Walk like a Man

by Robert J. Wiersema

  LURKING IN the shadows of Bruce Springsteen’s songs and onstage monologues, only occasionally making an appearance, is a gypsy woman, a fortune teller. She’s the woman who promises a happy ending to the soon-to-be-married couple in “Brilliant Disguise,” though it begins to seem, not too long after the wedding, that she was wrong, or that she lied. More promisingly, it is she who tells the singer, in the monologue during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on the reunion tour, that he needs a band (cue huge round of applause and band introductions).

  It’s easy to surmise that this figure is based, at least in part, on Madam Marie, the fortune teller on the Asbury Park boardwalk who is arrested in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” though the fictional presence serves just as compellingly as a counterpoint to the Catholicism that runs rife through Springsteen’s work.

  There was a gypsy in my life, too.

  Well, not so much a gypsy as a French teacher.

  My French teacher in high school and I bonded early. She was nearly as unpopular with the administration as I was.

  My notoriety resulted from a couple of . . . trends, shall we say . . . in my behavior. First, I had limited patience with what I felt—in retrospect, perhaps a little too self-righteously—were bullshit rules and regulations. I was always polite about it, but if something rubbed me the wrong way, I made my displeasure known, or simply ignored the rule altogether. Thus, not feeling I was getting anything out of my English 12 class, I would leave. I spent most of the year’s worth of classes drinking coffee at Pang’s Chinese restaurant. Second, I was unflinching in what I wrote, despite how it might be received, or what rules it might violate. Thus it was, for example, that I was almost expelled for a short film I wrote and directed that featured a student committing suicide.4 Third, I was up front about what the administration seemed to consider bad behavior; it was common knowledge that my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, for example, a fact that didn’t sit well with the devout principal (who happened to be the father of one of my closest friends).

  My transgressions were clear; however, I was never sure what my French teacher had done wrong.

  I do know she swore me to secrecy the day she read my tarot cards, warning me she would lose her job if anyone found out.

  As if I would tell.

  It was a quick reading, between classes one day. Three cards, focused on one question: would I become a writer?

  It was the most important question I could ask. It was the only question that mattered.

  As a kid, I was always scrawling in notebooks, taking inspiration from whatever I was watching or reading, ruthlessly plundering popular culture for inspiration. When I was obsessed with the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, I wrote mysteries with boy detectives. When I fell into the thrall of James Bond, first the movies, then the original Ian Fleming novels, I wrote spy pastiches, loaded with sex and imaginative—though highly derivative—violence.5

  When the bullying was at its worst, I had my writing to retreat into, a world that was utterly my own. I wrote about the revenge I wanted to take, the violence I wanted to do in return for the violence done to me. I wrote about the mass murder of my tormentors, about torching the school, and about being “saved” by the girl who I had an incredible crush on.

  When I was falling in love, I wrote love stories. When my heart was broken, I wrote sad stories.6 When I was close to graduating, I wrote stories about kids leaving home or living out their last summers in their small hometowns.7

  I’d chosen UVic because it had the best creative writing program in the province at that time.8 I had no vision of any future except that of being a writer. I didn’t have the faintest idea what that might actually be like, except that there would probably be girls and I’d finally be popular. But I had to know. I had to know whether it was just a silly dream. I needed someone to tell me that I was on the right track.

  So I asked the gypsy.

  My French teacher looked at the cards carefully, then looked at me.

  “According to the cards,” she said, “you’re going to write a lot. A lot of short things. And it looks like there’s a chance you’ll be very popular very fast.”

  I could feel my blood starting to rise.

  “But,” she said, and I cooled, “if you don’t have that early success, you’re going to have to wait a long time. Ten years? Maybe more?”

  She tucked the cards away, and we never spoke of it again.

  Was she just being kind, and telling me what I wanted to hear while tempering it with caution? Was she just not very good at the whole tarot thing?

  Or was it, in fact, my fortune? That I’d either make it right out of the gate or spend a long time trying?

  I went to UVic and joined the creative writing program. I wrote stories and short plays, submitted things to magazines. I read voraciously, and I wrote for The Martlet, the student newspaper. Cori and I were seeing each other by that point, and she would take photos for my newspaper stories, and edit my fiction.

  That instant success? It seemed to be a while in coming.

  I transferred out of the creative writing program and into English. I wrote, a lot, keeping Cori busy with her red pen. I got a job in a bookstore. I read like a fiend. I submitted my stories around.

  Still no instant success.

  And somewhere inside me, a clock was ticking.

  I graduated, and got caught up in the day to day, in work, in being married. The writing slowed down, then all but stopped.

  The complacency of comfort.

  I missed my window. I turned twenty-five, then twenty-six. Too old to be a wunderkind.

  And then I got fired.

  I could be colloquial and coy and say “I lost my job,” the one that I missed my convocation for, the one I chose over my honeymoon. But no, this is no time for coyness: I got egregiously shit-canned, there one minute, gone the next.

  The following morning, I got out of bed and started writing a short story, the first story I had started in years. It was a story about pregnancy and childbirth, a mythic tale focusing on the male journey through what is usually seen as exclusively a women’s experience.

  After I finished that, I wrote a novel.

  And then another short story.

  And another.

  And then Cori got pregnant. I responded to the news by going a little insane and channeling all of my fears, all of my worst-case scenarios, into a manuscript about a little girl who gets hit by a truck.

  Before I Wake was written in a white heat of fear over the first three months of 1999. I wrote it longhand, in the study of our new house, smoking cigarillos with the side door open in the middle of winter as I scrawled into my notebooks.

  Once it was written, I left it. The notebooks sat undisturbed for a couple of years. There was no rush to go through the agony of transcribing it onto the computer: no one was waiting for it, and it was such a bizarre story it’s not like anyone would be interested in publishing it anyway.

  Eventually, though, I buckled down and did the typing. And when it was done, I was strangely pleased by what I had. It wasn’t perfect, but I knew that with a little work it would be better. It might even be good.

  So Cori and I worked it. Over and over, draft by draft, we made those notebooks into a novel.

  We polished, and we honed, and when I thought it was ready, I sent the first section to an editor I had come to know over my past few trips to Toronto. That was March 2003.

  The next month, I took the ferry over to Vancouver for the first show of the Canadian leg of the tour for The Rising. Greg and John picked me up, and we headed out to the old Pacific Coliseum. It was only eleven at night by the time we got there, but there were already more than fifty people in line.

  It was, as Caryn would say,9 a clusterfuck. The word was out about the pit, and everyone wanted to be in.

  We got our names on the list, got our numbers, and crashed at Greg’s in-laws’ place for the night.

  I don’t know
if I told Greg and John that I had sent the book out. I probably did. It was probably casual, like a fait accompli. I generally tried not to make too big of a deal out of anything to do with my writing. I couldn’t let anyone see how important it was to me. How central to my being.

  My mother, I’m sure, would have called it putting all of my eggs into one basket. Yet it was more than that, even. I had staked my whole life on one roll of the dice. One reader.

  I had no idea what I would do if she didn’t like it.

  The show the next night was the show in which Springsteen allegedly audibled in “My Hometown” instead of “Incident on 57th Street.” It was the show where John and I got mildly hammered when we discovered—after buying the beers—that they weren’t allowed on the floor. What option did we have but to pound through the eight beers in less than twenty minutes? It was the show where we stood in front of Clarence for the first time, and I got to sing along at the top of my lungs to the final lines of “This Hard Land.”

  And it was the night I discovered I loved “Dancing in the Dark.”

  It was the guitar heavy version that we had first seen in Tacoma the year before, but now it seemed different. When he hit the line “I’m sick of sittin’ round here trying to write this book,” I laughed out loud. It was what I had been doing for months. It was exactly how I had been feeling.

  That song’s been a touchstone for me ever since. In 2008, at three shows in a row, I suspect my laughter might have been a little maniacal: I was mired in the depths of what would become Bedtime Story, my second published novel, which was then just a stack of notebooks with no end in sight.

  But that moment in 2003, that first laugh of recognition? My manuscript was away, being looked at by an editor, and I knew that no matter what happened, whether it got published or went back into the drawer, I was a writer. It was like the gypsy woman had promised. I was right on schedule.

  I’m dying for some action

  I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book

  I need a love reaction

  come on now baby gimme just one look

  1. Interestingly, none of the singles hit number one on the Billboard chart. “Dancing in the Dark” was blocked first by Duran Duran’s “The Reflex,” then by Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” Yes, I appreciate the irony of Springsteen’s synth-pop gambit being chart-blocked by the pretty-boy synth kings in Duran Duran. And, hey, “When Doves Cry” is just a fantastic song.

  2. As I was writing this, I posted this observation on Facebook and Twitter—never have I posted anything that has started so much dialogue, or caused so much disagreement. Several people argued that “The River” was Springsteen’s most existentially wrought song. Some argued “The Promise.” “State Trooper” and “Stolen Car” were both mentioned. These are all valid contenders, but I stand by my point. And fuck, it’s my book, so . . .

  3. Yes, years. The songs that made up Nebraska, released in 1982, were, in many ways, the first demos of the Born in the U.S.A. sessions—those tracks date from early January of 1982, a home-recording session that also included early versions of “Born in the U.S.A.,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” and “I’m On Fire.” It was only when the sessions with the band in early 1982 failed to transform the bulk of those demos into E Street Band songs that it was decided to release them in their original form. Which, given the bleak, gut-wrenching nature of Nebraska, should have really served as a hint of just how dark Born in the U.S.A. was, despite the cheery flag cover and synthesizers.

  4. I have never felt closer to my mother than I did the day she, upon being invited to visit the principal’s office to discuss the issue, proceeded to lacerate the principal on my behalf. She’s the reason I wasn’t expelled, and why the film went on to represent the school in a province-wide competition.

  5. When I was in grade seven, I asked one of the English teachers to read one of my spy novels—thirty or forty pages of badly printed looseleaf in a Duo-Tang. He was generous and careful in his response, especially when I asked him what he thought of the sex scenes. “Well,” he said, measuredly. “There’s a reason you don’t buy shoes from a snake.”

  6. Of course, it is not that easy. One of my mother’s recurring questions in those years was, “Why can’t you write anything happy?” I suspect she still asks herself that, but she’s given up on asking me.

  7. Over the Labor Day weekend in 1987, I entered the 3-Day Novel Contest, a marathon session that requires you to write a novel in, well, three days. The book I ended up with was a fractured collection of vignettes about couples making love in deserted boathouses, friends getting high and throwing rocks off of overpasses, parties down by the river’s edge, and young lovers saying goodbye, all set on the Sunday of the Labor Day weekend. I called it Soft Summer, drawn from the first line in Bruce Springsteen’s “Backstreets.”

  8. Well, that was the stated reason. We all know the truth by now, don’t we?

  9. She did say it, in fact: we met up with her the next day, and “clusterfuck” was one of the first words out of her mouth.

  Jesus Was an Only Son

  Album: Devils & Dust

  Released: April 26, 2005

  Recorded: 1996–2004

  Version discussed: VH1 Storytellers, Recorded April 4, 2005

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

  DESPITE HIS POSITION atop the rock-and-roll pyramid, Springsteen has spent significant chunks of his career on the other, folkier side of the tracks.

  As he recounts in his introduction to “Long Time Comin’” on the bonus DVD that accompanied the initial release of his Devils & Dust album: “I was signed as a guy with an acoustic guitar when I was twenty-two . . . I always, even when I was in my late teens, had a band, and then on another night I would go down to the coffee shop with my twelve-string and I would sing a whole group of songs that wouldn’t work in a bar, or needed more attention, or were just . . . different.”

  With Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River, Springsteen largely embraced his rock side, distancing himself from the folk elements present in Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (on “The Angel” in particular), and in The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The folkie oompah of “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” on the latter album is a jarring contrast to the rock-jazz elements of the other songs, but tunes like “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York City Serenade” reveal a singer-songwriter’s eye for story.

  Nebraska, the 1982 album which followed up the blockbuster success of The River, was something completely different. The stark, mournful, at times nihilistic collection was actually recorded by Springsteen at his New Jersey home in early 1982 using only an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a primitive mixing board hooked up to a cassette deck. The songs were demos, rough versions intended for the band, and they weren’t considered for public release until the recording sessions failed to exceed their raw power.

  Although widely regarded as Nebraska’s folkie successor, The Ghost of Tom Joad, released in 1995, was intended for public consumption from the outset. For that reason, possibly, it lacks the naked intimacy of Nebraska, and feels overly self-conscious. It’s also not a solo acoustic album; many of the tracks feature what you might call a folk-rock version of The E Street Band.1

  The Ghost of Tom Joad is a solid album, and the title track has become a Springsteen classic,2 but to me it feels like a case of too much reportage, not enough insight. Springsteen had done a lot of reading about life in the border country, the difficult lives of illegal immigrants, their role in the drug culture, their fate, and he channeled his research into his lyrics, creating complex stories that, in the main, failed to connect.

  Ten years later, Springsteen released his third “folk” album, Devils & Dust. Another small-ensemble album—this time with a string section as well as a folk group comprising mainly E Street mainstays—the album met with limited success before virtually disappearing. That’s not really surprising:
the album was all over the map stylistically, cobbled together from songs as much as fifteen years old.3 It also lacked solid thematic unity. “Devils & Dust” is a political song, rooted in the American war in the Gulf, while “Reno” is a sad, frank song about an encounter with a prostitute. “Leah” and “Long Time Comin’” are among Springsteen’s finest adult love songs, but “Matamoros Banks” is very much in the social-observation mode common on The Ghost of Tom Joad.

  For all that, Devils & Dust is a strong album, addressing a number of Springsteen’s career- and lifelong concerns in highly distilled ways. The title song, for example, expresses his political leanings while never losing sight of the real individuals caught in the crossfire of ideologies. “Long Time Comin’” is rooted in the reality of a long-term relationship and a promise to learn from the mistakes of the past.4 “The Hitter” is a folk-music short story, rich in pathos and hard-won wisdom, about a boxer whose great talent is taking a fall. “Matamoros Banks” scratched Springsteen’s socially conscious itch with its account of desperate Mexican immigrants drowning as they attempt to cross the titular river.5

  And then there’s “Jesus Was an Only Son.”

  The strands of faith and family that had run so deeply through Springsteen’s work reached an apotheosis with “Jesus Was an Only Son,” an account not only of Jesus’s final hours, but also of the relationship between Christ and his mother. The song works on both levels, using imagery that is both domestic and canonical. A mother praying for her child is a powerful enough image, but it takes on a different hue when that child is Jesus. It’s an intense, breathtakingly beautiful song.