Just Kids [55]
As we were leaving in the elevator, Fred Hughes, who managed the Factory, addressed me in a condescending voice. “Ohhh, your hair is very Joan Baez. Are you a folksinger?” I don’t know why, as I admired her, but it bugged me.
Robert took my hand. “Just ignore him,” he said.
I found myself in a dark humor. One of those nights when the mind starts looping bothersome things, I got to thinking about what Fred Hughes had said. Screw him, I thought, annoyed at being dismissed.
I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. I realized that I hadn’t cut my hair any different since I was a teenager. I sat on the floor and spread out the few rock magazines I had. I usually bought them to get any new pictures of Bob Dylan, but it wasn’t Bob I was looking for. I cut out all the pictures I could find of Keith Richards. I studied them for a while and took up the scissors, machete-ing my way out of the folk era. I washed my hair in the hallway bathroom and shook it dry. It was a liberating experience.
When Robert came home, he was surprised but pleased. “What possessed you?” he asked. I just shrugged. But when we went to Max’s, my haircut caused quite a stir. I couldn’t believe all the fuss over it. Though I was still the same person, my social status suddenly elevated. My Keith Richards haircut was a real discourse magnet. I thought of the girls I knew back in high school. They dreamed of being singers but wound up hairdressers. I desired neither vocation, but in weeks to come I would be cutting a lot of people’s hair, and singing at La MaMa.
Someone at Max’s asked me if I was androgynous. I asked what that meant. “You know, like Mick Jagger.” I figured that must be cool. I thought the word meant both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Whatever it meant, with just a haircut, I miraculously turned androgynous overnight.
Opportunities suddenly arose. Jackie Curtis asked me to be in her play Femme Fatale. I had no problem replacing a boy who played the male counterpart of Penny Arcade, shotgunning lines like: He could take her or leave her / And he took her and then he left her.
La MaMa was one of the earliest experimental theaters, off-Broadway with a few more offs. I had been in a few plays in college, Phaedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Madame Dubonnet in The Boyfriend. I liked performing, but I dreaded the memorizing, and all the pancake makeup they have you wear onstage. I really didn’t understand the avant-garde, though I thought it might be fun working with Jackie and her company. Jackie gave me the part without auditioning, so I had no real idea what I was getting into.
I was sitting in the lobby trying to appear that I wasn’t waiting for Robert. I worried when he disappeared into the labyrinth of his hustling world. Unable to concentrate, I sat in my usual spot, bent over my orange composition book containing my cycle of poems for Brian Jones. I was dressed in my Song of the South getup—straw hat, Brer Rabbit jacket, work boots, and pegged pants—and was hammering away at the same set of phrases when I was interrupted by an oddly familiar voice.
“Whatcha doin’, darlin’?”
I looked up into the face of a stranger sporting the perfect pair of dark glasses.
“Writing.”
“Are you a poet?”
“Maybe.”
I shifted in my seat, acting disinterested, pretending like I didn’t recognize him, but there was no mistaking the drawl in his voice, nor his shady smile. I knew exactly who I was facing; he was the guy in Dont Look Back. The other one. Bobby Neuwirth, the peacemaker-provocateur. Bob Dylan’s alter ego.
He was a painter, singer-songwriter, and risk taker. He was a trusted confidant to many of the great minds and musicians of his generation, which was just a beat before mine.
To hide how impressed I was, I got up, nodded, and headed toward the door without saying goodbye. He called out to me.
“Hey, where did you learn to walk like that?”
I turned. “From Dont Look Back.”
He just laughed and asked me to join him in the El Quixote for a shot of tequila.