By Caleb Bethea
Bruce Springsteen knows something about quantum physics. The way he sets up a dichotomy in a song, a divide between squalor and salvation. Then he hits the last chord before you ever hear the end of the story—the hero’s foot on the gas of his ‘54 but you have no way of knowing if he’ll really make it out of New Jersey or not. A Schrödinger’s Cat on the Boardwalk.
One of the best examples is “I’m on Fire.” An earnestly horny track just two and half minutes long. The protagonist wants nothing more than to have this woman, but she’s married, and all we end the song with is that he’s up all night thinking about her. A dull knife cutting a valley through his skull.
I saw the music video the same year three of my grandparents died. I was seven-turning-eight, and we had a VHS of all his music videos that we watched at my great-grandmother’s house, rewinding, fast-forwarding to our favorite performances. Among my siblings, the segment of the tape most crystallized as an example of his cool, late-American demeanor was the video for “I’m on Fire.” It kicks off with a busy garage. Bruce’s legs are dangling out from under a car and he’s cranking something into place when the woman walks her heels over toward his boots to ask if he can fix her perfectly functional car and have it ready by tomorrow.
He’s covered in grease. He smiles, a little timid, saying he can bring it by her place—but he sees the diamond on her finger and she explains they live way the hell out in the hills.
He was so goddamn cool. A working-man rockstar in the face of death all around me. A cowboy sort of masculinity that had something to do with worker’s unions and gambling debts. So I kept rewinding, fast-forwarding to that video, believing that on the other side of all this death was me as a man who was so goddamn cool. Adulthood would find me behind the wheel of a ‘54 with an Atlantic City sign in the sky.
But now I’m thirty-two, and instead of grease on my hands, it’s seething under my skin and it slides the anxiety from one side of my body to the other, and someone along the way has knifed a valley between me and masculinity. I’m in there somewhere, just trying to keep a lid on the feral cat under the boardwalk.
It’s fine. No one really thinks one thing or another about my masculinity, that I can tell, but I’m not real into the idea of being a man. Still, I tell myself I haven’t earned the non-binary title, not enough motor oil sliding through my veins instead of blood. And Jesus fucking Christ, I kinda hate that about myself. My looking less like Bruce and more like the person in the Iron Maiden shirt holding the boom over Bruce’s head behind the scenes for the “I’m on Fire” video shoot. But, I like that about myself, too. Still, I fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, static.
It’s fine.
As an adult, I watch YouTube videos about gender identity and then I watch the “I’m on Fire” video, and then I read the comments underneath. Half of them sound like “This song always makes me think of my first girlfriend, who became my wife of forty years, and died last week.” And it only takes three or four of these comments before you realize this song about a little sex is a lot about death. And not in a metaphorical way. There’s a gravity to work like this, bringing us back to the first time we wanted someone as we listen after losing them.
And gender might be something like that, a dense, rumbling fucking mystery, a space—or a lack of space—where we lose the shit that once made us who we were. All of us in our high heels rolling under the heavy machinery of a car with a supernova swirling above us. We don’t know whose car it is. We don’t care. We just want to feel so goddamn cool.
It’s fine.
My grandfather, who was the last to go the year I turned eight, had hands strong as hell, his own pre-Springsteen brand of cool—of being a man. And I think of all my grandparents and all the pictures they took of me, the woodworking they gifted me, the souvenirs they brought me from their travels across the country, and I wonder what they would think about their grandkid’s gender confusion. I wonder how we view people from the other side of this death trap. If we get it. If it matters.
I like to think we call our grandchildren non-binary after we die. I like to think it matters.
Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They’re the author of DISCO MURDER CITY (Maudlin House ‘25). You can also find their work in HAD, X-R-A-Y, hex, Bruiser, ergot, Modern Alchemy, and elsewhere. But, mostly, they’re just a family ghoul with a wife and four goblins by the ocean. You can say hi on most platforms: @caleb_bethea_