John & Mary

Song: "Thunder Road"

Artist: Bruce Springsteen

Story: John & Mary New York in the seventies was something from a dream. It’s hard now to imagine it ever really existed, with its smells and filth and danger, sweltering subway cars covered lavishly in graffiti, homeless people on cardboard at every corner. A world was coming to an end. The federal government refused to rescue the city from bankruptcy, and most of middle America saw the place as a cess pool made up of deviants and too many blacks and Puerto Ricans for comfort, Jews that controlled too much, and freakish fags in tight bell bottoms and platform shoes parading unashamedly in the streets. Whatever New York was was just too much. It was what I stepped into when I took a semester off from Yale to do a play off-off-Broadway with my new boyfriend, Paul. We miraculously found a sublet in the Village and rehearsed during the day in Times Square -- eyes wide open with every step from Port Authority to Theater Row; the drug addicts were desperate for cash and too fucked up not to try to rob you in broad daylight, or grope your crotch, offering quick sex for quick money. We worked at night as waiters. I was lucky that my older brother, John, a writer living in Brooklyn, bartended at a restaurant on the Upper West Side and got me a job serving burgers and quiche in the kind of place that was common at the time – ferns everywhere, Chablis in carafes, Roquefort dressing for that exotic touch – a place out of a Jill Clayburgh movie that suited me just fine because it meant I could subway home to Paul at night with my pockets stuffed with sweaty cash. I was a fish out of water in New York, not just because I’d been living safely behind the cloistered walls of Yale, but because, in many ways, what New York represented was just what I’d spent my young life running away from – the kind of chaos and barely suppressed insanity I’d grown up with. I was one of eight kids being raised by a widowed mother with no money and even less emotional bandwidth, a situation and environment in which I’d often felt like a pinball being flung around with little sense of purpose or meaning. Yale was giving me what I’d longed for: structure, order, Old World convention. It was there I was safe at last. Musically speaking, I was also retrograde, playing L.P.s on our second rate Hi-Fi at home, chosen to smooth out rough edges and soothe a queasy stomach, music almost always classical and low-key: Corelli, Telemann, Bach – all of it lovely, but if you were to visit our place when I was D.J.-ing you’d think you’d entered a retirement home for decaying English professors and dowagers in lace. There was one night, though, after work, that I sat at the restaurant bar, having a beer before heading downtown to Paul and our bed -- a night and a song that changed things, musically speaking, and more. John was wrapping things up at the bar, wiping it down and re-stocking the shelves behind him. He was a romantic figure to me. Startlingly handsome, he turned the heads of men and women just by coming up out of the subway, and was just as startlingly smart, the most well-read person I knew – Cervantes and Joyce to pulp science fiction and comic books. He’d already had two novels and a slew of short stories published. His customers at the bar loved him, came in just to debate him on whether Norman Mailer was a genius or a fraud, or to flirt, or to hear him regale them with filthy jokes that were too erudite to be mere smut. The night I’m talking about, I watched him close up shop while I sipped my beer. He was just about to turn off the music that filled the place when he stopped short. “Hear that?” he said to me. “Hear that?” “Hear what?” “The music. That lyric.” I knew it was Bruce Springsteen, whom I’d never much listened to, and I even recognized the song, which was played a lot at the time. Thunder Road. “Bruce Springsteen,” I said, wanting him to see that I wasn’t just a nerd, that I could recognize things that other people listened to. “’The screen door slams,’” he said. “’Mary’s dress waves.’” “Oh. Uh huh.” “It’s a poem,” he said. “The guy’s a poet.” “Bruce Springsteen?” “He writes poetry. He makes everyday things into poetry and then into songs.” “Right.” “’The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves.’ It couldn’t be simpler, but it tells you so much.” “Yeah?” “Right from the top of the song, you know where you are even if you don’t know where you are.” “Huh.” “It’s summer and this girl’s just stepped out to get some fresh air. You know it’s summer because it’s a screen door and because her dress waves from the slamming door. It’s a lightweight dress.” He took a sip of the Johnnie Walker he’d been drinking all night and stacked some glasses. “Her name’s Mary. A straightforward girl with a straightforward name. A wholesome name, but her waving dress is sexy. There might be more to her than you think.” He smiled. He didn’t go on to the next lines. The song had ended by then, and he turned off the music and lights, locked up the place, and headed home to Brooklyn, while I took the IRT train to the Village. It doesn’t sound like much. It didn’t seem like anything at the time. But John’s take on the first eight syllables of Thunder Road, a song I’d never paid much attention to before, stayed with me. I thought about what he’d said as I walked the streets of New York with Paul that summer, learning all the tricks for surviving in an expensive city without much money – where to get falafels for two dollars each, what nights to pick up discarded furniture in the streets, how to jump the subway turnstiles when you had to. I never would have done any of those things, wouldn’t have lived in New York at all if it hadn’t been for Paul and his much-more razor’s edge way of living. New York cracked me open. So did Springsteen’s song, gently. Every once in a while I’d hear it on the radio, blasting out of someone’s car, and I’d sing the part I knew -- “The screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves” – all of seven words, and I came slowly to figure out that poetry wasn’t only John Donne or T.S. Eliot, that it didn’t need to be lofty or accessible only to someone with a PhD, that poetry wasn’t to be found only in torturously complex ideas or in ridiculously expensive universities. That it was a girl in a dress on a porch. It was the obnoxious guys from Jersey or Staten Island who’d come into the city on Saturdays and get drunk and scream in the streets in the night. That it was pop music written by people not much older than me, who hadn’t gone to college, who just got out of bed in the morning and opened their eyes. That it was all around me and wasn’t always pretty and wasn’t always soothing. That if you spent your life addicted to serenity, as I had been, you’d miss out on most of it. I realize now, too, that it was the simplicity of those lyrics that made it possible for me to expand. I could only take Springsteen in small doses – it was all too raw and emotional. If John had focused on an entire song, or some more muscular or butch set of lyrics, they wouldn’t have entered me in the same way. Instead, those seven simple words were like a daisy growing slowly through a crack in a sidewalk, was a daisy making the crack, through me. Come September, Paul and I headed back to Yale, full of ourselves for having broken ground on our theatrical careers and for becoming bona fide New Yorkers, at least in our own eyes. But in the comfort and safety of the cloistered halls again, everything seemed a little pale. Since that time, forty years have passed in minutes. Paul and I are still together, which is itself a kind of poem. John, who never produced another novel, but who saw poetry all around him, slipped away from the world, quietly, in a California hospice and at an early age, the victim of the alcoholism that had taken hold of him in his days as a bartender in New York. He never was able to shake it. He’d remained good to me -- came to see me in plays and lavished me with praise, read my own stories and my own poetry. When it was time for me to clean out his apartment in San Diego, I sifted through his big collection of books, DVDs, and CDs, all of which he’d left to me. One of the CDs was Born to Run, which I took home, along with the rest of his things, and kept in a box in the basement. I don’t play it very often. I almost never play it. When I do, I take a breath and close my eyes. There’s a silence, and then the music. I see the door and there’s the porch. Mary’s in a dress that waves. John is in the summer day.