Kellogg Roots and Springsteen Tunes (Sunday Scribbling: Miscellaneous)

I listened to/worshipped Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" album all through my senior year at Whitworth College. The song "Born to Run" carried me far away from Dr. Wombolt's chair during a root canal that winter as it played on KHQ-FM and I wrapped my legs around some velvet rims and wondered if love was wild, wondered if love was real.

Two nights ago "Jungleland" live at Madison Square Garden came down from the sky on XM radio and my Whitworth pal Cutch was in my living room on Moss and 19th in Eugene on September 26, 1981 with his suspender straps wrapped around a thick piece of forked firewood wailing Clarence Clemons' "Jungleland" solo on his air firewood tenor saxaphone.

Cutch and Rog and Terry and Peter and Lannie and I crawled our way back home that evening after the Huskies trounced the Ducks at Autzen Stadium and my wife Eileen had invited Peggy to drive from Yakima to give her protection and help her fix us chili and corn bread to help sop up the beer and peppermint schnapps and Oregon Chablis we'd been drinking all day out of boda bags, pitchers, and redeemable aluminum cans.

Lannie was in tough shape. He'd knelt on both knees and puked down a toilet bowl at Rennie's Landing and staggered out of the bar alone and headed for 19th and Moss, a stranger to Eugene. After veering across dark streets and winding around rainy east Eugene blocks, he asked a couple for directions to 19th and Moss.

"You're standing at 19th and Moss."

Lannie joined Peggy and Eileen and waited for the rest of us to arrive.

I've often wondered if this was the night Eileen decided she had to pursue life on her own and on her own terms, that she couldn't take being married to me any more.

I'd promised that if we put "Jungleland" on the turntable that I'd dance in my boxers and as Cutch played the firewood and we hoarsely cried out, "Tonight. in. Jungleland", I stripped to my skivvies and danced and laughed and cheered and nakedly laid all my joy and love for The Boss and for my football buddies on the line.

At that moment, dancing in my boxers and screaming with Bruce and riding the high of a day of drinking that ended at two a.m. the night before and began again at seven a.m. when I got out the potatoes and the eggs and the Lone Star beer and tomato juice and fixed my friends breakfast and started getting juiced for the game, at that moment I was as fully alive to what it meant to me to be a man and a man from Kellogg as I'd ever been. I was as fully alive in the intoxication of brotherly love and cheap alcohol as I've ever felt.

I could feel it all: the vats of Wapatuli, the nights closing down the Kopper Keg and taking more beer to go and drinking until three in the morning and being right on time for day shift in the cell room at seven, the slow pitch softball tournaments in Missoula and Lewiston and riding with Keith and Don with a case of iced Lucky Lager, sacks of sunflower seeds, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Beach Boys on the casette player, Keith and Don and I screaming at the top of our lungs while driving down I-90 or up the grade outside of Kendrick after getting kicked out of a bar in Julietta that we wished they all could be California Girls.

Yesterday I was trying to help my Survey of World Literature students understand how Homer has characters in The Odyssey tell short digressive stories that are always stories that stand in parallel, either by comparison or contrast, to the larger story of Odysseus and Penelope. For example, Telemachus, Odysseus' son goes on a short odyssey in search of news of his father and he hears from Nestor about the infidelity of Clytemnestra which contrasts the faithfulness of his mother, Penelope. Homer shows us the big story in an inverted small story.

I wonder about that night after the Duck/Huskie game. I often wonder if the big story of my failed first marriage was played out in the small story of that night. What was it like for Eileen, not a Kellogg girl, not raised on alcohol and vulgarity, more frightened, perhaps, than invigorated by vulgarity, to see her husband drunk, in his boxers, singing "Jungleland", dancing, yelling how fucking awesome it all was, reveling in the vulgarity of the moment? Did she realize that night that it was this, not church, not graduate studies, not traveling to England, not Masterpiece Theater, not movies at the Bijou, not Chuck Mangione, not even Harry Chapin, that it was this unapologetic vulgarity that made me feel alive and happy?

Did it come clear to her that night that despite my eclectic tastes in the fine arts and despite my often engaging intelligence and that despite my desire to tone things down, to get my outbursts of temper and spasms of ecstasy under control, that at bottom I was really the happiest in the unbridled, uncensored, rock and roll, football and alcohol-fueled company of my male friends, especially those from Kellogg, or, when I could be, with my unrefined father, who didn't know The Boss, but who loved to drink fully and dance wildly, especially at the Sunshine Inn where he could stomp his foot in time with the great Tony Orlando and Dawn's "Knock Three Times"?

I don't know.

The last time I was at the dentist, Dr. Stephenson told me he thought he might have to do some work on the crown from a root canal he could tell I'd had done many years ago.

Thirty-two years ago, to be exact. It's the Springsteen canal.

When I have this dental work done, Bruce Springsteen won't be belting out "Born to Run". So, I won't "sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American Dream".

Nope.

Dr. Stephenson's office subscribes to Sirius.

It's always tuned to Cafe Jazz, the smooth jazz channel.

I'll get comfortably numb with George Benson or Joe Sample.

Something refined.

Nothing vulgar.

Certainly not The Boss.


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For other Miscellaneous Sunday Scribblings, go here. I really like my sister's, InlandEmpireGirl's Sunday Scribbling post. You'll see gorgeous pictures. Just click here.