PUBLISHED IN THE HERALD NEWS ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2002
WRITTEN BY MARY KATE FRANK OF THE HERALD NEWS
LIVING THE NIGHTLIFE
Site chronicles guidos showing Jersey critics how they party
BY MARY KATE FRANK
HERALD NEWS
Originally published December 8, 2002
It's almost 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, and there's no line outside Club Abyss in Sayreville. If there were a line, though, it's safe to say that Anthony Moussa and the rest of the guidos would blow right past it.
As it is, they pile off the bus, which the club paid to chauffeur them, and strut inside without paying the $12 cover charge. Then they head to the bar, where the beefy, goateed bartender offers them free drinks and lights their cigarettes. A DJ, who goes by the name "Manny the Greek," booms their arrival over the music: "NJ Guido in the hoooooouse tonight!"
The management of Club Abyss has invited the guidos to the house tonight, hoping their presence and a subsequent write-up on their popular Web site njguido.com, will help revive "Wildlife Wednesdays," an Abyss theme night that has waned in popularity lately. But despite bold promotional flyers that proclaimed "Ladies pay no cover" and promised $2 Coronas all night, only a handful of people occupy the dance floor.
Moussa, who is known as "the Moo," leans back against the bar, scans the room and offers an assessment.
"It's really dead in here," he says.
Moussa launched njguido.com in May as a way to share photos of his Jersey Shore weekends with his friends. Armed with a digital camera, he headed out to the clubs and kept a photo diary of his summer, defined by scantily clad women, shirtless men and tans as far as the eye could see.
Soon, people he met while out at night were surfing njguido.com, looking for their pictures. But the site really took off when Moussa added some of his writings, such as an essay about the pain of leaving his Shore house on Labor Day weekend, which, he says, made his aunt cry.
"I felt as if my feet were cemented to the floor, I could not walk any further; I could only rotate around like a carousel," he writes in the essay. "That is when I noticed something that changed my life forever. Right there in the middle of the little living room of my shore house was the worst feeling that I had ever felt in my life."
Moussa, 23, of Franklin Lakes, "wanted people to know that we have feelings about this stuff. We love it. We really love it, and we're just showing the world what we love to do."
He claims the site now attracts 300,000 visitors a month.
As for the name: "You've got preps and you've got yuppies. When people look at us... we're guidos," Moussa explains.
The term guido is usually used to describe an Italian American guy with a certain style. In the guido heydey, the late 1980s, the look included gelled hair, gold chains and muscles. Guidos might drive Mustangs or Camaros. They might wear Z. Cavaricci baggy pants with silk shirts. In the 1990s, with the explosion of hip hop, styles changed. But Moussa maintains that the guido look never died, it just got altered.
"It's a guy who is into certain things: the club scene and tight jeans, the designer tank tops and the sunglasses and the spiky hair, for sure," says Moussa, who is equal parts Italian and Lebanese, and whose brown hair sticks up in two-inch spikes. "The new element of the guido is a tan. The new guidos try to stay tan all year long."
For him and his friends, "guido" refers to a way of life - which they call "the scene" - even more than a manner of dressing. At this time of year, the scene revolves around Joey's in Clifton, Metro Lounge in Rochelle Park or River Street in Hoboken. During the summers, of course, the guidos spend weekends at their version of paradise, the Jersey shore.
Their outings are chronicled on the Web site, which, for some, has become a guide to local nightlife as well as an online haven. A special section of the site pays tribute to guidos of the 1980s and 1990s.
"I have grown apart from a lot of my friends throughout the years because others have chosen to become more sophisticated or are too good to still be considered a guido/guidette," despairs Christina from North Jersey in a posting on the site with the subject line: "Guidette from Birth."
For others, the site is a running joke, giving picture-proof to the Jersey stereotype of tight jeans and big hair.
The critics are addressed in the "NJ Anthem," written by Moussa and posted on the site.
"This is the weekend we show the rest of the world what we're made of," it reads. "It's time to show the New Jersey haters out there, how we party... We don't need a city lounge or a fancy dinner... 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...There are no excuses...party like a rockstar."
It's in this spirit that Moussa and seven other site-followers headed down to Abyss in the free bus that left from the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne. Moussa contends that two busloads of people signed up for the "exclusive" road trip but many canceled because of the threat of snow.
Brian Carline, a high school friend of Moussa's, is there, also armed with a camera to take pictures for the Web site. Tonight he is dressed in a tight-fitting "njguido.com" T-shirt, like the ones that go for $20 on the site.
Brian, of Upper Montclair, is known as "Construction Carline" because of his penchant for wearing an orange construction hat in the nightclubs. Asked why, he replies, "Why not?" A group of William Paterson students are also part of the crew. Drea Arias , 20, discovered the Web site after her photo was snapped at a club.
"NJ guido - that's like the best-looking Italian guys in New Jersey," says Arias, a wide-eyed girl in tight jeans who seems to embody the guido ideal.
Others at Abyss don't consider themselves guidos at all.
"Do I look like an NJ guido to you?" snarls Jay Farrell, 26, of Edison. He defines guidos as "guys with too much hair on their chests."
But to most at the club, the njguido.com group are minor celebrities. People buy them shots. The female bartenders tousle their hair and run their tongues over their teeth in preparation for Web-site-destined pictures. Moussa and his friends hang out in the DJ booth.
"This is a little young for me," Moussa says, looking around. "The truth is, we're not really a college crowd."
They leave early, about 1 a.m. On the bus ride home, Moussa and Carline get into a discussion about the people who mock them.
"People call us guidos from the '80s because we have spiked hair, but the truth is, they'll have spiked hair next year," Moussa says passionately. "I think they're a little bit behind us."
Carline, sitting across the aisle, couldn't agree more. "You're totally right," he says, nodding.
And there's not a soul on this bus who's inclined to argue with him.
COPYRIGHT 2003 NORTH MEDIA GROUP
www.northjersey.com