Chronicles - Bob Dylan [8]
I left the Folklore Center and went back into the ice-chopping weather. Towards evening, I was over at the Mills Tavern on Bleecker Street where the basket-house singers would bunch up, chitchat and make the scene. My flamenco guitar–playing friend, Juan Moreno, told me about a new coffeehouse that had just opened on 3rd Street, called the Outré, but I was barely listening. Juan’s lips were moving, but they were moving almost without sound. I’d never play in the Outré, didn’t have to. I’d soon be hired to play at the Gaslight and never see the basket houses again. Outside of Mills Tavern the thermometer was creeping up to about ten below. My breath froze in the air, but I didn’t feel the cold. I was heading for the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don’t think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either. I’d come from a long ways off and had started from a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.
2
The Lost Land
I SAT UP in bed and looked around. The bed was a sofa in the living room and steam heat was rising out of the iron radiator. Above the fireplace, a framed portrait of a wigged colonial was staring back at me — near the sofa, a wooden cabinet supported by fluted columns, near that, an oval table with rounded drawers, a chair like a wheelbarrow, small desk of violet wood veneer with flip-down drawers — a couch that was a padded back car seat with spring upholstery, a low chair with rounded back and scroll armrests — a thick French rug on the floor, silver light gleaming through the blinds, painted planks accenting the rooflines.
The room smelled of gin and tonic, wood alcohol and flowers. The place was a top floor walk-up in a Federal style building near Vestry Street below Canal and near the Hudson River. On the same block was the Bull’s Head, a cellar tavern where John Wilkes Booth, the American Brutus, used to drink. I’d been in there once and saw his ghost in the mirror — an ill spirit. Paul Clayton, a folksinger friend of Van Ronk, good-natured, forlorn and melancholic, who must have had at least thirty records out but was unknown to the American public — an intellectual, a scholar and a romantic with an encyclopedic knowledge of balladry — had introduced me to Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, the occupants of the place. I walked over to the window and looked out into the white, gray streets and over towards the river. The air was bitter cold, always below zero, but the fire in my mind was never out, like a wind vane that was constantly spinning. It was midafternoon and both Ray and Chloe were gone.
Ray was maybe ten years older than me — from Virginia — he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred — came from a long line of ancestry made up of bishops, generals, even a colonial governor. He was a nonconformist, a nonintegrator and a Southern nationalist. He and Chloe lived in the place like they were hiding out. Ray was like a character from out of some of the songs I’d been singing, someone who had seen life, done deeds and lived romances — had traipsed around, had a broad grasp of the country, its conditions. Though there was an undercurrent of upheaval reverberating, and in a few years the American cities would tremble, Ray took little interest, said the real action was “in the Congo.”
Chloe had red-gold hair, hazel eyes, an illegible smile, face like a doll and an even better figure, fingernails painted black. She worked as a hatcheck girl at the Egyptian Gardens, a belly-dancing dinner place on 8th Avenue — also posed as a model for Cavalier magazine. “I’ve always worked,” she said. They lived as husband and wife, or brother and sister, or cousins, it was hard to tell, they just lived here, that’s all. Chloe had her own primitive way of looking at things, always would say mad stuff that clicked in a cryptic way, told me once that I should wear eyeshadow because it keeps away the evil