A Love Note to NJ: The Moth Radio Hour

The Moth

This episode of The Moth Radio Hour presents three personal narratives centered on New Jersey, exploring themes of mentorship, community connection during isolation, and navigating cultural divides. Sidhu Gangadharan recounts his

Key takeaways

• Sidhu Gangadharan worked at a Texaco service station as a teen, where boss Doug taught him meticulous attention to detail and unwavering loyalty.
• Marisa Genuzzi Thomas took a summer gig driving an ice cream truck in Westwood during the 2020 lockdowns to combat isolation after her marital separation.

Main topics

• Mentorship and workplace loyalty
• Pandemic isolation and community connection

Notable quotes

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

Conclusion

Listeners gain a nuanced appreciation for New Jersey beyond its pop-culture stereotypes, seeing

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:12) This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hickson. In this show, greetings from New Jersey, a state with attitude. Forget about it. Speaker 6 (0:24) 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 Kool 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, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey waters. So we claim her as a Jersey girl, too. Speaker 6 (1:15) In this hour, we'll hear stories by people who've called this great state home. Speaker 6 (1:22) 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 Gangadharan. Speaker 4 (1:45) In the spring of my freshman year of high school, I come home in the afternoon, I exchange 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 and she decided to get me a job. Speaker 4 (2:35) And thus I learned that I would be working at the gas station down the road from my house. Speaker 4 (2:40) 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. Speaker 4 (3:03) 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. 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. Speaker 4 (3:48) 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. Speaker 4 (3:59) 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. Speaker 1 (4:14) He Speaker 4 (4:14) 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 exact, detail-oriented. 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? 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 hash, 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. 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 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 a sleeve of his white t-shirt, and he rocked a blonde ducktail haircut that even then I thought looked like a caricature. 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 hot wire it. Speaker 4 (7:06) 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 name, but it was like this old car where the gas tank is behind the rear license plate. 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. 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. Speaker 4 (8:22) 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. When 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 a thousand bucks in cash. 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 a thousand percent sure. I remember it well because there were a lot of small bills that night. I could almost not close the envelope. Speaker 4 (9:20) 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. Speaker 4 (9:48) Now, Doug was the first person I knew with alcohol use disorder. And a couple years after I worked there, he got sober. And he took me aside to give 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. Speaker 4 (10:13) And I was thinking, Doug, I'm like 16. Speaker 4 (10:19) 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. Speaker 4 (10:28) And you know I have. Speaker 4 (10:30) 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. Speaker 4 (10:46) 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. Not getting 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. Speaker 4 (11:11) Who would not pay you that extra 50 cents if you went over by accident? Who would even bother to say thank you? Speaker 4 (11:19) The spring of my senior year of high school, it was hot enough