Understand. New Jersey has no baseball or football teams and half of it stinks. It used to be that if you were from Jersey and you came over to New York — by that I mean Manhattan, naturally; Queens certainly doesn’t count — you didn’t admit you were from Jersey. No, if there was one thing we New Yorkers could get together on it was Jersey: not a one of us would’ve given a second thought to blowing the joint off the face of the universe like the infected pimple that it was... Was, I say. My God, how times change. I mean, I stopped going to the Academy of Music on 14th Street because the average patron there was a Jerseyite — you know, loud or nodded out or smelly or in any way obnoxious. But now, just like the guys down the hall from me who pretend that they’re black and jive and shuffle about the building all day, I

— a New York chauvinist if ever there was one — wonder why my mother wasn’t considerate enough to have gone to Jersey to borne me. And when folks ask, these days, if I have any interest in impressing them, I say: “Me? Hey, I’m from Jersey, man!” Because