by Neal Pollack
Suddenly, I knew. Shit! I parted the crowd with my fists and tore for home.
On a windless night, Barbara heard the wind. Our white chenille drapes fluttered. The gusts grew louder and rattled the window. Louder still and the room filled with a cacophony of gale. In her doorway stood Neal Pollack, naked. His eyes lived with fire.
“Oh, god,” Barbara said.
She opened herself to him.
Consumed by weeks of desperation, loneliness, and desire, they humped. Barbara had never known passion like this, and Pollack had been without passion like this for at least a month. He had a lot of energy.
I appeared in the doorway.
“Pollack, you sonofabitch!” I said.
I wrenched Pollack from my wife. He was on the floor. I pounded him. He drew his hands to his face. Barbara threw off the sheets.
“Leave him alone, Paul!” she said. “He’s more of a man than you’ll ever be!”
I was smacking Pollack with a frying pan.
“Untrue!” I said.
“It is true! And he’s a better writer, too!”
Then I, Paul St. Pierre, ordinarily a kind man of mild temperament, did something. I grabbed Neal Pollack’s feet and dragged him to the window. Pollack was barely conscious.
“Uh…” he said. “Unnnnnnh….”
Barbara reached to stop me, but I slapped her away. I lifted Pollack up, edged his body out the window, and let go. It was four stories down.
Pollack was falling, falling, falling. Eternity opened beneath him, a gaping mouth of darkness where A&R men sharpened their long knives. As the world went black, Pollack heard the end of music.
“Clambone,” he said. “Don’t let me die.”
INTERLUDE
MIDNIGHT DRIVE ON A HIGHWAY STREET
1971–1972
With a moan and a grunt, I sit upright in bed. My lower back wrenches. The bottle of Maker’s sits half-empty on the nightstand. Through my boxers and undershirt, I can see the permanent paunch. I haven’t shaved in several days. It feels like flies are buzzing inside my head.
Ruth appears in the bedroom doorway. She’s holding her overnight bag.
“Paul,” she says.
“What?”
“I’m leaving you.”
I lay back down.
“No,” I say.
“We haven’t spoken in two months.”
“That could change.”
“You went to Detroit without telling me.”
“I had research.”
“You have children.”
Speaking of children.
“Oh, god!” I say. “Where are the children? What about the children?”
“They’re at my parents’ in Connecticut,” she says. “They’ve been there since January.”
Well, I think. No wonder I haven’t seen them.
“Good-bye, Paul,” she says.
Have my months of immersion in Neal Pollack’s world caused me to become like him? Am I losing human feeling, intellectual integrity? The assignments have slowed to a trickle, and then a drip. Suddenly I find myself living off my book-contract scraps, and spending most of those on booze.
Aw, fuck it, I say, and roll over.
When I wake again, it’s dusk. Across the river, into the New Jersey marshes, I hear Bruce calling to me. Somehow, I know where I’ll find him. I hope Ruth left me one of the cars.
Three hours later, I park in front of an abandoned factory in a forlorn field on the outskirts of Asbury Park, New Jersey. There, atop a rusted blast furnace, sits the Boss, holding his acoustic guitar. He’s crying.
“Hello, Bruce,” I say.
“Look what they’ve done,” he says. “Look what they’ve done to America.”
“Why are you sitting here?”
“Man’s gotta sit somewhere,” he says.
He sings in an authentic voice that reflects all our pain, with lyrics that make the universal particular and the particular universal. Because whenever we hurt, as Americans, Bruce is there. Whenever we feel, he feels with us. In our darkest, coldest hour, we call out to him, and he answers:
Hey there mister can you tell me
Whatever happened to the dreams we had?
We were feelin’ good, now we’re feeling bad.
I’m just driftin’ now from bar to bar.
With my workin’ hands.
And my old guitar.
Johnny came back from Kuwait
In the summer of ’92.
He was alive, he had survived
His buddies taught him how to drive A tank.
Uncle Sam said Johnny just you wait.
We’ll find you an important job to do.
Well Johnny waited patiently
He kissed his wife beneath the tree
He was a metaphor
For you and you and me.
Johnny moved to Oklahoma
In the spring of ’95
He leased a house, he was a renter
His wife got a job at the Federal Center
For life.
Uncle Sam said Johnny see,
We took care of your children’s mom.
Well Johnny hopped onto the public bus
He watched along with all of us
As his wife got killed
By a patriotic homemade bomb.
Hey there mister can you tell me
Whatever happened to the jobs we had?
We were feelin’ good, now we’re feeling bad.
I’m just driftin’ now from bar to bar.
With my workin’ hands.
And my old guitar.
Johnny moved to New York City
With his kids and his broken heart.
He was an also-ran, but he had a plan
To become an urban fireman
At last.
Uncle Sam said Johnny you’re a zero
No benefits.
We’ll make you quit.
Your life is not worth turkey shit.
Then America blew up.
And Johnny was a hero.
Hey there mister can you tell me
Whatever happened to the world we had?
We were feelin’ good, now we’re feeling bad.
We’re just driftin’ now from bar to bar.
With our workin’ hands.
And our old guitars.
Bruce finishes. Bows his head. The Jersey night is still, out of respect.
“Wow,” I say. “That really captures the tenor of the times. We need you, Bruce. We really do.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve just been sitting here a long time and thinking that the world isn’t what they promised us, back then, in the storybooks. I mean, you look at how hard my old man worked, and his old man, but we escaped that somehow, didn’t we? Because of the songs we heard on the radio. And then it all just falls away, the American dream.”
“Tell me about Neal Pollack.”
Springsteen looks confused and bitter, but he always does.
“Aren’t you that guy from the Nation?” he says. “The one who appreciates and understands me?”
“No,” I say. “I’m Paul St. Pierre. Remember? After you played Boston the first time, I wrote about you in the Phoenix. If I remember correctly, the piece said: ‘I have seen Bruce Springsteen, and he may just have a future in rock ’n’ roll.’"
“Didn’t read that one,” says the Boss.
“Oh.”
The Boss strums his guitar and starts to hum.
“Please tell me about Pollack,” I say. “Please. I had a hard one today. My wife left me.”
He pauses mid-strum.
“I’ve been there, man,” he says. “Marriage isn’t what they promised us, back when promises were made. When they sent Frankie off to ’Nam, his woman said—”
“Pollack,” I say.
“Oh yeah,” says Springsteen, his voice raspy. “I met him, uh, about thirty years ago, maybe thirty-one, about this time of the year, around August. I was working in this
bar down on the Shore. I worked there for three, maybe four months. Place called the Broken Coaster.”
He starts ticking off a rhythm.
“So it was me, and it was Steve and Garry. And Southside Johnny. Do you get down to the Shore much?”
“No,” I say. “I have a place in the Catskills. And I go to Mexico.”
“Well, I’ll tell you that the Catskills never had a band like Southside Johnny’s band. Yeah, the Dukes. Anyway, we were all working in this bar, and we were feelin’ real discouraged. Because no one would give us a gig or nothin’. This guy had just bought the Broken Coaster. He was blind and had one leg, and didn’t know nothin’ about runnin’ a bar. That was the dingiest, dirtiest dump any of us had ever set foot in. It was empty and it smelled like dead animals. We say we’ll play for the door. Charge a dollar. We had an eighteen-piece band at the time, and we brought ’em in. That night, we must have made…”
Out of the night shadow steps a hook-nosed man wearing a white suit and a broad-rimmed white hat.
“Five dollars,” says the man.
“Thank you, Stevie,” says Springsteen. “Five bucks, maybe. And a bunch of guys quit. The next week, we had a fourteen-piece band, then a ten-piecer, and then we were down to six, then we had to dump this guy Eric ‘Little Picker’ McGonigle, he’s a bus driver in New York now, until finally it was four of us, and we all wanted to quit, too. Seemed like in this world we had no hope, no fans, and no friends. Nothin’.
“One night after the gig, we was all feelin’ down in the dumps and we’d each had about eight beers. It was one of those nights when we were sayin’: ‘Man, I’d rather work in a damn factory than do this.’ Even sadder was that we all did work in factories. ‘How come we ain’t got no record out?’ I said. Steve said, ‘Because we ain’t got no recording equipment,’ and it was all very mournful. None of us had a car that night, and we were gonna walk home along the boardwalk.
“It was a nasty night. Rain comin’ down in big old sheets and the wind whipping in off the Atlantic, gettin’ salt in our hair and our eyes. It was late, too. It musta been three in the morning. Steve was playin’ his guitar, tryin’ to get some chords right. He worked damn hard. Like all Americans. We work hard, but what do we get in return? Nothin’. It’s all just broken promises and forgotten dreams.”
He began to sing:
Under the overpass
Down by the sea
Hiding from reality
Prayin’ to be free…
I find myself growing frustrated with the Boss.
“Damn it, Bruce,” I say. “Would you please finish the story?”
“Yeah,” he says. “We see something rumblin’ toward us, on the boardwalk, really fast. ‘What the hell is that?’ I said. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ Garry said, ‘but we better get out of its way.’ We jumped onto the beach. There was water up to our ankles. We hid under the boardwalk and looked up through the cracks. Turns out it was this maroon van, brand-new. It brakes to a halt right in front of us. These two burly guys, both white, almost albino, but both dressed all in black, get out of the front seat, and they open up the back. We’re looking on, real quiet, and they pull out this skinny naked guy. He has a big gash in his forehead. God knows if he was even alive. They toss him headfirst onto the beach. Guess they figured by the time high tide hit, he’d wash out to sea. Now none of us were gonna mess with guys like that. As they got back in the van, one of them said, ‘Cheap-ass rock critic didn’t pay us enough to finish the job,’ and I’m thinkin’, ‘rock critic? How’re we gonna get one of those to our show?’
“The naked guy starts twitchin’ and moanin’ in the sand. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty pounds. Steve said, ‘We just can’t leave him out here to die.’ Among the four of us, we managed to get him to his feet. ‘What’s your name?’ I said. He was twitchin’ and droolin’, and I think he started to cry, though I couldn’t tell because it was rainin’ so hard. He said, ‘I…I…I…I can’t remember! My true identity is a mystery to me!’ He passed out right there in my arms.
“We just stood there for a few seconds, in the rain, all confused. Then I said, ‘Boys. I think we’ve got ourselves a roadie.’"
The man might have been dying. He lay on a cot at Bruce Springsteen’s house in Freehold, New Jersey, for almost two weeks, not moving, just sweating in his bandages. Springsteen’s family had long since left for California, so it was only Bruce and the occasional band member living in the place. They fed the man soup and soda through a straw. Occasionally, he would bolt up and scream, “I WANNA DIE! LET ME DIE!” Then he’d collapse again in his fever.
“Ain’t no way I’m gonna let you die, pal,” Springsteen said.
After a while, the man started sitting up in bed, asking Bruce to put records on.
“I wanna hear Jerry Lee,” the man said. “And Warren Smith. Don’t know why.”
Springsteen didn’t know who this man was, but he certainly knew about the early days of rock ’n’ roll.
Eventually it was safe to move him. Springsteen had rented an apartment over a drugstore in Asbury Park. The mystery man went with him, but as soon as the move was done he sat in an easy chair and stayed there. Sometimes at night Clarence Clemons would come over and lull him to sleep with gentle saxophone lullabies. Other nights, the honky-tonk songs of Southside Johnny drifted up from the boardwalk and filled his dreams with abstract, almost generic images of an all-night party.
At a club called the Upstage, every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, Springsteen and the boys would play shows. They’d start at three in the afternoon and sometimes go until three in the morning. All that summer, they’d line up four thick at the door to see the band that everyone was calling “that band that Springsteen’s in.”
The man with amnesia woke up one night to the sound of thunder. How far off? he sat and wondered. It sounded like it was coming from down the street, maybe two blocks. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He could stand! His knees felt solid. But he had no clothes. He’d been naked all summer. Guess he’d have to borrow some of Bruce’s clothes. He looked in the closet. There were four black leather jackets, six identical pairs of blue jeans, and about twenty sleeveless white T-shirts. Also a blue denim cap. Well, it was something. He wore one of each, and the cap, along with one of Bruce’s eight pairs of black leather work boots.
He got to the club. Women were spilling out the door. The band was ripping through a twelve-minute version of “Green Onions.” Inside, the air was dense with smoke and sweat and good old-fashioned rhythm and blues. Bruce was onstage, leading the crowd in a merry, rollicking chorus of “Jambalaya.”
“Whoo!” shouted the amnesiac. “Good old New Orleans boogie-woogie! Yeah!”
The band moved into a slow, steady rhythm. Bruce smiled that smile, that shit-eating world-swallowing grin. He said:
“Now, I’m from New Jersey.”
The crowd cheered.
“Is anyone else here from New Jersey?”
“Yeah!” the crowd said. “We’re all from New Jersey!”
“Now a lot of people out there put New Jersey down. They say it stinks.”
BAM! went the band, on the one beat.
“They say people here are stupid!”
BAM!
“They say it’s dying and it’s hopeless!”
BAM!
“Well, I’m here to tell you, New Jersey is not dying!”
BAM!
“It’s not hopeless!”
BAM!
“It does stink! But we’re working on that!”
BAM!
“New Jersey has the most beautiful women in the world!”
The crowd was whipping from side to side now, frenzied.
“And let me tell you one more thing about New Jersey!”
BAM!
“New! Jersey! Knows! How! To! Rock!”
And so the song began:
Midnight drive on a highway street
Jenny’s got her blue jeans
Crumpled at her feet
One hand in her crotch
One hand on the wheel
I’m cruisin’ ’cross New Jersey
While I’m coppin’ me a feel!
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Beautiful American
So hungry and so free
I haven’t got a job
I’ve just got you and me!
Midnight layoffs at the automotive plant
They’re downsizing my cousin
My uncle, and my aunt
Dad’s got one hand on the bottle
One hand on the gun
While I’m cruisin’ ’cross New Jersey
Runnin’ wild and havin’ fun!
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Beautiful American
So hungry and so free
I haven’t got a job
I’ve just got you and me!
Midnight burglars at the Watergate
While my hometown is boiling
With anger and with hate
I’ve got one hand on the Bible
Little Jenny’s in the pew
She says with a name like Springsteen,
You’ve just got to be a Jew!
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Jenny Jenny, Jenny Jenny Jenny
Beautiful American
So hungry and so free
I haven’t got a job
I’ve just got you and me!
Three hours later, the show ended. The band sat around drinking cheap beer, understanding one another as no men have ever before or since. The amnesiac joined them. Springsteen slapped him on the back.
“That was a great show, guys,” said the amnesiac.
“Thanks.”
“It seemed to embody the living mythos of rock ’n’ roll, as though you were creating a fresh universe from stale parts. Somehow, in the fetid Jersey night, you encapsulated the hopes and dreams of a generation, living out the fantasy of every kid who ever saw a guitar in a store window or listened to a record alone in their bedroom or saw the Rolling Stones on television, who said, ‘I wish that were me.’ A hard sound, yet a soft sound, a shout of pain and celebration, of communal joy yet also utter isolation.”