by William Gay
The needle hissed on the vinyl. The guitar picking seemed to come out of some old, lost, absolutely timeless place. It could’ve been a hundred years ago or next week. The voice, when it came, was always unexpected. You were hearing it for the first time no matter how many times you’d heard it before, the voice weary and resigned and pissed off all at the same time it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe, iffen you don’t know by now.
Son of a bitch sure can’t sing, my friend said, his ears forever spoiled by mainstream Elvis and Johnny Mathis.
He can’t blow that French harp, either, the other friend said.
I didn’t protest. I’d heard all this before. He’s a good guitar picker, I said again.
But my brother, who was learning to play then and whose instrument was never more than an arm’s reach away, picked his guitar up from the bed. He leaned and carefully set the tome arm back. When the guitar came again he started turning the keys and plucking strings, matching the tuning that was coming out of the speakers. When he was satisfied, his left hand began felling around the strings, experimentally for the chords.
Calendar pages riffled, blew away in the wind, it was another year. I was in the Gulf of Tonkin in the South China Sea, war smoldering like a banked fire. Eight-inch guns hammered and hammered and paint flaked off the galley ceiling like harsh gray snowflakes. The ship maneuvered to avoid conjectural torpedoes. On the decks of our carrier, jets came and went and came and went, left loaded and returned empty in a seemingly endless cycle. On the bench, the fires from ammunition dumps flared and ebbed all night. By day, burning oil refineries smoked and stank.
Already I was looking forward to getting the hell gone. Something didn’t quite compute here. What was happening never matched what I was reading about in the paper. There seemed some grotesque disparity between event and event’s recounting.
Still, there was Dylan. Four albums now. On the new one, the songs were different; surreal images were becoming more and more common. These songs flickered around the edges. They were becoming more personal, their concerns moving from the ills of society toward some interior landscape. Less protest music. He seemed to have decided it was a lost cause. He confided in the hallway that he sometimes felt as if he were charged with holding together a world already faulted, leaking and determined to come apart at the seams. The folk-music business expected him to do this. He was tired of it. He didn’t think he could do it. He didn’t think the world was going to last.
I was keeping the music to myself. Dylan was an acquired taste nobody I knew was interested in acquiring. I had one of those small phonographs, the kind that closes like a suitcase, not unlike the one Anse Bundren’s new wife is carrying at the end of As I Lay Dying, and I kept it with my records in the computer room that was my workspace. I would go there in the small hours of the night and write and listen to music.
I had a lot more records now: blues and folk and the new singer/songwriters who were working Dylan’s side of the street.
Timing is everything. I was playing the album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song called “All I Really Want to Do.” To the untrained ear this song is particularly grating. There’s a part where, on the work, his voice rises and rises and pulsates until it screeches into a sort of yodeling giggle. It’s great, and funny as hell, but there are folks who regard this moment as a perpetual fingernail on an interminable chalkboard.
McPherson, my leading petty officer and boss, chose this moment to come through the hatch and see what was going on. If it had been another song, a moment earlier or a moment later, everything might’ve gone down differently.
He gave a sort of strangled inarticulate cry. He seemed taken with some manner of fit. His mouth was a horrified; his eyes bulged in agony. He clasped his hands to his ears. God Almighty damn! He screamed, and ran across the deck and jerked the cord from the wall. He grabbed up my records blindly Dylan, Joan Baez, Brownie McGhee, Jimmy Reed. He jammed them between the lid and turntable and forced the lid down and grabbed up everything and whirled and went through the hatch. I could hear him going up the ladder to the main deck.
I followed him. He was at the rail. The deck rose and fell in the chop.
Drown this caterwauling son of a bitch, he said.
He hurled everything into the sea, albums skipping like Frisbees, the phonograph listing and filling with water, going down for the third time, do not resuscitate.
He turned and went without a word.
I stood watching the records drift toward the shore. Like messages sent into space, hello out there. I wondered what the Vietcong would make of these strange cultural artifacts. All these drowned bluesmen and Cambridge girls with ironed-looking hair. I imagined them putting Dylan on the turntable, lowering the tonearm. Scratching their heads in perplexity. Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.
Timing is everything. When I stepped off the plane that had flown me from Japan to Long Beach for discharge, a crewman’s tinny radio was blasting away. I stepped into the hot glare of sunlight, and a familiar voice was demanding, How does it feel? To be on your own? A complete unknown? With no direction home? Like a rolling stone?
That sounds like Dylan, I thought. But the music sure doesn’t. What the hell’s happened here? Dylan hadn’t been in his room for a few months. He was on the road, more changes in the wind.
There was more strangeness around. Changes abounded, they seemed to be the order of the day. I’d been gone 18 months. In days to come I saw men on the streets with hair down to their shoulders, people carrying signs protesting the war. Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? I saw rock music on primetime TV, a show called Hullabaloo. The Byrds were singing Dylan, granny glasses, more long hair. McGuinn was even phrasing like Dylan. I saw a duo calling themselves Sonny and Cher. They looked like Brill Building hippies. They were singing a song called I Got You Babe. The words were drivel except for one word. Babe? Where’s that Babe coming from? They’re stealing from Dylan, picking his pocket, ripping him off like a Tijuana pimp. Where’s a cop when you need one?
More calendar pages blowing in the wind, a veritable snowstorm of them. Time passes slowly up here in the mountains, the world goes its weary way. Dylan and I grow older. He’s much on the road these years, identities flicker like frames in a film. He’s a family man, a gypsy rover, a whiteface minstrel, a born-again Christian. He’s an 80-year-old bluesman from the Mississippi Delta: masks shuffle like cars in a deck. I try a few masks of my own.
Then comes a day when the attic is almost deserted. Except for Dylan, the tenants are long gone. Who knows where perhaps they’re winos living like street people. Heroes have feet of clay; they stand on shifting sands. A man must make his own way. A cold wind blows down Desolation Row, the ambulances are long gone, the sweeping Cinderella is so far past the age of being easy, her Bette Davis style is a grotesque vamping.
A man could learn to live listening to Woody Guthrie, Dylan said a long time ago. I believe that this is just as true of Dylan. You could learn to live listening your way through all those albums. Especially if you have an affinity for masks and one-eyed jacks and shifting identities: now you see me, now you don’t.
And you learn to accept growing older. You become aware of mortality. The sun lowers, hovers over the horizon. I got new eyes, Dylan marvels. Everything looks so far away.
Don’t think twice, it’s all right. The more things change the more they stay the same.
A man must make his own way, and you grow too old for heroes. But Dylan and I go back a long way; we’ve been through a lot together, and you never grow too old for a friend, even one you’ve never met.
Presidents come and go, and empires rise and crumble, but Dylan’s still on the road. The never-ending tour rolls on to its inevitable end. But nobody’s giving up here, nobody’s getting old. On Love and Theft, the most recent studio album, Dylan sounds positively rejuvenated, shot full of some kind of goat-gland ton
ic, funny as Charlie Chaplin, brash as Robert Johnson and wise and fatalistic as Mississippi John Hurt.
So jump into that hopped-up Mustang Ford, babe, and throw your panties overboard. This ride’s not over yet.
And hey girl from the North Country: Goodbye’s just too good a word, babe. So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.
CALVES HOWLING AT THE MOON
–To accept art you have to accept mystery–
I’M NOT AN ARTIST, I just paint for the reasons most people do the things they like, because they’re fun and because of the satisfaction you get when you have completed (or decided you’ve completed) a picture. And because you have an idea in your head, you try to paint pictures that equal it. They never do, but the feeling that you get a little closer each time is part of that satisfaction.
The first painting that ever affected me deeply was by Andrew Wyeth. I was in elementary school, about the fourth grade. Wednesday was library day, and although most of the books were off-limits to fourth graders, I looked forward all week to roaming around the shelves, and picking out titles that I promised myself I would read one day.
The librarian controlled us with an acerbic tongue and a fierce eye, but she liked me for a couple of reasons: because I could refold a newspaper and keep all the sections in order (If he can do that, I don’t know why the rest of you can’t) and because I had once asked her how much she had to pay to be in charge of all those library books.
She noticed that I was always drawing pictures, comic-book panels with Zane Grey Westerners pummeling each other with their fists or battling with six-guns.
She was also the high-school librarian, and one day she brought down from there a coffee-table book of prints of great American paintings. She told me I could take it home and study it for a few days. Look at something besides trash, she said. But don’t tear it. And don’t spill anything on it.
The picture that grabbed me was Christina’s World. Wyeth had painted a woman crouching on a grassy slope, who awkwardly faces away from the viewer, toward a New England farmhouse. Years later I read that the woman was disabled and that Wyeth had painted her climbing the hill in the only means of locomotion available to her. But the knowledge was not necessary to appreciate the painting. What affected me about the painting was its mystery. The background story neither deepened the mystery nor explained it. It was like that Frost poem about stopping by the snowy woods, miles to go before you sleep. The woman seemed affected by the gravity or enormity of something just out of view. To me, as a child, Christina’s World needed an explanatory panel before and following it.
If you’re doing a job for someone, say building a chicken coop, you have to build it the way you were hired to build it. Plumb and square, the size just so. A story or a song or a painting is your own chicken coop and you can build it the way you damn well please.
The first picture I made that I actually thought of as a painting was a present for my father. I was in the Navy then, the Vietnam War was going full-tilt, and I was on a destroyer in the South China Sea. Privacy was hard to come by, and late at night, when everyone except the watch section was asleep, I used to ease down to my work station, the computer room, to read and write. I decided to paint there.
My father had this thing about images of wolves and trains. I guess they represented a yearning for a world free from timeclocks and Sears payments and folks waiting for the food to be set out on the table. Now Christmas was approaching and I was going to paint them: three wolves on a snowy slope, a gauzy yellow moon to bay at, their breath smoking in the icy air.
I was well into it at three o’clock in the morning when the hatch sprang open and my division officer burst through it with a calculator in hand. The ship was rife with rumors that China was coming into the war to aid the North Vietnamese, and the officers spent a lot of time figuring the distance from mainland China and how long it would take jet fighters to reach the fleet. He was inside the room abrupt and sudden, his eyes sweeping for an uncapped bottle, his nose sniffing for marijuana, his ears straining to pick out the diminishing footsteps of naked Taiwanese prostitutes.
What the hell are you doing down here?
Trying to paint, I said.
He looked at the consoles, the walls.
Oh, he said, a picture? You’re painting a picture? You’re not even supposed to be here. You’re supposed to be in your rack, not wandering around the ship all night. We’re at war here, not running some art school. That’s mighty suspicious behavior.
I was just working on a Christmas present for my father, I said.
He came over to look. He squinted one eye, like a jeweler with his loupe screwed in. He shook his head, They look a little fluffy to me, he said.
A little what?
Fluffy. Plump, chunky. Hell, look at the shoulders on those suckers. They look like young cows. You’ve painted calves there, howling at the moon.
Well, so be it. Perhaps they were wolves who’d bulked themselves up on steroids and were grouped there baying at the moon, patiently awaiting the judgment of a congressional committee. Or perhaps they were not wolves at all, but offspring of dark and dangerous liaisons between seemingly incompatible beasts who had some black and lonely night been of a fey and experimental frame of mind.
Well, they were my wolves, or whatever the hell they were, and they looked like whatever I had painted onto the canvas. Maybe art is striving for the perfect wolf. The world is wide, you can walk toward the horizon the rest of your life and never reach it.
This was a long time ago, and the military is probably different now. Perhaps one is issued palette and brushes upon induction. But I decided it was unwise to paint aboard ship in the small hours of the morning. One’s motives, one’s very gender, seemed called into question. If, during a war, the compulsion to paint is overwhelming, Warhol-like silkscreens of AK-47’s might be acceptable. Jack Dempsey slamming the canvas. Best to avoid still lifes of light caught in wine bottles and artfully arranged pears. Perhaps best to avoid fruits altogether.
Just as if you are a closet writer by night, and work in a construction crew by day, you do not come on the job site interrupting conversations about football and deer hunting, with tales about the fragility of typewriter ribbons. This is just the way things are, it is the way of the world. If you have a secret identity to protect, if you are wearing a costume under your work clothes, you do not cross a landscape strewn with Budweiser cans and 30-06 casings trailing sheets of foolscap and calling out, Goddamn, boys, listen to this sonnet I wrote over the weekend.
The southern part of the country I live in is abandoned. It used to be owned by a mining company. The people who lived here, sometimes thirty families to a single hollow, are long dead, their children long dead. As the ore played out, the people played out with it. Nothing left but the graveyard, the stones weathernworn and tilted, the graves violated by tree roots and the burrowing of animals. Nothing left but broken glass and fallen brick and drilled holes forty feet deep.
It is a good place to find subjects to paint or to write about because it is a place obsessed with time, by the lives once lived here, the very atmosphere scored by hard times and rough ways. Listen closely and you can hear the timbre (but not the words) of long-gone conversations. All these lost lives seem to exist and to go on uninterrupted around you and every life exists simultaneously, every one layered like stacks of imaged glass that, held to the light, show all these past lives without precedence or priority, time itself having become pliable and of no moment. If you try to paint this landscape, a force that is invisible and just outside the frame (but there all the same) seems to affect whatever you are laying on the canvas.
I have a friend in Alabama who makes wind chimes from found objects. Though he has published a novel Hollywood made into a movie, he is known locally as The Wind Chime Man. His front yard tends down toward Mobile Bay and is thick with live oaks from those branches hang Spanish moss and his creations, which are like bizarre fruit, graceful or absurd or eerily b
eautiful. As the wind whistles through them, they clash gently like frozen leaves.
He finds suitable props on roadsides and at garbage dumps and he keeps objects he hasn’t yet found a place for in boxes: ancient bluegreen bottles that have imprisoned rays of light so that they gleam even in darkness, lost or discarded costume jewelry, the replevied engines of Lionel model trains.
I sat on a lawn chair one day and watched him work. He’d try an object, back off, and see if it matched whatever picture he had in his head, and try another one.
You’ve got enough of those things for all the front porches in the world, I said. Why do you keep making them?
He looked impatient, irritated. He shook his head. It’s therapy, he said. It keeps my mind occupied. Keeps me out of trouble. Besides, people won’t let me alone. They drive here from as far away as Atlanta and pay me three or four hundred dollars apiece for these things. They got to have some selection to pick from.
But he thought about it while he worked, because he knew I really wanted to know.
I just want to make something I’d like to look at, he said. Something that looks right.
All right. That works for me. Maybe art is just coming up with something you’d like to look at, whether it springs from dream or vision or nightmare.
I know another sculptor who was hired to build an animatronic horse for a Hollywood action movie. It had to be absolutely lifelike so that it could stumble and die broken-necked onscreen and no one save the ASPCA would be the wiser. It took a long time, but what he built required da Vinci’s knowledge of anatomy, the wise hands of Michelangelo, patience that would have taxed Job.
Is that art or commerce? I don’t know, but he also welds scrap metal into strange animals that few people pay him for. He joins discarded automobile axles and children’s tricycles and broken lawn chairs into constructs that look like creatures that have staggered from the tangled undergrowth of the imagination into reality, shaking their heads and blinking their eyes against the brightness, aghast at this world they’ve been brought into against their will. He also creates Goldbergian machines that look as though, given the proper voltage, they could power the world or short-circuit it.