On Springsteen, Sandy, and Unintentional Irony.

1. Dusty Arcades

It’s fascinating to me that the young tend to have as great penchant for nostalgia as the old. Perhaps greater: I’ve never felt so nostalgic as I did at the age of eighteen, graduating high school and leaving behind Oregon for the huge world that awaited me in Los Angeles. Nevermind that I hated high school; nevermind that I was escaping a repressive Catholic school and heading to a place that DFW once called “the land of the 1600 SATs”; nevermind that it rained the day I left. I’ve never been old, but as my parents advance in age, I don’t see in them any particular desire to dwell in the past, at least not more than they already did.[1] {follow link for footnotes}

Bruce Springsteen must have been 22 or 23 when he wrote “Sandy”, which may be the most beautifully, poignantly nostalgic song ever written.[2] God, it’s spectacular. “Me, I just got tired / of hanging in them dusty arcades / banging on them pleasure machines,” the narrator tells us, but it’s clear that he misses it dearly, even as he’s preparing to leave: there are fireworks, a tilt-a-whirl, psychics, cops, “silly New York virgins” — and the key, his ex-girlfriend, who used to be “that girl you saw bopping on the beach with a radio”, but now is “dressed like a star / in one of them cheap little seaside bars”: oh, he misses her all right.

The young leave youth reluctantly, slower than they realize. When I was actually a child, I was desperate to be an adult — all I wanted was to drive a car and go to a job and be able to Be In Charge of Myself. As I was meant to become an adult, I suddenly felt the urge to scramble back, back, back: back to the safety of rules set by parents and teachers; back to the easy comraderie of Little League; back to the old neighborhood, the old room under the fir tree and the old obsessions — which, though unhealthy, were familiar, comfortable. Yeah, I was tired of hanging in the dusty arcades of my adolescence, but I was going to miss them, too.

2. The Aurora Is Rising Behind Us

When I feel nostalgia these days, it’s for New York City. I moved there in search of a world that wouldn’t die on me; unlike when I was 18, and left Oregon facing backwards, this time I charged away, as if launched out of a rocket, desperate to escape a place that had become a trap of bad memories. New York, I found, was constant: it thumped like a heart, and people flowed through it like blood. I lived in Brooklyn, and in my building lived a centenarian woman from Grenada who spent every summer day out front with her nurse, watching the world pass by — schoolkids in their uniforms, hipsters in their skinny jeans, gangbangers in their giant clothes, recent arrivals from afar in their dress that in almost every other spot in America would seem strange but there is normal for being weird. One day, it occurred to me that she must have been born a British subject: was she still? I never asked.

When Sandy came to New York, she flooded Red Hook, Gowanus, Alphabet City, Battery Park. I happened to live on a hill when I was there, not far from the crest of Fort Greene Park, from which one could look out over the Manhattan skyline and become overwhelmed with vertigo. My building was fine, but that doesn’t mean my home was untouched. My home wasn’t the rooms I haunted; it was the streets I walked, the bodegas I wandered into when out running, the Ghanan soccer games I watched, leaning on my bike, while an Australian girl who didn’t quite love me bought a bottle of water from a Guatemalan guy toting a cooler that had been made in Malaysia. It was my brother’s apartment in the East Village, which was flooded so deep that I could have swum into his downstairs neighbor’s window. It was the melting pot of the subterranean New York cricket scene, where Kiwis and Trinidadians and South Africans and Indians come together to play the dullest, most stultifying[3] game devised by man.

Sandy buried that. She washed the ocean, poisoned with all the shit[4] of nine million souls locked together in an unparseable heartbeat of humanity, up over the soccer fields, the cricket pitches, the intersection of 14th Street and 1st Avenue. It’s hard to describe the kind of incredulity a person feels when he knows his home is underwater but can’t see it for himself: it’s ineffable. New York is constant. How could it drown?

It didn’t drown, of course. It was altered, in some sense, permanently — but, too, the city cannot be defeated by one hurricane. It is a testament to what is huge and beautiful about humanity — the collective beat of the human heart is damn near impossible to halt. It would take a nuclear bomb.

3. On the Boardwalk Way Past Dark

If you live long enough, and loud enough, eventually your life will grow riddled with unintentional ironies. We all live on a bedrock of accumulated assumptions, the best guesses we have about the nature of the world. I can remember, when I was a teenager, complaining that the world I lived in was boring: oh God, I was a Gen Xer in those days, disillusioned with the adversarial dialectic of the Baby Boomers, but equally disenchanted by the lack of activity born of wealth and complacency. It was the 90s and I was still a kid, that’s my only real excuse.

I sometimes yearn for that boredom now. We all know what has happened since then: 9/11, war, Katrina, political schism, financial collapse. I remember in September of 2001 being aware that, for the first time in my conscious life, things were bad, and they were only going to get worse. And worse they got, for years and years after. Worse they are. What I wouldn’t give for a country in which the biggest problem was a Presidential sex scandal. The boredom I felt when things were good now seems not only ironic, but sickly so.

“You know the cops finally busted Madame Marie / for telling fortunes better than they do.”

Those are lines from “Sandy”.[5] I assume you see where I’m going with this. Springsteen wrote the most powerfully nostalgic song of his life about the Jersey Shore, where he grew up — and a hurricane sharing the name of that song destroyed the Jersey Shore. If I wrote a novel about a rock star to whom that happened, you’d say: Oh, come on. That’s too much. But life is often too much.

It’s funny, Springsteen didn’t totally abandon nostalgia or the Jersey Shore after writing “Sandy”. But every time he doubled back there, his vision of the place became darker: in “Backstreets”, it’s the scene of a “dark, infested summer” of doomed love; by the late 70s, he would detect a “darkness on the edge of town”; by the time he released Nebraska, in 1982, he wrote of Atlantic City as a place of desperation, where “everything dies”, and hope consists largely of the last urge of those at the end of their ropes.

Of course, one imagines that Springsteen was exploring this irony wilfully: the romantic young boy is disillusioned. By the time he wrote “My Hometown”, which was released on Born in the USA (1984), Springsteen was talking about moving away from Jersey. A person listening to Springsteen albums in order from from the late 60s (Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ) through the mid-80s (Born in the USA) can watch the ironizing process that we all experience writ large.

They may not seem analogous, the way our youthful romanticism is made unintentionally ironic by the cold-hearted process of aging, and the way the impersonal forces of nature can render one young man’s paean to his hometown ironic by destroying it. I would argue that they are: one is a function of time; the other, of physics. Both are irresistible. They are related — some physicists might argue that time is a subset of physics. Either way, they’re equally inevitable: even if you didn’t feel nostalgia as a youth, even if you felt something else, there will come a time when you could (even if you don’t care to) step back from your life and understand that something you used to believe has become hilariously, not to say tragically, strange and unconscionable. Maybe it’s just called growing up.