Waiting for Bob Dylan

I was walking down the block of my childhood, 44th Street between New Utrecht and 12th, in Boro Park, Brooklyn. Such traffic: cars were backed up in the wrong direction all down the one-way street. They must have changed the traffic pattern since my childhood.

I saw the guy to whom Elaine and I had given a can of Fix-a-Flat the other day. He and his nephew had been in a university paking lot, trying to roll a car with a dead battery and flat tire onto a trailer. We helped push — no use — and invited the uncle to walk back to our house with us (a five-minute walk) so we could give him the can. Now he was waiting in this line of idling cars to meet and get an autograph from Bob Dylan.

I saw the uncle again, but now his car was further back, at the end of the block, as if the line in front of him had lengthened. I was in my car, parked alongside him. “When you move forward, I’ll pull in,” I said. And some time later, I was at the head of the line outside Bob Dylan’s hotel room.

The room was small and windowless, lit by a table lamp. Dylan was lying on a bed, head on a pillow, playing an acoustic guitar. Alongside him, at a 45-degree angle, in a long red robe, was a woman scatting an old standard, maybe “Indiana,” maybe “Pennies from Heaven,” maybe “Whispering.” Dylan was playing an astonishingly good accompaniment, with all sorts of complex substitute chords. I was, as I said to myself, “agape and aghast” and began recording on my phone. Then I decided I didn’t want any of this on my phone, so I stopped.

When the song was done, Dylan rose from the bed and walked out of the room and past the line of people. He was taking a break. “Hi Bob,” someone said. He didn’t acknowledge them. I realized that I had had a question to ask, but now I couldn’t remember it. And I had left in the car the album I was going to ask him to sign. I didn’t think there was time to walk back and get it.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[The Fix-a-Flat is from waking life. No idea where Dylan came from. “Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). Here is “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”]