doug promoted me, first the night manager, then weekend manager, where the guys I supervised, other than, you know, kids like myself, were adult drifters like Johnny Y. Johnny Y looked like he was 40, going on 60. He had a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up in the sleeve of his white t-shirt, and he rocked a blonde ducktail haircut that even then I thought looked like a caricature.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  These were guys who worked in gas stations drifting from one to the other across the state, their entire adult lives. But from them, I learned how to change all the fluids in a car. I learned how to repair, mount, and balance a tire. They taught me how to hook up a car to a tow truck and, as a bigger challenge, how to reverse a tow truck with a car hooked on. And they showed me how to break into a car with a Slim Jim and hotwire it.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  I felt like I was living in a Tom Waits song. I loved working with these guys. Now, over the five years that I worked there, I realized I was doing something right by Doug, because when I messed up, he still had my back. So one time, a car came in and asked for a fill. I don't remember the make, but it was like this old car where the gas tank is behind the rear license plate.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  And when the pump clicked off, the guy looks back at me, he says, "You didn't just put diesel in my car, did you?" I had just filled up a car that took regular leaded gas with diesel. Now, that could happen, because only the unleaded nozzle was that smaller gauge, but I knew I should have known better. I was mortified. The guy was pissed, understandably. But Doug came out, he said, "We'll take care of it." He talked the guy down off the ledge. I don't know what he did, actually, to take care of it, but I never heard about that one again.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  There was a lot of cash that came through there, so sometimes there were crimes. And I'm not talking about pinching a few quarters out of the soda machine to get a bomb pop from Charlie Chimes, the ice cream guy. There was a kid named Jimmy that worked there, and he was double-swiping credit cards and pocketing the cash. When Doug figured that one out, Jimmy was gone. A little while after the Jimmy incident, I got home from school one day, and my mom says, "We have to go to the station right now." And we pull up, Doug sees us, he comes out to the car. He says, "What happened to the money?" And I'm thinking, "What are you talking about?" I had worked the night before, I closed. I had tallied over $1,000 in cash.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Doug says, "The bank doesn't have it. What happened?" I say, "Doug, I took the tow truck to the bank like I usually do. I put the envelope in the night drop, like nothing weird." Now Doug's face is red at baseline, and right now it's getting even redder. And I'm thinking, "How am I going to pay this back? Am I going to go to jail?" Now my face is getting red. He says, "Are you sure you know what you did with that envelope?" "I'm 1,000% sure. I remember it well, because there were a lot of small bills that night. I could almost not close the envelope."

• 9:20Speaker 01

  I get home the next afternoon after sweating it out all day. My mom tells me that Doug had the bank take the night drop apart, and they found that big fat envelope stuck on the way down. I hadn't gotten fired, I wasn't going to be the next Jimmy. And even though I hadn't actually done anything wrong, I realized how worried I had gotten, that I had almost just jeopardized the confidence that Doug had in me.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Now Doug was the first person I knew with alcohol use disorder. And a couple of years after I worked there, he got sober, and he took me aside, gave me some advice. He was always giving me advice. He said, "Listen, you know, these people that you hang out with at a bar, that you pal around with, they're not your real friends. Remember that." And I was thinking, "Doug, I'm like 16."

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I look like I'm 13. I'm like 110 pounds and I've never been in a bar. But I'll take that under advisement.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  And you know, I have.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  A lot of the regulars were from the next town, the rich town next to mine. And there was one, Dr. J. He was a proud Harvard Medical School graduate. And the fact that we even knew that should tell you something. He would come in in his candy apple colored Porsche 911 with the gas tank, you know, right in front of the driver's side door. He would watch you like a hawk. Do not get any gas on my pants. Well, between the regulars and the highway traffic, I drew a lot of inferences based on who would tip you if you did the whole check the oil, wash the windshield thing?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Who would not pay you that extra 50 cents if you went over by accident? Who would even bother to say thank you?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  The spring of my senior year of high school, it was hot enough one day, I wasn't even wearing my Texaco shirt, just the T-shirt. And Dr. Red Porsche comes in, pulls up, he says, "Fill it." Then he stops. And he's looking at me and my T-shirt. This is a T-shirt that I'd gotten on a field trip up to Boston a couple of years earlier. Specifically, he's looking at that crimson lettering on the shirt.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  And he says, "Are you gonna go to Harvard?"

• 11:55Speaker 01

  And I said, "No."

• 12:00Speaker 01

  And this flicker came across his face, and I'll never forget it, you know, because he's looking at me, he's looking at my brown skin. I've got gasoline oil all over my pants. I'm wearing unlaced Tims. I've got black stuff underneath my fingernails that no amount of Gojo hand cleaner is ever gonna get out. And when I said no, this look of relief came over him. Like, "Yeah, phew, because Sidhu is not Harvard material." Now, it turned out that I did apply to college. And because Doug was the adult who knew me best, other than my parents, I had asked him to write me a letter of recommendation. You know, this is Doug, I'm pretty sure he never graduated high school. And when I asked him to write me this letter, he said, "Do I need to type it?"

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I said, "Doug, yeah, you should probably type this letter."

• 12:51Speaker 01

  But I like to think that what Doug wrote about me in that letter convinced somebody on the admissions committee at Dartmouth to take a chance on me.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And his letter, his letter made them take my application off the stack and stamp it, accept it. Now, in a distinguished five-year career at the gas station, I learned how to work hard. I learned how to pay attention to detail. Probably most importantly, I learned how never to stop being delighted by interacting with people across this crazy, beautiful spectrum of humanity. All skills I use now every day, taking care of people.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And now that I'm a full professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Sorry, Dr. J, but I guess I am that kind of material.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  I have realized that sometimes the most important and powerful people who could do just a little bit to help you out often choose not to do so. But if you're lucky enough to find someone like Doug, who trusts you as much as you trust them, who demands your best, who shows up to your father's memorial service because he still has your back 15 years after you did your last shift for him, you just might have found your greatest mentor.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  That was Dr. Sidhu Gangadharan. Way to drop the mic, Doc, so very New Jersey. Oh, really? So you doubt us? Boom, Harvard Medical School professor. Way to do it. Sidhu is the chief of the Division of Thoracic Surgery and Interventional Pulmonology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Mass. And as you heard, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, where he says the students are talented and caring people and would never dream of giving a gas station attendant any attitude. Take that, Dr. J. To see a picture of Sidhu rocking some very 80s New Jersey styles back in the day, capizios, anyone?

• 15:38Speaker 00

  And pictures with his parents and wife and kids, visit themoth.org, where you can also download the story.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Sidhu had not seen his boss Mike from the service station in many years and learned that he passed away during COVID. He urges everyone to reach out to the people from their past who've helped them find their way.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  When I asked Sidhu, "What is the best thing about New Jersey?", he answered, "The Jersey Shore. I grew up visiting my cousins in Cape May. My godfather was stationed there for the Coast Guard. Storing our boogie boards in a fudge store on the boardwalk seems like a quintessential experience I read in a book, but it actually happened."

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Second best thing, he says, is the diversity. It wasn't as rounded out as it is now. He remembers being one of the only brown kids for a bit, but it seems a lot different when he visits now. Third best thing, people don't get offended if you happen to jump in before they're necessarily done talking. There's a difference between rudely interrupting and excitedly adding to the conversation. New Jerseyans get it. I agree, Sidhu, I agree.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  In a moment, a story about cruising the streets of New Jersey in a special truck, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 17:15Speaker 03

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• 17:59Speaker 03

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• 18:11Speaker 00

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Jennifer Hixson. We're hearing about New Jersey. Next up, we hear a story told in Princeton, where we partnered with the McCarter Theater. Here's Marisa Januzzi-Thomas.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. I've always loved connecting with people, and I've always been incredibly awkward about it. I first realized how awkward I was back in high school. And I could tell you all about discovering I was awkward in high school, but, you know, why bother? Because I'm obviously so much cooler than that now.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  Even so awkward, but even still, I'm married, I have two daughters, and I got a job teaching English at my old high school, which sometimes feels like the universe's way of giving me 120 fresh social starts a year.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  My marriage, though, my marriage was awkward from the beginning.

• 19:28Speaker 04

  Craig and I love each other very much, but it seemed like we were always stepping on one another's toes.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  For instance, I really wanted us to have friends, and he preferred to keep people at a distance. He preferred to keep sometimes even me at a distance. And, yeah, every September, I would watch my fellow teacher I share a classroom with sending flowers to his wife, who's also a teacher, and I would wish that my marriage were just a little warmer like that. But I loved teaching, I loved my family, I loved being a mom, and for like 20 years, that was enough.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  And then one day, my youngest, Rosie, asked if she could take a ballroom dance class. And I thought, well, that's wildly random. But, you know, she was just starting high school herself, and I thought, you know, maybe this would sort of smooth her way. So I took her to this studio, and we were met by this short, Eastern European dance instructor. And he, you know, he had frosted blonde hair, and he smelled really strongly of cigarette smoke and cologne. And as I took my seat a little awkwardly by the dance floor, he just swooped my petite daughter, Rosie, up into his arms and whooshed her out onto the dance floor.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  And under this gigantic, glittery chandelier, they danced, and they waltzed, and they rumba'd, and they cha-cha'd, and they tangoed, until it seemed like they had pretty much achieved flight.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  And I was their witness. And I was feeling so many things.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  I mean, mostly, I was proud of Rosie. I mean, here she was having a ball, swanning around on a ballroom dance floor with a complete stranger in no-pockets pants.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  But I was also feeling wistful because she was growing up and she looked like she was gonna fly for good soon. But underneath that, there was another feeling, and it took me a while to put a finger on it. You see, for 20 years, I had done nothing but work and take care of my family and keep friends at arm's length, and I suddenly realized underneath it, I was feeling incredibly lonely. Fast forward a few years, and the pandemic shut down the dance lessons and everything

• 22:23Speaker 04

  else, including my usual summer camp job. And, you know, we were all four of us under one tiny roof, and things got so bad between Craig and I that we decided to call it quits. But because of the lockdown, he wasn't going anywhere for a while. And, you know, between one thing and the next, I really didn't know how I was gonna get through that summer of 2020. And I was venting about this in our newly-formed teacher chat, and my friend Dana said that her brother JJ had just bought a truck for his shop and might be hiring drivers.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  And did I want his contact information? You know, I don't know. I had zero experience driving trucks. And, you know, in fact, it had taken me three tries to get my license back in the awkward days of high school in the first place. But I was cash-strapped and definitely house-trapped, and I was thinking, you know, there are worse things I can do than maybe to put myself out there for this job. You know, so I emailed JJ, and he emailed me back right away, and he said he was hiring

• 23:52Speaker 04

  a driver for his shop's new ice cream truck. It was an ice cream truck. And JJ said that, you know, if I was interested, I could actually choose my routes in the towns where we'd cruise. And he said that I could, as long as I didn't disgrace the brand, I could play whatever music I wanted over the loudspeakers, which was incredible. And he even said I'd be an easy hire because I'm a public school teacher, and we're fingerprinted and relatively road-tested with the general public and all that. So, you know, was I interested?

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Was I interested? Hell, yeah. I said yes. I said yes right away to the truck. I mean, there was a minute when I thought, is this crazy? Like, I wasn't going anywhere that wasn't essential, you know? It was peak lockdown, and I wondered, you know, would anybody even want to see an ice cream truck? But I was suddenly curious, and I thought it might be sweet to find out. Well, it wasn't sweet driving the truck at first, not at all. There's like, you know, right where you expect to be a rearview mirror, there's just not one.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  And so I was kind of terrified to back up. I was, you know, humiliated doing these, you know, to be seen doing these 12-point K-turns in the dead ends where I was cruising. But as I adjusted to her enormous size, she became a nimble pleasure to drive. She did. And the music was so much fun to choose. I mean, I was pretty much flying my Gen X playlist, the flag with the playlists, and,

• 26:01Speaker 04

  you know, picture me cruising at 5 miles per hour, you know, down these empty streets, blasting Madonna's Vogue, like, at top volume. Nine-foot Dodge Pro Master. And I was surprised to see that people, even people who didn't want any ice cream, they were grooving to the music. I was driving, singing along to Proud Mary, the old Tina Turner version, and there's this woman, I see a woman up on her porch, and she's singing along too. And pretty soon, she's waving her arms above her head and coming down the steps, and she's proud as hell.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  And she comes up to the truck and orders an ice cream sandwich, and I served her, and it was pure bliss. Another day, it was a mom. A mom came out down to the end of her driveway, she's wearing a floppy sun hat, and she has her son with her, he's maybe nine or 10 years old, and I'm playing Brown-Eyed Girl, and she starts to dance. And, you know, pretty soon, she's dancing so hard that she's embarrassing the heck out of her young son. But I can't help it, you know, because I'm brown-eyed too, so I hop out of the truck and I start dancing with her, right?

• 27:28Speaker 04

  And we enjoyed like a socially distant moment, right? Yeah. Slowly, it was amazing. Slowly, like friendships picked up around the truck. My friend Lisa asked that I cruise her street, but she requested that when I did, would I please play the official anthem of the great state of New Jersey, which, for some of you young people out there, you may not know this, but it's Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." And so I did.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  But what really cemented our friendship is that the first time I did this, Lisa came running out of the house, you know, smiling, and it was so great to see her. And she threw half a leftover pizza in a box in the front passenger seat of the truck, and, you know, I just drove away feeling so fed. Fed and grateful, yeah. Yeah. You see, I could have been sitting home feeling bad, but instead, I was out there putting good energy in the streets and getting it back like tenfold.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  All that summer, all those rough months leading up to the 2020 election, I was privileged to see neighbors checking in on neighbors, buying each other ice cream, and stopping to talk face-to-face in the street. One day that summer, I was driving, and I got a little lost in this tangle of streets behind our local hospital. And if you're from New Jersey, you know that this kind of thing can happen, even to people with like a better sense of direction than I have. And, you know, the shift was changing, and all these first responders were coming out

• 29:33Speaker 04

  looking exhausted, and nobody wanted any ice cream. But Jackson Brown's Running on Empty must have been hitting the right note, because some nurses smiled at the truck and saw me and gave me thumbs up, and I gave them thumbs up right back. And again, I just felt so lucky to be right there right then. The lockdown ended, and eventually Craig did move out. But it was around that time that JJ said that if I wanted to, I could bring a ride along.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  And it was a good thing that he did because there were some dark days, and on any of those days, either of my daughters might grab her sunglasses and hop in the passenger seat and come along for the cruise, and it never failed to bring the sunshine back. Members of my family opine that it's crazy that I'm driving an ice cream truck, especially since my other side hustle of tutoring is so much more lucrative. But how could I explain how much I needed to see people enjoying a treat, right?

• 30:56Speaker 04

  Connecting with each other and living a little, even in the midst of a crisis. If you're ever in Westwood, New Jersey, and you hear Stevie Wonder at top volume, and it's the middle of the day, that could be me. Because it's two years now, and I'm still driving, and I hope the road is long, and I really hope to meet you one day on end. Thank you.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  That was Marisa Januzzi Thomas. While working on this hour, I visited Marisa at her house on a snowy Saturday afternoon. So I'm sitting here in Harrington Park, New Jersey.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  Yay.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  With Marisa Januzzi. We have rested the microphone on a pile of papers.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Ungraded essays.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Ungraded essays. And, and gosh, it's a very, it's a high stack there.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  Don't remind me, Jennifer.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  What is it, what do you teach? You're an English teacher.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  I teach AP English, language. So shout out to my AP students, all five sections of them.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  I've always wanted to ask somebody who drives an ice cream truck this, because as a parent, there's times when the ice cream truck comes by and you're dreading this. You don't want to buy ice cream.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I, I fully understand that. And also, it's not the old price structure anymore either. Right? So a lot of times, you know, between one thing and another, we've created a bit of a burden that it can be awkward. And it's hard because I have to be driving very slowly to see people and to avoid, you know, causing, you know, mayhem by hitting little people. That's never happened, thank God. But I have to drive really slowly. But, but then there's a moment, you know, if I'm seeing moms giving it a no or dad, you know, so I'll just say, hey, next time maybe, right? And just kind of wave at the kid and keep it light because, you know, you don't want

• 33:09Speaker 04

  to devastate the kid. Dads almost always say yes. I'm just going to put that out there.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Oh, good tip. Listen up, kids.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Yep. Ask dad.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  When does ice cream truck driving season begin?

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Well, ice cream season begins when we have that first glorious, slightly unseasonably warm day, usually late April, early May, when people want to push the season. Everyone puts on tops that are a little too chilly for the weather, but they're looking forward to summer. And I'll just text my boss, JJ, and say, JJ, can I take the truck after school today? And he says, go for it. So I'm looking forward to that day.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Aww.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I am.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Is there a song that you begin every season with? You're like, this is the one I start with?

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Um, you know, I, I, there is a song that I always start every party with when I'm pulling, like my drive up song is "Here Comes the Sun."

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Aww.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Unless they're, you know, teenagers, in which case I'll play "Like Sugar" by Maroon 5 or something a little more to convince them I'm not dead yet.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  That was Marisa Januzzi Thomas. When I asked Marisa, what's the best thing about New Jersey? She wrote, "It's that so many of us are immigrants or descended from immigrants and know how to hustle. Plus, we're the number one exporter of smart college students." I asked Marisa if she had any additional thoughts about her story and she wrote, "My great grandmother, Madalena Pioli, was an organ grinder who walked from New York to DC, pedaling while putting music in the streets. I hope she experienced joy, connection, and deliverance on her way, like I do, out and about in the suburbs of milk and honey." She also said, "I need to thank my sister-in-law, Roberta, who thought my time on the truck

• 35:07Speaker 00

  during a marital hiatus was an indie movie with a built-in soundtrack. She urged me to go to The Moth to share this story." Thank you, Roberta. There's also an important update. After several years apart, Marisa and her husband Craig have happily reunited. To see a picture of Marisa in the ice cream truck, visit themoth.org, where you can also download the story or pitch a story of your own. Have you made a big pivot in life? Taken on a job you weren't sure you were ready for? We'd love to hear it. Maybe something about the state you grew up in. If so, you can pitch us a story right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  That's 877-799-MOTH. In a moment, a kid moves just a couple of towns over and finds himself very homesick for the old neighborhood when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  The Moth is sponsored by the 75 Million Campaign, a national movement fighting for the 75 million women in America's workforce to have fair wages, paid sick leave, and freedom from discrimination. Recently, the 75 Million Campaign introduced the Working Women's Bill of Rights Resolution to Congress. This is a national women's policy agenda that calls for paid sick leave, modern labor laws that value women's work, increased wages for women, and ending workplace discrimination. The project is co-led by the National Partnership for Women and Families and the National Women's Law Center, which have convened a broad coalition of organizations with proven track records of advancing the rights and economic security of women workers across the country.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  To learn more about the 75 Million Campaign and working women's rights in America, visit the75million.org. That's T-H-E-seven-five-M-I-L-L-I-O-N dot O-R-G.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  My name's PJ Vogt, and our podcast search engine recently got this question from a listener. His dad, a retired pharmacist, had been sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, either because he was funding a Bollywood movie with a director he'd met on the internet or because he was being scammed. What exactly had his father really gotten himself into? Where was all this cash really going? On our episode, we go all the way to India to investigate what's really going on. Check out the podcast search engine. The episode is called Bollywood Dreams.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  This is The Moth Radio Hour. We're celebrating stories from New Jersey. Our final story was told at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, known as SOPAC. Here's Christian Estevez.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  I was born in 1974 in Plainfield, New Jersey. The four, uh, Plainfield people here. The fourth son of Afro-Latino immigrants from the Dominican Republic. In 1974, Plainfield was a place left behind by white flight. In 1974, the law said that if you were white and you lived in the town with people of color, you had to send your kids to the same schools. So I grew up surrounded by a sea of boarded-up houses.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Growing up in Plainfield wasn't easy from the very beginning, but it got a lot tougher when I was nine. That was the year that my parents split up. That was the year that my mom moved us to a small, small apartment on the tougher side of town. And basically, immediately, I was being initiated into the local gang. The older kids, the teenagers, would hide in the bushes or around the corner and pounce on me when I passed. Punch back, punch back, they would yell as they wailed on me. We're going to make you tough.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  And I wasn't the only nine or 10-year-old that this was happening to. They were making us all tough. They were teaching us how to survive. They were teaching us how to take care of each other. See, my mom wasn't around much because she had to work two jobs just to keep a roof over our heads. So I spent a lot of time out on the street with my boys. Plainfield, in Plainfield, you couldn't walk outside your own neighborhood by yourself without risk, risk getting jumped. So we rolled deep, meaning that we traveled in large groups. And the larger the group, the safer you were.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  And this gang that we formed to keep each other safe also created a safe haven for drug dealers. And as little kids, we did things for the drug dealers, like hold their stuff because the police didn't search the little kids. But as I was getting older, things were getting more dangerous and my mom was getting worried. So when I was 14, she got together with my two older brothers, who by this time were adults and had jobs, and they hatched a plan to pull their money together and move us to a nicer, a nicer town.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  And they were able to get a small apartment in Westfield, New Jersey, which is an affluent town a few towns over. And as soon as I got there, it was like day and night. This place had like the white picket fences. It was something like out of a TV show, like Happy Days or something. And...

• 41:24Speaker 01

  See, in Plainfield,

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I was like one of the kids in a classroom of thirty kids that were all in crisis. Imagine being the captain of a boat and all thirty passengers fall in the water at the same time, and you only have one life preserver.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  It wasn't that we had bad teachers in Plainfield, it's that we were all drowning at the same time.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  But in Westfield, it was just me, and they had all the energy and all the time just for me.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  I got access to programs and a lot of time with the school psychologists and the counselors. They assigned me a teacher of color to be my mentor. I got, um, I got to, I learned how to fight with my words instead of my hands. I was encouraged to play sports to get my aggression out, so I joined the wrestling team and the football teams.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  And, but something just didn't feel right. And this became really clear on Monday mornings, when I'd get to school and I'd hear about all the parties that all the white kids had over the weekend that I wasn't invited to, that none of the students of color were invited to.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  And I started going back to Plainfield more, back to my old neighborhood, and to my boys, to my family. And I started doing the same old stuff and getting into the same old trouble.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Gangs by their nature have rivals.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  So, we got into a lot of fights. And one, and I was a soldier. So when my crew got into a fight, I didn't ask why, I just threw down over and over again. And got into a lot of dangerous situations. But somehow, I managed to graduate from high school. I managed to get into college. But even then, I kept coming back to Plainfield every weekend, and especially on like, like, school breaks when the dorm would close down. And when I'd come back, sometimes I had to stay in different places because

• 44:04Speaker 01

  of my family situation at the time, it was difficult to stay at my mom's place.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  So I used to stay where my, I used to stay with my friend Mikey, who by this time had an apartment with his girlfriend and their baby. And I don't remember exactly when the day I met Mikey, but because when we were really little kids, we lived in different neighborhoods. And the gangs were all broken up by where you lived. But as time went on, um, the Latino kids started to come together throughout the whole city, and we formed one big crew.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  But Mikey was different. He was a leader, but he kind of was like me. We shared the same vision. We thought that we can maybe change the gang into something that wasn't focused on the violence and the drugs and, and, and do something better, but who would have known that like, the drug dealers wouldn't really accept that?

• 45:06Speaker 01

  And, uh, we wanted to change things, but we didn't have the tools, we didn't know how to, how to do it.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  And, um, and things just kind, kind of kept going that way. I was like half in and half out, and Mike was completely in, but we were both in a dangerous place. I remember one Christmas break, I was staying on Mike's couch, and, um, a bunch of us are there in his apartment, and we hear commotion outside, we hear a car like racing up the street. So we like, put our heads out the window, we, and we see it's our friend Benji, and he's driving up, and he's honking his horn, and he's yelling, "They're chasing me, they're chasing me." So, we all run down the stairs, and on the way out the door, we grabbed the bats that we kept by the door for situations like this.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And I ran out to the first car that, that pulled up, right as we were getting out there, the other guys' cars, they pulled up. And I just swung my bat at the pass, I mean, the, the driver's side window, and smashed the window, and the driver ducked, and I missed him. I missed his head, but I just kept hitting the car with my bat, and I can see that my friends were beating up the other cars, until the other car, the cars just like took off and retreated. And we didn't even have time to celebrate because we knew that the neighbors by that time had probably called the cops and we had to get out of there. And I escaped once again.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  And about a week later, we're at a party, because it's Christmas time and there's a lot of parties, and we're there with all our guys, and Mike comes up to me and says, "Come with me, let's take a walk, I have to talk to you." So we leave the party, and we go outside, and it's December, and it's cold, and it's rainy. And Mike says, "Let's get in my car, get out of this." And we get in his car and he starts the engine, and he turns on the wipers even though we weren't going anywhere. And I'm watching the wiper, the wiper blades thump back and forth, and I can see the street clearly now. And Mike lights a cigarette,

• 47:17Speaker 01

  and he cracks the window to let the smoke out. And he says, "Man, this ain't working out." And I'm like, "Wha- what are you talking about?" And he said, "Look, man, you know, you have something really good going on, and we're all really proud of you. And, you know, we really need you to succeed."

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And, and you, and I'm like, "What do you, what do you mean?" And he's like, "Look, if you keep coming back here and doing this stuff, you're gonna fuck it all up."

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And I tried to protest, and I say, "Look, man, I don't want to be that guy who like turns his back on his friends and leaves you all behind." And he says, "Don't worry about that."

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I said, "Well, what are people gonna say about me?" He says, "Don't worry about that, I got this. I'll talk to them, they'll understand." And I continued to try to protest, and he just stops me, he says, "Yo, it's time to go."

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So I did. And I went back to college. And later that year, Mike and a bunch of my friends went to prison.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  And I did my school thing, and I graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Labor Studies and Latino Studies.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  And, and I went to work for the union, and I worked, I learned how to organize people for good.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  And eventually, I reunited with Mike. And we put together all the things that we had learned. And we started to help our community. And we started a program to help our bros who were coming out of prison, prepare them to, for job interviews so they can get jobs, and try to find positive activities for the younger kids coming up behind us so they didn't have to fall into the same old thing. And, and it all began with that rainy night in December, when Mikey saved my life. Thank you.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  That was Christian Estevez. He's the son of Dominican immigrants and a lifelong advocate for Latino workers and social justice, and has had a long and distinguished career in the labor movement, fighting for, well, everyone who has a job. He thinks of Mikey and the boys he grew up with often, and tries his best to help the next generation find their way. Christian has lived in New Jersey his whole life. When asked what he loves best about the place, he says, "Our forests. They cover over forty percent of the state."

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Do you have a story about where you grew up? We want to hear stories from every state in America. Remember, you can pitch us online at themoth.org, where you can also share these stories or others from the Moth Archive.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  So, before we say goodbye, I want to invite you to come visit New Jersey, our mountains, our marshes, okay, our malls, and our greatest natural resource, our people. But if you're gonna come and give a shit, just stay the fuck home.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  That's it for this episode of The Moth Radio Hour, and sincerely, we hope you'll join us next time. I want to thank all the storytellers in this hour, and I want to thank New Jersey. For some, it is the light at the end of the tunnel.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  This episode of The Moth Radio Hour was produced by me, Jay Allison, and Jennifer Hixson, who also hosted and directed the stories in the show along with Chloe Salmon and Larry Rosen. Co-producer is Vicky Merrick, associate producer Emily Couch. The Moth's leadership team includes Christina Norman, Marina Cluce, Sarah Austin Jenness, Jordan Cardinalle, Caledonia Cairns, Kate Teller, Suzanne Rust, Sarah Jane Johnson, and Patricia Uraina. Marisa Januzzi Thomas and Christian Estevez were first discovered through workshops with our education and community programs. Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Other music in this hour is from Epidemic Sound. Podcast music, production support, from Davey Sumner. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Special thanks to our friends at Odyssey, including executive producer Leah Reese Dennis. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching us your own story, and to learn all about The Moth, go to our website, themoth.org.