Walk like a Man (10 page)

Everything that had been wrong in elementary school was worse. And there were new horrors: lockers to be slammed against or into; bigger bullies, and more of them; isolated corners of a (relatively) huge building to be savaged in.

And gym class.

Even worse, though, were the change rooms. Mandatory showers after gym class. When I imagine Hell, it looks an awful lot like the boys' change room at Agassiz Secondary.
¹⁷

Through it all, I put up a front. I created someone else, so that no one would see how I was hurting. How this was killing me.

Thirteen is too old to be crying yourself to sleep every night.

And it's too young to be standing in the bathroom thinking that maybe the razor blade wouldn't hurt that much as you ran it up the inside of your wrist (not across . . . you want to do it right).

No one knew how I hurt, and how much I wanted to die. And no one knew how much I wanted to kill. The stories I wrote back then would have me arrested today. But I confined my bully-cide and school burnings to the page.

And no one ever knew.

I created a mask, one that looked a lot like me. This persona, this arrogant, self-righteous, infuriating Rob? That was the part of me people hit.

Nobody could touch the real me.

And you know what saved my life?

Since you've been reading this far, it shouldn't come as a surprise.

Rock and roll.

Heavy metal, to be specific. Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden. I never really got into Judas Priest, but I wore the t-shirts.

Really, it was all about the t-shirts.

There is nothing like heavy metal for the consummate outsider. It's the music of misfits, of clumsy kids and the socially disjointed. There's a heroism to it, honor among the down and out.

In 1983, in Agassiz, when you wore a Black Sabbath
Mob Rules
t-shirt, the one splattered with blood and decorated with post-massacre body parts, you were self-identifying as an outsider. When you put on an Iron Maiden
Piece of Mind
shirt, the one with the pie slice cut out of the brain, you were pledging allegiance to the world of not-fitting-in. You had officially hit the point where you didn't give a fuck, and you didn't care who knew it.

So I started growing my hair, and I wore the t-shirts, and something stunning happened. The beatings stopped. The persecution stopped. The pain stopped.

Within a few weeks, a lot of the older kids were calling me Ozzy.
¹⁸
I was greeted as people passed. I was high-fived. And some of those older kids stood up for me now when the bullies started in on me.

The trouble was, that don't-give-a-shit heavy metal kid wasn't me. The real me was still locked somewhere inside.

When I think about those days, I remember the ass-kickings and the torment. I remember the taunting, the incessant laughter.
¹⁹
And I remember feeling so, so alone.

But I did have friends. One friend in particular.

Peter.
²⁰

Peter moved to Agassiz from Sardis, a suburb of Chilliwack, the summer before grade four. I met him on the first day of school. He was a tall, gangly kid, glasses and a funny haircut, from a strict German family. He wore his shirts buttoned to the very top, and we sat together near the back of Mr. Fraser's class.

We hit it off immediately, two geeks at the back, and our friendship has never flagged, despite the thousands of miles between us. He's still tall, and he's still got glasses, but he's grown into that gangliness.

Peter suffered a lot of the same persecution I did,
²¹
but he developed coping strategies that kept him largely from the brunt of it, an approach that largely boiled down to “not being there.” He lived in town, so he'd arrive in the morning just before the bell, he went home for lunch every day, and he disappeared right after school.

Smart lad, that Peter.

The dynamic we had then is pretty much what we continue to have. He's the wise one, and I'm the smart-ass; he hangs back and I plunge in, persona-first. I'm the one who gets into trouble, and he's . . . well, he's right there with me. Your friends, your true friends, are the ones you wake up in jail with.
²²

Those days were ahead of us, though. Grades four through eight? Well, we survived. That's about as much as can be said.

The devil appeared like Jesus through the steam in the street

Showin' me a hand I knew even the cops couldn't beat

I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat

It's so hard to be a saint when you're just a boy out on the street

1
. In
Songs,
the 1998 book that collects Springsteen's lyrics with commentary from the songwriter, he describes it as one of several songs from his first album that serve as “twisted autobiographies.”

2
. In music industry parlance, A&R refers to “Artists & Repertoire,” the person or division in a record company charged with finding new talent and fostering that talent through the early stages of their career. An A&R person is generally expected to stay abreast of trends and current tastes, with an eye to finding, always, the next big thing. John Hammond was one of the best.

3
. Dylan was actually referred to as “Hammond's folly” in the Columbia corridors, until he became, well, Bob fucking Dylan.

4
. Springsteen, as one might expect, chafed at the comparison.

5
. Or possibly constrained by the limitations of 914 Sound Studios.

6
. Or on any Springsteen album, really. It's been said of the Grateful Dead that they were really two bands, and if you wanted to get it you had to see them live. The dichotomy isn't quite as extreme with Springsteen and the E Street Band; there are songs in the studio catalogue that give a sense of the band's power in a live setting, but nothing really captures it. You really
do
have to see them live to get it.

7
. Note the “officially” here. There are some great, great bootleg recordings of shows and radio sessions pre-Hammersmith, if you know where to look, including one of the all-time best Springsteen shows, from the rightly celebrated Bottom Line gigs of August 1975.

8
. The
Live
box set is a fantastic artifact, and you can't possibly quibble with what it contains: forty tracks of live Springsteen, at a time when only a handful of live recordings had been officially released. However. It's also one of those releases that has fans wondering, to this day, “What the fuck were they thinking?” For starters? They cut the “Sad Eyes/Drive All Night” passage from the recording of “Backstreets.” One of the most haunting, intense moments in Springsteen history, and they cut it?

9
. Completely acoustic, if you go back to the original Hammond demos.

10
. So strongly do I feel about the 1978 tour that I considered at one point attempting to collect bootlegs of every show. Why, you might ask? Tell you what: listen to
Pièce de
Résistance, Live at the Roxy, Summertime Blues,
and
Live in the Promised Land
and see if you still need to inquire. I think you'll see the wisdom of the plan.

11
. If you're like me, you
can
picture the narrator. “Saint” was used to great effect in John Sayles's film
Baby, It's You,
as background for a breathless first glimpse of the tough male lead, the Sheik, played with slicked-back, leathered glory by Vincent Spano. Try as I might, I can't shake that image. It doesn't, however, detract from what I'm about to say.

12
. To paraphrase a great Tragically Hip song, no, I didn't give a fuck about hockey. And in Agassiz, they'd never heard anyone say
that
before.

13
. I'm not going to tell the story of the purple cords. It's an involved, painful tale of hand-me-downs and church rummage sales, set to that infernal
swish-swish-swish
noise. I haven't worn cords of any color since third grade, the scars run so deep. But catch me on a night when I've had too much to drink and maybe I'll tell you the story. Because there's nothing I like more when I'm drinking than making people cry.

14
. Understand, this wasn't a rational process. Had I given it even a moment's thought, I would have faded into the wallpaper and saved myself five or six years of torment.

15
. Thankfully, I grew out of that. No, really. All right, shut up.

16
. And clearly I've forgiven her: she's one of three teachers thanked in the acknowledgements in my novel
Before I Wake.

17
. I admit I brought some of this torment on myself. It is not, for example, a good idea to point out that the penis of the fourteen-year-old bully about to kick the crap out of you in the change room shower is curiously small and hairless for someone of his size and age. Let's call that a lesson I learned the hard way.

18
. I don't need to explain that the nickname came from Ozzy Osbourne, former lead singer of Black Sabbath, then infamous for the rumor that he bit the head off a live dove, do I?

19
. To this day, the sound of teenage girls laughing on a bus will cause an adrenaline spike and a fight-or-flight reaction. Hence the music during my commute.

20
. I told you you'd meet Peter. Wasn't that a good entrance?

21
. It just occurred to me: he might actually have suffered from some of that persecution
because
of me. I suppose I owe him an apology. And a drink.

22
. Metaphorically speaking. Really.

Badlands

Album:
Darkness on the Edge of Town

Released:
June 2, 1978

Recorded:
October 12, 1977–March 19, 1978

S
PRINGSTEEN FANS ARE a weird lot.
¹
It's not just the devotion, the inexorable pull that draws us away from home, that has us happily spending twelve hours in a general admission line and referring to each other by nicknames drawn from one Springsteen song or another.
²
No, those things are relatively normal, as far as devoted fans go.
³

What strikes me as odd about Springsteen fans is our masochism. It's the way we grow, largely by process of overexposure—which we ourselves are responsible for—to revile the songs we love most. Familiarity, for us, breeds contempt. I'm not talking about songs from
Born in the U.S.A.;
no self-respecting Tramp
⁴
is likely to claim any of those as his favorite, save for possibly the title track.

No, I'm talking about songs that genuinely move our souls, that are key, in many ways, to our fandom, and that we eventually come to loathe.

Take “
Badlands
” as an example.

The opening track on
Darkness on the Edge of Town,
“Badlands” was most people's first glimpse of the new Bruce Springsteen. He was still recovering from his bitter legal battle with his former manager, Mike Appel, which had kept him from releasing new music for three years, and
Darkness
revealed a songwriter tortured and ground down.

Darkness
is a mature record, by design. Gone are the anthems of escape, like “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run.” Rather than jumping in a car and running, the characters in
Darkness
are trapped, consigned to late-night road races and early mornings waking to the factory's whistle. Exploring loss of faith, loss of love, succor in sex, and weekend thrill-taking, the album is a masterpiece of ennui verging on despair. Sure, there's defiance there, but it's a bitter and impotent railing against reality.

Springsteen wasn't even thirty years old when
Darkness
was released, and it sounded as if the world had already broken him.

This was, in fact, a deliberate choice on Springsteen's part. In the book
Songs,
he writes, “After
Born to Run
I wanted to write about life in the close confines of the small towns I grew up in . . . I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege.”
⁵

As a result of that deliberateness (some would say ruthlessness), the songs on
Darkness
—each of them a masterpiece—have some of the best staying power in Springsteen's canon. A typical Springsteen concert, even more than thirty years later, will feature four or five tracks from the album. The title track, “The Promised Land,” “Candy's Room,” “Prove It All Night,” and “Racing in the Street” are all in regular rotation even now.
⁶

It's a curious alchemy, what these songs do to a sold-out arena of fans. Take the title track. “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is utterly despairing, a chronicle of a man who's lost his money and his wife and no longer cares. He lives for weekend nights when he can race in the darkness and lay what little he has on the line. In concert, though, the song becomes a communal moment, a shared cry of frustration. Let's face it: there are a lot of lives that feel like dead ends, and many people live for the moments that take them out of that life-as-mere-survival mindset. A Springsteen concert, say. “Darkness” is a raised voice of understanding, twenty thousand strong, every night. That shared experience transmutes despair to a true measure of defiance.

The same is true of “
Badlands
.” In concert, especially since the 1999–2000 reunion tour, it's become a regular setpiece. The house lights are turned up partway, and the song transforms into a sing-along, often with several minutes of milked audience response. And it works. Of course it works. On the
Live in Barcelona
DVD you can see the intensity of the crowd reaction, the surging, roiling sea of hands, hear the voices raised in song almost overpowering the band. It's remarkable, and moving.