Never Mind the Pollacks

by Neal Pollack

  I’m gonna get laid tonight, Pollack thought, and these broads are gonna make me dinner, and I’ll probably have a place to crash.

  “Hey, Bob,” he said. “Introduce me to your friends.”

  “This is Susan,” he said, “and this is Evelyn. They’re from New Jersey, and they love folk music.”

  “Well,” Pollack said. “We can’t deny them.”

  They sang together, and the women listened:

  Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, chokin’ on a chicken bone…

  The magazine Sing Out! sent Pollack to cover an April 9, 1961, protest against restrictions on folksinging in Washington Square. Pollack got drunk at the Cedar Tavern, passed out, and missed the whole event, but he filed the article anyway, calling it a “real righteous hootenanny.” The next night, April 10, everyone got together at Gerde’s Folk City to celebrate a successful protest. A rested Pollack brought his guitar and his notebook.

  The mainstays of the folk scene each sang a couple of songs—Dave Van Ronk (“subpar,” Pollack wrote in his notebook), Doc Watson (“half a man, no staying power”), Gil Turner (“sucks big ass”), Bob Dylan (“superhuman prodigy”), and, at the white-hot center of the evening, Ms. Joan Baez herself (“the luminescent paragon of perfect, a beauty unmatched on this continent, a voice like that of Circe, but with good intentions”).

  Pollack gazed upon Baez as she sang “Silver Dagger” and “El Preso Numero Nueve,” songs that, when sung by others, he later dismissed as the work of “pre-Cambrian Eurofags.” But on that night, as he later wrote on a bar napkin, “My heart thundered like the hooves of a thousand rhinos. I was Zorba the Greek drunk on ouzo afire, hovering over a moonlit bog of unrequited desperate love. Joan was the shimmering luz de mi corazon.”

  Afterward, Pollack and Dylan sat together at Gerde’s, eating peanuts and grinding the shells under their authentic work boots.

  “Hey, man,” Dylan said. “I want Joanie to hear our Woody Guthrie song.”

  “Naw,” said Pollack, his stomach boiling with love. “She wouldn’t have time for us.”

  It was nearly 2 A.M., and a friend was hustling Baez out the door, along with her sister Mimi. Dylan made for the exit, but Pollack, unusually shy, could barely stand to follow him.

  “Joan, hey, Joan!” Dylan said. “I’m Bob Dylan! Mind if I play you a song?”

  He sang for her.

  “That was very nice, thank you,” she said.

  Behind Dylan, Pollack wept softly into his fisherman’s cap. Joan Baez noticed him for the first time.

  “Who’s your sad and sensitive friend?” she said.

  “My name is Neal Pollack,” he said. “My life for you!”

  Pollack covered his mouth.

  What’s the matter with me? he thought.

  “Are you a folksinger, Neal?” Joan asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Can I hear something?”

  Pollack sighed, his belly full of hungry love rodents that gnawed at his soul.

  “Yes,” he said. “This here’s a song that I wrote after I saw something terrible in Kentucky, something so terrible that I had to write a song about it.”

  What he sang next had been lost until the lyrics and music were recently found in the basement of a Long Island lighthouse. No one knows how the document got there, but it bears Pollack’s authentic scrawl. In a voice from the past, yet very much in the present, he played…

  THE BALLAD OF EMMETT O’DONNELL

  Poor Emmett O’Donnell shot the Boone County sheriff

  With an old Remlinger that he perched on his shoulder

  At his family’s farmhouse way out in the country.

  And the cops were called in and they shot up his barn

  And they brought the dogs in to nuzzle his corpse

  And they hacked up his body all riddled with bullets.

  But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,

  We do not need your attention.

  Your sympathies are quite worthless in

  This state House of detention.

  Emmett O’Donnell, who at twenty-four years

  Farmed six hundred acres of corn and of carrots

  With no one around but his simpleton sister

  And a hulking manservant, left over from slavery,

  Could not tolerate the banks’ sternest warning

  All the notes of foreclosure went straight into the garbage

  With the leftover fruit and the cheese and the wrappings.

  But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,

  We do not need your attention.

  Your sympathies are quite worthless in

  This state House of detention.

  Marcellus Kincaid was the Boone County sheriff

  He was fifty-five years and had fathered twelve children

  By six different women who he never married

  Who he never looked at while he was impregnating.

  He planned and completed more than sixty-two lynchings

  He laughed and he laughed at the drunks in the gutter

  And burned down the taverns when they didn’t make payments

  To his election fund, which he used to throw parties

  In a brothel with guests like the mayor and governor

  Who passed bill after bill to hurt the cursed farmers

  Like Emmett O’Donnell, who was dead on his birthday.

  But you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,

  We do not need your attention.

  Your sympathies are quite worthless in

  This state House of detention.

  In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel

  To let the people know that dead Emmett O’Donnell

  Would hang for the murder of the Boone County sheriff.

  And that Emmett’s corpse, it would twist from the galleys

  For one hundred long weeks before heading to prison

  Where an outfitted cell would be specially curated,

  For the remains of the man who’d shot up the sheriff.

  For a most dire warning for the other poor prisoners

  That until their death, the state owned all their bodies

  And would hold them in jail until eternal heaven

  For their baseless desire to smoke marijuana.

  Oh, but you who don’t understand the story of Emmett O’Donnell,

  We do not need your attention.

  Your sympathies are quite worthless in

  This state House of detention.

  As Baez later recalled in her memoir Fly, Tender Butterfly, “his singing was abysmal and his playing was worse, but something about Neal made me fall like I’d never fallen before. I melted.”

  “Come home with me tonight,” she said.

  “Yes,” Pollack said. “I must.”

  “Can I come, too?” Dylan said.

  “No,” said Joan Baez.

  “Can I go home with your sister, then?”

  “No,” she said.

  Joan extended her hand to Pollack, and he took it in an exulted trance. Their flesh seemed to ripple at the touch. They laughed together instantly; no one could understand their love, borne on wings to heaven by the tragedies of folk and the triumph of future hope.

  A cab took them into the night. Neal Pollack eased his head onto Joan Baez’s lap and began to cry.

  “It’s been so hard,” he said. “I miss my mommy.”

  “I know, sweetie,” she said. “I know.”

  Back in front of Gerde’s, Bob Dylan picked the nits out of his hair and stared at the bills. Pollack was a big fucking phony. He wasn’t no hobo, no fishin’ cowboy. And he’d stolen Joan Baez.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to himself. “This just won’t do.”

  In the summer of 1961, Pollack and Baez moved into a one-room pine saltbox house in the Carmel Highlands of California. Joan did all the cleaning and made all the meals on a wood-burning stove. She also te
nded to the lawn and the gravel driveway and cleared away the pine needles to make a path leading to a stone chapel in the woods, which she built herself. Sometimes she stole an hour to practice her guitar, but she also had to feed the ten chickens that Neal, on a whim, had purchased at the farmer’s market in Monterey. Twice a day, at Neal’s command, they made love, and then, also at his command, she wrote song lyrics about him, which he promptly made her discard.

  “Now that I think about it,” she said later, “it wasn’t an entirely equal relationship.”

  They lived this way for months. Pollack spent the day working on a novel, which he said was about “an abandoned child in America,” as well as occasional folk songs, and various other untitled projects. At night, they would eat dinner and drink wine. Joan would sing for a while, she would draw his bath, and then they would tumble about. In bed, they shared as lovers do.

  “We must have a civil rights bill in this country,” she said. “It’s a moral imperative.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know a black man.”

  “Josh White?”

  “No. There is another.”

  Pollack began to weep.

  “What is it?” Joan said.

  “Every time I think of this man, it reminds me of something true, yet also false. He’s the source of everything, but also nothing. All my life, I search for him, find him, and then lose him again. To me, he’s nothing but a loosely disconnected series of glimpses, yet also the raw hard truth of the primeval.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Joan,” said Neal, “I’ve kept this from you all these months, because I didn’t want to hurt you. But I’m not who you think I am.”

  “Who are you?”

  Pollack seemed to grow in size, and stature. He also seemed to radiate glory. Like Persephone returning to the underworld after an overripe summer, Baez absorbed his words, feeling her soul grow darker.

  “I’m a rock critic,” Pollack said. “Since I was eight, I’ve known that I bear a critical mind so shrewd that it may someday tragically lead me to damnation. And it’s all because of this man. When I first heard his music in a Chicago alley, I knew that I had to find the source. But that was fifteen years ago, and I’m no closer now than I was then. Everything I’ve done, whether I’ve known it or not, has been a search for this man. They call him Clambone Jefferson. He is the horrible essence of American music. He is my god.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “I’m scared.”

  She stroked his hair, soft from months of her careful conditioning. He cried softly.

  “There, there, little bird,” she said. “Let it all out. Tell your Joan about your Clambone.”

  And so he did:

  William Arugula Clambone Jefferson was born in South Carolina to a recently immigrated Afro-Cuban Jew named Carmela Goldfarb. When Clambone was four, his mother accidentally mailed herself to Omaha, Nebraska. A judge sent Clambone to live with his only known relative, a vicious bootlegger and killer by the name of Pee Wee Wilson, in a three-room outhouse in the very depths of Louisiana Bayou country. Clambone spent his days locked in a four-by-six cedar crate, listening to his uncle play the accordion, plotting murder. In 1917, the judge sent Clambone to the Louisiana Boys’ State Reformatory Home for the crime of disemboweling his uncle with a tuning fork. Clambone quickly amazed his fellow inmates with his easy mastery of a number of instruments, including the saxophone, drums, slide trombone, and hurdy-gurdy.

  One of Jefferson’s fellow inmates was a young man named Louis Armstrong. He heard Jefferson playing in the prison courtyard one day and never forgot that sound. “It sounded like a clam,” Satchmo said, “only with a bone in it.”

  At the age of seventeen, Clambone Jefferson broke out of prison. He began a journey deep into the heart of the South, descending into a seamy world of clinging vines and thick, viscous swamps and broken-down old juke shacks populated by bighipped rough-skinned women, down, down, down into the depths, into the dirty stanky hungry maw.

  Rather than making a deal with the devil, which was popular in those days, he moved in with a white farmer and hillbilly guitarist named Doc Thompson, who lived just outside Natchez, Mississippi. All day, they would beat each other senseless with hoes and then play out on Thompson’s front porch, a keg of moonshine between their legs, songs like “Shrimps in My Shoe,” “If I Had One More Minute I’d Pass This Stone,” “The Devil Bit My Ass In Two,” and “Won’t Stop Drinkin’ Till I Start Drinkin’ at Dawn,” which went like this:

  Won’t stop drinkin’

  Till I start drinkin’ at dawn.

  Yeah, I won’t stop drinkin’

  Still I start drinkin’ at dawn

  Well, the devil bit my ass in two

  And now my baby

  Is long gone.

  Musicologist Alan Lomax ran out of gas in front of Thompson’s farm one night. He heard the music and got out his gear. The next day, Jefferson beat Lomax up and took his recordings. He and Thompson sold their collected songs to a company in New York for more than one thousand dollars.

  In 1930 Jefferson shot Thompson dead, stole his car and his prize sheep, Tootie, and lighted out for Chicago, where jazz was hot and jazz was cool. For a time Clambone owned a nightclub called the Wet Grotto, which was closed by the health and revenue departments simultaneously, and he played piano with Cab Calloway, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t that Cab Calloway. The 1940s came along soon enough. Clambone spent much of the decade in a coma. On December 6, 1941, after attending a meeting of the American Nazi Party, he injected a quart of sugar water into his left leg.

  He awoke in 1949, staggered down to Maxwell Street, played a full set, kissed a mysterious woman who he only knew as “sexy bitch,” and collapsed again.

  Then it was 1951, and a beautiful nurse was hovering over him.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  “Why, Memphis, Tennessee,” she said.

  She held his hand.

  “You’re going to be OK,” she said. “I’m going to take care of you. Forever.”

  Clambone ripped out his IV. He slugged the nurse in the face, pinched her wallet, and fled the hospital into the street. For blocks and blocks, he ran like he had nowhere to go. Then he realized that he really did have nowhere to go, and he collapsed on a park bench, panting to himself, “That’s all right, Mama, that’s all right.”

  He started saying it louder and louder, and then singing it, until his voice became a quivering, plaintive wail that fused together the blues and country yodeling, with a distinct, rhythmic backbeat.

  The legend goes that Clambone’s voice was heard all throughout Memphis that spring morning. As he moaned away on the park bench, a tall, handsome man wearing a cowboy hat approached him.

  “Hello,” the man said. “My name is Sam Phillips.”

  Clambone never saw the man again.

  The story ended, incomplete. Dawn shivered over the trees, and bathed an exhausted Neal Pollack and Joan Baez in redemptive light. The ocean heaved a half mile in the distance, and he slept. Joan looked at the strange, hairy man lying next to her, and her eyes trembled with tendrils of love. What an authentic person he was!

  The doorbell rang. Neal didn’t stir. Joan put on a flowered housedress.

  Lo and behold! It was Bob Dylan. He kissed Joan’s hand.

  “Hey hey,” he said. “Come to stay a while. And I brought very cheap wine.”

  During the day, while Pollack wrote, Dylan and Baez took long walks by the sea and in the woods. Dylan told her things that, at first, she didn’t believe.

  “Neal says that he’s just with you because he wants to become famous.”

  “Neal believes that we should resegregate the schools, and he voted for Nixon in 1960.”

  “He doesn’t like your singing or your cooking.”

  “He had syphilis.”

  The effects accumulated. At night, Pollack and Dylan worked on songs and smoked cigarettes while Joan cooked them dinner. When
Dylan was around, Pollack tended to ignore Joan, only taking her into his lap after the second bottle of wine.

  “I love this woman!” he said.

  Meanwhile, Dylan filled Joan’s head with sinister whispers.

  “Pollack has other girlfriends.”

  “He told me you’re a lesbian.”

  “His family sent money to McCarthy in 1953.”

  Baez began sleeping outside, because she said it was good for her skin. Pollack joined her in the sleeping bag often, but she no longer stroked his hair or talked to him after sex. Her eyes gazed at the moon, but not at him.

  Late one night, a wolf moaned, causing the elk to flee. A vague frost formed on the ground, and Pollack felt his body chill. Next to him in the sleeping bag, Joan was stirring.

  “Neal,” she said, “we can’t do this anymore.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s almost winter. We should sleep inside.”

  “No. I’m leaving you.”

  “You are not.”

  “I am. We can’t see each other anymore.”

  “But I love you!”

  “You may think it’s love,” she said, “but it’s not. It’s become something sick and terrible.”

  “Come on, baby,” Pollack said. “Don’t be such a drag.”

  “I don’t need you, Neal,” she said.

  “I am your deflowerer!”

  “Neal,” she said, “I wasn’t a virgin when I met you. Not even close.”

  Neal Pollack yowled into the darkness. He scrambled from the sleeping bag, mad with heartbreak and shattered ego. Plunging naked into the woods, he tore at his cheek flesh with long nails.

  “ARRRRRRRRGH!” he said.

  It was unimaginable out there.

  The moon threw off shards of glinty light. Pollack’s bare feet touched a patch of stone slathered with slimy moss. He spilled to the pine-needle floor, his head slamming to the rocky earth. His chin cracked and bled. He crawled toward wood’s end, where the ocean slammed the cliff with tidal inevitability.