Coincidentally, the story takes place on this very date, November 13, in the year 1998, which also happened to be a Friday. I was settling down for my usual patty melt in Daffy's Bar & Grill, on the outskirts of Cleveland, waiting for the night's entertainment, Seether, a punk tribute band to the music of Pete Seeger, to take the stage when a disheveled guy walks in wearing black jeans and a dark gray anorak. He sits down unassumingly at the bar a few stools away from me and orders a chocolate milk and wheat toast. Nothing seemed odd until he called after Duffy (Daffy's twin brother who was minding the B&G because it was Friday evening and Daffy, who had converted to Judaism a few years prior, was home observing Shabbat), "And burn that toast good."
Can't be, I thought. Never in a million years. But that voice. I tried to look over nonchalantly and get a look at what just could be that famous profile, but the hood obscured even the nose. Well, I believe, I said to myself, and if nothing else I can tell the story for the rest of my life about how I sat three stools away from the man himself and quietly ate my patty melt as he drank chocolate milk and ate burnt wheat toast. And the toast, when it arrived, was very burnt. Smoking, even. "Hey man, you're an artist." Bingo. The way he said the word artist, the first syllable aggressive like a pistol shot, the second abandoned--it could be nobody else. Bob Dylan.
I'd rehearsed this moment in my dreams for years. I'd simply say, no introduction or anything, "Hey Bob, how important is finding the appropriate hat?"
Well, my courage was at best half-mustered when all of a sudden he turned to me, chocolate mustache beneath that nose and a well-gnawed burnt crust in his hands (it was Bob Dylan all right) and said, "Hey man, are you from around here?"
"Yes, Bob, I am." I felt there was no need to pretend I didn't know him.
"Man I been walking around all day, trying to find the place Alan Freed lived in when he lived here. Not my lucky day." He shook his head and gulped the last of the chocolate milk.
"Friday the thirteenth, what did you expect, Bob?" I had no clue where Alan Freed had lived when he lived here, but I had Bob Dylan, for the moment, hanging on my answer, so I wasn't going to make it easy for him.
"No," dragging the word out and running his crumb-laden fingers into the hood and through his famous hair, "shit." He burped then. "No wonder. I thought maybe it was Wednesday the 15th or something. Paraskevidekatriaphobia, man. I got it bad. Hey man," calling to Duffy, "get me something, anything, with alcohol in it."
"Tell me about it, Bob," I said, moving over to the stool next to him (not an "I know exactly what you mean" tell me about it, but an "I'm here, I will listen, unburden yourself" tell me all about it; hell, Blood On The Tracks alone had gotten me through at least 113 dark nights of the soul by then, I owed it to the man).
"In the wee hours of Friday morning, December 13th, 1963, I drifted off to sleep, and maybe it was the Beaujolais, but I had a helluva dream, my thirteenth, don't you know. A flat out nightmare. I was in a parlor somewhere in upstate New York, 1800s, and who was talking to me but Millard Fillmore, the former president of the United States. The thirteenth president, only because the twelfth, Zachary Taylor, had died of gastroenteritis. I mean, who doesn't get gastroenteritis just listening to the Eagles, but you don't die from it, man. Anyway, old Millard was retired by then, married an heiress, nothing to do but find Buffalo University, and he's bald, talking to me. Telling me all about his times with the Know-Nothing Party. Well, he wasn't all bald, he had a few hairs combed over across his head, you know? Like a bar code. Anyway, all of a sudden, one of the hairs, the thirteenth from the front, of course, stands up from his head and kind of points at me, like it's pointing a finger, and then the hair turns into some Texas lawyer named Wade from the present day, 1963, and he's pointing fingers and telling me I'm too young to know anything. Tells me I don't know shit. Man, I woke up sweating and I don't think I slept again for two nights. And, well, you know, that night, Tom Paine and all. Paraskevidekatriaphobia."
He hung his head over the bar, buried his hands deep into the anorak, and just shook his head. Feeling buoyed by the trust he showed in me for knowing the arcana of his life, I took my left arm, patted him gently on the back and said, "Midnight's approaching, Bob. Saturday the fourteenth is nigh."
"Thanks, man."
And so we drank away the rest of the night knocking back Chocolate Russians, ignoring Seether, and telling each other knock-knock jokes. Just after midnight Bob turned to me and said, "Man I ain't stupid. I know it's not Wednesday the fifteenth. But that's the only way, one, two, three times a year, whatever, I can cope."
"I understand, Bob."
"And goddamnit, you know who Wade was?"
"Tell me, Bob."
"The guy who prosecuted Jack Ruby for killing Oswald. And the Wade in Roe versus. Put a couple innocent people in jail, I think, too."
"It's a small world, Bob."
"Yeah, screw Alan Freed." With that he pulled out a crumpled c-note from his jeans, put it on the bar and said, "The night's on me. I owe you so much more, though." Then he stood up.
"No problem, Bob. Sweet dreams."
"The best kind, man. I'm up to four thousand something umpteen by now."
Behind the Curtain:
I swear this is how it happened. I'm puttering around this afternoon, trying to think up something to write for Friday the 13th. For whatever reasons, my brain fixates on the story of a man's thirteenth strand of combed-over hair. And I get the notion of finding out who the Wade in Roe v. Wade is and working him into the story. I also think of telling the story of Bob Dylan's 13th dream (of course there are the songs "Bob Dylan's Dream" [1962] and "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" [1965], so I figure there's got to be a 13th dream, somewhere in 1963). Then I start the research, find out Millard Fillmore was the 13th president (and Zach Taylor did die of gastroenteritis), there's actually a word for fear of Friday the 13th, and all about Henry Wade. Now I've got the ingredients. My last thought is to see if I can find out what Fridays in 1963 fell on the 13th. Two seconds later on Google I'm looking at a calendar for 1963. I see a Friday the 13th in December, and then, oh my God, I'm thinking. Could that have been the date? Run upstairs to find my Bob Dylan day-by-day book (you mean your house doesn't own one?) and hot damn, there it is, the very day!
Long story short: On December 13, 1963, Dylan received the Tom Paine award given by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committe at its annual Bill of Rights dinner. As Clinton Heylin tells it, Dylan, 22 at the time, was a bit uncomfortable and supposedly drank heavily. In his speech, he insulted the audience, among other things for their lack of hair, and infamously said he could sympathize with Lee Harvey Oswald, who of course three weeks earlier had killed JFK. Well, there was a bit of an uproar, and Dylan, "profoundly embarrassed by his behavior" (in Heylin's words), later wrote an apology and offered to reimburse the committee for any loss in donations they suffered.
Mesmerized by finding out all this happened on a Friday the 13th, and somehow connecting (a wee bit only, perhaps) with baldness and Wade, I Googled a bit more and found this amazing page, with a transcript of Dylan's remarks that night (I think Heylin is right; drink seems to have gotten the best of Bob that night), a letter from the committee's head defending the choice of Bob as recipient of the award, and--new to my eyes--Bob's typescript of the rather fascinating letter of explanation/apology. Great reading.
Finally, I recall watching the Dylan documentary No Direction Home a few years ago and being somewhat amazed, even a bit disappointed, that years later, Bob seems to have dismissed his own embarrassment (which is pretty obvious to me in his letter) and now regards the incident as a kind of proud, standing up to the establishment moment. Alas, I searched in vain for the clip from the documentary that talks about the episode, but I couldn't find one. Anyway, more lattice of coincidence stuff. Happy 13th.
Marley's Ghost-Bob Dylan's Dream
"...(T)hey talk about colors of red and blue and yellow. Man, I just don't see any colors at all when I look out. I don't see any colors at all..."---Bob Dylan, 12/13/63
ReplyDeleteHey Dan, he's color-blind, too!