(by Bryan La Placa - Webmaster and Argus Managing Editor - August 06, 2008)
NORTH JERSEY - Writer Wheeler Antabanez is flush with success from a polluted place – the Passaic River.
His special edition Weird NJ magazine “Nightshade on the Passaic” is flying off the shelves. The new magazine documents his two years of travels in a canoe up and down the 80-mile Passaic River from the river’s crystal headwaters in Mendham to its septic end in Newark Bay. He signed autographs all night during the magazine release party on July 26 at Calaloo Café in Morristown, where he works.
But success didn’t come easily for the 31-year-old writer who lives in Montclair and grew up in Caldwell.
The writer, whose real name Matt Kent, was a nihilistic kid who first came to the attention of Weird NJ about 10 years ago. He sent a note in his unique demonic scrawl to Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, the editors and publishers of Weird NJ – a magazine devoted to Garden State oddities that has heavily focused on West Milford’s particular weirdness.
Kent’s note invited “Mark and Mark” to join him and meet Jesus Christ at the abandoned Essex Mountain Sanatorium – a popular haunt for fans of the weird in the Garden State.
“We get a lot of insane mail, as you might imagine,” laughed Moran during an interview with Suburban Trends last week. Kent’s letter is kept framed in a keepsake chest at the Weird NJ office in Bloomfield.
“He was dead serious. He’s very intense. We didn’t pay much mind to the letter because it doesn’t make any sense, but I did start keeping tabs on him and I went on his Web site (welcometohell.net), which was dedicated to the Essex Mountain Sanatorium, which has been abandoned for years. We had written about it, and he grew up right there, and spent a lot of time wandering the huge, old buildings,” said Moran.
The now-defunct Web site intrigued Moran and Sceurman, and they kept an eye on it as Kent documented his explorations of the abandoned sanatorium and his own dark thoughts.
“Reading the daily journal was like being witness to somebody slipping into madness, because it got stranger, and more intense and just off-the-hook as he went on. Nobody really knew where he was going with it. But it was enough to keep people coming back, and he became sort of a legend in that area of the sanatorium. But where he was going with this was anybody’s guess,” said Moran.
Kent was arrested in the lead up to the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre for his alter ego’s writings about the school shooting on his Web site.
“Some of what he does is just playing a character to push people’s buttons. It’s a very fascinating character, but the main thing about him is that he is a great writer, and very evocative, and could really set a mood and take people along on a journey that a wiser person would not want to take personally,” said Moran.
After Kent was arrested, he shut down the Web site, and got his book “gasstationthoughts and the daily journal of wheeler antabanez” published by Barricade Books – publishers of other controversial works like “The Anarchist Cookbook” and “The Turner Diaries.”
“It became more apparent to us that the whole thing was almost like a publicity stunt to garner attention for this manuscript he had written,” said Moran.
After that controversy settled down, Kent found a new haunt – the abandoned Hill Top Care Center in Montville. He wanted to write an article about it for Weird NJ, but Mark and Mark were against the idea.
“We were reluctant to publish too much about it because it was dangerous and illegal to go there,” said Moran. The Hill Top Care Center was burned down by arsonists in August 2006, and again the wandering spirit needed a new haunt.
“All my favorite places were burning down, except there’s one place they can’t take away from me – the Passaic River,” said Kent in an interview with Suburban Trends last week. “All I knew was, ‘I have to get a boat, and I have to name it Nightshade, and I have to do it now.’ I didn’t know why, or where it was going to lead me, but my instincts were just tingling. I knew I had to do this.”
He did not have the Weird NJ project in mind when he bought the canoe.
“I just wanted to get a canoe. I had no idea that it was going to lead me to Weird NJ or even the Passaic River. When I got the canoe, I was living by the Whippany River and it was too shallow, so I wondered where to go – and of course, the Passaic River was right there,” said Kent.
“We grew up with the river. It’s always there, but very few people ever bother with it because it’s really pretty dead. There’s not a lot to do there. It’s not exactly a recreational body of water,” said Moran. “Wherever you go around here, there’s a branch of it snaking around somewhere, so it’s omnipresent. It’s got a lot of stories because everybody has either seen a dead body floating in it, or it flooded their living room. There’s a whole underbelly of New Jersey along the banks of that river. It attracts an odd group of people who live along its banks. These are people that choose to live in a floodplain, and every year have the river go through their house. So, that tells you something about the kind of river rats that live along it, so it was the perfect topic for us to cover. And Wheeler gets so immersed in his subject matter that we knew if he started it, he would see it through to completion and wouldn’t leave any stone unturned. So it was a perfect fit for us.”
After reading Kent’s initial writings about the river, Sceurman wanted to publish a whole special issue of Weird NJ dedicated to his travels on the Passaic River.
“It was a big honor to be able to do that with Weird NJ,” said Kent. “Once I knew I was going to do the special issue, I knew I had to get a motor for the Nightshade. That opened the river up to me. It made it like a highway to me. Having a canoe with a motor is like having a moped for the river.”
He fell in love with the Passaic River and its many different faces as he traveled the length of it.
“It starts in Liddell’s Pond in Mendham. It’s beautiful, pristine water, like a bubbling mountain stream,” said Kent.
The river does not show its ugly side until it runs through the Great Swamp area where it is joined by several tributaries. The mountains of trash start with plastic bags, then bottles, and then sports balls, said Kent.
Although he’d rather the river stayed pure, Kent found a bright side to all the trash.
“It keeps people away. It makes it my own river. No one is going to go out there for a pleasure cruise. If they do, they’re going to be sorely disappointed,” said Kent
Since his magazine was published, Kent has done several media interviews, and always gets asked the same question: What was the weirdest thing you found?
“The weirdest thing I found was myself out there – the peace and the solitude out there – with my daughter and my girlfriend at the time. I was just connecting with world around me, and nature as New Jersey likes to display. With the river being so polluted, people say it’s crazy to go out on it, but that’s where I found my purpose, and my niche and my direction.”
Travels in our area
Kent also explored tributaries of the Passaic River, like the Pequannock and Pompton rivers, and the Two Bridges area in Lincoln Park.
One day while canoeing with his friend Bill, they decided to come ashore in that area and take a break. There, Kent realized he had stumbled into the infamous “Buttonwoods.”
Buttonwoods is a neighborhood along the banks of the river on the border of Lincoln Park and Wayne, known for being deluged almost yearly, and for the colorful people who choose to live there.
Buttonwoods was immortalized in a Weird NJ story written by Chris Gethard about a “beast” of a man who lived back there.
“The monster ended up being a guy named Shultzy who was over seven feet tall and lived in the floodplain amongst a pile of garbage. He dwelled in an actual house, but it was so obscured by trash that it was barely visible from the overgrown road,” writes Kent in “Nightshade on the Passaic.”
“Chris and Mark were driving by the house when Shultzy suddenly appeared in his greasy pickup truck, and aggressively ran them off the road. Once he had them pinned, Shultzy threatened them from the driver’s seat with nonsensical gibberish,” Kent retells the story.
Shultzy eventually let the weird explorers pass through, and a Lincoln Park police officer later wrote in to Weird NJ to tell them that Shultzy was actually a pretty nice guy, despite his eccentricities. Shultzy had been dead for a few years though by the time Kent visited Buttonwoods.
“I was kind of sad that he was dead. I would have liked to have met him and talked to him,” said Kent. “That’s a cool place. Back in the woods there is tons and tons of junk.”
He explored Shultzy’s abandoned house and snapped several photographs of the site, like the others he explored along the Passaic River that he documented in the special issue.
In the full-color 78-page issue, Kent also documents the Great Piece Meadows, Sharkey’s Dump and the Rockaway Graveyard, squatters’ turf in Newark and Paterson, the river beneath the Pulaski Skyway, famous murder sites along the riverbanks, abandoned mausoleums and assorted, shot-up junk.
Kent said he has often struggled with writing, but writing “Nightshade on the Passaic” was “the easiest thing I’ve done in my life. It was a great project, and I loved it. Doing this was one of the greatest opportunities of my life. It was a most beautiful time.”
With the success of “Nightshade,” Kent hopes to continue his writing career.
“Everyone hated me for ‘gasstationthoughts,’ but people really love “‘Nightshade on the Passaic.”’ It’s crossing boundaries, and going beyond Weird NJ readers to people who’ve grown up around here and grown up on the Passaic all their lives. It’s cool to have my writing reaching a broader audience rather than these underground freaks and psychos,” said Kent.
In the future, Kent wants to do a documentary of the Passaic River, exploring all 80 miles of it with cameras running. He would also like to do a sequel to “Nightshade on the Passaic” called “Nightshade on the Tigris.”
He wants to explore the river in the cradle of civilization with the U.S. military, but Mark and Mark have passed on that idea, saying it is too dangerous.
“I’ve been on the Passaic through Paterson. How could it be more dangerous than that?” laughed Kent.
The high school dropout is beaming with pride at his successful writing career. He now wants to concentrate on getting his novel “Matt & Jess Forever” published.
“Nightshade on the Passaic” is available at book retailers all over. For more information, go online to weirdnj.com, or myspace.com/wantabanez. |
