A Freewheelin' Time (9 page)

Those are just the people I remember, but I know there were more. It was a pajama party, only everyone slept in their clothes. I would stay with Bobby as long as I dared, then I would go upstairs to my lair at the penthouse, making sure I made enough noise walking through the place to the bathroom so my mother would know that I had arrived and that everything was as it should be.

It was at this sublet on Sheridan Square, with Bobby staying at Micki’s a few floors below, that he and my mother got to know each other, so to speak. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She, and my sister likewise, judged harshly. They had high standards. I might have felt inadequate around them, but Bob was under no obligation to play by their rules.

T
here were rumors and mumblings that the surname Dylan was not his last name, but as I said, stuff like that was no big deal. My mother had a hunch right off the bat that the tales he told about himself, not to mention his name, were bogus. When Bob needed a cabaret card to play his first gig at Gerde’s in 1961, Mike Porco helped him get one and he claimed Dylan as his stage name. A cabaret card was a license issued by the police department to entertainers so they could work in places that served alcohol. Performers who had arrest records for drugs or anything else had their cards revoked or were not issued them in the first place. Many were deprived of their livelihood for years, including the great jazz musician Thelonious Monk, legendary singer Billie Holiday, and Lord Buckley, a performance artist before the category was invented. The cabaret card was finally done away with in the mid-1960s. Rumors that Zimmerman was Bob Dylan’s real last name surfaced around that time.

I guess I thought he would say something sooner or later. I didn’t give it much thought at the beginning of our relationship. But as we got closer, and I moved in with him, things like that took on more significance.

My father chose the name Susan for me when I was born. He wanted something American since my mother had chosen an Italian name, Carla Maria, for my older sister, named after Karl Marx, no less.

Susan was a very common name for girls born in the 1940s. I used Sue for a time, but I preferred Susie. Having been given a name that lent itself to diminutives and varied spellings, I took the task seriously and went on a quest to find just the right version that would define me or at least distinguish me from the pack of Susans, Susies, and Sues I already knew and was bound to meet throughout my life. My school notebooks were full of variations on the spelling of Soozie. I certainly had been called Suze (Sooze) innumerable times but for some reason had never thought of it as a possibility.

One day in the early 1960s when leafing through an art book about Picasso, I came across a reproduction of his collage
Glass and Bottle of Suze.
Eureka. Suze was the name of a French liqueur. In addition I could pronounce it with two syllables or one, like the name Bette. Perfect. When I was in France a few years later I drank the liqueur and it wasn’t half bad. Suze has a golden yellow color, not too sweet, with a faint citron flavor.

Whether Bob’s motivation for name change was the same as mine or not, he went for the big time and kept the highly common first name of Robert (Bob, Bobby) and changed his last name instead. Now that was innovative.

I found out for sure that his name was Robert Allen Zimmerman when I saw his draft card. In spite of myself I was upset that he hadn’t ever said anything about it.

Bobby had moved to West Fourth Street and I was staying there off and on before officially moving in. We came back to the apartment after a long night out and he was really drunk. When he clumsily removed his wallet from his pocket its contents fell on the floor and that is when I saw his name. We had been laughing, but when I picked up his draft card, my mood changed.

So Zimmerman is your real name after all? Yes? Well, why didn’t you tell me?

The discovery of his birth name didn’t have to be anything astounding or earth-shattering. I didn’t mind his keeping secrets from others. I was accustomed to that, having grown up in the McCarthy era, when it was necessary to be wary of prying outsiders. But it was suddenly upsetting that he hadn’t been open with me. I was hurt.

He was more forthcoming after that and he also learned how well I could keep secrets. Slowly the hurt wore off, but I couldn’t shake feelings of doubt about him. I asked him never to lie to me. When I was in Italy the following summer, he sent letters telling me about himself with honesty and clarity that were unexpected after so much time together.

I called him Raz now and then, taken from his initials, just because I knew it annoyed him. After we saw the film
To Kill a Mockingbird,
I would call him Boo Radley, after the odd outsider character played by Robert Duvall. That one made him laugh, though.

Precious Time

I left the job
at CORE because I was finding more paid work in the theater building sets and making props. A day job meant having to be alert during the day and since I was spending more time with Bob at night, wandering about listening to music, playing poker at the Van Ronks’, going to parties, or just walking the streets with him until the sun came up, that was difficult.

The jail known as the Women’s House of Detention sat on the triangle of land bordered by Sixth Avenue, Ninth Street, and Greenwich Avenue and was very much a part of the local Village scene. The building was a big, hulking edifice that dwarfed the delicacy of the Jefferson Market Courthouse next to it—today a public library.

The House of Detention windows faced Sixth Avenue and Greenwich Avenue. It had a fenced-in exercise yard on the roof from which the inmates would holler out taunts to passersby on the streets below. The jailed women’s lovers, pimps, friends, and families, would line up in front of the shops along Greenwich Avenue and bellow up to them at all hours of the day and night. Anyone living in the neighborhood with a window open to catch an elusive breeze on summer nights never got much sleep.

Over on Bleecker and Thompson, which was still predominantly an Italian area, there was a store that sold live chickens in cages piled one on top of the other. It was a clean place, and the chickens were humanely kept in reasonably sized cages, with adequate space between them. I remember my grandfather Pop Rossi, whose chickens I cared for on his farm in Connecticut, telling me that chickens need to be kept clean and separated; otherwise they peck at one another viciously. They need adequate space or they become diseased. Even though I lived in the city, far from any farms, the information I learned from my grandfather about gardening and farming always stayed with me. I’d milked cows and taken care of chickens. I knew where meat and vegetables came from.

Pop Rossi made wine and grew beautiful juicy tomatoes that we would bite into like we did the apples on the tree out near the cow pasture. We ate homemade tortellini and pasta of all kinds, as well as risotto (but never polenta). My grandmother Cesarina baked bread in the wood-fired stove with the metal rings that she cooked on before they bought a modern gas stove. She made the butter she spread on the toast for breakfast in the morning and she gave us a little taste of coffee poured into a cup of milk fresh from the cows.

One summer morning I woke very early and looked out the bedroom window to see Pop holding a chicken down on a big tree stump with one hand. The chicken was making a hell of a noise. With his other hand, Pop raised an axe and thwacked the chicken. Its head went one way and its body the other, and with blood spurting from its neck it danced around the yard. The sight transfixed me. I was horrified to realize that the chickens I cared for so lovingly were the very same ones we ate for dinner in the evening. My poor grandmother, who was caring for me for an extended period, could not convince me to eat chicken or the broth with tortellini the rest of the time I was there.

The chicken coops on Thompson Street in the Village were well maintained. The chickens were healthy but not destined to live long, obviously. The customer picked out the chicken and it was taken in the back, where it was quietly and covertly killed, defeathered by scalding in hot water, and then butchered as the customer desired.

When Bob and I stayed up all night, which was not unusual for us, if we were in the vicinity of the south Village on our path toward home, we heard the roosters crowing at the break of dawn. We would wander up Bleecker Street across Sixth Avenue to Zito’s Bakery. Zito’s had a coal-fired brick oven in the basement and the night bakers readily handed out hot fresh bread to night Village wanderers on their way home. For us it was an inevitable pass-by. From Zito’s we made a right from Bleecker onto Jones Street, practically perpendicular to the apartment on West Fourth. The bread was so good. We went upstairs and made coffee and stayed up some more or, completely exhausted, fell fast asleep, saving the bread for when we woke up, whatever time of day that was. I worked as a waitress in between theater jobs or just lived off my earnings for a stretch. Sometimes I was even eligible for unemployment insurance, if a job lasted long enough. Rents, food, and entertainment were not expensive back then. We were young and could live on very little. I bought my clothes at thrift shops or else made them. Books and records were for sale in the many secondhand shops around Manhattan. Usually someone you knew was working at some club or theater and you could get in free.

There were also many generous people who had food ready to feed hungry musicians and friends. Dave Van Ronk and Terri Thal were great cooks, as was Lillian Bailey, who with her husband, Mell, got to know Bob at Gerde’s when he first arrived in the city. They always had something on the stove that was enough to feed whoever dropped by. We spent time with the MacKenzie family, Eve and Mac, and their teenage son. Bob was close to them and he was sleeping on their couch when I first met him. The door to their book-filled loft on West Twenty-eighth Street was always open to him and he stayed there off and on until he got his own place on West Fourth Street.

I’m not sure where I first encountered Dave Van Ronk. It might have been at the Gaslight or Gerde’s or the bar the Kettle of Fish. On evenings when the weather was good and the music wasn’t, a group of us would sit outside on the loading dock around the corner from the entrance to Gerde’s talking, playing music, having a cigarette. At a certain point we’d walk over to the Gaslight or the Kettle of Fish to find Dave and Terri, and whoever else was around and up for roaming.

After wandering from club to coffeehouse we’d eventually head down to Chinatown for a meal at Sam Wo’s, then end up at Dave and Terri’s apartment on Waverly Place for an all-night poker game.

Dave would put a stack of LPs on the turntable, and under the thick cloud of smoke and whatever it was we were drinking, we’d knot our brows over heavy bets made in nickels and dimes.

It is hard to remember precisely who was playing poker on those nights because at the Van Ronks’ apartment the door was always open. Besides Bobby and me, other rotating regulars included folksingers Pat Sky and Tom Paxton, with his soon-to-be wife, Midge, and Barry Kornfeld, who played a mean guitar—both the six-and twelve-string—and was a diverting storyteller. Barry would regale us with tales of his days escorting the blind bluesman Reverend Gary Davis from gig to gig. Gary Davis was a man with a commanding personality and voice, singing or talking. He would be in a room with a group of people and in the middle of a song or a conversation he’d suddenly stop dead and say: I smell a woman! A woman just walked in. Bring her to me.

At twenty-five, Van Ronk was well known and respected in the downtown music scene. He had been living in Greenwich Village and performing since the mid 1950s. Before he made a name for himself singing blues and folk music, he had played with Dixieland jazz bands.

Those were formative years for most of us, and Dave did a lot of the forming and teaching. It was amazing how much that man knew and how quick his wit.

Because I was younger than most of the people I was hanging out with, he kind of kept an eye on me. On the other hand Terri was responsible for an entirely different form of higher education. She was freewheeling, straight-talking, and like Dave, very political. When I first met them they lived on West Fifteenth Street, but not long after they moved to Waverly Place. The Van Ronk apartment at 190 Waverly quickly became the living room of the new generation of bohemians.

Bob Dylan brought me to their West Fifteenth Street place not long after we’d met at Riverside Church. He was intent on having me get to know the people he had become close to since coming to the city that winter, telling me how great they were, and how much he wanted me to meet them. When we’d arrive at the apartment, the café, the bar, the club, he’d bring me to that person, point to me and say, Hey, this is Suze. Remember when I was telling you about her?

It was a hot summer day when we went to Fifteenth Street and trudged up the stairs to their apartment on the top floor. Dave greeted us at the door. After a few minutes Terri walked out from the kitchen wearing only a bra and panties. Her underwear was white cotton—nothing lacy, frilly, or sexy about it, but that didn’t make a bit of difference. At six feet tall, with the looks of a slightly off beat and eccentric model, she made quite an impression. Her hair was dark brown, like her eyes, and she wore it very short, accentuating her long neck. She had a low voice and spoke in a heavy New York accent with the vocabulary of a sailor. I was in awe of her ways.

Terri managed Dave and a few other folksingers. To be a manager in the early days of folk music wasn’t much of a profession. Folk music venues were small and informal places that didn’t pay; performers passed around a basket for tips—hence the term
basket houses.

Terri helped struggling folkies get gigs at the few clubs or coffeehouses that paid musicians. She was certainly more capable than they were at taking care of business. Both Dave and Terri seemed quite upstanding, despite their bohemian way of life. They were married, after all, and had a real apartment with real furniture in it.

There were not many females hanging out in their flat. It was mainly guys, musicians or politicos or both, who came and went, casually taking in Terri in her white underwear as she offered them things to eat or drink and then sat down on the couch to join the conversation.

Terri Thal and Dave Van Ronk, 1963

No one said a word about her clothes or lack of them, taking the cue from Dave, who obviously felt her attire was perfectly acceptable considering how hot the apartment was in summer.

When Dave found out that my parents had been Communists, he felt it was his duty, as a Trotskyite, to work on my politics. It did no good to tell him it wasn’t my battle. He would expound on the merits of the anarchists and Marxism as interpreted by Trotsky, but he had absolutely no love for Stalin and the American Communist Party.

Not being up on the details and the finer points of his discourse, I’d nod and say I had no problem with that, but he looked skeptical. Even in the last conversation I had with him, just days before he died in 2002, among other things he said to me was, I’ll see you soon, and I’ll straighten out your politics.

D
ave was not like others around the Village, both musicians and friends, who resented the attention focused on Bob—that was not his style. The only serious bad time and bad feeling that ever developed between Bob and Dave was over “House of the Rising Sun,” a blues song out of New Orleans. It was a woman’s lament but men tended to sing it. When Dave sang it, he gave the song such desolation and sorrow that no one else around the Village clubs sang it anymore. It was Dave’s song. He owned it. His unique raspy, bluesy voice and the arrangement he created for the song added to its effectiveness. When Bob was recording songs for his first album on Columbia Records, he included “House of the Rising Sun,” in Dave’s version.

When Dave asked how the sessions were going at Columbia, Bob told him they were going fine. Then Dave told him about his plans for his own upcoming recording session.

I’m finally recording “House,” he said.

Oops, said Bob, and confessed to Dave that he had just recorded it.

That did not go over well. Bob had done a traitorous thing, breaking the code of honor among thieves. He went to the session and sang the songs he knew, had recently learned, and just loved to sing. He insisted he did it all without thinking. He hadn’t realized the error. Now he sorely did, but there was nothing to be done. The record had gone to press.

We were close with Dave and Terri by then. We hung out a lot together. Terri and I were intent on fixing the friendship because we knew it was important to both of them. We worked at it, going back and forth between them. It was a serious affront on Bob’s part and Dave was angry for a long time.

Bobby felt really bad. The situation made him very nervous. Whether he was standing or sitting, his knees were bouncing, pumping the air as if he wanted to take off. He was not talking much, his brow was furrowed, and he was chain-smoking. He knew he’d crossed a line.

Eventually Terri and I prevailed and the rift was resolved via booze and food and poker games where Bobby lost often, as penance. Dave, however, had a bead on the new kid.

Once Bob’s album came out, Dave stopped singing the song. He never recorded it. Personally, I think that is a loss. Bob’s version on his first LP isn’t bad at all, but all things considered, it’s a copy of a lost original.