The Promise
Bruce Springsteen’s flight left Newark at 8.50pm last night, London-bound.
The premiere of The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town is tonight at a cinema which is a fifteen minutes’ bus ride away from where you live.
None of this was announced or confirmed until late yesterday, and you comfortably got tickets for the screening last week. They were also cheap. You have to understand that this is not how it normally works: to see Bruce Springsteen from a vast distance in a large stadium with an average of 40,000 other people, first you normally have to suffer the ticket masters’ theatre of the absurd. But that’s six-eight months earlier at least. On the day you’ll get up at 4am, and start queuing before the sun is up. Your name will be put on a list, and a number stamped onto your hand in semi-permanent black ink. If you’re lucky you’ll receive a wristband within a few hours, and then you can go somewhere to relax your back and rest your knees. If not, you’ll have to camp out, and wait. And wait. And wait. Sometimes it rains, sometimes the sun cooks your brain so hard you’ll feel like you won’t make it to the opening song. Then the floodgates will open, and you’ll run in like the wind; you’ll get into spats, and fight to be as far ahead as possible, as close to the stage to catch as many of the sparks as come your way. If you are really blessed, one week before your wedding day your friends will get together and help you out. You’ll suddenly be standing face to face with him, he’ll look at the sign you’re carrying with shaking fingers and eyes aflood with emotion, smile and point at you - it’s your song he wants to play. You won’t actually remember any of it, with the exception of the thrill, the moment his eyes scanned your soul like the sonar of a fast-approaching whale, and you’ll hand it over, his hands holding the entire meaning of your life for that moment. You won’t be able to speak for three days.
It will all be worth it, this crazy madness, this fever bug, just to renew your faith in a promise you made to yourself. It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. That phrase burns in neon like a giant Exxon sign etched in your memory of the day after Kurt Cobain shot himself. Your father picked you up from school, and he had a tape cassette playing in the car. His favourite. Now your favourite. Nothing seemed to make sense, not the words in a foreign language you were learning to decipher, not the senseless, desperate act of one you thought you trusted, the one who had given up. But you felt deep down that coherence in this case was a betrayal, you couldn’t possibly support this. You had chopped up your hair and wrecked your jeans, sung songs of misery, lithium-fuelled, like the words to the Book of Revelations. All spent, all wasted, all resting on the wrong premise. Here you had to take a stand. Then suddenly a sign, a new prayer, I believe in the love that you gave me I believe in the faith that can save me I believe in the hope and I pray that some day it may raise me above these Badlands. A credo one could stand by, every day: in hoc signo vinces. Enough with the posture, the nihilist swagger, the leaden life: roll down your window and let the wind blow back your hair. Go home. Play the hell out of that guitar, and live with words that are yours and no one else’s. This life is good, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Pack up and get ready to go. Promise that you won’t give it up.
The man who gave you all that will be in a room with you and two hundred other people tonight. Fifteen minutes away from home. You have prepared a black marker pen for him to put a witness’ seal to that contract, to the promise that bound you back to life, for the sake of the young girl you once were, and the woman you have become. If he doesn’t get anywhere near you it won’t matter, because a promise made to yourself is more important. But still, that plan to get some rest last night: it didn’t really work.
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