Born to Run (4 page)

My great-grandfather was called “the Dutchman” and I suppose descended from some lost
Netherlanders who wandered down from New Amsterdam not knowing what they were getting themselves into. Thus, we wear the name Springsteen, of Dutch origin, but prominently, here’s where Irish and Italian blood meet. Why? Previous to the Mexicans and African-Americans who harvested Monmouth County crops, the Italians were in the fields with the Irishmen and working the horse farms alongside them.
Recently, I asked my mother how they all ended up with the Irish. She said, “The Italian men were too bossy. We’d had enough of that. We didn’t want men bossing us all around.” Of course they didn’t. If there was bossing to be done, the Zerilli girls would be doing it, although somewhat surreptitiously. My aunt Eda told me, “Daddy wanted three boys but he got three girls instead, so he raised us tough
like men.” That, I suppose, explains some of it.

As a child, I would return from dinner at my aunt Dora’s house exhausted, my ears ringing. Anything more celebratory than dinner and you were taking your life into your hands. You would be fed ’til stuffed, sung and shouted at ’til deaf and danced with ’til dust. Now, as they all move brazenly into their nineties, it continues. Where did it come
from? What is the source of their unrelenting energy and optimism? What power has been sucked from the spheres and sent coursing through their tiny little Italian bones? Who set it all in motion?

His name was Anthony Alexander Andrew Zerilli. He came to
America around the turn of the century from Vico Equense, a stone’s throw from Naples in southern Italy, at the age of twelve; settled in San
Francisco; and found his way east, graduating from City College to become a lawyer at 303 West Forty-Second Street, New York City. He was my grandfather. He served three years in the navy, had three wives, spent three years in Sing Sing prison for embezzlement (supposedly taking the rap for another relative). He ended up on top of a green and gracious hill in Englishtown, New Jersey. He had some
money. I have pictures of my mother and her family decked out in impeccable whites in Newport, Rhode Island, in the thirties. He went broke in jail. Their mother, not well, went MIA back in Brooklyn, abandoning my mom and her sisters, then still teenagers, to live alone and make their own way at the farmhouse where they raised themselves.

As a child, this modest farmhouse was a mansion on a hill
to me, a citadel of wealth and culture. My grandfather had paintings, good ones. He collected religious art, robes and antique furniture. He had a piano in his living room. He traveled, appeared worldly and just a little dissolute. With gray hair and huge dark circles under big brown Italian eyes, he was a short man with a thunderous baritone, a voice that when cast your way brought with it the
fear of God. He often sat, an old Italian prince, on a thronelike chair in his den. His third wife, Fifi, sat knitting just across the room. Tightly dressed, made up and perfumed enough to knock you out, she would plant a huge red lipstick kiss, bringing a warmth to my cheek every time we dropped by. Then from the throne it would come, rolling the “Br” out to infinity, adding and emphasizing an
“a,” surfing long and low on the “u,” then just touching the “ce”: “BAAAARRRRUUUUUUUUUUUCE . . . Come here!” I knew what was coming next. In one hand, he held a dollar. I received this dollar every Sunday but I had to go get it. I had to deal with what he had in his other hand: the “pinch of death.” As you reached for the dollar, he would grab you with the other hand, pinching your cheek between his
thumb and the first knuckle of his forefinger. First, the incredibly tight eye-watering pinch, followed by a slow upward twisting motion,
abruptly shifting to a downward reverse circular tug. (I’m caterwauling now.) And then the release, a quick flourishing pull, away, out and back, finishing with a snapping of his fingers, accompanied by a hearty laughing, “BAAAARRRRUUUUUUUUUUCE . . . WHAT’S
THE MATTER?” Then, the dollar.

At Sunday dinner, he held court, yelling, ordering, discussing the events of the day at the top of his voice. It was a show. Some might have thought it overbearing, but to me, this little Italian man was a
giant
! Something made him seem grand, important, not a part of the passive-aggressive, wandering, lost male tribe that populated much of the rest of my life.
He was a Neapolitan force of nature! So what if he got into a little trouble? The real world was full of trouble, and if you wanted, if you hungered, you’d better be ready for it. You’d best be ready to stake your claim and not let go because “they” were not going to give it to you for free. You would have to risk . . . and to pay. His love of living, the intensity of his presence, his engagement
in the day and his dominion over his family made him a unique male figure in my life. He was exciting, scary, theatrical, self-mythologizing, bragging . . . like a rock star! Otherwise, when you left the house at the top of the hill, as soon as you hit roadside pavement, in my family, WOMEN RULED THE WORLD! They allowed the men the illusion of thinking they were in command, but the most superficial
observation would tell you they couldn’t keep up. The Irishmen needed MAMA! Anthony, on his hilltop, needed Fifi, HOT MAMA! There was a big difference.

Anthony had separated from Adelina Rosa, his first wife, from an arranged marriage, while they were in their twenties. She had been sent to the United States as a young girl from Sorrento to be an old-world bride. She lived for eighty-plus years
in the United States and never spoke a sentence of English. When you walked into her room, you walked into Old Italy. The holy beads, the fragrances, the religious items, the quilts, the dusky sunlight reflecting off another place and time. She, I’m sure, unfortunately, played the “Madonna” role to Anthony’s other inamoratas.

My grandmother suffered mightily from the divorce, never remarried
and had little to do with the world at large again. She and Anthony were never in the same room with each other for a long, long time. Not at funerals, not at weddings, not at family gatherings. Every Sunday after church when I visited my aunt Dora’s, she’d be there in her hairnet and shawls, scented exotically and cooking delicious Italian dishes. She’d greet me, smiling, with hugs and kisses, murmuring
Italian blessings. Then one day, on the hill, Fifi died.

Sixty years after their divorce, Anthony and Adelina reunited. Sixty years later! They lived together in their “mansion” for ten years, until Anthony died. After my grandfather’s death, in the summers, I would ride my bicycle from Colts Neck to Englishtown and visit. She was usually there alone, and we would sit in the kitchen, conversing
in a smattering of broken English and Italian. She claimed she only went with the old man to protect her children’s inheritance . . . maybe so. She died peacefully and wit sharp at the age of 101, having seen the invention of the automobile and the plane and men walk on the moon in her lifetime.

Anthony and Adelina’s house on the hill remained in a state of suspended animation for twenty-five
years. When I walked through it as a fifty-year-old man, it was exactly as it had been when I was eight. To the sisters . . . it was hallowed ground. Finally, my cousin Frank, the jitterbug champ, who taught me my first chords on the guitar and whose son, Frank Jr., played with me in the Sessions Band, moved in with his family and filled the house with children and Italian cooking again.

The
power of the “pinch of death” has been handed down to my aunt Dora, who has developed her own version, the “headlock of doom.” This little five-foot-two, ninety-year-old Italian lady could rip your neck into permanent whiplash or kick the ass of Randy “Macho Man” Savage should he be foolish enough to bend down for a kiss. While I no longer fear Big Daddy’s “pinch of death,” still, on many nights,
right around eight thirty, Anthony lives . . . as the house lights go dark, the backstage
curtain opens and I hear that long, drawn-out . . . “BAAAARRRRUUUUUUUCE.”

Work, faith, family: this is the Italian credo handed down by my mother and her sisters. They live it. They believe it. They believe it even though these very tenets have crushingly let them down. They preach it, though never stridently,
and are sure it is all we have between life, love and the void that devours husbands, children, family members and friends. There is a strength, fear and desperate joy in all this hard spirit and soul that naturally found its way into my work. We the Italians push until we can go no further; stand strong until our bones give way; reach and hold until our muscles fatigue; twist, shout and laugh
until we can no more, until the end. This is the religion of the Zerilli sisters, handed down by the hard lessons of Papa and the grace of God and for which we are daily thankful.

FIVE

THE IRISH

In my family we had aunts who howled during family gatherings; cousins who left school in the sixth grade, went home and never left the house again; and men who pulled hair from their bodies and heads, leaving great gaping patches of baldness, all within our little half block. During thunderstorms, my grandmother would grab me by the hand and rush me past the church to my aunt Jane’s
house. There, the gathering of women and their black magic would commence. Prayers were murmured as my aunt Jane threw holy water over all of us from a small bottle. With each flash of lightning, the quiet hysteria would ratchet up a notch, until it seemed like God himself was about to blast us off our little corner. Folktales were told of lightning fatalities. Someone made the mistake of telling
me the safest place in a lightning storm was in a car because of the grounding of the rubber tires. After that, at the first sound of thunder, I caterwauled until my parents would take
me in the car until the storm subsided. I then proceeded to write about cars for the rest of my life. As a child, all of this was simply mysterious, embarrassing and ordinary. It had to be. These were the people
I loved.

We are the afflicted. A lot of trouble came in the blood of my people who hailed from the Emerald Isle. My great-great-grandmother Ann Garrity left Ireland at fourteen in 1852 with two sisters, aged twelve and ten. This was five years after the potato famine devastated much of Ireland, and she settled in Freehold. I don’t know where it started, but a serious strain of mental illness
drifts through those of us who are here, seeming to randomly pick off a cousin, an aunt, a son, a grandma and, unfortunately, my dad.

I haven’t been completely fair to my father in my songs, treating him as an archetype of the neglecting, domineering parent. It was an
East of Eden
recasting of our relationship, a way of “universalizing” my childhood experience. Our story is much more complicated.
Not in the details of what happened, but in the “why” of it all.

My Father

To a child, the bars of Freehold were citadels of mystery, filled with mean magic, uncertainty, and the possibility of violence. Stopped at a red light on Throckmorton Street one evening, my sister and I witnessed two men on the concrete outside of the local taproom beating each other toward what seemed certain death.
Shirts were torn; men surrounded, shouting; one man held the other by his hair as he straddled his chest, delivering vicious blows to his face. Blood mixed deeply around the man’s mouth as he desperately defended himself, his back to the pavement. My mother said, “Don’t look.” The light changed and we drove on.

When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown, you entered the mystical realm
of men. On the rare night my mother would call my father home, we would slowly drive through town until we drew to a stop outside of a single lit door. She’d point and say, “Go in and get your father.”
Entering my father’s public sanctuary filled me with a thrill and fear. I’d been given license by my mom to do the unthinkable: interrupt my pop while he was in sacred space. I’d push open the door,
dodging men who towered over me on their way out. I stood waist-high to them at best, so when I entered the barroom I felt like a Jack who’d climbed some dark beanstalk, ending up in a land of familiar but frightening giants. On the left, lining the wall, lay a row of booths filled with secret assignations, barroom lovers, and husband-and-wife tag-team drinkers. On the right were stools filled
by a barricade of broad working-class backs, rolling-thunder murmuring, clinking glasses, unsettling adult laughter and very, very few women. I’d stand there, drinking in the dim smell of beer, booze, blues and aftershave; nothing in the outer world of home smelled remotely like it. Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon ruled, with the blue ribbon stamped on the bartender’s pouring spout as the golden elixir
was slid expertly into tilted glasses that were then set with a hard knock on the wooden bar. There I stood, a small spirit reminder of what a lot of these men were spending a few moments trying to forget—work, responsibility, the family, the blessings and burdens of an adult life. Looking back, it was a mix of mostly average guys who simply needed to let off a little steam at the end of the
week and a few others, moved by harder things, who didn’t know where to draw the line.

Finally, someone would notice a small interloper amongst them and bemusedly draw me over to my dad. My view from the floor was bar stool, black shoes, white socks, work trousers, haunches and powerful legs, work belt, then the face, slightly discolored and misshapen by alcohol, peering down through cigarette
smoke as I uttered the immortal words “Mom wants you to come home.” There would be no introductions to friends, no pat on the head, no soft intonation of voice or tousle of the hair, just “Go outside, I’ll be right out.” I’d follow my bread crumb trail back out the barroom door into the cool evening air, into my town, which felt somehow so welcoming and hostile. Drifting to the curb, I’d hop into
the backseat and inform my mother, “He’ll be right out.”

I was not my father’s favorite citizen. As a boy I figured it was just the way men were, distant, uncommunicative, busy within the currents of the grown-up world. As a child you don’t question your parents’ choices. You accept them. They are justified by the godlike status of parenthood. If you aren’t spoken to, you’re not worth the time.
If you’re not greeted with love and affection, you haven’t earned it. If you’re ignored, you don’t exist. Control over your own behavior is the only card you have to play in the hope of modifying theirs. Maybe you have to be tougher, stronger, more athletic, smarter, in some way better . . . who knows? One evening my father was giving me a few boxing lessons in the living room. I was flattered,
excited by his attention and eager to learn. Things were going well. And then he threw a few open-palmed punches to my face that landed just a little too hard. It stung; I wasn’t hurt, but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. We had slipped into the dark nether land beyond father and son. I sensed what was being said: I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our
home and a fearful disappointment. My heart broke and I crumpled. He walked away in disgust.