by Larry Sloman
“Rolling Thunder’s wife stands out in a crowd,” Ratso defends. “I like alliteration. Don’t worry you’ll get your fucking Wall Street Journal information too. We oughta send you to business school, Chet. Wouldn’t you rather work for Forbes?”
“It’s just that money is a part of any tour,” the editor explains.
“Well, I’m an artist, you know,” Ratso sulks.
“This is all you got from Dylan?”
“It’s a page of fucking quotes, the rest is personal.”
“Oh come on, Larry. It ain’t much.”
“It’s a page.”
“I’m talking about the quality of the thing. You really haven’t asked Bob anything, he’s telling you what he wants reported.”
“If you think I’m going to ask him about who he’s sleeping with, you’re mistaken,” Ratso huffs.
“I’m not talking about that kind of crap. Business, for one thing. How much is everybody getting? How much is he gonna get out of the thing?”
“I got quotes from Kemp on that, he’s not getting a penny. It’s all going into the film.”
“The film ain’t gonna make money?” Flippo chuckles.
“Sure it will. So, he doesn’t deserve money? You don’t think he deserves money? Did you ever see him sweat onstage?” Ratso shakes his head in disgust.
“I didn’t say he doesn’t deserve money. I just said he needs to talk about it.”
“He needs to talk about his money. That’s none of your goddamn business,” Ratso shouts, finding himself very protective of Dylan.
“Well, if he’s charging the goddamn public $8.50 it is,” Flippo shoots back.
“Why? What does anyone charge? What does Elton John charge?” Ratso finds himself parroting Dylan.
“Well he should answer for it too, man. Look, if someone’s putting on a show for $8.50 and the people in the seats can’t even hear the goddamn thing. I talked to a lot of people in New Haven who couldn’t hear.”
“I was in New Haven, I didn’t hear anybody ask for their money back after the show. There was a standing ovation.”
“What I heard, the night show in New Haven there was no standing ovation,” Chet parries.
“Who told you that?”
“People who were there.”
“I was on a chair watching,” Ratso starts.
“You were the standing ovation,” Chet cracks.
“I was standing on a chair in the fourth row facing out with my back to the stage. You got jaded friends who are telling you they didn’t like it. Why don’t you just come to any one concert? I’m talking from the musician’s standpoint, the audience’s standpoint, and from other media accounts, they say it’s the greatest show they’ve ever seen. And Rolling Stone is getting the inside story.”
“We haven’t yet, man. I just went over this thing again with Abe and it’s not a good story by Rolling Stone standards.”
“What should we do?” Ratso picks up the challenge. “Forget it, I’ll just sell it somewhere else.”
“We gotta print something this time.”
“You can get something,” Ratso jeers. “You got some crack reporters, Dylan’ll love them.”
“That’s the problem. You’ve gotten too close to Dylan to report the tour.”
“So get someone who can get better stuff, more access than me,” Ratso challenges.
“Your access is not doing any good.”
“What would you have gotten that I haven’t gotten?”
“Business.”
“I can’t. They don’t want to talk about that, man. I’m getting what I possibly can get. You think anybody else could have gotten Joan Baez to say ‘shove it up their ass’?” Ratso fumes.
“No. But you wouldn’t have gotten it if I hadn’t been on your ass to get it.”
“So keep on my ass but I can’t get business shit. I’m not a fucking accountant.”
“Meanwhile you’re doing a great thing for the movie and we ain’t getting great coverage. Not what you filed with Iris today. It’s generalities.”
“You’re right, it’s not a Wall Street Journal piece. It’s the spirit of the tour. It covers it, the stuff about Lisa. She’s a prototype on this tour. I’m a sociologist, I’m not a fucking businessman, and that was a sociological piece. And if it was flowery at times, it was flowery because there’s a reason to be flowery, because they’re doing something here that’s never been done before. I don’t know about finances.”
“I ain’t just talking about the finances,” Chet interrupts, “I’m talking about other things. Like what a show is really like, you never talk about the name of the halls.”
“I was just trying to get the flavor of the tour and that’s the flavor, Kemp’s role, Lisa as a fanatic fan, there are at least ten girls like that following the tour like vagabonds, the mask, Dylan on stage, that pins it down. I didn’t say he picked his nose in New Haven. How many details can you get in a two-thousand-word article. I thought you wanted to cover the press, Kemp’s role, relations with the press, the opening is the guy this tour was named after, nobody else spotted him, when he was onstage, this fucking Indian wanders onstage during the finale, stroking a fucking feather, looking self-confident like he’s inheriting the stage. That’s a perfect lead.”
“Well, there’s almost no reporting. Just general impressions. You glossed over Kemp, he’s really an asshole.”
“No, he ain’t,” Ratso decides.
“He acts like an asshole at times, locking people up.”
“He never locked me in a room. I would have locked up that guy from the Village Voice too.”
“Why don’t you describe some of the things he has done to you? Like kicking you out of the hotel.”
“OK, put it in,” Ratso relents. “Rough treatment, which included barring all press from hotels, confiscating cameras at doors, put it in, I’m not afraid of Kemp. Is that enough? Want to hit him some more? Say he generally made access to the performers virtually impossible.”
“Is he doing this on Dylan’s orders?”
“No, off the record, I had told Dylan some of the shit going down. He doesn’t know all that stuff. Dylan’s not like the head of the Mafia, he doesn’t direct Kemp to do shit. Dylan’s a crazy artist, like I say in the piece, ‘more concerned about those roses shooting out of the waitress’ head than who gets backstage passes in Waterbury.’”
“Yeah, what does that mean?” Flippo wonders.
“Artists have different perceptions …”
“I know, but what does roses shooting out of a waitress’ head mean?”
“It’s like a surreal image, artists have different conceptions of reality.”
“It doesn’t come across that way in print.”
“It does to people I read it to.”
“We’re not putting out Rolling Stone for them,” Flippo fumes. “When you read that you say, ‘What waitress? What roses?’”
“So change it. He’s concerned about Rubin. Put that in. More concerned about Rubin in solitary than backstage passes.”
“Detail,” Chet chides.
“I’m more concerned whether people on the tour thought I captured it, than someone totally removed from it.”
“That’s what I’m talking about, being too close to it.”
“You’re too far away from it.”
“I know but the readers are far away from it too.”
“And this draws them into it,” Ratso concludes.
“I don’t think it does,” Flippo shakes his head, “it doesn’t draw me into it.”
“Well, then you’re a bureaucrat,” Ratso shrugs.
“Bullshit, where do you get that crap.”
“You’re a bureaucrat, you got a Wall Street Journal mentality.”
“Bullshit, everybody in the fucking country—”
“You’re asking me to ask business questions.”
“That’s part of it.”
“But that’s not what the kids want to read,”
Ratso rallies.
“How do you know?”
“I know kids. I ask them. Who talks to more kids and derelicts on the street than me?” Ratso falls silent. “Oh, do you want any stuff on Sara. He’s married to her. Not Ronee Blakley, remember?”
“I understand. That was a joke when I asked you that.”
“Oh, man,” Ratso feigns concern, “I told him that. I didn’t know you were joking.”
“Oh fuck, I was joking,” Flippo’s annoyed, “from now on I’ll raise a flag.”
“I thought you were serious,” Ratso suppresses a laugh. “By the way, I got an interview with three groupies the other night, they said they wanted to schmutz Dylan.”
“What does schmutz mean?” Flippo the editor asks.
“I don’t know, I guess fuck.”
“Put it in, put it in,” Flippo yells, “how do you spell schmutz?”
When Ratso checked out of his Danbury motel on Sunday, after what seemed like a week on the phone, he decided to forego the next night’s concerts in Rochester and instead drive straight to Boston, where his friend Pat, who wrote for the Boston Globe, would put him up, a timely hospitality since the journalist had already spent most of the expense money Rolling Stone had wired him in Danbury. The drive to Cambridge was uneventful, the lodgings there more than adequate, so after unpacking a bit, Ratso jumped back into the Monte Carlo and decided to explore Boston’s night life.
After a few hours’ sightseeing, he’s pretty wired, the few drinks interacting with the amphetamine to produce a restless gnawing angst. Well, if I can’t relax I may as well make myself useful, he thinks, and steps into a pay phone to call Mel Howard in Rochester.
“Howard, you fucker, it’s Ratso. I feel like Walter Fucking Winchell, I’m speeding, freezing my ass off, standing in a booth in Boston. You got anything for me to do?”
“Rats baby,” Howard’s soothing voice floats back, “we need a bare room, actually we need an old house, spooky, Edgar Allan Poe-ish.”
Ratso hears a muffled conversation then Howard comes back. “Here, Bob wants to talk to you.”
“Hey man,” Dylan greets Ratso. “Listen, line up all the pool halls and all-night diners you can find.”
“How about whores?” Ratso screams. “There’s millions here, and transvestites, pimps, all that shit.”
“Yeah, yeah, pool halls, whores, and all-night diners.”
“I can’t make the gig,” Ratso apologizes.
“Man, you missed last night. It was super. O. J. Simpson came. O. J. got into a rap with T-Bone.” Dylan laughs.
“Hey, where are you staying in Boston?”
“I dunno,” Dylan answers.
“C’mon, you can tell me.”
“Hey, I’d tell ya, but I don’t know,” Dylan protests. “Shit, if anybody can find it you can. I don’t even know, you’ll find it. See you tomorrow.”
Ratso bounces back onto Boylston, buoyed by his mission. He strides immediately into The Store, an odd-looking establishment that’s open twenty-four hours and takes food stamps, as the large signs boast. The reporter prowls down the aisles, admiring the range of merchandise, everything from food to clothing to magazines to Maalox. He finds the manager, a young guy around thirty, well dressed, and asks about the clientele.
“In this area, we get everything that walks, bums, winos, hookers, street people.” In the background, WBCN is blaring Little Walter’s Time Machine, a bizarre program that seems to have been lifted intact out of the ’50s. By now, Ratso has induced the manager to show him where the whores hang out and the two of them walk out and huddle in the fall night chill.
“Not too many whores out tonight,” the manager surveys, “maybe ’cause of that scare. There’s a guy in a pickup truck driving around in a leather jacket, blue beret, glasses, and jeans and cutting up girl’s faces after they suck his dick. But you ought to try Bulkies’, the deli down the block. The hookers always hang out there for coffee.”
Ratso thanks him and scurries down the block. He enters Bulkies’ and slides into a booth. It could be any deli in New York, Ratso thinks, the same glarey orange vinyl decor, the busty, ugly waitresses, the scattered businessmen eating chopped liver, and yes, the chinchilla-wrapped hookers sipping coffee in the rear booth. The journalist decides on corned beef, Dr. Brown’s soda, and a side order of derma, and by the time he finishes relaying the order the waitress has already offered him a Compoz.
By the time the food comes, the place has filled up. In the next booth, four gays are discussing football, of all things. Four more hookers have filed in, two of them with a black pimp dressed in green crushed velvet. At the round table to Ratso’s right, a half-drunk businessman is busy trying to pick up one of the zaftig waitresses, while a tough small Irish-looking guy cracks up. Ratso finishes his sandwich and joins the table.
“Hi, I’m Phil Dryden, I’m in the shoe business,” the tipsy, suited one says, then returns his attention to Arline, the brassy waitress. “I married a well-to-do girl,” Phil explains, “but I want to go to bed with her.” Arline recoils in mock terror. “Honey if I’m not there, start without me.” Ratso turns to Murphy, who’s been quiet through all this. “What do you do?” he says to the Cagney lookalike. Murphy whips out his wallet and flashes a gold badge, instantly replacing it in his pocket.
“I’m a night judge in Superior Court. I set bail in Superior Court cases,” Murphy lies. Ratso figures him to be a bail bondsman, and asks if he knows any of the prostitutes scattered around the room, explaining that he’s looking for people for the Dylan movie.
“Murphy? Ha, ha,” Arline booms, “you should see the cast of characters he knows.” Murphy smiles. “You want to meet some whores?” he says portentously, his eyes twinkling. “Follow me.”
Murphy leads Ratso to a booth in the back occupied by two young white girls. One is wearing a white fur coat, piled-up reddish hair, and a fancy dress, the other’s got short hair, one great big earring, a black leather coat, and her boobs spilling out of a black dress. Murphy introduces them as Rega and Kim, and tells them about the movie.
“How much money for the movie,” Rega challenges Ratso, “nobody donates anymore. Two thousand dollars and I’ll do it.” She looks down the aisle. “Get that fucking broad,” she motions toward the waitress, “what a dingy creep.”
“C’mon,” Murphy says soothingly, “she’s all right. She’s a poet.”
“I’m a poet too,” Rega snaps, “I’m starving to death.”
The waitress, who seems to have a clubfoot, limps up.
“Can I have my water?” Rega asks coolly. “I want my ice to chew on.”
The girls’ food comes, hamburgers and French fries, and Rega starts to scatter onions over her burger as Kim looks on, horrified. “Oh, it’s OK,” Rega reassures, “it’s after 2 A.M., I’ll eat onions. Who cares? I’ll just go home and let my dog lick me.” She looks toward Ratso and turns serious. “The last time someone tried to film down here the camera got smashed,” she says ominously.
“It’s slow tonight,” Kim breaks the silence.
“Do you know Alison, the fat broad?” Rega asks. “She got cut up. And TC with the big boobs, she got cut up with a rock. Must be the same guy. Nobody’ll bust him.”
“They got a good description of him,” Ratso interjects, “he drives a pickup truck.”
“So what,” Rega spits. “He’ll change cars and come down in a Volkswagen. A girl was stabbed last week in Liberty Mall. I didn’t know her, but she had hooker shoes. Sequins on her heels. It was just a slasher. In New York, at least, the cops protect the girls. Here they do shit. I had to fight once to get out of a car that took me out to Chelsea.”
Murphy looks bored and he takes out his beeper and flips it on, producing a blast of static. Rega laughs. “I got a beeper too, Murphy,” she bats her eyelashes, “I’ll show it to you.” Ratso offers the girls tickets to the Boston shows, but Rega politely declines. “You can keep the tickets. We won’t be able to use them, we�
�ll be working. You know, you remind me of Donald Sutherland. You’re better-looking than Sutherland, though, Ratso.” He smiles and offers the girls Hurricane T-shirts instead. Rega’s eyes light up.
“Yeah, I might want a small. Listen, if you go in to any of the places in the Combat Zone, where the hooker bars are, don’t ask too many questions. You don’t want your glasses smashed.” Rega stares at Ratso, concerned.
“Do you have a pimp?” the reporter wonders.
“No, any girl that has a pimp is just a masochist.” Rega frowns. “They hate themselves, they must want to inflict pain on themselves.” She looks down at the empty plate. “It’s T-shirt time, huh?”
Ratso tries to stall. “How much do you charge?”
“Fifty dollars an hour,” Rega shoots back, “but that varies. I like to make it with Chinks. They come quick, in your hand. They’re look freaks.”
A tall black girl in a long white chinchilla coat lopes by and Murphy stares at the new arrival. Rega slips on her fur coat and they head for the door, passing a white girl accompanied by her black pimp.
“I’m gonna have my own car, someday,” Rega dreams, “a Rolls. I’ll make five hundred dollars a night.”
Murphy frowns. “So what, I’m lying,” Rega continues, “I’m better off than that chick we just passed. She better make it or she gets her teeth kicked in. That spade looked like a mean bastard. I’d never give my money away. I don’t know, maybe she likes it. Look how many square women stay with a man for fifty years and get beat up every day, fuck ’em three times a week? What’s the difference? But with these guys, it’s not love taps. I know that broad, she gets cracked bad, but she’s out there like rain, snow, sleet, no matter.” Rega looks down at her watch. “I’m almost all right for tonight, I came out at ten o’clock, it’s three now.” She looks down deserted Boylston Street with no tricks in sight. “What am I supposed to do,” she shrugs, “manufacture it?”
The four of them walk around the corner to Ratso’s car and he opens the trunk and emerges with two T-shirts. “Oh, this is cute, honey,” Rega gushes, “I’m wearing it tomorrow night. I’m in a bowling league.” They pile into the car, and Ratso starts down Boylston. “I went out with Dustin Hoffman,” Rega offers, “four years before he made it big. He was with a theater company in Boston. He looks like Ringo, he’s cute.” Murphy summons Ratso to a halt and the three get out and head for his car. Ratso drives on to check out the Howard Johnson’s, another hangout for the night people in the area.