Bruce Read Online Free Page A

them was Bobby Duncan, a slightly younger boy he’d befriended when they were both preschoolers. To Duncan, the young Bruce was a regular kid: passionate about baseball, content to spend an afternoon riding bikes to the candy store on Main Street, then pedaling back to his grandparents’ house to watch the children’s shows on TV, read Archie comics, or both. Duncan also noticed his friend’s differences. “He was like the lone rebel back then. He didn’t care what people thought.” Which presented such a striking distinction from the typical grade school boys that the other kids in the neighborhood were often at a loss. Particularly when they grew up enough to battle for stature in the traditional arena of sandlot fistfights. “I grew up on a black block, but we were surrounded by blocks of white families,” says David Blackwell, who lived a few blocks away from Bruce’s street. “We all became friends because we were all fighting. I had fights with all my friends, white and black. But something about Bruce . . . I don’t think you can find anyone at Freehold who tried to fight him.” If only because, as David’s brother, Richard, remembers, the Springsteen kid either ignored or was somehow immune to the childhood taunts that sparked battle. “You could be sayin’ some shit about his mother, and he’d just shrug, say ‘Okay!’ and keep on walking,” he says. “Nothin’ you can do about that. You gotta respect it. Let that boy go about his business.”
    Bruce’s odd yet stubborn ways made him a juicy target for the nuns and their vaguely medieval humiliations and for the classmates who tittered at the odd boy’s hapless flailing. Bruce incited enough institutional fury to end more than a few of his school days in the principal’s office, where he waited for hours before Adele could come claim him. Faced down by his parents at the end of the day, Bruce always had the sameexplanation for his behavior. “He didn’t want to go back to Catholic school,” Adele says. “But I made him do it, and now I’m sorry I did. I should have known he was different.” 4
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    Douglas Springsteen spent most of those years huddled inside himself, handsome in the brooding fashion of actor John Garfield, but too lost in his own thoughts to find a connection to the world humming just outside his kitchen window. Often unable to focus on workplace tasks, Doug drifted from the Ford factory to stints as a Pinkerton security guard and taxi driver, to a year or two stamping out obscure industrial doo-dads at the nearby M&Q Plastics factory, to a particularly unhappy few months as a guard at Freehold’s small jail, to occasional spurts of truck driving. The jobs were often bracketed by long periods of unemployment, the days spent mostly alone at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and gazing into nothing.
    Doug felt more comfortable with his cousin and closest friend, Dim Cashion, who had pivoted from his years in the farm system of Major League Baseball to a position as coach for Little League teams and a player-coach in New Jersey’s semipro leagues. But even while Dim’s talent and charisma helped him lead generations of Freehold boys to the joys of baseball, it also came with the spiraling undertow of manic depression. The seesaw of black-eyed despair into neon auroras of unhinged energy could trigger fits of often uncontrollable behavior. “Kitchen cabinets came off the wall, telephones came off the wall, state troopers were called,” says Dim’s youngest brother, Glenn Cashion. And while Doug and Dim didn’t always get along, and sometimes went months without seeing each other (despite living within a block of each others’ homes), the cousins still passed their empty hours together in the same pool halls, still drank beer together, always linked by the same history and the same genetic information.
    Eager to feel connected to other kids—and maybe even create a bondwith his father at the same