A Freewheelin' Time (8 page)

In addition to being a musician, Jack was a great storyteller, and he was in good form that day, regaling us with tales of his wanderings all over the United States and Europe. It was a very warm summer day, and we’d dressed accordingly. I was wearing a simple shift dress with thigh-high slits I’d recently made. Jack looked around and declared that his ambition after death was to come back as a sidewalk so women could walk all over him. Better than being walked all over by women in the manner he suffered in his life now, he said.

Whenever I looked around, Bobby was nearby. I thought he was oddly old-time looking, charming in a scraggly way. His jeans were as rumpled as his shirt and even in the hot weather he had on the black corduroy cap he always wore. He made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly.

Though I’d seen Bob play at Gerde’s in a duo with Mark Spoelstra, I was more aware of him when he was playing backup harp for other performers. I’d noticed him more then but didn’t much think about it.

We started flirting and talking backstage at Riverside Church early in the day and didn’t stop until the day was done. He was funny, engaging, intense, and he was persistent. These words completely describe who he was throughout the time we were together; only the order of the words would shift depending on mood or circumstance. If I drew a portrait of him, it would consist of words morphing into different shapes and sizes. He was not linear; he was quirky and jumpy, receptive to what was around him. As inexperienced as I was in the ways of love, I felt a strong attraction to this character. It was as if we knew each other already; we just needed time to get better acquainted. And so we did over the next four years.

After the marathon concert was over and the musicians were packing up their gear, tired but never too tired to party, word went out quickly that there was a gathering not too far from Riverside Church at the apartment of one of the folksingers and that is where everyone headed.

By then, Bob and I were pretty much glued to each other. When we needed a lift, it was for us as a couple, plus his guitar. Our private little world was taking shape.

As for the folk music radio station at Riverside Church, I don’t know what became of it. Oscar Brand and Cynthia Gooding hosted the only two radio shows for the growing folk music scene in New York City. An appearance on these shows was a must for any ambitious folksinger. In a very short time, Bob Dylan got on both.

Pete Karman’s report on the Riverside folk concert

In
the
Name
of Love

After Bobby and I
met at Riverside Church in July and slowly started getting to know each other, I was hesitant and avoided giving him a definite answer about where and when we would next meet. But that didn’t last long. Initially we’d find each other in the evening at Gerde’s or one of the other clubs and gathering places around the Village. When I wasn’t working, we would spend afternoons together wandering here and there, engrossed in conversation.

At the Museum of Modern Art, I took him to see Picasso’s
Guernica
and other much-loved paintings; then we’d sit outside in the sculpture garden and talk some more. Poetry, philosophy, art, and the horrors and injustices in the world—very earnest we were. He was also very funny and we made each other laugh. I felt good around him and I liked him sticking close by me or watching me from across a room. But I also liked that he could go inside himself so thoroughly and so completely that there was nothing else around but the music he was hearing in his head or the thoughts crossing his mind. He just disappeared for a spell. I admired his ability, his confidence, to do whatever he needed to do whenever he felt the need to do it.

He would withdraw anywhere at any time. It could happen in a noisy room full of people or when it was just the two of us alone together. I would observe him mentally go away and then come back. He didn’t have to be present all the time. There was something so true about that that I did not feel excluded.

We discovered how much we had in common, including a mutual need for a comfortable place away from the chaos of life. We found in each other a kind of safe haven. Yet trouble between us slowly grew out of his facility for not telling the truth. The fact that he was evasive and secretive with me eventually created a rift. We were so very close, yet I felt insecure in not being able to trust him completely. He was vague about where he came from but open about anything that intrigued him. He was out and about collecting experiences, soaking up life right now in the present. Nobody was that bothered by or interested in where anyone came from, unless it was the topic at hand. Bobby wove tales and embellished on the truth, telling good stories, moving them along entertainingly. This was not untypical of anyone in that bohemian atmosphere and at the age we were, except that some of the tales he wove were out of sync with a previously woven one.

The sad story he told of being abandoned at a young age in New Mexico and then going to live with a traveling circus didn’t jibe with his stories of growing up in Duluth. It became a running joke in a way—what would be the next version? There were suspicions about that Welsh last name, but nobody really gave a shit. At the end of the day, a good story was a good story. For Bob, where he came from held no sway on the young man he was becoming.

But as he became more known around the Village and beyond, interviewers and industry types asked questions and expected honest and coherent answers. He was on guard. His paranoia was palpable. It was as if he expected someone to show up and blow his cover and expose him. When we lived together, he didn’t want people to just drop by unless he invited them himself.

When we met he was staying at different places and sleeping on couches. I was still house-sitting on Waverly Place, but that would end soon. We were both nomads with no fixed address. After he got a rave review in the
New York Times
in September, things changed for him. He got more paying work, for starters. And then Columbia Records signed him, delivering the first heady whiffs of fame. At last some decent money was in the offing, and he began looking for an apartment of his own. He went to see a few and then he called me to come check out a place he’d found on West Fourth Street.

161 West Fourth Street was a small four-story building just west of Sixth Avenue. The Door Store, a place that sold affordable unfinished furniture, occupied the ground floor, and O’Henry’s, a relatively expensive Village restaurant with Tiffany lamps, oak tables and chairs, and sawdust artfully strewn around the floor, was down the street on the corner. Allan Block’s sandal shop, the absolute best place for handmade leather sandals anywhere, and the Music Inn, an impossibly cluttered store that sold every kind of musical instrument ever made in the entire world, were just up the street. Allan Block played the fiddle, and folk musicians hung out at his store to jam the way they did at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center a few blocks away on MacDougal Street. If one of them didn’t have an instrument with him, he could always borrow something to strum or bang on at the Music Inn right next door. Directly across the street was a local eatery called the Bagel where the cook worked in the window grilling hamburgers over a roaring flame. The burgers were charred on the outside, rare in the center, and served on crusty bread. There was a narrow counter with just a few stools and maybe two tiny tables on the opposite side. The place was small, dark, and dingy, but the food was good and the cook friendly. We went there often.

The apartment was a walk-up on the top floor of the building. The woman Bob rented it from was asking a nominal fee for the furnishings, and since it wasn’t very big she didn’t have much in it other than a bed, an armchair, and some crudely built shelves. The minuscule kitchen was against one wall with a bamboo curtain on a track in the ceiling that pulled across to hide it. She was leaving a few plates, glasses, and a pot or two. He paid her.

There was a tiny bedroom behind the main room and one closet that was to the left of the entrance door, which faced the bathroom. The floor was hardwood, but it was painted with a gray deck paint often used by landlords and tenants alike in old buildings to make the worn floors look better. The place was cozy and full of daylight, hot in summer and cold in winter. It faced the back of the building and overlooked an unkempt garden behind the pizza place in the adjacent building. A constant smell of overcooked tomato sauce wafted up through the windows. Because the bed took up the whole room, Bob would move it into the main room and put the couch—just a foam cushion on a wood platform with throw pillows that someone had given him—into the bedroom.

After a while he bought a secondhand black-and-white TV that was encased in a wood cabinet, a record player, and a radio from a guy named Francis who had an electronics shop on the corner of Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue South. The TV never worked very well, so Bob took it out of the cabinet and used the wood to build a decent coffee table and better shelves.

Francis was a neighborhood fixture, an electrician who could fix anything. His shop was in the basement of an apartment building and he spent time sitting out on the stoop working on something while watching the street. Whatever inventory he had—a radio, a TV, a turntable, a clock, a coffeemaker, you name it—it plugged in. Nothing had a battery, let alone a rechargeable battery, which probably didn’t exist back then. And most of his inventory was secondhand, stuff he had repaired. He stockpiled anything that was hopelessly broken and scavenged it for parts. I don’t think he had anything brand-new, and if he did have something it probably fell off a truck. The place was like a minigarage, with most of his stock on the floor or on rickety shelves. He had a huge pile of rabbit ear TV antennas off in a corner. If a customer came in complaining that a TV purchased from him didn’t work, Francis would untangle an antenna from the pile and say, Take this and see if it doesn’t solve the problem.

Once when Bob came back from a trip he brought me a battery-run portable clock radio not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It was a new product and at the time an unusual one. When the clock stopped working, I took it to Francis and he marveled at it. He sent me to a hardware store for a battery. There the clerks passed it around, puzzling over it. One of them put in a new battery, but it must have been the wrong voltage because now the radio didn’t work, either. I think I ended up giving it to Francis.

B
ob and I had been talking about living together when he found an apartment of his own, but I could not officially move in with him until after my eighteenth birthday in November. There had been many discussions and much speculation about my moving in. Terri Thal and Dave Van Ronk were the oracles. I was underage and Bob was not; therefore he could be charged with something or other with a minor, they said gravely. But he wasn’t twenty-one yet. We were both minors in that case and I would have to wait until I was twenty-one for us to be able to live together—eons away. Marriage was way too serious an option, not to be trifled with at our age. Once it was established that at eighteen I would be safely legal, all was well, and within a month or so I would be able to move in. To be on the safe side, Terri suggested, I should wait one day past my birthday.

My mother and her soon-to-be husband Fred, a humanities professor, had sublet a penthouse apartment in the Village, at 1 Sheridan Square. Fred had been in the navy and he must have looked good in the uniform, with his clear blue eyes and refined Anglo-Saxon demeanor. My mother’s brother Al had introduced her to Fred, the father of the woman for whom he’d left his wife. Al thought it would be good for my mother, a widow, to meet him since he was also adjusting to life after a recent divorce. Or maybe Al just wanted the new woman in his life to meet someone from his family. In any case, the matchup worked out. Fred got on well with my mother. They began spending time together. He was very gentlemanly: he lit her cigarette, helped her with her coat, and held her chair when she sat down. He took her to the theater and to nice restaurants. She was not in the habit of being treated that way. It did her good.

She was secretive, however, about seeing Fred socially. Somehow it had an aura of incest, since he was the father of her brother’s soon-to-be wife. My mother was reluctant to talk about the four of them socializing. There was also the problem of her relationship with Val. Even though my mother had been aware of Al’s womanizing over the years, they had always been close. It was awkward for everyone involved.

Fred’s divorce was still pending, so they couldn’t get married until it came through. Fred did not want to “live in sin” at his home at the university where he was teaching. It wouldn’t be proper, so they “lived in sin” in the penthouse sublet until his divorce was final. My sister and I had great fun with the hypocrisy of that one. We couldn’t believe our mother, who had brought us up to reject bourgeois morality, was now going to marry it.

In those archaic times, couples living together without being married really were considered to be living in sin. If they had a child out of wedlock, the child was considered a bastard. If a single young woman got pregnant, it was a serious issue. Either the couple was forced to marry or the young woman was sent away somewhere until the baby was born and the infant was put up for adoption. To be a single mother was rough going, to say the least. Abortion was illegal and a highly risky choice. Women died. To choose to live in Greenwich Village meant more than just freedom to be an artist and run wild. Couples living in sin could rent an apartment, interracial couples had an easier time of it, and homosexuals, albeit still called fags and dykes, were pretty much let alone. The social upheavals of the 1960s, followed by the women’s and gay pride movements, made dents in those other problems in the society at large. And after a long struggle the right to a safe and legal abortion became law.

T
he apartment on Sheridan Square that my mother and Fred sublet wasn’t what I expected a penthouse to look like. In fact it was rather small, but it did have a terrace. The building was eight stories tall and the so-called penthouse was an apartment on the top floor. The terrace had a very high wall that pretty much blocked the view of the streets below, but there was sky to ponder. The place had one bedroom, a small kitchen, and a good-size dining room–living room. As part of the deal it offered another bedroom, without a bathroom but with its own entrance, on the same floor. My mother twisted my seventeen-year-old arm and persuaded me to live in that little room. Since I had to leave Waverly Place at the end of the month and I was still underage, I really didn’t have a choice. I stayed there for the duration of their sublease and then the Ehrenbergs took me in again for a short stay past my eighteenth birthday. When I moved in with Bobby at the end of 1961 the fiction for Fred, at my mother’s request, was that I had rented an apartment with my friend Janet. In the interim, since there was a separate entrance, Bobby and I could steal some time to engage in activities without the sanctity of marriage.

During that time Bob stayed off and on with Micki Isaacson, who had a one-bedroom apartment on a lower floor of 1 Sheridan Square. I didn’t know much about Micki other than that she was always upbeat and welcoming—a Doris Day type. I don’t remember if she had a job; she might have had a trust fund. It was as if Micki were running a hostel for folksingers—she became a kind of den mother. It seemed everyone was sleeping on her floor at some time or other, and it didn’t bother her that if she had a party the guests never left. There were nights when Peter Yarrow, Jack Elliott, Jean Redpath, and Bobby were all camped out on her floor.