On the Road with Bob Dylan (45 page)

Ryan gets up and heads into the locker room and Ratso and Sara start back toward their rooms. “I’m sick of wearing him on my chest,” Sara joshes, looking down at her Rolling Thunder T-shirt. “When is he gonna wear me on his chest?” They head up to Sara’s room, since Ratso is out of shampoo. She disappears into the bathroom and re-emerges with a bottle of Head, an organic shampoo. “Take this, love, it’s all I’ve got, there’s not much left in the bottle.”

“Sara,” Ratso coos wide-eyed, “can I tell anybody you gave me some Head?” She frowns and he peeks into the bedroom. “Jeez, I wish I had my tape recorder with me,” he sighs. “You must have it under your bathing trunks,” Sara cracks. “I can’t believe you’re a reporter. I hate the press.” She shakes her head.

Ratso seizes the opportunity to peek under the hot platter at the remains of Bob and Sara’s dinner last night. “Ratso,” Sara screams. “Bob’ll kill you if he finds out.”

“I’m just hungry,” Ratso whines, “I just want something to eat. These fucking potatoes are cold.” He picks up a mushroom, peers at it for a while, then plops it into his mouth. He grabs a bottle of wine.

“Not bad,” the reporter whistles, “1971. This shit—”

“Take it, take it,” Sara’s screaming. “C’mon, Ratso, go take your shower.” The reporter dutifully complies, with his wine and Head in tow.

That night, before the concert, Ratso decides to go shopping on Yonge Street, Toronto’s equivalent of Greenwich Village and Times Square combined. He wants to get some books as presents for the performers for their train ride to Montreal tomorrow, and he also promised Dylan he would look for some elk buttons for Bob’s winter coat. After a half hour’s search he doesn’t find them, but he winds up with a huge furry burnt-sienna vest, and an authentic raccoon hat complete with tail, making the reporter look, as Dylan would later describe him, like a sheep in wolfs clothing.

Ratso grabs a cab, rushes back to the hotel, drops off the three shopping bags of books, and speeds back to the Gardens. As he comes in, Roger McGuinn is onstage.

“What’d I miss?” he screams at T-Bone, who looks especially odd tonight.

“Nothing, man.”

“How come you’re not up there?” Ratso suddenly realizes the guitarist usually plays on this number.

“I took myself out of the show,” Bone groans, “I was too weird.”
Up onstage, Neuwirth puts his arms around Baez after McGuinn concludes his number. “Let’s show them some positions,” Bob ogles, as Goldsmith and Michael Wadleigh shoot the proceedings from the pit. Neuwirth’s arm goes around Baez forming some weird sort of position, somewhere between the Kama Sutra and a hammerlock. Joan blanches. “There goes the ol’ Madonna right down the tube.”

Neuwirth just chuckles and pats Baez’s belly. “I’m not pregnant,” she gets mock-offended, and some people begin to clap their displeasure. “You must be drunk,” she leers at Neuwirth, “they’re filming you, that’s why you’re so weird.”

Neuwirth just continues to pat her belly. “She’s hard as a rock,” he notes approvingly.

“Too bad I can’t say the same for him,” Joan sneers and brings the house down. “We could have a very interesting meditation at this point,” she continues in perfect guruese, “I think perhaps we could be spiritually, er, I think that the Western country needs more spiritual concentration, more spiritual concentration on the material. If everyone would turn to the person next to him and say something disgusting I think perhaps the spirituality of the entire nation could be raised.”

The crowd titters and Baez returns to normalcy and introduces Gordon Lightfoot, who gets an amazing ovation. He lights into his huge hit “Sundown,” and everybody starts to clap along. Especially the silver-haired sixtyish-looking woman in the front row, who at the first notes is bouncing up and down on her white go-go boot heels, waving her arms in wild abandon, and shouting at the top of her lungs, “Gordon, Gordon.” Lightfoot looks down and smiles at the grotesque near-senile teenybopper. And she’s really going at it, dancing on the pit rail, flinging her fur hat off, kicking high like a Rockette in her flaming red outfit. Ratso rushes over and cracks up at her long underwear that gets revealed every time she does a high kick.

But it apparently isn’t that funny to the management and after a few minutes of this, an officious young usher goes to escort her back to her seat. And gets met with a solid pocketbook in the head. The documentary crew rushes over and gets a few feet of film, but even they get met with curses and a few roundhouse rights.

Which prompts Gene, the burly security man, to make a headlong dash across the front of the audience, snatch her up as if she were an offside kick, never breaking stride until he crosses the goal line on the other side. At which point he gently deposits her down, right next to Ratso.

“Those fucking bastards,” she’s screaming incoherently, just as the Stadium security in the form of huge lumbering Royal Canadian Mounted Police come up.

“OK, let’s go, you’re going with us,” they collar her and head for an exit.

Ratso runs along, screaming out a request for an interview, and promptly finds himself booted out along with her.

After a half hour talking to her, and getting booted out of the first restaurant they encountered, Ratso’s still puzzled that this obviously notorious public enemy was able to penetrate the defenses of the RCMP elite. “How’d you get into the Gardens in the first place?” he queries the celebrated deviant. Margaret, as she’s called, just smiles and slyly looks down at her white go-go boots. “It was easy. They just let me in when I told them I was Bobby Dylan’s mother.”

Ratso waves farewell to Margaret and starts back to the Gardens. Walking in the rain, he sings to himself and walks around the corner to where the campers are parked. The show won’t break for about a half hour but already there are at least twenty people waiting by the stage door. Mostly young tennyboppers waiting for Ronson, or McGuinn or Dylan or Lightfoot, but Ratso gravitates to one neatly dressed guy, around thirty, who’s waiting all alone. The reporter sidles up to him.

“Are you waiting for something here?” Ratso asks innocently.

“Yeah, Bob Dylan is going to come out this way,” the man says.

“Oh, did you see the concert?”

“I saw it last night,” he tells Ratso and the reporter proceeds to recount his experience with the RCMP.

“You got a car?” Ratso asks and the guy nods yes, so the two repair to a Volkswagen parked across the street. Roy, a government worker, introduces himself to the journalist.

“What’s your story?” Ratso wonders. “Why are we sitting here in this fucking Volkswagen, with the heater on, at the stage, waiting for, waiting for, er what?”

“Well, I just went to the concert last night,” Roy explains in soft, precisely measured tones, “and I like Mr. Dylan’s work a lot. I like Baez too, but I thought the concert would have been a bit better. Anyway, Bobby does a lot to instill the emotion of hope and I think he’s really important in society today.”

“Have you admired his work for long?” Ratso asks.

“I go back to ’64, the first time I remember hearing Dylan was ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ on the radio.” Ratso laughs to himself at the coincidence. “That was the first eleven-minute song, back then that was really something important, but it was the lyrics that kind of got to me.”

“What is he saying to you?” Ratso wonders, thinking of someone who would voluntarily wait in the minus-ten-degree weather outside of the Gardens.

“A lot of things,” Roy muses, peering out of the car window at the stage-door scene. “Bob’s a focal point whether he likes it or not, a focal point for hope, love, that’s part and parcel too. It’s more than words though. It’s thoughts and feelings. There’s no sense in having thought on one hand and feeling on the other unless you can integrate the two in one. I think what Bob does is put them both together in one point in one place in time and that serves as sort of a catalyst for other people, not that they should
project their feelings on him, because he’s just human, just an individual, but he acts like kind of a catalyst in that people say, ‘Hey, this guy means something, this guy’s saying something.’” Roy falls silent.

“I guess he means enough to you to park a block away on a freezing night just to feel some vibe,” Ratso smiles.

Roy turns to him. “I think there’s a common bond here among people our age. Do you feel that at all?” The reporter nods. “Think it could be possible to feel it all the time?”

“Depends on the circumstances,” Ratso says.

“Doesn’t it though?” Roy shakes his head and studies his hands. “I think one of Dylan’s best songs is ‘Talking WW III Blues’ where he says some of the people can be half right part of the time, part of the people can be half right some of the time, then he simply says ‘I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.’ I think that is the proper approach. I’d like to meet Dylan, I really would.” Roy peers out the window again. “Just to sit down and talk to him. His music really means something to me. It’s sort of like on the cover of
Before the Flood
, where everyone’s standing with a match, out there, there’s people who sort of glimpse knowledge, not knowledge but they know, they understand. That’s what Dylan is to me, a guy that carries certain strains of like thought and knowledge and keeps them alive and that in a sense generates spirit, ’cause that’s basically what it’s all about, spirit, and Bob’s very spiritual.”

“What if you met him …” Ratso starts.

“I’d talk to him,” Roy anticipates, “I’ve thought about it.”

“How would you approach him? He’s been hit on so much, he’s really wary. Let’s say you saw him in the street, not necessarily ten minutes from now in front of the Arena, just on the street, how would you break through that façade?”

“Let me ask you something,” Roy says softly. “Do you think it’s possible to break through that façade?”

“Not right away. But let’s say you saw him, what would you say?”

Roy coughs nervously and looks away. “I’d ask him if he was
looking for a brother and I think if he was interested he might sit down and think about it. He’d probably react.”

Ratso smiles. “Yeah, he’d probably say, ‘I got a brother.’”

“What’s he like, older or younger,” Roy asks, and Ratso suddenly finds himself in the middle of a psychodrama.

“He’s older and younger,” Ratso barks.

“I suppose he would be,” Roy nods. “Got any sisters?”

“Now, that’s something else there,” Ratso chuckles.

“That’s true,” Roy smiles, “I think it was some cat that said, ‘When Ruthie says come see her in her honky-tonk lagoon and I could watch her waltz for free.’ I bet there are two types of sisters. What I wonder about the guy who wrote that was how consciously aware he was when he wrote that.”

“How aware of what?” Ratso interrupts.

“What it meant to him.” Roy suddenly begins to look very spacey. “You’re not him.”

“No, I’m not him,” Ratso feels for the door handle.

“I guess Bob has thought about that too, what it’s like being him. I thought about him a lot. Listen,” Roy reaches into the glove compartment, “if you see him will you give him this for me?” He hands Ratso a folded piece of paper.

“Sure,” Ratso grabs the paper and opens the door. “What should I say to him?” he pokes his head in the car.

“Oh, nothing.” Roy glances at the stage door. “Just give him the note.”

The crowd has swelled to about fifty now, mostly teenyboppers who are primed to emit a torrent of shrieks as soon as Guam heads out the door and for the buses. Ratso elbows his way to the front and stands there surrounded by thirteen-year-old girls and a guy in his twenties with a dog.

The guy stares at Ratso and his coonskin cap and then meekly asks him who he is. Ratso explains. “I’m a New York Jew stuck in Toronto,” the kid smiles, and holds his dog up. “My dog sings with Dylan every time I put on a Dylan album. Whenever Dylan plays the
harp my dog goes
grrrr.”
All the girls crowd around to get a look. But suddenly they all break rank and tear off after Mick Ronson, who’s fighting his way onto Phydeaux. A few seconds later, they come streaming back.

“I got a kiss, I got a kiss,” one nubile twelve-year-old is muttering, walking back slowly in a trance.

“Oooohh,” her friend is moaning, rolling her fingers into two fists. “Ohhh, I hate you Gerry. I didn’t get one. I’m gonna cry.”

But then, Joni Mitchell starts inching her way out. “It’s Joni!” Ratso shrieks and he leads the charge, followed by twenty shrieking girls. After Joni successfully negotiates her way to the bus, stopping to give some fans the two bouquets she had emerged from backstage with, Ratso tires of the constant din and heads for the crew bus.

Back at the hotel, he checks out the hospitality suite. It’s fairly quiet, only McGuinn, Ronson, Gary Shafner, and Chris O’Dell around. But Sylvia, the Jamaican Jewess that Ratso compared bloodlines with, steps off the elevator and the two walk into the room.

They sit on the couch and immediately Gary starts to harass Ratso. “Do you know the best-looking part of your body is the raccoon tail?” Gary snaps. But before the reporter can respond, Dylan strides in.

“Hey, c’mere,” Ratso screams. “I got that Jamaican Jew you wanted to meet.” Dylan advances cautiously to the couch.

“Hey Gary, is there any more tequila?” Dylan thirsts, then turns to McGuinn. “You’re a trouper, man,” he smiles.

“Joan’s a trouper, did you dig her tonight?” Ratso remembers the exchange with Neuwirth.

“What happened?” Bob blurts.

“I’ll never tell,” the reporter turns coy, “I got kicked out of the hall tonight.”

“You didn’t get hurt did you?” Dylan’s mock-serious, the makeup still smeared over his face.

“Nah, I got kicked out with that woman who was dancing in the front row. She got in the hall by saying she was your mother.”

“I bet she was,” Dylan jokes.

“Man, I love your mother,” McGuinn gushes. “Your mother kissed me and said she loved me.”

“Stop telling him mother stories,” Ratso chides, “you’re embarrassing him.”

Dylan scans the room. “Is Hawkins still around?”

“No, he left. Hey, this is Sylvia, she’s the Jamaican Jew.”