I heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time before I was born, sitting upright in the womb like the world’s most eager listener, my dad playing his music through speakers, I would learn later, we could barely afford. My dad, the musician, who never played Springsteen himself as though it would be sacrilegious to do so. 

No such fear of blasphemy from me, now, some thirty years later, as I mangle the chords of “I’m On Fire” and imagine a thousand different ways to feel that sweet agony. Oh, I want to want someone the way Springsteen wants someone, to know how much it hurts. Or, to be wanted in such a way that a gut wrenching and rip-your-spine-out-perfect song is written about me. 

If there is such a thing as an American god, it is Springsteen in the early eighties on a bootleg MP3 talking about coming home to his father, being a disappointment, needing to get out of the town that caged him. Goddamn! We cannot escape ourselves, can we? And when Springsteen draped the American flag around himself like a uniform and set it on fire, people misunderstood and misunderstood and misunderstood, blasting “Born In the USA” on the Fourth of July—the wrong kind of war cry. 

The itch under my skin when I know I need to leave but I don’t know how, all I have is the squirm of my insides and the knowledge that I have to do something, anything. I’d change my clothes, my hair, my face, my whole goddamn being just to be someone, somewhere, doing something worthwhile. Something less deadening. I don’t want to hit the dead end just yet, god, just give me one more chance, one more way out of here, let me see what I can be!

Springsteen got out. Then he went back. I don’t think I’d look back. I’m not one for turning into a pillar of salt, you see. I want to run as fast as I can because I was born for it, for running. Torn into the world and into my father’s arms— a world I still don’t understand. I want desperately, for one gleaming second, to be like those pretty, perfect people speaking in voices like honey dripping off a spoon. Every word I speak has jagged edges, is made of thistles. Do you think about it? The running away? What it means? Do the fish hooks in your skin hold you back, tugging against flesh and ripping until it hurts too much to run anymore? We’re all on a tether, though none of us can see how long it is. Four-hour shows, and I want to believe I could change the world, too. I want to give someone else the religion I found. I’m not a goddamn pillar of salt. But they don’t make American gods out of boys like me, boys with broken brains and no way to leave. 

They don’t make them out of boys like Springsteen either, until they do. I look at the photo of him and he looks just like my dad, and I wonder whether that’s a coincidence or whether it’s fate that my dad’s hero is just a different variation on a theme, though my father dresses in denim rather than plaid. My dad came back. And I think he’s been trying to get out again ever since. The gnashing teeth of regret, of settling. 

I don’t know, man, I want to do so much, I want to be more. I want the well in my soul to overflow and I want that six inch valley and I want the kind of oblivion you only find when you lose yourself entirely to the music, to the act of creation.

My dad met Springsteen, and Springsteen called him “brother.” 

And yeah, I think that’s about right. Kindred seeks kindred, and I think that’s about right. 

I listen to Springsteen speak, a bootleg recording of a speech made in 1986 before playing “I’m On Fire,” the steady flow of words and the quick intake of air as he realizes that he has to do this, to perform, to be the man his father never was. He has to! And I think, that’s it. That intake of air is everything. It’s the tragedy and the catharsis. 

I pray to an American god that there’s some kind of ending for me that leaves a legacy. That doesn’t leave me on the porch scared of what my father’s going to say when I walk in and I’m not who I was supposed to be. I relate, too much, to all of it: the whole goddamn story of a boy who wanted to grow up to be something more, something better. 

There are no stained glass windows here, there is no way to make my listening holy, but I blast the music a little bit louder, I flex my fingers on the strings, and I sing along, dreaming mad schemes instead of sleeping.

Because, tramps like us, you know how it goes.

+++ 

Charlotte Amelia Poe (they/them) is an autistic nonbinary author from England. Their first book, How To Be Autistic, was published in 2019. Their debut novel, The Language Of Dead Flowers, was published in September 2022. Their second novel, Ghost Towns, was self published in 2023. Their second memoir, (currently untitled), will be published in 2024.