Chronicles - Bob Dylan [64]
This was coming into my life at exactly the right time. The deal would be complete. My lyrics, some written as long as twenty years earlier, would now explode musicologically like an ice cloud. Nobody else played this way and I thought of it as a new form of music. Strict and orthodox. Not one thing improvisational about it. The opposite of improvisation. Improvisation wouldn’t have done me any good, in fact, it would have taken me the other way. Also, you don’t need to feel any certain way in order to play like this. It doesn’t run on emotion. That was another good thing. I had been leaving a lot of my songs on the floor like shot rabbits for a long time. That wouldn’t be happening anymore. The thing was, I needed two hands. If I couldn’t play, I wouldn’t be doing anything better than ever now. Nothing would be exactly right.
It was noontime and I was shuffling around in my old-fashion garden. Cutting across the vacant lot to a bank of field flowers where my dogs and horses were, the strangled cry of a gull came whipping through the wind. Walking back to the main house, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the pines. I wasn’t near it, but could feel the power beneath its colors. Seemed like a net had fallen over me and if I’d tried to run, I’d only get more entangled. My hand had been gashed pretty good — no feeling in the nerves. Maybe it might not heal, never be the same, and the sooner I believed it, the better. Oh, the wicked ironies of life. I’d gotten a cosmic kick in the pants. I probably should have been wearing steel underwear.
Things changed a little, though, later in the week when I went to a school play that one of my daughters was in. The creative energy displayed onstage brought me to my senses. In the midst of this, another piece of sad news came in. My sixty-three-foot sailboat had hit a reef in Panama. During the night, the harbor lights had been misread. The boat was put into reverse and the rudder broke off. She couldn’t come down off the reef and the wind blew the boat up further. She lay on her side for a week, but it was too late. A lot of lines snapped trying to pull her off. Eventually, the sea took her back and the boat was gone. In the ten years that I had her my family and I had sailed the entire Caribbean and spent time on every island from Martinique to Barbados. This loss paled somewhat compared to the use of my hand, but I had been grateful for the boat and the news came as an unwelcomed shock.
One night I turned on the TV and saw soul singer Joe Tex on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Joe sang and left. Johnny didn’t talk to him — not like he did to the other guests. Johnny just waved to him from his desk. Carson used to like to talk to his guests about golf and things like that, but he had nothing to say to Joe. I didn’t think he would have anything to say to me either. All of his guests tried to be funny, put on a happy face, not come unglued, be like Gene Kelly and go singing in the rain even during a big downpour. If I did that I’d get pneumonia. You had to act as if everything was wonderful. Like Joe Tex, I’d never been much in the mainstream. I thought about how much more I was like him than like Carson. I shut the TV off.
Outside I heard a woodpecker tapping up against a tree in the dark. As long as I was alive I was going to stay interested in something. If my hand didn’t heal, what was I going to do with the remainder of my days? Not be a part of the music business, that’s for sure. Get as far away from it as possible. I fantasized about the business world. What could be more simple or elegant than venturing into that? It might be interesting to try the conventional life for a while. I was thinking ahead. I called a friend of mine who put me in touch with a broker who bought and sold