Unrequited Infatuations

Overture

The distant music speeds up and slows down like vinyl on a warped turntable, holding, then yielding to the wind’s caress, as the soft tinkle of breaking glass and tired car horns recede into the mysterious absence of light that becomes the exotic toxic wasteland beyond the city line, and the echoes of drunken revelry pass through their nightly metamorphosis, transformed on our soundtrack into the leaves softly rustling on the terrace, where on this particularly chilly December night in Greenwich Village our hero contemplates his fate.

It’s a vagrant winter and you can’t sell consciousness.

Nobody’s buying it.

Hell, you can’t even give it away!

Is what I’m hearing the icy wind blowing through the dead grey streets? Or are those echoes the sound of ridicule?

Once upon a time, consciousness was hard to come by, and nobody was buying it then either.

Information was rationed out by the clergy, witch doctors, power-drunk elders. People we foolishly trusted to do the understanding and interpret life for us.

Every hundred years or so, somebody would have a revelation and try to share it. They would usually be excommunicated, confined to asylums, or burned at the stake by our grateful society.

Who dug the Buddha when he was around? A bunch of poor homeless acolytes who hoped to someday actually understand what the hell the pleasantly plump man was talking about?

Who’d Jesus have? A dozen guys and an ex-hooker or two?

Socrates and Robert Johnson both got the same reward for their insights. A final toast from the Loving Cup.

No, my friend, you better come with something better to sell than truth.

Something we can use.

Like war, taxes, government, long tiring meaningless work, the phony scorecard of Wall Street, sexual frustration, suffering, false hope, disease, guns, drugs, gasoline, agribusiness, fear, booze, poison, hatred. Give us someone to blame. Fill the vacuum of our spiritual bankruptcy with religion.

We’ll buy any and all of that. Speak to us condescendingly as children so we understand. There’s a pandemic of stupidity, so no one will notice.

We will follow you anywhere.

Parents, teachers, priests, doctors, politicians, philosophers, poets, artists, gods, Lord Almighty, Holy Spirit, are your obligations so diminished?

Your offspring need suckling and you are busy doing what?

December’s Children are orphans.

It’s a vagrant winter and you can’t sell consciousness.

Prologue

Silence.

He was under a blanket in the back of the car on the floor in the crazy spooky silence.

Nobody spoke. No radio. Just the lazy hum of the motor, and him alone with his thoughts. And ooh daddio, that was not his favorite thing.

His two coconspirators were sneaking him past the military blockade into the black township of Soweto. The “native unrest,” as the government liked to call it, erupted every few years, but lately it had become more frequent, and now, constant.

Not coincidentally, the police had become less dependable. They had mixed feelings about beating their own family members and neighbors at demonstrations or turning their backs as people they knew ended up tortured and occasionally murdered in prison.

The government, no longer able to trust the police, had in an unprecedented move brought in the military. They were stationed at every checkpoint in and out of the massive ghetto. Not to protect the inhabitants, but to keep them contained for more convenient slaughter once constructive engagement gave way and the bloodshed levee broke. Tension was at an all-time high. It was no time to be the wrong color in the wrong place. Hence the under-the-blanket thing.

The seemingly endless township had no electricity, so a thick fog of fuel oil and coal smoke hung four feet off the ground, making the mystery and sense of imminent danger even more pronounced. It felt like a Twilight Zone ride at a Dostoevsky Disneyland. Or a Star Trek landing party where he was the expendable crew guy in the wrong uniform. In this case the wrong uniform was his white skin, dig?

Every country smelled different. In South Africa, the sweet scent of the jacaranda, cane, and banana trees was cut by an occasional breeze that carried traces of an acrid stench, a mix of burning rubber and human flesh that came from tires filled with gasoline, forced on perceived traitors, and lit as a means of execution.

They called it necklacing.

There was also, in the combination of the intoxicating beauty and smoldering hatred, the distinctive scent of revolution. And he loved every scary crazy exhilarating minute of it, baby.

A final showdown was coming and he had a ringside seat.

He was on his way to a very secret and very illegal meeting with the most violent sect of the South African Revolution, the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO). The plan was to learn how they thought and hopefully gain their endorsement for the strategy he’d come up with to aid their liberation.

In 1984 South Africa, it was illegal for three black men to congregate in the same place at the same time. Illegal for anyone to suggest support for the cultural boycott, especially Blacks (as they were legally designated). And a capital crime to have a gun or to consort with anyone who did.

He was about to violate all of the above.

AZAPO were frontline soldiers, heroes to the struggling masses, terrorists in the eyes of the government.

What he hadn’t planned on was that in one hour’s time he’d not only be criticizing their strategy for revolution, but making the case for why they should let him live.

How the fuck did a half-a-hippie guitar player get here?

For seven glorious years, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were Rock and Roll’s Rat Pack, and he happily and naturally played the Dean Martin role.

If you were even thinking of throwing a party, you called him. That was the extent of his politics. He was the fun guy. The court jester. Always good for a laugh. Sex, booze, drugs, Rock and Roll, and… more sex. Yo bartender, another round for the house!

A whole lot had to go sideways to find him under that blanket.

And yet it was all perfectly logical that a Rock and Roller from New Jersey would be risking imprisonment and death. Logical to his new mind. New mind because he had become a different guy.

He’d worked night and day with the E Street Band, proudly contributing to making them the biggest and best in the world. Then, in a moment of clarity (or insanity, take your pick), he had left the band to discover who he was and how the world worked. It was now or never, he knew. Once you take that road to being rich, there ain’t no going back. The rich had too much to lose. He chose to take the adventure instead of the money.

What a putz.

Early on in his crazy new journey, he’d made a surprising discovery. He’d found that with proper research he could analyze and find a solution to virtually any political problem, no matter how complicated. Of course, implementing the solution was another matter entirely, but all he was trying to do was collect research to write some songs. At least at first.

He had always known that he had the talent of improving things when it came to art. A song, an arrangement, a lyric, a production. You name it. For years, for others, he had made bad into good, good into great, and great into greater.

It wasn’t all roses, by any means.

Even in art, this ability to fix and improve things was both a gift and a curse.

The gift part was obvious.

The curse was twofold. For starters, most people didn’t want advice, no matter what they said. They wanted to think they could figure things out themselves. Sometimes they pretended to listen and then ignored the advice. It was also a tough way to make a living, in that it depended on others driving the wagon while he kept the wheels greased, occasionally leaping off to make repairs.

And then there was the biggest drag, which was that he had never been able to apply this beautiful logic to his own life. The frustrations of business constantly drew him away from the pleasures of Art. No matter how he fought it, the delusional devil down inside him was still waiting for that magical, mystical patron who should have shown up by now if they were coming at all.

When he found out that his ability extended beyond art, that it carried into the real world, it came as quite a shock. He considered himself half a moron who had barely managed to finish high school. Not to mention his mind’s normal state, which, when not actively doing something, was a chaotic combination of frustration, impatience, self-hatred, or preoccupation with artistic and philosophical puzzles.

That’s why artists became artists, wasn’t it? To make order out of the chaos? To impose a rationale on the irrational? To answer the unanswerable questions? To create a structure that provided shelter from the contradictory tornados that constantly ravage the mind? Or was it all revenge? Best not go there, he thought. It risked emotional indulgence.

But this new insight, this awareness that he could focus his talent on the larger problems of the world, taught him that his destiny, at least for the foreseeable future, was to be a political Rock Artist.

And not in the way Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Graham Nash, and John Hall were political. They were heroes. On the front lines. His interest, at least at first, was journalism. Combining his art and journalism. The way Bob Dylan did as a Folk artist. He would be the first to make art about political problems all the time, with every individual song relating to a bigger theme on every album. Nobody had done that, not on a regular basis.

Why not?

Well, first of all, everybody else was too intelligent. It was a career-ending move, and they knew it. He didn’t care. In the heat of self-discovery, a career was the last thing on his mind. This blind naivete would turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He was interested only in the adventure of learning. His life had started over again, and he had become a seeker. He was in search of truth to absorb, of lies to expose. He was making up for everything he hadn’t learned in school and maybe, just maybe, justifying his existence in the process.

When he had embarked on his solo career, he had outlined five albums that handled five different kinds of political problems.

But things had gotten more complicated when his creative passion and his practical research were combined and he was drawn into the real-world issues he was writing about.

South Africa was the best example.

The challenge of the remainder of his life was crystallizing on that back-seat floor.

The car slowed down for a moment, then sped back up. Had they been waved through the checkpoint? It was his second trip to South Africa trying to complete the research for his third solo album.

He should have felt fear under that blanket. But he didn’t. All fear had left his being.

He realized it on the long flight from New York. He’d never liked flying. Always a bit squeamish about the turbulence. Suddenly it hit him. He was over it.

He was over it because he’d blown it. He’d worked his whole life to achieve the impossible dream of being a Rock and Roll star. And just as he’d finally, miraculously made it, he had walked away.

From the moment on the plane when he let go of his fear, suicide would be his constant companion and temptation. No longer fearing death, it turned out, was an asset. It let him go places and observe them without giving a fuck about his own safety.

He’d lost his band, his best friend, his career, his way of making a living. Everything. Why? Just to pursue some abstract idea of justifying his existence?

He still wasn’t even sure about being a front man. He happened to be quite natural at it, but he just didn’t need it. All great front men needed the spotlight. The adoration. The endorsement. The reassurance. The completion of something missing in their souls.

He needed some of those things, but not as much, and not in the traditional way. When he was a kid and fantasized about being in his favorite bands, he was never the front man. He was George in the Beatles, Keith in the Stones, Dave in the Kinks, Jeff in the Yardbirds, and Pete in the Who.

He liked to watch people, to sit at a sidewalk café and just be. All of that vanished when you were in front. You were crowded all the time. You couldn’t observe if you were constantly being observed. It brought out his claustrophobia.

And yet here he was, in front, but also under a blanket in back. It was a strange state he’d gotten to. And yet surprisingly liberating. He had an unusual clarity. He felt like he’d finally discovered what he was born to do.

And so, like every mythological Greek hero in denial of the inevitable tragic results, he had set off on his quest. His odyssey. Relentlessly, calmly, and, yes, fearlessly, irrationally determined to fulfill it.

The car stopped.

They were… where? All the houses looked the same. Eight members of the executive council of AZAPO, machetes in their waistbands, waited inside to put him on trial.

He looked up from the mist, impenetrable, township shrouded in doom, into the crystal clear African sky. Is this where life began? Or was this where it all ended?

The eternal spirit of the world’s original motherland was whispering in his ear.

Destiny awaits!

He smiled to his companions to calm their nerves. Shrugged with acceptance.

And walked in…