Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  This time, Cori came to my rescue.

  The party was in my room, a quiet, sedate affair of twenty or twenty-five young adults crammed into a room no larger than your average prison cell. I was flying high, top of the world, and then I rubbed my eyes and dislodged a contact, which proceeded to bury itself under the curve of my eyeball.

  I stumbled out of the room, half blind, into the brightness of the washroom. And Cori followed. She found me there, yarding my eyelids open in front of the mirror, fingers thick with drink, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

  She sat me down on the counter, and told me to lean back my head and open my eyes.

  And as she gently dipped the tip of her pointer finger toward my eye, I whispered, “I love you.”

  I don’t know where it came from. I wasn’t planning on saying it. But I knew, in that moment, trusting her enough to want her to stick a finger in my eye, that I could trust her with anything.

  She stopped, and looked at me, and smiled, and said “I love you too.”

  And then, without hesitation, she slid her finger into my eye and popped out my contact lens, and we kissed, and held each other, both of us knowing that our lives had changed, right then.

  She moves up, she moves back

  Out on the floor there just is no one cleaner

  She does this thing she calls the “Jump back Jack”

  She’s got the heart of a ballerina

  1. The footage comes from a showcase gig that Springsteen and the band performed on May 1, 1973, at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. They were third on a bill—one of the rare times Springsteen appeared as an opener after the disastrous Chicago tour, which also featured Doctor Hook & the Medicine Show and New Riders of the Purple Sage. The video is, like the “Rosalita” video, drawn from the original footage by Thom Zimny; sadly, it fades out at the ten minute point . . . (A confession: the main reason for this footnote is so my mom could be comforted by the knowledge that there was a time when Springsteen opened for Dr. Hook, her favorite band.)

  2. Well, of course I had, at some point, realized I had it. I mean, I’m not an idiot. The presence of the three tracks from 1973 was obviously a selling point of the box set; I knew they were there. But, much like my 1992 copy of the Musician magazine interview, which I’ve been looking for for weeks . . . well, I lost sight of them.

  3. The other two songs on the DVD, “Spirit in the Night” and “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” are equally impressive, but for me it’s all about “Thundercrack.”

  4. Springsteen has long claimed never to have done any drugs. It might just be my personal baggage, but performances like this one make me skeptical.

  5. Over the course of his career, Springsteen has had a complex and often contradictory reaction to the idea of bootlegs. During radio broadcasts on the 1978 tour, he seemed to take a live-and-let-live approach (kicking off the second set of the July 5 show at the Roxy with the exultant encouragement “Bootleggers, roll your tapes! This is gonna be a hot one!”), yet he and his management were ruthless in their pursuit and prosecution of bootleg producers, distributors, and sellers. It’s pretty much a moot point now, what with virtually every show appearing online almost as soon as Springsteen and the band leave the stage.

  6. I would, of course, never encourage you to listen to bootlegs. Heavens no. Perish the thought.

  7. I wore out my copy of The Saint, the Incident and the Main Point Shuffle, the bootleg of this show, listening to “Incident.” It’s a transcendent performance, utterly breathtaking, and here’s the best part: it opens the fucking show. Yes, he opened the show with a song and a performance that it would be nearly impossible to top, then proceeded to top it, song after song.

  8. I would, of course, never encourage you to collect bootlegs. Heavens no. Perish the thought.

  9. I added that “damn near” under duress, and due to not wanting to look like a complete geek. I’ll correct it here: it’s a perfect show, and the bootleg would be one of my ten desert island discs, no question.

  10. “Santa Ana” was eventually released on Tracks, but nothing rivals the one-two punch of these songs in the early Springsteen sets.

  11. It was a terrible place to warehouse hundreds of hormonal, scared seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. We used to hear stories of undergrads who “dove a stairwell,” attempting suicide, and I always wondered why more people didn’t do it.

  12. All of “Thundercrack” reminds me of Cori, not just because of how much she loves to dance, but because the lyrics get her so hilariously, directly wrong: she does have curls, her hair is brown (or was then), and her eyes are too. It makes me smile every time I hear the song.

  13. I would like to be able to claim that, as I’ve matured, I’ve gotten better, both with the social anxiety and with limiting my alcohol consumption. Can we pretend, for the sake of argument, that this is true?

  14. I had never asked her, outright, so I asked Cori tonight if she did it on purpose, if she had cockblocked with intent. Tonight, twenty-two years later, she smiled. “Of course not,” she lied.

  15. Not coincidentally.

  16. So does she, apparently. We were talking about it yesterday. Telling Xander the story. Apparently I was clumsy, and practically falling over, and a little slobbery. And she was smiling as she told him all about it.

  Side Two

  Yeah, I know I ain’t nobody’s bargain

  But, hell, a little touchup

  and a little paint . . .

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Human Touch”

  Tunnel of Love

  Album:Tunnel of Love

  Released: October 9, 1987

  Recorded: January–July 1987

  ONE OF THE secrets of a good mix-tape lies in the recognition that you’re dealing with two separate entities, each with its own concerns, but each working in tandem with the other.1 Each side of the tape should tell its own story, develop its own themes and movement. Sometimes the two sides build off one another (this is useful for mix-tapes intended for wooing). Other times, the two sides will create a contrast. Light and dark, happy and sad, that sort of thing.

  It’s appropriate for both my life and Springsteen’s that the tape flip here happens with “Tunnel of Love.”

  It’s pretty clear that the Tunnel of Love album was a turning point for Springsteen. Prior to Tunnel, Springsteen’s work was largely external to himself. From the doomed greasers of “Jungleland” to the blue collar workers of “Factory” to the disenfranchised Vietnam veteran of “Born in the U.S.A.,” the songs were clearly and deliberately stories. Until then, Springsteen dealt in emotional veracity without treading too close to personal emotional truth.

  With Tunnel of Love, however, he changed tack. Yes, there were still story-songs (Springsteen has never been a desperate single mother trying to decide not to drown her young son in a river, as the heroine of “Spare Parts” finds herself doing), but there were also songs that seemed, at least, to come directly from his own experience.2 Given the albums that followed, it’s easy to see Tunnel of Love as the moment that Springsteen began to turn inward, exploring himself at least as much as he was exploring the lives of the people around him.

  He chose a hell of a place to start.

  Upon its release in 1987, Tunnel of Love was regarded as his marriage album, his first collection of new material since marrying Julianne Phillips during the Born in the U.S.A. tour. It is not, however, an account of a man growing fat and happy in his new domestic kingdom. Steeped in betrayal, pain, and recrimination, Tunnel of Love has more in common with the emotional brutality of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks than it does with the comforting homilies of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Our House.” Just the song titles alone—“Ain’t Got You,” “Cautious Man,” “Two Faces,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “When You’re Alone”—alert even the casual listener that all was not well in Casa Springsteen.

  Tunnel of Love also marked a shift in Springsteen’s process. He recorded the album’s b
asic tracks largely on his own, bringing in band members only as necessary for texture and flourish. The Bo Diddley–esque opener, “Ain’t Got You,” is a Springsteen solo track, and The E Street Band appears together only on the title song. Clarence Clemons, whose saxophone had been key to Springsteen’s sound, is relegated to a single appearance on the record, as a background vocalist on “When You’re Alone.”

  We’ll never know how closely the songs on Tunnel of Love hew to the disintegration of Springsteen’s own marriage, or to the reality of his doubts and questions.

  We do know this, though: in the liner notes, he writes, “Thanks Juli.”

  CORI AND I got married in the side yard of my mother’s house on the Saturday of a May long weekend. May 16, 1992. It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny but not overly warm. We had a few friends there, but it was mostly a family affair.

  In my family, we do up large-scale occasions with a practiced ease. Christmas dinners for thirty are old hat. Family reunions are even easier, with their potluck nature. For the wedding, my grandmother cooked and my aunts brought food. My dad and Sue supplied the booze. And Jon spent the morning wandering the country roads, stopping in at houses with gardens to ask for flowers.3

  Cori was carrying a basket of flowers as she walked toward me, up the front walk and across the grass, to the sound of Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.” She really was, as Van sang, “an angel of the first degree.” Her mother had made the dress, and I had a piece of the same ribbon tying back my ponytail.

  Peter was in Germany, on a family trip that couldn’t be changed. Greg was there, though, with Lisa, the woman he would marry a year later in a splendid extravaganza in Vancouver. Our friend Dorothy, who was in classes with Cori, served as her maid of honor. In the card she gave us, Dorothy confessed to being relieved that we were finally married: with her strict Catholic background and beliefs, she had feared for our mortal souls due to our premarital transgressions.

  Cori and I had moved in together at the beginning of our second year at UVic. We had planned on sharing a house with a bunch of people, but things fell through, and it ended up just the two of us in a shitty, furnished ground-level apartment.

  By the time we got married, we were living in an attic suite over a daycare. Every Saturday night we had a houseful of people over, a loose circle of friends gathering to watch the weekly doubleheader of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. We both worked while we were going to school, so those Saturday night get-togethers were our only social life, populated as they were with people we knew from our classes, co-workers from my job at the bookstore or hers at the community center. The kitchen was downstairs, part of the daycare. We would make a big pot of soup over the course of the day and bake some soda bread to go along with it once people had arrived. The evenings would usually dwindle to a finish sometime after the end of Saturday Night Live.4

  Cori and I were the picture of responsibility in those years. We both worked all through our degrees to avoid onerous student loans. Aside from a couple of nights in Vancouver, we skipped our honeymoon so we wouldn’t miss work.5

  We traveled a little bit (though we never made it to Europe as planned), and we got into the habit of going to New York as often as we could.

  As our friends started to leave town after they finished their degrees, we grew closer. Our Saturday nights turned into games nights, playing Scrabble or Monopoly, eating cookies and drinking tea.

  It was a good life. Comfortable.

  And we bought a house.

  Oh, the house.

  After a fairly lengthy search in Victoria and its neighboring communities, we found a house close to downtown, a 1910 home that had been in the same family for most of its eight-decade history. We bought it from a couple with two kids. It felt homey, but we also bought the house with the idea of tearing it down, sundering the conjoined double lot, and building two skinny houses. That was our medium-term plan, a way of having a new house for the cost of an old one.

  It was an old house. We didn’t imagine being in it any more than five years.

  Fourteen years later, it’s an even older house. It’s riddled with problems (right now, there’s no heat or hot water, and a mysterious amount of water in the basement). These days, the only thing holding it together is debt.

  That’s the way these things go sometimes.

  The old expression, that man plans and God laughs? That’s pretty much spot on.6 There’s supposed to be a natural order of things, isn’t there? It’s like a checklist: you leave home, you go to school, you fall in love, you get a job, you get married, you buy a house—that’s how it’s supposed to work.

  But it doesn’t, always.

  You don’t realize, as you’re struggling to balance work and school, sacrificing on both sides, that you’re going to get fired at the first sign of problems, and you’ll find that the degree you busted your ass to earn isn’t worth much of anything.

  You don’t realize, walking through a cozy family home, holding hands with your wife, that someday you’re going to be up to your knees together in a sewage-flooded basement, or you’ll be holding a ladder for her when she goes up to tar patch the roof. Again. That things will get so bad your home feels like a prison you just can’t escape.

  You don’t realize as you’re kissing your wife for the first time that there will be days when you’re no longer two people fighting against the world, but two people fighting against each other, or that things you were once so sure of would become riddled with doubt.

  And you don’t realize, standing in the yard of the house you grew up in on a lovely warm spring day, watching the most beautiful girl in the world walk toward you on her father’s arm, that the road ahead of you is bumpier, and more fraught with peril, than you can possibly imagine.

  Those are things you have to find out the hard way.

  That’s why the Tunnel of Love rides in old amusement parks have that warning sign, just as you’re about to go in: “This Is a Dark Ride.”

  It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough

  Man meets woman and they fall in love

  But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough

  And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above

  1. Sort of like a marriage, that. Just in case the metaphor was too gentle.

  2. Emphasis must be placed on the word “seem.” We have no way of knowing, for example, if the account of the relationship between father and son in “Walk Like a Man” is rooted directly in Springsteen’s personal experience. But we do know about the fraught-at-times relationship he had with his father, so it’s easy (and, given his use of the first-person narrative voice, fairly compelling) to speculate.

  3. Jon is very polite, and very good with people, especially people with gardens. He brought home basketfuls of flowers.

  “People just gave you these?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Most of them,” he said, cutting stems over the sink.

  “What do you mean, most of them?”

  “Well, if somebody’s gonna be an asshole, they don’t deserve to have such pretty flowers, do they?”

  It took a moment for it to sink in. “You committed misdemeanors for décor?”

  He patted me on the cheek. “It’s your wedding day, big brother. Of course I did.”

  4. That ritual viewing of snl was not without its risks. Dorothy was fine with bawdy, frat-boy humor, but we were watching the night that Irish singer Sinead O’Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope while crying out “Fight the real enemy!” as the climax to her cover of Bob Marley’s “War.” Dorothy’s reaction was . . . intense, to say the least.

  5. A decision we now both regret, though it made sense at the time.

  6. Though it’s certainly open to agnostic, atheistic, or interfaith diddling. I’m partial to “man plans, and the universe mocks,” because that’s how it feels some days.

  Living Proof

  Album:Lucky Town

  Released: Ma
rch 31, 1992

  Recorded: September 1991–January 1992

  I LOST SIGHT OF Springsteen for a while there, from about the time Cori and I moved in together up to the reunion tour of 1999–2000. A decade or so.

  I use the term “lost sight” in a relative sense: I bought the three new studio albums that he released during that time. I bought the import edition of the xxPlugged CD, and the Tracks box set. I followed newsgroups and listservs on that new interweb thing that everyone was talking about. I was, even in what I think of as my disconnected years, what most normal people would consider a zealot.

  It didn’t feel that way to me, though. In the throes of finishing my degree,1 working full-time, and starting married life, Springsteen wasn’t speaking to me in the same way any more. He wasn’t important.

  I liked the records, but it didn’t go much beyond that. Greg still has, in his collection, an unused ticket from a show at the Tacoma Dome in the early nineties that was supposed to be mine—he mocks me with it about once a year. I regret not going, and I kick myself, to this day, for not going to one of the solo acoustic theatre shows on the Ghost of Tom Joad tour, but at the time it didn’t really seem to matter all that much.

  Looking back, I can see I was in an in-between space as far as Springsteen’s music was concerned. I had outgrown the youthful anthems of escape, and I was too contented then to connect with the post-therapy albums Human Touch and Lucky Town, released on the same day in 1992.

  That changed, though.

  Now those two albums, with their songs of deep soul-searching, speak to me more directly than any Springsteen work before or since.2 They are albums of hard-won domestic happiness, with just enough self-effacing humor—in songs like “57 Channels (And Nothing On)” and “Local Hero”—to keep them from being nauseatingly saccharine.3

  As I mentioned earlier, Springsteen found happiness in the arms of his longtime back-up singer, Patti Scialfa, after the breakup of his first marriage. They married in 1991, when Patti was pregnant with their second child, their daughter, Jessica. (Their eldest, son Evan, was born a year earlier.) Rumors about his divorce— which was sealed up tight in apparently bulletproof nondisclosure agreements—claimed that one of the reasons for Springsteen’s unhappiness with Phillips was that he wanted a family, and she wanted to focus on her acting career. Whether this is true or not, by the time of the albums’ release, Springsteen was the father of two, resettled in California.