I Was a Teenage Swamp Monster

Around the time I was 21-22, I did a lot of unconnected writing, short vignettes that I was hoping to someday make into something, or not. Here's one:

Everything I know about rock & roll and a lot of what I know about life, I learned from Bruce Springsteen by the time I was ten years old. Sometime in my seventh or eighth year of life, I took to falling asleep every night with a Springsteen cassette playing on my Panasonic boom box, the volume low and my head literally pressed against the grills of the speakers. There was more than music coming through those speakers, and I was doing more than listening. It was an education by way of rock & roll, and I absorbed it, let it run through me. The black metal grating against my ear was an IV needle feeding my soul. I became it. To this day I have vivid memories of events I never experienced except behind my closed eyes with “Born to Run” or “The River” pumping softly into my head. Many times, the things I was learning weren’t even apparent to me until years later, when some twist or turn in my life would call to mind a lyric or I would find myself unexpectedly prepared for an unfamiliar situation and realize it was because Bruce already told me that this was coming, that this was how life would be.

One of the two most important things I learned from The Boss in those formative years of my rock & roll life is that in rock & roll, as in life, what you say is rarely as important as how you say it, or more accurately, how you make it feel. The second is that in life, as in rock & roll, everybody has a story, and more often than not, it’s a sad one. And I do mean everybody—every scruffy, dirt bike riding high school kid working after school at the gas station; every fat, grey old man at a liquor store, looking at your driver’s license with his squinted right eye while his left stares straight at you, open so wide you think it might jump right out of his flabby head and you’ll have to catch it; every clean cut Wall Street yuppie with a can of beer in a paper bag on the 6:27 train back to Jersey; every fresh-faced college girl lifting her shirt on Bourbon Street for Mardi Gras beads even when Mardi Gras is months away—they all have stories, if you give them a chance to tell them.

Sometimes the stories come out easy, the first time you meet someone. Standing by your open window while your gas tank fills, the attendant will tell you about how he moved here from Turkey and works seventy hours a week. He’ll tell you that he’s tired, that he stands out there in the cold and the rain, and he’ll let you know what he really wants when he starts asking you questions: you work with computers, don’t you? In an office? Forty hour weeks? Yes, of course you do. Other times, the stories are harder to figure out and need to be teased out a little bit at a time. You’ll ask a pretty girl that you just met to tell you about her family and she’ll tell you she doesn’t really have one. You’ll ask what happened to her parents. They left. Fucked off. Abandoned. Three days later you’ll find out she’s staying at her father’s house to get away from Aunt Joan’s menopausal rampages, but she won’t give a hint as to how she really feels about Dad—or Aunt Joan. It might be months or years later when you’ll be laying naked in the dark with the twisted sheet pulled halfway over you and her head on your chest, in that moment of post-coital vulnerability when you feel so exposed that the only ways you can combat it are to voluntarily open up and spill your most private thoughts or to try and make her, and so you ask, quietly, listening to your voice shake off the walls, “Do you love your father?” After a pregnant but not uncomfortable pause in that timeless darkness where seconds are eternities and eternities are never long enough, where between one thought and the next, you’re never sure if you’ve stayed awake or fallen asleep, she’ll say, simply and matter-of-factly, as though you had asked whether she’d gotten the mail that day, “Yup,” and in the first movement either of you makes in what seems like so long that you’re actually surprised by its ease, she’ll tilt her head slightly to kiss your jaw before you both fall asleep.

Finally Free

This is another scrap from some forgotten time. I just came across it, and although there's a lot I might change about it, it once again captures a moment and feeling in my life just as it is.

I grew from your shadow like a monolith--
a dark thing of mystery and potential.
--power for progress. or destruction.

The strength that you taught me always forced me to smile:
A scared child inside, to the world a conqueror.

And you were finally free, unchained and wild.
And I, alone, left behind.

Even in absence, you were a model.
"Don't look back," cried your silence over miles.
Let past lives be buried. Move on from old weaknesses.

And you were finally free...

I don't miss your shadow or its shelter
from cowards' eyes or the burning sun.
But you were larger than your shade. You also cast light.

Times when I burned to cry to you, you made me too strong to cry.
When I wanted to feel flesh, you taught me to make myself stone.
Bodies accomplish by the power of wills. A man is as strong as his mind.
I learned from you that limits are just what you let them be.