PREFACE

Looking in on Asbury Park

 

 

It’s been a long time coming but now, for a few warm September days, I’m finally here. I spent years of my youth roaming the States in search of who I might become. But the Jersey Shore for me has been a place of the mind. The nearest I’ve been was a cloudless night decades ago. Seen from a plane porthole, a string of lights rimmed “the pitch-black nothing of the Atlantic.”1 Back then I didn’t know its significance as part of Bruce Land. The shot of Springsteen on the back of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. is serrated like a stamp as if for the album’s postcard cover. It’s unlikely he’d read William Faulkner back then, but his instincts led him to mimic that southern novelist, who described the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as his “postage stamp of soil.”2 I’ve approached the actual Asbury Park with unease and expectation. I’ll never again understand Springsteen’s music and images in the same way, but the real place will glitter with preconceived notions. I’ll see in it what only a Springsteen listener could see: a place created by his artistry.

I haven’t been in the States for three years or on the Eastern Seaboard for six. The twenty-first century barrels on. Barack Obama’s time in office is ending. Within months of my visit, Donald Trump will be president. BA0189 from London to Newark is a Dreamliner, a new generation of planes that feel less cramped inside, with more headroom and bigger lockers. You can tint your window to cobalt blue. The touch screen is a virtual-reality arcade. You can spend the flight “bangin’ them pleasure machines.” But the past is still present. The TV in the Fairfield Inn breakfast room shows footage of the towers falling fifteen years ago today. I collect the car and set off beneath blue sky along the New Jersey Turnpike to the Garden State Parkway. Just as I pass signs for the New Jersey Veterans Memorial and for Asbury Park, the DJ plays “The Promised Land.” I turn the radio up loud. Soon I’m rolling down Asbury Avenue and right on Fifth Avenue to the Asbury. Converted from a seven-storey Salvation Army building by Sunset Lake, it’s the first hotel to open in the town in years. Situated at the end of a row of private houses right by Kingsley Street, beyond it are Ocean Avenue, Convention Hall, and the sparkling waves. Everything is quiet. The summer crowds have gone. The streets are empty. Michael Waters, a poet at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, tells me the Pony is dark this week, but I trust in serendipity. I’ll view the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection at Monmouth, meet contacts, and expect the unexpected. “I never got into being discouraged,” Springsteen once said, “because I never got into hoping.”3

After my fill of WellFleet, Cape May Salt, 40 North and Chincoteague at the Oysterfest on Cookman Avenue, I stroll back along the boardwalk, past an old saxophonist playing to a bucket of dollar bills, and reach Convention Hall. This “first mansion” of Springsteen’s rock-and-roll dreams has seen better days (BTR 456). One eroded strut appears to be buckling beneath the weight. The sea end of the balcony is boarded up. I climb the steps to the Beach Bar and watch the sun set the sand ablaze. Between the tables an old hippy couple dance to a Sinatra medley, a real death waltz. “I lost you to the summer wind,” soothes Frank’s voice across the beach, captured on record decades ago, slung out now to accompany the fiery sky. Down on the beach, a girl in pink impresses her parents with sunset cartwheels, spraying sand like stars. “Summer Wind” gives way to “It Was a Very Good Year” and “Imagination.” On the wall of the Wonder Bar across Ocean Avenue, Tillie’s Cheshire smile fades in an orange sky. Against “Sinatra’s favorite color” (so I’ll later read in Born to Run), “Angel Eyes” bows out to “Ebb Tide.” Streetlights punctuate the darkness.4 Autumn is a black ship on a dim horizon, barely perceivable but definitely there.

To cool my feet, I’ve ventured into “the murky Jersey surf,” recalling the seashore rhythm of Springsteen’s version of Tom Waits’s “Jersey Girl” (BTR 116). The waves threaten to engulf, but the slope is deep and the undertow so strong this evening that they soon withdraw. I’ve been strolling the boardwalk down past Cookson to Wesley Lake and Southside Johnny’s Ocean Grove in one direction and up to Deal Lake the other. Asbury has lakes each end and in the middle: Wesley, Sunset and Deal. Like spirits in the night, snatches of Springsteen lyrics populate the air. “By the time we made it up to Greasy Lake.” A sunset makes a lake look greasy, and the greasers would have hung out at dusk. Contemplating what was once the circuit, the phrase “riding down Kingsley” comes to mind. In a different way from when I was a teenager, I still seek something in the night. I’m still the outsider. I’m not from the States. I’m not a musician. I’m not blue collar or working class, or any class, or really anything much. I’m not of Springsteen’s era. I barely heard of him before 1980 and didn’t see him live until 1981. Perhaps I’m therefore unqualified to write about him or have anything useful to add. Yet here I am, in search of that feeling only visiting a place evokes.

Asbury Park seems small. I’d pictured an immensity to match the music. The Asbury and another hotel, the Berkeley Ocean Front, are the only tall buildings by the boardwalk, and Convention Hall the only other notable building aside from the derelict Casino at the south end, where Mickey Rourke filmed scenes for The Wrestler. Head north through the cavernous area of shadowed shoppers ambling around souvenir shops and there’s nothing but a locked building with no name and, at the north end, Asbury Tower, a high-rise providing affordable housing for low-income senior citizens. As for the other residents, nowadays tattoos are abundant among the young and on every visible patch of skin. Like anywhere, there are people of all shapes, sizes, and standards of fitness, from those with blubber from years of fried food and sugary drinks to joggers and power walkers vibrating the bleached boardwalk planks. “Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone,” croons Frank as if on a balcony stool, his trilby tilted to cover eyes the same sea blue as my father’s. A Philadelphia couple confide over cocktails that they don’t like Springsteen but are trying to like Asbury Park. (“I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” the girl might as well have been echoing Quentin Compson from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!)5 But I find it beautiful on this fiery night and especially after more beer and what the Beach Bar sells as the Boss’s Margarita.

My walk has dredged up debris from those days when Springsteen first became a local hero. I’ve found the Upstage—scene of his early break—where local musicians jammed into the small hours. I’ve found the Stone Pony, closed, as Michael warned me, but hard to miss since it’s a low building on Kingsley with a large black pony painted on its white wall. A poster for the tribute band Tramps Like Us wilts in an outside wall cabinet. On my way from the Asbury to the boardwalk, past the turquoise, red-trimmed Wonder Bar on the corner of Ocean and Fifth Avenue, decorated with Tillie gazing toothily into the distance, turning right onto the boardwalk, away from Convention Hall, I’ve found a granddaughter of Madam Marie. Like Springsteen decades before, I later read, I’ve “sat across from her on the metal guard rail bordering the beach,” and would have “watched as she led the day trippers into the small back room,” had she found any takers. When she’s beckoned me over I’ve turned down a reading.6 A stroll from the beach stands the house where Springsteen lived while writing Greetings. From his top-floor room would be a view of Deal Lake to the left and the ocean to the right. That album makes sense of the environment, as does The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, whereas Born to Run is an impossibly large and melodramatic sound for such a low-key seaside setting.

This is the penultimate weekend of official summer, and back here at the Beach Bar the cartwheeling gymnast and dancing couple continue to make the most of a dying season, just as the people of New York and New Jersey did that Tuesday morning in 2001. For when winter comes in this part of the world it can do so with a vengeance. Meanwhile, the wagon train of Sinatra songs rolls on across the street-lit town. I came in search of Bruce but find that, tonight at least, the son of Hoboken remains, as Jack Nicholson put it to Springsteen, “King of New Jersey” (BTR 420). Ol’ Blue Eyes breezes out “One for My Baby” across the shore as if here with us, “ . . . and one more for the road.” While such songs add to the melancholy of eating and drinking with strangers in a rusty bar far from home, they also help create an incredible sunset. As surely as day turns to night, time’s wrecking ball will obliterate the daguerreotype dancers framed against the pillars and boardwalk lights, the Philadelphia couple who don’t hate Asbury Park, and the girls at the next table, each tattooed with faces, symbols, and sayings, their skin imprinted with memories. “When you’re smilin’,” Frank’s voice echoes out, “the whole world smiles with you.” As I hear these words, I realize that sayings my mother deployed in response to my periodic childhood morosity come from songs she heard growing up. I drain my Margarita, bid farewell to the Philadelphia couple, and head back past the Wonder Bar. Saturday Night Fever is playing on the Asbury’s rooftop cinema. From the street you can just see John Travolta’s toothy grin, a more handsome echo of the now darkened Tillie.

 

* * *

After the night of the Sinatra sunset, I drive Monday morning to the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. In January 2017 Monmouth University announced the creation of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music, but at the time of my visit the collection exists in the Springsteen House, a modest clapboard building separated from the campus by a wooden fence. To stand on the driveway is to be on the outside of campus and academia, looking in. The white clapboard house resembles a modest home. It contains mostly secondary material with the occasional primary item—a couple of letters, a handwritten set list, and, on a 2007 tour schedule, brief notes, one referring to a dentist appointment for Steve Van Zandt, the other Springsteen’s reminder to himself that he must curtail a rehearsal to do the school run: ordinary people juggling life and work, making something of their lives. Assisted by a couple of students, John and Mariza, I peruse the material for four days. Outside the sun blazes, enticing me out each late afternoon to sit on the beach until dusk.

Eileen Chapman, who runs the Springsteen Collection as associate director of the Center for the Arts at Monmouth, drives me around one afternoon. She shows me the black neighborhood the residents burned down in the riots of 1967–68, watched by Springsteen from the roof of the Upstage. She tells me about all the jazz and blues clubs Gary Tallent would sneak into and how they closed down one by one. She rolls us past the Upstage, the Student Prince, where Springsteen met Clemons, and around the circuit. But as she talks I realize just how vast and empty are the gaps between buildings. The place has been all but bulldozed out of existence. It’s not just that it’s an empty beach town. It’s that it’s been emptied. What I’m actually looking at is a huge swath of space, much of it consisting of parking lots where bohemian life used to be. This explains an aspect of “Wrecking Ball.” Maybe not much changes in America. I think of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and how they pave over paradise with parking lots. I never knew Asbury Park in the first place, and I doubt it was paradise, but you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

“So,” I say, “you have to imagine the way it was.”

“I don’t,” replies Eileen. “I see it. It’s still here for me.”

I’ve seen photographs of Stephen Zorochin’s bust of Springsteen, complete with red bandana, and of the giant guitar on Belmont, but the only remnant I find near the boardwalk is a life-size poster of Bruce and band from the inside of the Magic album plastered onto the Ocean Avenue side of that nameless, windowless, virtually featureless building north of Convention Hall. Already, the band is fading into a past that no longer exists, and that’s probably how it should be: new times, new bands. I find them on consecutive nights at the Wonder Bar. The second night it’s Whiskey Shivers, a quintet from Austin, Texas. The banjo player, James Bookert, tells me he’s “just started” on Springsteen and asks what he should listen to. I tell him to try everything, but he’ll surely enjoy We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle before venturing toward the darkness on the edge of town and down to the river and so on.

 

On my way out of Asbury Park I trace a loop beyond Monmouth University up to Rumson and Sea Bright, inland to Colts Neck, and then on to Freehold. To borrow the title of a novel by New Jersey writer Richard Ford, I’m seeking the lay of the land. But first I stop in West Long Branch to view the Born to Run house. If arriving in Asbury Park is disconcerting, that’s nothing to encountering 7½ West End Court, where Springsteen wrote much of the album. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert talks of “the loftiness” of Emma’s dreams and “the littleness of her house.”7 In her own way a romantic pragmatist, albeit a grossly misguided one, she works tirelessly to make her dreams reality. The novel is a tragicomedy never better summed up (unwittingly given the novel was as yet unwritten) by Flaubert’s one-time lover, Louise Colet, in her comment that “love, like life, is a great comedy, unless you’re playing one of the roles.”8 Springsteen’s story, too, had he remained obscure, might have been tragicomic. Where the older Springsteen, in the 2016 Vanity Fair interview that preceded the launch of the autobiography, refers to his “Sisyphean” temperament, and attraction to repetitive activity, such as going to the gym and “lifting something heavy up and putting it down in the same spot for no particularly good reason,” even the young Springsteen saw the comedy in the deadly seriousness with which he pursued his vision. “Someday we’ll look back on this,” he was able to write, “and it will all seem funny.” I picture him gripped with an obsession to break through to a “promised land,” to escape “a town full of losers,” to “win,” working his band to the bone in that squat beach house, so at odds with the grandiosity of the musical landscape with its giant Exxon sign, its highways and avenues, and the Big Man joining the band. “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—,” writes Emily Dickinson in Poem 632. As I stand before this house, the roof of which looks touchable without stretching up, she reminds me that the mind is a universe. We can make of the world something dramatic however mundane our outward existence.9

Near the house I’ve waited at tracks for a freight train to cross the road. No wonder some of Springsteen’s imagery involves trains whistling through sleepless nights. Maybe the sound of the freight train running through his head was literal. One song I can imagine being composed here is “Backstreets.” This has indeed been a “soft infested summer,” and today is a dog day, where high summer tilts into fall and the heat is like a precipice over which the season will plunge. While West End Court is a short, nondescript backstreet, wedged between Second and Ocean Avenue, beyond it lies the Atlantic like a blue ribbon, the very sea across which the pilgrims came to invent the America that Springsteen would claim his part in creating. The tiny house on a stub of a street is thus something of an illusion. The vision of immensity has its counterpart in the setting, with its beach house, and the possibility of feeling the summer weather could last forever.

The northern end of Ocean Avenue culminates in Sea Bright, a town along the narrow strip of land north of the university. This is where a local spied Springsteen pulling out of the beach parking lot in the days after 9/11 and called, “We need you, man.”10 I only see the beach, a few shops, and the parking lot (a theme of this trip), but it allows me to envision the moment. The strip of land lies between the sea on one side and Rumson and the Navesink River on the other. It further epitomizes the seaside culture to which Springsteen escaped from Freehold, and that gave him a community when his parents and youngest sister left for California. It’s to that town that I now head, by way of Colts Neck and what may be Springsteen’s horse farm along a road ending at fields and woodland. This I assume to be the meadowlands, where mosquitoes grow big as airplanes.

I arrive in Freehold that mellow evening knowing in advance that I might find nothing. It’s quite a distance inland, and would have seemed even further in the 1960s, especially without a car. (Springsteen didn’t learn to drive until into his twenties.) I park by 39½ Institute Street thinking that there must be something in this ½ and Springsteen’s homes—as if his family were literally marginalized, fitted into spaces between more important ones. His second home where he lived from the age of five is a white clapboard house, with pale blue sides and blue shutters. Looming over the backyard is a water tower. I walk down Institute Street, turn right on South Street by the St. Rose of Lima School and up to 68 South Street where he lived as a teenager, prior to his ill-fated attempt to study at Ocean County Community College. Jon Stauff, vice-provost for global education at Monmouth, has told me that his father tried to teach Springsteen history, but this was merely a draft dodge. Springsteen had no interest. He dressed inappropriately (back then colleges had a dress code), carried his guitar around, unnerved other students, and eventually got kicked out. It was not, Jon told me, a good experience for teacher or student. In Born to Run, Springsteen explains that, even back then, they lived only “a block away from the Puerto Rican neighborhood” (BTR 30). “All you need do,” he writes, is to walk down the main street of Freehold “on any summer evening to see the influx of Hispanic life” (BTR 402). On my way down South Street I pass Mi Casa, a shop proclaiming its dedication to Productos Mexicanos y Musica Latina. A Puerto Rican flag covers the inside of an upstairs window of the house next to 68 South Street. “There’s just different people coming down here now,” I can hear Springsteen tell his father, “and they see things in different ways.” Yet it’s striking how very Catholic this area remains. The Irish and Italians may have left, but other Catholics have taken their places.

Back down South Street and right on McLean, I’m in the vicinity in which five-year-old Virginia Springsteen, an aunt who never was, died beneath a truck on the corner by a Lewis Oil gas station while riding her tricycle one late afternoon in April 1927. Along on the left is the St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church at the start of Randolph Street. Beside it (of course) is a parking lot where 87 Randolph once stood, housing Springsteen and his parents and grandparents, with Virginia’s faded photograph on the mantelpiece. Leaning against a tree I think of “Candy’s Boy” on The Promise, a slow cut of what became “Candy’s Room” on Darkness on the Edge of Town. In this version, Springsteen sings not, as in “Candy’s Room,” of “pictures of her heroes on the wall,” but of “pictures of her savior on the wall.” Candy thus becomes the equivalent of Raskolnikov’s devout prostitute and confessor, Sonya Marmaladov. Again, Springsteen probably hadn’t contemplated Crime and Punishment back then, but his subject matter was already converging with literary themes.

The church is redbrick, built in the 1920s. On the lawn is a white statue of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus in her arms. Someone has stuck a red rose in the crook of her elbow. I envisage Springsteen driving past the parking lot, recalling what once stood here, and reflect on how very personal “Wrecking Ball” must be, both in terms of Asbury Park and this early home. “Yeah, we know that come tomorrow, none of this will be here,” Springsteen tells me as we walk down the street. “Now, when all this steel and these stories, they drift away to rust / And all our youth and beauty, it’s been given to the dust. . . .” This happens in Europe,
too. I once found the house where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes vacationed in the then-fishing village of Benidorm. Surrounded now by skyscraper hotels in that holding pen of English migrants and partygoers, the cottage no longer gets much sun. In America, though, these drastic changes are perennial. William Styron writes, in Set This House on Fire, of a character revisiting Newport News in the Virginia Tidewater—coincidentally just across Hampton Roads Bay from Clarence Clemons’s hometown of Norfolk. Recalling how he’d “known its gentle seaside charm,” and shaken loose for himself its “own peculiar romance,” he finds on his return that the magnolias have “been hacked down to make room for a highway along the shore,” and “a Yankee-built vehicular tunnel” now pokes its “snout two miles beneath the mud at Hampton Roads.” Seeking a recognizable scene, he stops at a garage and realizes that, right there, “several fathoms beneath the foundations of this Esso Servicenter,” he’d once hunted for crawfish and “had almost drowned.” All has been obliterated. His “great-grandchildren’s cleverest archaeology” would “strive in vain to unlock that sun-swept marsh, that stream, those crawfish.” This observation of destruction and construction, and of a landscape altered forever, stands as well for Bruce Land, even though, at other times, in unexpected ways, tantalizing glimpses of that past and links with that music still emerge.11 By the time I’m loitering on Randolph it’s between 5 and 6 p.m., the sun still warm through the trees. The church’s electronic organ begins to grind out tunes I can almost place. Stroked by sun and shadow, I walk in tune, accompanied by the occasional percussive knock of a dead leaf on the hood of a car. Further from the church I fancy it might be “Hungry Heart.”

I know what I’m doing during this foray into Freehold is not unlike what Springsteen did: going back to look at places where life was once lived. He’d drift past his family home, seeking out the root of his troubled relationship with his father, Douglas, later to be told by a psychiatrist that he was trying to right something that went wrong and that he would never be able to.12 As men of that era point out, Springsteen is singing of the particular difficulties the Vietnam War years threw up between generations, and how fathers and sons were sometimes never reconciled. The crew-cut World War II veterans and the longhaired musicians could never understand one another. They held antithetical worldviews. The sons were demonstrable, the fathers not, even though they felt what they couldn’t show. Of course, in my case, I’m not going back to my family home but to someone else’s, as I’ve done before with other writers. I’m revisiting a past I could never adequately imagine, let alone know. So far as my own life is concerned I’m revisiting, to use a Springsteen title, “a time that never was.” Empty spaces, shadows—that’s the lonesome. Doing something practical—getting some work done, such as writing a book—that’s pragmatism. Dusk gathers. I find the site where the Karagheusian Rug Mill once stood. I don’t check out St. Rose of Lima Cemetery. I’ve had enough of hunting invisible game. It’s dark by the time I return to the shore.

 

So ends my brief time looking in on Asbury Park. I drive back to Newark International Airport, take the train over the Jersey swamps into Manhattan and, with a day or so before my flight home, revisit some of the places that have been part of my past experience of New York. These include the site of the World Trade Center, McSorley’s Irish Ale House on East Seventh Street in the East Village, B. B. King’s Bar and Grill on Forty-Second Street, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. Last time I was at the site of the twin towers it was Ground Zero. In 2002, there were still snapshots of victims on the railings of St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church on Wall Street. I recall, in 2010, the area swarming with protestors and police due to tensions related to a proposal for a new mosque nearby. Now, thanks to Daniel Libeskind’s vision, the place is barely recognizable. “Architecture is communication,” he suggests, “poetry in stone and in light and in gravity.” The big hole in the ground, which became a building site, holds a vast, underground shopping mall with a white-ribbed roof resembling the remnants of the fallen towers. The sites of the towers are now Michael Arad’s memorial, “Reflecting Absence.” Created in collaboration with landscape architect Peter Walker, the area is a plaza of pine trees with an oblong cavity marking the parameters of each tower. The victims’ names are carved around each rim, and water cascades down to a central sluice. Beside them is the 1,776-foot Liberty Tower, gleaming in sunshine or disappearing into mist.13 The rising has happened. But beneath it, via a walkway through the subterranean granite that allowed Manhattan to materialize, is the cavernous Memorial Museum with its tribute to those who died and those who served in the rescue operations. Here I find another Puerto Rican flag—recalling the one in the window on South Street—this time in a glass case. It belonged to Sergeant First Class Jose O. Calderon-Olmedo of the U.S. Army. “Stationed around the world, including tours in Germany, South Korea, and in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm in 1991,”
the accompanying information explains, he died working at the Pentagon.

After this sobering visit, over McSorley’s dark ale I sit in the almost empty spit-and-sawdust bar, contemplating the years I’ve been returning to New York, sometimes to visit friends, often to roam alone. I ask the barman how long he’s worked there. Forever, he replies. How long’s forever? Twelve years, he explains. I don’t tell him I’ve been visiting McSorley’s for over three decades, just that I was last there six years ago. He asks what took me so long. That night, I seek out the colorful cacophony of Times Square, then descend to B. B. King’s, listen, over Samuel Adams draft, to Springsteen contemporary and blues musician Jon Paris, accompanied by Amy Madden on bass, and contemplate how Springsteen found his way through music, through making his guitar talk, to getting the world to hear him. Amy was playing at B. B. King’s when I first ventured down there on that same trip six years previously. I chatted with the barmaid, a drama student married to a 9/11 fireman. As things got busier, she refused payment for my beers. The money wasn’t the point; what mattered was the human touch in the heart of Manhattan. That’s why I go back.

On the final day I’m at the Metropolitan, seeking as usual the silent wisdom of Rembrandt, gazing out in his sixties from his 1660 portrait in Gallery 634. Rembrandt’s self-portraits may seem the very antithesis of rock. On one hand, the portrait hangs mute through the centuries, silent, unaware, inanimate, even though to look into those barely glimmering eyes makes it hard to accept that this isn’t Rembrandt looking back at us. Rock, on the other hand, is ostensibly all present, all sound. Yet there’s a link. On the train in from New Jersey I asked an old man with a knee brace—a Swede from Seattle, as it turned out—how he’d done the damage. “By living,” he replied. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are an uncompromising record of the toll of time. Witness a succession of such portraits and, with his merciless depiction of ripening features and the scars of experience, you see him age before your eyes. When I look at the 1660 portrait I recall a dream of walking the corridor to my parents’ room one childhood night. They stood smiling in the doorway, but as I drew nearer the wallpaper began to peel, they began to age, and when I reached them, standing in the rotted doorframe, they crumbled to dust. Springsteen’s body of work, however different, is equally about “the pain that living brings.” His weary look on the cover of Magic speaks of the passing years. The artist and his assistants look out at us and say, we’re getting old. Witness the aging process. Witness our mortality, mirroring your own. It’s also true that just as this portrait I’m viewing is not Rembrandt, so the voice and sound and songs we hear, on record, are not Springsteen. Rembrandt made every brush stroke of the portrait, and Springsteen was involved in making the sounds on every song, but neither artist remains present in the artwork. It’s not, therefore, all now, now, now in rock or in Rembrandt, but we’re fascinated that the work came into being, that it records human activity, and that the moment of creation has vanished while the result will remain part of a present beyond our own time. Art, when seen or heard, becomes the property of the recipient.

Sitting on a bench in the Metropolitan, Rembrandt and I watch each other. I imagine approval in his expression, just as I look at Springsteen live, or hear his music, and think he somehow knows or acknowledges me. This is a powerful and enabling illusion fostered for decades. “The final belief,” writes Wallace Stevens, “is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.”14 The brain cannot see. The eye and ear translate data into what’s familiar from past experience. The past doesn’t exist, and nor does the future, but we believe in all three things willingly, there being no sustainable alternative to doing so. What, I wonder to myself, is the connection between my attachment to Rembrandt and my attachment to Springsteen? What part of me responds to the silent image of the aging Dutch artist, in his dignified silence on the wall of Gallery 634, and the words and music of this American musician? I am the common factor. The art is the conduit. What matters is my relationship not with the unknowable artist but with the art.

Time to catch a plane. Walking down the Museum Mile stretch of Fifth Avenue
from the Metropolitan, someone passes wearing a baseball camp stamped with the phrase, “New Era.” I think of the Santa Fe wrap I had for breakfast, the burger and fries I had for lunch, the sushi I might have for dinner. I think of the pipe bombs in Manhattan and on the Jersey Shore that have caused consternation these past days. New York, like America, is a mélange of people from the world over. We’re always trying to make sense of it, and of the world. A great artist makes you see aspects of it as they see it. Riding the 6 Train Uptown, everyone resembles a Rembrandt painting, with a Rembrandt mouth and eyes and skin. Then, around Fifty-Seventh Street, opposite me sits down Springsteen’s very own Puerto Rican Jane, with a toddler on her knee. Her hair is dyed blond, and she has a bandage on her left wrist. Soon after that, as I switch to the Airtrain at Jamaica, I see that in writing about Springsteen I must include the lonesome and the communal, the images and the sounds, and notions of high culture and popular culture. Only by doing this can I describe his significance as an American artist of global renown. The way artists affect our perception of the places we visit, the people we see, the experiences we have, and the lives we lead is a very democratic process; I really mustn’t care, I realize, about perceived hierarchies. I mustn’t hold back from approaching the subject as I need to, from offering my vision, and from yoking together disparate ideas that might at first seem worlds apart. Being an outsider looking in is, I realize, precisely my qualification and reason for writing. To echo Sinatra, I must do it my way. Galvanized, encouraged, with a reason to believe, I fly home and write the book.