Chronicles - Bob Dylan [106]
Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out. She was just as outspoken and opinionated as Dave was, especially about politics — not so much the political issues but rather the highfalutin’ theological ideas behind political systems. Nietzschean politics. Politics with a hanging heaviness. Intellectually it would be hard to keep up. If you tried, you’d find yourself in alien territory. Both were anti-imperialistic, antimaterialist. “What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,” Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. “Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?”
Terri had managed to get Dave booked in places like Boston and Philly…even as far away as St. Louis at a folk club called Laughing Buddha. For me, those gigs were out of the question. You needed at least one record out even if it was on a small label to get work in any of those clubs. She did manage to come up with a few things in places like Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Hartford — once at a folk club in Pittsburgh, another in Montreal. Scattered things. Mostly I stayed around in New York City. I didn’t really want to go out of town. If I wanted to be out of town, I wouldn’t have come to New York City in the first place. I was fortunate to have the regular gig at the Gaslight and wasn’t on any wild goose chase to go anywhere. I could breathe. I was free. Didn’t feel constrained. Between sets I mostly hung out, drank shooters of Wild Turkey and iced Schlitz at the Kettle of Fish Tavern next door and played cards upstairs at the Gaslight. Things were working out fine. I was learning all I could and stayed keyed up. Once Terri offered to bring me over to meet Jac Holzman, who operated Elektra Records, one of the companies that released some of Dave’s stuff. “I can get you an appointment. Do you want to sit down with him?” “I don’t want to sit down with anybody, no.” The idea didn’t contain too much for me. Sometime later in the summer Terri managed to get me on a live radio folk extravaganza broadcast from Riverside Church up on Riverside Drive. Things were about to change for me again, to get new and strange.
Backstage the humidity was soaring. Performers came and went, waited to go on and milled around. As usual, the real show was backstage. I was talking to a dark-haired girl, Carla Rotolo, who I knew a little bit. Carla was Alan Lomax’s personal assistant. Carla introduced me to her sister. Her sister’s name was Susie but she spelled it Suze. Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled by my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard. Suze was seventeen years old, from the East Coast. Had grown up in Queens, raised in a left-wing family. Her father had worked in a factory and had recently died. She was involved in the New York art scene, painted and made drawings for various publications, worked in graphic design and in Off-Broadway theatrical productions, also worked on civil rights committees — she could do a lot of things. Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1,001 Arabian nights. She had a smile that