by Lewis Shiner
They sat in the den downstairs while the albums were taping and Cole tried to get a line on the female situation. He’d heard about an all-girl’s school called Hockaday that was the distaff St. Mark’s.
“No, man,” Alex said. “Hockadaisies are a bunch of stuck-up prudes. There’s going to be a party at Arch Walker’s house in a couple of weeks. I’m talking about drama club girls, art girls, music girls, a live band. Action guaranteed.”
Cole nodded.
Alex said, “You’re still a virgin, right?”
After a silence, Cole said, “Yeah. I’ve been in Midland. Nothing’s happening in Midland. You?”
“Close,” Alex said. “Not all the way. Not yet.” They’d snuck a couple of Bohemias out of the spare refrigerator in the garage and Alex took a long drink. “We go down to Guanajuato every Christmas for a week or ten days. It would be pretty easy to, you know, go with a professional. A lot of my friends down there have done it. But… that’s not really what I want. You know?”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “I would want her to want it too.”
Cole went upstairs to turn the record over and when he came back he said, “That’s why I wanted to go to public school. I’ve been in Dallas for four months and I haven’t even met any girls my age.”
“Your dad is like my dad,” Alex said. “He wants you to go further than he did.”
“And I don’t even want to go in the same direction. Meaningless job and wife and mortgage and car payment.”
“Yeah? You already know what you want to do?”
“I’ve known since I was little.”
“Tell me.”
Cole shook his head. “Nope. Unh-uh. If I told you, you’d mock me.”
“Now you have to tell me. I swear I won’t give you shit.”
“I always wanted to work for like the fbi or the cia,” Cole said. The beer, he thought, was loosening his tongue. “Field agent, overseas, undercover, the whole deal.”
“Like James Bond.”
“I’ve read all of those. And John le Carré and Len Deighton and people you’ve never heard of. Philip McCutchan, Donald Hamilton, Philip Atlee. And that’s just the fiction.”
“You are seriously into this.”
“Right now I can only work in Latin America because Spanish is my only other language, except for a few words of Arabic. That’s why I’m going to take Russian in college.”
“Do you really think you could kill somebody?”
“Oh, hell yeah. I think it would be very satisfying. Once you were in the middle of it, kill or be killed? No question at all.”
“Cole, have you ever considered the idea that you might be completely fucked-up crazy?”
“No,” Cole said. “If it’s either me or the rest of the world, I know who I trust.”
*
All that week, Cole put on the Dylan tape as soon as he finished his homework. The walk-in closet in his bedroom was his secret headquarters, furnished with an old armchair and a lamp and tv tray. He listened to Dylan there to lessen the chance of his father hearing it and going on a tirade. When he sang along, his voice was no more than a whisper. By Saturday night, both albums played continuously in his head.
Alex arrived alone in the Monza to pick him up. “I thought Susan was coming,” Cole said.
“She went with her own friends. Are you kidding? Why would she want to go with us?”
“No reason,” Cole said. “Never mind.”
Moody Coliseum was the smu basketball court, a red brick box like all the campus buildings. They parked two blocks away in a student lot and joined the crowds on the wide flight of concrete steps outside. For all of Cole’s father’s talk about “beatniks” and “long-haired weirdos,” what they mostly saw was short-haired college boys in slacks and sport coats. A few balding guys in black turtlenecks, some women in their thirties with straight hair halfway down their backs and skirts above their knees who looked like they’d taxied in from New York.
Cole got his ticket out. He’d been carrying it in his billfold all week and it had started to show some wear. They passed through the big glass doors and followed the signs to the steeply raked seats of section M. The stage was below them and to their left, a set of risers with a white cloth backdrop and a rough scaffolding for the lights. He could make out instruments in the dimness of the stage—piano, organ, drums, amplifiers. He had trouble getting his breath.
The sight of Susan climbing the steps toward them made him sit up straight and try to look casual at the same time. She was squired by a tall, massive guy in a yellow blazer and a narrow tie that looked like it might choke him. Behind her stood a girl with a blonde flip, cat-eye glasses, and an equally large date. Susan spotted Cole and Alex and waved. Cole smiled and waved back and watched her settle in, three rows down and a dozen seats past him, eclipsed by her date’s bulk.
The wooden floor of the basketball court had been covered with a gray canvas tarp and folding chairs, nearly all of them full. The stream of people into the side sections had slowed to a trickle. Expectant silences passed over the crowd, followed by bursts of nervous talk. Cole saw that he was drumming his fingers on the wooden seat between his legs and forced himself to stop.
At last the lights faded. A spotlight picked out the front of the stage and a disembodied voice introduced “Columbia Recording Artist” Bob Dylan. The applause was nearly drowned out by shouts and yelps and whistles.
Then Dylan was there. Small, not more than five-eight in his boots. Some kind of ultra-modern tan suit with no collar or lapels, hair standing up like a rooster tail. Acoustic guitar, harmonica rack.
He waited for the applause to fade, and then he leaned toward the mike and said, “Hi.” Laughter, more applause. He stroked the guitar strings, and the strokes turned into chords, and he started to sing. “Of war and peace, the truth just twists…”
Until that moment, Cole had been detached, watching the movie unfold. Now, suddenly, the reality of it hit him in the solar plexus. He smelled the hair oil of the guy in front of him. He felt the density of the concrete beneath his loafers, heard the pa echo off the rear wall of the coliseum, saw a kid in the front row of chairs lean forward to put his elbows on his knees. He felt the chill and dampness of the air that lay over the city, the curvature of the earth, the tidal pull of the moon.
The piercing notes of the harmonica, Dylan’s voice itself, nasal and whiny, his curiously emphatic “the,” his chilly distance, all meant more than the tangled symbolism of his lyrics. They were the secret handshake, the tap on the shoulder, the beckoning hand from the alleyway. They separated the curious from the initiated.
Toward the end of the acoustic set, a girl with long, ironed blonde hair walked slowly out of the center aisle and floated toward the stage as if she’d been hypnotized. She reached out a hand to touch Dylan’s boot and before her fingers made contact, two cops materialized out of the shadows and gently led her away.
Dylan finished the set with “Desolation Row,” a song that Cole was sure nobody else in the audience understood half as well as he did. None of the places he’d ever lived, not the mud-brick houses and palm-lined suburbs of Suez, not the pastel-colored plaster walls and oily air of Villahermosa, not the blasted, salty plains of West Texas, and certainly not the high-rises and miniature mansions and paved-over scrublands of Dallas, had ever felt like home. The only space that the word defined for him was inside himself, a space that Dylan had mapped to the finest detail.
The lights came up and Alex asked if he wanted anything. He was talking about getting a Coke, Cole realized. He shook his head. The four dollars he’d paid for his ticket had wiped out his allowance. As Alex ran lightly down the steps, Cole wondered what Susan’s friends had made of Dylan. The two boys had stood up and turned to face their dates, brawny arms folded, talking and laughing. Cole willed Susan to turn around and see him, to see that he understood that this was no laughing matter. She resisted his psychic powers, as so many had before her.
Hi
s awareness kept returning to the stage. Tilted, overlapping circles of drum heads and cymbals, worn guitar necks propped against the silver fabric of the speaker cabinets, cables wrapped like vines around the trunks of microphone stands. Their hum ran up his spine. He was content to be in that fulcrum moment, knowing that once the electric set started, it would be on its way to being over.
When Alex finally made it back, he had two Cokes and handed one to Cole. “In case you changed your mind. The lines were really long.”
“Thanks, man.” He took a long drink.
“So what did you think?”
Cole opened his mouth, and nothing came out. He thought of the blonde girl, drawn toward Dylan by currents of magnetic force. It was more like that than words.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Me too.”
The lights began to dim. The last voices in the audience fell silent at the same moment that the room went dark.
Somebody moved on the stage. Shadows passed in front of the tiny red lights on the amplifiers, the bass drum gave out a single, muffled thud. A voice counted to four and the stage lights came up behind a tidal wave of noise. So loud and so distorted, so garbled by echoes off the hard, flat walls, that Cole couldn’t distinguish the individual instruments, let alone any semblance of melody or rhythm. Terrifying, exhilarating, uncontainable, triumphant. It blew harmlessly through Cole’s body even as it leveled Western civilization around him.
Dylan had the same suit on, now under an electric guitar, and the electricity arced through his legs and made him jump stiffly across the stage. He charged the microphone and spat lyrics into it, his expression no longer distantly amused but aggressive and defiant. He’d been booed, Cole had heard, in New York and LA, and was clearly expecting it again.
Cole felt a chord change more than heard it, and that and the lead guitar riff told him that the song was “Tombstone Blues,” the second cut on the first side of Highway 61. The chaos of sound clicked into focus and now he could make out the words and hear the surging Lowrey organ and the pummeling bass.
Cole had grown up in the era of cowboy shows on television, and despite years without tv in Mexico and Egypt, he’d been obsessed with them, from Wanted Dead or Alive to Have Gun Will Travel to Cheyenne. The iconic pegged jeans, low-slung holster and cartridge belt, hat and vest and boots added up to an image that overshadowed plot and dialog and character. Dylan’s new persona was equally powerful and fit precisely into the absence that the cowboys had left in Cole’s imagination, the absence that the secret agents in their anonymous gray suits had never quite filled. Even more compelling was the lead guitarist at Dylan’s left hand, pin-striped jacket and tie, black hair, guitar as blonde as the girl from the audience, half-smiling as he leaned into it, not so much creating the music as riding it the way a cowboy would, controlling it with flicks of the wrist, his body rippling with corollary motion.
As the song clattered to a close, Cole heard whistles and cheers over the applause and no boos at all. Cole clapped until his hands hurt. Dylan, more interested in his band than the audience, quickly started another song, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down,” the Animals’ rock version instead of the folk version from his first album, an album that hadn’t moved Cole when Alex had played it for him.
He was moved now.
After that came “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” and what had at first been noise was full of melody, not as cheap and accessible as the Italian love songs that Cole had once listened to on krld’s “Music Till Dawn,” but all the more intense because of it. Then everything slowed and Dylan sang, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez,” and Cole snapped a mental picture to take with him for the rest of his life—blue lights washing the stage, the giant shadow of the head of the bass guitar on the white backdrop, the drummer and the piano player both hunched over, Dylan wide open to the microphone, the lead guitarist watching him, as everyone in the audience was watching him, leaning forward into the song, as Cole was, and all of them, together, surrendering.
After that “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then “Maggie’s Farm” as encore with Dylan on piano, not enough, but really, everything after that first electric onslaught had been overkill. The damage was done.
*
On Saturday mornings, Steve Cole liked to sleep late, put on his old brown corduroy bathrobe, nearly worn through in the elbows, and listen to Goodman at Carnegie Hall or Ellington at Newport. Betty would make French toast and then he would get dressed and maybe go out to the woodshop.
It was October 2, the first seriously cold morning of the fall. As he unfolded the newspaper at the dining room table, he heard the mower running in the front yard.
Betty brought him his first cup of coffee, and he said, “The kid’s cutting the grass?”
“He said it needed one last trim before winter. He said to tell you he was lowering the blades to strip it.”
Steve grunted in satisfaction. Nice not to have to remind the boy for once. “A little early, isn’t it?” At this hour the lawn would still be damp with dew and the bag would get heavy fast.
“He’s playing tennis later.”
“With the Mexican kid.”
“With his friend Alex, yes.”
Betty went into the kitchen and a minute later he heard the bacon hiss and pop in the pan. The headline read, “Panel Ask Pay Boost, More Dallas Policemen.” Steve nodded in silent agreement, wondering where the money would come from.
Betty brought in their plates and Steve poured syrup on the French toast. “Did he eat anything?”
“He had an Instant Breakfast.”
“He’d take food pills if he could, like those astronauts of his.” He cut the point off one of the triangles of bread and chewed it slowly. It was slightly underdone.
Betty said, “He brought up the guitar business again this morning.”
“Why doesn’t he talk to me about it?”
“Why do you think?”
Steve took another bite of French toast and then a bite of bacon that had been lying in the pool of syrup, salt and sweet together. “He’ll get over it.”
“I don’t think so. Not this time.”
“Well, he’s going to have to talk to me directly. I don’t want to hear any more about it from you. You can tell him that.”
He reached for the sports page with his left hand and another piece of bacon with his right.
*
After he finished the yard, the kid changed into tennis shorts and a sweater and then came and told Steve he needed to talk. Betty was hovering around the living room, pretending to dust and rearrange the magazines on the coffee table.
“I need to drive over to Centennial,” Steve said. “Come with me and we can talk in the car.”
The kid shrugged. “Sure, okay.”
Dallas was a Baptist city, with antiquated and hypocritical Baptist laws. Blue laws kept most of the stores closed on Sunday, and liquor laws forced bars to resort to the “private club” dodge, like during Prohibition. North Dallas was dry, which meant you had to drive a couple of miles south and east to the island city of University Park to find a liquor store.
As soon as he backed onto the street, Steve said, “Do you think I like my job?”
He saw he’d thrown the kid for a loop. “Don’t you?” he finally asked.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Oil is filthy and I can’t stand the smell of it. Most of the people I work with are ignorant and crude. Accounting is boring and I’ve hated most of the places we’ve had to live.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Life isn’t about what I want to be. It’s about making a good living in a job with security and a chance to get ahead. It’s about making sure my kid gets opportunities I didn’t have, to go to a first-rate college—”
“So I can get a job I hate?”
It stung, like the kid had snuck in a good right hand to the face. He took a second to clear his head. “No,” he said. “So you have more choices than I did.”
“What di
d you want to be?”
“What, you mean did I want to be a movie star or a big game hunter or pitch for the Dodgers? That’s kid stuff. By the time I got out of the Army I was married to your mother and all I wanted was a job where I could make enough to get us a place of our own and get away from the foldout bed at your Grandpa Mac’s.”
“What about before you went in?”
Steve hesitated. He didn’t like to talk about it. On the other hand, this was the first time the kid had attempted a real conversation since puberty. “I wanted to fly. I tried to volunteer before Pearl but I was too young. I turned eighteen in June of forty-two and they took me into the Air Corps. Then it came out that I’d had some epilepsy attacks when I was a kid. Nothing since I was three years old, but they had their rules and they washed me out before I got my wings. That’s when they put me in accounting.”
“How come you never told me?”
“It doesn’t help to talk about it. There’s different kinds of happiness. One kind is where you do your job well and take care of your family and people know they can count on you.”
“I don’t think that’s a useful definition of happiness for a fifteen-year-old kid.”
“You have to think about your future happiness, not just scratching whatever itch you have at the moment. If you don’t think ahead, if you don’t have a plan, you’ll end up broke on some street corner with pencils and a tin cup.”
“Or with a guitar?”
Steve looked over at him. No smirk, no challenge, no indication that he was smarting off. “Or with a guitar,” he agreed. “Your mother told me. What do you want a guitar for?”
“Alex and I are going to start a combo.”
“Who’s Alex?” Something about the way the kid expected him to remember everybody’s name made him contrary.
“I play tennis with him? Have eaten dinner over there? We went to the concert together?”
“Concert? Since when is some beatnik wailing a concert?”
The kid was struggling to keep his patience and Steve let him stew for a while. Finally the kid said, “I want this, Dad. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything.”
