On the Road with Bob Dylan (21 page)

Tentative Title: THE MILLION DOLLAR BASH
On the Road with Bob Dylan and Friends

The next morning the jarring phone shocks me out of slumber. It’s my wake-up call, Saturday noon, time to throw on some clothes and meet Roger McGuinn for lunch. According to Kemp’s ground rules, it’s OK for me to drive up to their motel and wait in the car for whoever was foolish enough to want to leave their asylum and risk spending some time with a heathen like me. But, I thought to myself, maybe he was right. I sneak a look into the rearview mirror. Not quite natty. I haven’t shaved since the tour began, haven’t found a place to wash my clothes, even missed a shower or two. My vitamin C intake was down but was more than made up for by a surplus of vitamin M—Methedrine.

Lately, I had noticed myself doing strange things, like lecturing the Holiday Inn housekeepers about ethnomethodology as they made up the room, inviting strange secretaries on the street to view my famed collection of sea sponges, and on occasion watching
The Tonight Show
. The signs seem unmistakably the dread effects of Road Fever. I think about Kinky, one of the more tragic victims of this malady. A bright boy, a fine person, a credit to his religion. But after two years of touring with the Texas Jewboys, playing Godforsaken places, Kinky was just the shell of the man he used to be. I remember the last time I had seen him, he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York and we went down to Chinatown about 2
A.M.
Kinky was wearing his satin Menorah shirt, gaudy blue and yellow, and his alligator cowboy boots with steel toeguards. He had a red, white, and blue sport coat, a sequined cowboy hat, and a glittering silver mesh bandanna. And those strange chirping sounds he was making as the waiter brought the menu, the highpitched “Hi, hi, hi.” And then when the beef chow fun finally came and it tasted as if it had been simmering for three weeks just waiting for us to arrive, and when everyone in the place was staring at us, with the same looks usually reserved for out-of-town zoos or female derelicts, a fusion of awe, compassion, and scorn, then Kinky leapt up, grabbed a handful of burnt noodles and hurled them to the floor, narrowly missing a horrified housewife from Forest Hills who
was coming in, and then a strange low guttural sound issued from his lips, a slightly familiar sound, yes, it was unmistakably the sounds I once heard years ago at summer camp in the Catskills, the strange sound of a loud, long resonant belch that was somehow in perfectly comprehensible English, the burpwords drifting up past the startled diners and wafting into the kitchen loud and clear, scattering the three small cooks out into the room. “I DON’T LIKE IT HERE,” Kinky burped, ground his cigar into his white rice, and vaulted up the stairs and out into the street.

I was still shaking my head, mourning Kinky’s fate, when I pull up to the Shelbourne Inn to pick up McGuinn. Roger hops into the Granada and we start pulling out of the driveway but suddenly the car is surrounded. Meyers and Johnson and a few others from the film crew are lolling about, and directly in front of us, Baez and her road manager, Carlos, engage in horseplay.

Baez skips over to the car, and leaps up on the front hood. “It’s Ratso,” she laughs. And, of course, she was right. Meyers wipes the sweat off his brow. “Ratso, huh,” he says, his eyes twinkling. “He is Ratso,” Johnson shouts, leering at me. “Yeah, he is,” Meyers agrees.

“Why do you call me Ratso, because I remind you of Dustin Hoffman?” I ask Baez.

“No,” she leans her head into the car, “because you remind me of Ratso.”

“Ha,” McGuinn chuckles, “it’s Ratso!”

I smile wanly, far too fragile at that point to argue with a rock star. And besides, there was little to argue about. I was Ratso, I realized, rolling with the punches, licking my wounds in auxilliary highway hotels, stuffing my frayed dreams into a tattered suitcase, limping along the highway in search of that warm sun that always follows the Thunder. And why not, if I couldn’t cover the tour in the more prescribed fashion, why not become a sort of spiritual mascot, part fan, part scribe, part pharmacist, part jester? Ratso would be the perfect counterpoint to Kemp’s Broderick Crawford, the victim of the overzealous trespasses of the highway patrol. It was
an ideal role, one which didn’t require a hell of a lot of Method preparation, and one that just might get me to that Miami sun after all. Ratso chuckled to himself at that.

“Where are you guys going?” Meyers peers in.

“I’m going to eat and get McGuinn some heroin,” Ratso jokingly leers.

Baez starts bouncing up and down on the front fender. “Let’s rock his car off,” she shouts impishly. “Yeah,” Carlos and Johnson join in, bouncing up and down until it feels like the inside of a boat. “Go ahead,” McGuinn issues a challenge. “It’s a Hertz, you can do anything you want to it.” He turns to Ratso. “You have full coverage, don’t you?”

They soon tire, and Baez walks over to the driver’s window again. “You’re gonna be lead weight forever, Ratso, unless you clean up that fucking hair,” she warns, as she gingerly fingers a few strands of Ratso’s mane.

“Get out of here,” he slaps at her, then smiles sheepishly. “I gotta get some shaving cream.”

“Wow, I’ll get it for you,” Baez quickly offers.

“Would you?” Ratso laughs.

“Honey,” Baez rolls her eyes, “I would do anything.” She pokes her hand in the car again. “Let me see,” she narrows her eyes, her fingers groping for Ratso’s hair again, “do you wash that?”

“I wash it every fucking day,” Ratso lies indignantly, “I use Ogilvie.”

Baez laughs. “I was wondering what you used, I thought it was toothpaste.”

“Why, you got something better,” Ratso pouts. “It’s thin, that’s all. You gonna make something of my genes?”

“No,” Baez smiles maternally, “you’re a good egg.”

“I know it,” Ratso softens. “Everybody knows it except Kemp. He thinks I’m a schmuck.”

“Just clean up your act, Ratso.” Baez starts off with Carlos.

“OK, Madonna,” Ratso screams after her, as he screeches the Granada out onto the highway.

“Whaddya want, breakfast or lunch? Want eggs?” Ratso asks McGuinn.

“I never eat eggs,” McGuinn yawns, wiping the sleep out of his eyes, “I always eat lunch for breakfast.” Roger moans and holds his stomach. “I got drunk again last night. I gotta watch that. I poured a bottle of vodka down the toilet today and—”

“And you drank it,” Ratso laughs.

“No, I’m not gonna drink no more.” Roger stares out the window. “You know, we were only a quarter of a mile from Alice’s Restaurant but I didn’t go there. I missed the filming too and the bus. It took off exactly on time. I didn’t really want to go to the filming though, if I really wanted to go I would have made it. My attitude about it was I can always be in the film.” McGuinn looks at Ratso for approval. “This thing’s gonna keep shooting and shooting and like I’d rather be in the film by rolling into it as opposed to panting into it. I don’t want to go ‘huhuhuhuhuh,’” McGuinn pants, his tongue dangling down like a St. Bernard’s.

“What do you think of the tour so far?”

“I’m in love with it, man,” McGuinn bubbles like a hippie, “never done anything better in my life.”

“Who you been hanging out with?”

“Everybody,” McGuinn bubbles, “I’ve been hugging everybody and telling them that I love them and I mean it too, it’s not bullshit.”

“I hear the bus drivers are upset,” Ratso interjects.

“They’re cool. Well, they can’t hang out with the musicians, they’re not allowed to fraternize with us or something. That’s too bad, but that’s the way it is. It’s that old thing of don’t fraternize with the help.”

“How does communication work?”

“They give us newsletters every day. I’ve even contributed to them.”

Ratso swings the car into the parking lot of a small country-style restaurant. He and McGuinn enter and move to the back to a small sunlit patio. The hostess instantly comes over, with menus.

“Would you like a drink first,” she asks, smiling.

“Conspiracy, conspiracy,” McGuinn mumbles, pushing his longish dirty-blond hair out of his eyes as he peruses the menu.

“Have you been getting sick?” Ratso asks, concerned.

“No, not a bit,” Roger smiles wanly. “I sweat it out. Literally.”

A rosy-cheeked young waitress appears. “Hello,” she bubbles, “would you like something to drink?”

McGuinn rolls his eyes. “You mean alcohol. No, no alcohol.” He laughs. “We were just talking about the international conspiracy to get people to drink alcohol,” he explains to the waitress.

“OK,” she says cheerfully, “how about coffee?”

“There’s an international conspiracy to get people to use caffeine too,” Roger lectures. “It’s a drug-oriented culture.” He picks up his glass. “What’s in this water? Seriously, I’d like a cheddar-burger to drink. A liquid cheddarburger.”

“I’ll put it in the blender,” the waitress shoots back, a bit annoyed.

Ratso orders cheesecake for breakfast and hands the menu back to the girl. “There seems to be such a nice spirit, I mean Baez running around today like a meshugena.”

“I’m so loose,” Roger agrees, “now I feel like I can fly. I watched Dylan. I learned it from him. I watched him being constricted and tied down. I remember Eric Anderson saying Bob’s making too many kids and being tied down and I noticed that and I said ‘Uh huh,’ and I have two kids by another marriage and I was tied down too. And I watched him blow out, get out of the thing with Sara, I mean he loves her. I love Linda. But I got my work cut out for me and I can’t do it with her around. Linda’s been doing silver and gold jewelry, going to UCLA, she’s been constructive lately. She’s a real smart girl and she was as tied down as I was, but she didn’t realize it. She’s twenty-five. She’s got to have her shit together by that age.”

McGuinn smiles at his last comment. “What am I saying, it took me that long. Where am I coming from? I’m thirty-three and I’m still a punk. I plan to stay one too. Peter Pan, you know. Never grow up, never grow up.”

“But that song, ‘Sara,’ man, Levy told me how he wrote that,” Ratso purrs, “being on the beach, remembering where they hung out. It’s like a diary.”

“Yeah, ‘being at the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you.’ I love that line so much.”

“It’s so personal, I can’t believe he’s singing that shit.”

“To the world? Why not? That’s what poets are for. He’s one and he realizes it. I’ve never seen him more upfront, right. He’s out there. It’s great. This whole tour is amazing. Last night I had chateaubriand with Mick Ronson. Then I had a couple of martinis and that’s the last thing I remember. So that’s why I’m being good today.”

“Your song …” Ratso starts.

“Oh, I know what I was gonna say,” McGuinn blurts. “There have been some little girls following us around going ‘Roger and Rono,’ it’s like the Ringo thing, like a campaign, they’re pushing for that combination of Ronson and me.”

The food finally arrives, and Roger bites into his cheddarburger with a vengeance.

Ratso begins to recount the anecdote in which Dylan had been concerned that Kinky didn’t like him.

“But he does,” Roger interrupts. “Bob asked me the same thing. We brought Kinky over to the house in Malibu one night, and we all sat around and Bob made Kinky sing all of his songs. Then the next day Bob asked me if he had said anything wrong last night. Bob got drunk and didn’t remember what he did so he asked me the next day. He said, ‘I don’t think Kinky likes me,’ and I said, ‘Kinky likes you, Kinky loves you man, do you remember singing go to sleep little Jewboys or Ride ’Em Jewboys or something,’ and he said, ‘No.’ He didn’t remember it but I told him that everything was fine and he conducted himself perfectly well.”

“Then Dylan asked me what I thought about that guy, Bruce Springfield?” Ratso recalls. “You think he’s jealous of Springsteen?”