Born to Run (42 page)

On the evening of our show in Pittsburgh, I declined the compliment paid me earlier in the day by President Reagan. His attention elicited from me two responses. The first was . . . “Fucker!” The second
was, “The president said my name!” Or maybe it was the other way around. The important thing that happened that night was I met Ron Weisen, ex-steelworker and radical union organizer, who’d just opened a food bank for steelworkers laid off by the closing of the mills in the Monongahela Valley. I didn’t grow up in a political household. Beyond asking my mother our party affiliation (“We’re Democrats,
they’re for the working people”) I don’t remember a political discussion ever being held. I did grow up a child of the sixties, so social conscience and political interest were bred into my cultural DNA. But it was really the identity questions that became prominent after my success that spurred me to be a voice on the forces that’d impacted my parents’, my sisters’ and my neighbors’ lives.
If you’re thirsty, you go where the water is, and by now I knew some of the answers and questions I’d been looking for lay in the political arena.

Dylan had deftly melded the political and personal in a way that added resonance and power to both. I agreed the political
is
personal and vice versa. My music had been developing in that direction for quite a while, and the confluence of the Reagan
presidency with my history, musical direction and meeting people whose boots were on the ground stimulated my interest in integrating all these elements into a cohesive whole. That night in Pittsburgh, I met and talked with Ron, and he filled me in on the tough times
people were suffering in the valley. As with the Vietnam vets, we were able to provide some publicity and financial support. Before
he left, he mentioned a counterpart in central LA. Once in Los Angeles, I reached George Cole and met poet Luis Rodriguez, both ex-steelworkers in south-central Los Angeles, a little-known major steelmaking corner in Southern California. George and his organization had a food bank and a traveling political theater company. With the help of my assistant manager, Barbara Carr, we slowly began to
network with organizations in other towns.

The national food bank system was just getting under way and over the coming years and tours, they’d allow us to bring to our audience local sources and workable solutions for battling poverty and hunger and harnessing political action in the places we passed through. These were modest and simple efforts but we were in prime position to accomplish them.

I never had the frontline courage of many of my more committed musical brethren. If anything, over the years, too much has been made of whatever service we’ve provided. But I did look to develop a consistent approach. Something I could follow year in and year out, and find a way to assist the folks who’d been hit hardest by systematic neglect and injustice. These were the families who’d built
America and yet whose dreams and children were, generation after generation, considered expendable. Our travels and position would allow us to support, at the grassroots level, activists who dealt, day to day, with the citizens who’d been shuffled to the margins of American life.

White Man’s Paradise (Little Steven vs. Mickey Mouse)

Our first stop in Los Angeles for the
USA
tour was marked by
the visitation of Little Steven Van Zandt and the two of us with our “entourage” being unceremoniously thrown out of Disneyland for refusing to remove our bandanas. It went like this: Steve is the biggest kid I know. For days we’d planned on a trip together to the Magic Kingdom. As we neared it, Steve’s
excitement rose to light hysteria (not too great a leap from his daily demeanor). Space Mountain!
The Haunted House! The Pirates of the Caribbean! We were going to do it all. I was accompanied by “first fan” Obie Dziedzic, who’d followed us since we were sixteen back on the Shore. Today, her reward would be bestowed upon her. A trip with Steve, Maureen (Steve’s wife) and myself, to, as the sign says, “THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH.”

We buy our tickets. Steve, giggling excitedly, can’t wait
and enters through the turnstiles first. He proceeds approximately thirty feet inside, where he is stopped, asked to step aside and told that in order to remain in the park, he will need to remove his bandana. This, say the powers that be, is so he will not be misidentified as a gang member, Blood or Crip, and fall victim to a drive-by while hurling his cookies on Space Mountain. Steve’s bandana is
neither red nor blue but an indeterminate hue, chosen carefully and precisely to complement the rest of his “look” by the man who invented the male babushka. So the removal of such . . . I wish to enlighten Mickey’s storm troopers . . . is . . . NOT FUCKIN’ GONNA HAPPEN! In solidarity, I, sporting my
Born in the USA
do-rag, also refuse to remove my head scarf. The main honcho of the several security
guards now gathering around us then tells us that he will “overlook” the way the rest of our crowd looks (Steve’s wife! and number one fan Obie!) but
we
simply cannot be allowed to stay wearing our current headgear.

“WE’RE OUTTA HERE! SCREW YOU, FASCIST MOUSE! WE’RE GOING TO KNOTT’S BERRY FARM!” And we do.

On the way over, I ask Steve how he feels having just been thrown out of “THE HAPPIEST
PLACE ON EARTH” and I draw his notice to the fact that we, obviously, do not deserve that degree of happiness! Steve is now a shouting one-man thesaurus of every conceivable four-letter word and guttural obscenity, all directed at Mickey’s right-wing sartorial hit squad and the cabal that’s keeping an eye on Mr. Disney’s white man’s paradise. Upon reaching Knott’s Berry Farm,
before
we buy our
tickets, we are enlightened
by our ticket taker that our bandana-laden skulls are not going to get in here either! FUCK YOU! and all of sunny Southern California.

Silently, morosely, we drive back to Los Angeles and for two solid hours, Steve pours it on. The Constitution! The Bill of Rights! Fucking dress codes! Nazis! “I’m going with this on NATIONAL TELEVISION!” . . . blah, blah, blah. We
decide to catch a late dinner at Mirabelle, a lovely restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. As we stand at the bar, the owner, a friend, dressed in a suit, comes up for some convivial chatting. Steve, still going, says, “You don’t have a dress code in here, do you?” He looks at us and answers, “Of course I do. Do you think I’d let you guys in here if I didn’t know you?”

Little Girl, I Want to Marry You

A while earlier: I was thirty-four, far enough out of Catholic school to have shimmied off some of the carnal shame and guilt that came with my Italian/Irish Catholic upbringing. I figured now was the time to take advantage of the sexual perks of superstardom. Generally a serial monogamist, I never looked too hard for company on the road. First, I wasn’t out there to party. I was there to
work
, and too much fun would get in the way of the hair shirt I insisted on wearing. Secular penance was my joy and raison d’être. Still, all work and no play, etc., etc., etc. Wilt Chamberlain would not have to start looking over his shoulder any time soon but at the beginning of the
USA
tour I decided to . . .
see
. So . . . I
saw
. I generally adhered to a “don’t fuck with the civilians” code
when I did, but I had no time for the “professional groupies” either. I did not want to be a notch on someone’s belt. That diminished the field quite a bit. Still, where there’s a will . . . I make no claims on sainthood, a thrill’s a thrill, and I’ve occasionally taken mine where I found them, but . . . I didn’t last long, it just wasn’t worth it! So, with the occasional exceptional evening and
company
excluded, after each show I returned to my late-night bacchanal of fried chicken, french fries, TV, a book
(choosing not Frank’s but Dino’s way), then bed. Let the good times . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . .

After my short shot at being Casanova, my psychological/biological clock must have been ticking. I wanted something serious. I wanted to get married. By now, I knew my model came with a
sexual catch-22, not quite right for the confines of monogamy but no libertine either. I operated best within a semi-monogamous (is there such a thing?) system, generally holding firm and steady, but occasionally deploying the United States military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. That’s a hard sell.

In Los Angeles I met Julianne Phillips, an actress out of the Pacific Northwest. She was twenty-four,
tall, blond, educated, talented, a beautiful and charming young woman. We hit it off and began seeing each other regularly. Six months into our dating, I proposed on my cottage balcony in Laurel Canyon. We were married in Lake Oswego, Oregon, where a scene straight out of a Preston Sturges film unfolded. Our pending betrothal had leaked and the little town exploded. At Julianne’s house,
the ten-year-old kid next door climbed on his garage roof with a cardboard box camera and junior-paparazzi’d our wedding party munching hot dogs in the backyard. He sold it to the newspapers for skateboard money and overnight became a local celebrity. Once we took out our marriage license, the press feeding frenzy was on. The local priest got a special dispensation from his bishop to let us marry
without the required time to kick the tires. He asked us twenty questions, and we were signed, sealed and delivered to the Catholic church (Al Pacino,
The Godfather Part III
: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”).

We got married at midnight, hoodwinking the sea of press. The next day, whirlybirds, jammed with tabloid photographers, filled the sky over our reception brunch. My
dad sat smoking at a picnic table, looking as if he’d been lifted by a crane out of his California kitchen and set down unruffled in a field in Lake Oswego. I kept constant company with Mr. Jack Daniel’s and my old man was my only relief, for short of a planet-demolishing apocalypse nothing could ever change his kitchen-table demeanor. As the
choppers buzzed overhead, I walked over and took a
seat across from him at the brown plank table. He sat, his suit straining his girth, like it’d been sewn on over a rhinoceros; took a long drag on his Camel cigarette; and deadpanned, “Bruce . . . look what you’ve done now.”

Julie and I honeymooned in Hawaii and set up house in my Los Angeles cottage. Things were good; she pursued her career, I pursued my music and we pursued our life together.
The only thing eating at me was I knew I’d never made it past a two-or-three-year period in any of my other relationships. Usually, that was when the image of myself, physically and emotionally, would be punctured, and my flaws revealed. I was broken and so sadly punctual, my mom would rag me about it (“Bruce, it’s been two years!”). So now, in the dead of night, my contented sleep would occasionally
be disturbed by the dreaded ticking, emanating as from the belly of Hook’s alligator, of my “clock.”

I suppose I should’ve advertised myself as damaged goods but I decided I couldn’t let that knowledge or my fears dictate my actions or negate my feelings. I had to go on faith that I could love someone,
this
one, and find the resources to make it work. Following our wedding I was struck by a series
of severe anxiety attacks I fought my way through with my doctor’s help. I tried to hide them as best I could and that was a mistake. I also had (shades of my pop) paranoid delusions that scared me.

One evening, while I sat across from my beautiful wife in an upscale Los Angeles eatery, a conversation formed silently inside my head. There, as we politely chatted by candlelight, hand in hand,
a part of me tried to convince myself that she was simply using me to further her career or to get . . . something. Nothing could’ve been farther from the truth. Julianne loved me and didn’t have an exploitive or malicious bone in her body. Inside, I knew that, but I was out where the buses don’t run and couldn’t center myself around the truth.

I was sliding back toward the chasm where rage,
fear, distrust, insecurity and a family-patented misogyny made war with my better angels. Once
again, it was the fear of
having
something, allowing someone into my life, someone loving, that was setting off a myriad of bells and whistles and a fierce reaction. Who’d care for me, love me? The real me. The me I knew who resided inside my easygoing façade. I became hypersexual, then nonsexual, suffered
multiple anxiety attacks and swung from one side of the graph of funky human behavior to the other, all the while trying to keep a lid on it. I was scared, but I did
not
want to scare the wits out of my young bride. It was the wrong way to handle it and created a psychological distance at just the moment I was trying to let someone into my life.

Julie was already sleeping one evening as I came
to bed. There, in the darkness, the bedside lamp caught a glint of my wedding ring. I’d never taken it off; something inside of me told me I never would, never should. I sat on the edge of the bed, gave it a light tug and watched as it slid off my finger. An ocean of despair swept over me and I felt faint. My pulse leapt and I could feel my heart threatening to push through my chest. I got up, made
my way to the bathroom, ran cold water over my face and neck, then, gathering myself, beneath the bathroom’s fluorescent light, I slipped my ring back on. I walked back into the shadows of our bedroom, a room containing all my mysteries and fears, where my lovely wife lay in bed, her body just an outline, a dark, gentle ridge of tousled covers. I placed my hand upon her shoulders, moved my palm
over her cheek, breathed in, felt the air return to my lungs, pulled back the sheets, climbed in and went to sleep.

Europe

June 1, 1985, Slane Castle, Dublin, Ireland, our first stadium show,
ever
. Precariously perched in a field fifty miles outside of Dublin were ninety-five thousand people. The largest crowd I’d ever seen. They completely filled a grassy bowl bounded by the Boyne River at our
stage’s rear and Slane Castle, perched in front on a high green knoll, in the distance. The crowd
closest to the stage, an immediate couple of thousand, were deeply into their Guinness and dangerously swaying from left to right. They were opening up gaping holes amongst themselves as audience members by the dozens fell to the muddy ground, vanishing for unbearable seconds ’til righted once again
by their neighbors. Then, once standing, they’d slosh back the other way and the whole interminable, nerve-grinding exercise would be repeated again, ad infinitum. It was a sight way too hairy for my tender eyes. I thought somebody was going to get killed and it’d be my fault.