the New Pantagruel

My Life as Bruce Springsteen

by Garth Risk Hallberg

knew as early as the summer of 1985 that I would never be the raddest kid in the neighborhood. That honor might have gone to Tall Jim Brantley, who was a grade ahead of me. Or to Glenn Crumpler, on those odd weekends and Wednesdays when he lived with his mom on Fantasia Street. Or to Frankie Kata, whose death in 1992, along with my parents’ concurrent divorce, persuaded me to break off all diplomatic contact with God and declare a war that would last through junior high. Not having ever been initiated into the appurtenances of cool, I’m still not really qualified to say who, exactly, was the king of the hill; lord of the barnyard. All I know is that my BMX bike lacked the mag wheels I coveted, I never got to be Han Solo, and when it came time to decide how we would waste an afternoon, my voice hardly registered.

Only in private did my nascent self-consciousness fall away. I remember long afternoons that summer when my mom and dad were out of the house—perhaps no further than the garden, but invisible to me. In their room the blinds were perpetually drawn, and toward evening the yellow light would strain at the translucent fibers as though on the verge of bursting through. Being in that room at that time of day—seeing the mounded bedclothes and coffeecups and earrings and other evidence of adulthood etched in the overspill of illumination—was like entering one of the secret sanctuaries I always suspected existed on the other side of movie screens. Charged with the nervous friction that arises where waking life and dream life rub up against one another, I would creep into the walk-in closet and fetch my dad’s bomber jacket and tennis equipment. Then I’d stand bejacketed in front of the long mirrored door of the bureau and watch myself strum the black Dunlop racket. Had the dying sun, like a projector bulb, suddenly scorched through the film of the shades, my mother, looking up from the flowerbeds outside the window might have laughed to see her gangly six-year old in a Bjorn Borg headband and outsized coat. In my mind, though, I was invincible, impervious to ridicule. In my mind I was Bruce Springsteen.

In a child’s world, every gesture is a movement of the spirit; every object is suffused with mystery. The solitary hours I stole that summer, playing “Born in the U.S.A.” to a capacity crowd at Giants Stadium, constituted my first fumblings toward religion. Christ was an abstraction, foreshortened by history and stained by the dull light of church. Bruce was, in that multiplatinum year, as close as the nearest cable TV. In Technicolor and stereo, Bruce radiated a charisma that revealed Jim and Glenn and Frankie as the little kids they were, and I, then as now easily distracted from the big picture, needed that. In the person of Bruce Springsteen, that word charisma came close to its original, Greek meaning, a fusion of the cool I craved and the holiness to which I didn’t yet aspire.

While my parents were outside distracted by yardwork, by the insatiable weeds and the plagues of bugs, some sort of transubstantiation took place in my interior, a confusion of the rock star with the Messiah that I’ve never fully untangled. Though I’ve managed to cleanse my understanding of Christ of the taint of the devil’s music, I’ve never quite been able to abstract Springsteen from the halo of divinity that surrounded him in my eyes when I was six. Instead of being Christlike, I wanted to be Brucelike, and I still feel I could have done worse for a false idol.

For example, Springsteen taught me compassion—something neither Def Leppard nor Father Price at St. Timothy’s Episcopal could have accomplished. Jumping around or flopped in beanbag chairs in Jesse Miller’s stifling attic, we wore out a cassette tape of Born in the U.S.A., and what I heard, in almost every lyric on the album, was more disturbing than the jubilant melodies would suggest. In the title track, in “Downbound Train,” in “Workin’ on the Highway” and “Dancing in the Dark,” and, especially, “I’m on Fire,” I heard anger and desolation and bleakness that, like all things I was too young to understand, both frightened and seduced me. I couldn’t stop listening. I couldn’t stop dancing. And I credit this forced exposure to moral ambiguity, to convicts and deadbeats and drifters, with teaching me sympathy for the downtrodden. Which proves, incidentally, that there are six-year-olds with more moral imagination than certain Republican presidents of the United States.

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3