Chronicles - Bob Dylan [41]
Johnny’s big fireplace was blazing and crackling. After dinner, everybody sat around in the rustic living room with high wooden beams and wide plate-glass windows that overlooked a lake. We sat in a circle and each songwriter would play a song and pass the guitar to the next player. Usually, there’d be comments made like “You really nailed that one.” Or “Yeah, man, you said it all in them few lines.” Or maybe something like “That song’s got a lot of history in it.” Or “You put all yourself into that tune.” Mostly just complimentary stuff. I played “Lay, Lady, Lay” and then I passed the guitar to Graham Nash, anticipating some kind of response. I didn’t have to wait long. “You don’t eat pork, do you?” Joe Carter asked. That was his comment. I waited for a second before replying. “Uh, no sir, I don’t,” I said back. Kristofferson almost swallowed his fork. Joe asked, “Why not?” It’s then that I remembered what Malcolm X had said. “Well, sir, it’s kind of a personal thing. I don’t eat that stuff, no. I don’t eat something that’s one third rat, one third cat and one third dog. It just doesn’t taste right.” There was an awkward momentary silence that you could have cut with one of the knives off the dinner table. Johnny Cash then almost doubled over. Kristofferson just shook his head. Joe Carter was quite a character.
There weren’t any Carter Family records up at the apartment, either. Chloe slapped some steak and onions on my plate and said, “Here, it’s good for you.” She was cool as pie, hip from head to toe, a Maltese kitten, a solid viper — always hit the nail on the head. I don’t know how much weed she smoked, but a lot. She also had her own ideas about the nature of things, told me that death was an impersonator, that birth is an invasion of privacy. What could you say? You couldn’t say anything back when she said stuff like that. It’s not like you could prove her wrong. New York City didn’t faze her at all. “A bunch of monkeys in this town,” she’d say. Talking to her you’d get the idea right away. I put on my hat and coat, grabbed my guitar and started bundling up. Chloe knew that I was trying to get places. “Maybe someday your name will get around the country like wildfire,” she’d say. “If you ever get a couple of hundred bucks, buy me something.”
I shut the door behind me and went out into the hallway and down the spiral cascading staircase, got to the marble-floored landing at the bottom and went out through the narrow courtyard entryway. The walls smelled of chloride. I walked leisurely through the door and up to the sidewalk through the latticed iron gate, threw a scarf around my face and headed for Van Dam Street. On the corner, I passed a horse-drawn wagon full of covered flowers, all under a plastic wrap, no driver in sight. The city was full of stuff like that.
Folk songs played in my head, they always did. Folk songs were the underground story. If someone were to ask what’s going on, “Mr. Garfield’s been shot down, laid down. Nothing you can do.” That’s what’s going on. Nobody needed to ask who Mr. Garfield was, they just nodded, they just knew. It was what the country was talking about. Everything was simple — seemed to make some kind of splendid, formulaic sense.
New York City was cold, muffled and mysterious, the capital of the world. On 7th Avenue I passed the building where Walt Whitman had lived and worked. I paused momentarily imagining him printing away and singing the true song of his soul. I had stood outside of Poe’s house on 3rd Street, too, and had done the same thing, staring mournfully up at the windows. The city was like some uncarved block without any name or shape and it showed no favoritism. Everything was always new, always changing. It was never the same old crowd upon the streets.
I crossed over from