Billy works downtown. Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. Performer trope as used in popular culture. A contrast between a highly-skilled, perfectionist virtuoso and a less-skilled, but more. Today’s Ligue 1 match between Lyon and SC Bastia was delayed after a group of home fans ran on the field during warmups and went after Lyon players: No players were. Alex Rodriguez turned down an opportunity to bid against old teammate Derek Jeter for the Miami Marlins, according to Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports. Teaching with Documents. Alien Enemy Registration During World War I Helen Divjak and Lee Ann Potter German immigrants who had not yet become citizens. Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home.— Bruce Springsteen. The Promise.* * *I remember the first time I heard The Promise. It was about a decade ago. The song had been around for a long time before I first heard it — Bruce Springsteen would say it was the first song he wrote after Born To Run made him a rock and roll star in 1. It figures that this was the first. Born to Run, the whole album, was about longing, open highway, the amusement park rising bold and stark, the poets who write nothing at all, the ghosts in the eyes of all the boys Mary sent away. Born to Run is about that brilliant age when you know dreams don’t come true, but you still believe they might come true FOR YOU. And The Promise is about the every day numbing of those dreams. It is a follow- up to Thunder Road, that song about the guy who learned how to make his guitar talk, and the girl who ain’t a beauty (but hey, she’s all right), both of them, pulling out of that town full of losers, pulling out of there to win. Now, that guy’s got a job. Some nights he don’t go. A friend told me, “You have to listen to this song. I can’t believe you haven’t heard this song.”I listened to the version of The Promise on 1. Tracks. It’s not the version Springsteen recorded more than 3. This version is stripped down to almost nothing, just Springsteen and a piano. And the weirdest thing happened, something I can never remember happening before or since when I listened to a song. I felt myself crying.* * *I followed that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen. Drove my Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes. When the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my own dreams* * *If I had to pick a single memory, the memory that best summarizes my teenage years, the memory that best expresses the kind of man I hoped to become . That’s how my father wakes me up. He mildly bumps the bed with his knee. It is summertime, but rain pours, so it is still dark, a harsh gray. My father walks out of the room without saying a word. There is nothing to say. It is time to get up. I dress quickly. There are no morning showers. We have timed our morning to the minute so that we can get as much sleep as possible . Dad doesn’t sleep much except for the naps he gets in front of the television. I meet my father downstairs. He is already there — he is always there first, dressed, ready to go. He is always waiting on me. He wakes up long before 6 a. His lunch is packed in a brown paper sack. It is probably a salami sandwich. It is usually a salami sandwich. We trudge out to the car, a declining Pontiac T- 1. I hope to buy at the end of the summer. The rain hits our necks, but there’s no running. We ride in silence for a few minutes. Then we start to talk about small things. We stop at Popeyes for a breakfast biscuit. The morning gains light slowly, like an old television picture tube coming to life. The ride is 3. 0 minutes or so. There is little traffic this early in the morning. And then, we get out . Alisa is the name of the place. It is a knitting factory. We make sweaters, I guess, though I never actually see any sweaters. It is hard to breathe because of the heat and the humidity and the dust and the cardboard boxes and because the yarn chokes the air. I feel sure that a sweater is being knitted in my lungs. My father’s job is to make sure the knitting machines run. He unclogs jams, quiets the guttural sounds, tightens bolts that break free, loosens bolts that choke the machine. Anthony Keith "Tony" Gwynn, Sr. Padre", was an American professional baseball right fielder who played 20 seasons. His hands are unnaturally strong; I have known this since I was a boy. Now I see that he uses his fingers to loosen bolts that are wedged tight. There is no time to find a wrench. Sometimes, when the machines run smoothly, I see him drawing Xs on graph paper as he works out a sweater color design. When kids in school used to ask me what my father did for a living, I would tell them he designs sweaters. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of what he did; quite the opposite. That was how I saw him. My job is to stay in the warehouse and move boxes of yarn in and out, and, one day a week, Thursday, unload barrels of dye from a truck. I am doing this to raise enough money buy that old car, that Pontiac. I’m 1. 8 years old and thoroughly without purpose except for that; I desperately want my own car. I am an accounting major at college though even the most basic accounting concepts baffle me. I can’t help but think of debits as good and credits as bad. The professors keep telling me that they are not good or bad, but I don’t believe them. I already know I won’t be an accountant but have not admitted it to myself. I don’t have any idea what I will do — or what I can do. Everything feels out of reach. I work six days a week at Alisa, and the pay, if I remember correctly, is $4 an hour. The minimum wage at the time is $3. The highest paying job, at $4. My job there was to set up a payment schedule. I wasn’t good at this; I didn’t understand the fury and desperation of the voices on the end of dial tones. I was too young to know what it meant. I got threatened a lot. I don’t get threatened at the factory. There’s no point in threats, not here. It’s understood by everyone how easy I am to replace. I’m scrawny and weak and a non- prospect. I’m here as a favor to my father, the only guy who knows how to fix the machines if they break down.* * *Well now I built that challenger by myself. But I needed money and so I sold it. Lived a secret I should’a kept to myself. But I got drunk one night and I told it.* * *Springsteen wrote The Promise for the Darkness on the Edge of Town album. People who follow the Springsteen story know that the time when he wrote The Promise, that time after Born To Run made him a star and before Darkness made him an adult, that time was strange for him. He was locked in a searing legal battle with his manager Mike Appel over creative freedom — the thing Springsteen called his musical soul — and he was struggling with what it meant to be a huge success for the first time in his life. He hated success and loved it and hated himself for loving it. And the music poured out of him like sweat. He was 2. 7 and hungry, still hungry, but he was not entirely sure for what. He was listening to punk music. He was listening to Hank Williams. The Born to Run sessions were legendary for Springsteen’s refusal to compromise, his 1. But at least with Born To Run, there was a clear vision everyone could understand. Springsteen simply wanted to make the greatest rock . That was what 2. 5- year- old musicians did. The kid had ambition. But nobody quite knew what Springsteen was trying to do with Darkness, maybe not even Springsteen himself. The band learned song after song after song. Some of the songs sounded like hits, but Springsteen seemed uninterested in those. He would give away “Because The Night” to the punk star Patti Smith — her biggest hit. He gave “Fire” to The Pointer Sisters — their biggest hit. He gave “This Little Girl” to Gary U. S. He gave an older song, “The Fever,” and “Talk to Me” to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. He gave “Rendezvous” to Greg Kihn. In the documentary about Darkness, Springsteen’s guitarist and foil and alter- ego Stevie Van Zandt would say, seemingly without irony, “It’s a bit tragic in a way. Because he would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.”The one thing Springsteen knew for sure is that he didn’t want to be a great pop songwriter. He did not want hits, not then. He did not want to repeat Born To Run. He wanted to say something, and he wanted to “leave no room to be misunderstood.” He didn’t want to try to make the greatest rock and roll album of all time, not this time. He wanted something else, something harder to describe. The band rehearsed and recorded “The Promise” for three months, trying to get it just right.* * *All my life I fought that fight. The fight that you can’t win. Every day it gets harder to livethe dream you’re believin’ in.* * *My job at Alisa is monotonous and soul draining. Oh, it has sitcom elements — I am still young and detached enough to see that. There is the vicious boss who loves to yell at me for no apparent reason except that I’m not good at moving boxes and he probably hates his life. Once he takes me and a couple of warehouse guys, puts us in a truck, drives us off somewhere without explaining where or why. We end up in a ritzy neighborhood. Turns out the owner of the factory needs his couch moved. And so we move his couch. There is a humorless old man who works with us in the warehouse who constantly tells us that he has seen kids come and go but that he has survived for all these years (we sometimes attempt to guess what he’s making after all these years; we think $5 an hour). There is the preposterous nature of the actual work — my job is to move boxes of yarn here, no, over there, no, back here, no, leave it there until later. There are even young non- beauties- but- hey- they’re- all- right identical twins who look better and better the longer I work here (it is fitting, I suppose, that in time I come to like one of them, the prettier identical twin if that makes any sense, but it’s the other one who seems to like me). Still, at its core, there is little funny about the place or the job. Alisa is day after day after day after day after day of endless work that never gets completed. There is always another truck to unload, another tour of the floor (“Box ’em up!” the boss used to yell), another run to the dye part of the factory, which is poisonous and bleak and dangerous, like something out of a Dickens’ novel or the Batman movies. All the while, the machines whir and shriek and clank and buzz — the noise makes the boxes shake, but after a while I stop hearing the noise, at least while I’m in the factory. My ears ring for hours afterward, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I still hear those machines.
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