Walk like a Man Read Online Free PDF

as he was exploring the lives of the people around him.
    He chose a hell of a place to start.
    Upon its release in 1987, Tunnel of Love was regarded as his marriage album, his first collection of new material since marrying Julianne Phillips during the Born in the U.S.A. tour. It is not, however, an account of a man growing fat and happy in his new domestic kingdom. Steeped in betrayal, pain, and recrimination, Tunnel of Love has more in common with the emotional brutality of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks than it does with the comforting homilies of Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Our House.” Just the song titles alone—“ Ain’t Got You ,” “Cautious Man,” “Two Faces,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “When You’re Alone”—alert even the casual listener that all was not well in Casa Springsteen.
    Tunnel of Love also marked a shift in Springsteen’s process. He recorded the album’s basic tracks largely on his own, bringing in band members only as necessary for texture and flourish. The Bo Diddley–esque opener, “Ain’t Got You,” is a Springsteen solo track, and The E Street Band appears together only on the title song. Clarence Clemons, whose saxophone had been key to Springsteen’s sound, is relegated to a single appearance on the record, as a background vocalist on “ When You’re Alone .”
    We’ll never know how closely the songs on Tunnel of Love hew to the disintegration of Springsteen’s own marriage, or to the reality of his doubts and questions.
    We do know this, though: in the liner notes, he writes, “Thanks Juli.”
    CORI AND I got married in the side yard of my mother’s house on the Saturday of a May long weekend. May 16, 1992. It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny but not overly warm. We had a few friends there, but it was mostly a family affair.
    In my family, we do up large-scale occasions with a practiced ease. Christmas dinners for thirty are old hat. Family reunions are even easier, with their potluck nature. For the wedding, my grandmother cooked and my aunts brought food. My dad and Sue supplied the booze. And Jon spent the morning wandering the country roads, stopping in at houses with gardens to ask for flowers. 3
    Cori was carrying a basket of flowers as she walked toward me, up the front walk and across the grass, to the sound of Van Morrison’s “ Tupelo Honey .” She really was, as Van sang, “an angel of the first degree.” Her mother had made the dress, and I had a piece of the same ribbon tying back my ponytail.
    Peter was in Germany, on a family trip that couldn’t be changed. Greg was there, though, with Lisa, the woman he would marry a year later in a splendid extravaganza in Vancouver. Our friend Dorothy, who was in classes with Cori, served as her maid of honor. In the card she gave us, Dorothy confessed to being relieved that we were finally married: with her strict Catholic background and beliefs, she had feared for our mortal souls due to our premarital transgressions.
    Cori and I had moved in together at the beginning of our second year at UVic. We had planned on sharing a house with a bunch of people, but things fell through, and it ended up just the two of us in a shitty, furnished ground-level apartment.
    By the time we got married, we were living in an attic suite over a daycare. Every Saturday night we had a houseful of people over, a loose circle of friends gathering to watch the weekly doubleheader of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. We both worked while we were going to school, so those Saturday night get-togethers were our only social life, populated as they were with people we knew from our classes, co-workers from my job at the bookstore or hers at the community center. The kitchen was downstairs, part of the daycare. We would make a big pot of soup over the course of the day and bake some soda bread to go