Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  It was the first Springsteen song that I ever heard,5 and it was like I had been waiting for it my whole life.6

  Born in the U.S.A. was released a couple of months later. I was primed for it, to say the least. In fact, it’s the first record I can remember actively anticipating.

  The release of the “Dancing in the Dark” single did give me pause as I waited: the song was so slick, so glossy, so commercial. Where was the grit? Where was that dork messiah shaking himself free of those screaming girls? And what the fuck: was that a synthesizer?!

  But those fears dissipated in about the time it took to count in the first bars of “Born in the U.S.A.” itself. There it was: fire, passion, integrity, grit. I was a goner, and I’ve never looked back.

  Now I know your mama she don’t like me ’cause I play in a rock

  and roll band

  And I know your daddy he don’t dig me but he never did understand

  1. The line between “honest” and “true” is key to Springsteen’s work.

  2. The fact that it was the spring of 1984, and not the summer, has, as any Springsteen fan will tell you, a certain significance. After the June release of Born in the U.S.A., the world went Springsteen-crazy. The “Dancing in the Dark” video—with Courtney Cox at her winsome, non-speaking best—went into heavy rotation. Politicians name-checked him left and right, and the tour quickly made the transition from arenas to stadiums. If you “discovered” Springsteen during this time of media saturation, a whiff of bandwagon-jumping sticks to you in certain fan circles even twenty-five years later. Especially if you ever wore a bandanna to a concert, or you now state that “Glory Days” is your favorite Springsteen song. For the record, and just so we’re clear: spring of 1984, no bandanna, loathe “Glory Days.”

  3. I suspect (cough) that it’s available online—if you go looking, you want the longer (nine-plus minutes) version, which includes the band introductions cut for the first official video release. The full version—band introductions intact—was released on an Old Grey Whistle Test anthology. And, thankfully, in October 2010, Springsteen Inc. finally released the full version of “Rosalita,” on one of the DVDs included in the box set The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story. (It’s not that simple, though. The version in the box set was actually recut by director Thom Zimny, who had access to footage from all the cameras. Zimny also managed to correct the sound, though, which was always a little fast, so say what you will about historical revisionism, it does have its advantages.) The box also includes, for the first time, video of an entire Darkness tour show (Houston, December 8, 1978). This, for your average Springsteen fan, is roughly the equivalent of finding the Holy Grail on a pallet at the local Costco.

  4. As Craig Finn of The Hold Steady is wont to say, thirty-odd years later, “There is so . . . much . . . joy in what we do.” But more on that later.

  5. Well, not really. I was an ardent radio listener, and I had of course heard “Hungry Heart,” ad nauseum, after 1980. But I didn’t identify that song with anyone in particular, let alone Springsteen. To this day, I don’t identify it with Springsteen—it’s so unlike anything else he’s ever done, I’m convinced it was actually recorded by anonymous studio musicians and accidentally included on The River. Why it became popular, I’ll never know. I do know this, though: if I never hear it again, it’ll be too soon.

  6. As I wrote this, I realized something: my falling in love with “Rosalita” was kind of a set-up. I had actually seen that very video years before! It was included in a movie about the history of rock and roll I saw at my grandmother’s place one night. I was more interested in early Elvis and Beatles stuff at that time, but I think that viewing planted the “Rosalita” seed in my head, Manchurian Candidate style. When the seed was triggered that spring of 1984, I exploded all to hell.

  My Hometown

  Album: Born in the U.S.A.

  Released: June 4, 1984

  Recorded: January 1982–March 1984

  COMING OFF the bombast and exuberance of a live version of “Rosalita,” the transition into “My Hometown” (the studio version, no less) is the musical equivalent of slamming headfirst into a brick wall. That’s by design, and it’s precisely the feeling I get every time I hear the song.

  I don’t actively dislike “My Hometown”; that would be giving it too much credit. It’s just not a song I ever seek out. It’s not in my top ten (or twenty, or fifty) favorite Springsteen songs. Those who were with me in Vancouver in 2003 will probably remember my self-righteous indignation (and the vitriolic flow of obscenities) upon hearing a rumor that the evening’s performance of “My Hometown” had been an audible1 and had replaced, of all things, “Incident on 57th Street” on the setlist.2

  The music is clunky and monotonous in “My Hometown,” and the live versions, they do tend to go on. And on. You can’t argue with the sentiment, however, simultaneously plainspoken and borderline overblown though it may be. And therein lies the rub: “My Hometown” speaks to me.

  There’s a perfect, and beautiful, movement to the song. It begins with the personal—a young boy, the narrator, running out to buy a newspaper for his father—then radiates outward, first to the level of family (with the boy being driven around on his father’s lap), then to their community, and then to larger social concerns (the racial tensions of the 1960s, the economic decline of the 1980s) before contracting back to the familial and the personal to finish. This not only allows a panoramic perspective but builds a narrative that spans decades, showing how these social changes have affected individuals: in contrast to the freedom of a boy in a small town running off to the corner store, the “contemporary” characters feel boxed in and are looking for escape. Which leads to the question: is the song’s final assertion, “son take a good look around, This is your hometown,” with the next-generation repeat of a son driving around on his father’s lap, a farewell or a gesture of resignation?

  “My Hometown” is a perfect example of what I find most significant about Springsteen’s work: his ability to use the specific and the personal (whether true or fictionalized) to create a sense of the universal. In its specific details—newspapers that only cost a dime, a confrontation at a traffic light, the closing of a textile mill—the song resonates for anyone who has grown up in a small town and felt it dying around them.

  It certainly resonates for me.

  A FEW MILES from where the only stoplight in town marks the center of Agassiz proper, out past where the streetlights give way to the darkness, there’s a stretch of highway. It’s almost the last gasp of the Lougheed, which starts in Vancouver as a major urban thoroughfare, before running into the depths of British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, skirting the north side of the river through Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Mission before just bypassing Agassiz and ending up in Hope.

  The stretch of highway I’m talking about is little more than a country road: two lanes, pretty quiet most of the time, though on holiday weekends the campers and motorcycles on their way to Harrison Lake can ride bumper to bumper. It’s dead straight, that stretch of road, less than a mile long, lined with farms and houses and the skeleton of the old Kent Hotel. It’s anchored at one end by the house my mother grew up in, where my grandmother still lives, and on the other by the house my brothers and I were raised in, the house that my father built, now the house my mother lives in with my stepfather, Tom.

  When I think of my world as a child, I think of my bedroom, where I hid myself away with my books and my pencils. I think of the hayloft in my grandmother’s barn, kittens from the barn cats hiding in the eaves behind the bales, mewing and just out of reach. I think of the forest behind our house, carved with well-beaten trails and bike paths, and of the woods behind my grandmother’s place, which were endless, magical, and only slightly terrifying. I think of the tiny elementary school I went to for first and second grades, building forts at lunchtime, kissing Karen in the schoolyard in the spring, and I think of my high school, and the number of times I wa
nted to burn it to the ground.

  Mostly, though, I think of that road.

  Our house was on the south side of the road, down a short driveway that looped around a chestnut tree. My father—who was a carpenter—built it from the shell of the old bungalow he and my mother had bought a couple of years after they got married. Some of my earliest memories—little more than fragments, really—are about the gradual emergence of the new house: the way the crumbling patio off the kitchen got covered over by the floorboards of the new family room; an afternoon with my father and his friends and my mother’s brothers raising the walls and roof over the second floor; the agonizing process of my father hand-cutting hundreds of angled slats to pattern the walls and floors, the heartbreak, the anger, the beauty. I get my temper from my father. And my propensity for obscenities. The smell of fresh-cut lumber is magical for me; I can’t go into a hardware store without feeling like a child again.

  My father kept up his industrial first aid certification to give him an edge in the rough job market of the seventies. He worked on a lot of big projects, including one of the prisons they built outside of town, and he was away a lot, weeks at work camps punctuated by weekend visits home.

  My mother stayed home with us boys—my two younger brothers, Dave and Jon, and me—until Jon was two, and then she got a job in the accounting office at the Harrison Hotel. Money was tight since my dad was often out of work.

  Once the three of us were in school, we would catch the bus to school every morning down at the corner. Mornings were ritualized, in the way that a tight schedule demands: breakfast—the birthday party call-in show on chwk radio out of Chilliwack— washing up—school bags packed—coats on—out the door by 7:55. We would wait for the bus with the Doran kids from down the road, the Bazan boys, whose parents ran the Kent Hotel, and a few others.

  When we got home in the afternoon, it was just the three of us. There was a window at the front of the house, hidden by a shrub, and every day after school we would sneak into the flower bed, slide the window open, and pull ourselves in, closing the window behind us. We were supposed to drop our stuff off, then walk down the road to my grandmother’s house, where we would stay until Mom picked us up after work. Some days, though, Dave, Jon, and I would call Mom with a reason to avoid making that trek: maybe it was raining, or one of us wasn’t feeling well. Sometimes our excuse actually worked, and we’d stay at the house by ourselves, have a snack, maybe turn on the TV, and occupy ourselves until Mom got home. I usually read. Or wrote.

  Most days, though, we would head down the highway at about 3:30. My grandmother would call to check in if we were too late.

  Every step of that walk is ingrained in my brain, every foot of that half-mile imbued with memory. We would walk it in all seasons, in all weather. We explored the ditch—looking for frogs and otters when it was full of water, collecting bottles and cans when it was dry, picking blackberries in the summer, pushing each other into the snowy depths in winter. We used the ditch to avoid the big yellow dog that lived—unchained—at the halfway point, sneaking along in silence like a commando unit, breaking into a dead run if we heard the ominous barking.

  I hated that dog.

  You see, I was born with a clubfoot, which meant, in addition to a number of surgeries and corrective procedures, that I was basically hobbled during my childhood. Oh, I could get around, but to say that I wasn’t athletic would be a grave understatement. It also contributed to the fact that I didn’t learn to ride a bike until very late, relatively speaking.

  Mom and Dad decided when I was nine or ten that it was high time I learned. We dedicated a weekend to the task. And after hours—days—of anguish, I had done it: I was in command of a vehicle, one complete with a banana seat and high handle bars. To mark the occasion, we decided to ride down to Gram’s place to show off.

  It wasn’t a big deal, in theory. The shoulders of the road were wide, Mom was riding behind me with Jon in the carrier seat, and it was a quiet time of day: everything should have been fine. And it was, until we hit the halfway point.

  They say dogs can smell fear. That yellow dog must have had a hell of a nose on it, because it tore out of its yard like its tail was on fire, barking furiously as it raced across two lanes of country highway. All I saw was a streak of yellow fur and teeth, with the sound of that barking, and then I felt a crunching as those jaws closed around my left arm. I was already precarious on my banana seat, shakily navigating the asphalt, and when that dog hit me, I went ass over teakettle into the ditch. I lost the bike, and I think the dog got tangled in it and was torn off me. The rest is just a blur.3

  I hated that dog.

  I think I danced when I heard the news that it had been killed on the highway, years later. I hoped he was chasing a kid on a bike when it happened.

  But I digress.

  The end of the road, for us, was my grandmother’s place. It was our second home.

  My grandmother was, and is, a pillar of the community. Active in the United Church, she seemed to be friends with everyone in town. There were always cars in her driveway, tea in the pot, and a game on the go on the kitchen table (usually Scrabble or cribbage). Even now when I go back to Agassiz, I’m “Phyllis Eddy’s grandson.” It was a heavy weight to grow up under: I couldn’t get away with anything. Word of even the most innocent of childish trouble-making would work its way to my grandmother with an efficiency that would put Twitter to shame, and ultimately come back to my mother. And, inevitably, me.

  Case in point. I spent an afternoon hanging out with Marshall, a kid who lived nearby and was a couple of years older. We rambled through the neighborhood, exploring the ditches and the woods, poking around in forbidden yards. As part of our travels, there was a span of time, maybe two minutes in length—maybe—during which we threw sticks at some crows behind the old Kent Hotel.

  Sure enough, I arrived at home to my mother asking, “Were you throwing sticks at crows with Marshall?” I was dumbfounded: it had been two minutes, and those crows had been as safe, as my grandmother herself would say, as in the left hand of God. Throwing has never been in my skill set.

  Of course, I tried to lie my way out of it. And of course it didn’t work.

  It was a great time to grow up, and a great place. My brothers and I pretty much had free rein: we rode our bikes everywhere, disappeared into the woods for hours, built forts in the hayloft and the disused, crumbling chicken house. Those times came to an end, though.

  At first, the changes happened close to home.

  My grandfather died when I was seven. I don’t remember him very well, but two memories are crystal clear.

  The first is the afternoon that I went with him into Chilliwack4 to pick up the suits my brother Dave and I were to wear to my aunt’s wedding. We had roles in the wedding party that called for matching powder-blue children’s tuxedoes, made from a rare polyester found only in the late 1970s. I remember riding with my grandfather in his blue Toyota pickup, the way it shook and shivered as we went over the bridge, as we drove the twenty minutes there and back. I remember talking to him (or, knowing me, talking at him) for the length of the drive, and I remember ice cream, probably a Canadian Mint bar (of the ample old-school variety, before they shrank to virtual nothingness, as such things tend to do).

  The second memory is of being awakened late one night. My bedroom was at the back of the house, upstairs, alongside the driveway. I heard the sound of the screen door closing, and voices below my window, too quiet for me to make out the words. Voices that I recognized but in my sleep-addled state couldn’t place. The screen door opening, then closing again. Engines starting and cars leaving the driveway, cars driving in.

  I had to pee, but there was something about the sound of those voices that kept me in bed until I couldn’t bear it any more. I snuck out of bed and down the stairs. The lights were on in the kitchen, watery and orange-gold. I hesitated at the foot of the stairs hearing those voices. There had never been a night like this before, and I
knew somehow that as soon as I went around the corner, nothing would ever be the same.

  It wasn’t. My uncle Dan was there, sitting at the table across from my mother, holding her hand as she sobbed. I froze in the doorway, not sure what to do. When my mother finally noticed me, she opened up her arms and tried to smile, explaining that Grandpa had died. I let her hug me, feeling the cold wet of her tears on my neck.

  It was the first time I had seen her cry.

  It wouldn’t be the last.

  A few years later, my parents told my brothers and me, over a spaghetti dinner, that they were separating.

  From then on, nothing was safe. Nothing was certain. Danger lurked around every corner.

  I’d first felt that kind of deep fear in the pit of my belly after the first breakout from the new prisons. There was a warning on the radio, and my mother walked us to the bus stop. Roadblocks stopped traffic, and gun-carrying Mounties searched our school bus first thing.

  And then it got worse. In the spring and summer of 1981, the bodies of murdered children and teenagers began to be discovered around the Lower Mainland, several in the area around Harrison Lake, mere minutes up the road. As more and more youths disappeared, my childhood freedom came to an abrupt end: the Clifford Robert Olson killing spree and its aftermath changed life not just in Agassiz but around the province.5 The woods were no longer a safe haven; they became places of menace, of dangers unseen.6

  I remember camping that summer, sleeping in the “kids’ tent” with Dave and Jon, alongside the daughter of one of my mother’s oldest friends and her younger siblings. She was the first girl I can remember having a crush on.7 After it got dark, with the low voices of our parents almost drowned out by the crackling of the fire, the girl and I whispered about how scared we were. But we shared a great sense of responsibility: we were the oldest in our families. We had a built-in imperative to rise above it. To grow up.