On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “But you always stare at people,” Ratso yells. “Ronee likes you.”

  “She told Roger she was envious of me,” Lisa shrugs.

  “Bullshit, she told me she likes you,” Ratso chides.

  “C’mon,” Lisa makes a face, “she just wants to sleep with the whole football team.”

  “Did Neuwirth tell you to split?” Ratso changes the subject quickly.

  “Yeah, he said that one of these days security is gonna break my nose and it won’t be their fault.” She glares at Evans, who’s twice her size. “I said that I would fucking sue. He said that he would go get the police right then.” Lisa stalks back to the couch and Evans just shrugs at Ratso.

  Ratso turns and hops on the elevator, and goes directly to Beattie’s room. No answer. But he remembers there’s a nursery where the kids hang out, and Beattie may be babysitting by now, so he checks the newsletter. There are the travel arrangements for tomorrow, a notice about a concert Sunday at the prison that George Lois helped arrange, and a schedule for Monday’s concert at the Garden.

  Ratso’s eyes get drawn to a contribution on page 2.

  STRIPERS SPEAK

  **LISA HAS OFFENDED THE SENSITIVITIES OF SOME MEMBERS OF THE TOUR. WOULD THE MUSICIANS PLEASE NOT FEED OR ENCOURAGE HER FURTHER.

  UNSIGNED

  He finally locates the nursery and walks in to find Baez, her mother, and Gabe’s nurse Gail, with their hands full of little Dylans.

  “Beattie’s not here, huh? Hey listen, do you want to hear ‘Combat Zone’ now?” Ratso seizes the time.

  “I’m not really ready.” Joan really hasn’t seemed to relish Ratso’s company since he talked nonstop in her bus that snowy day in Maine, instead of interviewing her. “I have no interest.”

  “I’ll never listen to your set again,” Ratso threatens.

  “OK, OK,” Baez rolls her eyes. “Do you need accompaniment?”

  “Well, Dylan said it should be a march,” Ratso remembers.

  “How about if I simulate drums, Ratso,” Baez smirks and starts the beat, “Bum bum bum, bum bum bum.” Ratso shakes his head and begins to recite it, getting up to the second verse when Baez raises her head.

  “Stop, stop,” she shrieks. “What was that, ‘a certain spark every time she smiles,’ we can see who you’re copping from.”

  “I wasn’t even aware of the similarity to ‘Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,’” Ratso protests. “Even Dylan said he thought it reminded him of ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues.’”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that your writing is coming from your conscious, Ratso,” Baez cracks.

  Ratso goes back to the reading, getting through about three more verses before Baez interrupts again.

  “You’re gonna have such an identity crisis after this tour is over, Ratso,” she shakes her head.

  “Why, I don’t think this is particularly Dylanesque. I also like Leonard Cohen, and …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Joan smirks, “old razor blades and Seconal. I can’t believe you came in to sing a song about whores to the children.”

  “No, Momma,” Gabriel blurts something out that Ratso doesn’t comprehend.

  “What he say?”

  “He said that the horses would understand it,” Joan smiles.

  Ratso goes back to his narrative and in the middle of the climactic verse, Baez starts talking to her mother.

  “Jesus Christ,” the writer explodes, “the best goddamn verse and she’s talking through it.”

  “Now you know how it feels,” Baez smiles sardonically, as Bernie enters the nursery. Ratso hands him the lyric sheet and he scans the song. “Don’t use ‘Mona,’ it’s been done. ‘Mona says come see me.’ Change it to Noma.”

  “Or Roma,” Joan suggests.

  “How about Rhonda,” Ratso sulks.

  “Rama,” Joan shouts, “like the God.”

  “I don’t like Rama, I’m leaving it at Mona.”

  “OK,” Baez throws up her hands, “leave it at Mona and just suffer more criticisms and the death of a thousand slashes for imitating Dylan.”

  “He told me it sounds like ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues,’” Ratso repeats.

  “And he’s happy and you’re happy so just go on,” Baez shrugs.

  “OK,” Ratso concedes, “forget Mona. Let’s call it something else. How about Sally. No. There’s a hitch everywhere you turn. Nina?”

  Baez chuckles. “All I can say is that you’re no longer anal retentive. It all came out in this song. Is the Combat Zone anywhere near Desolation Row? Or are they in different cities?”

  “I don’t have to take this abuse.” Ratso gets up to leave. “Anyway, I’m supposed to interview Beattie now.”

  “Well you better do it soon, ’cause it’ll be a hell of a lot easier now than when she gets all these kids back.”

  Ratso says good-bye, gets attacked by one of the kids, and finally makes his way down the hall to Beattie’s room. He knocks.

  “Coming, coming,” Beattie’s booming voice penetrates the door.

  “Come in,” she smiles and ushers the reporter into the room, “we just got back from shopping, it was the first time we had a chance to get out of the hotel in this city.” Beattie scampers over to the bed and starts unpacking some of the bundles, while Ratso marvels at this tremendously forceful woman, proud, opinionated, solicitous, generous, a bit of a ham, the perfect Jewish mother for Bob.

  “I just told Bob I was interviewing you,” Ratso settles into an easy chair, “I told him you were the lead of my article and he said that maybe I should keep Beattie out of this. But then I told him that I once wrote about my father so he gave me permission.”

  “What kind of permission?” Beattie suddenly looks up.

  “Just an interview. We can’t do anything else, we can’t fool around.”

  “How about that.” Beattie goes back to unpacking. “We looked for you in the coffee shop. We were waiting with Helena, she’s a lovely person. How do you like Montreal?”

  “I love it, but I haven’t been out yet,” Ratso moans. “I’ve been in the railroad station and the hotel.”

  “You know, Larry,” Beattie suddenly lowers her voice, “like Bob says, maybe you should keep me out of this. What can I tell you?”

  “Well, I can ask you how you feel about the tour and being onstage.”

  “I loved it, I loved it,” Beattie gushes. “Are the kids all right? Are they playing upstairs?”

  Ratso nods.

  “Oh that’s good. Where did you see Bob today—in his room? Did he just wake up? Was Sara there? Was she all right? Was she sleeping? ’Cause you know she wasn’t feeling so good yesterday.”

  This barrage of questions has given Ratso an incredible dose of déjà vu, plummeting him right back to his parents’ house, reminding him of the good-natured Jewish third degree he’d get when he came back from school, or from a night out.

  “I gave Sara some vitamin C,” Ratso finally answers. “I told Bob I was putting you in the first paragraph and he just said to keep Beattie out of it.”

  “That’s right. Keep Beattie out of it.” The silver-haired woman sits down on the bed opposite Ratso. “You know why? People, they don’t care about me, Larry …”

  “I care about you,” Ratso protests.

  “But they don’t care about me.” Beattie makes a face as if she had swallowed a whole lemon. “What for? You know what it is, honey, after all, Dylan should be written about for his music, not for his mother, or his late father, right? They should write about his music.” Beattie jumps up and straightens out one of the dressers.

  “But I think we should clear the air and correct the record of the rumors,” Ratso starts to explain.

  “Crazy people start rumors,” Beattie shrieks, “you can quote that from me. Small thinkers.”

  “How do you like the tour so far?”

  “We love it, we’re enjoying it, having a wonderful, marvelous time. The children keep you young, and you keep wanting to help them and
do for them and that’s about it, Larry. What else can we tell you, honey?” Beattie shrugs the shrug of the content parent.

  “You must be so proud,” Ratso shakes his head.

  “I am proud. Always been proud. It makes me very proud because everybody likes his writings, and that to me makes me feel very, very good, Larry.”

  “Did you always know he was special?”

  “Oh sure,” Beattie answers without batting an eye, “he’s always been special. His poetry, he wrote when he was young, he wrote for young people then.”

  “Any idea that someday he’d be this—”

  “Noooo,” Beattie draws the word out like it was taffy, “uh huh, no idea he’d be this big. No! No!”

  “What did you want him to be when he grew up, a doctor?” Ratso remembers his own childhood.

  “Noooo,” Beattie winces. “Nooo, no, no. I wanted him to be his own self, his own person, to do what he wanted to do. Nooo, we never came from medicine, we never came from dentists, or any of that. We came from a long line of theater. Theater people. We had movie houses.”

  “You told me once that you came from a long line of philosophers …”

  “Oh yeah, my father, my late father, he loved music and philosophy. Oh yes, he was a philosopher, sure, years ago.” The phone rings and Beattie picks it up. “Hello, yes, dear, did you get to Sara? Sleeping? She is sleeping. Well, this is a California call, we have to get to her. She must be asleep, yes, because she’s not felt too good at all. This is Jennifer, a friend of Sara’s, she was trying to get her yesterday too but the room doesn’t answer over there, they must have the phones off the hook. How can I get this over?” Beattie hangs up, and hands Ratso a note. “Can Bob let you in there? Good, give this message to Sara.”

  “What did your father do for a living?” Ratso wonders.

  “He was a merchant. He had a store. He sold men’s clothing to the miners. We came from a little mining town in the depressed area.”

  “How did the Jews get there originally?”

  “Well, they came when they were youngsters, they were all little youngsters. Sure, they’ve been there for eighty years. Eighty years. They went right to Superior, Wisconsin, eighty years ago. Right to Superior.”

  “Bob once told me he had a little bit of Cossack blood in him,” Ratso recollects the conversation they had in the car during the snowstorm in Maine.

  “Sure,” Beattie shakes her head, “from Russia, Russia. Odessa. But that isn’t Cossack now, is it?” She shrugs. “My grandfather owned the theaters, that would be Bob’s great-grandfather. His grandfather on his father’s side had a shoe store in Duluth. Then we had an appliance store in Hibbing. We moved back because that was my home town. I was born and raised in Hibbing,” Beattie says proudly.

  She gets up and starts to put some clothes away, the vitality just oozing out of her pores. Ratso just watches her in awe. “Are you a poet too, Beattie?” he gapes.

  “Sure, I’m an artist. I can talk a lot. That’s an artist. An artist can talk, paint, or write poetry. I don’t paint, I talk. So that’s my part of the artistry.”

  “When Bob was growing up did you have an inkling of his gifts?” Ratso repeats.

  “No, how can parents know about a genius, really. You can’t tell when they’re growing up exactly what they’re going to do, Larry.”

  “What was he like as a kid?” Ratso probes.

  “Oh, he played the guitar and he liked basketball and baseball. He liked sports, he was always a goer and a doer. He always did everything. He was a joiner, he joined in on everything.”

  “Was he aggressive and outgoing?”

  “Noooo,” Beattie shakes her head, “he was more on the retiring end. He didn’t get in anybody’s way. He wasn’t a pusher. He did what he liked to do and he did his own thing. In writing and painting.”

  “You know that Bob’s Highway 61 album changed my life,” Ratso confesses. “I was going to be an accountant, Beattie, and then I heard that and I started hanging out in Greenwich Village. But my parents freaked out. Were you overprotective toward Bob? I mean, were you worried that he was like hanging out with all those schwartze musicians?”

  “We all worry, Larry,” Beattie flashes her ice-melting smile, “but I didn’t even think of that. I figured Bob knew his status and Bob knew what he could do and what he couldn’t do.”

  “Were there any restrictions on him?”

  “No, no restrictions at all, in our town we didn’t need any restrictions.”

  “What about that scene in Scaduto’s book on Bob that has Bob’s father seemingly overprotective?” Ratso remembers.

  “That’s all garbage,” Beattie winces. “I never gave Scaduto any information, period. I never gave anybody any information to write in a book, Larry.” Beattie’s voice is rising and she seems to be getting agitated. She plops down into a chair. “And that you can quote me. I never gave that Toby Thompson, I took him out to lunch, I thought that he was just a fan, I didn’t know he was going to go out to capitalize on anything I had to say because I didn’t have anything to say about my son, nothing.” Beattie’s close to screaming now, pounding her fist on the table for emphasis. “Dylan is Dylan, and I am Zimmerman. These people that think that they can just quote me and turn all this stuff around and write garbage, they’re badly mistaken because I don’t go for it. My son got where he is today not because of his father and me. He was born to us, but then he went away and he did this on his own. And he is the writer, I am no writer, his late father was no writer. Bob Dylan is the writer. Dylan, not Zimmerman.”

  A stunning soliloquy. Ratso is nearly speechless but manages a question, “Did you feel hurt when he changed his name?”

  “No, not at all, he was a writer and he wanted to change his name.”

  “Did he ask you if he could do it?”

  “No, he just said that he couldn’t show two cards and that he wanted to have one legal name and that was it. I wasn’t hurt, we were never hurt because Bob Dylan never hurt us in any way, there was no way that he could ever hurt us. He protected us, he protected us.”

  “When was the first time you realized that your son was so gifted?”

  “Well,” Beattie thinks for a second, “we knew he was gifted when we went to Carnegie Hall, when we heard him in Carnegie Hall then we realized it was a gift, he was only twenty-one or twenty-two maybe. That was in, uh, I don’t know the year, it was in Carnegie Hall and he was alone. We flew in for the concert and we stayed for a few days and we knew that he was really enjoying what he was doing and that was important to us.”

  Ratso talks on, telling Beattie some anecdotes about Bob’s influence on both his generation and Beattie’s, and then the talk turns to social responsibility. “Beattie, did you feel hurt when people were attacking Bob, claiming that he had abandoned his social conscience, you know, that he didn’t write an antiwar song during Vietnam?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Larry,” Beattie smiles. “I never paid any attention to any of the gossip.” At this, she leaps up and scurries over to her purse, searches a bit, then comes up with a small jar of Vicks Vaporub. She applies some to the ends of her fingers and then rubs the lotion into the insides of her nostrils. “If I don’t get any rest I won’t be able to go to the show tonight. This congestion is just killing me. Are you sick too, dear? Here, just put a little bit on your pinky, and put it into your nostril and breathe it honey, breathe it dear. I bought it last night in the drugstore because I was sniffling.”

  Ratso blanches a bit. “Beattie, are you sure you’re supposed to sniff this instead of rub it in? Should you really put this into your nostril?”

  “Just breathe it, breathe it, dear,” Beattie shows Ratso the method again.

  The reporter snorts some rub and moves on to a critique of Beattie’s performance the other night. “How’d you get onstage in Toronto?”

  “I sat right down in the rocking chair,” Beattie beams, “I don’t ask anybody any questions. I just sat do
wn in the rocking chair.”

  “Those security guards didn’t stop you?”

  “No, they knew me. They knew who I was.”

  “But how’d you get onstage dancing and clapping,” Ratso can’t suppress a smile.

  “I was sitting on the rocking chair when the music was coming to an end, so I just got up and joined them and I clapped along and everybody was in the finale, so I clapped too. I’m not bashful, you can quote me and say that I’m not a bashful woman.”

  “What was Bob’s reaction? Did he say anything to you afterward, like, ‘Oh, Ma’?”

  “No, uh huh,” Beattie shakes her head vigorously, “he was glad, I’m sure, he doesn’t care. He knows that I’m not a pusher. I never was a pusher in my whole life. I’ve always been me. I’m me. I’m just plain old me. I’m glad to help in any place I can.” Beattie smiles beatifically.

  “You sound like him,” Ratso chuckles. “I bet he gets lot of his stuff from you.”

  “It’s the same old me,” Beattie continues. “You don’t change, you just mature. My quotation is this and I’ve said it all my life …”

  “You’re a philosopher too, Beattie,” Ratso interrupts. “You know that. You’re modest but you’re a philosopher too.”

  “I say this: What one likes at fifty,” she raises one dramatic finger, “they will detest at sixty. And this is the stage of life. What you like at thirty, you don’t do at forty.”

  “Well, what about you? You’re about forty-five?” Ratso compliments her.

  “I’m sixty dear, yes, yes, I am, in June. I’m a Gemini. My philosophy is to like people, respect them for what they like to do and not to be that critical because if you can’t do it as good as they’re doing it, then keep your mouth shut.”

  “Great, Beattie,” Ratso laughs. “Let’s end it on that, tomorrow we can talk some more.”

  “How do you like that quotation?” she beams. “All right, Larry,” she ushers the reporter to the door, “I’m depending on you to get that message to Sara …”

  “Oh, I thought that you were gonna say that you depend on me to write the real story about Bob …”