Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  Springsteen worked painstakingly on Human Touch over a period of about a year, recording in concentrated bursts with a group of Los Angeles session musicians. The album was ostensibly finished in early 1991, but Springsteen felt he needed one more song. Instead, he wrote and recorded an entire second album in a matter of weeks at his home studio, then decided to release both records on the same day.

  The first song he wrote for Lucky Town, the bridge between the two albums, is “Living Proof.”

  The song chronicles the building of a family from the ashes of Springsteen’s personal struggles, his negativity and despair. It’s definitely post-therapeutic, and it marks the next stage in the story, his hard-won “close band of happy thieves,” after Tunnel of Love’s relentless questioning and the very personal tests of Human Touch. It’s profound and stirring.

  And it starts on a summer afternoon, with the birth of a child.

  THE CLAIM borders on cliché: “The only pain worse than a kidney stone is labor.”

  That assertion is also fundamentally wrong. I don’t have firsthand experience, lacking both calcium buildups and ovaries, but I’ve seen both in action. I’ve held the monitoring strip in my hand.

  That’s jumping ahead, though. We need to go back a year or two from August 26, 1999, for the context.

  Cori and I knew from the beginning that we were going to be parents. But it was a matter of timing. We had a pregnancy scare early on—midway through our second year at UVic—and after that we were very careful. We wanted everything to be just perfect: we wanted to have our degrees behind us, own a house, have steady jobs if not actual careers. We wanted everything to be as stable as possible before we had kids.

  When we hit that point, we started trying.

  Anyone who’s had a scare can tell you how easy it is to get pregnant. But until you’re actually trying you don’t know just how tough it can be.4 A few months went by. Months of furious and frequent lovemaking, of cautiously raised hopes and cyclical disappointment.

  We did everything right. Not only did Cori eat better, and eliminate potential trouble areas like caffeine, but I, concerned about my contribution,5 started exercising, cleaned up my diet, and cut out coffee, alcohol, and my couple-of-times-a-week cigars. No sacrifice was too great.

  And we kept trying.6

  I took a break on my birthday, November 25, 1998. I’d booked the day off work, and when I woke up I pressed myself a carafe of coffee that, after months without, tasted like heaven. I sat out on the front porch all day, drinking gin and tonics and smoking cigars. Cori and I went out for dinner to celebrate, breaking every single one of our self-imposed rules.

  A little less than a month later, Cori gave me an early Christmas present: a calendar for 1999. It took me a while to notice that she had marked a page in mid-August with a tiny strip of thick paper with a blue stripe at one end.

  When I looked at her, not really believing what I was seeing, she smiled. “I washed it,” she said. “And dried it carefully.”

  Cori had a great pregnancy. We walked to work together every day, and went to prenatal classes, and decorated the baby’s room. She was never sick, her energy was high, she hit or exceeded every milestone.

  It’s no wonder the baby didn’t want to leave.

  Her due date came and went, without a sign of a contraction. The baby was big, and content to remain within. A day passed. A week.

  Nothing happened.

  Finally, ten days past the due date, we went to a doctor’s appointment at the hospital. Cori’s fluid volume was low, and it was time to induce. That was the twenty-fifth of August.

  We got her checked into the hospital, got her comfortable, and they gave her an injection of oxytocin to induce labor.

  Nothing happened.

  I stayed with her until visiting hours were over. We were waiting for a sign. We were waiting for our new life to start. It was right there, so close we could almost see it.

  And nothing happened.

  I went home alone. After calling her parents and mine, I sat out on the porch with a cigar and a bourbon and the cordless phone. It didn’t ring.

  I found out the next morning, when I arrived at the hospital shortly past dawn, that her water had broken, and the first of the contractions had hit at about three am. Nothing more than twinges, though. No reason to wake me up.

  Things started happening around ten with the first major contraction. Moments later the kidney stone, disturbed from whatever precarious perch it had been painlessly occupying, lodged itself painfully and undeniably smack in the middle of our birth story.

  Cori vaulted out of the bed, stumbling in blind pain toward the bathroom. She almost made it, but she ended up barfing in the sink.

  The rest of the day unfolds like a battle: shards of memory and confusion.

  I remember sitting at the edge of the bed, Cori hooked up to equipment to monitor the strength of her contractions, watching as each wave of pain hit and peaked and passed, completely unnoticed by Cori, who was sweating and borderline delirious from the kidney stone pain.

  I remember arguing with the nurses, none of whom believed that Cori was having a kidney stone episode, ascribing the situation with derisive glances and clucking of tongues to another first-time mother not being prepared.

  I remember being told, over and over again, to wait for the doctor, who would decide if a specialist should be called in. And when would the doctor be there? “Later,” they said. I have never felt more violent toward a group of women in my life. Didn’t they see what was going on?

  Finally a doctor coming in, a stranger. He took one look at Cori and asked, “You’ve had kidney stones before?”

  She nodded and gasped, “Yes.”

  “Right. Then you know exactly what this is. Nurse?” The nurse leapt to attention.

  The next hour or so exists only in fragments. Watching Cori get an epidural, turning away as the needle slipped into her lower back. An assessment, with stirrups, and a quick decision that, no, this wasn’t going to happen on its own. The rush to an operating theatre. Scrubbing up. Putting on surgical greens.

  And then I was at the head of Cori’s bed, perched on a stool behind the wires and tubes, stroking her forehead as the anesthetic rushed into her.

  The one thing the doctor told me, our doctor, who had finally arrived, was “Don’t look over the curtain.” He pointed at the institutional green sheet drawn up taut as a trampoline between Cori’s head and the rest of her body. I kept hunched low, watching Cori breathe, listening to the doctors and nurses joke casually back and forth about their weekends as they cut into my wife’s body.

  An endless moment seemed to hang in suspension, a moment I feel like I’ve never truly escaped.

  And then our doctor, Doctor Dave, said, “It’s a boy.”

  I almost wept.

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Alexander,” I said, without hesitation. “Alexander James.”

  I don’t know where it came from.7 I don’t know why it burst out of my mouth so fully formed. Cori and I had a list of possible names for boys and girls, and Alexander James was nowhere on it. James was my grandfather’s name, and there were several Jameses and Jims in the generations since, so we hadn’t even considered it.

  And yet . . .

  Alexander James. Xander.8

  It stuck.

  “Do you want to see him?”

  I’m not good with kids. I don’t know how to hold them, or what to do if they cry. Xander was crying, but there was nothing I wanted more, right then, than to see him and hold him.

  The anesthetist lifted the wild nest of tubes and cables and gestured for me to go under. I dropped to my knees from the stool and crawled.

  But I made a mistake, like Orpheus at the gates of Hades. I looked to my left. I looked under the table.

  I had never seen anything so horrific in my life. It looked like a MASH unit, drenched in blood and—

  I turned my head and kept crawling until the ope
rating table was behind me, until I could risk standing up without seeing anything else.

  And there was our son. My son.

  He was beautiful, and perfect, and crying. And as I watched, he peed on the nurse who was lowering him to the warming tray.

  His first order of business upon arriving in the world had been to piss on an authority figure.

  My boy.

  The nurse picked up a set of surgical scissors and extended them toward me. “Do you want to cut the cord?”

  I looked down at Xander’s belly, at the tube of flesh, and I blanched. Cutting the cord felt important. Decisive. Significant. But I couldn’t do it.

  I shook my head.

  As the nurse lowered the scissors to the umbilical cord, I flinched and looked away.

  That meant I was looking directly at the table. Directly back at Cori.

  It was . . . terrible.

  I knew, rationally, what a C-section was. I knew the clinical description. I knew the risks.

  But nothing prepared me for seeing my wife laid out like that, the great bloody spreading wound, her bladder outside of her body, resting on her belly. There were hands moving within her, flesh being tugged, blood . . .

  I almost fell over. And I have never loved her as deeply as I did at that moment. She is the strongest person I have ever met.

  And I couldn’t even cut the cord.

  I think I was escorted out of the operating room. I don’t remember taking off my scrubs.

  A nurse brought Xander out. He was swaddled up tight, and silent. And he was wearing a hat. When the nurse removed it, I could see that his head, covered in brown hair, tapered to a rounded point, like an old intercontinental missile. “That’s from pushing against the pelvic brim,” she said, replacing the cap. “There was no way he was coming out on his own.”

  And then I was alone with him, for the first time. My son. Suddenly burst forth from imagination and conjecture into the world. I snugged him close. I whispered his name into his ear.

  There’s a photo taken that day or the next. In it, I’m holding Xander slightly away from myself, both of his feet on my chest. I’m leaning slightly forward, enraptured, and he’s looking back, tiny and pale.

  You can almost see our eyes meet.

  The way the light falls on his face, the way it seems to shine back at me. It feels holy. Sacred.

  It feels like living proof.

  Well now on a summer night in a dusky room

  Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light

  Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon

  In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take

  Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make

  In a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused

  Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy

  I found living proof

  1. I wrote the graduating thesis for my Honors undergrad on linguistic variations in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”—Cori has yet to forgive me for the three months of constant Dylan (eight or nine versions of the song!) she had to endure.

  2. These are among Springsteen’s less popular albums. Some fans resented his firing of The E Street Band, and their fondness for Springsteen flagged as a result. More significantly, though, these are two of Springsteen’s weakest albums. Unlike Born to Run or Darkness, on which every track was a classic, these albums contained a fair bit of filler (“Roll of the Dice,” anyone? “Man’s Job”?). Fans actually created a single-disc compilation of the best tracks off the two albums, referred to either as Lucky Touch or Human Town.

  3. Speaking of saccharine, though? One of my favorite songs on Human Touch is the closing track, “Pony Boy.” A gentle ballad, it’s a lullaby for Springsteen’s oldest son Evan, but it also serves as a wonderful resolution for many of the album’s themes. It does, however, galvanize the fans. I may be the only person who likes it. That’s fine, though. They can keep “Hungry Heart”; I’ll take this one.

  4. If you’ve read my novel Before I Wake, this might sound familiar: the deliberateness of Cori’s and my timing, and the resulting attempts, is the source of Simon and Karen’s experience of conception in that book. Simon and Karen struggled for years, though— for Cori and me it was only a few months.

  5. I’m not comfortable using the phrase “daily sperm production” even in a footnote, but yeah, that.

  6. Everyone knew we were trying. I recall a weekend at Cori’s folks’ place, sitting down to breakfast with Rolf and June. My father-in-law asked, good-naturedly, how things were going. When I replied that we were trying, he suggested that I should be trying harder. “Well,” I said, reaching for the butter, “I was trying a few minutes ago. I thought I’d get some breakfast before I try again.” I don’t recall him asking again after that.

  7. This, it turns out, is not entirely true. I’ve been reminded that early on in our relationship, I bought Cori a teddy bear, which she named Alexander James Fuzzy Wuzzy Skadoodle Bear. I make no further comment, except, “Huh. Weird.”

  8. At the reunion of our prenatal class a few months later we were stunned to find that of the thirteen babies born, nine had been named some variation of Alexander (including several Alexandras). Calling him Xander was a way of making him distinct, and avoiding people calling him Alex. (One has to wonder, though—were there that many teddy bears making the rounds, or was there something in the air?)

  Brilliant Disguise

  Album: Tunnel of Love

  Released: October 9, 1987

  Recorded: January–July 1987

  Version discussed: VH1 Storytellers, Recorded April 4, 2005

  Album/released: VH1 Storytellers DVD, Released September 6, 2005

  ON APRIL 4, 2005, Bruce Springsteen took the stage of the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, for a performance unlike any other he had ever given. As part of VH1’s Storytellers series, he appeared on a bare stage with only his songbook, a harmonica, a piano, and a guitar.1 Springsteen had, of course, performed solo and acoustic previously—for the entire Ghost of Tom Joad tour, for example, which took him around the world over a period of eighteen months. He had also done an audience question-and-answer period before, at the two concerts he performed in support of Double Take magazine in Somerville, Massachusetts, in early 2003.

  But the Storytellers performance was different by design—it wasn’t just a concert, it was an inquiry into process, inspiration, and creation. As the title suggests, it was to be an evening’s worth of stories. And Springsteen delivered. Over the course of almost two hours, he dissected eight songs spanning his career, discussing his songwriting process, exploring references and connections, and laying bare both his craft and his soul.

  As he takes the stage, Springsteen is clearly uncomfortable,2 and the opening discussion of “Devils & Dust,”3 while interesting, is stilted and clearly scripted. His comments about “Blinded by the Light,” while revelatory and frequently hilarious, are also stagey and deliberate.

  He seems to find his groove as the show progresses, however, along with a level of comfort that allows him to make some stunning disclosures. Most significant among these, for me, is what he says about his public face and his private self and how they interact. “I didn’t write very well about men and women until 1987,” he confides during his introduction to “Brilliant Disguise.” “I wasn’t doin’ it very well either. Maybe that had something to do with it.”

  The song, which was the lead-off single from Tunnel of Love has always been about the impenetrability and falseness of the faces we show the world, and the impossibility of true intimacy, even with ourselves. On the Storytellers stage, it becomes a vessel for honesty and disclosure.4 “We all have multiple selves,” Springsteen says. “That’s just the way we’re built. We’ve got sort of this public self, this public face we show to others. I’m wearing mine right now.”

  Springsteen goes on to recount his fondness for strip clubs and mentions two people who have objected
to his going: his wife and “that holier-than-thou bastard Bruce Springsteen.” He describes meeting fans as he was leaving a strip club, one of whom remarked “Bruce, you’re not supposed to be here.” His response—that he’s a figment of Springsteen that “Bruce does not even know [is] missing”—is surreal, with the ring of truth.

  Springsteen’s revelations about his two selves are significant enough, considering the piety with which he is often regarded by his fans. But he continues, describing how “Brilliant Disguise” has changed for him, over time, from a song about the separation of identities to a hymn of communion. “When you sing the song with somebody you love it turns into something else, I think. It becomes a song of a reaffirmation of the world’s mysteries, its shadows, our frailties and the acceptance of those frailties, without which there is no love.”

  The acceptance of those frailties.

  Patti Scialfa joins him on stage for the version of the song that follows. It’s beautiful and haunting, and it changes in exactly the way Springsteen said it would. There are still secrets, still questions, and there always will be. That’s the nature of the world.

  And the world, as the poet5 says, is always too much with us, late and soon. Watching Springsteen and Scialfa on that stage, the love so thick between them it’s almost a physical thing, it’s easy to idealize their relationship. You don’t have to dig too deeply, though, to understand that their happiness is hard won, a trial by fire. It’s not just strip clubs. Rumors of Springsteen’s lack of fidelity— and his stays in the “barn,” an outbuilding6 on their Runsom, N.J., property, often for weeks or months at a time—appear frequently in the mainstream media and are whispered among fans online. Longtime fans hold that his concerts are looser, his interactions with the crowd more liberal, when Patti is at home with the kids. He’s playing for the ladies; he always has.7