Chronicles - Bob Dylan [84]
“The Queen of Country Music was in here a while back, bought a brass ashtray.”
“Who would that be?”
“Sweet Kitty Wells.”
“Oh, yeah.”
A subtle change comes over Sun Pie. He glanced over at the poster of Mao. “War is not a bad thing. It thins out the population. You got to let it all float up to the surface.” In my mind’s eye I saw blood being splattered and spilled. Whatever he was getting at, I didn’t believe like that. “Does your conscience bother you? It doesn’t matter, a man’s conscience is useless, clear or guilty, a live man’s is anyway.” This conscience stuff would stick in my mind.
I was holding a cane and felt my hand tightening on it. I made my way towards the door, looked out into the thick trees and then over at my pretty wife, who was looking back at me. I was thinking that if Sun Pie was an active man, I’d go to great lengths to get out of his way. “I’m ready,” she said.
I started to buy one of the bumper stickers but Sun Pie gave it to me for free — the one that said WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDPA. That would come in handy in a few years, when I would need at least about a dozen of them. Sun Pie was inspiring, didn’t play empty headed kid games. He was the right guy to run into at the right time, a guy who grooved on his own head.
“Got everything you need, then?” he asked.
“Yeah, but I need some more,” I said.
He laughed, said he did, too. We walked across the boards of the porch and over to the blue Harley. The sun was shining and it was as hot as a branding iron. Then we climbed on the bike — I tooted the trumpet-style horn, put the pistons in the upper position and we headed towards the railroad tracks — stopped only once more, and that was at Jesuit Bend, but before nightfall we were back on St. Charles Avenue.
I’d gotten back to New Orleans with a clear head. I’d finish up what I started with Lanois, even write him a couple of songs I never would have written otherwise. One was “Man in the Long Black Coat” and the other was “Shooting Star.” I’d only done that once before — did it for the producer Arthur Baker. Baker had helped me produce the album Empire Burlesque a few years earlier in New York City. All the songs were mixed and finalized except Baker kept suggesting that we should have an acoustic song at the end of the record, that it would bring everything to the right conclusion. I thought about it and I knew he was right, but I didn’t have anything. The night the album was being completed, I told him I’d see what I could come up with, saw the importance of it. I was staying at the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street and had come back after midnight, went through the lobby and headed upstairs. As I stepped out of the elevator, a call girl was coming towards me in the hallway — pale yellow hair wearing a fox coat — high heeled shoes that could pierce your heart. She had blue circles around her eyes, black eyeliner, dark eyes. She looked like she had been beaten up and was afraid that she’d get beat up again. In her hand, crimson purple wine in a glass. “I’m just dying for a drink,” she said as she passed me in the hall. She had a beautifulness, but not for this kind of world. Poor wretch, doomed to walk this hallway for a thousand years.
Later that night I sat at a window overlooking Central Park and wrote the song “Dark Eyes.” I recorded it the next night with only an acoustic guitar and it was the right thing to do. It did complete the album.
New York City wasn’t New Orleans, though. It wasn’t the city of astrology. It didn’t have any mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell. New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice. New Orleans wasn’t like that.
My wife would be leaving soon. She had to go to Baltimore to be in a gospel play and we were sitting outside on the porch facing the veranda, sipping coffee, low thunder rolling in. She stuck