Peter A Carlin - Bruce

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For Sarah Carlin AmesThis is not a dark ride.

T HE FIRST TIME ANYONE CALLED Bruce Springsteen the Boss was in the early weeks of 1971, in the dining room of a chilly apartment on the edge of downtown Asbury Park. Once a beauty parlor, the ground-floor flat was then the home for Steven Van Zandt, Albee Tellone, and John Lyon, all musicians in their early twenties and already veterans of the club circuit on the Jersey Shore. Their house became a nexus in Asbury Parks rock scene. When they threw open the door for their weekly Monopoly games the place filled quickly. Garry was a regular, so was Big Bad Bobby, Danny, Davey, and a dozen others.

Bruce had a particular talent for the rogue brand of Monopoly they played. In this version, the games actual rules barely figured in the action. The real gaming took place between the players turns, when they could build alliances, negotiate settlements, offer bribes, and resort to trickery, coercion, and what an outsider might think of as cheating. And this was where Bruce excelled, due both to his shifty powers of persuasion and the leverage provided by the sacks of candy bars, Ring Dings, and Pepsis he brought with him. Funny what a young man, when hungry and presented with two cream-filled cupcakes of sheer chemical deliciousness, will agree to when its 2 a.m. and hes really, really hungry.

And so Bruce won enough Monopoly games to inspire the others to dub him the Gut Bomb King. This lasted only until Bruce, who also had a talent for inventing nicknames, came up with a new one for himself: the Boss.

That stuck. I remember people calling him that and not taking it seriously, recalls fellow bandleader Steve Van Zandt. Not til I started calling him the Boss. Then they took it seriously because I was a boss, too. So when I started calling him the Boss the vibe was, If Stevies doing it, theres something to this!

Hearing this now, Bruce cackles cheerily. Ill leave you with that, is all he says.

For three years, Bruces semi-secret nickname didnt leave the tiny loop of his band and their friends. All of whom understood how seriously Bruce took such things. Because one of the privileges of being a Boss is controlling who can and cant call you that. Definitely the band and the roadies. Also some friends, but only the ones who bore their own Bruce-bestowed nicknames. Southside, Miami, Albany Al, and so on. Which made it all the more outrageous when the Boss got wrenched into the public domain.

It happened in 1974, when the crowds got bigger and the records began to sell. Bruces Jersey Shore mystique grew into a point of journalistic intrigue, and when one writer heard a crew member drop a casual Hey, Boss! into a conversation the game was up. By the time Born to Run broke through in 1975 the Boss had become something else entirely. An honorific. A championship title. Another piece of Bruce sacrificed to his own ambition.

Bruce didnt complain in public but he made his feelings clear as early as the mid-1970s by revising the lyrics of his best-loved party song, Rosalita: You dont have to call me lieutenant, Rosie/Just dont ever call me Boss !

Because there were rules. Including the crucial one about not acknowledging the existence of the rules. Because the Boss isnt supposed to be seen compelling others to put him on a pedestal. As far as you know hes just there, his power and authority as inevitable as the tides. So dont even ask, because thats when Bruce will cock his head and give you that vaguely annoyed look.

Rules? I dont have any particular strict rules about it.

Ask again in a slightly different way and his vaguely annoyed expression gains clarity.

There was no exalted reasoning behind it, Bruce says with purposeful evenness. That was just because I paid peoples salary and it was literally like, What are we going to do? Hmm, I dont know, somebody better ask the Boss. So really, it was just a name you would use wherever you were working.

So the Boss is a generic term? With no larger significance or accompanying ethic? Meaning that anyone, present company included, can call him Boss whenever and wherever?

For a moment Bruce just stares.

Well, for you to call me that would be ridiculous , he says. Besides that, it wouldnt necessarily be right .

He throws back a little tequila and shrugs again.

And this is still the first Ive heard about rules.

Call him Bruce.

T HE TRUCK COULDNT HAVE BEEN moving fast. Not down a sleepy residential street like McLean. If it had just turned in from Route 79known in Freehold, New Jersey, as South Streetit would have been going even more slowly, since no seven-ton truck could round a 90-degree corner at a fast clip. But the truck had the height and breadth to all but fill the side road and sweep the other cars, bikes, and pedestrians to the side until it grumbled past. Assuming the other folks were paying attention to the road ahead.

The five-year-old girl on the tricycle had other things on her mind. She might have been racing her friend to the Lewis Oil gas station on the corner. Or maybe she was simply a child at play, feeling the spring in the air on a late afternoon in April 1927.

Either way, Virginia Springsteen didnt see the truck coming. If she heard the drivers panicked honk when she veered into the road, she didnt have time to react. The driver stomped hard on the brakes, but by then it didnt matter. He heard, and felt, a terrible thump. Alerted by the screams of the neighbors, the girls parents rushed outside and found their little daughter unconscious but still breathing, They rushed her first to the office of Dr. George G. Reynolds, then to Long Branch Hospital, more than thirty minutes east of Freehold. And thats where Virginia Springsteen died.

The mourning began immediately. Family members, friends, and neighbors streamed to the little house on Randolph Street to comfort the girls parents. Fred Springsteen, a twenty-seven-year-old technician at the Freehold Electrical Shop downtown, kept his hands in his pockets and spoke quietly. But his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Alice, could not contain herself. Hair frazzled and eyes veined by grief, she sat helplessly as her body clutched with sobs. She could barely look at Virginias toddler brother, Douglas. The boys father couldnt be much help either, given the pall of his own mourning and the overwhelming needs of his distraught wife. So in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy virtually all of the care and feeding of the twenty-month-old boy fell to Alices sisters, Anna and Jane. Eventually the others eased back into their ordinary lives. But the approach and passing of summer did nothing to ease Alices grief.

She could take no comfort in the clutching arms of her small son. Nearing his second birthday in August the boy grew dirty and scrawny enough to require an intervention. Alices sisters came to gather his clothes, crib, and toys and took the toddler to live with his aunt Jane Cashion and her family until his parents were well enough to care for him again. Two to three years passed before Alice and Fred asked to be reunited with their son. He went home soon afterward, but Virginias spirit continued to hover in Alices vision. When Alice gazed at her son, she always seemed to be seeing something else; the absence of the one thing she had loved the most and lost so heedlessly.