It must have been the summer of ’98 or ’99, because those were the last years when I had a car. It was a 1985 silver Volvo sedan, a “refrigerator on wheels” with a stick shift that I kept pulling out of the floor and a tendency to start billowing smoke on hot days on very crowded highways. But I thought it was a cool car nonetheless, and it got me safely from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back on hundreds of evenings.
One of those was July 4 of that year. I snuck the car into a lucky parking spot on the Upper West Side and watched the fireworks with a group of people on the roof of a co-worker’s apartment building. When the party was over, I didn’t feel like I was done for the night.
I took the Volvo back down the FDR Drive and across the Brooklyn Bridge. This was an unpredictable journey. The potential for a mind-numbing traffic delay was always there, around the next bend in the road, no matter WHAT time of day or night you were driving. But if the route was clear, there was nothing like the sight of the Bridge as you curLed under it and then cruised across it, with Brooklyn ahead of you, the Statue of Liberty lit up to your right, and the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan shining in the far corner of your eye.
The road was surprisingly empty for a 4th, so I got on it and kept going, windows down, music loud. I skipped my usual turn onto Atlantic Ave. and went right down Broadway, which is known as Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn. I eventually parked in front of a bar I’d been to a few times in the past, one of the few where New Brooklyn, with its hipsters and beardos from the borough’s northern tier, co-existed with Old Brooklyn, the natives up from Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge.
Like the streets around it, the bar was also mostly empty, but there was plenty of ragged evidence—stray glasses, bottles, napkins, an overturned chair—of earlier activity. In the back, there were three girls—natives, not hipsters—around the pool table. They seemed to be hanging onto the evening, like I was, trying just to make it last. One of them, who had long, curly black hair, was pretty. Boldly breaking the hipster/local divide, I got in their game as a fourth; after my first turn, I went to the jukebox. One song stuck right out at me because of it’s name: “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” by Bruce Springsteen. It was also a long-time favorite, an anthem of that day, of the beach, of long shot romance.
By the time I got a beer and made it back to the pool table, the song was playing and the black-haired girl was shooting. As she lined up a shot, she mouthed a few of the words. Leave it to Bruce to cross the Brooklyn divide. But I never followed. When she was done, she stuck the stick back up on the rack and told her friends she had to go. I can’t tell you why, out of the hundreds of similar scenes and evenings, I’ve never forgotten that one. The tell-tale sound of the accordion in Bruce’s song always brings the whole thing back to me, from the fireworks over Manhattan to the scattered post-holiday trash on an empty Flatbush Avenue to the Brooklyn girl’s shy, fleeting sing-along. One more useless moment of thwarted fate, with no repercussions, but nonetheless unforgettable.
So here, a day late, is a live version of “Sandy”—over the top, yes, and not nearly as atmospheric as the original, but there’s something about the ridiculous, un-ironic emotionalism of the performance that makes it feel worthy of being the real anthem of July 4. The great memory it evokes is also mixed with the melancholy thought that neither of the two men who flank Bruce on stage, Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons, are alive today, and this video isn’t all that old; it’s from 1978.
But the sight of those two is also a reminder, to me at least, as I finally and officially begin my American summer after spending the better part of six weeks in Europe, to savor it while it lasts. To savor what I’ve missed so far, and what seems distinctly American about it. Humidity that, on pleasant days, makes the air feel like an embrace. That too-strong Coppertone smell. The trees and bushes that grow and overflow wildly through my Brooklyn neighborhood. Weekday evenings spent in the company of a good Philadelphia Phillies team. The chance, best of all, to play tennis outdoors. Tomorrow is my first day out.
What I like best about this song, though, is a word that Bruce took out of it. Typically, it begins, “Sandy, the fireworks are hailin’ over Little Eden tonight.” In some early versions, though, the fireworks were hailin’ over “our” Little Eden. Asbury Park was Bruce’s own cheesy, unlikely little Eden; a lot of cheesy, unlikely places can feel like that on a summer night.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I brought up that word change to the black-haired Brooklyn girl shooting pool back in ’98 or ’99. I try to imagine that conversation, and then i think: Maybe it’s better I never got a chance to talk to her after all.
