I always wished I was the strong silent type, Gary Cooper, Lee Marvin, Duke Wayne. But I am not and I'm open about my feelings. I don't know if this is a weakness or the fact that men like the aforementioned don't really exist. I think they don't, they all had an ear that they spoke to and a shoulder to cry on. I have my own in my life, a few people who I bear all to when I need them.
I remember jogging in the hangar bay of the USS George Washington spilling everything, all the fears, concerns and doubts to a particular friend who was good enough to entertain my ramblings. He was the only one I let into that world, at the time if I didn't have that I didn't know what I would have done with myself. At the time I couldn't be alone, I couldn't be the person I was or the person the world knew without him.
So in this post, yet another Springsteen post, I want to write this for another friend who may be going through the same thing I was dealing with at the time aboard that ship, when I thought all was lost and couldn't see life beyond each left and right foot that came down on the hard steel of the hangar bay.
"Dry Lightning" reminds me of those times and the hopelessness that invaded my dreams every night when I set my head down. It is easy to talk about it now but at the time I couldn't face it, for the first time in my life I couldn't face something in my life and I had zero idea how to move forward.
I'd drive down to Alvarado street, where she danced to make ends meet,
I'd spent night over my gin, where she talk to her men,
Well a piss yellow sun comes bringing up the day,
She said ain't nobody gonna give nobody
What they really need anyway...
You get so sick of the fighting, lose your fear in the end.
I can't lose your memory,
The sweet memory of your skin.
It sure does take me back to those days of hopelessness, but like the desert of which the narrator inhabitates, he is resilient. Like the desert it is timeless, worn down by the wind and elements but standing before them in defiance. In the situation I was in, like my good friend, you have to stand before them and let it wear you down.
It wears you down until the only thing that is left is your character, the core of the person you are and always have been with or without the thing you have lost. For the only thing that is worse than the predicament you currently are in is to lose that bedrock of which you've based your whole life upon. And there's a beauty in that ideal. A beauty in the Randian, Emerson, Thoreauian way of living your life, the acceptance of what life has dealt you and your ability to rise above it all.
I remember spending a few days in the eastern California desert, a small town with two bars filled with modern day characters from some Steinbeck, Joadian screenplay shot with John Ford's eye. Playing pool smoking Marlboro Reds, drinking domestic beer with a few shots mixed in until we went to the strip club where our narrator spend nights over his gin...you realize that life doesn't work out for a vast many people in this world. Luckily most of those people don't have the knowledge of the outside world to compare their own lives to, sadly I did. In the end it was something to celebrate instead of mourn. Of people venturing through their daily lives with the steadfastness those in more sophisticated worlds could never possibly imagine.
But like my friend this is dedicated to, she called me one day and told me she was engaged. It was right before I was going out, before a work dinner in which I had to show a good face. A friend was driving and I took a full glass of gin in the car ride while I tried to catch my breath for right then and there it was all over. It was over before but I at least had the luxury of pretending that it was not. It was.
After the initial shock it was liberating and it set me free. I sit here now writing this thinking about that day while listening to this song of sorrow, of resigned hopelessness, I sit here now writing this a man with many disappointments and happinesses after her, finding in others what I never thought I would find again even though she still comes to me in the night at times when I least expect it. I write this thinking about another love of mine across an ocean, her brown hair that waits to accept me with open arms and loving skin.
He'll eventually get to that point, he simply needs to know that that point will come to fruition in the future once he lets her go to her new life and accept that he has a new one, to look at it as such and embrace it as a new beginning. I am not a fateist but I do believe that you can make the remainder of your life work, hopefully they'll be another, and certainly there will be, that will break his heart once again.
