The first concert I ever went to was in the summer of ’84. It was June 26, the third night of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour down at the CNE Grandstand in Toronto. It was hot as hell that evening, but it was an outdoor show so every now and then you’d catch a quick, cool lake breeze that would blow through your hair and give you a couple short seconds of relief.
We lived about an hour outside the city, so going in for a concert downtown was more like an adventure than it is now: you left early and made a day of it. It was magical.
This show was just three days before Bruce released the video for “Dancing in the Dark,” the one where Courteney Cox was planted at the front of the stage and got pulled up near the end to dance, not in the dark, with Bruce. The video where we all fell in love with her and had no idea that she was actually hired to be there until years later. “Dancing” hit at the midway point of the show that night—it was the fifteenth song Bruce played. Two songs after “Born in the U.S.A.” and ten before “Born to Run.”
I was nine, about to turn ten in the fall, and the summer of ’84 is what defined so much of who I am today. I don’t think you forget those magical summers when you’re nine, ten, and eleven. Those are your peak kid years, when you maybe kiss a girl for the first time, get into your first fight, fall in love, or get that ticket stub from your very first concert. That was the first night I ever got lost dancing in a crowd full of strangers, and the first time I saw another human being stand on a stage and have absolute control over the bodies and emotions of thirty thousand people. Not only was 1984 the most significant year of my youth, but it was the most significant and incredible year in pop culture history. And that’s a hill I will die on.
In 1984, I went to the third night of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Tour and became a legend among my classmates.
My dad’s co-worker Penny had become more like a family friend. She’d been to our house a few times, and I remember her being a little younger than my parents. She was cool and pretty, and she always talked to me about the music I was into. My parents really had zero interest in what I liked, so I was always happy when we’d see Penny. She lived in a fancy high-floor apartment close to the city, and every now and then Dad and I would drive out there so they could hang out together.
I was totally blown away by her balcony when we arrived.
“Can I go out there?” I remember asking. I’d never been in a condo before, or on a balcony.
“Sure! Of course you can.” Penny set me up on the balcony with her portable tape player and a stack of her cassettes, and I burned through Born in the U.S.A. as many as times as I could before my Pops dragged me in because it was time to leave. Penny’s apartment was exactly how you’d picture a modern ’80s condo—glass block divider wall between the kitchen and living room, white metal spiral staircase up to the bedroom, and a built-in and fully stocked bar with four high-back, dusty-rose stools. I loved it there.
Another time we went, another Saturday afternoon, I was allowed to swim in the pool off the back of Penny’s building while she and my dad hung out upstairs. On about our third or fourth visit, I remember Penny and my dad in the kitchen pouring bottles of alcohol down the kitchen sink. I looked over at the bar and it was empty. All the bottles that were there the last time were now on the kitchen counter. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. Why would you do that? Maybe the booze had gone bad?
I do remember Penny crying that day. She was sad, an absolute mess, and my dad was trying to console her and calm her down by rubbing her back and whispering in her ear. I felt bad for her but stayed in the living room with my back to the kitchen, still wet from my swim, trying not to make too much noise. I could see everything going on behind me through the reflection in her TV. She was having a rough day, and I wished she wasn’t.
“Hey, Roz,” Penny yelled to me as she walked out of the kitchen, wiping tears from her eyes. “You ready to have the best day of your life?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
My dad was still in the kitchen, leaning against the counter putting tops back on empty bottles. Penny grabbed her purse off the coffee table, dug her hand down to the bottom of it, and pulled out a small white envelope. “Here,” she told me. “These are for you. For us, actually,” and handed it over.
I opened it up and pulled out three concert tickets. I’d never seen a concert ticket before, so I didn’t really know what I was looking at. “What is it?” I asked her.
“Bruce Springsteen,” she explained. “Tickets to his concert. It’s in three weeks and your dad said I could take you and your brother. The three of us will go together.” To be honest, I didn’t fully understand how concerts worked—like, was Springsteen coming here?
“Yes. Springsteen is coming here. And we’re going to see him. Live.”
“Will they have T-shirts?” I asked. I don’t remember why that was such a concern, but it was the only question I could think to ask. Concert shirts were the only thing I knew about concerts.
“Yeah,” she said and laughed. “They will definitely have T-shirts and we can definitely get you one.”
I spent the next few weeks bragging to all my friends that I was going to a concert, and that it was Bruce friggin’ Springsteen. None of my friends had ever done anything like that before. This was another one of those things that I did way before any other kid I knew.
In the days and weeks after the show, I was a hero, an absolute legend. I would be at a friend’s house and even their parents were jealous of me because they’d tried and failed to get tickets to one of Springsteen’s three nights in Toronto. I knew all the songs in order. I told them how he started with “Badlands” and ended the night with a cover of “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. I told them how I danced on my chair and screamed until I had no voice left. I told them about how incredible our seats were, third row floors just off to the left, and that I was pretty sure Bruce pointed at me but was definitely sure Clarence Clemons did. I remember telling anyone who asked that yes, I did get a T-shirt, but forgot it in the bathroom after the show, and I was pissed about it because it was twenty-five bucks. I told everyone everything.
I’ve told this story for almost forty years. I’ve told it to friends, I’ve told it on the radio, I’ve gone into detail about that night on TV and mentioned it in interviews when anyone ever asks me what my first concert was. Hell, I even told Bruce himself that he was my first concert when I met him, briefly, on a red carpet years later. I had maybe four seconds with the man as he was ushered past me, and I told him he was my first. “That’s really great, man,” he told me. We shook hands and he was gone. How many people get to do that?
But it never happened. It’s all bullshit. A lie. All of it.
I never went to see Bruce Springsteen that night. I never danced on a chair, sang along, or lost my T-shirt. The tickets were real, that’s for damn sure. But I didn’t make it to the show because a week before it happened my mom kicked my dad’s ass out of the house because he was having an affair with Penny. He was cheating. They were fucking. And it broke my mom’s heart, and almost destroyed our family.
I don’t know exactly how he told her or how my mom found out, but I remember being up in my room and hearing my mom yell, “Well, you’re a hell of an actor, Ralph!” as she slammed the door behind him. It had obviously been going on for a while.
“Your dad’s gone and he’s not coming back!” she shouted up the stairs when I poked my head out of my room to see what was going on.
I didn’t know how to react, I didn’t know what to do with sadness and rage, so I picked up a small metal shelf in my room and threw it into the beige wall over my bed, just to the left of my Loni Anderson poster. “No!” I yelled as I grabbed it again and put four more holes in the drywall from the sharp feet on the bottom of it. Then four more holes. I pounded that thing as hard as I could, as many times as I could, until I fell back onto my bed, next to my Chewbacca stuffy, and cried in my hands.
Out of all the things that happened in 1984, this is my most vivid memory. I have no recollection of seeing Ghostbusters in the theatre, but I remember my mom calling my dad a liar and kicking him out. I didn’t want to remember it because I didn’t want it to be real. I wanted everything to be normal again. I didn’t want my mom to cry, I wanted my dad back, and I didn’t want to have to tell the other kids why I didn’t get to see Bruce Springsteen.
So I lied.
The day after the show I was riding my bike around Prospect Park, which was right across the creek from the old flour mill where Rich and I got our first jobs. Two older kids, maybe late teens or early twenties, were standing around and talking about the concert the night before. I rode circles around them, without getting too close, as they went on and on about how great the show was, and I memorized everything I overheard. Then I rode up to Ed’s In-N-Out Variety and grabbed a copy of the day’s paper that reviewed the show and printed the entire set list. I memorized that too. Twenty-eight songs. “Dancing in the Dark” was the fifteenth, two songs after “Born in the U.S.A.” and ten before “Born to Run.” That’s all I needed to know.
I hated my dad for doing this to me. For putting me in a position to lie for him, because the truth hurt too much to tell. So I lied, and I’ve lied about this for my entire life. Maybe because I’ve never told anyone about my dad’s affair, and those two things are somehow tied together in that little part of my kid mind that still exists somewhere. Maybe I kept this story in the same place I kept that afternoon in the closet with that family friend, and the same place I put the possibility that I may have fathered a child when I was thirteen going on fourteen.
My dad broke the rules. He broke the rules of his marriage, of his workplace, and of Alcoholics Anonymous. There’s a long-standing rule in AA when it comes to sponsorship: the boys with the boys and the girls with the girls. That’s the rule when someone sober is helping someone else through the early stages of their recovery. It’s not an official rule, but it is code among recovering drunks. Most try to stick to it.
The relationship between the sponsor and the sponsee is an emotional one based on trust between two equals. But we’re all only human. My dad and Penny were human, and they broke the rules. They weren’t in love, and he was never trying to destroy our family because he’d found someone else. He simply went too deep and became just as vulnerable as the person he was trying to help. That’s why the boys stick with the boys and the girls with the girls. My dad was the in-house counsellor at his work and had been for years. He’d helped countless friends, strangers, and co-workers get into recovery, and he was great at it. But for the first and only time, with Penny, he broke the rules. He lied to my mom, and I’ve lied about him my whole life.
Mom took Dad back before the school year started, and by Christmas you couldn’t even tell. We never talked about it.
But out of all the things that went down in 1984, in that year that shaped so much of who I am today, both good and bad, the most significant event happened on May 24 in Guernsey, which is a small island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy. That’s when Katherine Holland was born. My Katherine. And in 2005, exactly twenty-one years, one month, and five days after I should have been at that Springsteen show, we met.