My first bedroom was on the second floor, off the back of our house, over the kitchen. A lazy turn to my right in bed and through my window I had a perfect view of my dad on fifteen-degree mornings down in the yard, back to the frozen ground, cursing and grumbling underneath one of our junkers, that he might get ’er running and make work . . . brrrrrrrr. I had no heat in my room, but there was a small iron grate on the floor I could open or close over the gas jets of the kitchen stove on the east-facing wall. As physics has taught us, heat rises. Hallelujah! For in our first years on South Street those four jets provided me my only warmth and salvation through many a cold New Jersey winter. A voice calling, two half notes, a step up and a rise to the whole note, shouting through the grate, “Bruce, get up.” I plead unmusically, “Turn on the stove.” Ten minutes later, with the smell of breakfast cooking on the kitchen gas burners, the edge has come off of my icebox and I roll out of bed into the cool and unwelcoming morning. This will change when, with my little sister at her side, my grandmother dies in the room next to mine. At sixteen, I will be visited by a black melancholy I never dreamt existed. But . . . I’ll inherit Grandma’s room—heat!—and the early-morning symphony of my mother preparing for work.
I get up pretty easy. If I don’t, my mom hits me with a glass of cold water, a technique she’s refined from dragging my father out of bed to the job. My sister Virginia and I are at the kitchen table, toast, eggs, Sugar Pops; I snow more sugar on, and we all hustle out the door. A kiss and we’re off to school, lumbering with our book bags up the street, my mom’s high heels clicking lightly in the other direction, toward town.
She goes to work, she does not miss a day, she is never sick, she is never down, she never complains. Work does not appear to be a burden for her but a source of energy and pleasure. Up to Main Street and through the modern glass doors of Lawyers Title Inc. she glides. She walks the long aisle to her desk, farthest in the rear and closest to Mr. Farrell. My mom is a legal secretary. Mr. Farrell is her boss and the head of the agency. She is secretary numero uno!
As a child, I delight in my visits here. Alone, I wheel my way through the door to be greeted by a smile from the receptionist. She makes a call to my mom and I’m given permission to walk the aisle. The perfumes, the crisp white blouses, whispering skirts and stockings of the secretaries coming out of their cubicles to greet me as I stand exactly breast high, feigning innocence while being hugged and kissed upon my crown. I walk this gauntlet of pure pleasure until I end up back at my mother’s desk in a perfumed trance. There I’m greeted by “Philly,” the beauty queen of Lawyers Title, a knockout and the last stop before my mom. She has me shy and speechless until my mother comes to my rescue, then my mom and I spend a few minutes together as she entertains me with her typing skills. Tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack, keys hitting the margin, then the typewriter’s decisive bell, slide and bang as her fingers, flying, continue to type out the vital correspondence of Lawyers Title Inc. This is followed by a lesson on copy paper and a crash course on getting rid of unwanted ink smudges as I stand fascinated. This is important stuff! The business of Lawyers Title—and essential business it is to the life of our town—has been momentarily suspended for me!
Occasionally I’ll even see “the Man” himself. My mother and I will wander into his wood-paneled office, where Mr. Farrell will sternly tousle my hair, say a few kind words and send me on my privileged way. Some days, come five o’clock, I’ll meet my mother at closing time and we will be amongst the last to leave. With the building empty, its fluorescent lights out, its cubicles deserted and the evening sun shining through the glass doors and reflecting off the hard linoleum floor of the entryway, it’s as if the building itself is silently resting from its daily efforts in the service of our town. My mother’s high heels echo down the empty aisle and we are out onto the street. She strides along statuesque, demanding respect; I am proud, she is proud. It’s a wonderful world, a wonderful feeling. We are handsome, responsible members of this one-dog burg pulling our own individual weight, doing what has to be done. We have a place here, a reason to open our eyes at the break of day and breathe in a life that is steady and good.
Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honor, love, faith in and fidelity to your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for life. These are some of the things my mother taught me and that I struggle to live up to. And beyond these . . . she was my protector, stepping literally into the breach between my father and me on the nights his illness got the best of him. She would cajole, yell, plead and command that the raging stop . . . and I protected her. Once, in the middle of the night, my father returning from another lost evening at the tavern, I heard them violently arguing in the kitchen. I lay in bed; I was frightened for her and myself. I was no more than nine or ten but I left my room and came down the stairs with my baseball bat. They were standing in the kitchen, my father’s back to me, my mother inches away from his face while he was yelling at the top of his lungs. I shouted at him to stop. Then I let him have it square between his broad shoulders, a sick thud, and everything grew quiet. He turned, his face barroom red; the moment lengthened, then he started laughing. The argument stopped; it became one of his favorite stories and he’d always tell me, “Don’t let anybody hurt your mom.”
As a young girl of twenty-three, she struggled with the early years of motherhood, ceding far too much control to my grandmother, but by the time I was six or seven, without my mother, there was nothing. No family, no stability, no life. She couldn’t heal my dad or leave him, but she did everything else. My mother was a puzzle. Born into a relatively well-off family, used to much of life’s good things, she married into a life of near poverty and servitude. My aunts once told me that when she was young, they called her “Queenie” because she was so spoiled. They said she never lifted a finger. Huh? Are we talking about the same woman? If this is so, this was someone I’d never met. My dad’s family treated her like the help. My father could be sitting, smoking at the kitchen table, and his parents would call on my mother to go to the store, get the kerosene for the stove, drive them and our relatives where they needed to go—and she did it. She served them. She was the only person my grandmother would allow to bathe her in the last corrosive months of her cancer. She covered for my dad constantly, bringing home the bacon on countless mornings when, depressed, he simply couldn’t get himself out of bed. She spent her life doing it. Her whole life. It was never over. There was always one more heartache, one more task. How did she express her frustration? With appreciation for the love and home she had, a gentle kindness to her children and more work. What penance was she doing? What did she get out of it? Her family? Atonement? She was a child of divorce, abandonment, prison; she loved my dad and maybe knowing she had the security of a man who would not, could not, leave her was enough. The price, however, was steep.
At our house, there were no dates, no restaurants or nights out on the town. My father had neither the inclination, the money nor the health for a normal married social life. I never saw the inside of a restaurant until I was well into my twenties and by then, I was intimidated by any high school maître d’ at the local diner. Their deep love and attraction and yet the dramatic gulf between my mother and father’s personalities was always a mystery to me. My mother would read romance novels and swoon to the latest hits on the radio. My dad would go so far as to explain to me that love songs on the radio were part of a government ploy to get you to marry and pay taxes. My mother and her two sisters have an unending faith in people, are social creatures who will merrily make conversation with a broom handle. My father was a misanthrope who shunned most of humankind. At the tavern, I’d often find him sitting solitarily at the end of the bar. He claimed to believe in a world that was filled with crooks out for a buck. “Nobody’s any good, and so what if they are.”
My mother showered me with affection. The love I missed from my father she tr
ied to double up on and, perhaps, find the love she missed from my dad. All I know is she always had my back. When I was hauled into the police station for a variety of minor infractions, she was always there to take me back home. She came to my countless baseball games, both when I stunk up the place and the one season lightning struck and I turned into a real fielding, hitting player, with my name in the papers. She got me my first electric guitar, encouraged my music and fawned over my early creative writing. She was a parent, and that’s what I needed as my world was about to explode.
SEVEN
THE BIG BANG (HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS . . .)
In the beginning there was a great darkness upon the Earth. There was Christmas and your birthday but beyond that all was a black endless authoritarian void. There was nothing to look forward to, nothing to look back upon, no future, no history. It was all a kid could do to make it to summer vacation.
Then, in a moment of light, blinding as a universe birthing a billion new suns, there was hope, sex, rhythm, excitement, possibility, a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of looking at your body, of combing your hair, of wearing your clothes, of moving and of living. There was a joyous demand made, a challenge, a way out of this dead-to-life world, this small-town grave with all the people I dearly loved and feared buried in it alongside of me.
THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED!! A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OF LIBERTY HAVE RUNG!! A HERO HAS COME. THE OLD ORDER HAS BEEN OVERTHROWN! The teachers, the parents, the fools so sure they knew THE WAY—THE ONLY WAY—to build a life, to have an impact on things and to make a man or woman out of yourself, have been challenged. A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT THE WORLD IN TWO!
The small part of the world I inhabit has stumbled upon an irreversible moment. Somewhere in between the mundane variety acts on a routine Sunday night in the year of our Lord 1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN TELEVISED!! Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that “IS,” who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call out the national gestapo to SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP QUICK!! As a matter of fact, the arbiter of public taste in circa-1950s USA, “MC” ED SULLIVAN, was not initially going to let this Southern, sexually depraved hick sully the American consciousness and his stage. Once the genie had been let out of the bottle on national television . . . IT WOULD BE OVER! THE NATION WOULD FOLD! And we the great unwashed, the powerless, the marginalized, THE KIDS! . . . would want . . . MORE. More life, more love, more sex, more faith, more hope, more action, more truth, more power, more “get down in the gutter, spit on me, Jesus, teach my blind eyes to SEE” REAL-LIFE RELIGION!! Most of all, we would want more ROCK ’N’ ROLL!!
The polite charade, the half-assed circus acts, the anemic singers, the bloodless (and often highly enjoyable) shit that passed for entertainment would be revealed for what it was.
In the end, ratings and money did the talking and Ed (actually, on Elvis’s first appearance, Charles Laughton, covering for Ed, who’d been waylaid by a car accident) did the walking, right out to the center of his stage to cough out, “Ladies and gentlemen . . . Elvis Presley.” Seventy million Americans that night were exposed to this hip-shaking human earthquake. A fearful nation was protected from itself by the CBS cameramen, who were told to shoot “the kid” only from the waist up. No money shots! No shifting, grinding, joyfully thrusting crotch shots. It didn’t matter. It was all there in his eyes, his face, the face of a Saturday night jukebox Dionysus, the shimmying eyebrows and rocking band. A riot ensued. Women, young girls and many men, screaming for what the cameras refused to show, for what their very timidity confirmed and promised . . . ANOTHER WORLD . . . the one below your waist and above your heart . . . a world that had been previously and rigorously denied was being PROVEN TO EXIST! It was a world with all of us in it . . . together . . . all of us. HE HAD TO BE STOPPED!
And of course, in the end, he was stopped. But not before the money got made and the secret slipped out from between his lips and his hips that this, this life, this “everything” you know is a mere paper construction. You, my TV dinner–sucking, glazed-eyed friends, are living in . . . THE MATRIX . . . and all you have to do to see the real world, God and Satan’s glorious kingdom on Earth, all you have to do to taste real life is to risk being your true self . . . to dare . . . to watch . . . to listen . . . to all the late-night staticky-voiced deejays playing “race” records blowing in under the radar, shouting their tinny AM radio manifesto, their stations filled with poets, geniuses, rockers, bluesmen, preachers, philosopher kings, speaking to YOU from deep in the heart of your own soul. Their voices sing, “Listen . . . listen to what this world is telling you, for it is calling for your love, your rage, your beauty, your sex, your energy, your rebellion . . . because it needs YOU in order to remake itself. In order to be reborn into something else, something maybe better, more godly, more wonderful, it needs US.”
This new world is a world of black and white. A place of freedom where the two most culturally powerful tribes in American society find common ground, pleasure and joy in each other’s presence. Where they use a common language to speak with . . . to BE with one another.
A “human being” proposed this, helped bring it to pass, a “boy,” a nobody, a national disgrace, a joke, a gimmick, a clown, a magician, a guitar man, a prophet, a visionary? Visionaries are a dime a dozen . . . This was a man who didn’t see it coming . . . he WAS it coming, and without him, white America, you would not look or act or think the way you do.
A precursor of vast cultural change, a new kind of man, of modern human, blurring racial lines and gender lines and having . . . FUN! . . . FUN! . . . the real kind. The life-blessing, wall-destroying, heart-changing, mind-opening bliss of a freer, more liberated existence. FUN . . . it is waiting for you, Mr. and Mrs. Everyday American, and guess what? It is your birthright.
A “man” did this. A “man” searching for something new. He willed it into existence. Elvis’s great act of love rocked the country and was an early echo of the coming civil rights movement. He was the kind of new American whose “desires” would bring his goals to fruition. He was a singer, a guitar player who loved black musical culture, recognized its artistry, its mastery, its power, and yearned for intimacy with it. He served his nation in the army. He made some bad movies and a few good ones, threw away his talent, found it again, had a great comeback and, in true American fashion, died an untimely and garish death. He was not an “activist,” not a John Brown, not a Martin Luther King Jr., not a Malcolm X. He was a showman, an entertainer, an imaginer of worlds, an unbelievable success, an embarrassing failure and a fount of modern action and ideas. Ideas that would soon change the shape and future of the nation. Ideas whose time had come, that challenged us to decide if we would all be attending a funeral of national destruction and decline or dancing while birthing the next part of the American story.
I don’t know what his thoughts were on race. I don’t know whether he thought about the broader implications of his actions. I do know this is what he did: lived a life he was driven to live and brought forth the truth that was within him and the possibilities within us. How many of us can say that? That we committed all of ourselves to something? Dismissed as a national joke, he held out a dream of the kind of country this could be, and soon we would go there . . . kicking, screaming, lynching, burning, bombing, saving, preaching, fighting, marching, praying, singing, hating and loving our way forward.
When it was over that night, those few minutes, when the man with the guitar vanished in a shroud of screams, I sat there transfixed in front of the television set, my mind on fire. I had the same two arms, two legs, two eyes; I looked hideous but I’d figure that part out . . . so what was missing? THE GUITAR!! He was hitting it, leaning on it, dancing with it, screaming into it, screwing it, caressing it, swinging it on his hips and, once in a while, even playing it! The master key, the sword in the stone, the sacred talisman, the staff of righteousness, the greatest i
nstrument of seduction the teenage world had ever known, the . . . the . . . “ANSWER” to my alienation and sorrow, it was a reason to live, to try to communicate with the other poor souls stuck in the same position I was. And . . . they sold ’em right downtown at the Western Auto store!
The next day I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar. I took it home. Opened its case. Smelled its wood (still one of the sweetest and most promising smells in the world), felt its magic, sensed its hidden power. I held it in my arms, ran my fingers over its strings, held the real tortoiseshell guitar pick in between my teeth, tasted it, took a few weeks of music lessons . . . and quit. It was TOO FUCKIN’ HARD! Mike Diehl, guitarist and owner of Diehl’s Music, didn’t have any idea how to teach whatever Elvis was doing to a young shouter who wanted to sing the elementary school blues. Despite incredible access to these amazing machines, he remained clueless about their real power. Earthbound like everyone else in 1950s America, he was all “Buzzing on the B string,” staff paper and hours of stupendously boring technique. I WANTED . . . I NEEDED . . . TO ROCK! NOW! I still can’t read music to this day, and back then, my seven-year-old fingers couldn’t even get around that big fret board. Frustrated and embarrassed, shortly, I told my mom it was a no-go. There was no sense wasting her hard-earned cash.
Born to Run Page 4
