This one time I woke up to find myself laying along side this road in the middle of nowhere with Bruce Springsteen sitting next to me, picking at an acoustic guitar. It took me several moments to clear my head. Springsteen just kept plucking his guitar. There was nobody else on the road and it was getting dark. I stood up.“Are you—?”
“—the Boss? Yeah,” he said in a raspy voice, nodding his head to the beat of his guitar-work. “That’s me. You’re probably in shock right now; you might want to lie back down.”
“What happened?”
“You swerved to avoid a deer. Your car was badly damaged. I had to get you out of there,” he said, looking down at his guitar.
I looked around. My car was nowhere to be found. “Where?”
“A little bit down the road. The crash site is too dangerous…”
“Shit man, well thanks,” I said, going to shake his hand. He didn’t even look up at me.
“Don’t mention it,” he said.
“So where are we?”
“A little place nobody knows called Lincroft.”
“Lincroft, New Jersey?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where Brookdale Community College is?”
“…yeah.”
I looked around again. “Wait, are we in Thompson Park?”
He got up and slung the guitar over his back. “I wouldn’t be as concerned with where I was… I’d be more concerned that we’re safe.”
“Okay, that was sort of a weird thing to say. Safe from what?” I asked.
Springsteen took a few paces around the area. He didn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular. He’d occasionally stop and tilt his head as if he were listening for something, but then he’d just go back to pacing around.
“Alright man, you’re starting to freak me out,” I told him. “How about we just sit down and smoke a little bit of this?” I pulled out a piece and an eighth of mid-grade weed. Springsteen took to pacing for a little longer and then sat down next to me. I packed the bowl.
We smoked in silence for a minute or two, and then Springsteen started humming a song. The humming turned to some light singing. Eventually, the volume increased and Bruce was intensely wrapped in the performance of the song. He got up and started dancing back and forth, adding some clapping to the mix. At the time I didn’t recognize it, but now I know that it was "Dancing in the Dark.” I just nodded the whole time, desperately hoping he would stop.
He finished and sat back down. “You like that?” he asked with a smirk. I nodded my head and tried to smile as genuinely as possible. “So tell me…” he suddenly commanded, picking up the bowl again. “…what’s your favorite part of New Jersey?”
“Physically?”
“Anything; it doesn’t have to be physical.”
“I don’t know man,” I said. I thought about the question. “I don’t know if favorite would be the right word.”
“Oh come on, there are a lot of great things about Jersey. I’ll tell you what I like, it’s the people. The common New Jersey working men and women, they’re what makes Jersey great.”
“Listen,” I told him. “I’m from Jersey too. I don’t know what you expect me to say. The people… I don’t know. I like that my hometown doesn’t smell like ass, the way that other parts of Jersey do. I like that my drinking water doesn’t catch fire anymore. I like that the state has enough confidence in me as a driver to expect me to cross two lanes of traffic to get to an off ramp. Other than that, I can’t really say.”
The Boss shook his head. “How can you say that about New Jersey? There’s plenty of greatness in this state. Just think of Princeton, and the Stone Pony… the Meadowlands… Giant’s Stadium… the shore… hell, the first college football game was held in this state.”
“I know. My 4th grade class did a play on how great New Jersey is. I get it. But all of those things you just mentioned: Central and North Jersey,” I told him.
“It’s all just New Jersey, man,” he said, passing me the bowl.
“It’s not, trust me. You’ve got that shit; South Jersey, we’ve got Atlantic City and the Cowtown rodeo.”
“Well,” he said, adjusting the way he was sitting, “I don’t know if there’s really much different between North and South Jersey, from how I see it.”
I saw that the bowl was beat and tapped out the ash onto the ground. “Do you say sprinkles or jimmies?”
“Sprinkles.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I told him, getting up to leave. I headed down the road, away from Springsteen. For several minutes I wandered through Thompson Park, unsure of exactly where I was going.
Suddenly, a man jumped out at me from the tree line like a wild beast. I reeled back and ended up tripping over my own feet. The man stood over me and hissed menacingly. There was something terrifying about him. I was about to shield my face from him, when a wooden stake suddenly blasted through his chest, being plunged in from behind. A liberal helping of blood splattered on my face. “Fuck!”
The man fell over right next to me, clutching the stake through his heart. Bruce Springteen was standing there, aiming a crossbow at the spot where the man was just looming over me. “Checkmate,” he said, relaxing his aim.
“What the fuck was that?!”
“Vampires,” he said, loading another stake into his crossbow. “This place is crawling with them.”
“Thompson Park is crawling with vampires?” The Boss nodded. I looked over at the corpse of the vampire. “Aren’t they supposed to explode or catch fire or turn to dust or something?”
“That’s just the movies.”
“So what happens when the police get here?” I asked.
Springsteen shrugged. “It hasn’t come up yet.”
“It hasn’t come up yet?”
“No.”
“You know what; maybe I’m just approaching this from the wrong angle,” I said. “…since when are you a vampire hunter?”
“Remember that movie where Bon Jovi was a vampire hunter?”
“Vaguely… something like a direct-to-video sequel to John Carptenter’s Vampires.”
“That’s it,” he said, pointing at me. “So I figured, if he can do it, why can’t I?”
I nodded a few times. “Alright well, there are so many things wrong with that statement that I’m not even going to address it. You’re holding a crossbow; if you say you’re a vampire hunter, fuck it, you’re a vampire hunter.”
“Now you’ve got it,” Springsteen said, slinging the crossbow on his back and pulling out his guitar. “How about a song for the road?”
“Oh… no… no that’s cool,” I said.
“Oh, okay…”
He stood there a minute, holding his guitar.
“Great…” I said. “So, I’m going to leave… now.”
“I’ve got your back,” he said in his raspy voice.
“Nah, that’s cool. Don’t cover my back… seriously.” And with that I walked away. After some distance I looked back and he was gone. Despite some mysterious rustling in the trees, my trip out of the park was uneventful. Eventually I located my car and called AAA. As I was reporting the problem to them, I faintly heard an acoustic guitar.
And that was the time that Bruce Springsteen and I smoked a bowl, then he either saved me from a vampire or committed first-degree murder.
