Born to Run Read Online Free PDF

IRISH
    In my family we had aunts who howled during family gatherings; cousins who left school in the sixth grade, went home and never left the house again; and men who pulled hair from their bodies and heads, leaving great gaping patches of baldness, all within our little half block. During thunderstorms, my grandmother would grab me by the hand and rush me past the church to my aunt Jane’shouse. There, the gathering of women and their black magic would commence. Prayers were murmured as my aunt Jane threw holy water over all of us from a small bottle. With each flash of lightning, the quiet hysteria would ratchet up a notch, until it seemed like God himself was about to blast us off our little corner. Folktales were told of lightning fatalities. Someone made the mistake of tellingme the safest place in a lightning storm was in a car because of the grounding of the rubber tires. After that, at the first sound of thunder, I caterwauled until my parents would takeme in the car until the storm subsided. I then proceeded to write about cars for the rest of my life. As a child, all of this was simply mysterious, embarrassing and ordinary. It had to be. These were the peopleI loved.
    We are the afflicted. A lot of trouble came in the blood of my people who hailed from the Emerald Isle. My great-great-grandmother Ann Garrity left Ireland at fourteen in 1852 with two sisters, aged twelve and ten. This was five years after the potato famine devastated much of Ireland, and she settled in Freehold. I don’t know where it started, but a serious strain of mental illnessdrifts through those of us who are here, seeming to randomly pick off a cousin, an aunt, a son, a grandma and, unfortunately, my dad.
    I haven’t been completely fair to my father in my songs, treating him as an archetype of the neglecting, domineering parent. It was an East of Eden recasting of our relationship, a way of “universalizing” my childhood experience. Our story is much more complicated.Not in the details of what happened, but in the “why” of it all.
    My Father
    To a child, the bars of Freehold were citadels of mystery, filled with mean magic, uncertainty, and the possibility of violence. Stopped at a red light on Throckmorton Street one evening, my sister and I witnessed two men on the concrete outside of the local taproom beating each other toward what seemed certain death.Shirts were torn; men surrounded, shouting; one man held the other by his hair as he straddled his chest, delivering vicious blows to his face. Blood mixed deeply around the man’s mouth as he desperately defended himself, his back to the pavement. My mother said, “Don’t look.” The light changed and we drove on.
    When you walked through barroom doors in my hometown, you entered the mystical realmof men. On the rare night my mother would call my father home, we would slowly drive through town until we drew to a stop outside of a single lit door. She’d point and say, “Go in and get your father.”Entering my father’s public sanctuary filled me with a thrill and fear. I’d been given license by my mom to do the unthinkable: interrupt my pop while he was in sacred space. I’d push open the door,dodging men who towered over me on their way out. I stood waist-high to them at best, so when I entered the barroom I felt like a Jack who’d climbed some dark beanstalk, ending up in a land of familiar but frightening giants. On the left, lining the wall, lay a row of booths filled with secret assignations, barroom lovers, and husband-and-wife tag-team drinkers. On the right were stools filledby a barricade of broad working-class backs, rolling-thunder murmuring, clinking glasses, unsettling adult laughter and very, very few women. I’d stand there, drinking in the dim smell of beer, booze, blues and aftershave; nothing in the outer world of home smelled remotely like it. Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon ruled, with the blue ribbon stamped on the bartender’s pouring spout as the