Born to Run (45 page)

Patti was a musician, was close to my age, had seen me on the road in all of my many guises and viewed me with a knowing eye. She knew I was
no white knight (perhaps a dark gray knight at best), and
I never felt the need to pretend around her. Julie had never asked me to either; I just did. When Julie was filming on location, I’d be at home in New Jersey, slowly slipping back to my old ways, the bars, the late nights—nothing serious, just my usual drifting—but it wasn’t the married life. It was during one of these periods Patti and I got together under my ostensible excuse of working on our
“duets.” It was a September night, the moon a slim fingernail in the western sky over the silhouetted wood that bordered the backyard. We hung out, sat in my little bar, talked and pretty soon, I could feel something was on. After seventeen years of sporadically bumping into each other, then two of working side by side, somewhat flirtatiously, there came a moment when I looked at Patti and saw something
different, something new, something I’d missed and hadn’t experienced before. I was always busy, as Patti would later say, “looking in other fields.” Patti is a wise, tough, powerful woman, but she is also the soul of fragility, and there was something in that combination that opened up new possibilities in my heart. In my life, Patti is a singularity. So, it started.

At first, I told myself
it was just “a thing.” It wasn’t. It was
the
thing. The surreptitiousness didn’t last long and I came clean to Julie as soon as I knew how serious Patti and I were, but there was no decent or graceful way out of it. I was going to hurt someone I loved . . . period. Soon I’d be separated and photographed in my tighty-whities with Patti on a balcony in Rome. I dealt with Julie’s and my separation
abysmally, insisting it remain a private affair, so we released no press statement, causing furor, pain and “scandal” when the news leaked out. It made a tough thing more heartbreaking than necessary. I deeply cared for Julianne and her family and my poor handling of this is something I regret to this day.

Julianne was young, just getting her career started, while at thirty-five, I could seem
accomplished, reasonably mature and in control, but, inside, I was still emotionally stunted and secretly unavailable. She’s a woman of great discretion and decency and always dealt with me and our problems
honestly and in good faith, but in the end, we didn’t really know. I placed her in a terribly difficult position for a young girl and I failed her as a husband and partner. We handled the details
as civilly and as graciously as possible, divorced and went on about our lives.

After our divorce was final, I took a few days and visited my parents, gave them the news and listened to my mom hector me with “Bruce, three years, your limit! . . . Whaaaaa!” They loved Julianne, but I was their son. I stayed awhile, having my wounds treated with home cooking and sympathy, then headed back to New
Jersey. My dad drove me to the airport. Ten minutes out he turned to me and said, “Bruce, maybe you should move back home for a while.” I was tempted to mention that I was a nearly forty-year-old self-made multimillionaire and the prospect of moving back into an eight-by-twelve-foot room in my parents’ house, still holding my stuffed Mickey Mouse, was . . . not impossible, but not likely. Nevertheless,
when I looked over at my pop, his suspendered girth squished between the wheel and the driver’s seat, all I could say was, “Thanks, Dad, I’ll think about it.” The old man finally wanted me around the house.

’88

Seven years after Steve and I first walked through Checkpoint Charlie, I brought my band back to East Berlin. Steve wasn’t there, but 160,000-plus East Germans showed up. The wall still
stood, but the first cracks were definitely appearing in its once impregnable façade. Conditions were
not
what they had been a decade ago. There in an open field stood the largest single crowd I’d ever seen or played to, and from center stage, I couldn’t see its end. Home-stitched American flags flew in the East German wind. The tickets claimed we were being presented by the Young Communist League
and were playing a “concert for the Sandinistas”?! It was news to me! The entire show was broadcast on state television (another surprise!) with the exception of my short speech about the wall, which somehow was conveniently
deleted. I went from being a complete nobody sashaying unmolested down the streets of East Berlin, on the day
before
our show, to a national superstar in twenty-four hours.
When I poked my head out of our hotel the day after our gig, I was surrounded by hipsters, grannies and everything in between vying for an autograph. “
Ich bin ein Berliner!
”

We partied at the East German consulate and then headed back to West Berlin and a show for seventeen thousand that, despite our good West German fans, felt a lot less dramatic than what we’d just experienced. (Rock ’n’ roll
is a music of stakes. The higher they’re pushed, the deeper and more thrilling the moment becomes. In East Germany in 1988, the center of the table was loaded down with a winner-take-all bounty that would explode into the liberating destruction of the Berlin Wall by the people of Germany.)

Around the World in Forty-Two Days

Heading back home, we had the option to continue our
Tunnel of Love
tour
or go to work for Amnesty International, the highly regarded human rights organization. Amnesty was making a concerted push to enlist and engage young people around the globe in the fight for civil liberties and figured what better way to prick up the ears of the youngsters than rock ’n’ roll. Guided by Peter Gabriel, we were enlisted by Amnesty’s then executive director, Jack Healey, and our
Tunnel of Love
tour morphed directly into Amnesty International’s “Human Rights Now!” tour. We shortly found ourselves on a 747 with Peter; Youssou N’Dour, the sensational Senegalese singer; Tracy Chapman; and Sting, international rock stars all, hopping around the world, dropping for a moment from the clouds to tell you how to run your show. I’d always felt rock music was a music of both personal
and political liberation and I thought the tour would give us an opportunity to practice some of what we preached. It did, but in the process, I got mugged by SCHOOLWORK! Nobody told me I was going to have to STUDY! We had to do a
full press conference in
every
country and we needed to know in detail the human rights issues in each. Trying not to look like the dilettante I was, I studied like
I hadn’t since Sister Theresa Mary stood over me, ruler in hand, at St. Rose grammar school.

The audiences were spectacular. The concerts lasted for eight hours and featured local opening acts. In Zimbabwe, the great Oliver Mtukudzi tore the house down with African soul. A little over a year from now, Nelson Mandela would be released from prison and the slow dismantling of the apartheid system
would begin to occur, but at this moment in 1988, the battle was raging. The simple mix of a white and black crowd of this size, something that was forbidden and illegal a mere three hundred miles south, brought an urgency to our appearance.

In the former French colony of Côte d’Ivoire, I was greeted, for the first and only time since the 1966 Tri-Soul Revue at the Matawan-Keyport Roller Drome,
by an audience, a
stadium
audience, of completely black faces! I finally knew how Clarence felt. We were
one
black man and seven white folk from New Jersey. Was this gonna work? Was the wooden-legged, four-four beat of Jersey Shore punk ’n’ soul going to communicate to an audience used to the swaying and supple rhythms of Afrobeat? Headlining, we were last to go on. A cool sweat slowly formed
on the uppermost layer of my skin beneath my black vest and shirt. We went for the nuclear option, kicking straight into “Born in the USA.” Time . . . crept to a standstill . . . then . . . BOOM! The place exploded into a frenzy, the crowd moving en masse as if they’d been wired together and had suddenly decided this was okay! It was the most joyful mutual celebration of discovery I’ve ever experienced.
We were the wrong color, singing in the wrong language, to the wrong beat, and still, the crowd shed upon us their generosity, openness and national hospitality. It was the first audience the E Street Band had had to truly
win
, cold, in a long, long time. Women leapt onstage and danced, the crowd rocked in ecstasy and the band walked off feeling exhilarated and validated. (It works! All the way
over here! It works!) We felt the closeness of old hands being
challenged and, in league with this unexpected and willing audience, becoming victorious. The mysteries of music’s communicative power to cross great divides proved themselves once more and we knew we’d just experienced something special.

Somewhere along the way we played a few dates in the United States, where our usually politicized
press conferences were peppered by celebrity questions and a vacuousness that sometimes made me embarrassed for the locals. We also stopped in Japan, Budapest, Hungary, Canada, Brazil and India and finished up in Argentina, a country of stunning landscapes and a gorgeous, sensual citizenry that made me want to learn Spanish immediately! In South America were countries that had recently experienced
the full brunt of dictatorship and the daily trampling of simple human freedoms. Thousands of sons and husbands were disappeared off the streets during the reign of brutal regimes in Argentina and Pinochet’s Chile. Here, Amnesty’s job was immediate, critical and personal. There was something hard to push up against and to feel pushing back. With Pinochet still in power, we played on the border
of Chile in Mendoza, Argentina. There the “mothers of the disappeared,” whose loved ones had vanished from their homes and the streets in the years of Pinochet’s dictatorial rule, stood holding placard photos of lost loved ones along the roadside as we drove toward the venue. Their faces were filled with the remnants of terrible things we simply had no clue about or ability to understand back in
the USA
and
proof of the ongoing human will, desire and primal need for justice.

The Amnesty International tour made me thankful to have been born in the USA, in my little, repressed, redneck, reactionary, one-fire-hydrant crap heap of a hometown that I loved, where despite the social pressure of the ignorant and intolerant, you could walk and speak freely without fear for life and limb (mostly).

Six weeks after we’d started we’d had our say, boosted Amnesty and its international agenda, played our rock ’n’ roll and stood, for a moment, thumbs out, political-cultural hitchhikers at the crossroads of history.

Home Again

Patti and I said our good-byes to Peter, Sting, Youssou, Tracy and Amnesty’s mighty road crew (whose human rights were consistently violated with long working hours and
untenable conditions during the tour), and we returned to New York City. We’d rented an apartment on the East Side and I gave my one and only try at becoming a city boy. It was a no-go. The East Side wasn’t for me, its only redeeming feature being I was just a walk away from Doc Myers’s office, which helped because I was not at my best. I came home torn by the confusion of my divorce, and with no
recourse to roads ’n’ wheels, the city days were long indeed. In New York City, I was “the magic rat” in his maze. I couldn’t get sky, couldn’t see sun and couldn’t run. Yeah, the museums, the restaurants, the shops, but I was still SMALL-TOWN! I couldn’t change, so Patti (a nineteen-year New York City resident, in Chelsea) capitulated and we packed up our bags and headed back to Jersey, where she,
I and my ice-cold feet spent a lost summer, with me up to some of my old ways and thoughtless behavior. Patti was patient . . . to a point.

Adjustment

Back at home, Patti and I fought a lot, which was a good thing. I’d never argued much in most of my other relationships and it had proved detrimental. Too many issues simmering, unresolved, beneath the surface always proved poisonous. Like my father,
I was a passively hostile actor. Denial and intimidation, not direct confrontation, was my style. My dad had controlled our home by quietly sitting there . . . smoking. He was all passive anger until he’d break and rage, then return to his beer and monklike silence. He was our own one-man minefield, filling our home with the deadly quiet of a war zone as we walked on point, waiting . . . waiting
 . . . for the detonation we knew was coming. We just never knew when.

All of this had seeped into my bones and ruined so much. I didn’t
“lose it” often, but I could, silently and just enough to put the fear of God into my loved ones. I’d learned it at the feet of the master. Worse, I’d picked up his bad habits behind the wheel and I could be very dangerous. I would use speed and recklessness
to communicate my own rage and anger, with the sole purpose of terrorizing my rider. It was gross, bullying, violent and humiliating behavior that filled me with shame afterward. I was always full of a thousand apologies, but of course, it was too little, too late, and I suppose I’d learned that too. These incidents occurred only with people I cared about, loved. That was the point. I wanted to kill
what loved me because I couldn’t stand being loved. It infuriated and outraged me, someone having the temerity to love me—
nobody does that . . .
and I’ll show you why. It was ugly and a red flag for the poison I had running through my veins, my genes. Part of me was rebelliously proud of my emotionally violent behavior, always cowardly and aimed at the women in my life. There was assertion, there
was action, there was
no impotence
. The passivity of the men I grew up surrounded by frightened and enraged me. My own passivity embarrassed me, so I went in search of my “truth.” This . . . this is how I feel about myself, about you, how I feel, how you make me feel in my darkest of dark hearts, where I truly reside.

Over the years I had to come to the realization that there was a part of me,
a significant part, that was capable of great carelessness and emotional cruelty, that sought to reap damage and harvest shame, that wanted to wound and hurt and
make sure
those who loved me paid for it. It was all straight out of the old man’s playbook. My father led us to believe he despised us for loving him, would punish us for it . . . and he did. It seemed like he could be driven crazy by
it . . . and so could I. When I tasted this part of myself, it made me scared and sick, but still I held it in reserve, like a malignant power source I could draw on when psychically threatened, when someone tried to go someplace I simply couldn’t tolerate . . . closer.