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I lean against the passenger-side panel of a washed out blue DeSoto while Bruce Springsteen sits on the trunk. In the camera’s eye, he has yet to woo Rosalita or invite Wendy to strap her arms across his engine. Behind us a hill rises from the earth in New Jersey. Bruce stares at the lens in a striped black-and-tan tank top while I wear the burgundy jacket of a man grown leery of July chills. When he hums a fragment from “Dancing in the Dark,” an anthem as yet unheard, I sing beneath the familiar lyrics. Both of us born in the year of The Asphalt Jungle. Neither of us drove before we turned twenty-five. Until the Boss drove a pickup across the desert for a gig in California. Until I stripped the gears of Brad Kiesel’s gold Beetle during a night ride to Denver the year of Greetings from Asbury Park. The American mountains arose before us on the road traveled by father-flawed sons escaping kitchen arguments and years spent sidestepping rage. Posing beside me, the Asbury Kid crouches on the bumper, his feet tensed to propel him onto the entry ramp into his glory days. My face is rough-hewn and weathered as I button my coat to the neck and regret losing my grandfather’s Irish beret. In the photograph I hear Springsteen’s baritone rasp “Devil with the Blue Dress” to the carnival of a boardwalk night.