The Springsteen Reader: Greasy Lake

Monday, April 7, 2008

I try to keep my fangirlish tendencies to the minimum on the blog, but today when I typed "our drive to the Springsteen show" in my head, I was actually squealing, OMG! The Bruce Springsteen concert is only 6 days away. OMG OMG OMG. You see why I'd want to suppress this side of me.

I've been a fan of the Boss since I was eight and yes, it was that damn Courtney Cox video that did it. In the years since, I've become a more sophisticated Springsteen fan. I would not have gotten through high school without my Born to Run cassette and in the months surrounding the first anniversary of 9/11, The Rising was pretty much the only CD in my car stereo.

True to the fangirl within, over the years I've hunted down pretty much anything I can read related Springsteen. In honor of this weekend's trip, I'll be sharing some of my favorite takes from the literary side of Springsteen. Enjoy!

There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent' whining station wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice. Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andre Gide and stuck elaborate poses to show that we didn't give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.

~from "Greasy Lake" by T. Coraghessan Boyle.