Born to Run (8 page)

Racial tensions at Freehold High exploded into violence.
If you entered the wrong restroom, it was lights-out and a beating. I entered the first-floor restroom one afternoon, walked up to the latrine next to a black friend. I went to speak. He just looked at the wall and said, “I can’t talk to you right now.” I was white and he was black; the lines had been drawn, even amongst neighborhood friends. There would be no communication until it was
over,
and it wouldn’t be over for quite a while. The town erupted in rioting. There were harsh words spoken between two cars at a South Street light and a gun was fired into a car full of black kids. At my corner sub shop there was a demonstration after an elderly black man had been thrown out and had fallen and been injured. I stood on my porch watching just two houses down as the proprietor rushed into
a black crowd wielding a meat cleaver. It was taken from him and it was amazing no one was killed. Someone was chased up onto the porch of the house next to mine and pushed through the front window. The times they were a-changing . . . the hard way.

TEN

THE SHOW MAN (LORD OF THE DANCE)

My showmanship skills developed early. Seasoned by the Zerilli blood that flowed through my veins, I was born 100 percent grade A ham. So to grab the spotlight before I could play, I DANCED! . . . somewhat. The main thing was I was willing to risk the ridicule of half of the neighborhood’s population (the male half) because I’d found out that the other half
found a guy who would dance with them to something other than a bone-grinding slow song enthralling.

Bimonthly on Friday nights, St. Rose of Lima would open up its basement cafeteria and host a heavily chaperoned Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) dance for its wild-hormoned teens. On the dance floor I already had a head start. I’d been pulled out onto the living room rug at family gatherings
to Twist with my mom ever since Chubby Checker smashed the hit parade to bits with “The Twist.” (My mom even took us to the Atlantic
City Steel Pier to see Chubby “live” as he lip-synched to his hits. Then we went across the boardwalk and caught Anita Bryant on the same sun-filled summer afternoon.) Also I’d been going over to the YMCA Friday night canteen, just fifty steps from the door of my
South Street home. This was absolutely forbidden territory by nuns’ decree, and you would be racked and tortured in front of the smugly satisfied class of eighth graders on Monday morning if word leaked out that you’d joined the heathen class and their satanic Friday night rituals.

It was here, high in the shadowy bleachers, that I experienced my first kiss (Maria Espinosa!), my first dance floor
hard-on (unknown, but could as well have been a wet mop) and the atmosphere of a basketball gym, lights seductively lowered and transformed into a greasy hardwood-floored wonderland. Before I’d stand on these same boards, strapped with my sky blue Epiphone guitar in my first band, the Castiles, I’d dance with anyone who’d have me. Often, still horribly insecure, I’d have to wait for the last
few desperate records to get up the guts to cross the no-man’s-land between the camps of the boys and girls and pop the question. But on a good night I’d spend the evening dancing with strangers from St. Rose’s crosstown rival, the intermediate (gasp, public!) school. Who were these tight-skirted, smoky-eyed young girls, unfettered by the green St. Rose’s jumper that tapped down the budding womanhood
of my school’s female population? Here were girls in their dimly lit, scented glory, gathered in small hushed circles that suddenly erupted into soft giggles as they eyed the guys across the room culling the herd. I was a complete outcast. I didn’t really know the guys who were cloistered into their cliques, and there were only a few other eighth-grade Catholic school students who braved the Young
Men’s Christian Association soirees. I’d been lured to the Y by a secular neighborhood pal for after-school hoops and the pool table in the musty basement. But once I’d gotten the smell of the canteen (some mixture of leftover basketball sweat and dance-floor sex) in my self-consciously Roman nose, there was no going back.

Here I danced for the first time in public and limped those fifty steps
back home, blue-balled after some close encounter with a woolen skirt. The chaperones sat up in the bleachers, armed with a flashlight that they flickered on you during the slow dances if things were looking a little hot and tight. Still there was only so much they could do. They were trying to stop a millennia of sexual hunger, and for that job a flashlight just wasn’t going to cut it. At the end
of the night, by the time Paul and Paula’s “Hey Paula” was spun on the decidedly lo-fi gym sound system, every man and woman alike was throwing themselves onto the dance floor just to feel a body, almost any body, up against theirs. There in those death-defying clinches lay the promise of things to come.

By the time I got to the CYO dance at my own alma mater, I had some rudimentary skills. The
poor souls who comprised most of my Catholic male colleagues didn’t yet realize that GIRLS LOVE TO DANCE! So much so that they’ll get on the dance floor with just about any geek who’s got a few moves. That geek was ME! I had a ridiculous assortment of gyrations copped and exaggerated from the dances of the day. The Monkey, the Twist, the Swim, the Jerk, the Pony, the Mashed Potato—I mixed them
all up into a stew of my own that occasionally got me on the floor with some of the finest women in town. This shocked my classmates, who’d only known me as the poor soul at the rear corner desk in class. I’d hear, “Hey, Springy, where’d you learn that?” Well, I’d practiced and practiced hard. Not just with my mom and at the Y but heavily in front of the full-length mirror tacked up to the back of
my door in my bedroom. Way before I played broomstick guitar in front of it, me and that mirror spent hours together in a sweat-soaked frenzy, moving to the latest records of the day. I had a small suitcase stereo with a 45 adapter that held me in good stead, and I’d Frug and Twist and Jerk my way to a soggy T-shirt that wouldn’t be rivaled ’til many years later in the midst of a fevered “Devil with
a Blue Dress On” in front of a cavernous hall of twenty thousand screaming rock fans.

Then . . . come Friday, I’d slip on my tightest black stovepipe jeans, a
red button-down shirt, matching red socks and black winklepicker shoes. I’d previously stolen some of my mother’s hairpins, pinned my bangs down tight and slept on them so they’d come out as straight as Brian Jones’s. I’d comb them out,
then sit under a ten-dollar sunlamp my mother had gotten at the corner drugstore to try and combat some of my fiercest acne. I squeezed a half tube of Clearasil on the rest and stepped out of my bedroom, down the stairs, out the front door and onto the street. Show me the dance floor.

ELEVEN

WORKINGMAN’S BLUES

My parents had no money for a second shot at the guitar, so there was just one thing to do: get a job. One summer afternoon my mom took me to my aunt Dora’s, where for fifty cents an hour I would become the “lawn boy.” My uncle Warren came out and showed me the ropes. He demonstrated how the lawn mower worked, how to cut the hedges (not too short, not too long), and I
was hired. I went immediately to the Western Auto store, an establishment in the town’s center specializing in automotive parts and cheap guitars. There amongst the carburetors, air filters and fan belts hung four acoustic guitars, ranging from the unplayable to the barely playable. They looked like nirvana to me and they were attainable. Well, one was attainable. I saw a price tag hanging off of
one funky brown model that read “Eighteen dollars.” Eighteen dollars? That was more money than I had ever held in my hand at one time. A lot more.

After a while I noticed my “living expenses” were cutting into my savings from my job at Aunt Dora’s, so I was going to have to step up my workload. Across the street from my aunt’s house was a lovely, older white-haired lady named Mrs. Ladd. She wanted
her house painted and her roof tarred. My grandfather, when his electrician business went south, had become a housepainter, and I’d wielded a brush on the walls of our own home a few times. How hard could it be? I enlisted my pal Mike Patterson to join my workforce and together we’d finish it off in no time. Mrs. Ladd bought the paint, showed us what she wanted, was meticulous: black shutters,
white house, period. If she didn’t like the way the paint was lying, you did it again. One week I had to miss a day’s work. Mike said “no problem,” he’d handle it. When I came back, one whole side of the house had been painted yellow! “Mike . . . Did you clean the brushes?” “I thought I did.” One more time. We got it done, it didn’t look too bad and we went on to the roof. I knew nothing about
tarring a roof, so Mike led the way. It was midsummer New Jersey, 90 percent humidity, Fahrenheit ninety-five degrees; the tar was hot, sticky and burning as we slathered it on in the midday sun . . . hell on Earth.

It was done. Me and my twenty dollars went straight downtown. The salesman pulled my ugly brown dream out of the window and snipped off the price tag, and it was mine. I skulked home
with it, not wanting my neighbors to know of my vain and unrealistic ambitions. I hauled it up to my bedroom and closed the door like it was some sex tool (it was!). I sat down, held it in my lap and was utterly confused. I had no clue about how to begin. The strings were thick as telephone wires, so I just started making noise, playing by ear. If I accidentally hit on something that sounded like
music, I tried to remember it and do it again. I concentrated mainly on the lower-sounding strings, trying to make a “thunk, thunk” sound, a rhythm. It hurt like hell. My soft, pink fingertips were not prepared for the cables strung across this wooden box pretending to be an instrument. I stood up, went to the mirror on the back of my bedroom door, slung the guitar across my hips and stood there.
For the next two weeks, until my fingers screamed
for mercy, I worked up a whole repertoire of non-tunes to be played on an untuned guitar. I convinced myself I was getting somewhere, then fate and family intervened. My mom, Virginia and I went one Sunday to visit our aunt Eda. Her son, Frank, was an ace accordionist and every time we’d visit, he’d be called on to bust out his box and swing through
“Lady of Spain” or some other accordion anthem. (Inspired, I actually took a shot at the accordion one Christmas, ensuring job security for E Street keyboardist and accordionist Danny Federici forever after. It was impossible.)

One Sunday, Frank came into the living room with a guitar instead of his candy-wagon accordion. He proceeded to wail through the folk hits of the moment. The folk boom
was full throttle at the time.
Hootenanny
was a prime-time television show and Frank had picked up the guitar and was playing it pretty well. That weekend he sat on the living room floor, guitar in hand, wearing a white T-shirt, black socks, black chinos and white sneakers (I thought this was the coolest thing I’d ever seen up close and I immediately returned home and tried to emulate the look).
He was doing a lot better than I was. He took me into his room, showed me how to tune the guitar, taught me how to read chord charts out of an American folk music collection, gave me the book and sent me home. I tuned my guitar as best I could and realized immediately I’d have to start from scratch. All of my non-tuned “tunes” were now revealed as the complete crap they were. I opened up the book,
went to “Greensleeves,” read the opening E-minor chord (only needs two fingers!) and set back to work. It was a beginning. A real beginning. Over the next few months, I learned most of the major and minor chords; scrubbed my way through as many folk standards I could; showed my mother what I was accomplishing, to her encouragement; then put together the C, F and G chords that allowed me to play
“Twist and Shout.” This was my first rock ’n’ roll song. It was good-bye to “lawn boy” and the only real job I would hold my entire life. “Well shake it up, baby!”

TWELVE

WHERE THE BANDS ARE

Five months later, I’d beaten my Western Auto special half to death. My fingers were strong and callused. My fingertips were as hard as an armadillo’s shell. I was ready to move up. I had to go electric. I explained to my mother that to get in a band, to make a buck, to get anywhere, I needed an electric guitar. Once again, that would cost money we didn’t have. Eighteen
dollars wasn’t going to cut it this time. In my room I had a cheesy pool table I’d gotten the Christmas before when I planned to follow in my father’s footsteps as a pool shark. I got pretty decent playing in the basement of the Y on canteen nights, but I never got good enough to challenge my old man. However, it still was good cover to get my girlfriends up into my bedroom. Once I’d romanced
them to the bed I’d lean up once in a while and toss the pool balls across the table to keep the old man happy down in the kitchen. But by now the thrill was gone. Christmas was coming. I made a deal with
my mom: if I’d sell the pool table, she’d try to come up with the balance for an electric guitar I’d spotted in the window of Caiazzo’s Music Store on Center Street. The price was sixty-nine
dollars and it came complete with a small amplifier. It was the cheapest they had but it was a start.

I sold my pool table for thirty-five dollars; a guy tied it to the roof of his car and headed out the drive. So there on one slushy Christmas Eve, I stood with my mother staring into Caiazzo’s window at a sunburst, one-pickup Kent guitar, made in Japan. It looked beautiful, wondrous and affordable.
I had my thirty-five dollars and my mother had thirty-five dollars of finance-company money. She and my father borrowed from season to season, paying off their debt just in time to borrow again. Sixty-nine dollars would be the biggest expenditure of my life and my mother was going out on a limb for me one more time. In we went. Mr. Caiazzo lifted it out of the window and stuck it into a leatherette
cardboard case, and we drove home with my first electric guitar. In the living room I plugged in my new amp. Its tiny six-inch speaker “roared” to life. It sounded awful, distorted beyond all recognition. The amp had one control, a volume knob. It was about the size of a large bread box but I was in the game.