Born to Run
Page 48
Mentally, just when I thought I was in the part of my life where I’m supposed to be cruising, my sixties were a rough, rough ride. I came back to the States slightly changed and still wrestling with myself day by day. But things became a little more normal as time passed. I’ve long ago stopped struggling to get out of bed and I’ve got my work energy back. That feels good. Two years have passed and it can feel like it never really happened. I can’t specifically recall the state. The best I can do is think, “What the fuck was that? That’s not me.” But it’s in me, chemically, genetically, whatever you want to call it, and as I’ve said before, I’ve got to watch. The only real bulwark against it was love.
• • •
Writing about yourself is a funny business. At the end of the day it’s just another story, the story you’ve chosen from the events of your life. I haven’t told you “all” about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind. In these pages I’ve tried to do that.
SEVENTY-NINE
LONG TIME COMIN’
My father’s house shines hard and bright.
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling so cold and alone
Shining cross this dark highway
Where our sins lie unatoned . . .
“My Father’s House”
If I had one wish in this godforsaken world, kids
It’d be that your mistakes will be your own
Your sins will be your own . . .
“Long Time Comin’ ”
“My Father’s House” is probably the best song I’ve written about my dad, but its conclusion wasn’t going to be enough for me. In “Long Time Comin’ ” I lay out the wish I’ve had for my children. We honor our parents by not accepting as the final equation the most troubling characteristics of our relationship. I decided between my father and me that the sum of our troubles would not be the summation of our lives together. In analysis you work to turn the ghosts that haunt you into ancestors who accompany you. That takes hard work and a lot of love, but it’s the way we lessen the burdens our children have to carry. Insisting on our own experience, our own final calculus of love, trouble, hard times and, if we’re lucky, a little transcendence. This is how we claim our own lives as sons and daughters, independent souls on our piece of ground. It’s not always an option. There are irretrievable lives and unredeemable sins, but the chance to rise above is one I wish for yours and mine.
I work to be an ancestor. I hope my summation will be written by my sons and daughter, with our family’s help, and their sons and daughters with their guidance. The morning of my dad’s visit to Los Angeles before my fatherhood stands out now as a pivotal moment between us. He had come to petition me, to settle a new sum from the dark and confusing elements that had been our lives. He had some faith that it could be done, came searching for a miracle whose embers he felt stirring in his own heart and that he hoped was burning and buried somewhere in the heart of his son.
He was asking me to write a new ending to our story and I’ve worked to do that, but this kind of story has no end. It is simply told in your own blood until it is passed along to be told in the blood of those you love, who inherit it. As it’s told, it is altered, as all stories are in the telling, by time, will, perception, faith, love, work, by hope, deceit, imagination, fear, history and the thousand other variable powers that play upon our personal narratives. It continues to be told because along with the seed of its own immolation, the story carries with it the rebirthing seed of renewal, a different destiny for those who hear it than the painful one my father and I struggled through. Slowly, a new story emerges from the old, of differently realized lives, building upon the rough experience of those who’ve come before and stepping over the battle-worn carcasses of the past. On a good day this is how we live. This is love. This is what life is. The possibility of finding root, safety and nurturing in a new season.
The tree sprouts, its branches thicken, mature, bloom. It is scarred by lightning, shaken by thunder, sickness, human events and God’s hand. Drawn black, it grows itself back toward light, rising higher toward heaven while thrusting itself deeper, more firmly, into the earth. Its history and memory retained, its presence felt.
On a November evening during the writing of this book, I drove once again back to my hometown, back to my neighborhood. The streets were quiet. My corner church was silent and unchanged. Tonight there were no weddings and no funerals. I rolled slowly another fifty yards up my block to find my great towering copper beech tree gone, cut to the street. My heart went blank . . . then settled. I looked again. It was gone but still there. The very air and space above it was still filled with the form, soul and lifting presence of my old friend, its leaves and branches now outlined and shot through by evening stars and sky. A square of musty earth, carved into the parking lot blacktop at pavement’s edge, was all that remained. It still held small snakes of root slightly submerged by dust and dirt, and there the arc of my tree, my life, lay plainly visible. My great tree’s life by county dictum or blade could not be ended or erased. Its history, its magic, was too old and too strong. Like my father, my grandmothers, my aunt Virginia, my two grandfathers, my father-in-law Joe, my aunt Dora and aunt Eda, Ray and Walter Cichon, Bart Haynes, Terry, Danny, Clarence and Tony, my own family gone from these houses now filled by strangers—we remain. We remain in the air, the empty space, in the dusty roots and deep earth, in the echo and stories, the songs of the time and place we have inhabited. My clan, my blood, my place, my people.
Once again in the shadow of the steeple, as I stood feeling the old soul of my tree, of my town, weighing upon me, the words and a benediction came back to me. I’d chanted them singsong, unthinkingly, endlessly in the green blazer, ivory shirt and green tie of all of St. Rose’s unwilling disciples. Tonight they came to me and flowed differently. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil . . . all of us, forever and ever, amen.
• • •
I fought my whole life, studied, played, worked, because I wanted to hear and know the whole story, my story, our story, and understand as much of it as I could. I wanted to understand in order to free myself of its most damaging influences, its malevolent forces, to celebrate and honor its beauty, its power, and to be able to tell it well to my friends, my family and to you. I don’t know if I’ve done that, and the devil is always just a day away, but I know this was my young promise to myself, to you. This, I pursued as my service. This, I presented as my long and noisy prayer, my magic trick. Hoping it would rock your very soul and then pass on, its spirit rendered, to be read, heard, sung and altered by you and your blood, that it might strengthen and help make sense of your story. Go tell it.
EPILOGUE
A few weeks before Thanksgiving, a sunny late fall day springs upon Central Jersey. Sixty-degree temperatures send me out to the garage to fire up my motorcycle and catch the last good riding weather of the season. I head south to Manasquan Inlet. A two-day nor’easter has just subsided, blowing through, driving the ocean up to the dune grass at the boardwalk’s edge and washing away a significant amount of my old beach back into the whitecapped, still-churning sea. The jetty my sister and I so gingerly tiptoed out upon in the late-summer dark is topped with a good three or four inches of damp sand over black rock that makes navigating its shifting surface in engineer boots a minor adventure.
Here in November the sun sets over the southwest—Point Pleasant—side of the inlet, unsheathing and casting a shimmering sword north across the gray inlet waters to the Manasquan side. There I sit on the jetty at sword’s point. As the waves lap upon the rocks at my boot heels the tip of that sword shatters into shards of golden lig
ht on the waters below, breaking into mini suns, microcosms of the God source that brings life to our planet. Here I am amongst and greeted by friends known and unknown. It comes with the turf. A well-meaning menagerie of schoolkids, old folks with their metal detectors, dogs, surfers, fishermen, folks from Freehold who’ve always used Manasquan as their Shore getaway, the kids behind the counter at Carlson’s Corner, the endless strangers who wait in cars, sitting in line facing the inlet. There behind those driver’s-side windows could sit the merry, puzzled ghost of my old man dreaming of another life somewhere, someplace, far away from all the goodness he has wrought and his beautiful treasures. It’s my place now, another small and bittersweet inheritance.
As the sun sets into a range of gray-blue clouds I fire the engine on my bike back to life, tighten my helmet, throw my scarf around my face, toss a wave good-bye and slip from the small town of Manasquan out into the five o’clock traffic along Route 34. The sun is down now and a cool evening falls. At a light, I zip my leather jacket to the neck, notice my boot heel resting upon the hot, wrapped exhaust pipe of my V-twin, leaving a swatch of rubber and lifting a thin swirling slipstream of blue smoke into the crisp autumn air. The light goes green and the road stirs and rumbles beneath me as I pop over small sections of highway that have expanded in the summer heat, then cooled, leaving irregular ridges, sequential speed bumps where sections of asphalt meet. Rumble, rumble, rumble . . . pop . . . rumble, rumble, rumble . . . pop. With every “pop,” I’m bouncing up off my sprung seat and suddenly I’m back going round and round, rolling over the blue slate driveway outside the convent house of St. Rose and waiting, wanting, once again, to hear my grandmother’s voice calling to me at dusk. I listen . . . but tonight the past fades and there’s only the present voice of sparks, firing pistons . . . sweet cold mechanics.
I travel into a stream of headlights as commuter cars holding their day travelers flash by inches from my left handle grip. I move north up the highway until the traffic recedes, leaving only my headlight illuminating blank road and dashes of white line . . . white line . . . white line . . . white line . . . My “ape hanger,” high-rise handlebars thrust my arms out and skyward to shoulder height, opening me up to the winds full force—a rough embrace—as my gloved hands tighten their grip on that new evening sky. The cosmos begins to flicker to life in the twilight above me. With no fairing, a sixty-mile-per-hour gale steadily pounds into my chest, nudging me to the back of my seat, subtly threatening to blow me off six hundred pounds of speeding steel, reminding me of how the next moment holds no guarantees . . . and of how good things are, this day, this life, how lucky I’ve been, how lucky I am. I turn the corner off the highway onto a dark country road. I hit my high beams, scan the flat farm fields looking for deer. All clear, I twist the throttle as rushing into my arms comes home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written over a period of seven years. I’d write longhand into my notebook, then put it away at intervals, sometimes for a year or more while we toured or recorded. I was in no hurry and had no time pressures. This allowed me to come back to the book with fresh eyes to judge what I’d written. My story slowly unfolded into a long session of writing toward the end. Then, with the help of those below, it reached completion.
All my love and thanks to Patti for giving me the room and understanding to tell the story I needed to tell.
Thanks to Jon Landau, one of my earliest readers, for his enthusiasm, advice and encouragement.
Many thanks to Jonathan Karp, who first worked with us on Outlaw Pete, for giving us a home. His eye and advice guided me to the best of my writing and brought this book to its final fruition.
Special thanks to Mary Mac, my companion through the endless hours of rewrites as we transcribed my scribble into our home computer.
Thanks to Michelle Holme for curating our photo section, and to Frank Stefanko for our cover photo.
Thanks to my friend and old bandmate George Theiss for jogging my memory on some of our Castiles adventures.
I would like to thank Jon Landau, Allen Grubman, Jonathan Ehrlich and Don Friedman, who took care of the practical arrangements with Simon & Schuster, and a special thanks to Les Moonves for his helpfulness in this area, as well.
Thanks to Barbara Carr, who has handled the entire project with utmost dedication and effectiveness.
And thanks to Marilyn Laverty, who has been doing my public relations for thirty-seven years, and Tracy Nurse, who has worked on our presentation internationally for thirty years.
Thanks to all at Simon & Schuster who have contributed to this effort, especially Marie Florio, Cary Goldstein, Richard Rhorer, Stephen Bedford, Jonathan Evans, John Paul Jones, Aja Pollock, Erica Ferguson, Lisa Erwin, Ruth Lee-Mui, Meryll Preposi, Miah Saunders, Samantha Cohen, Kristen Lemire, Allison Har-zvi, Megan Hogan, Jackie Seow, Elisa Rivlin, Chris Lynch, Michael Selleck, Gary Urda, Paula Amendolara, Colin Shields, Sumya Ojakli, Dennis Eulau, Craig Mandeville, Jeff Wilson, John Felice, Liz Perl, Wendy Sheanin, Sue Fleming, Jofie Ferrari-Adler, Adam Rothberg, Irene Kheradi, Dave Schaeffer, Ian Chapman, Kevin Hanson, Iain MacGregor, Rahul Srivastava, Dan Ruffino and Carolyn Reidy.
Thanks to Greg Linn and Betsy Whitney at Sony Music for their ongoing efforts. And finally, thanks to everyone in the management office who lent a hand: Jan Stabile, Alison Oscar and Laura Kraus.
PHOTO CREDITS
(Arranged by insert page number.)
INSERT
Author’s personal collection: 1 (all), 2 (all), 3, 4, 5 (bottom three), 12 (all), 13 (all), 14 (all), 15 (all), 16 (all)
Billy Smith Collection: 5 (top)
Art Maillet: 6 (top)
David Gahr: 6 (bottom two), 7 (top right), 10 (middle left), 11 (top three)
Roz Levin: 7 (top left, middle right, bottom)
Peter Cunningham: 8 (top left)
Time Magazine: 8 (middle right) © 1975 Time Inc. All rights reserved. TIME and the TIME logo are registered trademarks of Time Inc.
Eric Meola: 8 (bottom)
Frank Stefanko: 9 (all), 10 (bottom left and bottom right)
Joel Bernstein: 10 (top)
Neal Preston: 11 (bottom)
ENDPAPERS
Joel Bernstein (front)
Mary Alfieri (back)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the New Jersey Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of twenty Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors. He lives in New Jersey with his family. For more information, go to www.brucespringsteen.net.
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Interior design by Ruth Lee-Mui
Endpaper and photo insert design by Michelle Holme
Photo licensing by Crystal Singh-Hawthorne
Jacket photograph © Frank Stefanko
Jacket design by Jackie Seow
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-5011-4151-5
ISBN 978-1-5011-4153-9 (ebook)