Born to Run (44 page)

An unusual buoyancy was in his voice. “Hi, Bruce!” He wanted to
go to Mexico on a fishing trip. My pop, who hadn’t had a line in the water for the past twenty-five years, dating back to the two of us moping (fishing,
not
catching) at the end of the Manasquan jetty, now wanted to Ernest Hemingway it and go marlin fishing. The only marlin
the old man had ever been close to would’ve been the one hanging over the bar at his favorite watering hole, but with the exception of our previous Mexican run to Tijuana, my dad had never asked me to go anywhere. Amused by his enthusiasm, flattered and curious, I listened to his pitch. Somewhere inside still lingered my hunger for that second (third? fourth? fifth?) chance with the old man where
all would go right. I said, “Sure.” I asked him if he needed me to make any arrangements and he proudly said he and his neighbor Tom (my pop’s only male friend of the past fifteen years) had “taken care of it all.” “This one’s on me,” he jauntily responded. What could I say?

A few weeks later, I flew to San Francisco and drove to Burlingame, California. There on a windy hill, bordering Silicon
Valley, the Oakland Bay in the distance, was my folks’ new residence and answer to their “gold rush” of ’69. It was a modest place they’d breathlessly picked out, my mother informing me of its every architectural detail as I listened on the phone back in Jersey. I spent the night. Then Tom, my dad and I hopped on Aeroméxico to Cabo San Lucas. The flight down was raucous, filled with other fishermen
and vacationers, high and excited to be going south of the border. My dad, now a huge man, struck up a friendship with some girls on the plane. (Something, considering his general immutability, he never failed to be able to do.) Once on the ground we all jammed, girls included, into a Ford Econoline van long past its warranty. We passed scenes of abject poverty, roadside shacks with rooftop TV
antennas, a blue glow emanating from within, as our driver, dodging local livestock, recklessly drove us off the road ’til we settled in screams and a cloud of dust amid the roadside brush. Upon reaching our resort, I had to admit, Pops hadn’t done bad. No TVs, no telephones, but pretty cushy. Cabo at the
time seemed caught between going upscale and a donkey-ramblin’ twilight zone. A phone at
the local post office, placed on a lonely stool, presided over by an olive-skinned beauty, was our only connection to folks stateside.

The following morning, we rose in darkness, hopped into a cab, and were deposited at dawn on a remote beach several miles from our hotel. It was there in the morning’s blue twilight that something just didn’t feel copacetic. Long minutes passed, my father silent,
Tom shuffling, until puffs of white smoke could be seen rising from behind the nearest rock outcropping. These were followed by the blub-blub-blub sound of an ancient overworked diesel. Slowly coming into view was a bright orange wooden crate of a boat that had to have Bluto (Popeye’s nemesis) himself at the wheel. Shit. My regrets on not having commandeered our arrangements were coming fast and
hard. I was loaded! We could have been going out on Ted Turner’s
Courageous
if we wanted to! But instead, we were about to risk our lives in this rust bucket.

A small tender with a straw-hatted, parchment-skinned old man on the oars rowed toward us. There was no English to be had, so upon reaching shore, incoherent greetings were mumbled by both parties and he motioned for us to get in the boat.
My father was outfitted for his encounter with Moby-Dick in his usual street attire: heavy, laced, brown brogan shoes; white socks; dress pants; a crumpled dress shirt; suspenders; and thinning, still-coal-black hair, slicked back. He looked great for a Polish picnic in Queens but was
not
prepared for the Mexican sea. Parkinson’s, body fluid buildup, diabetes, psoriasis and an array of ailments
too numerous to mention, along with a life of nightly smokes and six-pack séances, had left him severely limited physically. We shuffled him over to the boat and with waves lapping on the sand, one leg at a time, we guided him in.

With a wood-on-wood ka-thunk, we bumped up against the side of our
Titanic
. There was no boarding ladder, so the three of us, without the benefit of a common dialect,
had to lift 230 pounds of nickels in Sears slacks
onto a rocking tugboat. Jesus Christ. The fulcrum reached its apex, weight shifted and with a resounding thud, the source of my presence on Earth rolled into the death trap he’d rented us. It was six thirty a.m. and I was already soaked in sweat. Our expressionless captain turned his “lady” around and headed silently out to sea. Not far beyond
the cove, away from the sheltered waters of the coast, there were some serious seas stirring. We were a bobbing rubber duck in a five-year-old’s bathtub. When we were down in the trough of a wave, the following wave crested at wheelhouse height. Within fifteen minutes, Tom was blowing his all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast over the port side. My dad was in lockdown mode, gripping the armrests of the
fishing chair with his usual couldn’t-give-a-shit calm.

I tried to communicate with our skipper using some of my high school Spanish, but “
¿Cómo se llama?
” got no response. I found if I kept my eyes on the horizon and rode it out, I might spare myself a retching over the stern. Our engine, in a wood box set square above deck in the boat’s center, was belching diesel fumes and adding to the vicious
mix of elements that attacked our normally landlocked digestive systems. An hour passed, the sun burned, land receded and there was nothing but an endless chromatic panorama where sea and sky melded that was making me terrifically claustrophobic. Death at sea felt imminent. After a second hour had passed I commanded Tom to go on top and find out EXACTLY how much farther we had to go. Our skipper
raised one finger, then turned back to his wheel. Good, one more mile . . . no . . . no . . . turns out, ONE MORE HOUR! About a half hour back, we’d come upon a Boston Whaler with two locals inside, miles out at sea. They were obviously sinking, for the boat was low in the sea, filled with water up to their shins. I motioned to the captain for us to go to their rescue. Then, as we moved closer,
I saw . . . fish, many fish, swimming in circles inside the boat around their legs. They reached bare-handed, caught one and, smiling, lifted it up for our approval . . . bait . . . they were selling bait.

Finally, on the horizon a small circle of boats appeared . . . fishing
grounds. In ten minutes the lines were readied and there was a quick tug; I passed the pole into my dad’s hands and he
did his best to reel in . . . something. It was about half the size of my arm and went straight into the ice chest. Then, hours of nothing. There would be no epic, man-versus-nature, Darwinian battle. No Doug Springsteen versus my father’s favorite foe—
everything
—showdown. We sat, an infinitesimal cork bobbing on the bouncing sea, then, late afternoon, we headed back,
three more hours
of back.
I laid myself out on a wooden bench in the stern, gobbled the paper-bag lunch the hotel had provided, sucked diesel fumes and slept. I’d had enough. After the ritual we started the morning with was reversed (my dad lowered, like a sack of United Nations grain, into the tender), we were deposited, grateful survivors, back on the beach. We donated our catch to our crew and watched them smoke and blub
their way into the sunset (no doubt, bored with another pack of clueless gringos and headed for a drink and a laugh at our expense at the local cantina). The beach was empty and silent but for the small surf lapping upon the sand. My dad, in an alternate universe for the past several hours, suddenly looked over at me, as the sun dropped into the sea, and said—seriously—“I’ve got the boat for tomorrow
too!”

We did not use the boat tomorrow, or ever again. Instead I took the old man to a little beach bar, looking out over white sand and blue Pacific. I bought a round of beers and we spent a civil afternoon watching the girls on the beach and having some good belly laughs about our adventure. On our way through the marina, back to our car, we were offered several day trips by fishing rock ’n’
roll fans on glistening white, state-of-the-art yachts (the perks of rock stardom followed us even this far south). We were headed back in the morning so we politely declined—“Next time”—and went back to our hotel, slept and flew home the next day.

On our flight back, looking over at my bemused pops, I reminded myself my father was not “normal” or very well. I’d been around him for so long in
his condition, I’d gotten used to it and I could forget. I’d grown up on the Shore, knew plenty of real open-sea fishermen; I could’ve arranged
for him to have a shot at catching that marlin, had it stuffed and nailed up over his beloved kitchen table with a Marlboro in its mouth, if he’d liked, but maybe that was never the real point. Maybe he just wanted to give
me
something, something for the
gifts I’d given him and my mom once success hit, something that came wrapped in his seafaring fantasy. He did.

FIFTY-ONE

TUNNEL OF LOVE

After
Born in the USA
, I’d had enough of the big time for a while and looked forward to something less. Assisted by my engineer Toby Scott, I’d slowly invested in home recording equipment. Four tracks grew to eight to sixteen to twenty-four, and I soon had a decent demo studio set up in the garage apartment of my Rumson home. I’d recently begun writing some new material
that, for the first time, wasn’t centered around the man on the “road” but the questions and concerns of the man in the “house.”
Tunnel of Love
captured the ambivalence, love and fear brought on by my new life. Recorded in approximately a three-week period, cut with just myself on acoustic guitar to a rhythm track, like
Nebraska
, it was another “homemade” record where I played most of the instruments
myself. After
USA
I wasn’t ready for producers, a big band or
any
band. The music was too personal, so in the studio, it would just be Toby and me.

My first full record about men and women in love would be a pretty rough affair. Filled with inner turmoil, I wrote to make sense of my feelings. The beginnings of this new music went back to “Stolen Car” from
The River
. That song’s character, drifting
through the night, is the first to face the angels and devils that will drive him toward his love and keep him from ever reaching her. This was the voice that embodied my own conflicts. I was no longer a kid and now neither were the people who populated my new songs. If they didn’t find a way to ground themselves, the things they needed—life, love and a home—could and would pass them by, rushing
out the windows of all those cars I’d placed them in. The highway had revealed its secrets and as compelling as they were, I found its freedom and open spaces could become as overpoweringly claustrophobic as my most clichéd ideas of domesticity. All those roads, after all those years, when they converged, met down the end of the same dead-end street. I knew, I’d seen it (it’s in Texas!).

I had a left-field hit with “Brilliant Disguise,” the song that sits thematically at the record’s center. Trust is a fragile thing. It requires allowing others to see as much of ourselves as we have the courage to reveal. But “Brilliant Disguise” postulates that when you drop one mask, you find another behind it until you begin to doubt your own feelings about who you are. The twin issues of love
and identity form the core of
Tunnel of Love
, but
time
is
Tunnel
’s unofficial subtext. In this life (and there is only one), you make your choices, you take your stand and you awaken from the youthful spell of “immortality” and its eternal present. You walk away from the nether land of adolescence. You name the things beyond your work that will give your life its context, meaning . . . and the
clock starts. You walk, now, not just at your partner’s side, but alongside your own
mortal
self. You fight to hold on to your newfound blessings while confronting your nihilism, your destructive desire to leave it all in ruins. This struggle to uncover who I was and to reach an uneasy peace with time and death itself is at the heart of
Tunnel of Love
.

Bob Clearmountain cleaned up my playing
so I sounded like I knew what I was doing; I brought Nils, Roy and Patti in to sweeten a track or two;
then Bob did the mixes, adding the sharp spiritual space the music resides in.
Tunnel of Love
was released on October 9, 1987, and went to number one on the
Billboard
album chart. I hadn’t planned to do any touring but sitting at home while a record containing what I felt was some of my best
and freshest writing went untended didn’t seem right. I was asking my audience to follow me from highway’s end, out of the car, into the house and through marriage, commitment and the mysteries of the heart (is that rock ’n’ roll?). A lot of them by now were living these issues every day. Would they want to hear and be entertained by them too? I was rolling the dice that they would, and I wanted to
give my music a chance to find its audience. For me, that always meant playing, and so, a tour was soon planned.

Tunnel
was a solo album, so I wanted to distance the tour from being compared to our
USA
run. I shifted our stage layout, moving band members out of their long-held positions as a subtle way to signal to the audience that they should expect something different. I added a horn section,
brought Patti to the front of the stage and left of center, and designed a carnivalesque proscenium to frame the action and play off my main metaphor of love as a scary amusement park thrill ride. In keeping with Annie Leibovitz’s cover photo, we “dressed up.” The blue jeans and bandana were gone—I wore a suit for the first time in quite a while—and the band left their casual wear at home. My
good friend and assistant Terry Magovern donned a bowler hat and tux to perform the role of “ticket taker” and emcee. It was a nice show, with Patti providing a sexy female foil I could play off of, comically and seriously, to underscore the album’s themes. We covered Gino Washington’s “Gino Is a Coward” and the Sonics’ “Have Love Will Travel,” and performed my own unreleased song “Part Man, Part
Monkey” to flesh out the tour’s plotline. After
Born in the USA
, it was an intentional left turn and the band was probably somewhat disoriented by it, along with my growing relationship with Patti.