Wildwood Exit by Joel E. Turner

Chapter 1

The car bumped hard, the undercarriage hitting the edge of the shoulder, as it careened off the Garden State Parkway, heading for a stand of trees. The bump woke me up, and I jammed on the brakes and fought the steering wheel, cutting it hard left, but it was too late. The car fishtailed as the front smashed into a tree, the rear swinging right as the brakes took hold and crashing into another tree. I was flung forward, my hands coming off the wheel and banging against the console.

My hands were cut and bleeding as I sat staring at the road, the car twisted at a forty-five-degree angle. Pain throbbed from my right temple, and I realized I must have hit the windshield or the roof. A heaviness pressed down inside my head above my eyes, and I felt an urge to close them and go to sleep.

I forced myself to stay awake and get out of the car. I knew I was still technically drunk, but the crash had pumped enough adrenaline into my veins that I was hyper-aware, despite the likely concussion. I tried to open the trunk, but it was stuck shut, the right fender crunched in and bent on the top where it met the hatch.

A car passed going north on the other side of the Parkway. I looked back up the south-bound lane and saw no traffic. I stepped onto the road and half-jogged across, stepping over the median and across the north-bound lane. I glanced back at the car, slanted cock-eyed in the grass just past the Exit 6 sign for North Wildwood, then hurried through the grassy stretch alongside the road and into the woods that bordered it.

My only thought now was to avoid getting a DUI. I could deal with the car later. What a disaster. I had just bought the damn thing yesterday afternoon from a guy in Buena with a badly running nose and a burning desire to take my cash and go meet someone to make him well. That’s what I got for taking a lead on a cheap car from a guy holding up the end of the bar at a beer-and-a-shot place down the street from my house. I could have asked Lou to hook me up, but the price was right, and I just wanted something to get me through the summer. So I hitched a ride to Buena from a buddy who was headed to Margate, where I met Drew, the guy with the dripping nose. Drew had that pressing business to attend to, so he was fine with giving me the uncompleted paperwork.

Drew said, “Just see Mitch at the title place here next week, he’ll handle it.”

I trudged through the patch of woods, distancing myself from the Parkway. I came to a two-lane road and ran across that into deeper woods on the other side. I was about ready to just sleep under a tree there, when through a gap in the branches I saw an open field.

I pushed forward to the perimeter of the woods and stopped, trying to make out where I was. If it was somebody’s back yard, I would have to be careful. But there were no lights, just a dark field spreading out before me. I looked to my left and saw a brighter patch on the ground and a hundred yards beyond that a low building, maybe a garage?

I walked through tall grass to shorter grass, and as I got closer to the bright patch, I realized what it was: a sand trap.

I was on a fairway of Wildwood Country Club, the home course of my friend Lou Scolletta, whose house I was supposed to have been at four hours ago. There was probably a caddie shack I could hide out in, but I opted for a makeshift bed in the grass of a hollow a few fairways over. I lay down and, in the brief period before I passed out, wondered if this was the best way to prepare for the first day on my new job.

* * *

There was no way I wanted a full-time job working for Lou. I knew just enough about Lou to know not knowing anything more was the prudent path. The fact that he had just fired the prior manager for dipping in the till did not make the opportunity more appealing.

But there was a crazy part of me that thought running a place—a restaurant, not McNabb’s Tavern, the decrepit neighborhood tappie in Southwest Philly where until last year I humped kegs, mopped up fluids, breathed a lot of smoke and told myself I was the “manager”—might be something I could do. Because I was nowhere right now. No degree, no trade—just fifteen years of bartending that had ended when the last McNabb standing decided—wisely—that this was no way to make a living. The new owners didn’t need a mug like me in the fern bar that McNabb’s was to become.

I knew The Seabreeze, the quintessential Jersey Shore restaurant. When Lou bought it six years ago, I helped out a few weekends bartending when some of the corner boys he had hired just disappeared on him. It wasn’t hard finding someone to cover for me at McNabb’s. Our weekends were slower in the summer anyway, with a lot of folks going to the shore.

Lou and I hung out more back then. He bought the place in 1977 when I was thirty and Lou maybe thirty-seven. It was sort of a vanity project for him; his main business was a Cadillac dealership in South Philly. The following summer, he showed up at my bar with his son Davy—guess the kid was sixteen. He wanted Davy to get a summer job. Could we take him on, washing dishes, whatever? I wondered why he didn’t hire him at the dealership, but I guess he wanted him to work for someone else.

So I hired him, and he was okay, typical teenager, hardly said a word. There really wasn’t that much to do—we had a kitchen and did some sandwiches, but it wasn’t much to keep a dishwasher busy.

I guess that was the first favor I did for Lou. And I did owe him big, seeing as how his dad got me out of the draft back in 1967. Plus, Lou got me my first restaurant job, which was really a pretty good gig at a nice South Philly restaurant. But with Lou, you never felt like he was looking for payback. He just came off as a great guy, not like he was some connected dude that you had to say yes to. I’m sure he sold a lot of cars seeming like a great guy.

I used to give Davy a ride home sometimes, which often led to Concetta—Lou’s wife—asking me in to eat. There was always food, loads of food. She’d give me a plate of pasta, red wine out of a jug—might be ten o’clock in the evening, but so what? Then Lou would show up, and he wouldn’t bat an eyelash that I was there. Then he had me down to a little mom-and-pop restaurant near his dealership for dinner, and I met some of his friends. They were mostly older and had gone to Bishop Neumann or Southern, but a few knew guys from Kingsessing, my old neighborhood in Southwest Philly.

I thought about that pasta and how a mick like me was going to run a real restaurant, and, as I passed out in the wet grass at 3:30 AM, whether Davy was still having the same nose-dripping problems as Drew from Buena, a path I saw him starting down two and a half years ago.

* * *

The sound of a mower woke me up. The guy running it looked like he had seen worse. He pointed me to the caddy shack and gave me some coins for the payphone. Thank God Lou picked up, but then that’s Lou, he’s not surprised if some fuckup calls him at dawn. I washed up as best I could with cold water and no soap in the filthy sink in the shack’s bathroom, then waited outside the locker room, not wanting to meet up with anyone, until Lou arrived.

What a night. Blitzed out of my mind, drinking stingers like I was twenty in Somers Point, dancing with those crazy chicks, trying to teach me to moonwalk like Michael Jackson on that Motown show a couple of months ago. It was the Friday after a Monday Fourth of July, and it felt like the bar itself was stumbling under the strain of a week-long bender.

I had just stopped in for something to eat, then met these girls, three of them, late teens, which led to my dancing lesson. As it got late and the stingers took their toll, I figured maybe I’d just crash in the back seat for a couple of hours, then get breakfast somewhere, rather than roll in drunk at four in the morning and freak out Concetta.

Then two of the girls disappeared and the last one, Sharon, became glued to a chair at my table—that is, her butt was glued to the chair, but her face ended up stuck to the table itself, her long brown hair straggling out into the sticky remains of many ungodly drinks. At closing time, I struggled her to her feet and managed to get her to moan out where she was staying in Sea Isle City, a couple of towns south. After she vomited in the parking lot, I got her into the back seat and drove as carefully as I could, taking Route 9 to avoid the faster traffic.

I got the girl out of the car at her shabby rental duplex, leaving her sprawled on a chaise lounge in the screened porch. I banged on the door until one of her roommates appeared in a long t-shirt. We got her into bed and I talked the roommate through how to make sure Sharon didn’t choke on her own vomit.

I sat in my car, worrying about the girl. I was old enough to be her father, but being plastered in a Somers Point bar at closing time didn’t exactly qualify me to be in loco parentis. I was just a more experienced wastrel, a thirty-six-year-old failed bartender who would have been a disappointment to someone, if there was anyone left to fill that role.

When I left the girl’s rental, I figured it wasn’t much farther to Wildwood, and what the hell, why not take the Parkway? But of course, that’s what impaired judgment is all about. So fatigue and drunkenness once more exacted their toll on a stupid Irishman, and here I was creeping around at dawn like an escaped convict.

***

Excerpt from Wildwood Exit by Joel E. Turner. Copyright 2025 by Joel E. Turner. Reproduced with permission from Joel E. Turner. All rights reserved.