“I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.”

– Bruce Springsteen

I was introduced to Bruce through Elizabeth Wurtzel. At thirteen, strolling the aisles at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore chain with my family in tow, waiting for a table at the Italian restaurant chain around the corner. A suburban shopping center in a western American town, the kind where if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Her face beckoned me from the shelf like divine intervention. I returned her gaze as though through a mirror: her hollow sloe eyes, messy long dark hair, baggy, nondescript ’90s clothing, and distant, vacant expression all stared back at me from the cover, where the black-and-white photograph that contained her had been dramatically ripped apart and stitched back together. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. I didn’t have a clue what Prozac was, and I hadn’t given much thought to America yet, but you’d be hard-pressed to find two more suiting adjectives than ‘young’ and ‘depressed’ to describe me at this age — and well, I was in America, so I suspected that might have something to do with it.

By some miracle, my parents didn’t review my book selection that evening and purchased it for me without a second glance. It truly was a miracle, because I’m convinced that had they read the cover, it would have been sent immediately back to the shelf. By this time, they were highly attuned to my disposition toward any media and paraphernalia that would validate my depression, having already confiscated my Nirvana albums, the copy of The Virgin Suicides I stole from the library, and my collection of sharp objects. As soon as that book passed from the cashier back into my hands, I stowed it away like a thief in the night. For the next year, I carried the memoir around with me everywhere I went like my personal bible. I read it cover to cover, and backwards and forwards until I knew every scene by heart, and in the years to come, I’d revisit it again and again, like a dear old friend.

One quickly loses track of how many times Elizabeth tries to kill herself within those pages, but the point really is that she was trying equally hard to live. Somehow, as a thirteen-year-old girl, I knew, even though I didn’t have a way to make sense of it, I understood in my bones that that’s what everyone was getting wrong. The attraction to darkness wasn’t to seek a void but to seek a way through. I didn’t want to die; what I wanted was to live — to somehow rectify these two polarities which my child’s brain couldn’t hold simultaneously. For this, Elizabeth didn’t quite have the words either, but she was trying, and in her trying, Bruce seemed to be helping her along the way. So logically, I thought I’d better consult him as well. It was through Bruce that I came to understand America, freedom, masculinity, and raw pain.

At this time, I’d never been further east of Colorado in the USA, and Bruce, like Elizabeth, was from a faraway fantasy land called New Jersey. From both of their narrative fragments, I could only gather that New Jersey was a smaller, poorer version of New York, comprised of resourceful immigrant families and working-class white natives who all reached their peaks in high school and spent the rest of their lives trying to relive those days. For all intents and purposes, it didn’t seem too dissimilar from my drab reality in the suburbs of Denver — but a world apart, because in New Jersey there were mythical men in sleeveless t-shirts who rode motorcycles and picked up sad, lonely girls in the middle of the night, promising nothing for tomorrow or even for today, except a little hope, life, and if you’re lucky, something real between your legs.

The first album I could get my hands on was Born to Run. The connection wasn’t immediate, the songs were missing something my millennial teenage sensibilities were accustomed to, but I persevered and kept pressing play on my little discman as though it were a lock on a door that if I could just maneuver open would hold an answer. It first latched on with the droning harmonica, next with “Roy Orbison’s singing for the lonely / Hey, that’s me and I want you only / Don’t turn me home again / I just can’t face myself alone again,“ the key met the lock with, “You can hide underneath your covers and study your pain / Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain / Waste your summer praying in vain,” turned a little with, “My car’s out back if you’re ready to take that long walk / From your front porch to my front seat / The door’s open but the ride ain’t free,” and finally jiggled open with, “Oh, someday, girl, I don’t know when / We’re gonna get to that place / Where we really wanna go and / we’ll walk in the sun / But ’til then, tramps like us / Baby, we were born to run.”

With that, the lock was broken. In each ballad composed like an anthem I could taste it so strongly, almost grasping it in front of me: a freedom beyond all the countless invisible, contradictory wars relentlessly encircling and engulfing me as a young girl trying to grow up in America. The war between men and women, the war between rich and poor, moral and immoral, freedom and servitude. Somehow, in the impassioned delirium brought on by his chants, the noises of wars were silenced, if only just for a few moments — finally the sounds of the individual could be heard, and when they did, the loudest voice that emerged was that of men.

Bruce’s men are not moral, but neither are they necessarily immoral. They take wrong turns on the highway, meet a girl at a dive bar, and leave their wife and children forever. They work construction and court underage girls into running away with them until her brothers track them down and throw him in jail. Coming full circle, he simply returns to his manual labor existence to repeat the cycle. They drive south to pick up small-town girls who don’t know any better, luring them with money to spend on a big night and eloquent sweet nothings like, “It’s a long night and tell me what else were you gonna do.” They’re mad and aching and sneak into girls’ houses with bad desires asking if their daddies left them all alone.

Yet in the same breath they give us everything, “Little girl you’re so young and pretty / Walk with me and you can have your way.” They tell us of the edgy, dull knives piercing their souls, the ones they want to take to cut the pain from their hearts. They see through us and tell us to keep the faith, if nothing else but for the sake of it, never overpromising, “Well now, I’m no hero, that’s understood / All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood.” They don’t ask anything in return from us but everything, and nothing in between. They call a spade a spade and know love is tough, challenging us to be rough enough to try it. They bring a hammer and vise to pry open our hearts, knowing all along our elusive qualities, and that, lying deeper below yet, exists a secret garden of Eden, which they can only access by being led by us alone. Still, through it all they question if these roles are real or just a thrown-on fiction, pleading, “God have mercy on the man / Who doubts what he’s sure of.” But without fail in the middle of the night, when the freight trains are coming for their heads, they reach for only us, at last giving us a little promise to take us higher.

And I loved them for all of it. I loved them for their unapologetic freedom, for their life, their movement, their refusal to sit back and watch life pass them by — ready to destroy or cast away anything that blocked their path or forced a reality upon them they could not reconcile. I loved them for their lust, often not directed singularly but expressed as a part of their life force, thus giving it a quality of purity beyond what my world up until then had force-fed me to believe about sexuality. I loved them for their harshness in the face of their fate, so clearly fabricated to withstand a life under constant pressure of class struggles to protect their delicate cores: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true / Or is it something worse?” I loved them for their vulnerability, reflecting back my own torn, bruised, and yearning heart with uncanny perception.

Most of all I loved them for their honesty. Their desire to have their women and leave them too. Their contented reveling in blue-collar living but always demanding more. Their dreams of idyllic homes and families while keeping the car full of gas for a quick escape that could call at any moment. Their howling declarations of love that never go so far as to profess to know what love is or if itself is real. Their unshakable faith and hope in the future which even so doesn’t prevent them from waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night.

Putting on my headphones and listening to Bruce was like flinging off all the raging wars within and without, laying them bare on the tarmac to expose their falsely constructed dichotomies. It was simply as easy as getting dressed up and hitching a ride on the back of one of their suicide machines, to leave all those hopeless, lost battles in the dust. “Together we could break this trap / We’ll run ’til we drop, baby, we’ll never go back.”

Now, decades later, I ask myself again what the missing piece is that his tracks lack which sets them a tone apart from the music released in my lifetime, since the early 90s. To what do I owe the piercing nostalgia and hunger for abandon that floods over me every time I hear him sing? It comes to me that perhaps it’s these very wars, wars which in our globalized, digitized, over- processed, produced, politicized, and polarized world have become impossible to escape in virtually every aspect of our lives. It is the weight of these wars which is missing from Bruce’s music — and the absence of this weight is filled doubly by the expression of the triumph of the present moment.

Bruce’s songs have become synonymous with working-class America, representing an America where men and women take their lot in life but work hard for their moments of stolen freedom and the possibility of a higher freedom that might be attained somewhere out there in the open lands, or by the dirt under their fingernails and the skin of their teeth. They portray the innocence of going to the carnival on a Friday night with your baby, riding all the rides, knowing someday you’ll wear each other’s rings, an all-American summer night — fireworks and freedom, stars and stripes, and making out beneath the bleachers just for the kicks. But they don’t stop there, if you know what to listen for, the darkness at the edge is also revealed, “Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground,” and “I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong / They’re still there, he’s all gone.”

But does this America truly exist? Did it ever? I grew up in this America. I have looked for this America — on the backs of motorcycles, on Greyhound buses, in 24-hour diners, at traveling carnivals, in dark city backstreets, and on cross-country road trips from New England to Tennessee to California and everywhere in between. I’ve searched for it in the faces of gas station attendants, construction crews, church going families, bus drivers, teenagers on the 4th of July, and couples holding hands on boardwalks from Santa Monica to Boston. Even pursuing it on the lips of the sad-eyed man who traveled across the country overseeing the building of service station canopies with whom I shared one too many drinks with due to a delayed flight out of Montana, and in the bed of the Silverado-driving cowboy displaced in Denver, his wife and kids waiting for him back in Oklahoma.

Though I can’t say I ever found it. What I did find, however, was the myth of this America — a mythology constructed and perpetuated by Bruce’s cutting through the red tape of the forced trap of labels, always defining, categorizing, appropriating, branding, and managing. These proliferating systems of our current consumer-driven society which steal our private moments, not simply by demanding our time, but perhaps more significantly by using our attention to manipulate and distort our perceptions with what eventually comes out in the wash as only muck. If we are not diligent and constantly on the watch, the noise can get so loud it rings in our ears long after we’ve turned it off, coming to magnify every moment of our lives through the lens of war — always over-promising and under-fulfilling.

The America Bruce describes I dare say never existed, and still doesn’t exist. Yet it is the myth of it which has the potential to come to our aid, take back our stories, and give us back our freedom through the profound knowing that we were never meant to choose one state of being to the exclusion of the other — to cut through the noise and give us back to ourselves.

Bruce says the dogs on Main Street howl because they understand if we could take one moment into our hands — I say that this is the promise land, the myth, the moment, the myth of the moment. Freedom is allowing oneself to hold all these conflicting paradigms at the same time and bravely declaring them whole, or maybe even just good enough for this moment — then riding into the storm and letting everything “that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground” blow away.