Ghosts

I die a little more each year, in the late winter, when the post-Christmas and New Year’s party time has passed away and we are left with only a gray and cold string of endless days. In those short dark days and long nights of the New Year, part of me shuts down and the part that goes away never quite comes back.

Finally, the warm days come and with them the summer. I turn some old Springsteen songs up loud, Boomer music I know, you don’t need to remind me.

I dig out my leather jacket, bought in 1974, happy it still fits, and my Fender Telecaster attitude, and I wonder if the spirit that filled that old jacket and all those greaser boys still haunts those abandoned places we one day, without warning or plan, simply turned and ran away from, back to the soft yellow light of hearth and home; summer and youth abandoned. Some nameless ghost still haunts that long forgotten time and place, and some nights he confronts me in my sleep and dreams.

Huddled in packs we worked our way through hot nights, our path lit by Marlboro’s and Kools. Pointy toed boots shuffling from Camaros and Mustangs, never the money for Corvettes, to the night’s place to drink, where we’d devastate the sweet street-girls with our abundance of charm and wit. Expecting far more in return than we offered. Far more than could be expected from the purchase of a pitcher of beer, and a couple of songs on the juke box. Too cool to dance, we sat in dark corners sullen and working on our hard-edge. Collars up trying to be so tough, waiting for the pretty girls to come and salve our wounds.

Do the spirits of the young boys still haunt those places, like the streets of my hometown or the boardwalk and beaches of Asbury Park? Sometimes when I stand on that beach, the destination of so many summer migrations, I call out the names of my missing troops, but all I can hear is the surf and the wind. I can still feel the angst as we fought for position in a hierarchy that meant everything then, and absolutely nothing now.

Maybe the boys have gone to one of those meetups someone was always hustling off too. Those meetings on the other side of somewhere with genuinely scary dudes we weren’t allowed to fear. We buried fear so deep that it could not exist and marched in lockstep into battle for something so terribly important in that moment.

I stand on that same boardwalk now and try to smell those far-off summer scents. The grease and ninety-three octane exhaust—French fries and fried dough and the carnival air. Madam Marie is closed, our fortunes to remain forever untold. Then I sit quietly and try to connect to the anarchy of those days when we ruled the world, and that carnival and all its characters were simply part of our parade.

Falling asleep watching the moonrise in our cars at the beach, and waking to breakfasts of warm beer and cigarettes, masters of our own destiny, too young and too stupid to care. All those girls, portrayed in song, we couldn’t live without, but somehow managed to… and the realization the rising moon was a Burger King sign, two blocks away.

Those summer days crashed hard, and life and jobs and houses and families called, and we lost our leather and our rage. The boot heel of the world stomped down the attitude until the fire was barely an ember.

I wonder at night as I drive through these streets, many of the buildings boarded up and abandoned and left to the rot and wind, does the spirit of those high-strung boys, always at war, still haunt those places. Would that leather boy know me now. Would he still be looking for a fight?

Some of us held on too long, until our time abandoned us and we metamorphized into old, busted knuckle greasers, living in now steady retreat.

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That’s it for me this week. Here are some books to look at.

Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there!

Bill

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