Born in the USA

The end of my 30s have found me confronting my many contradictions: I’m a feminist that doggedly follows the path of Hemingway around the world, from Key West to Cuba to Lago Maggiore to Montreaux. A mostly vegetarian that sneaks chorizo into the skillet, the death squeals of the pigs of my imagination quelled by the smell of smoky fat. My flight to Switzerland from an America descending into chaos in the rearview mirror has landed me missing the mess of home. Despite my satisfying escape, I often I find myself: sitting on Lake Geneva imagining it is the Gulf of Mexico, reading the New York Times, flipping through old photos, listening to Bruce Springsteen.

My newfound, nearly-middle aged love of The Boss is a departure from my adolescent rejection of his music. My dad was always a big Springsteen fan. He loved playing his music on family trips: Born in the USA or Born to Run or Tunnel of Love blasting from the speakers in our Toyota station wagon, Mom and (mostly) Dad singing along in the front seat, while my sister and I stuck out our tongues or covered our ears or complained until my father relented. I remember feeling peak discomfort during Bruce’s 80s odes that were the most gutteral and masculine; it felt as though the speakers were oozing sweat and the car seats had grown a five o’clock shadow under my legs. Disgusting.  

I remember physically squirming listening to the bald desire of “I’m on Fire,” feeling as though the lyrics “Hey little girl is your Daddy home, did he go and leave you all alone…” were the voice of an unseen predator, knocking on my bedroom window. I remember the breathy euphemisms of “Pink Cadillac” and “Tunnel of Love,” the dark unknown of “When the lights go out, it’s just the three of us—me, you and all that stuff we’re so scared of.”

I couldn’t name it, exactly, but I had an encroaching sense of what I was so scared of. Around that time, I had begun to rub up against the rough edges of men’s desire. I wasn’t pretty in a mature way, like my more grown-up friends, but I had a coltish precocity, a fake ID and a sense of humor that sometimes got me in over my head. Those were the summers when, smashed in the humidity of a concert crowd, I felt an insistent hairy hand reach up my shorts, and when, during a beach vacation, I was chased by a man at full sprint until I ducked into the lobby of a resort. I was too afraid to tell my family about these brushes with the dangers of adulthood—at the concert, I had been drinking; on the beach, I had smoked a cigarette the man had offered me.

At 14, the sound of Bruce’s voice was too demanding, desperate, too laden with Y chromosome, smelling of dirty blue jeans and rust, leaving me wanting to escape the car, horrified by the vision of my father singing along to lyrics of silky blouses and brilliant disguises. Even my father was one of these hirsute, desirous men. The call is coming from inside the house!

At 38, I have looked back on myself at that perilous age and often thought of the poem “The Girl” by Marie Howe:

So close to the end of my childbearing life

without children

--if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl and not yet a woman—

but I don’t think there was a day like that for me.

When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,

or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,

she wears a furtive look—

and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now

she would never come into my arms

Without believing that I wanted something.

The poem is striking if not entirely true for me – I was a more guileless child than the girl that Howe describes. But by the end of that summer, a pall grew over my childhood. My grandmother would die, introducing me to grief. I remember wearing the same green swimsuit long after my body had outgrown it, because it was the last one that I’d worn swimming with Granny. My grandfather would follow her not long after, and then my dog, Dusty, whom we would bury in the backyard. I would leave home for college, lose my virginity, become familiar, and then intimate, with rejection, big city loneliness, the cold company of alcohol, and the monotony of a soulless job and an empty apartment.

Oh baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it’s a death trap…

It would take me twenty years to return to Bruce’s music with a sense of fellow-feeling. When I did, the music had seemed to change dramatically. Of course, it wasn’t the music that had changed. Perhaps there is something about encroaching middle age that leads one back to words and sounds of earlier life—I find myself rereading paperbacks from high school, seeking out art in museums that previously existed as posters in my college dorm room, and sifting through songs that transport me into my younger body and a place closer to home.

I recently was rereading Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and I came across the line in which the titular lover revisits the now middle-aged women he’d adored as a teenager: “Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.”

This line was heartening to me as a woman approaching forty and gave me a way of thinking about my latent Bruce Springsteen fandom: I adore the ravaged Bruce. It speaks to the ravaged me. The gravel in his voice is no longer a threat; it is a timepiece. His Tunnel of Love album is my darkhorse favorite—it features the post-divorce Bruce, mercilesly realistic, a man that seems perpetually to be driving America’s endless highways alone, singing love songs to himself, dark clouds rolling by, living with the human wreckage he’s left in his wake: “I met a girl and we ran away, I swore I’d make her happy every day, and how I made her cry...”

There is something that has come into focus for me, a world away from both the threat and comfort of my American adolescence, in Bruce Springsteen’s voice. When I walk alone in the hills behind our house, I am comforted by his Rust Belt growl: I’m just a lonely pilgrim, too, struggling to get everything right.

While raw sexuality exists in the music of Bruce, to me, this is not its true core. What I once interpreted as threatening, I now recognize as the howl of human need. It’s that unbeatable contradiction: we want, we need, we yearn for something else, which inevitably disenchants us too. We want to break away, to escape the small and familiar for the big and daring – and find that the big and daring leaves us dreaming of the small and familiar. We want love and connection, and find that even in love, miles can span across a shared bed. A beautiful domestic life is a yoke, but loosening that yoke brings its own heartache. We often quest for something just out of reach, and when we reach it, our hand is outstretched for something else. But the inevitability doesn’t slow Bruce down; he drives straight for it.

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive…

We recently hosted a 4th of July party for a bunch of displaced American friends and colleagues, and my man did his best at creating a miniature USA in the back garden. We had burgers on the grill and beers in our hands and flags festooned to the shutters. Country music and rock ‘n roll anthems filled the yard. As the party wound down into scattered quiet conversations and after dinner whisky, a longtime expat from California stood to leave. Just then, “Tougher than the Rest” came bleeding through the speakers. She leaned over and said: “Man, how am I leaving right when the music gets good?”

Her recognition warmed me—it was a feeling of familiarity springing up from the grass of a  foreign place. It was a homecoming: to the States, to the Boss, to the feeling of opening one’s arms to the inevitability of age and of the gut-checks life has in store. But it doesn’t scare me anymore.

As a girl, I used to fear the timeworn disillusionment, the loneliness that I heard in the howl of Bruce Springsteen’s voice. But now I have come to know those things, and I no longer fear them. They have become the bedfellows of my adulthood. Bruce’s music is a balm to the rough scrape of daily life, and a rally cry to the ravaged soul.

This is what my 40-year-old parents felt in the front seat of the Toyota, that I only know now.