Ask Her If She Likes Baloney

Hard to talk about Bruce without getting emotional; maybe there's no need to, anyway. Argument is calm and rational, but some things plunge beyond argument into the substrata of health and disease, meaning they organize your soul. Bruce is one of these things for me.

Like many romances, ours begins with a drought: specifically, the chunk of eight or so years that I lived between the ages of six and fourteen, when my family moved from Brattleboro, Vermont to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea to Lusaka, Zambia. The capital letters are just distracting: the most important part about where we were was that it was Not America. So, as the law of supply-and-demand dictates, we were raised under the banner of what I still flatter myself was a very peculiar Not Americanism.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school, when the walls of the schizo-edenic East Coast boarding school I had been languishing in since my parents moved to Egypt exploded, literally exploded, or rather inverted, figuratively inverted, to a sort of Deep Space Opera I later learned to call Bruce. This was Born To Run, the album that he called "My Shot at the Title." I decided immediately that I would like it.

(I don't know about you guys but for me, this is how liking things has pretty much gone my entire life. I decide for whatever reason that I like something, and then I make myself like it until I really do like it. Eventually, I'm so caught up in whatever it is that the delight can be described as "spontaneous." Will feeds delight feeds will feeds delight, back and forth like a Miranda July Poop Vortex.)

These days I'm on the downward spiral of my Bruce obsession - but I still think that he has important things to teach us. For example, I could ask you what you know about your own disease - the real disease I mean - and you probably wouldn't be able to tell me anything. But one way to know your disease is to see it reflected in another man so persuasively and completely that you feel a sort of intuitive sympathy for him. You think "I want to get away from this person," and at the same time "Maybe this guy will know what I'm talking about." You're fascinated, in other words, or repulsed, or whatever.

Bruce is rotting: grandly, operatically, and right before our eyes. If a Dylan withers and a McCartney ferments, then a Bruce rots, because he's an American and has spent his entire life running in two directions: mythical past and mythical future. Like all good Americans, he is a prophet of Not America, meaning he's never found rest and never will, and this is what makes the rot so disgustingly visible, like a bad sunburn, or male pattern baldness.

Apocryphal, but true, story: I once saw Bruce Springsteen's penis or at least a shadow of it, while weight lifting in downtown Boston. I'd gone to his concert the night before and was wearing my newly bought "Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band" hat, and it was early enough on a Sunday morning that there were only three other guys in the whole place: the owner, a trainer, and a guy who looked a lot like like Bruce Springsteen. Actually, this guy looked so much like Bruce Springsteen that, after he'd finished his workout, I followed him to the bathroom, Sharpie in hand, and prepared to take my chances.

The bathroom was cool and white, and filled (I immediately noticed) with a sound like a waterfall gushing over rocks. It was a mighty sound, a sound so intense and vigorous that at first I thought someone had turned all the faucets in the bathroom on at once, as a sort of paean to Bruce. As I cleared the corridor, however, I saw that this noise was being made, not in honor of Bruce, but by him! Bruce Springsteen, peeing (I include this for Seth)! And not any pee, but one filled with anguish and a low lament - the kind of pee that makes you glance over from your own place and consider, seriously consider, asking the stranger next to you if he's okay! A pee of terror and loneliness, the likes of which I had never heard before, and hopefully never will again...the pee of Job in the wilderness, or Jonah in his whale. A wild, hortatory pee.

When I closed the door Bruce re-sheathed himself and zipped up. "Excuse me," he said, shouldering his way past me. For a few long minutes, I seriously considered tearing the urinal off the wall and enshrining it in my bedroom.

Of course he was pretty cooked by "Tunnel of Love" - and that was the late '80s, before I'd even hit double digits. Now he makes albums called "Magic," and asks us to "Rise up" - a song that, more than any of his others, I like to play while running, writing, or taking a particularly difficult shit.

Anyway, after Bruce had left, the owner of the weight-room and I watched him walk away through the second-story window. I'd gotten my autograph, but I still wasn't satisfied.

"I saw The Edge once, in a pool hall," the owner said.

For some reason, I felt very jealous about this.