My Apologies to the Guitarist at the Rail House in Rahway, NJ

As I stumbled down the narrow side street which led from the bar to our apartment, my husband was trying desperately to hold an umbrella over me. It was the first week of December in Northern New Jersey and the rain drops pelting us should have been icy cold. It is then I realized I had managed to drink enough to make the rain seem like an April shower.

“Both of my parents are dead and that asshole wouldn’t even play a Bruce Springsteen song!” I shouted. In retrospect I am very glad the bar was so close to our apartment–it prevented me from embarrassing Dan (my then-husband) any more. I had already shouted this same sentence inside the bar at least a few times.

I am not usually an angry drunk and I had been having a really good time: one of my best friends, Jason, had come to visit us from California. We hadn’t gotten to see him since he officiated our wedding a few years before. We had met Evelyn, my then-friend from grad school, and her husband at the Rail House, a bar right across the street from train station. It had been a great evening: we had never been to the bar before and the place looked like a dump from the outside and Jason had never met Evelyn or Teli. But when we met and went into the bar it turned out to be a nice place and everyone hit it off immediately.

An hour or two into our being there, a guitarist started setting up to play a few feet from our table. At first we were giving each other looks of silent disappointment: we had been engaged in great conversation and now were going to have to compete with this music in order to keep talking. But the guitarist was great: he played a variety of great covers and a few uniqure original songs. Although there wasn’t a dance floor, at one point our whole table was up dancing–a true indication of how much fun we were having.

Towards the end of the evening, we were pitching dollars to the guitarist and making requests. I asked for a Springsteen song.

“No.”

I was genuinely surprised because he had been playing a lot of different requests from different genres all night. I tried to insist and ask again, but to no avail.  It is then that I may or may not have yelled about my dead parents and how the hell can any self-respecting guitarist not know ONE Springsteen song?

Dan later reflected on the matter with me when I was sober the next morning, saying, “Maybe people in New Jersey get annoyed by Springsteen requests.”

The other matter is both of my parents are not dead, making my choice to shout this fact over and over again an odd one.

My father died suddenly in 2003. We were extremely close.

My mother is alive and well, a woman with borderline personality disorder and severe substance abuse problems.

My parents grew up on Springsteen and he was always on heavy rotation in our house. Whatever discord existed between them in their 37 year-long relationship, Springsteen was a uniting force. Aside from the fact he is an amazing rock and roller, I know I depend on Springsteen to be able to taste at least the dregs of what it was like to have a set of parents.

I am not in the habit of telling people my mother is dead. I usually just omit her from conversations. If pressed for mother-related news, I talk about my mother-in-law, who lives with us and is a great mom.

Up until my Uncle Ben died in April of 2015, I hadn’t spoken to my mother since January 2007. When I saw her at the funeral, she talked to me like I was an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a while. She was impressed at how skinny I was. This was always one of my mother’s biggest measures of worth for any person, including her children.

At some point, someone at the funeral brought up Springsteen. To which my mother said, “I don’t listen to Springsteen anymore.”

Seemed like an appropriate thing to say at a funeral.