Forget the Aching Dream

The narrator recounts the last few minutes of the life of Bob Dylan.

Mr Bobs, the other brother you never had, lay in a heart seizure the experts said was caused by pigeons. Suzy and me and Silvester Leetime, the disk jockey with quartz in his voice, and Angelina of the Dawn, and sometimes Trumpet Stevens, the saxophone repairman, never left his side.

"Mr Bobs," said Suzie, "You the other brother we never had."

"Aw, shucks," said Mr Bobs, coy and like the best imitation of Philip the See-Through-Tube you ever did see. He had a twin named Renaldo and eleven outlined aliases and a long-time gal named Maggie Farmer. But he had a mind to ramble and amid the recollections he mentioned that evening’s empire was coming by at last. “Tis bin a long, long road,” he did say, “And now we’s comin’ round the bend.”

He had learned to talk like that from Ramblin’ Dick Filmore, a mean-fisted protest singer back in the days when the Back-Lit Cafe hosted open-mike on Tuesday nights and everyone was in love with Nicolette Lagubra and her band Destination Road.

His big break came when he met Fat Albert Hillman, the man who invented Peter, Paul & Mary and turned Puff the Tragic Dragon solid gold. He introduced the Bobs to Peter Hammond, Gene Autrey’s lovechild, who heard him singing Mama’s Got Her Ways and signed him up for a seven record deal.

“You was lucky, Mr Bobs,” said everybody.

Mr Bobs would look away because he knew his luck would end the day he dwelt upon it. He knew the moment he stood still he’d be run down by the mad momentum of the modern times. Thus he wore a dozen coats in as many winters, a master of multiplicity. He said he felt real pity for the thin man, was under the underdog and had always rung the chimes of flashing freedom. He donated a C minor chord to Donovan and Fat Alberts smuggled him into London to turn the Beatles on.

None of this was news. The thing he did confide, however, was that throughout the latter part of 1964 he was played by Norbert Crighton, a stunt man from Cincinnati, who did it for the glory.

"So Nobert did the raucous tunes?" I asked incredulous.

 Mr Bobs smiled. "Forget the way the world turns," he said, perennially evasive. "You're never late until you get there!" He tried to sit up.

"Look out," said Suzie, "The cowboy angel clears his throat..."

He spat into the bed pan and recalled the time he performed live for Pope Scylla IXth and Cardinal Charybdos. “I’ve dined with Kings and kissed their rings an’ never bin too impressed,” he said, rhyming.

Just like Mr Bobs.

He asked for coffee and refused an interview with Time magazine. It was Mr Bobs, of course, who reinvented the ballad and stole it from three guys from New Jersey. But it had long been assumed that he did the raucus tunes alone.

“Nope,” he admitted. “It was Norbert all along.”

“Well that explains the black sunglasses,” said the Trumpet.

“Yep,” he said. “He worked for peanuts and was straight from the hands of Harlem.”

“Which is why....” said Angela, just getting the picture, “It was called ‘Another Side of...’”

“Correct,” said the man.

It was Mr Bobs who had liberated an entire generation from the hoolahoop with songs of plain insinuation. Songs with soil under their fingernails, songs with grimey black roots, songs of lament, songs of love, long songs of sad-eyed ladies, songs with bold bandannas, songs in panama hats, songs with brown tobacco stains in their moustache; he could sing 'em all. Just back from wowing them in Japan, he once said that in his opinion Blind Jack McGinty had the spirit of the old guys living in his undies, which was high praise indeed. He acquired the McGinty style. To this he added Charlie Chaplan’s imitation of Huckleberry Finn and a sneer he borrowed from James Dean. Then - prolific accolades! - he humanized the hipsters.

Once I took him to meet Magenta Wendy, famous napkin artist, and they conversed into tomorrow on songs of the lost miners of '49 and esoteric jigs and the sad, empty fate of the folklore purists who never understood Sinatra. Behind him lay the wrecks of pretenders, the pimply faced has-beens who bombed on the country charts. With his curly face and affected squint Mr Bobs caught the gravy train to nowhere special  and turned it into a handful of rhyming quatrains and a slightly clever couplet that somehow shook the world. “A man with a guitar can stop an army, if he knows whats he’s doin’” he said, his Orpheus complex on display.

At one point he explained his theory of time travel. Inside every song, he said, is a tiny time machine, but if a singer has the right intonation he can squeeze fifty thousand fans in there and take them to eternity for three minutes, or four, or more if the backing band are in for the ride. He embellished black motorcycles with wise words, all his own devising. His father had been an honest habadasher down in bleak Chicago where the winds of winter teach a man to love his house and home. 

Then there were the things that no one knew. He was a lifelong fan of Gorgeous George. Lowdown Wainwright III had taught him how to smoke six packs of Marlboros a day. He’d been married five times and had nine children on four continents but the love of his life didn’t think twice about him. Such crazy sorrow. He’d won four Grammys, three Oscars, two Emmys and the Nobel Prize for Harmonica Improvization.  He’d known Doris Day before she was a virgin and shared a cold corn-dog with Lenny Bruce in a taxi in Manhattan.

Laying there as the surgeons milled about he had time to survey the twisted reach of all his yesterdaze and spoke to us in a kindly low-brow mood of some  reflection. There were wires and cables and tubes beneath his skin. Those subcutaneous roadsick blues. One time, he did reverie, three angels spake a lonesome upon the endless snows somewhere up near Hibbing. "Take up yodelling," they say, "for it resonates, whereas rock is little more than tuti-fruti. Strap on your saddle, Mr Bobs," they say, "and go exploring." And putting in the twang they bless him and say "Sing!" It was supernatural. With organ in the background. And bulky black ladies doing vocals. Sometimes fate grabs hold of a young man and remodels destiny to fit him. In another lifetime Mr Bobs might have been a geeky Jewish kid allergic to fabric softner. Instead he was the sonic rustler of his times, chronicler of ages, the all-electric black madonna two-wheeled troubador with nothing much to say. Complex Gemini. The six-stringed Rimbaud.

It was at this point that Keef Richards the Living Fossil dropped in and Mr Bobs did his painful Jack Kerouac impersonation.

“Remember the time,” said Keef, “When Leonard Cohen taught us how to moan...”

This was interupted by a visit from Tiny Montgomery and the Strong Man from Circus Acapulco who had toured through the southern states in the winter of ’74. And soon Helen Ginsburg came by to say farewell and dedicate her poem ‘A Supermarket in Newfangled Miami’ to Mr Bobs if he’d return the favour.

“How you feelin’ Mr Bobs?” she ask.

“My weariness amazes me,” he say.

This was because he’d packed six different lifetimes into a single suitcase and carried it with him on a trek from the iron mines of Minesotta to the bleak little hotels on the Isle of Wight and all the way home again - supremely restless - some thirty times until the pigeons gave him the seizures and he almost died on stage singing Trouble Will Follow You There. He seemed in denial when Helen walked away and he asked if she would be around tomorrow.

“Tomorrow is a long time, Mr Bobs,” she say, intrepid. And she left sad to see him go.

“Its not right that he should be reduced to a statistic,” said someone.

"Any last words?" said the latest blow in.

(Mr Bobs pretends to ignore it. A flashback to sunny days with Johnny Cash.)

"Any last thoughts on Guthrie Woodbox, the man who outsang a freight train?" asked someone else.

Mr Bobs was dry and lost in the past. "O rosebuds!" he says, and everyone believed he was mysterious.

At the same time, as if to underline the situation, Silvester and his Lady Caroline squabbled in the corner:

Silvester: I don’t love you anymore

The Lady Caroline: That’s not what you said!

Silvester: When?

The Lady Caroline: Always.

She was a dusty beauty who had been driven to vallium by the poetry of Gregory Corso. In her own mind, she was the architect of a comprehensive Anglo-Irish free-trade agreement and an anthology of brave new women pavement artists, but in reality...  Silvester kept her squabbling in a corner:

Silvester: That was then!

The Lady Caroline: When?

Silvester: Then.

The Lady Caroline:And?

Silvester: This is now.

The Lady Caroline: That’s not what you said.

Silvester: Yes it is.

Silvester's frustration grew more audible. He banged his tambourine. Single-handedly, he believed, he had crafted an empire of influence and had a rare nose for a hit. After sixteen years on the graveyard shift,  sixteen smoking guns in the cold hours of the night, he believed he deserved her better.

The Lady Caroline: No.

Silvester: Yes.

The Lady Caroline: That's not what you said!

Silvester: I don't love you anymore.

The Lady Caroline paused and, thinking twice, looked at him. She glanced at me and I glanced at Suze and she glanced at lonely Mr Bobs.

Silvester: Now I don't love you anymore

The Lady Caroline: How can you say that?

Silvester: I don't love you anymore.

The Lady Caroline: You always say that.

"Amen," said Mr Bobs, looking back.

"Amen," said Angelina, silent, faithful, who had loved him more than once.

Soon after this Jesus dropped in to say that he really liked ‘Slow Train Coming’ but Mr Bobs had other things on his mind.

In fact, Suze and me were only tiny when Mr Bobs revisited Homer, invented the postures of punk, expanded the sensibilities of the frisby fraternity and restructured all the corners of consumer iconography at the Newfolk Port Festival where Pete Seeger nearly strangled him back stage. He was a legend in his own living room. The man who called Andy Kiss Ya War Hole a shallow little faggot to his face. The man who made Jim Morrison look like narcassistic froth. The man with the long black coke. Pioneer of the twelve minute pop song, he will go down in history as the man who rhymed “Argentina” with “subpoena”!

“I don’t believe you!” yelled someone from the bleaches.

“Judas!” yelled Mr Bobs, alone in the spotlight reposting.

Joany the Plastic Wrapper came by to talk about her yesteryears and to promote her new album Live with Willy Nelson at the Big Wrangler’s Garden.

Kate Blanchard came in to say “Groovy” and we all nearly mistook her for a mirror. Corina Corina gave him a kiss. Baby-Face Melinda came by along with Stella May, Tony the Throttle, Max the Blind Commissioner, Emmett Grogan’s long-lost cousin, Bilbo the Wicked Messenger, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot - the dynamic duo - Mary Barely-Dappled, Vince the Makeshift, Tough Mama Hazel, the ghost of Victoria Spivey, three forgotten heroes from the Civil War, Absolutely Slick Maree, the dregs of Van Morrison, St. James the Jokerman. “Here’s my card,” said the Lonesome Undertaker, “Call me when he dies.”

When it was just back to the five of us and the respirator, looking up Mr Bob say, "Where's that kid?"

It seemed he meant the Bashful Newman.

“Where’s that croony kid?” he say, nursing his get-well-agains from the mere onlookers and the shifting clique of friends.

His thought had turned to Bashful Newman who had dropped in on the Thursday and sang Rarely Now Do I Recall and a ballad of his own to his long-time hero.

"Where's that lightning rod?" says the Bobs. "Where's that quiet type?"

The "kid" was a leaf-like apparition in a teenage demin fantasy modelled on the Bobs, but beneath the plain exterior was an opportunist with a fancy Spanish theme. The real McCoy. Indeflatably corny. One part prophet, three parts thief. He was heading back to the northerns, aloof and dreamy, with a reportoire of railway tunes that could make an old man whistle.

"You know,” says Mr Bobs, “My one wish is to hear the ballad that says it all, then may chariots swing down like clouds below and carry me off to Elvis.”

At this point Angelina shed a tear because she saw it coming.

I, on the other hand, was wondering at his true identity. Born Augustine Jacob Weberman, son of a hunchback, a solitary mister, he hired a train and supplied the great midwest with drunken drummers throughout the cold, cold War.  Only he - and now it seemed the bashful kid with the built-in rearrangements - had ever sung the ballad that says it all. Barry Manilow attempted Hard Rains a Gonna Fall and the unsung classic Danger on the Dial was almost covered by Paverotti, but no one had the timing, the gravel, the kutzbah or the vision. No one got the phrasin-g right.

It was thus fortuitous that the kid had sat at the bedside and received the sacred blessing. The song would live on. True blues. An epic tale of wild west justice and an unrigheous jury. A free-verse tell-tale blues about a single twisted fate. Or a lilting paean to a girl with hazelnuts for eyes. "I promise to go a' slumbering..." was its sorrowful refrain. Like Mr Bobs the Newman was a rustic barometer with an el-cheapo guitar and a harmonica always squeaking on his neck. "Plenty of stormy weather a-coming our way," Mr Bobs had told him, for he could get a whole hurricane in his bones if he really tried. Not bad for such a little guy.

“Newman aint here, Mr Bobs,” I say. “He’s gone back up to Queensland where the pineapple shines.”

He took this stoically but you could see the disappointment in his wrinkles.

For a while I ambled out into the jingle jangle morning trying to forget the aching dream. There were bus-stops and tram-stops and shop-lights and car-lights and sexy pedestrians, ruddy-cheeked boys on bicycles, bums, whores, winos, derilects, busy businessmen, arking architects, dirty cleaners and saleswomen in brown power-jackets adorned with amazing hair-dos. White men walking black dogs. All the tired horses in the sun.

It seemed strange that they never knew that the famous Mr Bobs was growing quiet up on the fifth floor and preparing for the changing of the guards. I thought of going on a search for the tombs of Isis but stayed and bought a strawberry frosty and drank it in the park and waited for the wind to come, thunder rolling through the sidewalks and the stations of the bland, neglectful city. No one remembers the truly windy days. Windy days are the days we soon forget. The average man remembers rain and sun and hail and snow. But the constitutional peculiars of the old Bobs - and the thing that kept his heart afloat the live-long years, they say - was that the windy days he recalled but the still days passed him by like a careless rapture. Glory, glory, the human weather vane. “The answer,” he said, with gravity, “is blowin’ in them winds...”

“But what’s the question, Mr Bobs?” wondered Suzie. 

He didn’t answer.

The barometer started falling in the late autumn of the night. Howard Kenlink, who had once played bass as back-up for the Grateful Dead, came tripping in most inoppurtunely, thinking he was late, and ruined a classic moment. No one said anything. Not even the Lady Caroline.  In the final end, Angelina broke out into a timeless ballad. I picked up the tambourine and gave it a quick rattle. We did a rendition of Bashful Newman’s Whatever Happened to the Light as the nurse rushed in and displayed her professional style of panic.

Mr Bobs was dead and his bleak face was grateful at last, like Uncle David what wrote those psalms by midnight streams but strolled out into one too many mornings. In the very last moments I mentioned that he’d soon come to the gates of Eden. He looked up at me disapproving and said - these were his final words, returning to the Spanish theme - “Is there any truth in that, señor?”