Tougher Than the Rest

If you're rough enough for love/ Baby, I'm tougher than the rest.

- Bruce Springsteen

Well, it’s Saturday night.

The last hours of our beach vacation have drifted away from us. Ragged and sun-whipped, I pick myself up from my chair on the screened in porch overlooking the street and move towards the sliding glass door.

“I’m heading to bed,” I tell Arle.

She doesn’t reply.

There’s no need to really.

There is an air of mellow understanding settled down on this house tonight. It’s as if we both know that the past week was a rare thing indeed in our world and that words here, in the end, can only mess things up.

In my weak knees, I feel the sea bashing up against me. In the curves of her back/ Tuesday’s waves/ and Wednesday’s too/ they keep ramming into her with ancient force. I waver when I rise. It is the sign of something good having happened, I guess. The very Earth has claimed parts of me. Muscle and energy. But in exchange, I am pretty sure that I have earned certain moments that have been burned into Charlie’s mind forever. Or Milla’s maybe. Or Violet or Piper’s. I have boogie-boarded into small legacy status. I have handed out crab cakes like potato chips. I have stood alone behind a kid in the wild Atlantic and smiled as they were eaten alive by full-moonish swells hurling their bodies as if they were already drowned.

At the sliding glass door the Spotify live Springsteen mix goes from an acoustic version of something into the first familiar kick and snare of something more. It’s Tougher Than the Rest. I stop mid-step and stand still. Behind me Arle is sprawled out on the couch, her long legs painted in darkness, only slashes of her face barely visible as weak illuminated strips are war-painted down her left cheek/ running down the one side of her neck.

When it comes to the endless saga of love, we only ever have two chapters to contend with. There is the one chapter written by everyone else who has ever lived. It is the longest chapter by a million miles, crammed with the inspirations and tragedies that have long defined love in the human style. Your grandparents are in there and so are their grandparents. All of your elementary school teachers. Shakespeare. Martin Luther King Jr. The gay peasants suffering madly in the dark of their daddy’s barns. The rich daughters pining for anyone but the one they got. Black folks. White. People from Mongolia and people from California/ all the people/ all the starlit eyes/ all that passion/ the lust fueled by the fires of a trillion suns/ the whispered promises/ the muttered sighs/ the self-cut veins/ the bloody bathtubs/ the forgotten graves and the family Bibles/ all of it/ together/ tells the story of human love in popular form through the eyes and words of people other than you.

The other chapter is yours. Like it or not, your chapter is always narrated only by you and as such, the ebbs and flows of its murky existence stand as a small monument to the most salient days and nights you ever lived through. Unfolding as it is now, in real time- you (with yours) and me (with mine)- we tend to ignore the chapter altogether, not out of some kind of ignorance or fear or whatever, but more out of necessity. Our love is still bashing us like waves/ still pushing us under, tossing our helpless forms over here and over there with locomotive vigor. And so within each of our own chapters we write, largely unconsciously, free from forethought or unnatural influence, about the loves we have found. The ones that got away. The ones that hurt us so immeasurably. The ones that might have happened but never did. And perhaps, if we are lucky, as it goes, the one that emerged out of all that gauzy war smoke to smile sheepishly at us, once upon a time, from across a field of wreckage.

As the first synth notes break through the drumbeat, a recording from long ago climbs up onto the deck of my ship, dripping from so many years adrift. I understand maybe a little bit in that moment, about all of this love coming down on me even as I’m wandering hard and fast across the night streets of my very own life unfolding all around me.

I stop short of the door into the house and I think to myself about this one shot. This one chance to do something I have never done before although I have no idea what that could mean or why it even matters. The chapter of my love is written in blood and piss and sweat; organically spilling down onto the unread pages. Someday maybe someone will stumble upon something I wrote, some notion or dream or regret I had, but probably they won’t. The moment I die, my solo chapter will fall in with the other one/ that collective tale of human love/ and it’s so easy to get lost in there. It’s so common to simply vanish when you show up there at the gates, your little journal in your hands, the four winds whipping across the plains of everyone that has ever loved. Or longed.

I turn around, spin around, retrace my exit, and hold my one hand out to Arle laying there in the humid night. Things are breezeless. In the house the light of the TV hung on the wall lights up the dark room. Piper’s pipsqueak body is stretched out across the cushions, exhausted in the YouTube glow.

I can tell right away that Arle understands what is happening. She rises to my open palm and takes it at the same time. We say nothing but we are muted smiles trying to break through. We are joy playing it cool. Our muted grins right then and there are carved out of space and sky and powers beyond our control.

I put my arms around her and I can feel the body she lives in. We sway together as Bruce begins singing/ his voice cutting across the years now from wherever he was so long ago when some stranger to us hit record in some hockey arena or some football stadium. To me, the nuances of his tone when he sings this one are a departure from any other song he sings. Something resonates deeper. There is a vulnerability and some sort of wisdom all over him when he starts into it.

Many Bruce fans would tell me I’m full of shit.

They don’t hear it, they’d say.

Fuck them.

I hear it loud and clear. So does Arle. We hear it like tornado sirens wailing down the roads at us from dangerous places. We sense it as we move now, as one, away from all the hard years behind us and all the ones yet to come. Every kind of loss is possible when you fall in love, but those are the chances we take. The risk is high for two people dancing slowly in the dark. But the breathing on your shoulder and the fingertips at the nape of your neck, easing up into your hair, tracing your backbone river down the maps of your skin, all serves to remind us that true love is worth it. It is so rare and so worth it.

There are crickets going loud down on the pebbles and broken seashells that people call yards here. Above their music, me and Arle dance to our own favorite singer, to our own favorite song, and down in all of that somewhere, somehow, I manage to pull my neck back so I can see her face as we sway.

It is real beauty, lit by the night, by the faint and distant lamplight of kitchens across the street where families spend their last night, or their first night, in a kitchen they will never own, drinks out on the table, kids running around the room, the radio playing songs that mark the soundtrack to another lovely evening being written by them all. One at a time. Each telling the story a little bit different than the person next to them. All of it bound to fade to black a generation or so from now, when all the survivors are gone, and the kitchen is gone, and the house is even gone, a new one in its place.

The guitar solo comes and my essence/my soul/ my very living breathing godless fire is out of me. It swirls around both of us through a verse and then, as Bruce’s harmonica shoots out of the music and transcends everything that I have ever known as truth, Arle’s inner ghost comes hissing out of her body and twists up with mine and off they go.

Through the trillion dots in the screens and out over this beach town street, our personal electricity holds hands with the other’s. At the edge of the street the ocean below us is rough and tumbling and we swoop down on it as the song begins to crescendo/ the harp not just a harmonica anymore but also something more than that/ the shapeshifting metal urging us forward/ breathing spitty desperate notes into our existence/ a banshee lifting gusts all around us in the sky/ our bodies are formless embers as we go dipping and spraying in all directions at once above the night people down on the sand.

Up, up, up we shoot.

In my arms I feel Arle release her hold on the ground. We have left these Earthly bodies now to take this song into the stars. It feels as good as anything I have ever known. Her head on my shoulder, her hair in my hair, I look out at the sea and down at the world and I can see boats sparkling miles off the shore and highways dotted with slow-moving headlights and the distant glow of cities unseen, far away as the mile goes.

Inside of the final seconds of the song, as Bruce Springsteen plays his harp, takes on the role of some galaxy wind driving us away from the only place we have ever known, I can almost glimpse us from centuries ahead/ our dusted bones/ our rotted watercolors long since seeped into the soil/ our one surviving crushed harmonica rusting, somehow, back in the sprawling roots of a hundred-year-old willow beside a stream that once teemed with wild trout but has now gone dry.

We stretch ourselves upwards like witches of the Sturgeon Moon.

We recognize mountains and cities we once knew exploding on the curving horizon below.

We humble ourselves by letting go of each planetary thread as it pings at its limit, plucking- one by one- the tightly wound strings that once tied us to this place. In the sky turning to space, the rushing blasts of galaxy become holes we burrow into together. We burst out then, of one new surface after another, smiling in awe as we emerge- time after time- into some new endless spiral corkscrewing across things we have never even imagined imagining.

Time, space, light and dark, all of it is forgotten almost at once when the fusion begins. When the union is recognized. Liars and hurters turn to pink mist at the edge of the blue sky. There the past stops forever. Selfish lovers evaporate before they ever set sight on a single star. But for those of us who let ourselves fall into all of this. For those of us who took the chance and believed in something ancient and true, there is a reward far greater than any afterlife could ever be.

The harmonica cuts across a humming stadium and the crowd noise is the crackling of constellations and the drum beat is the casting of one rough day after another until all that is left is the purest version of me and her powering onwards/ rocketing through every sky/ colliding in each other’s twist/ we slow dance on the edge of everything as a SUV rolls down the road below us/ the mosquitos tap quietly at the screens/ and the kids fade off to sleep/ one by one/ behind us in this waning summer dream.

As the song ends, Arle whispers in my ear.

That was my favorite thing ever..

I don’t look down. I squeeze her hand. I clench my eyes. I raise my face into the speeding black forever.

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Hello there. I hope you’re doing well. And I’m hoping you liked this Thunder Pie essay today. It was a FREE one and I am grateful for each and every one of you who subscribes. But if you really enjoy my writing, maybe it’s time to help support it? Paid subscriptions are what enable me to keep doing this. They are a good ass deal too! Just $120 a year or $10 a month for like 47 new essays a year. That’s several books worth for your hard-earned money. I depend on folks like you who ultimately decide to help pay for my art.

But look, if you can’t afford it, don’t sweat it at all. I know what that’s like too. If you want to read me every week and you cannot fork out that kind of dough… email me. I will hook you up with a paid subscription for free. Maybe that will make your world a little bit lighter.

Either way, I’m really glad you showed up here today. Have a great week.

Serge

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Things I Loved This Week.

• Tougher Than the Rest- Springsteen. This version.

• I finished Robert Maxwell’s novel, Time Will Darken It. I don’t know how to explain it to you. It’s a remarkable work/ a masterpiece deeply linked to the very raw roots of love and marriage. I can’t believe I never heard of Maxwell until a few months ago when I stumbled into him completely on my own, by accident. The world is so strange. His writing is incredible.

• Bethany Beach vacation with Arle and the kids was so great. We swam with dolphins, ate way too much, watched the sun rise and the moon rise over the beach, and boogie boarded for hours every day until my body felt pummeled by the mad rough Atlantic. It was all fucking perfect.

• Platonic (TV show/ Apple TV). Arle and I binge-watched this show pretty quickly and we both liked it a lot. I’m a big Seth Rogan fan. I’m not sure why; I just think he’s really funny and clever in unique ways. This series is like a good Justin Apatow flick…and that is solid-ass endorsement in my book.

• Talking with my kid, Violet/Blake, about our lives together. While, at 14, she rarely wants to spend much time discussing anything with me anymore, I still keep trying to engage with my oldest kid. Most of the time it falls flat and it hurts. But sometimes it catches and we find our spark and I see her hear me/ try to let her know I hear her too. I live for those times, whenever they decide to come around.

• Summer peaches. I bought some white peaches at the grocery store yesterday. They are magic. Now is the time. Go. Find. Some.

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Thunder Pie is Edited by Arle Bielanko

Photos: Serge B.

Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com

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