Free Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

blue-balled after some close encounter with a woolen skirt. The chaperones sat up in the bleachers, armed with a flashlight that they flickered on you during the slow dances if things were looking a little hot and tight. Still there was only so much they could do. They were trying to stop a millennia of sexual hunger, and for that job a flashlight just wasn’t going to cut it. At the endof the night, by the time Paul and Paula’s “Hey Paula” was spun on the decidedly lo-fi gym sound system, every man and woman alike was throwing themselves onto the dance floor just to feel a body, almost any body, up against theirs. There in those death-defying clinches lay the promise of things to come.
    By the time I got to the CYO dance at my own alma mater, I had some rudimentary skills. Thepoor souls who comprised most of my Catholic male colleagues didn’t yet realize that GIRLS LOVE TO DANCE! So much so that they’ll get on the dance floor with just about any geek who’s got a few moves. That geek was ME! I had a ridiculous assortment of gyrations copped and exaggerated from the dances of the day. The Monkey, the Twist, the Swim, the Jerk, the Pony, the Mashed Potato—I mixed themall up into a stew of my own that occasionally got me on the floor with some of the finest women in town. This shocked my classmates, who’d only known me as the poor soul at the rear corner desk in class. I’d hear, “Hey, Springy, where’d you learn that?” Well, I’d practiced and practiced hard. Not just with my mom and at the Y but heavily in front of the full-length mirror tacked up to the back ofmy door in my bedroom. Way before I played broomstick guitar in front of it, me and that mirror spent hours together in a sweat-soaked frenzy, moving to the latest records of the day. I had a small suitcase stereo with a 45 adapter that held me in good stead, and I’d Frug and Twist and Jerk my way to a soggy T-shirt that wouldn’t be rivaled ’til many years later in the midst of a fevered “Devil witha Blue Dress On” in front of a cavernous hall of twenty thousand screaming rock fans.
    Then . . . come Friday, I’d slip on my tightest black stovepipe jeans, ared button-down shirt, matching red socks and black winklepicker shoes. I’d previously stolen some of my mother’s hairpins, pinned my bangs down tight and slept on them so they’d come out as straight as Brian Jones’s. I’d comb them out,then sit under a ten-dollar sunlamp my mother had gotten at the corner drugstore to try and combat some of my fiercest acne. I squeezed a half tube of Clearasil on the rest and stepped out of my bedroom, down the stairs, out the front door and onto the street. Show me the dance floor.

ELEVEN
    WORKINGMAN’S BLUES
    My parents had no money for a second shot at the guitar, so there was just one thing to do: get a job. One summer afternoon my mom took me to my aunt Dora’s, where for fifty cents an hour I would become the “lawn boy.” My uncle Warren came out and showed me the ropes. He demonstrated how the lawn mower worked, how to cut the hedges (not too short, not too long), and Iwas hired. I went immediately to the Western Auto store, an establishment in the town’s center specializing in automotive parts and cheap guitars. There amongst the carburetors, air filters and fan belts hung four acoustic guitars, ranging from the unplayable to the barely playable. They looked like nirvana to me and they were attainable. Well, one was attainable. I saw a price tag hanging off ofone funky brown model that read “Eighteen dollars.” Eighteen dollars? That was more money than I had ever held in my hand at one time. A lot more.
    After a while I noticed my “living expenses” were cutting into my savings from my job at Aunt Dora’s, so I was going to have to step up my workload. Across the street from my aunt’s house was a lovely, older white-haired lady named Mrs. Ladd. She wantedher house painted and her roof tarred. My grandfather, when