Walk like a Man (17 page)

You don't realize as you're kissing your wife for the first time that there will be days when you're no longer two people fighting against the world, but two people fighting against each other, or that things you were once so sure of would become riddled with doubt.

And you don't realize, standing in the yard of the house you grew up in on a lovely warm spring day, watching the most beautiful girl in the world walk toward you on her father's arm, that the road ahead of you is bumpier, and more fraught with peril, than you can possibly imagine.

Those are things you have to find out the hard way.

That's why the Tunnel of Love rides in old amusement parks have that warning sign, just as you're about to go in: “This Is a Dark Ride.”

It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough

Man meets woman and they fall in love

But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough

And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above

1
. Sort of like a marriage, that. Just in case the metaphor was too gentle.

2
. Emphasis must be placed on the word “seem.” We have no way of knowing, for example, if the account of the relationship between father and son in “Walk Like a Man” is rooted directly in Springsteen's personal experience. But we do know about the fraught-at-times relationship he had with his father, so it's easy (and, given his use of the first-person narrative voice, fairly compelling) to speculate.

3
. Jon is very polite, and very good with people, especially people with gardens. He brought home basketfuls of flowers.

“People just gave you these?” I asked, incredulous.

“Most of them,” he said, cutting stems over the sink.

“What do you mean, most of them?”

“Well, if somebody's gonna be an asshole, they don't deserve to have such pretty flowers, do they?”

It took a moment for it to sink in. “You committed misdemeanors for décor?”

He patted me on the cheek. “It's your wedding day, big brother. Of course I did.”

4
. That ritual viewing of
snl
was not without its risks. Dorothy was fine with bawdy, frat-boy humor, but we were watching the night that Irish singer Sinead O'Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope while crying out “Fight the real enemy!” as the climax to her cover of Bob Marley's “War.” Dorothy's reaction was . . . intense, to say the least.

5
. A decision we now both regret, though it made sense at the time.

6
. Though it's certainly open to agnostic, atheistic, or interfaith diddling. I'm partial to “man plans, and the universe mocks,” because that's how it feels some days.

Living Proof

Album:
Lucky Town

Released:
March 31, 1992

Recorded:
September 1991–January 1992

I
LOST SIGHT OF Springsteen for a while there, from about the time Cori and I moved in together up to the reunion tour of 1999–2000. A decade or so.

I use the term “lost sight” in a relative sense: I bought the three new studio albums that he released during that time. I bought the import edition of the
xxPlugged
CD, and the
Tracks
box set. I followed newsgroups and listservs on that new interweb thing that everyone was talking about. I was, even in what I think of as my disconnected years, what most normal people would consider a zealot.

It didn't feel that way to me, though. In the throes of finishing my degree,
¹
working full-time, and starting married life, Springsteen wasn't speaking to me in the same way any more. He wasn't important.

I liked the records, but it didn't go much beyond that. Greg still has, in his collection, an unused ticket from a show at the Tacoma Dome in the early nineties that was supposed to be mine—he mocks me with it about once a year. I regret not going, and I kick myself, to this day, for not going to one of the solo acoustic theatre shows on the
Ghost of Tom Joad
tour, but at the time it didn't really seem to matter all that much.

Looking back, I can see I was in an in-between space as far as Springsteen's music was concerned. I had outgrown the youthful anthems of escape, and I was too contented then to connect with the post-therapy albums
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town,
released on the same day in 1992.

That changed, though.

Now those two albums, with their songs of deep soul-searching, speak to me more directly than any Springsteen work before or since.
²
They are albums of hard-won domestic happiness, with just enough self-effacing humor—in songs like “57 Channels (And Nothing On)” and “Local Hero”—to keep them from being nauseatingly saccharine.
³

As I mentioned earlier, Springsteen found happiness in the arms of his longtime back-up singer, Patti Scialfa, after the breakup of his first marriage. They married in 1991, when Patti was pregnant with their second child, their daughter, Jessica. (Their eldest, son Evan, was born a year earlier.) Rumors about his divorce— which was sealed up tight in apparently bulletproof nondisclosure agreements—claimed that one of the reasons for Springsteen's unhappiness with Phillips was that he wanted a family, and she wanted to focus on her acting career. Whether this is true or not, by the time of the albums' release, Springsteen was the father of two, resettled in California.

Springsteen worked painstakingly on
Human Touch
over a period of about a year, recording in concentrated bursts with a group of Los Angeles session musicians. The album was ostensibly finished in early 1991, but Springsteen felt he needed one more song. Instead, he wrote and recorded an entire second album in a matter of weeks at his home studio, then decided to release both records on the same day.

The first song he wrote for
Lucky Town,
the bridge between the two albums, is “
Living Proof
.”

The song chronicles the building of a family from the ashes of Springsteen's personal struggles, his negativity and despair. It's definitely post-therapeutic, and it marks the next stage in the story, his hard-won “close band of happy thieves,” after
Tunnel of Love
's relentless questioning and the very personal tests of
Human Touch.
It's profound and stirring.

And it starts on a summer afternoon, with the birth of a child.

THE CLAIM borders on cliché: “The only pain worse than a kidney stone is labor.”

That assertion is also fundamentally wrong. I don't have firsthand experience, lacking both calcium buildups and ovaries, but I've seen both in action. I've held the monitoring strip in my hand.

That's jumping ahead, though. We need to go back a year or two from August 26, 1999, for the context.

Cori and I knew from the beginning that we were going to be parents. But it was a matter of timing. We had a pregnancy scare early on—midway through our second year at UVic—and after that we were very careful. We wanted everything to be just perfect: we wanted to have our degrees behind us, own a house, have steady jobs if not actual careers. We wanted everything to be as stable as possible before we had kids.

When we hit that point, we started trying.

Anyone who's had a scare can tell you how easy it is to get pregnant. But until you're actually trying you don't know just how tough it can be.
⁴
A few months went by. Months of furious and frequent lovemaking, of cautiously raised hopes and cyclical disappointment.

We did everything right. Not only did Cori eat better, and eliminate potential trouble areas like caffeine, but I, concerned about my contribution,
⁵
started exercising, cleaned up my diet, and cut out coffee, alcohol, and my couple-of-times-a-week cigars. No sacrifice was too great.

And we kept trying.
⁶

I took a break on my birthday, November 25, 1998. I'd booked the day off work, and when I woke up I pressed myself a carafe of coffee that, after months without, tasted like heaven. I sat out on the front porch all day, drinking gin and tonics and smoking cigars. Cori and I went out for dinner to celebrate, breaking every single one of our self-imposed rules.

A little less than a month later, Cori gave me an early Christmas present: a calendar for 1999. It took me a while to notice that she had marked a page in mid-August with a tiny strip of thick paper with a blue stripe at one end.

When I looked at her, not really believing what I was seeing, she smiled. “I washed it,” she said. “And dried it carefully.”

Cori had a great pregnancy. We walked to work together every day, and went to prenatal classes, and decorated the baby's room. She was never sick, her energy was high, she hit or exceeded every milestone.

It's no wonder the baby didn't want to leave.

Her due date came and went, without a sign of a contraction. The baby was big, and content to remain within. A day passed. A week.

Nothing happened.

Finally, ten days past the due date, we went to a doctor's appointment at the hospital. Cori's fluid volume was low, and it was time to induce. That was the twenty-fifth of August.

We got her checked into the hospital, got her comfortable, and they gave her an injection of oxytocin to induce labor.

Nothing happened.

I stayed with her until visiting hours were over. We were waiting for a sign. We were waiting for our new life to start. It was right there, so close we could almost see it.

And nothing happened.

I went home alone. After calling her parents and mine, I sat out on the porch with a cigar and a bourbon and the cordless phone. It didn't ring.

I found out the next morning, when I arrived at the hospital shortly past dawn, that her water had broken, and the first of the contractions had hit at about three am. Nothing more than twinges, though. No reason to wake me up.

Things started happening around ten with the first major contraction. Moments later the kidney stone, disturbed from whatever precarious perch it had been painlessly occupying, lodged itself painfully and undeniably smack in the middle of our birth story.

Cori vaulted out of the bed, stumbling in blind pain toward the bathroom. She almost made it, but she ended up barfing in the sink.

The rest of the day unfolds like a battle: shards of memory and confusion.

I remember sitting at the edge of the bed, Cori hooked up to equipment to monitor the strength of her contractions, watching as each wave of pain hit and peaked and passed, completely unnoticed by Cori, who was sweating and borderline delirious from the kidney stone pain.

I remember arguing with the nurses, none of whom believed that Cori was having a kidney stone episode, ascribing the situation with derisive glances and clucking of tongues to another first-time mother not being prepared.

I remember being told, over and over again, to wait for the doctor, who would decide if a specialist should be called in. And when would the doctor be there? “Later,” they said. I have never felt more violent toward a group of women in my life. Didn't they see what was going on?

Finally a doctor coming in, a stranger. He took one look at Cori and asked, “You've had kidney stones before?”

She nodded and gasped, “Yes.”

“Right. Then you know exactly what this is. Nurse?” The nurse leapt to attention.

The next hour or so exists only in fragments. Watching Cori get an epidural, turning away as the needle slipped into her lower back. An assessment, with stirrups, and a quick decision that, no, this wasn't going to happen on its own. The rush to an operating theatre. Scrubbing up. Putting on surgical greens.

And then I was at the head of Cori's bed, perched on a stool behind the wires and tubes, stroking her forehead as the anesthetic rushed into her.

The one thing the doctor told me, our doctor, who had finally arrived, was “Don't look over the curtain.” He pointed at the institutional green sheet drawn up taut as a trampoline between Cori's head and the rest of her body. I kept hunched low, watching Cori breathe, listening to the doctors and nurses joke casually back and forth about their weekends as they cut into my wife's body.

An endless moment seemed to hang in suspension, a moment I feel like I've never truly escaped.

And then our doctor, Doctor Dave, said, “It's a boy.”

I almost wept.

“Do you have a name?”

“Alexander,” I said, without hesitation. “Alexander James.”

I don't know where it came from.
⁷
I don't know why it burst out of my mouth so fully formed. Cori and I had a list of possible names for boys and girls, and Alexander James was nowhere on it. James was my grandfather's name, and there were several Jameses and Jims in the generations since, so we hadn't even considered it.

And yet . . .

Alexander James. Xander.
⁸

It stuck.

“Do you want to see him?”

I'm not good with kids. I don't know how to hold them, or what to do if they cry. Xander was crying, but there was nothing I wanted more, right then, than to see him and hold him.

The anesthetist lifted the wild nest of tubes and cables and gestured for me to go under. I dropped to my knees from the stool and crawled.

But I made a mistake, like Orpheus at the gates of Hades. I looked to my left. I looked under the table.

I had never seen anything so horrific in my life. It looked like a MASH unit, drenched in blood and—

I turned my head and kept crawling until the operating table was behind me, until I could risk standing up without seeing anything else.

And there was our son. My son.

He was beautiful, and perfect, and crying. And as I watched, he peed on the nurse who was lowering him to the warming tray.

His first order of business upon arriving in the world had been to piss on an authority figure.