From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The “Brothers Under the Bridges” Series- Jeanbon Leclerc’s Thunder Road

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing his classic Thunder Road.

Thunder Road Lyrics

Artist: Bruce Springsteen
Album: Born To Run

The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves
Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays
Roy Orbison singing for the lonely
Hey, that's me and I want you only
Don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again
Don't run back inside, darling, you know just what I'm here for
So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore
Show a little faith, there's magic in the night
You ain't a beauty but, hey, you're alright
Oh, and that's alright with me

You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a savior to rise from these streets
Well now, I ain't no hero, that's understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey, what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well, the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, heaven's waiting on down the tracks

Oh oh, come take my hand
We're riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Oh, Thunder Road, oh, Thunder Road
Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey, I know it's late, we can make it if we run
Oh oh oh oh, Thunder Road
Sit tight, take hold, Thunder Road

Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride ain't free
And I know you're lonely for words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free, all the promises'll be broken

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines rolling on
But when you get to the porch, they're gone on the wind
So Mary, climb in
It's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win
*************
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:

As I mentioned in an earlier entry in this series, courtesy of my old yellow brick road magical mystery tour merry prankster fellow traveler, Peter Paul Markin, who seems to think I still have a few things to say about this wicked old world, recently, in grabbing an old Bruce Springsteen CD compilation from 1998 to download into my iPod I came across a song that stopped me in my tracks, Brothers Under The Bridge. I had not listened to or thought about that song for a long time but it brought back many memories from the late 1970s when I did a series of articles for the now defunct East Bay Eye (California, naturally) on the fate of some troubled Vietnam veterans who, for one reason or another, could not come to grips with “going back to the real world” and took, like those a Great Depression generation or two before them, to the “jungle”-the hobo, bum, tramps camps located along the abandoned railroad sidings, the ravines and crevices, and under the bridges of California, mainly down in Los Angeles, and created their own “society.”

Not every guy I interviewed, came across, swapped lies with, or just snatched some midnight phrase out of the air from was from hunger. Most were, yes, in one way or another but some, and the one I am recalling in this 1979 sketch had an off-beat story that brought him down to the ravines. But see he, Jeanbon Leclerc (the bon part after Jean is organic for those of us who trace some French-Canadian [ F-C] Downeast Maine heritage, mine via my mother Delores, nee LeBlanc), out of the lowland white clay back water potato road Calais night (north of my hometown Olde Saco, way north and don’t pronounce it Calay, not if you if you don’t want an argument) , did not want to talk about ‘Nam, about his war- weary troubles in the “real world” or about how he got himself hoboed up a continent away. No he wanted to talk about the time before Vietnam, 1966 time, the time when he was the max daddy of the Calais (Callus, and he drawled it out just that way) night down on Thunder Road (my term) and about how he “won” Diana Dubois away from all the Podunk corner boys. The story that accompanies the song to this little piece, Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road, is written under that same sign.

I should note again since these sketches are done on an ad hoc basis, that the format of the story here follows those of the “Brothers Under The Bridge” series previously posted .The editor of the East Bay Eye, Owen Anderson, gave me that long ago assignment after I had done a smaller series for the paper on the treatment, the poor treatment, of Vietnam veterans by the Veterans Administration in San Francisco and in the course of that series had found out about this band of brothers roaming the countryside trying to do the best they could, but mainly trying to keep themselves in one piece. My qualifications for the assignment other than empathy, since I had not been in the military during the Vietnam War period, were based simply on the fact that back East I had been involved, along with several other radicals, in running an anti-war GI coffeehouse near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down near Fort Dix in New Jersey. During that period I had run into many soldiers of my 1960s generation who had clued me in on the psychic cost of the war so I had a running start.

After making connections with some Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW) guys down in L.A. who knew where to point me I was on my way. I gathered many stories, published some of them in the Eye, and put the rest in my helter-skelter files. A while back, after having no success in retrieving the old Eye archives, I went up into my attic and rummaged through what was left of those early files. I could find no newsprint articles that I had written but I did find a batch of notes, specifically notes from stories that I didn’t file because the Eye went under before I could round them into shape.

The ground rules of those long ago stories was that I would basically let the guy I was talking to give his spiel, spill what he wanted the world to heard, and I would write it up without too much editing (mainly for foul language). I, like with the others in this series, have reconstructed this story here as best I can although at this far remove it is hard to get the feel of the voice and how things were said. This is Jeanbon Leclerc’s short, breathless story, the story of a soldier born under the sign of that blasted Thunder Road:

Hell, I don’t know when I first started fooling around with cars, putting parts together to make some heap that would run for a while and then daddy would sell it, or trade it for whiskey and I would have to put another one together. That happened five, six times anyway. I do know that I was running the back roads in some kind of car when I was maybe twelve or thirteen. And no I didn’t have a license, hell, which needed a license in the back country.

I know for sure though that I was a lot more interested in cars than girls for a long time until I got my ’64 green Mustang put together and I had to be interested in girls, or I couldn’t drive the streets of Calais. That’s way up in Maine right along the Canadian border and I am F-C and Mainaic proud too or was, before ‘Nam. But I already told you I don’t want to talk about that, that ‘Nam part. I want to talk, and you said I could talk about anything I wanted to, about when I was the king of the road, back roads anyway, and they called me; she called me her Rock and Roll Johnnie. And she, the she I am talking about was Diana Dubois, the girl who made me interested in girls more than cars, almost.

It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory L.A. smogged in days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Calais and Diana now that she is long gone and I am stuck here under this f-----g ravine. That’s what happened to me when you mentioned about the “chicken runs” you used to go on with your corner boy down at Olde Saco Beach on Saturday nights. Yah, we had them too up in Calais and we hung out, when not all-out fixing up our cars, in front of Jake’s Pool Hall over on East Main Street. [Really Route 1, the end of U.S. Route 1-JLB.] That was the Calais of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.

That stuff brought to mind my mad passion for fast cars, fast Mustangs a specialty, and my fate. Strange to think of now since I haven’t even owned a car of any kind of a couple of years. What it really brought to mind though was about, Diana Dubois, who had been a class mate of mine at Calais High School (I never finished so don’t ask me my graduation year, it did not happen) who one Jeanbon Leclerc “stole” with his fast cars, and fast hands in 1966 (exact date and month unknown, Christ what day is it today? I have trouble enough with that.).

I had better start at the beginning otherwise you will accuse me of puffing stuff up, or something like that. Yes, she had to be a dizzy blonde (don’t make anything out of that I just had, and have, when I am sober enough to get cleaned up and have a yearning for women have a preference for non-dizzy brunettes as a rule) and yes, she looked good in an early 1960s cashmere high school sweater. And yes, she had nice legs and such. But mostly she had six gallons of personality and, well, a smiling interest in me, or rather what I had to ride in those high school days. And what I had to say. See I was what they called an alienated youth , a beatnik they called me in Podunk Calais just because I tried to be the spitting image of Jean Dean with maybe a The Wild Ones Marlon Brando thrown in.

And what I had to say in those days was almost every arcane fact I could find out about the “beats.” You know on the road Jack Kerouac, om-ing Allen Ginsburg, doped-up drugstore cowboy William S. Burroughs and most of all, mad monk, mad cosmic traveler Neal Cassady. [The real life model for Dean Moriarty in that on the road Kerouac search for the great American night-JLB]. But see that is all I cared about, except cars, so I never got hip to school or stuff like that until it was too late, until they called my number.

Yes, I know , I know now, in 1966 these guys, these beats, were “old news” in places like Greenwich Village and Harvard Square but in Podunk Maine talking about such things was “cool.” Especially if accompanied by the “look,” black chinos, work boots, flannel shirts, and mandatory midnight sunglasses worn 24/7/365. And don’t forget the French-Canadian connection, Jeanbon Kerouac was an F-C as were half the residents of that old working class mill town just like in your Olde Saco (we were just a northern, way northern, Kerouac hometown Lowell). More importantly so was Diana.

And that is exactly where the problem, my problem, began and ended, the midnight crying hour began and ended. See Diana was crazy for beat stuff but she wanted a guy, and an F-C guy, with a little more speed. Literally. She was looking, and looking hard, and I know this because she told me so straight out, for a guy with big wheels, maybe a 1964 Mustang (green, of course) like mine so she could be sitting high and wide on the front seat but with some dough, and some prospects. Not white picket fence, spotted dog, three kids, two boys and a girl, prospects but dough to take her places and see things. And she found him, Rene Genet, a little older, out of school, working at the Downeast Valley Textile Mill (like about a quarter of the town’s population in those long gone good-paying mill jobs days) and with some dough to spent . But I am getting slightly ahead of my story.

Diana and I went on a few dates, afternoon dates, after school, mainly down to Jimmy Jack’s Homemade Diner (the one on Main Street, not the one on East Main that is strictly for tourists and “summer guests”) to listen to some jazz, rock or other be-bop stuff on the big old jukebox that drew every half-hip kid in town. But mainly we talked, talked late on the telephone, about this and that, mainly dreams, and mainly abstract stuff. I was in seventh heaven and I thought she was too. What I didn’t know, and never thought to know (or really wanted to know thinking back) was that Diana was working her way out of my front seat into beau Rene’s front seat. Want to know, or not, one night, one Thursday night, when I rang her up about eleven o’clock (her sole provider mother worked the second shift at the mill so I could call then) her younger sister answered the phone. Answered that her sister, Diana, was out and about with Rene Genet and that she would not be taking any more midnight calls from me. Period.

After our unceremonious “break-up” I would see Diana around school and we would “nod” heads but that was about it. Then just before school got out that summer I heard that Diana and Rene were having some troubles. I decided to make my move and to challenge Rene to a “chicken run’ down Route 1 early one morning going south as fast and furious as we could. Winning prize: Diana Dubois. Rene was a little unsure about taking the bet because he knew, knew in his heart if he had a heart, he couldn’t beat me not with those stakes. Diana? Diana was sky high like any princess would be when two modern knights were ready to do battle to win her favors. One June Saturday night I left Rene Genet in a puddle of water in some side ditch about twenty miles south of Calais. Diana, cool as a cucumber, and very aware of the spoils of war rules stepped right into my waiting Mustang like we had never parted. Moreover that night, or really that morning, after she had been totally turned on by the joust, the thought of the joust, and everything else she was crazy, crazy like I had never seen her before, in bed. And, hell, I guess I was too.

Diana and I got married a short time after her graduation and set up household in Ellsworth (Maine) where I got a good paying job in a paper mill. Naturally, 1960s F-C naturally, a child came along, and that complicated things, complicated things for me.

See I was really a “homer,” a Calais guy to the bone and while I was in love with Diana I knew that with the baby (and presumably more babies in Gallic Roman Catholic F-C speak knowledge ) I wasn’t going to be able to go back to dying mill town Calais any time soon.

That meant I wasn’t going to be the king hell king (my term –JLB) of the northern Maine back roads. And that last sentiment was important to understanding what happened later. It wasn’t, by the way, just Calais lonesomeness that distracted me but that I had actually lost the title as king hell king of the back roads “chicken runs” to one Rene Genet by default. That was a title I had held since I first learned to drive and “soup up” any old automobile (a burned-out ’57 Chevy was my first reclamation project). Nobody around northern Maine challenged , or even thought of challenging me and my 1964 green Mustang now named “Diana” after I put Rene in that ditch. Another distraction was a slight flirtation with Laura Bleu, Diana’s second cousin back in Calais before we moved to Ellsworth. Hell I was a good looking guy then, and like I said I had that fast car and fast hands so I would never lack for “flirtations” for the always plentiful girls who wanted to sit in that green Mustang front seat of mine.

But still and all I was always thinking about Calais, figuring ways to get to Calais (to see, uh, Laura?), or yakking about it to one and all in Ellsworth. And when I was in high dudgeon (my term JLB) I would take it out on Diana. Not physically, not for anything, but I would pout, I would spend endless hours working on the “Diana,” and I would be gone for hours. With no explanation (but also with no whiskey breathe or woman’s fragrance on my clothes either). I would head over to Cadillac Mountain in the Arcadia National Park the other side of Bar Harbor wind out on the deserted curves and sit, just sit, and stare out at the homeland sea. I know that sea stare-out, I know it from my father, I might have invented it, at least for our generation up there, so I know that I was troubled in mind, no question.

Time passed this way, a few months, a year. Rumors though started to swirl around that Jimmy Jack’s’ son, Pierre, (Jimmy Jack was the owner of two teenage hang-out diners, one complete with an incredible jukebox where I had taken Diana a few times) had a super-souped up Chevy that would “blow” my Mustang away. Way down in Ellsworth I heard those rumors. Then one night, one kind of foggy October night, a night not uncommon in Maine almost any part of the year, I found myself, and not by accident, in Calais. And not just in any spot in Calais but down at the corner of Main and East Main where every chicken run started ,where every head-to-head car duel started since back before memory, ready, willing and able to take on one Pierre Jacques (Jimmy Jack’s real last name) in the “chicken run to end all chicken runs.”

I won’t bore you with the details of the run; you have probably if you have seen that film that came out a few years ago, American Graffiti, or Rebel Without A Cause, or about twelve other teen alienation /angst films seen the scenes. Fast souped-up cars. Pierre’s “Lonnie Jean” against my “Laura.” They are off. And the winner is… Pierre. End of story. No. Diana, when she found out what I had done (and my thing with Laura), left me. Left for parts unknown with the baby one night, one night when I was up in Calais with Laura. End of story.

[End of story? No. One more little detail needs to be brought up although the details around it are sketchy. Like how Jeanbon drifted back to Calais after our talk in L.A., how he got the old heap running and what was on his mind that fateful night. Was he thinking of some lost Diana? Laura? On October 14, 1980 (really the early morning of the 15th according to the police report) one Jeanbon Leclerc was D.O.A. at Bangor General Hospital after being pried out of a rusted out green 1964 Mustang that had still been in great running order and that had been clocked doing one hundred and twenty miles an hour on Route One by the police in pursuit. The car had spun out of control and crashed about one hundred yard inside of the Calais border. JLB]