new jersey in the mornin' like a lunar landscape
Summary: Bruce is working on Nebraska—or trying to anyway.
Pairing: Bruce Springsteen/Clarence Clemons (could be read as platonic but why would you)
Rating: G
Word Count: 1709
Warnings: discussions of anxiety/depression
Read on AO3 or under the cut!
December 1981
Colts Neck, NJ
Bruce hasn’t gotten a solid night’s sleep in—he’s not even sure anymore. His brain is buzzing so badly it hurts. His eyes are dry and itchy, and his vision is full of the aggressive orange shag carpet the room is covered in, it’s making the back of his eyeballs ache and all he has with him is the scribbled-out nonsense words in front of him. A lot of words with no spark and his body and mind are exhausted but his thoughts won’t stop.
Bruce pushes himself away from the work around him—the loose papers scattered across his bed, his guitar, the microphones and four track recorder he’d been fucking around with for the past week. He grabs a jacket and he’s out the door. The night is frigid, and he turns up his collar and stuffs his hands in his pockets as he starts walking. The streets back here don’t even have a shoulder, let alone a sidewalk, so he’s walking along the side of the road, the frozen dirt crunching a bit under the weight of his footsteps. Years of hitchhiking have kept him in the habit of walking next to a space where a car would drive by even though there are no cars on the road and there won’t be any at this time of night, not here on these empty, silent streets.
Every single one of his muscles is sore (and he’s not even sure why since he hasn’t left the house for more than groceries and library trips in weeks) and thank god his feet know how to tread a familiar path because his brain doesn’t even remember the name of the street he lives on. His feet lead the way as he passes dark, two-story homes standing solitary among tidy yards and tall, old trees. In the summertime here, he thinks, there would be some nocturnal critters to keep him company. He would hear the hooting of an owl or, if he were very lucky, the rustling of a fox among the branches of trees. When he’d first moved in, it had been fall and hunting season in the nearby woods had driven deer into the neighborhood but they’d disappeared by the time winter settled over the area.
There is a twitchy, nervous energy vibrating under his skin like an animal on edge in an unfamiliar environment and he wants to get it out, he wants the feelings gone from his body. He could call up some of the guys for a jam session—he doesn’t know exactly how long it’s been since he spoke to any of them. Maybe not a jam session—maybe a gig, a gig would get him out of this funk. A jam session would lead him right back to where he is now—working on the same handful of songs, going over them and over them and over them and being left with nothing he feels confident in.
The last tour ended in September. It’s only been a few months and yet it has been an excruciatingly long few months. The end of a tour always gets him down—it’s been that way for as long as he’s been touring—but the end of the River Tour has been soul crushing in a way that’s left him alternating between a restlessness he’s mostly channeled into endless, circular writing and a strange emptiness that leaves him feeling like he’s lugging around a hollowed-out ribcage beneath his chest.
He thinks that maybe it’s because the River Tour had been so euphoric. Finally, for once, they weren’t playing for their lives. They weren’t playing to eat. They weren’t playing to prove themselves—over and over again to record producers, to managers, to fans. They were playing to play and it brought out a joyful, manic energy in all of them. Bruce could look around at the faces sharing the stage with him and know—really know that they’d made it. And then the tour ended. And with it? Every feeling of certainty Bruce had had while on it.
His feet have found their way to water, as they usually do. It was the main appeal of the house he’s renting now—its proximity to the Swimming River Reservoir. Well, that and its immediate availability since he’d come back from tour to find he wouldn’t be able to stay any longer in the last house he’d rented.
The reservoir was quiet, and he preferred it that way. He’d come up on the Shore music scene but lately even the thought of the bustling beaches and clubs along the boardwalk left him exhausted.
Staring out into the stillness of the black waters, he thinks about the tour, tries to conjure the same excitement in himself, as if remembering could bring him back to the feeling he had before and forget the feeling he has now.
He’s standing on the muddy bank (which is really only a few feet of space between the water and the tangled roots of trees behind him) and he remembers the grin on Stevie’s face any time Two Hearts would start up, Garry’s quick, efficient bow any time Bruce would introduce him to the crowd. The cold is biting into his skin and the moon is shining bright through the trees and he remembers Max’s watchful eyes on him, waiting for any sudden signal. The moon provides enough light from him to see the exhale of his own breath every time and he remembers the furious look of concentration on Danny’s face as his hands would fly over the keys. He remembers Roy’s serene energy paired with the huge sound his piano would make, filling more sound into his songs than he thought possible.
Bruce doesn’t even realize how late it really is until he notices the faint pink hues of early dawn starting to mix with the deep black of night and lighten the sky. He stoops to pick up a few rocks along the banks of the reservoir. He feels them in his hand, trying to determine if they’re the right shape. Clarence had tried to teach him how to skip rocks once. He never really got the hang of it.
He remembers the quick peck of Clarence’s lips against his own and he wants another show—and soon—so that can happen again…and again and again every night. He wonders if there’s a way to get the band back together for a tour without an album to promote. A tour for no reason just…a tour where they can play because they want to. There—in the chill of the earliest dawn, as only a spare few faint sunbeams are struggling through the dark—it almost seems possible. He can feel the ghost of Clarence’s arms around him—he could go to Clarence now. Clarence is always so free and easy with affection—naturally comfortable with it and willing to initiate touch where Bruce frequently struggles to bridge the gap between his body and someone else’s. He hasn’t been touched (by anyone for any reason) in a very long time. He’s in between girlfriends right now and maybe that’s why he’s having this strange desire to run into Clarence’s arms like a child—but he knows it won’t feel the same. It won’t feel as satisfyingly won as it does at the end of shows when he’s given his all—for the crowd, for himself, for the band, for Clarence—and then his hard work is rewarded with a giant bear hug from the Big Man himself—maybe even lifted into the air by him if it’s an especially good show that leaves Clarence energized.
Bruce wonders, briefly, what he could possibly do outside of a concert to deserve that—but he knows there’s nothing else that could earn him a celebration like that—it’s something that comes from deep in Clarence’s soul and only the peculiar energy of a show could bring it out of him. Not that Clarence doesn’t hug him or pick him up plenty of times outside of shows—any time he feels like it really. But it’s different. He wants to feel Clarence against him, sweaty and breathing heavy and filled with an infectious exhilaration—he wants that feeling back.
He thinks it’s too bad, too bad he doesn’t have new music he’s ready to release yet, he could hop right back on tour and be fine again. Instead, he has a bunch of recording equipment he’s not quite sure how to use in a rented bedroom and a handful of songs that won’t come out right. He thinks about maybe hopping in his car, driving past his childhood home again, like he’s done so many times over the past few weeks. But the daylight is starting to grow now, and he’s started to become a bit paranoid about someone recognizing him if he stops by the old house too many times. It’s not like the house ever changes—he knows what it looks like, he even knows the people who live there (by sight, at least).
The morning is coming on now and he wants to be back in the house before his neighbors start their own morning routines, so he turns from the reservoir and heads back the way he came. He's walked so far that his aching legs don’t want to carry him anymore and he wonders if he’ll end up passed out underneath a tree before making it back.
The sun is fully up by the time he walks through the door to the rental, most of his thoughts now scattered across his brain like lost marbles, the fantasy of returning to tour evaporated under the harsh light of day. He collapses on the sofa and his last coherent thought before losing consciousness is that he should walk himself over to his bed before he falls asleep.
A few short hours later, the sun breaks over the trees that surround the house, one bright midmorning beam falling straight on to his face and waking him from a fitful sleep.
Bruce drags himself to the small bedroom at the back of the house and gets back to work.
