Walk like a Man (9 page)

The second memory is of being awakened late one night. My bedroom was at the back of the house, upstairs, alongside the driveway. I heard the sound of the screen door closing, and voices below my window, too quiet for me to make out the words. Voices that I recognized but in my sleep-addled state couldn't place. The screen door opening, then closing again. Engines starting and cars leaving the driveway, cars driving in.

I had to pee, but there was something about the sound of those voices that kept me in bed until I couldn't bear it any more. I snuck out of bed and down the stairs. The lights were on in the kitchen, watery and orange-gold. I hesitated at the foot of the stairs hearing those voices. There had never been a night like this before, and I knew somehow that as soon as I went around the corner, nothing would ever be the same.

It wasn't. My uncle Dan was there, sitting at the table across from my mother, holding her hand as she sobbed. I froze in the doorway, not sure what to do. When my mother finally noticed me, she opened up her arms and tried to smile, explaining that Grandpa had died. I let her hug me, feeling the cold wet of her tears on my neck.

It was the first time I had seen her cry.

It wouldn't be the last.

A few years later, my parents told my brothers and me, over a spaghetti dinner, that they were separating.

From then on, nothing was safe. Nothing was certain. Danger lurked around every corner.

I'd first felt that kind of deep fear in the pit of my belly after the first breakout from the new prisons. There was a warning on the radio, and my mother walked us to the bus stop. Roadblocks stopped traffic, and gun-carrying Mounties searched our school bus first thing.

And then it got worse. In the spring and summer of 1981, the bodies of murdered children and teenagers began to be discovered around the Lower Mainland, several in the area around Harrison Lake, mere minutes up the road. As more and more youths disappeared, my childhood freedom came to an abrupt end: the Clifford Robert Olson killing spree and its aftermath changed life not just in Agassiz but around the province.
⁵
The woods were no longer a safe haven; they became places of menace, of dangers unseen.
⁶

I remember camping that summer, sleeping in the “kids' tent” with Dave and Jon, alongside the daughter of one of my mother's oldest friends and her younger siblings. She was the first girl I can remember having a crush on.
⁷
After it got dark, with the low voices of our parents almost drowned out by the crackling of the fire, the girl and I whispered about how scared we were. But we shared a great sense of responsibility: we were the oldest in our families. We had a built-in imperative to rise above it. To grow up.

Our childhoods were over.

And in the dark I kissed her, and she kissed me back.

. . . son take a good look around

This is your hometown

1
. An audible is a change made to the setlist during a show. “Calling an audible” typically involves Springsteen madly stalking the stage during the closing moments of the previous song and shouting out the title of the song to come. It often results in mass confusion, swift instrument changes and substitutions, and a big goofy grin on Springsteen's face as the band hits the new song right on the button: no hesitation, no prevarication. I suspect that it's not so much Springsteen being caught up by whimsy or reading the mood of the crowd: I think he calls audibles to fuck with the band. Except when he's substituting “My Hometown” for “Incident” in Vancouver: then, I'm pretty sure he's doing it to fuck with me.

2
. Ah, “Incident on 57th Street.” Or just “Incident,” as the fans call it. This
is
one of my favorite Springsteen songs: top ten for sure, possibly top five. It's a grandiose, intricate, operatic epic from Springsteen's second album, and I cannot get enough of it. It is also the one song I've been chasing over more than two decades of concert-going. I've never seen it live, though I've come close a couple of times. The substitution in Vancouver stings to this day, especially since they got it three nights later in Edmonton. Bastards.

3
. A blur for me, but not for my mother. She recalls coming to a skidding halt, and jumping off her bike and letting it drop at the side of the road to chase the dog away from me. This would have been good for me, but not so good for Jon, still buckled into his seat as the bike hit the pavement.

4
. Chilliwack, you have to understand, was the big city if you were from Agassiz: there were a couple of malls, the big grocery stores, and—yes!—a movie theatre.

5
. Olson was arrested in the summer of 1981 and confessed to the murder of eleven children and youths. He was sentenced to eleven concurrent life sentences, and, designated as a dangerous offender, will likely never be released.

6
. And it wasn't just the woods, it was the high school as well. Legend had it that Olson had actually been in the school, looking for a telephone, while one of his victims sat outside the library, unaware of her fate. Witnesses claimed she looked like she had been drugged. Whether or not this was true, it was enough to color our lives. I still get a creepy feeling when I look at my graduation group photos, taken at the table where the girl allegedly sat during her last hours.

7
. Desperately trying to impress her, I almost drowned (not once, but twice) over the years that followed. She's the reason I became a lifeguard.

It's Hard to be a Saint in the City

Album:
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.

Released:
January 5, 1973

Recorded:
July–September 1972

Version discussed:
Recorded July 7, 1978, at the Roxy Theatre

Album/released:
Live
1975–85, November 10, 1986

‘I
T'S HARD TO be a Saint in the City” is perhaps one of the most significant songs in the Springsteen canon. It sets the tone for his early work, casting a stone of bravado and strut “ that sends ripples out to “Rosalita” and “Jungleland.” It establishes the dynamic of one of his most compelling images (for me, at least): that of our public and private faces.
¹
And it gave him a career.

On May 3, 1972, Springsteen walked into CBS Studios in New York to play the most important set of his life, twelve songs to an audience, primarily, of one man: John Hammond, Columbia Records A&R man
²
and talent scout extraordinaire, who was the man credited with “discovering,” among others, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan.
³
Hammond was impressed, and after seeing how Springsteen interacted with an audience at an open mike that night at the Gaslight—a renowned Manhattan folk club—offered him a contract. He's been on the Columbia roster ever since.

Hammond and label president Clive Davis seem to have thought they were signing the latest in a long line of sensitive singer-songwriters, and their promotion of Springsteen's first record,
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,
was laced with talk of him being a “new Dylan.” One of many, many new Dylans at that time.
⁴

But Springsteen had The E Street Band as the ace up his sleeve.

The band's presence on the record is noticeable but restrained, nowhere more so than on “
Saint
.” It's definitely a rock song, complete with a great Clemons sax line, but there's something oddly tasteful about it. The E Street Band sounds tight, but almost polite.
⁵
There's nothing in that song, or on the album,
⁶
to hint at just how intense and overwhelming the band could be live. They were burning it up on stage (case in point, their 1975 appearance at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, now officially available on DVD
⁷
), but little more than background on the record. The band's power later comes through in spades on the version of “
Saint
” from the
Live 1975–85
box set, recorded at the Roxy in L.A. in July 1978 and released with a stunning amount of publicity just in time for Christmas 1986.
⁸

It's hard to avoid getting swept up by Springsteen himself, but listen to how unhinged the band is, racing through what was originally a relatively sedate, relatively acoustic song.
⁹
This is the sound of The E Street Band vintage 1978, playing as if their lives depended on it. As tight as James Brown's Fabulous Flames, as raw and urgent as The Clash, this is the band at its absolute peak.
¹⁰

For me though, it's mostly about the words. Check out those lyrics. You can almost picture the narrator, can't you?
¹¹
He's suave, he's cool, he's hard and confident; he's got the whole city at his feet. Cock of the walk, a prince among men. As Springsteen has said of Clarence Clemons many times over the years, “You want to be him, but you can't.” You've probably never met someone quite as cool as the narrator of “It's Hard to be a Saint in the City.”

You've certainly never heard anyone extolling his own cool to quite this extreme, at any rate.

And really, that's the key. If you're truly cool, you don't talk about it—you let other people do that. That's one of the hallmarks of being cool, isn't it? This guy can't shut up about it.

And then Springsteen hits you with the punchline: he's not all he claims. He's “just a boy out on the street.”

The song, save for that one line, documents the construction of a mask, a façade. It's the first of Springsteen's façade songs, and once you're aware of the theme, and of Springsteen's personal experience with hiding in plain sight as a child and teenager, you have to wonder: if he's trying that hard to create an alternate persona, what's that boy trying to hide? Who is he trying to fool?

I WAS NEVER a popular kid. Not from day one.

I was sheltered from it for a while: for grades one and two I went to McCaffrey school, a two-room schoolhouse with maybe fifty students. We were a relatively close-knit group, and everyone seemed to get along pretty well. That was where I learned to read, and where I started to write, making up stories in my head to explain the terrible pictures I attempted to draw.

The transition to third grade was jarring: we moved en masse to Kent Elementary, which went up to grade six. Damn, those were some big kids. In a big school. And me . . . with, really, nothing to offer.

It's easy, growing up in a small town, to develop an inferiority complex if you can't play sports and you aren't interested in watching them.
¹²
You're essentially cut off from the mainstream culture. More so if you're a bookworm, the sort of kid who sits on the bus jotting notes into notebooks and writing stories at lunchtime. Even more so if you're a shy kid in purple corduroy pants.
¹³

I was, as they say, out of my element.

Which would have been bad enough. I could have been one of those kids nobody notices, the ones who fade into the wallpaper, people you don't remember until they show up at your high school reunion, beautiful and tanned and rich. I could have been one of those kids.

But no, that would have been too easy.

I didn't want to be wallpaper. If I couldn't fit in, I was going to stand out.
¹⁴
So I embraced what I had.

I had always been a smart kid, but I started to let my classmates know it. I always had an answer, and a cutting remark, and an attitude. I became arrogant, condescending, and self-righteous. In order to avoid anonymity, I made myself insufferable.
¹⁵
I can admit that now.

But you know what? Nobody deserves the treatment I got. No one.

I was beaten up in the schoolyard. I was harassed on the bus and walking down the halls. I was jumped both when I was dreading it and when I least expected it.

And it wasn't just the kids. There were teachers who were almost as bad. Partway through grade four, I fell while running backward in gym class, and something snapped in my arm. The teacher refused to consider that anything was wrong, and scorned me for crying. I showed up the next day in a cast: I had broken my wrist.

I did make it worse for myself, in some ways. I never hesitated, for example, to lie. And lie boldly. In third grade, shortly before St. Patrick's Day, I claimed that I had kissed the Blarney Stone, having grown up in Ireland as I had. It took my teacher, Miss Guthrie, about fifteen minutes to confirm that I was full of crap, which knowledge she proceeded to eviscerate me with in front of my class, without mercy. I can't really blame her
¹⁶
—she was a teacher, and teaching moral behavior was probably part of her code—but it was the worst thing that could have happened from a Rob-getting-his-ass-kicked point of view.

That was the low point, until the beginning of grade four.

Grade four . . . I shiver just thinking about it.

Mid-August, two weeks before school went back, my mother and I took a trip to Chilliwack. In the course of a single afternoon, I visited the dentist and the optometrist. I got glasses and braces the same day.

I'll let that sink in before adding that was the summer I started to grow hair in fun places, and discovered just how fun those places could be.

Cut ahead to the first day of school. New glasses, new braces, in the first bloom of puberty? I was like chum in a tank too full of sharks. I got ripped apart.

And that lasted for four years.

It's easy to be glib about it now. Time blunts the pain and the reality. You can explain it away and make excuses. You can create punchlines. But it wasn't easy. In fact, I barely survived.

At the end of grade six, my classmates and I moved to the high school. Grades seven through twelve. Damn, those were some big kids. In a big school. And me . . . with, really, nothing to offer.