Read Online Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema - Free Book Online Page A

air of complicity: I’m like this, and you know you’re like this, too.
    It’s powerful stuff, and it’s easy to imagine where it came from. Frustrated and tired at the end of a writing and recording process that spanned years, 3 Springsteen seems to have funneled his despair and exhaustion into a song he resolutely did not want to write. It’s somewhat hard to imagine Springsteen as being this tortured—but perhaps the glossy trappings of the music are his way of attempting to hide it. In many ways, “Dancing in the Dark” is the song that most closely presages Tunnel of Love, his work in therapy, and the Human Touch/Lucky Town double-punch.
    LURKING IN the shadows of Bruce Springsteen’s songs and onstage monologues, only occasionally making an appearance, is a gypsy woman, a fortune teller. She’s the woman who promises a happy ending to the soon-to-be-married couple in “Brilliant Disguise,” though it begins to seem, not too long after the wedding, that she was wrong, or that she lied. More promisingly, it is she who tells the singer, in the monologue during “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” on the reunion tour, that he needs a band (cue huge round of applause and band introductions).
    It’s easy to surmise that this figure is based, at least in part, on Madam Marie, the fortune teller on the Asbury Park boardwalk who is arrested in “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” though the fictional presence serves just as compellingly as a counterpoint to the Catholicism that runs rife through Springsteen’s work.
    There was a gypsy in my life, too.
    Well, not so much a gypsy as a French teacher.
    My French teacher in high school and I bonded early. She was nearly as unpopular with the administration as I was.
    My notoriety resulted from a couple of . . . trends, shall we say . . . in my behavior. First, I had limited patience with what I felt—in retrospect, perhaps a little too self-righteously—were bullshit rules and regulations. I was always polite about it, but if something rubbed me the wrong way, I made my displeasure known, or simply ignored the rule altogether. Thus, not feeling I was getting anything out of my English 12 class, I would leave. I spent most of the year’s worth of classes drinking coffee at Pang’s Chinese restaurant. Second, I was unflinching in what I wrote, despite how it might be received, or what rules it might violate. Thus it was, for example, that I was almost expelled for a short film I wrote and directed that featured a student committing suicide. 4 Third, I was up front about what the administration seemed to consider bad behavior; it was common knowledge that my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, for example, a fact that didn’t sit well with the devout principal (who happened to be the father of one of my closest friends).
    My transgressions were clear; however, I was never sure what my French teacher had done wrong.
    I do know she swore me to secrecy the day she read my tarot cards, warning me she would lose her job if anyone found out.
    As if I would tell.
    It was a quick reading, between classes one day. Three cards, focused on one question: would I become a writer?
    It was the most important question I could ask. It was the only question that mattered.
    As a kid, I was always scrawling in notebooks, taking inspiration from whatever I was watching or reading, ruthlessly plundering popular culture for inspiration. When I was obsessed with the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, I wrote mysteries with boy detectives. When I fell into the thrall of James Bond, first the movies, then the original Ian Fleming novels, I wrote spy pastiches, loaded with sex and imaginative—though highly derivative—violence. 5
    When the bullying was at its worst, I had my writing to retreat into, a world that was utterly my own. I wrote about the revenge I wanted to take, the violence I wanted to