Just Don't End Up Like A Dog Thats Been Beat Too Much.
posted by jeremy on January 21, 2003
America: Our sweet, sweet & sublimely stupid home. What can you say? We live here. Love it or leave it. Or maybe hate it & stay in it. Or maybe ignore it & leech off it. Or maybe laugh at it & be killed by it. Or maybe, maybe, maybe.... What?
It may be that the range of experience here covers a lot of miles & years & lives. Maybe you've lived in dirt every minute of every day of your life here & maybe you, somehow, someway, found everything you were looking for. Maybe you were born to the richest of lives & died miserable, alone, unsung. Maybe you just ambled thru your life in this nation & never felt much, never did much, lived the life of the Average, of the Bored. Maybe you died at three years of age to a brain tumor caused by pollutants from a factory that was shutdown in '97 because productions moved to Mexico to escape EPA strictures considered 'too tough' to operate by. Maybe you were born in 1905 & have spent the last 21 years of your life sitting in a decrepit nursing home in Detroit. For the last ten years you've said nothing, nothing, not a single word. The other residents call you 'the Crier'. Where you really are though... is what you're remembering. Over & over, remembering the shining & wondrous days of your life; The exact sunshine of how your husband (dead since the third day of the second year of the Vietnam War) loved you so ferociously & you lie there, in your cheap hospital bed, remembering his strong tan arms holding you & the way he kissed your once-blond hair & you will continue to cry & the under-paid nurses will never ever know why. Maybe you crossed the border for the first time 3 months ago & here you are, looking for work in the Hispanic underground, looking, looking & all the while, cold, hungry & lonely. But you'll be caught by the INS in two weeks time & deported & oh, you'll cross the border again but this time you'll die of heatstroke while hiding from border agents in the desert somewhere east of Guadalupe. But for a short time there, amigo, you were almost an American.
It's a big fucking nation. Maybe you can feel everything for it. Maybe you can find whatever you're looking for here. Or hell, maybe you can't. Maybe you never will. Maybe in all of this insanity, this inanity, this roiled idiocy, this brilliant vibrancy of Empire, of cultural fusion & fission, you can, at least, find a hell of a spectrum to scramble your neurons in. America has a something for everyone; Be it freedom, greatness, prison or death. America retains its myriad options.
& I have my moments of pride for our motherfucker of a nation, believe it or not. America is a hell of a mix. America is a Generator. America has it's tough-ass underclass. America can still throw it down when it comes to it. America's irreverence for other cultures is sometimes what I love about it: America's culture-less culture. America is a queen-bitch to be dealt with. America birthed jazz. America's poetry broke all the foolish rules & America.... America honed the razor of rock & roll.
1985: I'm 10 years old. I'm living my young life in a blue-collar town just outside of Dayton, Ohio; a slowly dying industrial hell-hole of a city. The air is rotten. The streams & rivers are anything but clear & clean. Stray dogs & children are equally vicious. Junk-yards & back-yards are nearly indiscernible. Cincinnati, 60 miles away, manufactures an incredibly large portion of America's prolific shit...
In this era of my life, I'm known amongst my peers as 'the geek' or maybe, if I'm lucky, 'the nerd' ... due mostly to my voracious reading habits. I'm unhappy about this but I figure that these slurs are the price of pursuing my future career as a scientist or a great thinker. In a couple of years, I'll be reading Camus, Einstein, Hustler, Penthouse, Plato, Playboy, Sagan, Stephen King, Socrates & Whitman. I'm figuring things out.
I spend a mass of time hanging out with my two nieces, Becky & Charly, who are older than me, but just barely. (I was a late, late surprise for my parents) & these two hellions, daughters of my hellion & alcoholic brother, are doing their wonderful best to corrupt me at an early age. They will introduce me, bit by bit, to my first porn movie, my first cigarette, my first mixed drink & my first taste of rock n roll....
Fated: The tinny sounds of a bright pink boom-box. A scratched up tape-case with a picture of, I'm guessing, the Boss' ass, swaddled in denim & sporting a hankerchief & this, this music, this music was written about what I saw, everyday, all about me....
Ancient bars! Faded working men! Youngish doomed love! Sad lounges! Vietnam vets! Faded heroes! Pool halls! Prisons! Factories! A fucked-up but still, somehow, virile America. My very first brush with a music greater, dirtier, truer than the church hymns I had so far suffered thru every Sunday of my short life.
I was enthralled; Moved by this arrangement of sounds, vocals, astute & yet tough-ass observations. Who was this man? It seemed he'd seen so much. So much of the same world I'd yet barely seen. He was somebody not coming from the heights of LA-style, pink flamingo, bikinied-groupie rock-stardom but possibly from the fight-ridden working-class watering hole up on route 48; The same one my brothers stopped at every night after their long tedious shifts at where-ever the hell they had found work & it seemed he was right there with them. Watching. Listening. Singing about all the glory & the grime of it...
Bruce Frederick Springsteen was born on September 23 1949 in Freehold, NJ. A working-class shit-town of 10,000 people surrounded by rich suburbs & horse farms. Most of the employment available was to be found at either a rug mill, a Nestle plant or the 3M factory. Bleak options but better than nothing. His father was a factory worker as well as a bus driver, taxi driver & a guard at the county jail. His mother was a legal secretary. They were not a family that ever had to face the threat of drowning in luxury. (Bruce wouldn't really think about the socio-economic conditions of his family until 30 years after his birth, when he began to read The History of the United States by Allen Nevin. His musings on this, as well as the deep shadows cast by the Reagan era, would eventually give birth to Born in the USA.)
Bruce, amazingly, decided on the career of rock star when he was just six years old. He was watching a pelvis-shuffling Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show when he turned to his mother & told her that that's what he wanted to be: Something akin to Elvis... & so it was. The year I was born he would put out Born to Run, his first successful album. That same year, I think, he was on the cover of Time & Newsweek but even at that he couldn't make ends meet. Ironically, a letter written to his landlady in 1975, in which he apologized for not being able to pay his rent, just sold for $5000 on an on-line auction.
His childhood was filled with the normal sulking fuck-ups of youth. The usual redneck affairs & goof-ass trials & conformist-mongering tribulations of growing to maturity in a blue-collar environment. He wasn't allowed to attend his own high-school graduation because of his long hair. He was asked by his fellow students to drop out of community college due to 'excessive weirdness'. Nothing truly spectacular but his pattern as a loner was set, as it would be for most of his life. According to personal accounts of his youth, he didn't care much about the loneliness of his world, it allowed him the long hours needed to practice what he wanted to do: Make music.
Before the end of the Vietnam War, the Boss also had the not-exactly-small worry of staying out of the whole fucking cluster-fuck & with the help of injuries sustained in a 1968 motorcycle crash, he managed to do just that. But the casualties of the conflict continued to reappear (injured) or disappear (dead) around him. After reading Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic, he decided he had to figure out a way to help the survivors & so eventually, in 1981, he would almost single-handedly save the Vietnam Veterans of America from financial collapse by organizing a series of concerts to raise money & to spread awareness of the situation. He knew that most of the soldiers sent over were from the poorest strata of American society; A lot of kids from Freehold vanished into the war never to return & most, including the government, didn't give a shit about them. But thanks to his pulling power, (He raised a quarter million dollars) the VVA would survive & continue its fight in forcing the government to take responsibility for the war & for the sad slow fallout of the psychologically & physically maimed vets.
Starting early, Bruce did a lot with his stardom to help out where he could. Anti-nuke concerts, various benefits for food banks, homeless shelters, even literacy campaigns. He also helped out labor unions when & where he could but he was carefully selective; Such as his refusing to give blanket support to the AFL-CIO, specifically for their part in supporting the Vietnam war as well as turning their backs on the workers facing hard times in the '80s depression. The day after Ronnie 'can't-seem-to-remember-where-my-ass-is-now' Reagan was elected, Bruce said at a show that he was 'terrified' for the future of our nation. (& personally, I appreciate anyone who talked trash about about that particular old man in his heyday, especially to a crowd of 20,000 people.) I've also read some other comments he made about the American government & their war machine that, in sentiment, rivals anything Propagandi had to say. But Bruce wasn't easily classifiable in his affiliations, I've noticed. He seemed to think about what he had to say & do. He made statements about the Left ignoring the poor just as much as the Right. He seemed to realize that rich is rich & poor is poor & tried to use his own fame & wealth to even things up where he could. He seemed to care about people more than causes.
I stopped researching the Boss when I got to the end of his Born in the USA era. I just needed to know about all of that to write this but I'm going to read more. I want to know if the Boss evolved into the narcissist most rock-stars do or if he stuck to his guns. I'm almost afraid to find out because as it is I'm left with a picture of a man almost surprised by his own popularity & yet easily accepting of the potential for good that it allowed him. He honestly seems a blue-collar rock hero.
Three years ago I went to a Casey Neill show over at St Johns Pub in North Portland. It was a fine show but what I remember most was that Casey, as he went into his encore, told us in utter seriousness, "This is for the man single-handedly keeping rock & roll alive in America." & then he burst into a kicking rendition of 'Im on Fire'... & it was fucking amazing to hear again. Everyone was completely into it. Only a punk fascist could not be moved by the music of the Boss, I remember thinking & yet immediately following the show, I forgot all about him again. That is until six months ago, when Keith asked me if I wanted to do a piece for Avow. Yeah, I said. What about? Keith slurped his beer, considering & then asked me what the first album I ever bought happened to be. I, in turn, slurped my beer, thinking about it. Born in the U... I started to say & Keith exploded, as happy as a pig in shit. Do it. He laughed. Write about it. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Born in the USA it is & Keith kept chuckling.
& so I'd been thinking about this essay yet putting it off till a sheer 72 hours before Keith wanted it. I mean, I'd been listening to the album, reading a bit about the tale of the Boss but I hadn't actually written anything... & the writing is the most important part of any piece of writing or so I've heard.
& so finally I sat down to write this with a six pack of beer, B.I.T.U.S.A. playing in the background & then... Fuck. Nothing. Nada. Nope. Then while thinking about my first copy of that tape, I found that I was remembering parts of my childhood that I hadn't thought about in 15 years & from those memories I began to write this...
"My ridiculous & sad-happy history: The exact terrain of my hometown. The hills. Alleys. Parking lots. Paths. Hollows. Strip malls. Creeks. The children I played with. Their families. Their cancerous dogs. Their road-kill kittens. Their broken down cars. Their jobs at the plants in Franklin, Middletown, Kettering, Miamisburg... All those rusty satellites swinging round the collapsing center of the city of Dayton. Suddenly, I find that I can remember the colors of the booths in the creepy lounge where my brothers hung out at. I can remember playing hide & seek with my nieces in the ancient cemetery where my brother & eventually, my dad, worked as caretaker. (I quit playing that game there after I fell in an open grave one time & remained trapped until after dark.) I can remember the sprawling exposed roots of the hidden maple tree in which was carved D.G.+C.H: A 40-year old indicator of my parents once-fresh love... & I can remember the acid-rage I felt, watching that same tree, along with the surrounding forest, be torn down to make way for cheaply made yet staggeringly expensive suburban housing. I remember the swollen bellies of dead deer along the back roads. I remember the smell of the factories: Something about it almost always sweet yet horrid... Like candy dissolved in bleach. I remember how heart-breakingly beautiful the sunlight was as it poured thru the fields of genetically-identical strands of corn. I remember how getting out of there was everyones goal... & I know that so very few actually made it farther than the ghettoes of Cincinnati. Not much of an escape.
& even now, I'm thinking about all the kids from my youth who found some way or another to die. Motorcycle crashes. Car crashes. Cancer. Suicide. I'm thinking about all the kids I know who might as well be dead, at least by my definition of what living means. & mostly, I'm thinking about how I'm still alive & better yet, happy about it. Still figuring things out & working my way thru the daily labyrinth of American life & with nothing but dumb luck to thank for all of it.
Thanks, dumb luck. I mean it. It's good to be alive."
& as I finish this up, I'm thinking about how these certain aspects of my past wouldn't have occurred to me in the last fews weeks if it wasn't for the Boss. These are almost the exact details he's tried so hard to summon in his music & I suppose that's what all of this has been about; Staring at one's past. Measuring the heft of it. Going back to the not-so-glorious days & finding something, something, anything worth salvaging & I suppose that for me, it might not-so-simply be this: I'm glad to have lived when & where I did but I'm also glad to have escaped. I'm glad for everything thats ever happened to me. Fuck you. I love you. Like I said, It's so fucking great to be alive.
