Born to Run (5 page)

When my dad looked at me, he didn’t see what he needed to see. This was my crime. My best friend in the neighborhood was Bobby Duncan. He’d ride with his pop every Saturday night to Wall Stadium for the stock car races. At five o’clock sharp a halt would be called to whatever endeavor we were involved
in and at six, right after dinner, he’d come bounding down the front steps of his home two doors down, shirt pressed, hair Brylcreemed, followed by his pop. Into the Ford and off they’d go to Wall Stadium . . . that tire-screeching, high-octane heaven where families bonded over local madmen in garage-built American steel either roaring round and round in insane circles or at field’s center smashing
the hell out of one another in the weekly demolition derby. For the demo, all you needed was a football helmet, a seat belt and something you were willing to wreck to take your place amongst the chosen . . . Wall Stadium, that smoky, rubber-burning circle of love where families came together in common purpose and things
were as God intended them. I stood exiled from my father’s love AND hot rod
heaven!

Unfortunately, my dad’s desire to engage with me almost always came after the nightly religious ritual of the “sacred six-pack.” One beer after another in the pitch dark of our kitchen. It was always then that he wanted to see me and it was always the same. A few moments of feigned parental concern for my well-being followed by the real deal: the hostility and raw anger toward his son,
the only other man in the house. It was a shame. He loved me but he couldn’t stand me. He felt we competed for my mother’s affections. We did. He also saw in me too much of
his
real self. My pop was built like a bull, always in work clothes; he was strong and physically formidable. Toward the end of his life, he fought back from death many times. Inside, however, beyond his rage, he harbored a
gentleness, timidity, shyness and a dreamy insecurity. These were all the things I wore on the outside and the reflection of these qualities in his boy repelled him. It made him angry. It was “soft.” And he hated “soft.” Of course, he’d been brought up “soft.” A mama’s boy, just like me.

One evening at the kitchen table, late in life, when he was not well, he told me a story of being pulled out
of a fight he was having in the school yard. My grandmother had walked over from our house and dragged him home. He recounted his humiliation and said, eyes welling . . . “I was winning . . . I was winning.” He still didn’t understand he could not be risked. He was the one remaining, living child. My grandmother, confused, could not realize her untempered love was destroying the men she was raising.
I told him I understood, that we had been raised by the same woman in some of the most formative years of our lives and suffered many of the same humiliations. However, back in the days when our relationship was at its most tempestuous, these things remained mysteries and created a legacy of pain and misunderstanding.

In 1962, my youngest sister, Pam, was born. I was twelve. My mom was thirty-six.
That was pretty late to be pregnant in those days. It was
wonderful. My mother was a miracle. I loved the maternity clothes. My sister Virginia and I would sit in the living room in the final months of her pregnancy, our hands resting upon her stomach, waiting for our new little sister to kick. The whole house was caught up in the excitement of Pam’s birth and our family came together. With my
mom in the hospital, my dad stepped up and took care of us, burning breakfast, helping us get dressed for school (sending me there in my mother’s blouse, to Virginia’s roaring laughter). The house lit up. Children bring with them grace, patience, transcendence, second chances, rebirth and a reawakening of the love that’s in your heart and present in your home. They are God giving you another shot.
My teenage years with my father were still not great but there was always the light of my little sister Pam, living proof of the love in our family. I was enchanted with her. I was thankful for her. I changed her diapers, rocked her to sleep, ran to her side if she cried, held her in my arms and forged a bond that exists to this day.

My grandmother, now very ill, slept in the room adjoining mine.
One night at the age of three, Pam left my parents’ room and for the only time in her young life climbed into my grandmother’s bed. She slept there all night, lying beside my grandmother as she died. In the morning, my mother checked on my grandma and she was still. When I came home from school that day, my world collapsed. Tears, grief, weren’t enough. I wanted death. I needed to join her. Even
as a teenager, I could not imagine a world without her. It was a black hole, an Armageddon; nothing meant anything, life was drained. My existence went blank. The world was a fraud, a shadow of itself. The only thing that saved me was my little sis and my new interest in music.

Now things got strange. My father’s generally quiet desperation led to paranoid delusion. I had a teenage Russian friend
he thought was a “spy.” We lived a block away from the Puerto Rican neighborhood. My father was sure my mother was having an affair. As I came in after school one day, he broke down in tears at the kitchen table. He told me he needed someone to talk to. He had no one. At forty-five he was friendless, and due to my pop’s
insecurities, there was never another man in our home except me. He spilled
his heart out to me. It shocked me, made me feel uncomfortable and strangely wonderful. He showed himself to me, mess that he was. It was one of the greatest days of my teenage life. He needed a “man” friend and I was the only game in town. I comforted him the best I could. I was only sixteen and we were both in way over our heads. I told him I was sure he was wrong and that my mother’s love and
dedication to him was complete. It was, but he had lost his grip on reality and was inconsolable. Later that evening I told my mother and for the first time we had to confront the fact my father was truly ill.

Things were complicated by some strange occurrences around our home. One Saturday night someone shot a bullet through the window of our front door, leaving a perfect slug-size hole in the
glass seconds after I’d just walked up to bed. The police were constantly pulling in and out of our driveway and my father said he had been involved with some labor trouble at work. These occurrences fed all of our paranoid fantasies and created an atmosphere of terrible unease throughout our household.

My sister Virginia became pregnant at seventeen, and no one realized it until she was six
months along! In her senior year she dropped out of high school, was tutored at home and married her boyfriend and the father of her child, Mickey Shave. Mickey was an arrogant, leather-jacketed, bull-riding, fighting greaser from Lakewood and eventually all-around great guy. He traveled the competitive rodeo circuit from Jersey to Texas in the late sixties. (Unbeknownst to most, Jersey is home to
the longest consecutively running rodeo in the United States, Cowtown, and once you hit the southern part of the state, there’s more cowboy there than one might think.) My steadfast sister moved south to Lakewood after trouble brought its consequences, had a beautiful son and began to live the working-class life of my parents.

Virginia, who had never boiled water, washed a dish or swept a floor,
became the toughest. She had soul, intelligence, humor and beauty. In months, her life changed. She became a hard-core Irish workingwoman.
Mickey worked in construction, suffered through the recession of the late seventies when building ceased in Central Jersey, lost his job and took work as a janitor at the local high school. My sister worked the floor at K-Mart. They raised two lovely young
men and a beautiful daughter and now have a slew of grandkids. At that young age and on her own, she found the strength my mother and her sisters have always carried with them. She became a living incarnation of Jersey soul; I wrote “The River” in her and my brother-in-law’s honor.

SIX

MY MOTHER

I wake in the half-morning light to the sound of weight on the steps leading up to the small landing outside of my bedroom. A door creaks, a turn, a squeak, the running faucet, then the sound of water moving through the pipes in the wall between my room and our bathroom, a turn, then silence, a click, the sound of plastic on porcelain, my mother’s makeup case on the sink, time .
 . . then the last-minute rustling of garments before the mirror. These are the sounds that greet me every morning of my teenage life at 68 South Street. They are the sounds of my mother getting ready for work, preparing to present herself to the world, the outside world, which she respects and where she is confident she has duties to fulfill. To a child these are the sounds of mystery, ritual and
reassurance. I can still hear them.

My first bedroom was on the second floor, off the back of our house, over the kitchen. A lazy turn to my right in bed and through my window I
had a perfect view of my dad on fifteen-degree mornings down in the yard, back to the frozen ground, cursing and grumbling underneath one of our junkers, that he might get ’er running and make work . . . brrrrrrrr. I
had no heat in my room, but there was a small iron grate on the floor I could open or close over the gas jets of the kitchen stove on the east-facing wall. As physics has taught us, heat rises. Hallelujah! For in our first years on South Street those four jets provided me my only warmth and salvation through many a cold New Jersey winter. A voice calling, two half notes, a step up and a rise to the
whole note, shouting through the grate, “Bruce, get up.” I plead unmusically, “Turn on the stove.” Ten minutes later, with the smell of breakfast cooking on the kitchen gas burners, the edge has come off of my icebox and I roll out of bed into the cool and unwelcoming morning. This will change when, with my little sister at her side, my grandmother dies in the room next to mine. At sixteen, I will
be visited by a black melancholy I never dreamt existed. But . . . I’ll inherit Grandma’s room—heat!—and the early-morning symphony of my mother preparing for work.

I get up pretty easy. If I don’t, my mom hits me with a glass of cold water, a technique she’s refined from dragging my father out of bed to the job. My sister Virginia and I are at the kitchen table, toast, eggs, Sugar Pops; I snow
more sugar on, and we all hustle out the door. A kiss and we’re off to school, lumbering with our book bags up the street, my mom’s high heels clicking lightly in the other direction, toward town.

She goes to work, she does not miss a day, she is never sick, she is never down, she never complains. Work does not appear to be a burden for her but a source of energy and pleasure. Up to Main Street
and through the modern glass doors of Lawyers Title Inc. she glides. She walks the long aisle to her desk, farthest in the rear and closest to Mr. Farrell. My mom is a legal secretary. Mr. Farrell is her boss and the head of the agency. She is secretary numero uno!

As a child, I delight in my visits here. Alone, I wheel my way through the door to be greeted by a smile from the receptionist. She
makes a call to my mom and I’m
given permission to walk the aisle. The perfumes, the crisp white blouses, whispering skirts and stockings of the secretaries coming out of their cubicles to greet me as I stand exactly breast high, feigning innocence while being hugged and kissed upon my crown. I walk this gauntlet of pure pleasure until I end up back at my mother’s desk in a perfumed trance. There
I’m greeted by “Philly,” the beauty queen of Lawyers Title, a knockout and the last stop before my mom. She has me shy and speechless until my mother comes to my rescue, then my mom and I spend a few minutes together as she entertains me with her typing skills. Tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack, keys hitting the margin, then the typewriter’s decisive bell, slide and bang as her fingers, flying,
continue to type out the vital correspondence of Lawyers Title Inc. This is followed by a lesson on copy paper and a crash course on getting rid of unwanted ink smudges as I stand fascinated. This is important stuff! The business of Lawyers Title—and essential business it is to the life of our town—has been momentarily suspended for me!

Occasionally I’ll even see “the Man” himself. My mother
and I will wander into his wood-paneled office, where Mr. Farrell will sternly tousle my hair, say a few kind words and send me on my privileged way. Some days, come five o’clock, I’ll meet my mother at closing time and we will be amongst the last to leave. With the building empty, its fluorescent lights out, its cubicles deserted and the evening sun shining through the glass doors and reflecting
off the hard linoleum floor of the entryway, it’s as if the building itself is silently resting from its daily efforts in the service of our town. My mother’s high heels echo down the empty aisle and we are out onto the street. She strides along statuesque, demanding respect; I am proud, she is proud. It’s a wonderful world, a wonderful feeling. We are handsome, responsible members of this one-dog
burg pulling our own individual weight, doing what has to be done. We have a place here, a reason to open our eyes at the break of day and breathe in a life that is steady and good.

Truthfulness, consistency, professionalism, kindness, compassion, manners, thoughtfulness, pride in yourself, honor, love, faith in and fidelity to
your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst
for life. These are some of the things my mother taught me and that I struggle to live up to. And beyond these . . . she was my protector, stepping literally into the breach between my father and me on the nights his illness got the best of him. She would cajole, yell, plead and command that the raging stop . . . and I protected her. Once, in the middle of the night, my father returning from another
lost evening at the tavern, I heard them violently arguing in the kitchen. I lay in bed; I was frightened for her and myself. I was no more than nine or ten but I left my room and came down the stairs with my baseball bat. They were standing in the kitchen, my father’s back to me, my mother inches away from his face while he was yelling at the top of his lungs. I shouted at him to stop. Then
I let him have it square between his broad shoulders, a sick thud, and everything grew quiet. He turned, his face barroom red; the moment lengthened, then he started laughing. The argument stopped; it became one of his favorite stories and he’d always tell me, “Don’t let anybody hurt your mom.”