Composed by Rosanne Cash Read Free Book Online Page B

sources, mostly relating to fashion, paid for our meals. Brenda wore a red baseball cap every day of her life due to a chronic displeasure with her hair. One day, a couple of months into our friendship, she showed up at lunch panicked, because she had to attend a black-tie event and could not figure out how to make the baseball cap go with her evening gown. I never saw the top of her head during my entire stay in England. I loved the twins’ energy, their toughness, and their good-natured, and sometimes vicious, sniping at each other. They showed me how to thicken my own skin, how to dry up some of my cloying natural sentimentality and cultivate a more urbane sense of humor. I would never have had the courage to become the person I was turning into without both Anthea’s template for intellectual and musical depth and the wild influence of the Cooper twins.
    I was, I began to notice, gaining weight. The year before I had had a tumor removed from my left ovary, and had begun to develop another before I left for England. My doctor at home had started me on an injectable hormone that I had to receive every three months, which tended to make me fat. Soon after my arrival I found a private doctor in Belgravia who consented to administer the injections. The first time I visited him, I was led into his inner office, superbly appointed with mahogany and leather, and was shown to a seat in front of his polished desk. He smiled in greeting and said, “Well, first thing, let’s see your figure.” I had to stand and remove my brown velvet blazer, and turned slowly around in front of him in a state of increasing mortification. My figure was by this point dumpy and broad in the hips, and I could see by his curt nod that he thought so as well. He gave me the shot every couple of months, for an extraordinary fee, and I just continued to grow heavier.
    Early in my stay in London, the second day of my friendship with Sandy, we went to the Hard Rock Cafe, which in 1976 was brand new and outrageously trendy. It was cold, so we walked quickly from the Portman, and every man who walked by us turned to stare frankly at Sandy. She suggested we join arms so that they would think we were lovers, and we linked together. The male stares now became embarrassed glances, and Sandy played the routine up, squeezing me and whispering in my ear. We entered the Hard Rock, and again all the male eyes in the place turned toward Sandy. As soon as we sat down, a young man came directly over to her and asked her to join him and his friends. She responded with a withering comment, which I can no longer recall, and he recoiled and walked away silently. The few seconds that passed between his invitation and her reply were torture for me. Not knowing the rules, I was terrified that she would leave me sitting alone at this very prominent table, swathed in brown velvet, with my lackluster hair-cut, swollen body, dearth of makeup, and Dubonnet on ice. I was inexpressibly grateful and loved her for her loyalty.
    It was at the Hard Rock, on a subsequent visit with Sandy, maybe a week or two later, that I heard Bruce Springsteen for the first time. Everyone had been talking about him. I had read about him in Melody Maker , like everyone else in the music business in London, but I had not yet heard his music. I was sitting at the bar at the Hard Rock, Dubonnet in hand, when “Born to Run” came on the sound system. Sandy was talking to me, but I could not hear a word she was saying, so riveted was I to the music. The combination of urgency, poetry, testosterone-fueled guitars, and the relentless backbeat made me literally weak in the knees. It was as if William Blake had put on black leather and climbed a motorcycle. I was enraptured. I couldn’t begin to conceive that, thirty-three years later, I would do a duet with Bruce Springsteen on my album The List . That concept belonged to someone else’s life in 1976, not the shy, round girl sitting at the bar of the Hard