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BORN IN THE USA

As I drove slowly up the mountain road last night with the car windows open to the late summer air, screaming harmoniously to BORN IN THE USA over and over, the towering crystal chords and pounding drums of Bruce's jewel blasting top-cranked out of the speakers into the always receptive mountain night as Bruce and I rose through lower darkness toward the greater dark of the looming mountains, I suddenly re-realized, as I screamed out BORN IN THE USA one more time with such feeling, that yes indeed, I had been: BORN IN THE USA.

"Born down in a dead man's town..." And yes, Bruce's mood in that throat-clenching anthem to the Vietnam era put me so much in mind of my own mood when I'd left the States way back then, gave it all up, left it all behind, went open-eyed off into the world to do something other than what all my friends and acquaintances, colleagues and fellow alumni were doing: becoming parents, lawyers, junkies, brokers, bureaucrats, diplomats, soldiers, movie moguls, theater directors, artists... and here I was dropping it all like an old uniform, dropping it cold and going off into the whole world forever, wearing my own clothes.

Back then when I'd been only physically young, living like a Roman candle, with time itself often too confining, I'd left not just for the wander-yearning I was feeling, but for my growing unease at the tightening strictures of America, with the war ongoing and crooks in office and violence growing day by day in a pushy atmosphere and often venomous reactions to simply different strokes... "Till you spend half your life just a-coverin' up, now..."

"Down in the shadow of the penitentiary... out by the gas fires of the refinery..."

BORN IN THE USA: and so off I went, no turning back, to see what and where and when else there was in the world, "They're still there, he's all gone..." to find perhaps one day a treasure I hoped existed. To my years-later amazement, it turned out that I was the only one of my crowd who did leave the homeland.

As a result of that rash and necessarily baseless decision I had seen and lived and felt the other side of many of the things Bruce and I were screaming about right now as we rose along a Japanese mountain named after a Buddhist paradise, on a road metaphoring life and its up-ahead paradises that are in fact here and now as we turn and turn through what appears to be darkness, upward toward the light. And now I was going home.

But home wasn't in the USA: it was here, on the other side of the world. "I'm a long-gone daddy in the USA, now..." As a result of my travels I've had the treasure of many homes and families, all over this one great home we've all got to learn to share, no matter where we were born.