When the Depression hit in 1929, Anthony wished he could go back in time, too. Reduced to moving his family into an apartment, he borrowed some of his remaining clients’ cash to keep his own investments afloat. Then he borrowed more. Then he borrowed too much. Meanwhile, Anthony had other indulgences, too, including an affair with a secretary who eventually claimed his heart. Anthony’s marriage ended first, and then the federal agents came knocking. “I guess the word is embezzlement,” Adele says.
Then the word was convicted, then sentenced. And as Anthony prepared to spend a few years away, he bought an inexpensive old farmhouse on sixty acres near the edge of Freehold and had it fixed up so his family could live as comfortably, if inexpensively, as possible while he did his bit in the grim caverns of Sing Sing prison. Only by then, Adelina’s broken marriage and abrupt financial descent had unstrung the observant Catholic so thoroughly that she decided to let her daughters make their own household while she took refuge with relatives. Told to provide for her younger sisters, the recent high school grad Dora took a job as a waitress and kept her sisters on a short leash. Weekly visits from an aunt who always came bearing a suitcase full of spaghetti and tinned tuna helped make ends meet. The girls could also count on the help of the man their father had introduced as George Washington, an African-American day laborer he hired to serve as his daughters’ chauffeur and handyman. And though his name wasn’t really George Washington (that was apparently Anthony’s invention), and he was a grown man in his thirties, he became a regular presence in the home. “All we knew about him was that he could dance,” Adele says. According to middle sister Eda, the action heated up at seven o’clock when the nightly Your Hit Parade came on the radio. That’s when they turned up the volume, pulled aside the living room rug, and kicked up their heels. “That’s when we learned how to dance,” she continues. “It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s how it went.” The vision makes Adele’s son laugh out loud. “They used to go to the balls, and the soldiers were on leave, and they went to dance, dance, dance,” Bruce says. “They had it all going on.”
Dora and Eda had sided with their mother in the divorce, while Adele was officially neutral but sympathetic enough to heed her father’s request to accompany his girlfriend on the journey to Ossining, New York, so she would have the right to participate in Sing Sing’s family visiting hours. When Dora got wind of her sister’s jailhouse visits, she filed papers with the Monmouth County courts to bring it to a stop. And when Anthony convinced Adele to join his beloved secretary on another trip anyway, Dora had her sister put on probation. “It was stupid, because I was a baby!” Adele says. So she must have been terribly aggrieved, yes? “Nope. I just couldn’t go anymore, and that was that.” When daughter Ginny contradicts her—“She never got over it”—Adele admits it instantly: “I still have the letter!”
Either way, the dancing never stopped. And even when the Zerilli girls became adults and took on jobs, careers, and husbands, were made to confront hardship, and even face down tragedy, the sound of music always got their spirits up, always pulled them to their feet, swept aside the carpet, and carried them away. “To this day,” Bruce says. “You get the three of those girls, and they’ll still dance. It was a big part of their lives. Still is.”
• • •
Adele became pregnant again five months into Bruce’s life, and when the Springsteens’ second child—a girl they named Virginia in tribute to Doug’s lost sister—arrived in early 1951, it didn’t take long for Doug and Adele to realize that their apartment was no longer large enough to contain their growing family. Without the money to rent a larger place, they had no choice but to retreat to 87 Randolph Street, searching for space among the broken radio parts, the unsteady furniture, and the drafty corners of the living room. And then there was Alice, so joyous in having her beloved Bruce in the house she could barely contain her excitement. Virginia, on the other hand, barely registered in her vision. “They were sick people, but what do I know when I’m so young?” Adele says. “I thought I was doing the best thing calling her Virginia, but it wasn’t.” Besides, Alice and Fred had already settled on their favorite. “With Bruce, he could do no wrong.”
From the day the family moved in, Alice catered to her young grandson like a sun king. She washed and folded his clothes, then laid out each morning’s wardrobe on his freshly made bed. When Adele and Doug were out during the day, both Alice and Fred kept the toddler fed, warm, entertained, and always within reach. Ginny, on the other hand, was lucky to get much more than the occasional glance. Quickly frustrated by her grandparents’ disinterest, two-year-old Ginny demanded to be left with other adults during the day. Adele: “She didn’t want to stay with them, so she never did.”
“That was very caught up with the role I was intended to play,” Bruce says. “To replace the lost child. So that made it a very complicated sort of affection and one that wasn’t completely mine. We [Ginny and Bruce] were very symbolic, which is an enormous burden on a young child. And that became a problem for everybody.” Consumed by his grandparents’ unyielding attention, Bruce assumed that they, and not his parents, were his primary caregivers. “It was very emotionally incestuous, and a lot of parental roles got crossed. Who you answered to and the different kind of responsibilities you had were very confusing for a young kid. Your allegiances were being pulled in different ways. Then we were beyond the point of no return.”
Bruce remembers his grandparents’ house as a strange, austere place, its cracked walls adding to an atmosphere already clotted with loss, memory, and regret. “The dead daughter was a big presence,” he says. “Her portrait was on the wall, always front and center.” Fred and Alice trooped everyone to the St. Rose of Lima cemetery each week to touch her stone and pick weeds and errant grass from the little girl’s grave. “That graveyard,” Ginny says, “was like our playground. We were there all the time.” Death was a regular presence, particularly with so many older relatives on the block. “We went to a lot of wakes,” Bruce says. “You got used to seeing dead people lying around.”
Death was one thing. But for Alice, whose Old World Catholicism came larded with superstition and other terrors, eternal damnation was more difficult to confront. Grandma Alice sensed the presence of Satan in lightning and thunder, so the first flash would send her into the throes of panic. Within seconds she scooped up the children and sprinted the block to the home of her sister Jane, who kept bottles of holy water to protect her family against such attacks. “People would huddle together,” Bruce recalls. “You’d have near hysteria.”
When Fred lost the use of his left arm to a serious stroke in the late 1950s, he brought Bruce along to help troll for cast-off radios and electronic parts in the neighborhood trash cans. The time together deepened the bond between grandfather and grandson, and drew the young boy deeper into the eccentric rhythms of his grandparents’ home. So while Adele’s work as a secretary kept her on a normal schedule, the rest of the family—including Doug, already riding the currents of intermittent employment and long stretches at loose ends—abandoned clocks altogether. “There were no rules,” Bruce says. “I was living life like I’ve never heard of another child living it, to be honest with you.” At four years old, the boy took to staying up late into the night. Rising from his bed, padding out to the living room, flipping through his picture books, playing with his toys, and watching television. “At three thirty in the morning, the whole house was asleep and I’d be watching ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and then seeing the test pattern come on. And I’m talking before the first grade.” Many years later, when Bruce finished school and took to living by the musician’s up-all-night schedule, he had an epiphany: “I just returned to the life I’d had as a five-year-old. It was like, ‘Hey! All that school stuff was a mistake!’ It was a return to how I lived as a very small child, which was upside down, but that’s the way it was.”
When Adele read to him each night, Bruce made a nightly ritual of a picture book called Brave Cowb
oy Bill. Written by Kathryn and Byron Jackson, illustrated by Richard Scarry (in a style not the least bit reminiscent of his Busy, Busy World books), and published in 1950, Brave Cowboy Bill became such a fixation for Bruce that Adele could recite it from memory on her eightieth birthday in 2005. Central character Bill, who looks to be about six years old, storms gently across the frontier, rounding up cattle rustlers, killing deer and elk for his dinner, befriending Indians—albeit at gunpoint (“We’ll be friends, he told them firmly . . .”)—kills a bear, dominates every competition in a rodeo, and then stays up all night singing songs by his campfire before coming home to dream of the frontier where “No one ever argued with the daring Cowboy Bill.” All of which serves as an intriguing glimpse into the aspirational fantasies of a boy from a home governed by such a skewed set of expectations.3
When Bruce became old enough to play outside with the other neighborhood kids, his visits to their well-kept family homes both confused and bothered him. Suddenly he realized that his friends’ bedroom walls were freshly painted, their windows didn’t rattle in the frames, and the ceilings in their kitchens stayed securely above their heads. All the adults seemed dependable; steady jobs, regular paychecks, and no edge of incipient hysteria. “I loved my grandparents so deeply, but they were very outsider,” he says. “There was an element of guilt and shame, but then I felt bad about being embarrassed.”
• • •
With Bruce moving toward school age in 1956, Adele signed her son up to start first grade at the St. Rose of Lima’s parochial school in the fall. To the extent that Doug had an opinion, he kept it to himself. But Fred and particularly Alice had other plans for their grandson. Bruce, they declared, didn’t have to go to school at all if he didn’t want to go. Fred hadn’t spent much time in school, and neither had Doug. So why make such a fuss getting an education Bruce wouldn’t need? Adele, whose father had insisted his daughters all finish high school, at the very least, was having none of it. “He had to go to school,” she says. “But [Fred and Alice] wouldn’t let him.” Already feeling shoved aside in her son’s life, and more than tired of playing the dutiful wife in such a topsy-turvy environment, Adele made her stand. “I said to my husband, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here,’” she says. If Doug argued about it, he didn’t win. Hearing that a pair of cousins were about to leave their rented duplex apartment at 39 1/2 Institute Street, just three and a half blocks east of Fred and Alice’s home, they took over the lease and moved in almost immediately.
It was, Bruce says now, the only way his mother could give her family anything like a normal life. But for Bruce, that realization was a long time in coming. As a six-year-old, he says, the abrupt change was devastating. “It was terrible for me at the time because my grandparents had become my de facto parents. So I was basically removed from my family home.” The boy’s anxiety eased a bit thanks to his daily visits to his grandparents for after-school supervision. It also didn’t hurt that the two-bedroom, two-floor apartment on Institute marked a significant step up in the family’s residential standards. “We had heat!” says Bruce, who shared the larger of the home’s two bedrooms with Ginny. Doug and Adele made do in a cramped room that seemed closer to a closet than a real bedroom. Worse, the house had no water heater, which made dishwashing, and especially bathing in the upstairs tub, complex operations. As Bruce recalls, bathing was not one of his more regular habits.
Already shaken by the abrupt change in his family’s home and parental structure, Bruce reported for school in an especially vulnerable, and angry, frame of mind. The nuns’ strict rules and work requirements first confused, then enraged the boy. “If you grow up in a home where no one goes to work and no one is coming home, the clock is never relevant,” he says. “And suddenly when someone asks you to do something, and says you have twenty minutes to do it, that’s going to make you really angry. Because you don’t know from twenty minutes.” Just as Bruce also had no idea how to sit still in class, absorb the nuns’ lessons, or see their pinched faces and ruler-wielding hands as anything more, or less, than earthly visions of a fuming God.
Bruce did what he could to fit in. He pulled on his uniform in the morning, then marched proudly to school with Adele clutching his hand. “He had his head held high when he walked in there, and I thought, ‘Good,’” Adele says. But what was going on during the school day? To see for herself, Adele took a break from work and stood across from the playground to check on her son during recess. “And there he is, against the fence, all by himself, not playing with anybody. It was so sad.” For Bruce, his tendency for social isolation came as naturally as his secret desire to be at the center of everything.
“Companionship is a natural human impulse, but I didn’t make social connections easily,” he says. “I was a loner, just to myself, and I had gotten used to it.” No matter where he was, his mind was meandering somewhere else. “I had a very vibrant internal life. I seemed to be drawn to other things, different than what the subjects were supposed to be at a given moment. Like how the light was hitting a wall. Or how the stones felt under your feet. Someone might be talking about a normal subject, but I’m sort of zeroing in on that.”
Bruce had his small circle of friends, mostly the boys he’d tossed balls and pushed trucks with in the yards around Randolph Street. His closest pal among them was Bobby Duncan, a slightly younger boy he’d befriended when they were both preschoolers. To Duncan, the young Bruce was a regular kid: passionate about baseball, content to spend an afternoon riding bikes to the candy store on Main Street, then pedaling back to his grandparents’ house to watch the children’s shows on TV, read Archie comics, or both. Duncan also noticed his friend’s differences. “He was like the lone rebel back then. He didn’t care what people thought.” Which presented such a striking distinction from the typical grade school boys that the other kids in the neighborhood were often at a loss. Particularly when they grew up enough to battle for stature in the traditional arena of sandlot fistfights. “I grew up on a black block, but we were surrounded by blocks of white families,” says David Blackwell, who lived a few blocks away from Bruce’s street. “We all became friends because we were all fighting. I had fights with all my friends, white and black. But something about Bruce . . . I don’t think you can find anyone at Freehold who tried to fight him.” If only because, as David’s brother, Richard, remembers, the Springsteen kid either ignored or was somehow immune to the childhood taunts that sparked battle. “You could be sayin’ some shit about his mother, and he’d just shrug, say ‘Okay!’ and keep on walking,” he says. “Nothin’ you can do about that. You gotta respect it. Let that boy go about his business.”
Bruce’s odd yet stubborn ways made him a juicy target for the nuns and their vaguely medieval humiliations and for the classmates who tittered at the odd boy’s hapless flailing. Bruce incited enough institutional fury to end more than a few of his school days in the principal’s office, where he waited for hours before Adele could come claim him. Faced down by his parents at the end of the day, Bruce always had the same explanation for his behavior. “He didn’t want to go back to Catholic school,” Adele says. “But I made him do it, and now I’m sorry I did. I should have known he was different.”4
• • •
Douglas Springsteen spent most of those years huddled inside himself, handsome in the brooding fashion of actor John Garfield, but too lost in his own thoughts to find a connection to the world humming just outside his kitchen window. Often unable to focus on workplace tasks, Doug drifted from the Ford factory to stints as a Pinkerton security guard and taxi driver, to a year or two stamping out obscure industrial doo-dads at the nearby M&Q Plastics factory, to a particularly unhappy few months as a guard at Freehold’s small jail, to occasional spurts of truck driving. The jobs were often bracketed by long periods of unemployment, the days spent mostly alone at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and gazing into nothing.
Doug felt more comfortable with his cousin and closest friend, Dim Cas
hion, who had pivoted from his years in the farm system of Major League Baseball to a position as coach for Little League teams and a player-coach in New Jersey’s semipro leagues. But even while Dim’s talent and charisma helped him lead generations of Freehold boys to the joys of baseball, it also came with the spiraling undertow of manic depression. The seesaw of black-eyed despair into neon auroras of unhinged energy could trigger fits of often uncontrollable behavior. “Kitchen cabinets came off the wall, telephones came off the wall, state troopers were called,” says Dim’s youngest brother, Glenn Cashion. And while Doug and Dim didn’t always get along, and sometimes went months without seeing each other (despite living within a block of each others’ homes), the cousins still passed their empty hours together in the same pool halls, still drank beer together, always linked by the same history and the same genetic information.
Eager to feel connected to other kids—and maybe even create a bond with his father at the same time—Bruce threw himself into the Indians, his team in Freehold’s Little League, coming off the bench to play right field. Bruce was perhaps more enthusiastic about baseball than he was talented. Jimmy Leon (now Mavroleon), who shared teams with Bruce for years, still recalls the time when a high fly ball floated across the summer sky toward his teammate’s outstretched glove. Money in the bank. “But then it just hit him in the head. So it was kind of like that.” Still, Bruce was proud to be a part—no matter how small—of the Indians’ undefeated season in 1961. Which became slightly less perfect when the team lost the championship series by coming up short in two straight games against the Cardinals, a team coached by Freehold barber Barney DiBenedetto.5
Bruce Page 2
