On the Road with Bob Dylan

by Larry Sloman

  “He’s been unable to pin me,” Roger smiles, “and he always rolls away in frustration.”

  “That’s ’cause you always say ‘I’m sorry,’ all the time,” Joni cracks. “How can you pin someone that’s always apologizing?”

  “Gee, I’m sorry,” Roger gushes. “I didn’t mean to offend you last night, I’m really sorry.”

  Ratso gulps down his sake and accepts Suzanne’s invitation to a guided tour of the place. They tramp up the rickety stairs and view the small cubiculed bedrooms and, in one room, come upon Leonard’s two children. “Jesus, they’re so cute,” Ratso marvels at the two small figures.

  “Yes, they’re angels, aren’t they?” Suzanne says in her delicate voice, a voice that oozes grace and charm and patience, an avalanche of patience. When they return downstairs, Joni is enmeshed in a long story about her marijuana bust a few years ago in L.A.

  “I really started to feel like a fool, I felt so frustrated because I was really on the verge of a song,” Joni remembers, “and they didn’t give me a pencil or paper and I asked them for my guitar, and this one guy was like a guitar player and understood, and I felt like Huddie Ledbetter, ‘Give me my guitar,’ and they wouldn’t do anything. So finally the narcs called me out, which was good because I could smoke and at that point I was like three hours without a cigarette. So they called me in and the Man said this was off the record, it didn’t have to do with what I was up for and in the meantime they were analyzing my vitamin pills and had changed it from marijuana to like narcotics because I had this whole mixture of different kinds of vitamin pills that they were putting through the lab or something. So the guy asked me what my drug experience was because his kid was being hit on the playground for reds and he was only eight, and I asked them if they had experienced any drugs themselves because in this room I was in there were pictures of marijuana leafs of different shapes, pills and their titles underneath, all the way around the room.

  “I said, ‘Do you know what these things do to your chemistry? Have you tried anything?’ And he told me he wanted to be a professional baseball player but he couldn’t make it so he became a cop, and he was like half tough and half soft and we just talked for a long time. I said, ‘Ask me anything you want as long as I can keep smoking, this is the worst, you got all the leaves and pills up here but this,’ and I pointed to my cigarette, ‘is the really serious villain, this is the socially accepted drug.’”

  “They used tobacco as a tool against you,” Roger smiles. “They used it to get you to talk.”

  “But there was supposed to be a release to the press, they always do that, like they did with Steven Stills, and I said, ‘Well, you’re talking ’bout your kid, eight years old, and people hitting on him on the playground for reds, if you put that I was arrested for dangerous drugs, by nature of the people who listen to the things that I have to say, do you know how many people you’d turn on. Why don’t you try a little preventive crime?’ So the captain said, ‘No, we have to release everything to the press,’ and they didn’t release it! They didn’t put anything out. Sometimes the laws are very insensible and he was a man that went beyond the law to his own sensibility.”

  “Horse sense,” Roger cracks.

  “Then I went back to my cell,” Joni relates, “and they threw this girl in in the middle of the night, about three o’clock in the morning and I had already meditated three times, I’d done every dance step I know, and I was really starting to die of boredom. I’m fading,” Joni yawns, “we should go home pretty soon. I wish I had a guitar, I’d like you to hear the new song.”

  “I’d like to play myself,” Roger adds, a little tipsy from the sake, “but mine’s all packed away. We gotta fly tomorrow.”

  “We all want to serenade you guys,” Joni giggles, while Roger breaks into a spontaneous “One More Cup of Sake for the Road.”

  “Did I ever tell you I loved your live album, Leonard?” Ratso asks.

  “You and twelve thousand other people liked it,” Leonard sighs.

  The songwriter and the reporter walk into the front room as the others exchange good-byes.

  “Sing me some of your new shit, Leonard,” Ratso says eagerly, “the stuff you told me you were working on when I was following you around doing that story for Rolling Stone.”

  “OK,” Leonard assents and begins to recite the song in his haunting voice.

  A lady found me boasting in the Guerrero

  When I was running smoke across the line

  She let me love her till I was a failure

  Her beauty on my bruise like iodine

  When I was weak enough to learn her method

  I said ‘Will I be punished for my crime?’

  She said ‘There is a table set in heaven

  But I don’t like to eat there all the time.’

  She pulled away the mask of her Madonna

  She pulled away the valley of her thighs

  She bid me find herself in other women

  Until I should exhaust her last disguise.

  And I was with her when there was no ocean,

  When there was no moon to spill the tide:

  Oh long before the wild imagination

  Could lay us in Guerrero side by side.

  “Jesus, Leonard,” Ratso kvells, “that’s great. But you told me you were gonna write some top-forty stuff. That ain’t no Tommy James and the Shondells.”

  “Here’s another,” Leonard glances back and deduces there’s time for one more.

  I’ve never seen your eyes so wide

  Your appetite so occupied with someone else

  As if I didn’t know

  It ain’t my style to hold this tight

  So let’s be married one more night.

  It’s light enough to let it go.

  A while ago the scenery started fading.

  I held you ‘til you learned to walk on air.

  But don’t look down, it’s gone, it’s faded baby:

  The smoky life is practiced everywhere.

  Joni walks up just as Leonard comes to an end. “We should go,” she hugs the poet good-bye. “I need a week’s sleep.”

  They say good-byes and the troupe hops into the waiting cab and starts back to the motel.

  “Who was that guy?” McGuinn mysteriously whispers.

  “The Lone Ranger?” Ratso guesses.

  “No, it wasn’t Tonto either,” Roger grins.

  “I’m a stone Cohenite,” Joni brags. “Dylan, ehhh,” she jokingly dismisses the singer with a flap of the wrist.

  “Let’s call Dylan,” Roger starts to unpack his attaché-case phone.

  “I love Cohen,” Joni continues. “I’m promiscuous with my love. I love a lot of people. Who I can live with, that’s another question,” she laughs. “I can make it through, but I’m feeling like the mother of a large family.”

  “I’ve come around to a new way of thinking about everyone in the world.” Roger puts the phone away. “I’m serious.”

  “What new way?” Joni’s curious.

  “It’s called acceptance,” Ratso says cynically.

  “Small-town acceptance,” Joni smiles.

  “I love the people I love and I ignore the people I can’t tolerate if I can,” Roger says with impeccable logic, “and try not to loathe anyone.”

  “I don’t loathe anyone,” Joni agrees. “I try not to feel superior, like a jiveass superior chick, but I keep myself in check ’cause there are other perspectives I’m able to appreciate; the beauty of people on different levels until I get pushed in a corner.”

  “I’m against possessiveness and monogamy,” Roger interrupts.

  “I did it for two years, Roger,” Joni confesses.

  “I did it for five,” Roger three-ups.

  “Really?” Joni seems incredulous. “You didn’t cheat on the road?”

  “Not once,” Roger moans.

  “I sure broke down in a hurry,” Joni shakes her blond head.

  “I’m not talking
about this trip,” Roger is quick to qualify.

  “Yeah,” Joni laughs, “we all know about this trip. It’s very difficult and it’s very limiting and very indulgent at the same time, none of us are mature enough to be able to accept the fact that other people can love other people. We all want to be the conqueror, the one and only in every relationship that we begin.” Joni pauses for the right words. “There’s a duality that I can’t make out, I don’t mean to be a victimizer but sometimes I find I am by my own spontaneous nature, you know, like gravitating to people who interest me in a room and neglecting the one who is like hurting by my interest in other people.”

  “Yeah,” Roger leans forward in his seat, “like if I don’t give a fuck if you come around and say hello to me, you’re probably more likely to come over than if someone said, ‘Oh please, oh please, come over here and pay attention to me.’ I’m the same way with people, if they’re craving my attention.”

  “But Dylan makes mistakes because of his inconsistency,” Joni suddenly invokes the songwriter. “There are people that he lets in to a certain degree, he’s let me in pretty close in certain ways, and yet he will,” Joni goes into a perfect Dylan drawl, “act like we never have met the next day. I don’t trust him. He like put me on the spot in the film. I have preferred parts of my personality and part of my personality that I regret because of what it creates and he like wouldn’t cop, he copped to perfection, to being able to deal with all his personality and that’s bullshit. He must pinch. If he doesn’t pinch then I accuse him of inhumanity because he turns left so many times on people.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Ratso is finding it very difficult to follow Joni’s drift.

  “I’m speaking English.” Joni has a trace of irritation in her voice as the cab pulls up to the hotel. “I find his humanity is all on a very ambitious level. He goes for the big causes and neglects the people who could be potentially friends. He may be king artist, that’s an accomplishment, but he won’t be one of my favorite people.”

  “Yeah, well how come he enjoys people who don’t take shit from him,” Ratso remember’s Bob’s almost awe of Kinky, and Roger’s conversation in Vermont, and even the brassy woman in the lobby of the hotel who melted him till he eagerly signed an autograph.

  “Well, of course,” Joni stumbles a few seconds looking for an out, “he does it because what he says and what he is is a hypocrisy.”

  The next day is getaway day but since Ratso is driving back to New York he can afford to sleep late, and it’s four in the afternoon before he starts rolling. He locates Dylan and the film crew over at novelist Emmett Grogan’s house. Ratso arrives just as the shooting ends and he joins Bob, Sara, Emmett and his lovely wife Louise, a nationally known actress. The reporter does a quick survey of the wonderfully restored old house and heads straight for the kitchen where a buffet of roast beef and cheeses is set up. He makes a sandwich and sits down next to Dylan.

  “I heard that you were worried about the press tomorrow at the concert in jail,” Ratso mentions.

  “Yeah,” Bob nods, “Lois told me that there was a lot of press gonna be there.”

  “Well, Lois told me that he had rounded up AP, Reuters, UPI, Time, Newsweek, CBS, NBC …”

  “Fuck it,” Dylan dismisses the list. “It don’t matter. I’ll go out some other time to see Rubin. I don’t have to see him with all that press around.”

  “What?” Ratso’s mouth falls open.

  “Really,” Bob says straight-faced, “I’d rather see him man to man, without the press.”

  “We need the press for Rubin,” Ratso shouts.

  “Naw, there’ll be enough people there doing it. No, the show is covered. I’ll just go out there to see Rubin, man. I don’t go to see the press. The press can come to the Garden.”

  “Maybe we can arrange for the press to split before the concert in the prison,” Ratso thinks.

  “I just won’t do it,” Dylan decides.

  “OK, let’s just not do it,” Ratso plays the same game.

  “OK, cancel it then,” Dylan waves cavalierly. “Call Lois and tell him it’s canceled.”

  “And you’ll come back alone and play for the prisoners without press?” Ratso prods.

  “No problem,” Dylan shrugs. “Give Lois a call. Just tell him I canceled and that the rest of the people will be there though.”

  Emmett strolls by and notes Ratso’s pad. “In Boxboro I’m wondering who this guy is wandering around. I go into the bathroom and he’s writing down stuff. I thought he was writing down the life of my schlong or something.”

  Ratso goes to the refrigerator for a beer and returns to Grogan and Dylan talking about Montreal.

  “I didn’t get a chance to get out at all,” Bob complains.

  “The people here, all they ever do is smile,” the expatriate Brooklynite says in his raspy voice. “They never hit on you.”

  “It’s civilized here,” Dylan says with longing.

  “It’s also only three generations of people here,” Emmett reminds.

  “All I know is that when we cross that border,” Bob shakes his head. “We spent about six weeks in New England, that was great, real Old Town America. But it was still America, you know? Then we crossed that border into Quebec City …”

  “How was Quebec City?” Emmett asks.

  “It was heavy,” the songwriter whistles, “it was fantastic.”

  “How was it for the Revue?”

  “They didn’t understand a word but they loved it.” Bob smiles. “They loved it, they didn’t understand anything. I could tell, anybody could tell. Quebec City was the nicest place I’ve seen, I can’t figure it out.”

  Meanwhile, Ratso during this discussion has called Rubin in prison and, in an attempt to get Dylan to commit himself to playing tomorrow pulls the cord its full eight feet and offers the phone to the singer.

  “Wanna speak to Rubin?” Ratso smiles.

  “This guy is something else,” Dylan shakes his head, pointing to the scribe. “You got your own ideas, man,” he frowns and dutifully heads for the waiting phone.

  “Rubin. How are you doing, man? OK, we’ve been doing the film. No, it isn’t a porno one, close but not quite. We’re planning to come down tomorrow, yeah. Uh huh, OK, good, pretty smooth. We’re wrapping it up and we’re up here. It’s pretty cold. Yeah, we’re heading back down to never-never land, right. Well, see you soon, OK Rubin, OK man.”

  Dylan gives Ratso a stern look and sits down at the dining-room table again.

  “Did you hear about Dylan Thomas yesterday?” Emmett asks.

  “What happened?” Bob perks up.

  “His wife went to an auctioneer yesterday and she brought all the love letters he wrote to her. She brought them and nobody would bid and she had to wrap them up and leave.”

  “Really? All the love letters?”

  “And nobody would make a bid,” Emmett laughs. “So if you’re interested they’re up there.”

  “How much did she want for them?” Bob asks with mild interest.

  “I don’t know, there wasn’t even a bid.”

  Dylan picks at a piece of cheese. “Sounds like she’s trying to exploit him there a little bit,” he smirks.

  “I think she might be in trouble,” Emmett explains. “She’s had them but I think that she went to the wrong room because usually they pick that stuff up.”

  “They’re buying Jack’s stuff and all that,” Dylan points out.

  “I think she went to the wrong room, engineers or something, people looking for Chinese vases or something,” Emmett laughs heartily.

  “Lawrence’s letters went for a lot of money though,” Bob leans back in the chair. “I’d like to leave from here. I don’t want to go back to the hotel. I’m gonna leave from here.”

  “You gotta get your stuff from the hotel,” Ratso reminds him.

  “I don’t have any stuff. Gary can wrap up all Sara’s shit, or I don’t know, all our shit. Rolling Thunder
shit.”

  “I’ll go back and tell him, I have to get my own shit,” Ratso volunteers.

  “Would you? That would be great. I haven’t been in a place like this in three months.” Dylan surveys the room. “I like houses, old houses.”

  Emmett starts to tell Bob about his child, Max, as Ratso prepares to go back to the hotel. “Max’ll love it here,” Emmett smiles.

  “How could he not?” Bob says, wide-eyed. “This is a great place to grow up in.”

  “Leonard’s got kids his age,” Ratso relates.

  “Leonard does?” Bob seems surprised. “By his first wife?”

  “No, Suzanne, she’s not his wife.” Ratso smiles.

  “What?” Bob feigns shock. “Comment!”

  “Elle n’est pas femme from the song,” Ratso fractures both languages. “She’s not the one from the song. Leonard claims the song conjured her up, elle est conjurée par le chanson.”

  “He’s got us confused now.” Bob nudges Grogan. “This guy met a black Jamaican Jew.”

  “She wasn’t black,” Ratso protests.

  “She looked black to me,” Bob joshes.

  “She was Sephardic,” Emmett compromises.

  “Whatever, she was great in bed,” Ratso remembers fondly. “She said …”

  “I love you very much,” Bob pimps the reporter.

  “I love you, Ratso,” Emmett continues. “I’ll give you anything if you just fuck me again.”

  “No, schmucks,” Ratso fumes, “she gave me this bracelet, this sterling silver—”

  “Looks like a slave bracelet to me,” Emmett examines.

  “I traded her for one of those cheap ten-cent Dylan pins,” Ratso laughs.

  “I wouldn’t repeat that if I were you, Ratso,” Bob warns, “especially with that dollar sign on your left shoulder.”