does bruce springsteen drink the blood of young and virile lovers to maintain his stamina plus, if so, how can i assist him in continuing to do this
The first song I can remember knowing at all is “The River”. A sad one that I adored right away and still do, feeling it in me like the sweet ache of pressed bruise. Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse? What did I know of dead dreams and the violent creep of mundanities when my shoes were Velcro? Never mind that. It’s a cellular experience. Your body either knows what to make of that hurt or doesn’t and mine from the beginning was ready. I would say, neatly, that I was born to love story songs and I’ll always love story songs and I knew that in kindergarten I guess, but I also liked being in my father’s old Jeep with the loose brown fabric lining—its glue long dried up and breathed in—push-pinned to the roof in places and billowing down in soft sacks in others. And the crank windows and sucking down big heaps of summer air. Driving to a job site. Eating sour cream and onion Pringles with drywall dust in my hair and finding a private corner to pee into an old Styrofoam coffee cup. I feel I have always known Bruce Springsteen, much as I have always known the expansive menagerie of my parents’ friends and not to put ketchup on hot dogs and that I hate the Yankees. If there was a time before these certainties, as I understand there must have been, it was a time too before thought and memory and wiping my own ass and I have always known Bruce Springsteen but I had never seen Bruce Springsteen with my own eyes and moved when he did until Sunday night in California two beers deep.
There had been almosts. Concerts are expensive and children annoying. It makes a lot of sense. My dad has been a dozen times with friends. He and my mother went with his mother once in Albany in the snow, I think. My brother, one year younger, was taken to a show first which I can’t resent. He’s home and I’m gone and there’s a certain understanding. The older I get the more I understand the things which troubled me as a child, the encroachment on the certain boundaries of my person which I bristled against. I was a grown little girl and I know now how I crave to do things on my own time, to survey the situation and select privately how to proceed and how itchy and unpleasant I can become when not able to do this, when made to talk things through, though I have worked on this. I am a secret keeper. I like my little plans and rituals. A concert is a very minor thing but, in this instance, feels greater to me and regardless I was happy to have bought the tickets myself and not very sorry, really, for foisting the event upon my girlfriend, too. The whole thing felt fated last year all year. Finally, finally, and I’d share the moment with my love and she’d understand. I felt sure of that. I got tickets in February to see a show slated for December and the background anticipation built around my middle gradually until we learned that Bruce’s own middle had burned holes in itself and he wouldn’t be coming to LA anymore. A shame, but I’d rather, after all this time, see the man at his strongest and most sporting and not hampered by pain and burning and I for one am very sympathetic to the trials and tribulations of a stomach in pain and burning and I thought, well, anyway, next year. When next year came it was this year and this year the weeknight winter show would be a springtime Sunday evening which slaps and it did slap and there was a rude woman behind us who deserved to be slapped but it didn’t matter in the end as the crude and magical force of an aged rock band wrapped in love shot me all through bloody and happy and by the end after three hours when the lights came up I was, because Bruce was, because the night was, and the light was, and everywhere breathing out as one, gasping, I was spectacularly alive.
What I mean to say is the bitch still got it. I didn’t doubt this, but of course I’d wondered. I had considered and then discarded the possibility that watching Bruce and the E Street Band for the first time some fifty years into their run together would be like watching a costumed recreation of something now far away. It seemed possible that what I would see before me would fall flat against the expectations set by YouTube videos dating to 1979 or ‘84. The worry sprouted and I pulled it out as a weed because what good is it to long for what you can never have (the past) when the future keeps going and you’re right here. I decided not to think about this and then it didn’t matter because I was keeping my head forward and then it really didn’t matter because they fucking rocked. I’m thirty-two and all my joints creak and I writhe and whimper if I eat too much dairy and sometimes I go to sleep free and easy just to wake up with a locked neck. I’m kind of young by the real numbers in context of the average human lifespan but not by any measure that is actually culturally meaningful. I’m a young old person and Bruce Springsteen is seventy-four years old and he moved on stage and off–lunging headfirst into the pit, held by a friend at the ankles, to retrieve a sign asking him to play “Sherry Darling” (a silly, lively song he let off of The River and then barely included on Darkness on the Edge of Town, worrying that a brute’s good cheer and playfulness had no place alongside pain before rightly deciding he was wrong) and then back safe on dryland he did–in Inglewood last week with a vigor, stamina, and horniness to which I can only aspire, just daringly strive.
If I say I think the guy’s a vampire I mean it with love and respect. And when I say some of his audience has grown old in the heart ahead of him I mean it with a disdain that many deserve for being, by my survey, the sort of vulgar white small business tyrants who ruin the lives of everyone around them in ways large and small, but for some, also, with empathy. I see how it can happen and it’s what the world wants, the deadening. Of course, it’s easier to stay loose-limbed and hungry when you’ve got mountains of money and it's still coming. I’m not stupid. I’m not saying famous old white man Bruce Springsteen who did a podcast with Barack Obama is this really uniquely wonderful person, no, all right. He’s a talented writer with entirely too much energy still. I can picture his lips red-rimmed; it makes sense in the story I tell myself. I’m saying what the man has happening is something more than the zombie steroids they shoot into Joe Biden to make him barely legible. Springsteen’s is an organic and ferocious force. From up in the rafters even you could feel it. I whooped and danced and imagined a movie about a scrawny self-styled heartland rocker kept strong and vibrant by the wet, red power of lusty youths all too happy to oblige him and I thought I could probably write that up and sell to A24 but I can’t afford Bruce’s life rights and those in the know would be able to tell. Don’t we all drink of each other? Swapping back and forth. If at that last supper poor Jesus had wanted, instead, for each of his friends to open a vein to get the party going I think they would have done it and actually there’s a good movie in there, too. I don’t think Bruce Springsteen is a monster. I think he’s a poet which is a worse insult and a more dangerous path. I’m not religious but like Bruce I came up Catholic and the witchiness lingers in you and fills up the spaces in rooms where something momentous happens. It’s physical. I’m clapping. The body and blood. Living forever is an allegory or a wish it is real is it real we are moving we’re going and the light flashes and the sound is everywhere. When I cried while singing along it did feel cleansing. It wasn’t god. Not the holy ghost, no, something shaggier and more sexy which all the same I could not touch but felt there as physically solid and almost too much alive.
“For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside–” I’m keening now. I want it, well, we all do. You can smell it. “That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive !” A red wave crashing. Oh. Yes! “I wanna find one face! That ain’t looking through me! I wanna find one place! I wanna SPIT in the FACE of these BADLANDS!!!!!” Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Wet-mouthed and wanting. The words are nonsense and we know what they mean. Something animal in that man up there speaks to something animal in me and that it could ever end is for the moment an impossibility. He ended the night alone with an acoustic guitar singing “I’ll See You in My Dreams”, a beautiful dirge about holding onto dead friends, one of many late period Springsteen songs about being alive still when many of those you’ve loved have gone, about all different kinds of ghosts. He ended the night alone with an acoustic guitar singing “for death is not the end” and I don’t go in for heaven but right there that did sound true.