Big Man

by Clarence Clemons

  “Congratulations on your impending nuptials,” said Thomas.

  “Thank you,” said Clarence.

  “Remind me again why you’re doing this.”

  “I’m in love.”

  “Weren’t you in love the last five or six times?”

  “Yes,” said Clarence.

  “So how is this time different?”

  “It just is,” said Clarence. “I truly love this woman.”

  “It seems to me that you’re very good at getting married and very bad at staying married,” said Thomas. “Or am I stating the obvious?”

  “You’re good at that,” said Clarence.

  “Stating the obvious?”

  “Obviously.”

  “You’re avoiding the question,” said Thomas.

  “What question?”

  “The implied question of why you’re getting married when history tells us you’re a failure at remaining married.”

  “My lawyer tells me that with my prenup it’s just like dating,” said Clarence.

  Thomas laughed and reflexively stroked his beard. He’d shaved it a few years ago, but nobody recognized him without it so he grew it back. He found no irony in that.

  “Here’s to you,” said Thomas, raising his glass.

  “Cheers,” said Clarence.

  “Antiques Roadshow,” said Thomas.

  They drank. Somebody put some money in the jukebox and “Oh Babe, What Would You Say?” by the late Hurricane Smith began to play. Clarence loved the sound of the organ on this song. It reminded him of summer at the shore and all those waterfront bars and, of course, of Danny. So many people he’d known had died. He didn’t understand death. It felt like life was a movie with a bad ending. Hopefully the next life would make it worthwhile. Still, there was too much death that went with growing older. Too many fallen comrades.

  “I know more dead people than living people,” said Clarence.

  “I hate death,” said Thomas. “What was it Jackson Browne said about it in that song? ‘It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear / That I can’t sing / I can’t help listening.’ ”

  “Yes,” said Clarence.

  “How’s the tour going?”

  “Great. This band is better than it’s ever been at any time in history. It’s unbelievable. We did a show in Dublin at the end of May that was as good as any show in fucking history.”

  “That’s great,” said Thomas. “I’ll get a bootleg.”

  “That’s what rock and roll says,” said Clarence. “Fuck death.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas. “Fuck death.”

  They left the bar and walked off the drinks. They went up Columbus and headed down to the wharf.

  “Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators,” said Thomas. “They were my favorites back in the day. Roky’s made a comeback in recent years.”

  “Where was he?” asked Clarence.

  “He was insane in Texas. Too many drugs. Lots of misdiagnoses,” said Thomas.

  They walked over to pier 39, drawn by the cries of the sea lions. There were hundreds of them on the barges and docks. Clarence and Thomas watched them for a while. Sometimes when they were together they didn’t speak for hours. This wasn’t one of those times.

  “They started coming here after the last big earthquake,” said Clarence. “Weird, huh?”

  “Makes you wonder,” said Thomas. “Maybe they just wanted to come in close and watch whatever was going down go down. Or maybe it’s coincidence. Or maybe it’s a sign of the end of days. Or maybe it’s the herring. I’m going with the herring.”

  “Which reminds me of dinner,” said Clarence. “Where do you want to go?”

  “That’s a tough choice in this city,” said Thomas. “We could go to Capps Corner in North Beach, or Quince, or back to Chinatown.”

  “Where in Chinatown?” said Clarence.

  “There’s only one place in Chinatown,” said Thomas. “There used to be two. One of those private booths at the Far East Café… but the food’s not what it used to be. So that leaves only one.”

  “Let’s go there,” said Clarence.

  An hour later they were at a table on the second floor in Sam Wo’s restaurant on Washington Street, eating dumplings and drinking Chinese beer.

  “So you still doing your mystery man reclusive shit?” asked Clarence.

  “Not so much,” said Thomas. “I don’t know. In fact the only thing I know for sure is that I don’t know anything for sure. And I’m not really sure of that.”

  “How’d you start that no talking stuff?”

  “By not talking.”

  “Yeah, but why? I mean why at the beginning?”

  “I never liked the attention. I didn’t have much choice in the writing thing. I mean I had to write. I didn’t feel like I had to talk about what I wrote. The writing did the talking,” said Thomas.

  “But you chose to publish,” said Clarence.

  “Yeah, to feed my family and my writing habit,” said Thomas. “Then it turned into a thing. Then I became Professor Irwin Corey for a while.”

  “What?”

  “I hired him to pick up an award for me,” said Thomas, laughing. “I actually went with him but everybody thought I was his agent or something. It was very cool.”

  “Bob Dylan told me he could be somebody else,” said Clarence.

  “Somebody other than who he is?”

  “He says he could be anybody,” said Clarence. “He said identity is just an illusion and that maybe he’s actually somebody else.”

  “Sounds like Bob,” said Thomas.

  “Course, you could be doing the same thing,” said Clarence.

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, how do I know you’re you? I’ve never seen you write a book. Maybe Professor Corey wrote all that shit. It’s possible that he’s actually who you claim to be and you’re somebody else entirely. See what I’m saying?”

  “I do,” said Thomas, as he ate a dumpling.

  “It’s confusing,” said Clarence.

  “I’d say it’s vexing,” said Thomas.

  “You’re the writer,” said Clarence. “I think.”

  Clarence shrugged and sipped his beer. The place was jammed, as usual. Most of the customers were speaking Chinese.

  “Tomorrow morning,” said Thomas, “if you stay in the city…”

  “Yeah, we’re staying at the Ritz Carlton,” said Clarence.

  “Okay,” said Thomas. “There’s this place called the Liguria Bakery up on Washington Square Park that makes this incredible pizza focaccia in the morning. But they’re sold out by nine o’clock so you’ve got to get there early.”

  “Pizza in the morning?”

  “Yes. They sell it in slabs, but they’ll cut one or two up for you. It’s unbelievable. One of the best things to eat on the entire planet. And don’t be fooled by the way the place looks. It looks empty, like it’s closed, but it’s not. Trust me on this. I lived on that shit for about a year when I lived in North Beach.”

  “I always thought it would be cool to live in that neighborhood,” said Clarence.

  “It used to be,” said Thomas. “It’s yuppified now, but back in the day it was the center of the universe. I used to eat at the Golden Spike three nights a week. City Lights, the Condor, Café Tosca, shit…”

  He looked off into the middle distance, unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim.

  “I lived in Marin,” said Clarence. “I loved it. Now the Keys are calling me.”

  “I hear you,” said Thomas. “We go down there maybe once a year. Key West, mostly. Ride bikes. Sit in bars. You know, gathering material.”

  “This friend of mine, Paulie, says Key West is full of faggots, drunks, punks, and chickens.”

  “He’s obviously been there,” said Thomas.

  “Where do you stay down there?”

  “This place called Hidden Beach,” said Thomas.

  “Do you stay under your own name?”

 
“Nah, sometimes I’m Dr. Warren Kruger, but most of the time I’m Henry Porter,” said Thomas.

  “I’m C. O. Jones,” said Clarence. “As in cojones.”

  Thomas laughed again. Then they ate for a while. “You knew Mailer, right?” asked Thomas.

  “Yeah,” said Clarence. “I have a tendency to hang out with writers. I don’t really know why, but that’s how it’s worked out. Norman and I hit it off. We could just talk shit forever. I miss him. I miss him a whole lot. Last time we spent any time together was down in the Bahamas. We had a good time. He loved it down there. We sat around and smoked cigars and drank beer and worked on our tans. Solved all the problems in the world.”

  “Funny how we know so many of the same people,” said Thomas. “Then again, maybe there’s nothing unusual about it at all.”

  “I met Quentin Crisp once,” said Clarence. “He was wearing makeup and a big hat and a fucking cape. He pulled it off though. All attitude.”

  “You and Quentin Crisp are a very odd couple,” said Thomas.

  “Like we’re not?” said Clarence.

  Thomas laughed. That was his response, he laughed. Then they ate for a while.

  “You writing?” asked Clarence.

  “Yeah,” said Thomas. “I’m fucking with a kind of detective thing. Not really a detective detective…”

  “Of course not,” said Clarence.

  “We’ll see,” said Thomas.

  “Any talking dogs in it?” said Clarence, smiling.

  “Not yet,” said Thomas. “But I’m thinking there might be some seals.” “Assuming once again that you actually are who you say you are, which may or may not be the truth,” said Clarence.

  Thomas smiled.

  “True,” he said.

  Then he said it again.

  Tiburon

  Clarence

  I walked into DeAngelo’s restaurant in Mill Valley, saw her, and said, ‘I’m going to marry that woman,’ ” I said. “I kept going back and telling her she was going to be my wife.”

  “It’s true,” said Victoria. “It was incredible. I didn’t know what to do. I called my sister and said, ‘This guy named Clarence Clemons keeps sending me roses and asking me to go out with him,’ and she said, ‘Clarence Clemons? Go!’ So eventually I did.”

  “I started out sending her one white rose a day,” I said to Don. “Then it was two white roses, and eventually a dozen white roses.”

  “I started giving them to everybody in the restaurant,” said Victoria. “There were so many of them.”

  We were at the wedding party rehearsal dinner at a magnificent house overlooking the San Francisco Bay the night before our marriage. Michael Indelicato, the owner of the legendary Record Plant recording studio, owned the house where the ceremony would take place. My family, in the persons of my three aunts and my uncle, who would perform the ceremony, had flown in from Virginia for the occasion.

  “We never thought Clarence would amount to anything,” Aunt Sara told Don. “He was in school and he still didn’t know how to spell his own name. So in our minds we said, well, Clarence isn’t the one who’s going to make it, so we’d better focus on one of these other kids. Course, it turned out that we were all wrong. Took a while, though.”

  My family is a wonderful group of churchgoing people from Virginia, and it’s easy to see where I got my deep spirit of love for all. They are genuinely nice folks who are filled with life and laughter. Lots of laughter.

  “I’ve met Clarence’s family and his friends,” Don said to them. “I’ve even met his ex-wives. Well, not all his ex-wives. Nobody has that kind of time. I suppose I could do it, but I’d have to quit my job.” They took his cheeky remarks with gales of laughter.

  “I’m not certain that Clarence has met all of them,” said Sara.

  “I also think it’s a good idea to marry a woman with a twin sister,” Don said. “This way, if anything ever goes wrong with Victoria she can use her sister for parts.”

  It was a fun evening. The fifty or so people there were divided between my family and friends and Victoria’s, including her mother and father from Siberia, who didn’t speak a word of English. I wondered what they made of all this.

  Earlier that day we had walked through the ceremony and were about as ready as we were going to be. This was still rock and roll. As I said earlier, the wedding itself would take place at the oceanfront home of Michael Indelicato. It is a spectacular modern house directly on the water in Tiburon. However, it sits at the bottom of a very narrow and winding driveway with little space to turn a car around at the bottom. It would be difficult to get over a hundred guests down there on time, and dinner on the deck could prove to be a chilly and damp affair, but I was certain it would be memorable.

  “Is there an extension cable we can get for the speakers, or is there no such thing?” asked the Reverend Lawrence Rubin, who was the piano player who’d be working the wedding but not performing the ceremony.

  “There’s no such thing as no such thing,” I said.

  And I was right.

  On the day of the wedding, disaster was avoided when my uncle Milton Reid, the preacher from Virginia, announced he had to be in Washington, D.C., at noon the next day. We had made flight plans for him to leave in two days. Since he had already signed the license, replacing him was impossible. For a while everyone was in a state of high anxiety, but the problem was solved when a red-eye was booked for a few extra bucks.

  I spent the day relaxing. My doctor flew in last night and gave me the injections that enabled me to move pain free for a few days. Don came over and hung out with me for a while. I got a manicure and a pedicure, and I asked for sparkling blue toenail polish, but the girl was out of it. I settled for clear.

  Bruce called and wished me well and apologized for not being able to make it to the ceremony. He reiterated what he told me onstage the week before at Giants Stadium, which was that he believed that I had finally found the right girl. He said that he, too, had made mistakes, but the real thing was worth waiting for. I sat in a chair by the window and looked out at the San Francisco Bay. I sipped white wine. I smiled a lot but, as always, I worried about the details.

  I do believe in marriage. I believe in it despite all the evidence to the contrary. Much of that evidence was provided by me. We’re talking about a man who’s married different women in Philadelphia, Hawaii, Little Palm Island (also an all-white clothing affair), China, and now, finally, Tiburon. I am, among other things, an optimist.

  An old friend called me this morning and said, “It’s not too late. I can send a helicopter for you and get you out of there now.”

  But I’m staying.

  “This time,” I said to Don, “it’s for good.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I’ll let you have a little peace and quiet.”

  He started to leave the suite and head back to his hotel to get ready for the wedding.

  “But if you hear a helicopter go over,” I said, “wave.”

  The Wedding, Tiburon, 8/8/08

  Don

  The wedding was beautiful.

  Clarence wore a white East Indian type of suit accented with silver and a white turban. Not a lot of guys can make a turban work, but he is definitely one of them. The overall effect left him looking like a raja.

  Victoria wore a soft pink gown that Clarence had designed. She looked lovely.

  The ceremony was a combination of music and prayer. Sometimes both at once.

  Victoria’s twin sister, Julia, was the maid of honor; Clarence’s nephew, Jacob, was the best man. Narada Michael Walden and I served as groomsmen. Victoria’s high school girlfriends, Marianna Darmina and Ekaterina Timokhina, were bridesmaids. Julia’s daughter Natasha was the flower girl. Uncle Brother, more properly known as Dr. Milton Reid, performed the wedding ceremony in front of a hundred guests, all clad in shades of white.

  Everything went smoothly. (With one notable exception.) Nothing unusual happened. (With one notable e
xception.) Nobody fell into the pool or off the deck into the ocean. The food was delicious and the wine flowed until late in the evening. A good time was had by all. (With one notable exception.)

  I sat next to Clarence in the moments before things got under way. I have never seen him so nervous about anything. I have seen him get amped before countless shows but never to this degree. He kept repeating details of how the wedding was supposed to go, reminding Lani and Jacob of things they already knew. It seemed that he was almost in a state of shock until we stood and the song “Oceans” began to play, signaling the entrance of the bridal party.

  The evening was sweet and reflected the heart and soul and love that Clarence professes for Victoria.

  Bruce called earlier in the day to offer his congratulations and best wishes. Because of where the wedding fell in the touring schedule and in the country, none of the band members were there. All of them wanted to be, but it simply proved to be a logistical nightmare for them. But then these guys don’t hang out together the way people imagine they do. They see each other at the halls and stadiums where they play but don’t socialize beyond that, except on rare occasions.

  Clarence and Roy have dinner once in a while, and Bruce and the Big Man do find time to spend together away from work, but that’s about it. So no disrespect was intended or taken by their absence at the wedding. Plus, to be fair, Clarence has done this a lot, so they might have figured they’ll just catch the next one.

  All of this has been exhausting for Clarence. It’s been exhausting for me, and all I do is ride along attached to the Big Man like a pilot fish on a whale. All the flights, hotels, time zones, stress, and shows take a very real toll both physically and mentally. In five days Clarence will be in Florida to pick up the tour, with eight more dates scattered around America. After that he’ll be going to Atlanta to add his horn to the new music Bruce has been working on for the last six months. When that is done, Clarence faces double knee-replacement surgery and the difficult rehabilitation program that follows. After the first of the year another tour is in the offing. The question that comes up in my mind is: how long can he keep doing this? How long before that big body finally tells him enough is enough? Nobody knows, of course, but every time I see a show, especially the last show of a tour, I think I might be seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the last time. After one of those shows that will be true.