Big Man Read online

  “You’re an interesting man, all right,” said Clarence.

  “I think so,” said Norman. “Or maybe I don’t. It’s hard to say given the facts, isn’t it?”

  “And what makes you so interesting,” Clarence continued, “is the fact that you’re so much like me.”

  “How’s that?” asked Norman.

  “Well, I, too, am a compulsive liar,” said Clarence.

  “You are, huh?” said Norman.

  “Lie all the time,” said Clarence.

  “Well if what you’re saying is true,” said Norman, “and I have no reason to doubt your veracity, and what I’m saying is true, which I’ve already indicated is virtually impossible, then neither of us can believe anything the other one says about anything at any time. Because, all things being equal, the truth is that nobody really knows what the truth is.”

  Clarence ate a fritter.

  “True,” he said.

  That night after dinner they sat in the comfortable lobby lounge and smoked Cuban cigars. Clarence smoked a Hoyo de Monterrey double corona and Norman smoked a Montecristo #2. They were sipping cognac from crystal snifters. They sat in adjacent chenille covered chairs facing the lawn, which in turn faced the sea.

  “Do you think anyone, and mind you I’m not restricting this to Franklin, do you think anyone ever went down on Eleanor Roosevelt?” said Norman.

  “I hope so,” said Clarence. “She was a fine woman.”

  “That she was,” said Norman. “I worry about this.”

  “That’s what you worry about, huh?” said Clarence.

  “Among other things,” said Norman. “I always thought it would be nice to be a drummer.”

  “Is this in any way connected to Eleanor Roosevelt?” asked Clarence.

  “No,” said Norman. “I was just thinking how much fun it would be to own something called a trap kit.”

  “Sure,” said Clarence.

  They drank and smoked for a while.

  “I walked by the pool before breakfast this morning, and there was a guy laying on a chaise lounge in the sun. After breakfast I passed by again and he was still there in the same position. And I thought of the first line of my next book,” said Norman.

  “I’d love to hear it,” said Clarence.

  Norman closed his eyes and tilted his head back slightly.

  “He died on a chaise lounge by the hotel pool just after eight a.m., but laid there all day until he was discovered that night with a sunburn so bad it would have killed him had he not been dead already,” he said.

  “That’s good,” said Clarence. “Then what happens?”

  “I have no idea,” said Norman.

  A soft breeze blew into the room through the open doors and windows. It ruffled Norman’s thin hair.

  “Why don’t you write about us?” said Clarence.

  “You and me?” said Norman.

  “No,” said Clarence. “Although that might be interesting, too. I was thinking about me and Bruce and the band. The whole thing. Show bidness. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

  Norman drew on his cigar and blew smoke in a slow, steady stream.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s been done to death.”

  “There must be a fresh angle,” said Clarence. “C’mon, you’re a fucking genius, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am, which is why I’m saying no,” said Norman. “Your fans, Bruce’s fans, the band’s fans, are true fanatics. At least some of them are. They’ve chronicled every shit you’ve taken for the last thirty years. I’ve seen the Web sites. These poor fuckers have no lives of their own, so they pore over the minutia of everything E Street like demented archaeologists. Bruce sings a song he hasn’t done for a while, and they all go fucking nuts like he cured cancer or something. I can’t write for people like that. They’re crazy, rabid fuckheads who would crucify me if I said anything that didn’t conform to the God like status they’ve endowed upon you. Pass.” He sipped the cognac.

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Clarence.

  “Oh, I’m right,” said Norman.

  Clarence nodded. The woman with the two kids from the bar walked into the room with a short, bespeckled balding man. He wore a Tommy Bahama shirt with palm trees on it. She wore a black dress and some kind of transparent shawl, which looked similar to the cover-up she wore earlier. She looked at Clarence and Norman and then at their cigars. She wrinkled her nose and said something to the man, and they left. Clarence smiled.

  “Unless…,” said Norman.

  “Unless what?” said Clarence.

  “Unless it was partially bullshit,” said Norman.

  “What was bullshit?” said Clarence.

  “The book,” said Norman. “What if it was bullshit? What if we just made things up? I mean, I could write some real stuff about you, but then I’d say you also invented the cardiac stent. Not the medicated one, the original.”

  Clarence laughed out loud. It was a big sound and made the bartender look up from all the way across the room.

  “You’re funny,” he said.

  “It could be good,” said Norman. “Remember that book Guy Peellaert and Nik Cohn did? It was called Rock Dreams or something.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Clarence.

  “I’m going back thirty years,” said Norman. “They were paintings and stories. They imagined rock stars in fantasy situations but real at the same time. Like the Drifters were under the boardwalk and the Beach Boys were on the beach and Dylan was in the back of a limo wearing Wayfarers and a big fur coat with a cat on his lap.”

  “I’ll check it out,” said Clarence.

  “Yeah,” said Norman. “But I’m talking about a journalistic equivalent of that. Just let my mind go and see where it takes me.”

  “And I’d be in it?” asked Clarence.

  “Yeah,” said Norman. “Ostensibly, it would be about you. You, Bruce, Queen Elizabeth, Englebert Humperdinck, Rodney Dangerfield, whoever. Maybe I’ll put myself in there.”

  “I like it,” said Clarence.

  “So do I,” said Norman. He smiled. He looked pleased with himself. “The possibilities are limited only by the imagination.”

  “That could be a problem,” said Clarence.

  They smoked their cigars. It occurred to Clarence that he hadn’t heard a dog bark since he’d arrived here.

  “Course I’d have to tell real stories, too,” said Norman. “That’s where it gets difficult.”

  “Why?” said Clarence.

  “Well,” said Norman, “the problem is that it’s all been said. You’ve been so covered, so interviewed, so photographed, and so mythologized that there’s nothing left to say.”

  “You could talk about what a good dancer I am,” said Clarence.

  “Always an option,” smiled Norman.

  “So do you want to do it?” asked the Big Man.

  Norman thought for a minute.

  “Nah,” he said finally. “You can have the idea, though. Give it to one of your hack writer friends. I just don’t have the time.”

  An hour later Norman had gone to his room, and Clarence sat on a bench at the edge of the low bluff, looking at the night sea and feeling the warm tropical wind on his face. There were storm cells out over the ocean, and he could see them backlit by moonlight. Individual clouds drifted by with curtains of dark rain trailing from them like the tendrils of a jellyfish. Heat lightning burned the sky. Clarence thought about a girl he knew in high school, then about a song he used to play, then about the house he grew up in back in Virginia, then about a street in Paris, then about a room he stayed in once in San Francisco, then about a painting of a child and a dog sitting on a pier, then about a bottle of wine he especially enjoyed at a restaurant in New York or maybe Boston with its gardens and grown-up houses and trees along the river and the pizza in the North End and a car, his first car, a ’62 Chevy, a burgundy convertible; and he thought about all the people who had died and he thought about death itself and how his was comin
g someday and about how scared he would be to stop living and lose it all and slip into that great blackness and would it hurt and for how long; and he thought about the endless rush of time and color and sound as he moved down some corridor like at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where that guy is in that room where you’re young and you’re old and you’re young and you’re old again; and he thought about his mother and his father and his children and his concept of God and about Heaven and who would be there and would there be awkward moments like when Jackie O runs into Marilyn, and he wondered why ghosts are always wearing clothes and did that mean that shirts and pants existed after death, too; and he thought about all the things he didn’t do that he said he would, the broken promises, the broken hearts, the broken glass, the fragments of regret scattered around all his rooms, all his days; and he thought about the rain, the soft, steady kind, the deep, soaking rain that strangely brought him comfort on the days that said the sun would never come out again, and the rain would wash him clean if he stood in it and opened his arms to it and turned his face to the dark, weeping sky and allowed it to soak into his soul and make him one with the rain, part of it, lost in it where there was no pain and no memory and no regret, a place of peace and quiet, a place beyond hope, beyond repentance, beyond redemption, and beyond death.

  * * *

  If you had looked from the hotel you would’ve seen the Big Man sitting on the bench put his hands over his face and breathe deeply. You would have seen him stand slowly, feeling all the pain his body carried, and turn slowly, from the sea and begin to walk away. You would have seen him gradually fade from view and finally disappear into the darkness.

  Singer Island, Florida

  Clarence

  I’ve never felt this bad in my life,” I said.

  It was Thanksgiving week. Don and I had been talking and texting for a few days about the horrible depression that had descended on me in the days after I got home from the hospital. The operations and the constant pain were taking a psychological toll as well as a physical one.

  “They didn’t tell me this was going to happen,” I said.

  “Of course not,” he replied. “If they did you might not have the operations and the doctors couldn’t buy new BMWs.”

  But even Don couldn’t make me smile today.

  “I can’t talk anymore, Don,” I said. “Call me tomorrow.”

  The next day brought a slightly more hopeful attitude.

  Had a good day, I texted to Don. Hard workouts. Same tomorrow. I will get through this.

  The previous week I had described myself as an emotional mess. “I am really losing it,” I said.

  These operations and the attendant rehab process would be a bitch for someone who was in good shape when they went into it. I was not, so my recovery was all that much harder. Postsurgical depression is a very real thing, and it hit me hard. Today I read of a new study of heart patients with depression. The rate of another “event” occurring was 50 percent greater among the group who were the most depressed. This happened because they were less likely to continue their exercise programs and watch their diets. Basically they were more likely to just say, “Fuck it.” The fact that I’m working out hard is a good thing. The question is, can I keep it up before this dark cloud descends on me again?

  Last week the release of the new album was announced. Five days later Bruce and the Band will be playing at halftime in the Super Bowl game in Tampa. Right now it seems impossible that I will be able to walk out on that stage and perform with them. If I do, it will take some kind of miracle. And I’m afraid that I might be all out of them.

  Hallandale, Florida, January 24, 2009

  Don

  I saw Clarence in person tonight for the first time in months and he looks great. Following his double knee-replacement surgery he’s lost forty pounds. He’s working out daily and watching his diet. He has stopped drinking and smoking, and his eyes are clear and bright and he looks fantastic.

  Except for the wheelchair.

  I wasn’t prepared for the wheelchair.

  A little earlier, I was standing outside the world’s most bizarre nightclub/restaurant, Tatiana’s, located in a dying strip mall in Hallandale, Florida, between the senior health-care center and a credit dentist. I was there to meet Clarence and Victoria and her twin sister, Julia, who were celebrating their thirtieth birthday. I was with Damon Wayans and his date for the evening. Damon and I had come to Florida to attend Clarence’s charity golf tournament, to be held the two days before we headed to Tampa for Super Bowl week. Clarence’s limo pulled up and Lani Richmond got out, followed by Victoria and Julia and her husband. Clarence leaned out of the back door and smiled.

  “Daddy-o!” he said.

  Perfect Tommy Kline, Clarence’s driver and facilitator extraordinaire, got out of the car, said hello, and took the chair out of the trunk.

  The Super Bowl show was eight days away. In fact, Clarence had flown to New York for the first rehearsal. We would all be driving up to Tampa after golf, and there were more rehearsals scheduled for Tuesday through Friday at the site.

  Clarence got out of the car with help from Tommy and Victoria, and stood. Tommy handed him a cane.

  “Getting old is fucked,” said Clarence, smiling.

  “Can you walk?” I asked.

  “A little,” he said. “It’s getting better every day. This has been a bitch on wheels.”

  “What about the Super Bowl?” I asked. “Are you going to make it?”

  “We’ll see,” he said. Then something shifted in his eyes and he spoke again. “Hell yes, I’m going to make it. And then we’re going back out on the road for the best part of the next year. I’m going to make all of it,” he said.

  “Are you in a lot of pain?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not my knees or my hips,” he said. “Now it’s my back.”

  “You’re not thinking about more surgery, are you?” I said.

  “Yeah, I am,” he said. “I have to. I’ll do it after this tour because there’s going to be a long, long recovery period after this one. But then I’ll be perfect and pain free. Then I’ll probably drop dead.”

  We had a fun time in the deeply weird Russian restaurant. Words actually fail to convey what the evening was like. Suffice to say it included lots of food I couldn’t identify, lots of Russian music and conversations in Russian, festive and unbelievable costumes, giant Fabergé eggs lowered from the ceiling by exposed wires, lots of traditional dancing, a snake charmer, artificial smoke and holograms, a girl who flew around the room suspended by pieces of cloth, the old Santo and Johnny hit “Sleep Walk” played by a Siberian trio, and a fire-eater. And that barely scratches the surface.

  The next night, Damon and I attended the charity auction back at the Hard Rock in Hollywood, Florida. Then Damon headed down to South Beach, and I went northwest to Tampa to begin the countdown to halftime, when the horns would kick in and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” would begin. I still could not imagine that my old friend would be able to walk to the front of that stage and stand next to Bruce when it was time for “the Big Man to join the band.”

  Tampa, January 27, 2009

  Clarence

  Tuesday afternoon is the first time the band gets to practice on the stage. Everyone is in high spirits. The new album, Working on a Dream, has just been released, and the new tour dates are being announced. We’ll be touring the States for a couple of months starting in April, then spending most of the summer in Europe. When we return home we’ll continue to play into the fall. It’s a heady time, and we all feel lucky and blessed.

  But first there is the Super Bowl gig. We have been given twelve minutes onstage. Bruce quickly decided on the edited four song set list of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” “Born to Run,” “Working on a Dream,” and “Glory Days.” He also added other horns and the choir to beef up the sound and the spectacle.

  This morning I sat with Don and listened to a CD of those four songs that Bruce had sent over, wit
h crowd noises added so that it was as close as possible to how it would sound onstage. It is this attention to detail that continues to amaze me.

  But that obsession with perfection becomes even clearer inside the big tent, where the stage is set up. We rehearse those four songs for more than three hours. Three hours would be a long time to rehearse four songs even if they were new, but when you consider the fact that we have played three of these songs thousands of times before, and that there are potentially four more days of rehearsal, the dedication to getting it right becomes somewhat astounding.

  I ride home exhausted.

  Don is staying near Victoria and me at the Saddlebrook Resort outside of Tampa. I have stayed here before and liked it. Bruce and the rest of the band are staying in Sarasota at the Ritz Carlton. Nobody is staying anywhere near the event itself.

  We go out to an early dinner, and I know everyone could see the exhaustion in my face. This is, after all, the first time I have tested my energy level since the operations.

  “I can’t sleep,” I say. “I keep waking up, and then I just lay there thinking.”

  “What do you think about?” Don asks me.

  “The show,” I say. “Performing onstage. Getting it right. You’d think I’d have it down by now, but every show is like the first time. And I’m worried about falling down in front of a billion people.”

  After dinner we go back to the house where Victoria and I are staying and I put the rehearsal CD on again. I chat with Don a little more, make plans for tomorrow and he starts to leave. Before he closes the door, he looks back and tells me that what he sees right now is the definition of who I am. I agree. It is a summation of my life: after playing the song for hours that day, after playing the song thousands and thousands of times over the last thirty-five years, I am sitting in a room somewhere in Western Florida listening to “Born to Run.”