A Clarification

Click on that link I posted at the tail end of yesterday's blog entry, and follow it around the internet for a while. See where it leads. Toss a few blades of grass in the air, and check the direction of the wind. Hear what the people have to say.

After 'cruising the forums' today and gauging reaction near and far, one fact, and one fact alone, has become readily apparent: America hates Guidos. With a passion. The hair, the eyebrows, the clothes, the grease, the steroids -- the entire package has been evaluated, and found wanting. And you know what? I don't fucking blame you in the least. If nothing else, this blog -- and, to some extent, my forthcoming book -- has endeavored, for over nineteen months, to vigorously repudiate this entire 'culture.' So I know.

The one thing I'd like to make clear, however, is that this is, and has always been, a New York blog. The Guido phenomenon, much as it gives me the douche chills to sit here and claim it as my own, is centered in New York. Not New Jersey. There seems, however, to be a widespread tendency for people in other parts of the United States to refer to these characters as "Jersey Guidos," and I'm not quite sure how this misconception got started. Granted, there is, admittedly, a large segment of the Guido populace residing in the Garden State, but New Jersey isn't where the whole thing began, and New Jersey can hardly claim to be its cultural epicenter.

The people of whom I write hail primarily from the five boroughs of New York City, Long Island, and Westchester counties. The northern half of New Jersey, although from all reports saturated with Guidos, isn't sufficiently populated to register anything more than a slight blip on our radar at the front door of a Guido-infested city nightclub. One-in-ten, tops. And that's on one of their good nights.

When the "eyebrow parade" starts rolling down the sidewalk, I'm checking mostly New York licenses -- and, of course, the ubiquitous New York State Identification card indicative of a DWI arrest. Staten Island. Howard Beach, Queens. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Yonkers. Massapequa. Very few from Jersey. We do get some, to be sure, but I wanted to make it clear -- for what little it's worth -- that the term "Jersey Guido" is something that's been coined by people who quite obviously aren't from this area.

Trust me. I'm from here. I see them every single goddamned motherfucking day. When one of these jerkoffs comes strutting down the block, I'm not thinking he's from "Jersey." This is simple, folks. Think Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. This, like every other tackification of Americana, is purely a New York thing.