Walk like a Man (18 page)

My boy.

The nurse picked up a set of surgical scissors and extended them toward me. “Do you want to cut the cord?”

I looked down at Xander's belly, at the tube of flesh, and I blanched. Cutting the cord felt important. Decisive. Significant. But I couldn't do it.

I shook my head.

As the nurse lowered the scissors to the umbilical cord, I flinched and looked away.

That meant I was looking directly at the table. Directly back at Cori.

It was . . . terrible.

I knew, rationally, what a C-section was. I knew the clinical description. I knew the risks.

But nothing prepared me for seeing my wife laid out like that, the great bloody spreading wound, her bladder outside of her body, resting on her belly. There were hands moving within her, flesh being tugged, blood . . .

I almost fell over. And I have never loved her as deeply as I did at that moment. She is the strongest person I have ever met.

And I couldn't even cut the cord.

I think I was escorted out of the operating room. I don't remember taking off my scrubs.

A nurse brought Xander out. He was swaddled up tight, and silent. And he was wearing a hat. When the nurse removed it, I could see that his head, covered in brown hair, tapered to a rounded point, like an old intercontinental missile. “That's from pushing against the pelvic brim,” she said, replacing the cap. “There was no way he was coming out on his own.”

And then I was alone with him, for the first time. My son. Suddenly burst forth from imagination and conjecture into the world. I snugged him close. I whispered his name into his ear.

There's a photo taken that day or the next. In it, I'm holding Xander slightly away from myself, both of his feet on my chest. I'm leaning slightly forward, enraptured, and he's looking back, tiny and pale.

You can almost see our eyes meet.

The way the light falls on his face, the way it seems to shine back at me. It feels holy. Sacred.

It feels like living proof.

Well now on a summer night in a dusky room

Come a little piece of the Lord's undying light

Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon

In his mother's arms it was all the beauty I could take

Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make

In a world so hard and dirty so fouled and confused

Searching for a little bit of God's mercy

I found living proof

1
. I wrote the graduating thesis for my Honors undergrad on linguistic variations in Bob Dylan's “Tangled Up in Blue”—Cori has yet to forgive me for the three months of constant Dylan (eight or nine versions of the song!) she had to endure.

2
. These are among Springsteen's less popular albums. Some fans resented his firing of The E Street Band, and their fondness for Springsteen flagged as a result. More significantly, though, these are two of Springsteen's weakest albums. Unlike
Born to
Run
or
Darkness,
on which every track was a classic, these albums contained a fair bit of filler (“Roll of the Dice,” anyone? “Man's Job”?). Fans actually created a single-disc compilation of the best tracks off the two albums, referred to either as
Lucky
Touch
or
Human Town.

3
. Speaking of saccharine, though? One of my favorite songs on
Human Touch
is the closing track, “Pony Boy.” A gentle ballad, it's a lullaby for Springsteen's oldest son Evan, but it also serves as a wonderful resolution for many of the album's themes. It does, however, galvanize the fans. I may be the only person who likes it. That's fine, though. They can keep “Hungry Heart”; I'll take this one.

4
. If you've read my novel
Before I Wake,
this might sound familiar: the deliberateness of Cori's and my timing, and the resulting attempts, is the source of Simon and Karen's experience of conception in that book. Simon and Karen struggled for years, though— for Cori and me it was only a few months.

5
. I'm not comfortable using the phrase “daily sperm production” even in a footnote, but yeah, that.

6
. Everyone knew we were trying. I recall a weekend at Cori's folks' place, sitting down to breakfast with Rolf and June. My father-in-law asked, good-naturedly, how things were going. When I replied that we were trying, he suggested that I should be trying harder. “Well,” I said, reaching for the butter, “I was trying a few minutes ago. I thought I'd get some breakfast before I try again.” I don't recall him asking again after that.

7
. This, it turns out, is not entirely true. I've been reminded that early on in our relationship, I bought Cori a teddy bear, which she named Alexander James Fuzzy Wuzzy Skadoodle Bear. I make no further comment, except, “Huh. Weird.”

8
. At the reunion of our prenatal class a few months later we were stunned to find that of the thirteen babies born, nine had been named some variation of Alexander (including several Alexandras). Calling him Xander was a way of making him distinct, and avoiding people calling him Alex. (One has to wonder, though—were there that many teddy bears making the rounds, or was there something in the air?)

Brilliant Disguise

Album:
Tunnel of Love

Released:
October 9, 1987

Recorded:
January–July 1987

Version discussed:
VH1 Storytellers, Recorded April 4, 2005

Album/released:
VH1 Storytellers DVD, Released September 6, 2005

O
N APRIL 4, 2005, Bruce Springsteen took the stage of the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, for a performance unlike any other he had ever given. As part of VH1's
Storytellers
series, he appeared on a bare stage with only his songbook, a harmonica, a piano, and a guitar.
¹
Springsteen had, of course, performed solo and acoustic previously—for the entire
Ghost of Tom Joad
tour, for example, which took him around the world over a period of eighteen months. He had also done an audience question-and-answer period before, at the two concerts he performed in support of
Double Take
magazine in Somerville, Massachusetts, in early 2003.

But the
Storytellers
performance was different by design—it wasn't just a concert, it was an inquiry into process, inspiration, and creation. As the title suggests, it was to be an evening's worth of stories. And Springsteen delivered. Over the course of almost two hours, he dissected eight songs spanning his career, discussing his songwriting process, exploring references and connections, and laying bare both his craft and his soul.

As he takes the stage, Springsteen is clearly uncomfortable,
²
and the opening discussion of “Devils & Dust,”
³
while interesting, is stilted and clearly scripted. His comments about “Blinded by the Light,” while revelatory and frequently hilarious, are also stagey and deliberate.

He seems to find his groove as the show progresses, however, along with a level of comfort that allows him to make some stunning disclosures. Most significant among these, for me, is what he says about his public face and his private self and how they interact. “I didn't write very well about men and women until 1987,” he confides during his introduction to “
Brilliant Disguise
.” “I wasn't doin' it very well either. Maybe that had something to do with it.”

The song, which was the lead-off single from
Tunnel of Love
has always been about the impenetrability and falseness of the faces we show the world, and the impossibility of true intimacy, even with ourselves. On the
Storytellers
stage, it becomes a vessel for honesty and disclosure.
⁴
“We all have multiple selves,” Springsteen says. “That's just the way we're built. We've got sort of this public self, this public face we show to others. I'm wearing mine right now.”

Springsteen goes on to recount his fondness for strip clubs and mentions two people who have objected to his going: his wife and “that holier-than-thou bastard Bruce Springsteen.” He describes meeting fans as he was leaving a strip club, one of whom remarked “Bruce, you're not supposed to be here.” His response—that he's a figment of Springsteen that “Bruce does not even know [is] missing”—is surreal, with the ring of truth.

Springsteen's revelations about his two selves are significant enough, considering the piety with which he is often regarded by his fans. But he continues, describing how “Brilliant Disguise” has changed for him, over time, from a song about the separation of identities to a hymn of communion. “When you sing the song with somebody you love it turns into something else, I think. It becomes a song of a reaffirmation of the world's mysteries, its shadows, our frailties and the acceptance of those frailties, without which there is no love.”

The acceptance of those frailties.

Patti Scialfa joins him on stage for the version of the song that follows. It's beautiful and haunting, and it changes in exactly the way Springsteen said it would. There are still secrets, still questions, and there always will be. That's the nature of the world.

And the world, as the poet
⁵
says, is always too much with us, late and soon. Watching Springsteen and Scialfa on that stage, the love so thick between them it's almost a physical thing, it's easy to idealize their relationship. You don't have to dig too deeply, though, to understand that their happiness is hard won, a trial by fire. It's not just strip clubs. Rumors of Springsteen's lack of fidelity— and his stays in the “barn,” an outbuilding
⁶
on their Runsom, N.J., property, often for weeks or months at a time—appear frequently in the mainstream media and are whispered among fans online. Longtime fans hold that his concerts are looser, his interactions with the crowd more liberal, when Patti is at home with the kids. He's playing for the ladies; he always has.
⁷

Public faces, private lives. Public lies, and the truths we only tell in the night, when only one person is listening.

It's true for all of us.

IT'S ABOUT a four-hour drive from the Peace Arch border crossing to Portland, Oregon, on a good day. Add in the drive time from the ferry terminal, and the wait at the border, and you're looking at five plus.

It was late afternoon, August. High summer, and the heat felt like a wall coming.

It was less than two weeks into the 2002 tour for
The Rising,
and Greg and I were doing back-to-back shows, Portland and Tacoma. Springsteen Inc. was trying something new with this tour: a general admission floor, with a fenced-off area in front of the stage for the first three hundred or so fans in line.

We were determined to be in the pit, and that meant taking an extra day off work to get there in time.

The early part of the drive passed with the usual banalities: work, writing, reports from earlier shows on the tour, expectations from the setlist, plans for our day in the lineup.

We stopped for dinner, and when we came out, it was getting dark. Back in the car, we put on
Roses and Broken Hearts,
a bootleg from the
Tunnel of Love
tour.

It was going to be that kind of night. A Circle night.

Sometimes it's hard to tell how these things begin.
⁸

Was it going out for pie at the Lakeview Diner in Harrison when I was home from university for weekends?

Or was it those afternoons on the beach, with our broken hearts and our woman-hating music?

Was it those dawn mornings, picking strawberries in neighboring rows?

Was it before even that, back in home ec, talking about jerking off and heavy metal?

Where did the Circle of Men begin?

Ultimately, I suppose it doesn't matter. What matters is that it still exists, this magic Circle.

It exists over pie or breakfast at three am in roadside diners, throats raw following a show.

It exists in dive bars in strange cities, chain smoking and drinking crappy beer before passing out in a cheap hotel room.

And it exists on the highway in the middle of the night, lights from oncoming cars flashing through the windshield, Springsteen coming out of the stereo, voices hushed and no eye contact being made.

The Circle of Men is a term Greg thought of, and it comes with its own rules. Chief among them is that nothing leaves the Circle: what is talked about there stays there.
⁹

(I'm adhering to that, by the way. Greg has read these pages, and anything you see here has been released willingly from the Circle. No confidences will have been violated, no lines crossed.)
¹⁰

I've discovered over the years that I don't really
do
casual acquaintances. I don't have so-so friends. I recognize that this is an issue—I need more guy friends I can just hang out with, shoot the shit with over a couple of beers.
¹¹

That's not the way it works for me, though. I gravitate toward intense friendships. Greg and Peter and me? Nothing is off the table. No truth too hard, no secret too deep.

When you've sat beside a friend as his heart is breaking, as he cries, listening to “Point Blank,” there's nothing casual about that. When you've split a pair of earphones so you can both listen to a bootleg of Springsteen singing “Can't Help Falling in Love,” because you are both doing just that—in a sort of teenage doomed frenzy—there's nothing casual about that.

And when you spend four hours in a car at night, hurtling down a highway at seventy miles an hour, telling secrets? There's nothing casual about that.

It started off casually enough, though: we talked about the show we were listening to, and I gave Greg the expected hard time about not coming to Tacoma with Peter and me. He replied with the usual comment about the unused ticket from the 1992 tour.