Dancing in the Dark

For Piper, my man.

I was 12 years old in the Philly suburbs when Bruce Springsteen dropped ‘Dancing in the Dark’. It was the first single from his upcoming album, ‘Born in the USA’ which would be released about a month later. All of it just in time for summer. The summer of ‘84. The summer of Burger King air-conditioning after a long bike ride across dangerous ground. Google Maps tells me it was 1.6 miles on a bike and took 9 minutes. That is utter bullshit. That ride took a lot longer than that. It took hours. It was miles and miles from home.

The song from Springsteen kicked off what probably amounted to the most important season of music I have ever lived through. My entire system was primed for the touch of the raw sizzling wire that hit me that summer. Everyone has a season like that and for a lot of people I imagine it happens across a summer way more than it happens across a spring or fall or winter. It was as if I had been waiting for the moment all my life and never even knew it. The radio. MTV. Sam Goody and Wee-Three Records at the mall. ‘Born in the USA’ didn’t land gracefully like some lost little private plane outside my house on the sticky icky tar of early summer Forrest Street. It came down like a Russian 747, starting a half mile away, touching down up around Bishop Kenrick High School and bouncing down, violently, with all the pure Hollywood rapscallionism of a drunken lovable pilot smoking cigarettes as he lands Indiana Jones style in the middle of the goddamn jungle. Trees got decimated and all the power lines were raked down. Everybody’s parents big battleship cars and pick-ups were bashed and crushed and set ablaze by the sheer immensity of the presence of this thing. The world/ MY WORLD/ was scorched Earth after I heard that first song that first time. It was probably on WMMR. Or maybe I saw the video first. The world premier. Sitting there with my brother and my friend John, after school Big Gulps trickling sweat down into our crotches/ we would have been enraptured by this thing/ this new Bruce Springsteen song/ this first time for us to really be dialed in to a Bruce Springsteen just for us.

I suppose that how we first encounter a thing can have great effect on where the thing continues to sit with us for the rest of our lives. Sense of place and specific circumstances meld. No two moments have ever matched in the history of life and that alone is beyond all comprehension. Whoever else might have been tuned in to the very first airing of ‘Dancing in the Dark’ at the exact same moment as me and my gang, they might have had similar feelings/ similar surroundings/ and all that as we were having right there in real time Conshohocken on that Wednesday in May when the song first went from being something extremely private passed around between Columbia Records and the Springsteen camp to a bird uncaged/ a window opened/ and off you go forever and ever. Anyone else listening right when we were listening for the first time would have been experiencing a unique, and possibly intense, memory imprint being formed in their own cellar. And then years later, even if they forgot where they were or who they were with when they first heard it, they still could not (and would not want to) shake the sense that for the rest of their lives: that one song smelled like sunblock. Or late lunch hoagie. Or the balmy pleasant air of Bridgeport or Manayunk or Plymouth Meeting gushing hard through the rolled down window of a car they were riding in under a once-in-a-lifetime sky that was breaking apart even as the first synth notes rolled out of the radio and into their bones and tendons and veins with all the savage wonder of a massive jet coming to a stop right out front the house.

_____

Back when school first let out, my kids went down the shore and it was just me and Arle and her kids. Milla is 12, and Piper is 9, and they are also my kids now too, I’m proud to say. But they are my step-kids and so it means that sometimes I feel their vibes coming at me like I feel the vibes off my own bio crew, but then sometimes I don’t. It isn’t anything I am or am not doing, I don’t think. It’s just science. It’s humanity at its core. We can love all kids we come across, and maybe they might even love you back, but the love isn’t guaranteed. It is earned through a real show of strength and humility and patience and confusion on your part. It is hard, hard work, step-parenting, and few ever get it right.

But this one evening, just the four of us in the yard, I think I was messing with the fire pit when I saw that Arle was putting up the Wal-Mart tents. We’d bought them back during Covid: cheap gear but very usable in the yard. It had been some time since I saw them but immediately I understood. We were trying to give Milla and Piper a couple staycation days while my kids were on a legit shore trip.

It was cool, I thought. Seeing Arle diligently make the tents come alive was calming somehow. And seeing how excited Piper seemed to be about the whole possibility was exhilarating. There was this weird and rare committed energy about him that isn’t always easy to detect with kids. He was dragging his shit from the house the moment tent #1 was ready for habitation. And by the time tent #2 was up, he’d made several trips in and out of the house already. He had a sleeping bag and a pillow and his big Jack Skellington plushie and an extra blanket. He emerged from one trip back to the house in Minecraft pajamas and that’s when I knew that something was unfolding here right before my eyes.

_____

Some people don’t like ‘Dancing in the Dark’ (DITD). They say they hate the 80’s synths and the dance-y aura of the whole thing. Of course, I know the lay of the land here. There are always going to be people who want what they want, not what creators necessarily create. Entitlement runs rampant through America’s bloodstream. Many people have become convinced that their minds are the word of God/ that their likes and desires and viewpoints are the right ones.

Lucky for me, I figured that out about a couple years ago and ever since then, I have felt very, very comfortable in my unabashed love of DITD. For me, it isn’t purely a nostalgia thing, although as you can tell: there is that too. Instead, I just have to tell you that I think the tune is one of Bruce’s best because I think it might be one of the most honest things he ever wrote. This isn’t to say I believe he was bullshitting us a lot when he wrote his other stuff. I don’t think that at all. However, there were a lot of times when he was walking out towards the fence lines of what he actually knew. There, like most prolific writers, he mined the visual and presented it as experience. Within the imaginations of certain types, there are crossover galaxies where the mind, I believe, can actually dream so hard and deep that it can time travel your ass. Or drag you into the skull of another for just a few moments, so that you can close your eyes and smell the flame-broiled burgers in the air-conditioned blast and be transported into my head even if you have never been me in your life.

Does that ring true with you? It’s okay if it doesn’t. Not everyone sees stuff like me.

Either way though, this first single off of the album that would catapult Springsteen and his band into the furthest stratosphere available to 20th century entertainers, it has always stood out to me as being special. Maybe it’s the timbre of the singer’s voice: although I can’t really pinpoint any specific differences therein. He sounds like Bruce on the track. He doesn’t try to stray his voice too far from the well-worn road he’d been on for a long time at that point. So maybe it’s the lyrics… the way the narrator is telling you how he feels in the the first person. Again, not a thing Bruce hadn’t done many times before, and many would say he’d done it better then.

What the fuck is it then?

I’m frustrated sitting here at this old MacBook. My screen is dirty from sneezes and coffee and the letters on a lot of my keyboard have smudged away to nothing. I feel at home here though. As home as any home I’ve ever known. Why then can’t I understand my desire to hold DITD up to the communal light of public opinion? Why do I love the song so much more than so many other hardcore Springsteen fans? It isn’t to be different. I don’t give a shit about that at this age.

I just want to hear it over and over again. His version, not somebody’s dumb hushed cover of it. I just want to feel like I felt when I was a kid, alone in a crowd. Husky, horny, headed for the dugout after striking out.

Everything was impossible to understand when I was young. But everything was also pretty easy to just live through.

I saw Piper looking out of his tent at me.

He did this thing he does sometimes/ catches me looking at him/ me smiling at him like I’m thinking of fucking with him. He held his one hand up and moved his trigger finger west and east/ east and west/ like Dikembe Mutombo’s brilliant Geico commercial ‘No No No’s’.

His eyes lock with mine then and he is a young man shot up with the kind of confidence he doesn’t always exhibit. I love him so much in the throes of that moment. He looks like his mom, who I think he stole it from.

“No, no, no. You can’t come into my tent. Stay out there in your old man world.”

There’s something happening somewhere.

Right now: it’s right here.

But I can’t find the words!

I punch this fucking keyboard!

_____

_____

Two tents.

One holds a boy. The other: his sister.

I am in an Adirondack chair twenty feet away.

They zip up and disappear into a world I am not invited to.

I drink a slug of wine from my jelly jar.

Our beat up cars are behind me past the fire wood.

Life comes pummeling down on us. It’s the smashing and the shrapnel bursts. It’s the thunderstorm of a century but the birds are singing in the fading sky. Lightning bugs begin to flash and the vultures are coming back over the town/ easy high circles and floating together. I wonder who I am. How I got here. If I matter much at all.

*****

You sit around gettin' older
There's a joke here somewhere and it's on me
I'll shake this world off my shoulders
Come on, baby, the laugh's on me

*****

Once again, I see the witch heading for its roost.

She is many but casts only one shadow.

Look at her, I mumble to myself.

Look at her as she flies over me all slow like, menacing me, cackling down, barely blowing along towards the towering hemlocks up by the township building where I think she fucking sleeps.

_____

A part of me had suspected that Arle’s 1990’s kid notions would be wasted (again) on our modern young. To me, the outdoors often seemed more and more distant from their collective consciousness. Last year the two with iPhones had separated themselves from the creek and the trampoline and rarely left the confines of the house itself to venture out into the so-called real world. But the youngest three, without the cell phones strapped around their necks like battleship anchors, they continued to move freely in and out of the house. Yes they laid on the couch watching YouTube or One Piece for hours on end, but you could always count on them asking for permission to go use the rope swing/ swim in Elk Creek. They still liked to run around the yard screaming and laughing. In the back of my mind though, I knew it wouldn’t last.

Scratching and saving every penny we could, we made their Christmas wishes come true at the holidays by being able to give the phoneless each an iPad. It was all they had asked for, but we knew the price to pay. And sure enough: this spring rolled around and there was little interest in a sunny day/ practically no pleading with us to let them head to the creek.

So we both take delight in this unfolding here in the yard. It’s all Arle’s idea and it fits her quiet love strength to a T. She doesn’t talk about a campsite for the kids/ she doesn’t bullshit about it from a bar stool or on a group chat or whatever. She just heads up to the attic with the hornets and the bats and she drags down the tents and off she goes. Making something out of almost nothing, seeing if it just might stick.

Piper’s excitement seems to carry over to Milla and they both spend that first night with tents up, camping out back under the endless stars that scream to be noticed from behind the obscene street light that ruins everything in the church parking lot.

_____

I have these streaky days, just like anyone else who digs music a lot, where I’ll play one song in my car over and over again like 20 or 30 times. These are odd times, but probably necessary for certain kinds of minds. The immersion of a song into our total existence happened more long ago than it does these days for most people around my age. And that alone, the connection between a living human body and a song heard for the first time in life: it’s both fascinating and kind of inexplicable (as I’ve struggled to exhibit to you here today).

Where does that magic go? Is it a reflection of our controllable selves that we age and are hit less and less by the impact of hearing something we fall in love with?

If I heard ‘Dancing in the Dark’ later this afternoon for the first time… as in… it had never existed before and no one had ever heard it before today… would it capture my spirit like it did way back then?

Or would I shrug it off more or less? Would I critique it a little/ run it down through my experienced semi-jaded antique hipster machine in order to unconsciously annihilate all possibilities of further connection between it and me? Is there some kind of hidden emotional agenda living down in the crevices of our grown-up cultural tastes?

I don’t know. I have no clue. I only know that most of us love what we loved long ago. And we kind of like just tolerate what came after.

Sometimes I wonder: if you are one of those people who is super caught up on all kinds of new artists and new music and you are in your 50’s and you relish in unheard of bands even now, many moons past when you first entered the clubs in the cities and were filled with unstoppable lust and hope and hunger: is that good or bad?

And why? Or how? Or like, does it even matter to wonder that shit. Or am I simply trying to understand the tragedy of time, lovely as she is.

Afternoon school bus disappearing down the street.

3pm kids, raising happy hell, disappearing down the street.

_____

After the first night, Milla bails on the tents for the indoors again. I find her asleep on the couch with the TV on in the morning. She’d gone to be in her tent the second night, but I guess it didn’t stick.

After I feed the dogs, I clip them to their leashes and head out the back door. The grass is wet from the retreating dark. I hook the dogs to their outside lines and I move towards the tents. Milla’s is unzipped and empty, but Piper’s is sealed up. There is a sense of wonder then, like what will it be like? Will he be awake out here this early?

I unzip the flap quietly, slowly, and I peer inside. The light is dim and grey but still illuminating through the walls. There’s a cluster of fairy lights Arle had hung for her son here too/ above everything/ clamped or tied somehow to the highest point of the round roof. Piper is covered almost entirely by the sleeping bag and blankets he’d drug out here himself. His iPad is powered off/ it lays silent/ like it’s dead/ on the ground to his left. There are some empty snack wrappers and I am moved by that. He had snacks out here. Probably Arle made sure he had some. I see a drained juice pouch too. It dawns on me that I am being overrun by sentiment. By deep orchestral pulls that fill me with some kind of joy or presence that I don’t think I feel all that often anymore.

The tent reeks of new plastic still, a sign that it’s promise hasn’t been so fulfilled yet. But still, Piper’s face is absolute peace. His teeth show like roadkill but he is more alive than ever before. Moving through some other realm just now, my stepson’s mighty spirit is separate from his tiny bones. Where he is, I imagine, he is likely taller, stronger. Where he is, I hope to myself, he is running along a wooded creek, holding a homemade spear, and chasing after a boar or a bear or a mountain cat running for it’s life.

I pull my head out of his world because it’s the very least I can do.

I zip the tent up quietly again.

I head back towards the house. I’m a little plane off course. I fly over the vast wet grass sea, over tiny dog shit islands, and I’m feeling fragile and strange and unsure what comes next.

The tent remains at my back, like some mountain at the edge of the world.

I wonder how many more times I’ll see a thing like that.

_____

_____

Of all the music that came out in the 1980’s, I still think I like Dancing in the Dark maybe the best. The whole album remains a favorite of mine. It’s resiliency in my world is likely due to a lot of factors. I was ripe for the taking at the age I first heard it. I was a sharp kid, eager to be seen as such, but I was also rudderless, without any father figure in my world. Music meant everything to me back then. I stood at the front doors of rock/roll and I believed with all of my heart that it could be a thing that guided me across the decades to come. I also assumed my passion for it would never wane. But I was wrong about that, I guess.

Fires go out, but cinders remain. Even if they no longer burn in your eyes, what we once held dear to us at certain young ages, I think it lives on within us even when things we seemed to have been just as wild about later on in life kind of fade away a bit. The waves, as you know, never let up. Ever. And so the coast of me and the coast of you are both washing away every couple seconds.

If that notion makes you uncomfortable, that’s not at all what I’m going for here. And I’d like to try to turn that into something else if you’ll let me. See, all of this passing time/ all of this getting older/ all of these silly ways we try so hard to pretend it isn’t happening/ to be 64 years old but to look and act much younger or whatever/ there’s like no real poetry in it all, you know? There’s only true sadness to be found in the old desperately clinging to the past. Because that’s what you run from so desperately when you try to stay young. Or youngish. You flee the burning cities of time marching on. You attempt- naturally, I might add- to recapture something that is mostly gone. And that is a real reason to be sad.

I understand that. I really do. None of us want this thing to end.

Piper in his tent dream.

You in your pipe dream.

Springsteen in the mirror/ young/ unsatisfied/ even that reflection is now long gone.

Me in my chair by the fire pit, too worn out to even make a fire.

_____

You can't start a fire
You can't start a fire without a spark
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancin' in the dark

____

When I hear the song now, I am transported both backwards and forwards. The past, my past/ it rises up all around me for a short time and I hold it tightly/ I hold the boy I was like I would hold one of my kids now should they need me/ I can feel the ribs through the back/ the pulse of my small heart/ the strong lungs that I had drawing in and out to live. And ahead of me, any days to come/ I recognize them and I reach for them carefully but also eagerly/ hungrily/ because I know what I know now/ and I know that this raging sense of fury at my impending fate has always been with me/ like a curse/ like a curse all of us carry from the cradle to the grave/ this unfathomable injustice/ this lingering specter/ this knowledge that even in life unfolding, we are running out of time.

On the surface of things, this Springsteen verse speaks succinctly of our own humbled humanity by telling of our never-ending love hate relationship with our true selves.

Messages keeps gettin' clearer
Radio's on and I'm movin' 'round my place
I check my look in the mirror
Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain't gettin' nowhere
I'm just livin' in a dump like this
There's somethin' happenin' somewhere
Baby, I just know that there is.

But underneath all of that. Underneath all of these lyrical omnishambles that I am attempting to sell you here today based on not much but my own sweet life, there is, I’m sure of it, something else. Something more.

There is a yearning.

The yearning.

You know it.

We wanted everything.

And we never came close.

Except that we did.

But it was too late when we finally understood.

_____

Piper stayed four nights in the tent. One with his sister beside him, the other three all on his own. He is scrawny. He is cool. He loves his mama and I think he likes me. He is nine. Some might say that is bad parenting, letting him sleep out there alone, but I don’t think so. He has his story to tell now for the rest of his life. I think it will stay with him. I think it will end up being one of the grandest memories across a long lifetime of them.

Each night, Arle and I would lay there and try to imagine what his world was like down there. But it was no use, and I knew that. His head, his mind, the way his brain works and navigates and imagines, it is his own and his alone. The buried treasure of this life is just that and it always has been. Our imaginations could have us hightailing it into the house for a million different reasons. But if we play them right, and learn to use them to our perpetual advantage, then our deep dreaming minds, awake or asleep, can also prove to be the most magnificent weapon against the horrors this world might throw at us. Or the blues we throw at ourselves.

I saw this first hand for the first time in a while when Piper lived in a tent in our yard for while this summer. It ended just as breezily as it all began. Night five came along and he moved back into the house He didn’t explain it, he didn’t answer our questions. We were so proud but I’m not sure that it mattered to him all that much in the end. He’d gone to the tent for some wild primal reason, perhaps. Or maybe for some gentler more vulnerable modern one, who knows. He sure as hell didn’t know why he wanted that life for a time. But he did.

He knew he needed something more, something other than what he had. And when that tent appeared and his mom waved her hand at it, beckoning her boy to crawl inside, something clicked and it all made sense. Into a rocket ship. Into a submarine. Into a groundhog’s den. Into a ghost’s cottage at the edge of the yard.

He didn’t think about it. He only hungered for more.

And so he took a big leap for a kid.

And he won all of space and time as a prize.

_____

When I was a kid, that summer, 1984, I rode my Mongoose to other towns, to far off Wawa’s and video stores, not so much because I needed what they had, but more because I needed to get away from the safe world I had been given. I wanted adventure, I longed for danger. It’s been the same all down the line.

Pirates. Soldiers. Explorers. Dumb asses who climb Everest. The world is immense and it whispers at us constantly. Soon you will be nothing. For me, the words to songs began to help me understand, at a young age, that there is a universal commodity we are all hoping to trade in. We want to understand why we ended up here. And if we did it good.

You can't start a fire
Worryin' about your little world fallin' apart

So I would thrash my pedals, sweat dripping down my forehead and my cheeks, looking back sometimes to see if my brother and our friends were still there. They always were. Until one day they were not. And far from home, I looked in some mirror and I saw this face that was not mine at all.

And so it goes.

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Hope you felt something reading Thunder Pie today (Y or N ?). If you did… and if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet… please consider becoming one.

You’ll receive brand new writing from me every Friday morning. And you’ll be supporting an artist at the most grassroots level possible. Thanks so much. Have an excellent week. Try to stay cool out there!

Serge

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Edited by Arle Bielanko. Subscribe here: Letter to You by Arle.

Photos/ Art: SergeB. Except ‘dancing in the dark marker' and ‘night tents.’ by Arle Bielanko.

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Things I Liked This Week.

• This song/ for the 2,096th week in a row.

• Every now and then I need to remind my fellow Springsteen people that there exists, out there in YouTube Land, this short clip of home video footage of Bruce and Clarence practicing their moved for the Dancing in the Dark video. Damn. This thing is so charming/ Bruce is so young and relaxed and having fun...unlike the narrator of the song. I love that juxtaposition. Honestly, it is way way better than the actual video that aired on MTV, in my humble opinion.

• The Bear /Season 3/ Hulu. I mentioned this last week but I’m doing it again because the episodes toward the end of the season (which we’ve just been watching the last few nights) are pretty fantastic.

• Me and Henry went fishing over at Poe Valley Lake this week. Just the two of us on a sweltering evening when the burnt out sky was threatening storms, but they missed us back in the forest. We caught a few bluegills, yeah. But more importantly, we sat and talked and I watched him from afar as he tried to interest a largemouth into smashing his lures. Life is so fucking short in a way. Watching your kids fishing down the bank is as close to understanding the meaning of it all as I’ve ever come so far. Real love lives in the nightcrawlers and the gas station soda.

• Earlier this week, The New York Times ran an Opinion piece from James Carville titled Biden Won’t Win. Democrats Need a Plan. Here’s One. I thought it was a breath of fresh air in an increasingly suffocating room. Which probably means that all of the electrified ideas Carville mentions will never come to light, since anything inspiring or daring (god forbid) is a big no-no for the staggering Democratic dinosaur party. Whatever. This time next year, we’ll see where we all stand. :/

• My wife Arle has been working seriously hard this summer. As she juggles her regular day job with her real passion (making art to sell at pop-ups). This weekend, localish people venturing out for all the cool arty events can come find her (and me!) at the incredible Art in the Orchard event. For three days (Thurs Fri Sat/ July 11-13) ), an old Central Pennsylvania apple orchard is transformed into a really unique gathering of makers and creators and musicians and food trucks. So I just wanted to end this thing by telling Arle this in front of all you folks. “I see you, baby. You are KILLING it. Have fun this weekend… out there where you truly belong. And don’t stop.”

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from far off, he could hear the cannons starting in.