At age fourteen, what I wanted to be most of all was applauded, and if that wasn’t possible, I wanted to be a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song. A Jersey girl. A girl named Sandy or Wendy or Candy or Cindy or Sherry, Rosalita or Crazy Janie or Mary, Queen of Arkansas. A girl idolized by an intense and poetic man who had curly dark hair and brooding dark eyes and who wore a clean white tee-shirt every day. I spent hours in my bedroom, kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo fully equipped with AM/FM radio, cassette player, and turntable. I played the warped and scratchy Springsteen albums I bought at a garage sale.
Since the albums most likely to be found at a garage sale are The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings Christmas Carols; Midnight, Moonlight and Magic: The Very Best of Henry Mancini; and Bagpipes of Scotland, Volume 4, Springsteen albums are a major score even if they are, as these were, in rough shape. But I didn’t care because, to me, that made them seem more real, more true, more authentic. More like the kind of records Springsteen himself would own. These records were naked. They weren’t in sleeves, and they didn’t have covers, and the name Jack was written in black marker on the red Columbia label. Jack left his albums behind because he’d moved out in a hurry, but such haste was necessary because Jack had been caught cheating. His wife, a woman I'd never seen before and would never see again, told me about it. The consequence of Jack’s adultery was that his wife wrote “10 cents” on jagged pieces of masking tape, then sold for dimes the things Jack loved best.
As I flipped through Jack’s record collection, Jack’s wife, a pudgy brunette who was setting up their baby’s playpen in the driveway, called out that her soon-to-be ex just loved Springsteen, but since she hated Springsteen almost as much as she once loved her cheater-for-a-husband, she would let me have all five records for a quarter.
Jack’s wife was gabby. She asked me how old I was, and what grade was I in, and where did I go to school, and did I have a boyfriend. She told me to guess how old she was. When I guessed thirty, an answer that never failed to flatter any adult who was being coy about age, she said not for three more weeks.
The albums included Greetings from Ashbury Park; The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; Darkness on the Edge of Town; Born to Run; and Born in the U.S.A.
Jack’s wife was also selling the contents of her junk drawer, but she hadn’t bothered to dump the odds-and-ends in a box; she’d just brought the junk drawer itself outside and put it on the ground next to the mailbox and beside a wooden coat hanger. A geezer and a blue hair, obviously married for a hundred years or more, were rummaging through that drawer. Otherwise, it was just me and Jack’s wife.
“You’re still young so you don’t know anything,” Jack’s wife said, plopping her fat bald baby in the playpen. “So I'm going to give you some advice. You want my advice?"
I said okay. I was sure there was nothing this lady could say that would ever have anything to do with me. Jack’s wife and I had nothing in common, and I didn’t see how we ever could. Love had let her down, and she’d let herself go. She had a droopy chin and a lot of black eyeliner around her eyes and she was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers tee-shirt that was much too big for her. It hung past her shorts, like a little girl wearing a nightgown except she looked too tired in the face to be a little girl. When her bald-headed baby spit out its pacifier, and the pacifier landed on the driveway, Jack’s wife picked it up, popped it in her own mouth, then plugged it back in her baby’s.
"Two things I want to tell you,” Jack’s wife said. “First of all, take your Pill. Always. Don’t be sloppy! Take it at the same time every day. Don’t forget to take it!” She lit a cigarette. “Second, don’t get married. If you do the first then the second should be no problem.” She took my dollar, handed me back my change, then asked did I know anyone who liked to read because if I did there were a whole bunch of paperback James Bond books on that table over there. “For cheap,” she said.
For a girl like me – a girl growing up in a western Pennsylvania Rust Belt town; a girl whose old man goes to work clean but comes home dirty, whose mother keeps one eye on The Young and the Restless while folding the laundry and running the sweeper; a dreamy and moody girl, melancholy and full of angst; a girl with a talent for histrionics, sentimentality and exaggeration, who knows in her heart she’s too lyrical for the nitwits tugging at their testicles and sniffing their fingers in English class but too ornery for the mama’s boys who would never dream of changing their own sparkplugs, not that they’d even have at hand the tools necessary for performing such a task, not that they’d even know how to change their own sparkplugs let alone their oil or their brakes – a honey-tongued, blue-collared bastard like Bruce Springsteen is hard to resist. At age thirty-two, I would proclaim that it’d take a whole lot more than pretty words to make me lay down, but when I was fourteen years old and kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo, I listened to Springsteen in the privacy of my bedroom, the curtains drawn, the shades down, my heart pounding. Behind a door that was closed then locked, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen demanded to know if love is wild and if love is real. He was pleading to give him one last chance to make it real. He was promising to liberate me, to confiscate me, he said, "I want to be your man,” and even if I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t a beauty, I didn’t need to feel bad about it because in his eyes, hey, I was all right. He accepted me just the way I am. Springsteen swore he loved his girl so much that he wanted to die with her on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss. There was something dynamic and sexy, beautiful and brave about such a man. I wanted to marry him or someone exactly like him. At age fourteen, I wrote down the things Springsteen said in my diary, then I lifted the needle so I could hear him say them again.
By age thirty-two, I had some things in common with Jack’s ex-wife – motherhood, divorce, part-time income generated from garage sales. What happened to the girl I used to be?
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