I remember wasting my summers doing exactly what Bruce told me not to do: “praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets.” I had big ideas in my head of what that guy would be like, even as he would say to me, “I’m no hero, that’s understood,” but I wanted every bit of “redemption” he could offer “beneath [his] dirty hood” because he was my hero, a savior from the mundane, the one to take me out of this “town full of losers.” And they were all losers – girls who “combed their hair in the rear-view mirrors” to get the attention of boys who “tried to look so hard.” I saw through their posturing; I knew better. I didn’t have time for their silly teen games, and there was a boy out there somewhere who was longing for a girl like me, a girl with a quick brain and eyes that could see the truth – truths like how a life working in a factory everyday where you had to be nice to your boss so he would include you in the take-out lunch order and where you had to keep a special brush in your car just for threading out the cotton residue from your hair every afternoon was a life of futility on spin cycle. And truths like just because you live in a single-wide trailer with an extra room built on the side didn’t mean that you were a redneck ready to fight. And truths like how I really wanted to go to prom, but I couldn’t find a date, and I wouldn’t be able to afford a dress anyway if I did have a date. My mom would have been so excited to start looking for a dress, but then when one wouldn’t fit right because my shoulders were too broad for my flat chest and my hips were too round for anything off the rack anyway, and I would be a disappointment again. We would have to look for a bargain deal anyway, which meant the dress would look something like what the other girls were wearing, but not quite the same. It looked and felt like rejection and loneliness, but Bruce taught me that I was just misunderstood. Someone out there would promise me one day to love me “with all the madness in [his] soul.” And that is all I really wanted anyway, not a prom date. Because when I found him, we would agree that we were beyond silliness like proms because “we learned more from a 3-minute record… than we ever did in school.” We would have our backstreets hangout, a secret place where we could talk for hours about how “we liked the same music” and how “we liked the same bands,” and “we liked the same clothes.”

And I wanted him to come after me with the same desperation and longing I heard in Bruce’s voice, or the voice of the boy speaking the line to the girl. A guy so excited about his new record deal that he promises Rosalita that he would break her out of parents’ grips, coming to “liberate” me, “confiscate” me, coming to “lend a hand.”

Where was my “soft-infested summer” where we would become friends? Everyone around me seemed totally caught up in the high-school shuffle, loving all that Teen World offered. There was another misunderstood soul out there somewhere in the “promised land.” So I sat and waited and wrote sillly stories about the life I knew I was going to live someday, a life that the morons around me would never understand, a life that exceeded all their small-minded ideas of what made life worth living.

So, I blame Bruce for many of misguided attempts at love when I was younger. I spent so long searching for the brooding Romantic with a chip on his shoulder only to find out that he was the perfect guy for a whirlwind romance, but not so good for a lifetime commitment. And that kind of heated effort gets exhausting after a while. But the idea of loving someone with all the madness in one’s soul – what else would a girl want? And the idea of a hero rescuing me from the sea of mediocrity in which I drown was exactly the fantasy that kept me moving forward. I would find happiness one day, when I found him and we set out on Thunder Road.

So, when I listen to those Bruce songs now that I am 45 and happily married, my heart aches just like it did when I was 13, 14, 15, 16, and so on because the teen girl in me still longs for that Romantic brooding hero who doesn’t really exist. That’s what makes him perfect. He fits my imagination and fulfills every need of that insecure teenager I used to be, the one who just wanted to be beautiful and treasured. So, he can’t be real. But then, I look back on that insecure teenager, and I see her wasted potential, the opportunities she threw away because she was insecure. And I love Bruce even more. He seems to know and can name that feeling – a feeling much stronger than longing, a feeling of being misplaced far more harrowing than just loneliness, and a feeling of determination that seethes rather than blossoms. I love Bruce because he gets it. He understands angst and frustration and desire and disgust in a way I have never encountered in another artist. He gets me.

So now, when I hear “Thunder Road,” I might cry because I think about that girl who sat on the side porch of a trailer home with a room built on the side, and I watch her as she sings with The Boss, burying every word deep in her heart because she knows he is talking about her.

“There are ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you’ve sent away.
They haunt this dusty beach road in teh skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets.
They scream your name at night in the streets.
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet.
And in the lonely cool before dawn,
You hear their engines roaring along,
But when you get to the porch, they’re gone on the wind….”

Yes, they are gone on the wind, but she has survived. She has even thrived. And maybe she wasted a summer or two praying in vain for a savior to rise from those streets, but eventually, she found something worth keeping, something worth fighting for, something that makes all those lonely, bitter summer evenings just poignant and sweet memories, no longer able to hurt her anymore.