Chronicles - Bob Dylan [29]
Sometimes Paul Clayton and Ray would talk through the night. They called New York City the capital of the world. They would sit at two tables…either they’d lean back against the wall or forward on the table, drink coffee and glasses of brandy. Clayton, a good friend of Van Ronk’s, was from New Bedford, Mass., the whaling town — he sang a lot of sea shanties, had a Puritan ancestry, but some of his old relatives had been from the early Virginia families. Clayton had a log cabin outside of Charlottesville, too, where he used to go from time to time. Later on, a few of us went down there and hung around for a week or so in the mountains. The place had no electricity or plumbing or anything; kerosene lamps lit the place at night with reflective mirrors.
Ray, who was from Virginia, had ancestors who had fought on both sides of the Civil War. I’d lean back against the wall and shut my eyes. Their voices drifting into my head like voices talking from another world. They talked about dogs and fishing and forest fires — love and monarchies, and the Civil War. Ray had said that New York City was the city that won the Civil War, came out on top — that the wrong side had lost, that slavery was evil and that the thing would have died out anyway, Lincoln or no Lincoln. I heard him say it and thought it was a mysterious and bad thing to say, but if he said it, he said it and that’s all there is to it.
When I woke up later in the day, the place was empty. After a while I walked downstairs and left to go meet a singing pal of mine, Mark Spoelstra. We planned to meet up at a creepy but convenient little coffeehouse on Bleecker Street near Thompson run by a character called the Dutchman. The Dutchman resembled Rasputin, the Siberian mad monk. He held the lease on the place. It was mostly a jazz coffeehouse where Cecil Taylor played a lot. I played there with Cecil once. We played “The Water Is Wide,” the old folk song. Cecil could play regular piano if he wanted to. I had also played with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry there. From the coffeehouse, Mark and I were going to walk over to Gerde’s Folk City and run over some songs with Brother John Sellers, a Mississippi gospel blues singer who MC’d the shows there.
I was heading to meet Mark, walking along Carmine Street, past the garages, the barbershops and dry cleaners, hardware stores. Radio sounds came shifting out of cafes. Snowy streets full of debris, sadness, the smell of gasoline. The coffeehouses and folk music joints were only a few blocks away, but it seemed like miles would go by.
When I got to the place, Spoelstra was already there and so was the Dutchman. The Dutchman was lying dead in the doorway of his storefront. There were splotches of blood on the ice and red lines in the snow, like spiderwebs. The old man who owned the building had been waiting for him and had stuck a knife in him. The Dutchman was still wearing his fur hat, long brown overcoat and riding boots, and his head was propped up on the stoop under the pearl gray sky. The problem had something to do with the Dutchman refusing to pay his rent and being belligerent about it. A lot of times he’d force the old man out physically. The little old man had taken enough and snapped, he must have thrown himself through the air like Houdini. It must have taken much skill and faculty to stick a knife through the heavy brown overcoat. Seeing the Dutchman lying there, his long brown stringy hair and frosted beard, he looked like a mercenary who could have fallen at Gettysburg. The old man was sitting inside with the door open, facing the sidewalk surrounded by a couple of cops. His face was misshapen, looked queer formed, almost mutilated — like putty in color. His eyes were dead, and he had no idea where he was.
A few people were passing by and not even looking. Spoelstra and I walked away, headed towards Sullivan Street. “It’s sad. Makes