| new jersey guidos |
At the Jersey Shore, Guidos Are
Pumped for the Prime of Their Lives
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 6, 2003; Page D05
SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. -- Guidos belong to
summer, and summer belongs to the guidos.
Anthony Moussa, 24, who runs a Web site
called NJGuido.com, comes alive during
Memorial Day weekend, like a Roman statue
freed from stone, beautiful. The summer
months give shape and meaning to Moussa's
life. This is when he parties hardest,
staying up to see the dawn. This is when he
comes to the Jersey Shore with his buddies
and fixes his hair and hits the nightclubs
and admires the girls, again and again
tipping back the sweet, fruity shot he
calls life.
This is when Anthony Moussa achieves the
fullest _expression of his guido self. This
is when he becomes The Moo.
"The bus is leaving now!" Moo shouts, just
after 11 on a Saturday night, his hair
spiked, his shirt tight. It's nightclub
time and he's waited long enough. "I'm
locking the door and you can all go to hell
if you don't come!"
To understand the guido, a modern-day
Jersey dandy, come to Seaside, a honky-tonk
town with a boardwalk of neon signs and
flashing light bulbs, where Moo and his
friends flock every weekend all summer.
This year, eight of the guys have nabbed a
"palace," a four-bedroom, two-bathroom
apartment with central air in a house just
around the corner from their favorite
nightclub, Temptations.
Every Saturday and Sunday, they make their
way to this club, where disco balls glitter
and the dance floor is as crowded as a
chicken house. The music is so loud it's
like a dentist's drill in your mouth. Moo
and many other guys take off their shirts,
offering the glamorous guidettes an
eye-level display of countless man-nipples.
Here, rock-hard pecs are a sort of pickup
line all their own. Moo always brings a
digital camera to take pictures for his
year-old Web site, which he hopes will
transform the term guido, an ethnic
stereotype, into shorthand for all that he
loves: youth, beauty and flash.
"If it's changeable, I'm changing it," Moo,
who is half-Italian and half-Lebanese, says
as he steps into the club. He's grinning
wildly. Inaction is a burden upon Moo, who
gets anxiety attacks if he is forced to
spend too many hours lying on the beach.
The frenzy of Temptations serves as a balm
for his soul.
"This place actually relaxes me," he says.
"I'm in my element."
He looks around at all the taut, tan skin
and spandex.
"It's all New Jersey," Moo says
passionately. "It's like a cult." He
recalls how he once described Temptations
to a friend: "You can't tell me there's
anyplace in the world where you'll find
more beautiful women."
Like the guido, the guidette's beauty is
defined in upper-body terms, but instead of
muscle, her currency is breasts. Implants
are popular. Cleavage is all. Her nails are
pink or French manicured, her earrings are
hoop, her top is tube, her tank is mesh,
and she teeters on sandals with three-inch
heels. Her lips are wet with lip gloss. She
has the look of a varnished-sushi
refrigerator magnet, perfect under the
Temptations strobe lights.
Moo's friends gather around the corner of
the bar they always claim. Somebody orders
shots of Sex on the Beach for everyone.
"You know what'll happen in here?" Moo
asks, looking excited. "It'll get tighter
and tighter and tighter until it's like
this." He bumps one massive shoulder
against yours, and you know something both
thrilling and scary is about to happen.
The guido is breaking free.
It is Sunday morning in the palace, by
which we mean almost noon. Moo and his
girlfriend, Jana Brusich, 26, a bartender
and part-time model, are having breakfast
at the kitchen table. (In afternoons, this
table is replaced by a long wooden board
for beer pong, a game that involves
throwing ping-pong balls into cups of beer
and then drinking it.) Some of the guys are
over on the couches, recovering from their
night at Temptations, watching ESPN and
giving each other a hard time. One is
already having a beer.
"Bagel?" Moo asks a huge guy who has just
stumbled out of his bedroom and is now
wandering around the kitchen like a
disoriented bear. "Advil?"
"Hospital," the bear says.
Moo turns back to the table.
"There was a rumor going that they were
playing beer pong at 8:30 in the morning,"
he says.
"I think I heard it," Jana says, eating a
bagel with jelly. She's astonishingly thin.
Moo's best friend, Brian Carline, 24, known
as Construction Carline for his habit of
donning a construction helmet when going
dancing, is rooting through the freezer for
breakfast food. He pulls out a bottle of
Stoli Vanilla. "THERE'S NO WAY!" he shouts
in his everyday, cranked-to-10 voice. He
holds up the bottle, which is nearly empty,
and looks accusingly toward the couches.
"WHAT THE HELL WENT ON HERE?"
It's a rhetorical question. Carline starts
knocking the ice off a box of Eggo waffles.
Breakfast may be one of the few quiet
periods in the life of the guido, so it
seems appropriate to take advantage of this
lull to consider what "guido" means.
Consider the T-shirt Moo is wearing, which
he designed and sells on NJGuido. (Clothing
sales on the site net about $70 or $80 a
month, which is enough for one guy's night
of drinking at Temptations, if he's not
buying too much.) On the front of the shirt
is the site's logo: a bare-chested guy
holding what looks like a fireball -- Moo
calls this "the energy" -- above his head.
On the back it says: I am a New Jersey
guido. A well refined, clean cut, muscle
toned, fist pumping, girlfriend stealing,
machine. You got a problem with that?
Then, at the bottom: If a sexy guidette is
reading this . . . how you doin?
One slang dictionary dates the emergence of
the term guido to the late '80s. Back then,
he wore baggy-legged Z. Cavaricci pants,
tank tops and gold chains and drove a
souped-up Mustang or Camaro IROC-Z. The
guidette kabuki'd her hair into a massive
nest guarded by an iron fence of bangs. In
the '80s and '90s, the term guido was often
derisive and directed at Italians, but the
community was ethnically broader than that.
These were the people of northern New
Jersey and Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island
and Yonkers, a bridge-and-tunnel crowd
bound together more by attitude than by
ancestral homeland. They were the spiritual
descendants of John Travolta's "Saturday
Night Fever" character, the dim but
gorgeous Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint
clerk who is truly alive only when he's
strutting on the dance floor.
The guido ethos is showy, it bumps
shoulders and yells. It is a hey-baby
culture, in which the men are macho and the
women wear spandex. When cruising in cars
-- a popular pastime -- guidos like loud
dance music and loud-looking girls. When
they walk, they thrust their shoulders back
and take over sidewalks.
But as evolution teaches, those who cannot
adapt, die. Moo understands this, and he
wants the world to know that today's guido
is a modern, sophisticated creature -- that
although the guido persists, his Z.
Cavariccis do not. The old IROC-Z has been
replaced by the BMW 330 as the ideal form
of transportation. The guidette's hair is
no longer big -- it is flat as an ironed
skirt or limp and curly, like seaweed.
Moo, a computer consultant mostly for
construction companies, didn't start the
Web site with any grand ambitions.
Originally, NJGuido was just a place he
could post digital photos he'd taken of
nights out with friends. The name was
descriptive, because he knew what he was.
He was a guido.
"I never had a problem being called that,"
says Moo, who lives in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
"But then people were like, 'Why do you
have a Web site called guido -- is that a
joke?' "
The site's reputation seemed to spread by
word-of-mouth, becoming popular not only
with other guidos but also with people who
liked to make fun of them. Moo didn't care.
He got so much traffic, the message board
he'd set up was crashing. He moved NJGuido
to a bigger server. He put an "I H
NJGUIDOS" thong up for sale and added a
game called Bustout!, involving a girl in a
bikini. He added banner ads for local
nightclubs, which he says allow the site to
break even. He says he now gets 11,000 to
13,000 visits a day.
"Now that everybody sees it, I figure, may
as well try to turn it into something
good," he says.
Over on the couches, the guys are making a
fuss about a pop star on TV.
"That's Jewel!"
"I'm Jewel-ing right now!"
Perhaps these guys -- indeed, perhaps all
of New Jersey -- have been waiting for a
visionary like Moo. A proud man. A man with
a poetic soul who can write an
inspirational online piece like "NJ Anthem":
"This is the weekend that we show the rest
of the world what we are made of . . . . We
don't want to dress up, we want to dress
less. We want to show off the fact that New
Jersey men and women are in the best shape."
The anthem ends, as most of Moo's online
entries do, with his motto: "There are no
excuses. Party like a rockstar."
Seaside Before Dark
Waiting.
It's mid-afternoon on Sunday. The daylight
hours are slow. It's too cold to go to the
bikini bar on the beach the guys like to
call the Silicone Club.
The music in the palace is almost always on
and often extremely loud, so that a person
can find the apartment -- which is down an
alley, on the back side of the house --
just by following the thumping bass line.
This contributes to a sense that Moo and
his friends are perpetually pumping
themselves up for a party, even when
they're just sitting around.
In the kitchen, Moo is making burgers for
everyone on a George Foreman grill.
Construction Carline, who has been awake
for just about four hours, makes an
announcement to no one in particular.
"ALL RIGHT, I'M READY. I'M GONNA HAVE A
BURGER AND THEN I'M GONNA START SERIOUSLY
DRINKING."
Moo and his friends are being treated to
the fluttery presence of best friends Karen
Vega and Katie Mesa, who got to know them
by becoming devoted posters to the message
boards of NJGuido. Both are 21 and small,
with long brown hair. They showed up at the
palace for a visit the afternoon before
with such equally bouncy energy that a
newcomer could tell them apart only by the
color of their bandannas (one wore red and
the other wore blue).
Today, in one of the bedrooms off the
kitchen, Mesa, an aspiring actress who
studies at a conservatory in Manhattan, is
giving a guy a massage on one bed. Vega, a
college student who is sometimes called
Sparkplug, is sitting on the other bed with
Craig Caracozza, 23, who is sometimes known
by his NJGuido message board name, Joe C.
He is drinking a Bacardi and cranberry to
get rid of a headache. At some point,
Sparkplug lies on her side and asks Joe C.
for a massage, but instead, he just slaps
her bottom. She laughs.
The group is discussing what it means to be
guido. They say one needn't be Italian.
"It's a state of mind," says Joe C. "You
should make a Guidopoly." He means a board
game, like Monopoly.
"What would you have?" asks Mesa.
"Temptations, Seaside, boardwalk, a Deko
Lounge," says Joe C.
"A pizzeria!" adds Mesa.
"A pizzeria?" asks Joe C, in a dismissive
tone.
"It's going out, partying, dancing,
clubbing," says Sparkplug.
"Having fun," says Joe C., who wears a
Coach visor and a shirt that says Italia.
Friends describe Joe C. as the "ultimate
guido." He studies at William Paterson
University in Wayne, N.J., with hopes of
becoming a gym teacher, drives a
paprika-colored Mercedes Kompressor and,
perhaps more than anyone, understands that
being guido is an aspiration to carefully
crafted gorgeousness.
Joe C., Moo and many other guidos get their
hair shaped into what Moo calls the "guido
cut" -- short on the sides and gelled into
long spikes on top. They still favor gold
chains, but their fashion is current
clubwear. Moo likes Diesel, Boss by Hugo
Boss, Buffalo, Ted Baker, Ben Sherman,
Seven and Dolce & Gabbana, and he buys
something new every weekend. For going out,
Joe C., Moo and Co. like tank tops and
anything else that will evidence countless
gym hours spent on "pecs, abs, tris and
bis." On Saturday night, for example, Moo
wears a muscle tee, the sleeves of which he
has snipped to make room for his bulging
biceps.
Guidos may live in one of the few realms of
the straight world in which men are as
preciously groomed as women. The quest for
perfection is what prompts one of the Moo's
friends to bring an electric nose hair
trimmer to the palace. It's why Moo shaves
his chest and back -- and why Joe C. shaves
his back and arms and sometimes his legs.
"That's guido," Sparkplug says.
Joe C. also gets his eyebrows waxed, a fact
he reveals casually, only to be unnerved
when an outsider expresses astonishment. He
asks several guys who pass by the bedroom
door whether they also wax their eyebrows
and seems relieved when the third guy says
he does. It seems to confirm to Joe C. that
he is potently macho.
Mesa pipes up: "Guys are more girlier than
girls these days."
Moo Over Miami
The guido lifestyle is not made for wives
and children, or other things that get in
the way of fun. As one of the guys puts it
when asked if he has a girlfriend: "Depends
who's asking."
Moo and his guy friends partied in Miami
for five nights this spring and didn't make
it to bed earlier than 7 a.m. Some weeks
later, they celebrated the broken
engagement of the oldest member of their
crew (computer programmer Tony Gasperino,
29) by renting a stretch Navigator and
embarking on what Moo dubbed a Born-Again
Bachelor party. ("One of the drunkest
nights ever," he says.) That this is a
lifestyle only for the young seems to be
clear to Moo, who acts like he has to get
all his partying in now before it's too
late.
In one of his essays on NJGuido, Moo quotes
himself like he's quoting Thoreau:
" 'One minute awake is a minute of youth,
one minute of sleep is a minute of old
age.' (Anthony Moussa)"
One day at lunch, Moo says, "I don't like
downtime. Downtime stinks." He's drinking
an Amstel Light after finishing some sort
of spiked mango drink. "You know what'll
really give me an anxiety attack?"
He starts telling about this time he was
walking past a California Pizza Kitchen.
"And outside I see about five baby
strollers and I'm like, 'Oh, my God.' That
makes me crazy. I don't ever want to get
old. That's my worst nightmare."
Tony the bachelor, who's also sitting at
the table, explains how he knows Moo is
having an anxiety attack. His "face gets
red like a tomato and he has to lay down,"
Tony says.
What is the guido without the bloom of
youth -- without his bachelorhood, his
boundless bravado, his beauty?
At the shore house one evening, Moo remarks
that someone who was looking at photos of
him on NJGuido told him that the last
year's worth of partying seemed to have
aged him.
"Do you think I look older than I was?" he
asks a friend, in what seems a brief moment
of vulnerability.
To which the friend replies, as the true
guido must, "I don't pay attention to you."
The Countdown
As the sun sinks, guidos prepare for
partying. Some nap. Some shower. The whole
crew walks to Temptations to wait 20
minutes to pay $20 and get stamped so that
later, they won't have to wait in an even
longer line. When they stand outside the
club, guys drive by pumping loud music
through open windows, and a voice from
somewhere keeps yelling, " 'Ssup, girl!"
Then the guidos head back to the house and
drink. While the mainstay of daylight hours
is Bud Light, Amstel Light and Corona,
evenings are all about the shots. The guys
down Stoli vodka, licorice-flavored
Jaegermeister and Goldschlager, a cinnamon
schnapps whose novelty is its floating
24-karat gold flakes. Dancing starts in the
kitchen. The guys put on hats they keep
above the fridge: a green, oversize foam
hat with a huge brim and a shiny plastic
captain's hat that might once have belonged
to the Village People.
Then they get serious. They start
considering outfits.
Close to 10, Moo stands shirtless in his
room, grabbing tops out of his drawer and
pulling pants out of his closet. He keeps
seven pairs of jeans at the shore house,
all folded on hangers. He's asking his
girlfriend for advice.
"Does this work?" Moo asks.
"Absolutely not, it doesn't even match,"
says Jana. "I just think you should wear
the gray T-shirt."
"I wanna wear the green one."
"Well, then, you can't wear these pants, it
doesn't match."
Moo gives up and goes to take a shower.
Jana says, "He takes longer than I take."
Out in the main apartment, the music is
loud, and Construction Carline is shouting,
"WHO WANTS SOME SHOTS OF JAEGER?"
Carline already has his outfit set for the
club: his construction helmet (actually a
tree-trimmer's helmet with ear guards) and
a red cape. Tonight, he'll be calling
himself Tempts Man.
After the shower, Moo puts one kind of
moisturizer on his face. Then he rubs a
different moisturizer, which smells like
cocoa butter, on his chest and arms, adding
more and more until he's beige. This is
necessary. "When you sweat, it brings back
the cocoa butter smell," Moo says. He
sprays on deodorant, then heads back into
the bedroom, where he ponders jeans with
Jana.
"These are nice," she says. "You wanna wear
these with the green shirt?"
"I can't wear these with green."
"Why don't you wear these?"
"I wore those Friday night."
He gives up and goes to do his hair.
"He's worse than a woman!" Jana says.
The doing of the hair is a complex and
mysterious ritual. The night before, Moo
got so frustrated that he had to do it
three times and "change products." Tonight,
he first puts spiking gel in his hair, then
sprays his hair with hairspray, then styles
it, then sprays it again. "Then I'll come
back here when it starts falling from all
the weight and spray it again," he says.
He goes back in the bedroom and finally
settles on the green tank he wanted to wear
all along, plus a pair of blue corduroys.
He rejects two of the five pairs of
sneakers he's brought to the shore house,
settling unhappily on a third pair. ("These
are last year's, too, that's why I don't
want to wear them.")
This is about the point that Construction
Carline comes into the bedroom and starts
whispering something about underwear in
Moo's ear.
Carline is in a quandary. He's wearing
fitted boxer briefs, and he's trying to
decide if he should change into looser
boxer shorts. This is an important decision
because once in a while, in a fit of
giddiness at Temptations, Carline likes to
take off his pants. He knows that if he
wears his boxer briefs, which look an awful
lot like underwear, he'll never take off
his pants. If he wears his boxer shorts, on
the other hand, he gives himself the option
of keeping the pants on or taking them off.
The problem is that in Carline's life,
"Options always happen." Which means that
if he changes his underwear, he knows he'll
wind up taking off his pants.
He thinks a bit, shouts a bit, has another
beer.
Then he changes his underwear.
The longer Moo has to wait, the more
anxious he feels. At 11:17 p.m., moments
before the crew leaves for the club, he
stands by the kitchen looking distressed.
His face is not yet red like a tomato, but
it's clear he's succumbing to the immense
pressure of nothing happening. Like a fish
suffocating on a pier, Moo needs to be in
his habitat. He needs Temptations.
"I really think I have legitimate
problems," he says. "I can't breathe."
Lions' Din
By 2:15 a.m., Moo and Construction Carline
are onstage, standing in front of the DJ,
who they're friendly with, and prancing for
the crowd. Moo has been twirling his tank
top around his head, and Carline is
shirtless, wearing his helmet and cape.
After a while, they step off the stage and
onto the dance floor, making their way
around the club with a digital camera and
taking pictures for NJGuido. Girls primp
and guys pump. The place is so crowded, one
of Moo's buddies says, it's "bittersweet."
The guidos party till 3:20, when the lights
come on in Temptations, and then they keep
partying. The music stays on and the crowd
stays on the dance floor. Somebody in Moo's
camp orders 48 shots of Southern Comfort
and lime, and Moo's friends pass them
around.
"They don't care that the lights are on!"
says Moo, beaming like a man in religious
ecstasy. "They don't want it to end. Have
you ever seen energy like this at four in
the morning?"
Nearby, a stern, beefy staffer named Sam
Mickens looks over the crowd from his perch
on a wooden crate, watching everything
detachedly.
He says he is a graduate student in
psychology at Montclair State University,
and when he watches the crowd at
Temptations, he thinks of male lions trying
to attract females with their manes.
"They work on their bodies only to impress
the female lions," Mickens says. "If
challenged, the two males will compete for
the female's attention by fighting."
He eyes the crowd in his serious way.
"All women want the strongest male," he
says. "There are no subtleties in an
environment like this."
Over at the bar, a group of muscly guidos
is posing for a picture. Among them is
Construction Carline, looking like a
deranged tree-trimming superhero in his
cape and helmet.
He has taken off his pants.
Pumped for the Prime of Their Lives
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 6, 2003; Page D05
SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. -- Guidos belong to
summer, and summer belongs to the guidos.
Anthony Moussa, 24, who runs a Web site
called NJGuido.com, comes alive during
Memorial Day weekend, like a Roman statue
freed from stone, beautiful. The summer
months give shape and meaning to Moussa's
life. This is when he parties hardest,
staying up to see the dawn. This is when he
comes to the Jersey Shore with his buddies
and fixes his hair and hits the nightclubs
and admires the girls, again and again
tipping back the sweet, fruity shot he
calls life.
This is when Anthony Moussa achieves the
fullest _expression of his guido self. This
is when he becomes The Moo.
"The bus is leaving now!" Moo shouts, just
after 11 on a Saturday night, his hair
spiked, his shirt tight. It's nightclub
time and he's waited long enough. "I'm
locking the door and you can all go to hell
if you don't come!"
To understand the guido, a modern-day
Jersey dandy, come to Seaside, a honky-tonk
town with a boardwalk of neon signs and
flashing light bulbs, where Moo and his
friends flock every weekend all summer.
This year, eight of the guys have nabbed a
"palace," a four-bedroom, two-bathroom
apartment with central air in a house just
around the corner from their favorite
nightclub, Temptations.
Every Saturday and Sunday, they make their
way to this club, where disco balls glitter
and the dance floor is as crowded as a
chicken house. The music is so loud it's
like a dentist's drill in your mouth. Moo
and many other guys take off their shirts,
offering the glamorous guidettes an
eye-level display of countless man-nipples.
Here, rock-hard pecs are a sort of pickup
line all their own. Moo always brings a
digital camera to take pictures for his
year-old Web site, which he hopes will
transform the term guido, an ethnic
stereotype, into shorthand for all that he
loves: youth, beauty and flash.
"If it's changeable, I'm changing it," Moo,
who is half-Italian and half-Lebanese, says
as he steps into the club. He's grinning
wildly. Inaction is a burden upon Moo, who
gets anxiety attacks if he is forced to
spend too many hours lying on the beach.
The frenzy of Temptations serves as a balm
for his soul.
"This place actually relaxes me," he says.
"I'm in my element."
He looks around at all the taut, tan skin
and spandex.
"It's all New Jersey," Moo says
passionately. "It's like a cult." He
recalls how he once described Temptations
to a friend: "You can't tell me there's
anyplace in the world where you'll find
more beautiful women."
Like the guido, the guidette's beauty is
defined in upper-body terms, but instead of
muscle, her currency is breasts. Implants
are popular. Cleavage is all. Her nails are
pink or French manicured, her earrings are
hoop, her top is tube, her tank is mesh,
and she teeters on sandals with three-inch
heels. Her lips are wet with lip gloss. She
has the look of a varnished-sushi
refrigerator magnet, perfect under the
Temptations strobe lights.
Moo's friends gather around the corner of
the bar they always claim. Somebody orders
shots of Sex on the Beach for everyone.
"You know what'll happen in here?" Moo
asks, looking excited. "It'll get tighter
and tighter and tighter until it's like
this." He bumps one massive shoulder
against yours, and you know something both
thrilling and scary is about to happen.
The guido is breaking free.
It is Sunday morning in the palace, by
which we mean almost noon. Moo and his
girlfriend, Jana Brusich, 26, a bartender
and part-time model, are having breakfast
at the kitchen table. (In afternoons, this
table is replaced by a long wooden board
for beer pong, a game that involves
throwing ping-pong balls into cups of beer
and then drinking it.) Some of the guys are
over on the couches, recovering from their
night at Temptations, watching ESPN and
giving each other a hard time. One is
already having a beer.
"Bagel?" Moo asks a huge guy who has just
stumbled out of his bedroom and is now
wandering around the kitchen like a
disoriented bear. "Advil?"
"Hospital," the bear says.
Moo turns back to the table.
"There was a rumor going that they were
playing beer pong at 8:30 in the morning,"
he says.
"I think I heard it," Jana says, eating a
bagel with jelly. She's astonishingly thin.
Moo's best friend, Brian Carline, 24, known
as Construction Carline for his habit of
donning a construction helmet when going
dancing, is rooting through the freezer for
breakfast food. He pulls out a bottle of
Stoli Vanilla. "THERE'S NO WAY!" he shouts
in his everyday, cranked-to-10 voice. He
holds up the bottle, which is nearly empty,
and looks accusingly toward the couches.
"WHAT THE HELL WENT ON HERE?"
It's a rhetorical question. Carline starts
knocking the ice off a box of Eggo waffles.
Breakfast may be one of the few quiet
periods in the life of the guido, so it
seems appropriate to take advantage of this
lull to consider what "guido" means.
Consider the T-shirt Moo is wearing, which
he designed and sells on NJGuido. (Clothing
sales on the site net about $70 or $80 a
month, which is enough for one guy's night
of drinking at Temptations, if he's not
buying too much.) On the front of the shirt
is the site's logo: a bare-chested guy
holding what looks like a fireball -- Moo
calls this "the energy" -- above his head.
On the back it says: I am a New Jersey
guido. A well refined, clean cut, muscle
toned, fist pumping, girlfriend stealing,
machine. You got a problem with that?
Then, at the bottom: If a sexy guidette is
reading this . . . how you doin?
One slang dictionary dates the emergence of
the term guido to the late '80s. Back then,
he wore baggy-legged Z. Cavaricci pants,
tank tops and gold chains and drove a
souped-up Mustang or Camaro IROC-Z. The
guidette kabuki'd her hair into a massive
nest guarded by an iron fence of bangs. In
the '80s and '90s, the term guido was often
derisive and directed at Italians, but the
community was ethnically broader than that.
These were the people of northern New
Jersey and Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island
and Yonkers, a bridge-and-tunnel crowd
bound together more by attitude than by
ancestral homeland. They were the spiritual
descendants of John Travolta's "Saturday
Night Fever" character, the dim but
gorgeous Tony Manero, a Brooklyn paint
clerk who is truly alive only when he's
strutting on the dance floor.
The guido ethos is showy, it bumps
shoulders and yells. It is a hey-baby
culture, in which the men are macho and the
women wear spandex. When cruising in cars
-- a popular pastime -- guidos like loud
dance music and loud-looking girls. When
they walk, they thrust their shoulders back
and take over sidewalks.
But as evolution teaches, those who cannot
adapt, die. Moo understands this, and he
wants the world to know that today's guido
is a modern, sophisticated creature -- that
although the guido persists, his Z.
Cavariccis do not. The old IROC-Z has been
replaced by the BMW 330 as the ideal form
of transportation. The guidette's hair is
no longer big -- it is flat as an ironed
skirt or limp and curly, like seaweed.
Moo, a computer consultant mostly for
construction companies, didn't start the
Web site with any grand ambitions.
Originally, NJGuido was just a place he
could post digital photos he'd taken of
nights out with friends. The name was
descriptive, because he knew what he was.
He was a guido.
"I never had a problem being called that,"
says Moo, who lives in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
"But then people were like, 'Why do you
have a Web site called guido -- is that a
joke?' "
The site's reputation seemed to spread by
word-of-mouth, becoming popular not only
with other guidos but also with people who
liked to make fun of them. Moo didn't care.
He got so much traffic, the message board
he'd set up was crashing. He moved NJGuido
to a bigger server. He put an "I H
NJGUIDOS" thong up for sale and added a
game called Bustout!, involving a girl in a
bikini. He added banner ads for local
nightclubs, which he says allow the site to
break even. He says he now gets 11,000 to
13,000 visits a day.
"Now that everybody sees it, I figure, may
as well try to turn it into something
good," he says.
Over on the couches, the guys are making a
fuss about a pop star on TV.
"That's Jewel!"
"I'm Jewel-ing right now!"
Perhaps these guys -- indeed, perhaps all
of New Jersey -- have been waiting for a
visionary like Moo. A proud man. A man with
a poetic soul who can write an
inspirational online piece like "NJ Anthem":
"This is the weekend that we show the rest
of the world what we are made of . . . . We
don't want to dress up, we want to dress
less. We want to show off the fact that New
Jersey men and women are in the best shape."
The anthem ends, as most of Moo's online
entries do, with his motto: "There are no
excuses. Party like a rockstar."
Seaside Before Dark
Waiting.
It's mid-afternoon on Sunday. The daylight
hours are slow. It's too cold to go to the
bikini bar on the beach the guys like to
call the Silicone Club.
The music in the palace is almost always on
and often extremely loud, so that a person
can find the apartment -- which is down an
alley, on the back side of the house --
just by following the thumping bass line.
This contributes to a sense that Moo and
his friends are perpetually pumping
themselves up for a party, even when
they're just sitting around.
In the kitchen, Moo is making burgers for
everyone on a George Foreman grill.
Construction Carline, who has been awake
for just about four hours, makes an
announcement to no one in particular.
"ALL RIGHT, I'M READY. I'M GONNA HAVE A
BURGER AND THEN I'M GONNA START SERIOUSLY
DRINKING."
Moo and his friends are being treated to
the fluttery presence of best friends Karen
Vega and Katie Mesa, who got to know them
by becoming devoted posters to the message
boards of NJGuido. Both are 21 and small,
with long brown hair. They showed up at the
palace for a visit the afternoon before
with such equally bouncy energy that a
newcomer could tell them apart only by the
color of their bandannas (one wore red and
the other wore blue).
Today, in one of the bedrooms off the
kitchen, Mesa, an aspiring actress who
studies at a conservatory in Manhattan, is
giving a guy a massage on one bed. Vega, a
college student who is sometimes called
Sparkplug, is sitting on the other bed with
Craig Caracozza, 23, who is sometimes known
by his NJGuido message board name, Joe C.
He is drinking a Bacardi and cranberry to
get rid of a headache. At some point,
Sparkplug lies on her side and asks Joe C.
for a massage, but instead, he just slaps
her bottom. She laughs.
The group is discussing what it means to be
guido. They say one needn't be Italian.
"It's a state of mind," says Joe C. "You
should make a Guidopoly." He means a board
game, like Monopoly.
"What would you have?" asks Mesa.
"Temptations, Seaside, boardwalk, a Deko
Lounge," says Joe C.
"A pizzeria!" adds Mesa.
"A pizzeria?" asks Joe C, in a dismissive
tone.
"It's going out, partying, dancing,
clubbing," says Sparkplug.
"Having fun," says Joe C., who wears a
Coach visor and a shirt that says Italia.
Friends describe Joe C. as the "ultimate
guido." He studies at William Paterson
University in Wayne, N.J., with hopes of
becoming a gym teacher, drives a
paprika-colored Mercedes Kompressor and,
perhaps more than anyone, understands that
being guido is an aspiration to carefully
crafted gorgeousness.
Joe C., Moo and many other guidos get their
hair shaped into what Moo calls the "guido
cut" -- short on the sides and gelled into
long spikes on top. They still favor gold
chains, but their fashion is current
clubwear. Moo likes Diesel, Boss by Hugo
Boss, Buffalo, Ted Baker, Ben Sherman,
Seven and Dolce & Gabbana, and he buys
something new every weekend. For going out,
Joe C., Moo and Co. like tank tops and
anything else that will evidence countless
gym hours spent on "pecs, abs, tris and
bis." On Saturday night, for example, Moo
wears a muscle tee, the sleeves of which he
has snipped to make room for his bulging
biceps.
Guidos may live in one of the few realms of
the straight world in which men are as
preciously groomed as women. The quest for
perfection is what prompts one of the Moo's
friends to bring an electric nose hair
trimmer to the palace. It's why Moo shaves
his chest and back -- and why Joe C. shaves
his back and arms and sometimes his legs.
"That's guido," Sparkplug says.
Joe C. also gets his eyebrows waxed, a fact
he reveals casually, only to be unnerved
when an outsider expresses astonishment. He
asks several guys who pass by the bedroom
door whether they also wax their eyebrows
and seems relieved when the third guy says
he does. It seems to confirm to Joe C. that
he is potently macho.
Mesa pipes up: "Guys are more girlier than
girls these days."
Moo Over Miami
The guido lifestyle is not made for wives
and children, or other things that get in
the way of fun. As one of the guys puts it
when asked if he has a girlfriend: "Depends
who's asking."
Moo and his guy friends partied in Miami
for five nights this spring and didn't make
it to bed earlier than 7 a.m. Some weeks
later, they celebrated the broken
engagement of the oldest member of their
crew (computer programmer Tony Gasperino,
29) by renting a stretch Navigator and
embarking on what Moo dubbed a Born-Again
Bachelor party. ("One of the drunkest
nights ever," he says.) That this is a
lifestyle only for the young seems to be
clear to Moo, who acts like he has to get
all his partying in now before it's too
late.
In one of his essays on NJGuido, Moo quotes
himself like he's quoting Thoreau:
" 'One minute awake is a minute of youth,
one minute of sleep is a minute of old
age.' (Anthony Moussa)"
One day at lunch, Moo says, "I don't like
downtime. Downtime stinks." He's drinking
an Amstel Light after finishing some sort
of spiked mango drink. "You know what'll
really give me an anxiety attack?"
He starts telling about this time he was
walking past a California Pizza Kitchen.
"And outside I see about five baby
strollers and I'm like, 'Oh, my God.' That
makes me crazy. I don't ever want to get
old. That's my worst nightmare."
Tony the bachelor, who's also sitting at
the table, explains how he knows Moo is
having an anxiety attack. His "face gets
red like a tomato and he has to lay down,"
Tony says.
What is the guido without the bloom of
youth -- without his bachelorhood, his
boundless bravado, his beauty?
At the shore house one evening, Moo remarks
that someone who was looking at photos of
him on NJGuido told him that the last
year's worth of partying seemed to have
aged him.
"Do you think I look older than I was?" he
asks a friend, in what seems a brief moment
of vulnerability.
To which the friend replies, as the true
guido must, "I don't pay attention to you."
The Countdown
As the sun sinks, guidos prepare for
partying. Some nap. Some shower. The whole
crew walks to Temptations to wait 20
minutes to pay $20 and get stamped so that
later, they won't have to wait in an even
longer line. When they stand outside the
club, guys drive by pumping loud music
through open windows, and a voice from
somewhere keeps yelling, " 'Ssup, girl!"
Then the guidos head back to the house and
drink. While the mainstay of daylight hours
is Bud Light, Amstel Light and Corona,
evenings are all about the shots. The guys
down Stoli vodka, licorice-flavored
Jaegermeister and Goldschlager, a cinnamon
schnapps whose novelty is its floating
24-karat gold flakes. Dancing starts in the
kitchen. The guys put on hats they keep
above the fridge: a green, oversize foam
hat with a huge brim and a shiny plastic
captain's hat that might once have belonged
to the Village People.
Then they get serious. They start
considering outfits.
Close to 10, Moo stands shirtless in his
room, grabbing tops out of his drawer and
pulling pants out of his closet. He keeps
seven pairs of jeans at the shore house,
all folded on hangers. He's asking his
girlfriend for advice.
"Does this work?" Moo asks.
"Absolutely not, it doesn't even match,"
says Jana. "I just think you should wear
the gray T-shirt."
"I wanna wear the green one."
"Well, then, you can't wear these pants, it
doesn't match."
Moo gives up and goes to take a shower.
Jana says, "He takes longer than I take."
Out in the main apartment, the music is
loud, and Construction Carline is shouting,
"WHO WANTS SOME SHOTS OF JAEGER?"
Carline already has his outfit set for the
club: his construction helmet (actually a
tree-trimmer's helmet with ear guards) and
a red cape. Tonight, he'll be calling
himself Tempts Man.
After the shower, Moo puts one kind of
moisturizer on his face. Then he rubs a
different moisturizer, which smells like
cocoa butter, on his chest and arms, adding
more and more until he's beige. This is
necessary. "When you sweat, it brings back
the cocoa butter smell," Moo says. He
sprays on deodorant, then heads back into
the bedroom, where he ponders jeans with
Jana.
"These are nice," she says. "You wanna wear
these with the green shirt?"
"I can't wear these with green."
"Why don't you wear these?"
"I wore those Friday night."
He gives up and goes to do his hair.
"He's worse than a woman!" Jana says.
The doing of the hair is a complex and
mysterious ritual. The night before, Moo
got so frustrated that he had to do it
three times and "change products." Tonight,
he first puts spiking gel in his hair, then
sprays his hair with hairspray, then styles
it, then sprays it again. "Then I'll come
back here when it starts falling from all
the weight and spray it again," he says.
He goes back in the bedroom and finally
settles on the green tank he wanted to wear
all along, plus a pair of blue corduroys.
He rejects two of the five pairs of
sneakers he's brought to the shore house,
settling unhappily on a third pair. ("These
are last year's, too, that's why I don't
want to wear them.")
This is about the point that Construction
Carline comes into the bedroom and starts
whispering something about underwear in
Moo's ear.
Carline is in a quandary. He's wearing
fitted boxer briefs, and he's trying to
decide if he should change into looser
boxer shorts. This is an important decision
because once in a while, in a fit of
giddiness at Temptations, Carline likes to
take off his pants. He knows that if he
wears his boxer briefs, which look an awful
lot like underwear, he'll never take off
his pants. If he wears his boxer shorts, on
the other hand, he gives himself the option
of keeping the pants on or taking them off.
The problem is that in Carline's life,
"Options always happen." Which means that
if he changes his underwear, he knows he'll
wind up taking off his pants.
He thinks a bit, shouts a bit, has another
beer.
Then he changes his underwear.
The longer Moo has to wait, the more
anxious he feels. At 11:17 p.m., moments
before the crew leaves for the club, he
stands by the kitchen looking distressed.
His face is not yet red like a tomato, but
it's clear he's succumbing to the immense
pressure of nothing happening. Like a fish
suffocating on a pier, Moo needs to be in
his habitat. He needs Temptations.
"I really think I have legitimate
problems," he says. "I can't breathe."
Lions' Din
By 2:15 a.m., Moo and Construction Carline
are onstage, standing in front of the DJ,
who they're friendly with, and prancing for
the crowd. Moo has been twirling his tank
top around his head, and Carline is
shirtless, wearing his helmet and cape.
After a while, they step off the stage and
onto the dance floor, making their way
around the club with a digital camera and
taking pictures for NJGuido. Girls primp
and guys pump. The place is so crowded, one
of Moo's buddies says, it's "bittersweet."
The guidos party till 3:20, when the lights
come on in Temptations, and then they keep
partying. The music stays on and the crowd
stays on the dance floor. Somebody in Moo's
camp orders 48 shots of Southern Comfort
and lime, and Moo's friends pass them
around.
"They don't care that the lights are on!"
says Moo, beaming like a man in religious
ecstasy. "They don't want it to end. Have
you ever seen energy like this at four in
the morning?"
Nearby, a stern, beefy staffer named Sam
Mickens looks over the crowd from his perch
on a wooden crate, watching everything
detachedly.
He says he is a graduate student in
psychology at Montclair State University,
and when he watches the crowd at
Temptations, he thinks of male lions trying
to attract females with their manes.
"They work on their bodies only to impress
the female lions," Mickens says. "If
challenged, the two males will compete for
the female's attention by fighting."
He eyes the crowd in his serious way.
"All women want the strongest male," he
says. "There are no subtleties in an
environment like this."
Over at the bar, a group of muscly guidos
is posing for a picture. Among them is
Construction Carline, looking like a
deranged tree-trimming superhero in his
cape and helmet.
He has taken off his pants.
| new jersey guidos are the funniest guidos of all Copyright Washington Post, or something. I don't know, it's not mine. |
