WTF? Waking with an aching toe…left foot or right? The one I broke in the Bronx? Has the cold cut to the bone? Hope so. Huh? Well, IF it’s just this I.C.E. age, sleepy/creepy me will hibernate…
Then again, I might be at the mercy (all over again) of my own damn head. I’ve been getting worked over lately by a long manuscript. Upshot of a bad habit—call it “diligent indolence”? Years ago, I found I could cheat when I got stuck on an essay. Instead of hard-slogging through, if I’d been truly working—I could fade-to-bed and my brain would dream a solution to whatever was holding me back. All I had to do was trace the meander of the last dream I had after a natural wake-up. With piece-work, my mind wakes me up with the Answer after four or five hours. Lately, though, things done changed. I’ve been chasing a big bear of a book (?) and once I’m hunting, my head only lets me sleep for a couple hours and KEEPS waking me on the regular until I think I’ve taken my last shot. The manuscript is about 700 pages—10 (+1) years of essays, arranged alphabetically with intertexts. My under-aware has got it all on a scroll—so once I’ve launched into draft 60-whatever…?—it’ll open up my eyes with a message in a dreamscape: i.e. boy wants girl in the country, boy gets girl in the city, boy loses girl by the sea, i.e. piece #47 (with a big ole hard-on?) belongs between #34 and #33—which means new linkage and new title. (Please lord, let it not be plain when I’ve been to the website for scrabble words starting with letter…) I need my brain to stop being a pain in my snooze. While I’m used to pulling all-nighters when I put up batches of First posts around the beginning of the month, it’s harder to ease through longer stretches without a full night’s sleep as I close in on seventy. I could be done with serious revisions but…who knows?—I might be separating the dark from the dark all over again after midnight…
This morning, though, I got lucky (post-toe-ache) and fell back into a dream (that wasn’t a work-dream ((or was it?)))…
My late brother Tommy was live and well and sister Jo, who’d taken a night train from Montgomery, was back North (where she hasn’t been in years). It was a family function. Megan and Maria, sisters (by blood and law) were there with their kids (and their kids). Jo’s Jeff and my Mbayang and Ben Khadim were floating around (BK hiding a Guinness from Muslim mom)… There was one outlier at our party. Bob Dylan seemed at ease on the couch, chopping it up with Jeff, who knows from Pennebaker’s archive (since J&J got tight with Penny when they were coming into their own as documentary filmmakers). I think they were talking Alk…nodding to/with the Second City impresario and Bob-collaborator (in film and ((heroin))?) who once defined a Freudian Slip as “meaning to say one thing and saying a mother.” Dream on, where was Jo? We needed serious fun more than puns…
But Dylan seemed fine. What was not to like—he was sipping Brouilly.
Back from the kitchen with my own glass, I was tempted to ask about how fast the turn comes in “Highway 61” after the big S.O.B. says to kill me a son…
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God said, “No” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but next time you see me comin’, you better run”
Abe said, “Where d’you want this killin’ done?”
(Sheesh! That was quick!)
I wondered if Dylan was out to pasture with Christopher Ricks—was the Brit right that “All the Tired Horses in the Sun” is an inspired song (well, chorus) about having no-inspiration? Ah…fuck Ricks. The Tables Turned! (“Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife.”) I’ve got more Bob than Sweet Will by heart but this verse stuck: “One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man/Of moral evil and of good/Than all the sages can…” (And the locusts sang…)
Meeg was telling a story about guys up in a hill town who go ice-fishing at night on a moony river (with tents and heaters). Nephew Tyrone was goofing about going to school in North Field, Minnesota (no other direction home in that frozen state). Minny Zimmy (“the sun’ll burn your brain”) looked alive, but it was all too cold for Jo. Time to head South… Somebody (who?) should tell the story of dad hearing Aretha for the first time in the summer of ‘67 when he was in Mississippi. He came back home—after teaching black kids in a program that prepped them for their first year in integrated schools—with love for Aretha’s first Atlantic album. I remember him telling us how “I Never Loved a Man’s” piano chords awed him one night on the campus of Tougaloo College. He called up to the second-floor window of a dorm—“Who’s that?!” And got a one-word response: “ARETHA!” Can you imagine how powerful—and scary/thrilling—she must’ve sounded “inside the iceberg”? Not that this Northern head will ever be able to fully inhabit a sequence of emotion that takes in—over just a couple days—dad’s first full encounter with the frozen south and Aretha’s arrival.
“I’m not there.” OK. But Dylan should be down. (After all, Aretha’s the only undeniable thing in Tarantula.) Was he already in the Village the night she opened for Thelonious at the Village Gate? (Still can’t believe that miracle actually happened.) Musing on miracles, what about Dylan in Memphis?…We had it all? Was it true he once talked all day/night with Eddie Hinton? And since we’ve gone country-soul…Why’d Merle Haggard give him hemorrhoids? YO! Let’s go to Muskogee with McMurtry. Play “Choctaw Bingo…”
Strap them kids in
Give ’em a little bit of vodka in a cherry coke
We’re going to Oklahoma to the family reunion for the first time in years…
That rhyme about Uncle Slayton…
He cooks that crystal meth because the shine don’t sell
You know he likes his money he don’t mind the smell
Dylanesque? (Sorry.) More Zevonesque, I guess, but McMurtry’s last word on cousin Rosco’s road trip was truly Bobby…
Took the Big Cabin exit stopped and bought a couple of cartons of cigarettes
At that Indian Smoke Shop with the big neon smoke rings
In the Cherokee Nation hit Muskogee late that night
Somebody ran a stoplight at the Shawnee Bypass
Roscoe tried to miss ’em but he…didn’t quite
First time through, “Bingo” sounded a lot like “Come Together.” But Tom-the-Chuckster would’ve caught echoes of “You Can’t Catch Me.”
…Brother Tom got us back on the road in the living room. He recalled a Blonde on Blonde weekend on the Cape in the 60s—where he’d lucked into an empty house with big-ass speakers and a ball of hash. How he’d tried to hold onto and decipher just-sung lines “as the next and next and next exploded…What jewels hung from which mule? Why shoot that fire with holes?…” Wait, that’s Bob Levin, who could’ve been there smoking and listening with Tom, after a 5-on-5 run at a playground in Falmouth and a long ocean-swim…
I’m flashing on Jo, though, who never had to wait on illuminations. I remember hearing “Brownsville Girl” with her in the basement. (Same spot where I once made mom and pop dig Millie Jackson!?—what a son we have in Benji?) Bet she hadn’t heard any Dylan for years…— “I hate Gregory Peck.[1] Kee-rist, so that’s how he sees himself now—a star/stiff, boring to himself and others…—song’s GREAT though!”)
I’m in another basement now, the big house in Amherst, a mixed-up box of Jo’s stuff, with a mid-60s college paper on Dylan and Hume(!)—Philosophic-pirate Jo??? Me and epistemology walking side by side? Best to keep my distance—Only Hume I’ve read is his History of England. Good book, though I didn’t take anything in other than…Hume. Kinda like Jo’s paper. No clue (ever) what she was on about, but I remember SHE came through to me as I turned the pages, sitting on the cement floor, next to the ping pong table. Jo’s always all there on whatever page she writes…
If only Dad were here to play on… I’d like to know if Dylan ever listened to Worthington Breakdown—home-recording Jeff made of pop playing standards and blues. I sent it to that NYC PO Box, per instructions from someone who would know…Did anyone pass it on to you and did you ever…
Damn. I’m awake again. (Heat pipes just thud…) Dream is done.
…
But, what the hey, Mr. D. you’ve been in mine so maybe me and my beloveds can be in yours. What follows is a home-movie of footage taken in the early 90s at a family Thanksgiving. (Ignore “Xmas” in title below.) Sound like a turkey? (Man, I can see you acting the grump now, thanks to Levin’s fan’s note on his and Adele’s face-off with you in a Frisco hotel lobby[2]). Still, Mekons early on and dad’s musicking—starts about 6:20 and runs through 14:20—are nice. A light trip for your eye as well…outside in sun and shadow (and by the fire too).
PASSWORD: Worthington
Note
1 Though Jo allowed Gentleman’s Agreement was a-ok. (Doubt she ever saw The Gunfighter or The Yearling.)
2
We sat on a sofa across from the single bank of elevators. We studied who got on and where the elevator stopped when they got off and tried to guess which floor was his.
We had been there 30 minutes when the doors opened. “It’s Bob Dylan,” I said.
“I know,” my wife said.
He was short. He was thin. He glared with hostility and suspicion. Then he crossed the floor, having seen nothing more alarming than a greying woman in t-shirt and sweatpants and a balding man in a gabardine suit.