People had told me New York was cold and heartless. They had lied. I’d been invited into folks’ homes and slept in their beds, ate at their tables. I’d had good times and interesting conversations. I had smelled Sara’s hair, enjoyed soft flesh without the exchange of filthy lucre.
Now I was bound around the horn to San Diego. Where these things did not live. Where everything was sand and plastic palm jarheads who wanted nothing so much as to take you out into the alley and kick your sorry ass. Where merchants with cash-register eyes stood in the doorways of their jewelry stores and tailor shops and beckoned you to enter. Come in here, sailor. Easy weekly payments. Get an engagement ring for that girl back in the old hometown. A $20 watch for only a hundred bucks. Handmade suits of Italian silk that fit as if they’d been handstitched in the rain forest by spider monkeys.
And the men who cruised the bus stops like predators in late-model Volvos and Austin Healeys. In their sunglasses and golfing caps. Hey there, sailor, want a lift? How far are you going?
Nowhere near that far, good buddy.
And, oh my God, I’d just remembered. The drinking age in San Diego was 21, not New York’s youth-accommodating 18.
The ship rolled and yawed. Folks strapped themselves into their bunks. I couldn’t sleep. I lay and thought about what Sara had said: You’ve let him into your head.
Well, I’d concede that. But there was a precedent for it. Everyone has folks in their head. Already I had a few tenants up in those attic rooms. James Dean, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor had a lifetime lease, paid up forever. Faulkner had Melville and Conrad and Joyce. Even Dylan had Woody Guthrie and those beat poets and the French symbolists. And Little Richard. Woody had Joe Hill and Jesus Christ and maybe Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had the founding fathers.
So what if I gave Dylan a room. He’d be the only musician. Always room for one more, just another towel in the bathroom, another place setting at the dining table. I could give him the room with that little gallery where Carson McCullers used to sit in the twilight and watch the violet darkness seep into the soft Georgia landscape of her memory.
She’d be pissed and leave in a snit, but don’t think twice, it’s all right. She was outward-bound, anyway. She and Truman Capote had taken to scuffling and fighting and hissing like cars, and I was sick of the both of them.
Sometimes I could hear Dylan’s boots on the stairs. He stayed in his room a lot, drinking, I think. He sat on his cot and tuned his Martin while McCullers, interrupted at her packing, screamed through the wall You want to knock that shit off? It’s three o’clock in the morning. Do you have to tune that thing at three o’clock in the morning?
Of course this attic was not a nice place to live. Sometimes, in fact, it was a sordid, squalid place. You couldn’t have gotten Eudora Welty in there with a sawed-off shotgun. Walker Percy, slumming, sneered, waved a dismissive arm and hailed a cab for uptown. Its tenants drank too much and had indiscriminate and unprotected sex as often as they could, and when they weren’t doing it they were thinking about it in a constant state of tumescence. Regret and loss tinged the windowpanes, darkened the fading wallpaper. Once, Faulkner passed out sitting with his back pressed against the hot radiator and when they kicked down the door and peeled off his polo shirt the vertical brown burn marks on his back looked like the bars on a window.
This place was the set on the wrong side of the tracks and too near them. There was shouting and glass breaking at hours far past midnight. In the dark, freight trains went highballing past, their shrieks honing away to a thin remnant of loss that was like a taste on the back of your tongue that made you want to go with them and see the unknowable landscape they were arc-welding out of the night. The deferential ghosts of James Agee’s Alabama sharecroppers hovered in the hallways or crouched figuring with their fingers in the dust on the floorboards, spectral and transparent revenants toting up the ciphers of lives that always came up wanting.
Dylan didn’t seem to mind. He settled in. Sometimes I could hear him coughing. Sometimes his typewriter went on pecking until dawn.
On leave, preparatory to shipping out for the South China Sea, I imported Dylan to Lewis County, Tenn., bought him in like contraband in my sea bag. Three albums now. Two friends and my brother and myself sat in my brother’s room grouped around the stereo.
I didn’t say that I had been listening to him for months and that I’d decided he was a visionary and part prophet, or that I was so far into the words I might never get out or even want out.
The needle hissed on the vinyl. The guitar picking seemed to come out of some old, lost, absolutely timeless place. It could’ve been a hundred years ago or next week. The voice, when it came, was always unexpected. You were hearing it for the first time no matter how many times you’d heard it before, the voice weary and resigned and pissed off all at the same time it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe, iffen you don’t know by now.
Son of a bitch sure can’t sing, my friend said, his ears forever spoiled by mainstream Elvis and Johnny Mathis.
He can’t blow that French harp, either, the other friend said.
I didn’t protest. I’d heard all this before. He’s a good guitar picker, I said again.
But my brother, who was learning to play then and whose instrument was never more than an arm’s reach away, picked his guitar up from the bed. He leaned and carefully set the tome arm back. When the guitar came again he started turning the keys and plucking strings, matching the tuning that was coming out of the speakers. When he was satisfied, his left hand began felling around the strings, experimentally for the chords.
Calendar pages riffled, blew away in the wind, it was another year. I was in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea, war smoldering like a banked fire. Eight-inch guns hammered and hammered and paint flaked off the galley ceiling like harsh gray snowflakes. The ship maneuvered to avoid conjectural torpedoes. On the decks of our carrier, jets came and went and came and went, left loaded and returned empty in a seemingly endless cycle. On the bench, the fires from ammunition dumps flared and ebbed all night. By day, burning oil refineries smoked and stank.
Already I was looking forward to getting the hell gone. Something didn’t quite compute here. What was happening never matched what I was reading about in the paper. There seemed some grotesque disparity between event and event’s recounting.
Still, there was Dylan. Four albums now. On the new one, the songs were different; surreal images were becoming more and more common. These songs flickered around the edges. They were becoming more personal, their concerns moving from the ills of society toward some interior landscape. Less protest music. He seemed to have decided it was a lost cause. He confided in the hallway that he sometimes felt as if he were charged with holding together a world already faulted, leaking and determined to come apart at the seams. The folk-music business expected him to do this. He was tired of it. He didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t think the world was going to last.
I was keeping the music to myself. Dylan was an acquired taste nobody I knew was interested in acquiring. I had one of those small phonographs, the kind that closes like a suitcase, not unlike the one Anse Bundren’s new wife is carrying at the end of As I Lay Dying, and I kept it with my records in the computer room that was my workspace. I would go there in the small hours of the night and write and listen to music.