Last summer I went to Manasquan, a town on the coast of New Jersey. Now, having lived my whole life in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and having seen my fair share of the intellectual tragedy that is the show Jersey Shore, it’s not surprising that the coast of the Garden State was the absolute last place I expected to find a new understanding of the human connection. However after spending a day with my brother Aidan, his friend Ted talking to self-proclaimed rapper Andrew “Cozy” Cozenza, I found that I was dead wrong.

The first night we showed up in Manasquan would set the tone for the rest of the trip. We decided to take a late night walk along the boardwalk and say hi to everyone we met, typically starting off with a greeting of “Hey lad! Whatcha up to?” After talking to a few groups of people, we returned to the beach house determined to meet as many new people as possible in the next week.

In the days to come, we would find ourselves returning to the piles of giant concrete T-shapes that were arranged in piles around a nearby pier in order to prevent erosion, (dubbed the T-rocks) just to hang around and talk with the characters that would show up.

One of the first of these characters we met was a rapper who called himself Cozy. When we first saw Cozy, he was sitting on the T-rocks struggling to remove a flounder from the hook of his fishing pole.

“Hey lad! What’s up?”
Cozy looked up from his fish. “Oh hey, just trying to take this flounder off the line.”
We clambered over the rocks to get closer. “Nice catch! What’s your name man?”

Cozy gave up on untangling his flounder and wiped his hands off on his wetsuit. “Andrew, but I go by Cozy most of the time.”

“Wait… You’re Cozy?!” The T-rocks were covered in graffiti; names and pictures were sprayed and drawn everywhere, but by far the most prominent tag sprayed on the rocks was a simple “Cozy” scrawled in purple spray paint.

Cozy let out a short chuckle. “Yeah, you’ve seen my tags?”

“They’re kinda hard to miss, you sprayed them on pretty much every rock.” Ted replied, leaning on his elbow.

Cozy shrugged. “Yeah, isn’t it sweet?”

We looked between each other. “Yeah… they’re pretty cool I guess.”

“Just getting the name out there man, everyone who comes over here sees the tag. It’s awesome to be known for something around here.”

As we walked our way back to the beach house laughing about Cozy’s need to be recognized, we came across a group of people with cameras and microphones shooting what looked to be a commercial for a local roofing company.

“Hey lad, what’s with all the cameras?” I asked the man with the microphone.

“We’re shooting a commercial for Robert Haines Roofing.” He said with a smile. “Gotta get the name out there you know?”