Born in the USA (To Russia With Love)

You know those parts in some of Bruce Springsteen’s songs, near the end, when he kind of rehashes the chorus over and over, but with more urgency, and he throws in a few little changes to the lyrics? He’s got some like that. Drunk people in Wildwood love that shit. I decided I was going to sit down and write a song, made up entirely of that kind of ending sequence. One hundred percent rapture, just make it fucking smack. Drag it all the fuck the way out and create this 3-minute emotional gut punch. 

The battered acoustic guitar was soon employed. It was good that it was all beat to shit like that. It’s the only way to make some real heartland music. As I sat in my apartment in Philadelphia, it seemed almost impossible to fire on all the cylinders that were needed, but I knew I could capture that spirit of the Jersey highway if the wind would just blow the right way. I took my shirt off and the wind blew in through the window, just the right way. Hallelujah.

It got really screwed up, though, really quickly. The song I wrote ended up sounding desperate for sure, but in all the wrong ways. I figured it would scare most people if they heard this song of mine. I strummed the chords I had been arranging but they just sounded like the clanging of a mechanical process in the junkyard.

I put down the guitar. I felt stupefied. Writing this really disturbing little jangle of a song was like throwing nickels down a stairwell to nowhere. I picked the guitar back up and played three Alice in Chains songs in a row while singing along, kind of impersonating Layne’s crazy parrot warble here and there. I laughed to myself, alone in my apartment. I thought the whole sequence of events was pretty funny. Whoa now. 

I got up off my couch and threw my guitar on top of the overflowing laundry basket for a soft landing. Vision soaring through the window like a scorching bird, just flying through it all, going through the halls of my mind’s mausoleum.

It was a memory flood kind of Sunday; listening to all the melodies of yesterday’s mind paths sent me into a ruminating-my-doom kinda mood, radiating yet brooding. Thunder beyond the ghost fields. I thought back to an evening, about 8 or 9 years in the past. I was copping dope down the way. Just two nicks because I was broke til morning. It was raining, really steadily and cold like a nap in the cemetery. To me, though, it all felt like tinsel when I was made of liquid like I was in those days. 

A blonde girl walked past me right after I parked on Albert St., pushing a stroller and sobbing. I used to park up near the Huntington El station and walk around the Box, especially in the kitchen death months of July and August, gone to boiling Hell without popsicles. It was cold in this story, though. Or maybe it was cold just because of the rain, even though it was summer. Smiling flower demons. The facts are long gone. 

Back then there were more friendly faces than one might think, but then again I always tried to be one myself, so I guess I was more inclined to see a friend rather than a foe. I kept that in mind. I sat in my truck and watched her walk past me. But this girl, though, she was crying hysterically, gasping upwards like she was coming up from almost drowning. The stroller she was pushing was big as shit, and the baby was bawling inside. 

I cracked my window and called out “Hey” to her as she passed. She needed my cell phone, so I told her to sit in the passenger’s seat and make a call, get the baby out of the rain. She called some family friend, an aunt-type figure, and she cried harder as the lady on the other end yelled at her. I could hear it from the driver’s seat. The girl’s Russian-accented sobs sounded like a fat child laughing, to my funky ears. 

I ended up giving her a ride to the Frankford transportation center and there were all these other details along the way that might be interesting or not, but no, I didn’t fuck her, and I didn’t make any attempt, didn’t even try to get her number or anything. The main point is that I apologized to her before I drove her out of Kenzo, and told her to sit in my car and get the baby dry and warm because I needed to hit the set. She was mostly nonchalant and agreeable when I told her I would be a much better driver with blessed panacea working all my groove buttons just right. The baby would be safer this way.

The color was so washed out, around that timeline. Laundromat shelters in these rain-drenched no-go zones and my thoughts always turn Biblical.

Years after all of that, I would find myself in the little weight corner of the gym at JBRC with the homeys, tapering down from methadone, telling them the girl and the baby stroller story in between skullcrusher sets. One of the guys imitates a little Russian accent and says “You get bag for baby?” It was pretty funny, but that’s not the punchline, here. 

Where am I going to end this? Who knows, baby. Now that’s a tune for the E Street Band.