A Freewheelin' Time (23 page)

It was a good party, and the week of carrying on ended with a New Year’s Eve party at the Van Ronks’. It had been a complicated year, thick with ups and downs, sad and horrific events, upheavals and changes both very good and very bad. Anticipation was in the air for the New Year.

Not Dark Yet

Geno Foreman came
from a distinguished family. Though he was the son of Clark Foreman, the director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the group that had given Bob the Tom Paine Award, Geno didn’t seem to be from any family. It was as if he just flowed loose in the world with an extraterrestrial energy. He was about six feet tall, with very dark, thick hair and a full beard, and he was missing some front teeth. His dark, fiery eyes darted about as fast as his words when he spoke.

In the summer of 1964 we both went to Cuba as part of another group of Americans testing the travel ban. Geno looked like one of the Cuban revolutionaries, Camille Cienfuegos, who had been killed while fighting in the mountains with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Cienfuegos’s image was on the walls of buildings all over Cuba. Cubans did a double take when they saw Geno walking around with the other Americans.

Geno also managed to speak Spanish like a Cuban within a few days of his arrival. In Italy some years later, when I spoke to him for the last time, he had morphed into an Italian and spoke the language as if he were born speaking it. He was beyond cool and beyond hip—he was an uncontainable force. He knew everyone, was everywhere at once, and was anyone he chose to be.

The Avenue B flat where I had been living since leaving West Fourth Street was always full of people at odd times, especially when Bob was staying there. He had just come back to New York from California, and wherever he went, his expanding entourage would eventually follow. They all were there the day Geno appeared and bellowed (Geno always bellowed), Hey, Bobby, hey, man, heard about you and Joanie in California being, y’know, together, man. Look, man, she paid for these!

He pointed to his new teeth.

Bob was up like a shot, grabbing Geno and walking him to the other end of the apartment. Even though there was a lot going on around the place there was a sudden shift in mood. Albert Maher, who was an unofficial bodyguard and buddy when Bob was in New York City, came over to sit next to me and started talking in that low, sweet way he had.

I don’t remember when I saw Geno again—later that day or weeks afterward—but he had no sense of a gaffe or an offense because Geno wouldn’t intentionally hurt a fly. He just said what passed through him. Geno. Man. Geno was beautiful, brilliant, and irrepressible. He was the mad prince in the kingdom of the mad ones. He married and fathered a child and died in a freak accident in England some five years later.

CODICIL

Sadness so overwhelming it takes the breath away. Numbness affects the ability to move the body, and brain fog hampers vision. The slightest thing can bring on a bout of crying. Constricted throat, burning insides, dull aches. Nothing matters but what went wrong or what can go wrong now that something is beginning to feel wrong. There is a desperate attempt to stifle all doubt. Common sense is a wicked, hideous, backbiting enemy in cahoots with instinct to beat the daylights out of white-hot sentiment. No contest. Everything is obliterated.

BREAKING FAME

He saw right from his side and I saw right from mine, and we wore each other down for it. We talked a lot but told little. We both had overly sensitive personalities with nerve endings exposed. Outside of us were other pressures: He’s no good, she’s not right. Time to move on but unable to let go.

All those people, the constant crowding—I had the sensation of being in a herd of cattle and being prodded to move, move along with the hustling herd down a crowded road. Pushing, shoving, turning in place, prodding—turn, move, shoving, loud mooing. Go on go on come on come on come this way go that way. We called out over their heads, but the din was constant, and the dust churning up from the road made it hard to see. Soon I saw what looked like a way out far off to the side. I made for it. My fear subsided somewhat. The still and blank quiet of an unknown road. Moo.

That is how it was. Quite a herd goes with fame.

B
ack in the dark days, during the middle decades of the twentieth century, the personal pronoun used by the media was the masculine one. The titles for most professions ended in “man” unless there was a male and female version: spokesman, newsman, weatherman, steward, or stewardess. There were no spokespersons, firefighters, or flight attendants. The pronoun “he” was used when referring in general to doctors, lawyers, writers, poets, etc. A married woman lost both first and last names and became Mrs. John’s Wife, whether she chose to or not.

Most girls took on the life of their boyfriends unquestioningly and made their own lives within those boundaries. Instinctually I chafed at that but did my best until I couldn’t breathe. The folk music world was hermetic. It was centered on musicians and their work, the songs they were writing, their ambitions and their camaraderie. It was primarily a boy’s club. Girls knew their place if they were girlfriends. Even if they were folksingers working their way up just like the guys, their position was not quite the same. That was my take on it.

B
ob was my first significant relationship. I was seventeen when we met and, despite having had to grow up very quickly, I still had more growing up to do. Bob was just twenty, and precocious as he was he still had much to learn about life. During our time together things became very complicated because so much happened to him so fast. We had a good time, but also a hard time, as a young couple in love.

Bob was charismatic; he was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself. I loved him, but I was not able to abdicate my life totally for the music world he lived within.

I believed the intention behind his good words to me, but more and more his deeds spoke otherwise. In private he was one thing and in public another. Together we had created a private world, a private way of being that he protected. No intruders: West Fourth Street was his castle, and he held the key. He handpicked those allowed to enter. I could accept that; I was a child of my times, after all, but only up to a point.

As his fame grew, I came to understand the absolute necessity for that privacy. The paranoia and secrecy that were part of his personality early on were essential for his survival later on. He was becoming prey. Either people wanted to devour him or they offered themselves up for him to consume.

With this new recognition and expanded fame came adoration. Heady stuff. It gave him power, but it put him in an awkward position. People wanted to be his friend at all costs. Everyone craved his presence, his wisdom, and his judgment. After
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
had been out awhile, at parties I noticed that people would approach him with reverence and tell him involved stories about their lives and then wait for him to speak. They wanted him to suggest solutions for them, to enlighten them in some way.

It made him uneasy. He wanted to make music, not address a congregation. And it made me uneasy because, being close to their object of desire, I was someone they either wanted to befriend or be rid of.

As time went by, those of us who were close to Bob were subjected to trickle-down fame. We would close ranks protectively around ourselves and around him. Some people who knew Bobby only slightly would trade off his growing notoriety. Many resented him and pretended nothing unusual had happened, since recognizing any change would force them to acknowledge loss of the control or power they thought they had over him. Old friends wanted to hold him to where he was before all this clamorous attention—to keep him grounded. They acknowledged his fame but did not defer to it. They held him to himself, yet they let him expand. That was good.

I watched, learning how fame altered his life. He was given permission to do or say whatever he wanted. Restrictions were a thing of the past—of prefame time. The hard part now was to recognize the borders and boundaries that did exist, but which were very different from the limitations of the recent past.

Suddenly Bob had advisers and
consiglieri
in his corner, smiling and shuffling about, proffering “shoulds” and “why don’t yous” by the briefcase full. Media people begged for his attention. I would shy away and try to avoid them, but Bob would search me out and pull me near him. He sensed my mood and wanted to reassure me that we were together, that I was important to him.

I attempted to carry on with my life and do whatever work I was doing, and I never talked about Bob except with close friends. But I became more and more reticent even with them and adopted Bob’s paranoia. I had a hard time trusting anyone. People crowded around wanting to be my new best friend or claiming to be my oldest best friend, and couldn’t we all go hang out with Dylan?

I couldn’t handle being “one step closer to God.” I was being pecked at because of my proximity to the end of the rainbow. Expected to focus entirely on his needs, I was invisible—downgraded from chick and guitar string, no less. Where was I in all this? I felt lost, confused, and betrayed. We both needed protection from the outside world, but in the end I needed it more. Bob intuited what was happening to me and tried to prevent it, but I was not receptive to his concern.

I no longer knew who I could trust, including or perhaps especially my mother and my sister, as well as Bob. The feeling was devastating and eventually resulted in a crack-up. I wanted to get away from all of it and recapture the self I’d found in Italy the year before—to claim my pronoun.

One afternoon I was in a café with a friend and he mentioned someone who had said something complimentary about me. I laughed and told him that people were nice to me only to get close to Dylan.

He looked at me and said, Don’t you think someone might genuinely like you because you are you?

I doubt that very much, I replied.

B
ob had an aura of darkness and intensity that enveloped me when I was near him. I couldn’t stay in that cold, dark air. It frightened me because I was scared of my own dark.

When I left West Fourth Street, I’d taken my vulnerable sanity with me to Avenue B in the East Village. But Bobby was always there unless he was out of town, and when he was out of town he would telephone. It was like an addiction—he needed to know I would be there for him and I would be, in spite of my attempts to do otherwise.

W
e were walking together silently along East Seventh Street one night, heading toward the apartment on Avenue B. He was inside himself. I felt uneasy, trapped; I thought I would suffocate. I looked at him and said I had to go. I felt my life was at stake. With a resigned sadness, he gestured toward me with his hand. It wasn’t an offer to take it. I saw it as an acceptance of the inevitable, and I echoed the gesture. It was a sacrificial move so we could both move on and live as we needed to. I turned and walked away without looking back.

I believe in his genius, he is an extraordinary writer but I don’t think of him as an honorable person. He doesn’t necessarily do the right thing. But where is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world? (notebook entry, 1964)

BALLAD

For a long time my mother had made it clear she didn’t think much of Bobby. By the time
Freewheelin’
came out, she and Fred had long since moved to New Jersey. It was easier all around to avoid contact. I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob’s album. I was astounded.

True, the times they were troubled. Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent. Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events. Bob Dylan was labeled a “protest singer.” But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man’s losing a security clearance because I was on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless. And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general.

M
y mother had objected to Bob from the moment she laid eyes on him back in 1961, but the animosity between my sister and Bob developed over time. Both my mother and Carla were running interference on our relationship, and he couldn’t help resenting that. I couldn’t handle the constant pressure.

The way I saw it, Bobby and Carla had some kind of rivalry for controlling interest in me. She was intent on opening my eyes to his manipulative ways. In the beginning, she championed him wholeheartedly, happy to have him be her pupil, listen to her records, sleep on her couch. But Carla needed to be in charge—be the authority. That was the defensive stance she acquired growing up with our mother. Carla felt that others had to measure up to her standards, and Bob no longer measured up.

He saw how she tried to insert herself, and assert her importance, in people’s lives. I knew that was true, but family ties bind and blind, and my sister and I had only had each other to count on during some rough years.

Bob and Carla argued and fought, slinging words back and forth. She had many grievances. He had truths to tell. When he wasn’t around, the harangue continued. I was sick from it.

B
ob wanted me to stay where I was, to be there when he got back from wherever he went without me, and to be with whomever he pleased while he was there. He’d plead with me to marry him, which made no sense to me the way things were; nor did I believe he was sincere. My sister and others pointed to his hypocrisy and his ability to manipulate everyone and everything to his advantage.

Honesty was what I craved, and the more I needed to hear straight words from him, the more he twisted them like ropes to tie me down. I could not live like that.