Bob wore scarves, a grey felt wide-brimmed hat wreathed with flowers, pin-striped shirts with tiny mandarin collars, vests, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. He played a two-hour set with band and friends. Other people were featured at different times in the show. There was an anorexic palm reader named Scarlett Rivera who had black hair cascading to her waist and maroon lipstick and who played the gypsy violin, swaying back and forth in feathers and sequins and peering up occasionally at Bob. A small angel named David Mansfield played the steel guitar, the violin, and the piano. He had a pretty white face framed with curls, and one day the Rolling Thunder ladies dressed him in wings and a halo and nothing else but his shorts, and made him play the violin for us. A tall albino southerner with clear skin and black circles around his eyes sang a seven-minute song about a Japanese maiden who, I think, committed hara-kiri. Roger McGuinn came on and sang “Chestnut Mare” and got lassoed on the last note by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, who one night ran through all the trailers stark naked. Cowboy Kinky Friedman whooped out onto the stage dressed in a ten-gallon hat and chaps, and sang “Asshole from El Paso.” Ronee Blakely, looking like a cross between Greta Garbo and a Midwest prostitute, sat at the piano every night singing a long sad song with a heartbreak chorus which repeated over and over like a wolf’s howl. Her lips were pooched out like Marilyn Monroe’s, as though waiting for someone to poke a straw into the little round hole and offer her a milkshake. I told her I’d give her a hundred dollars if I ever caught her with her mouth shut. Providing laughter and insanity was Neuwirth. (My savior on the London tour so many years before. I had in fact been friends with Neuwirth long before I met Bob. He used to come visit Mimi and me when we lived in Belmont, near Boston, to cheer us up and make us laugh.) He put on a clown face, the kind with the big red nose and bald head and hair tufts of green nylon, and went onstage and sang “Where Did Vincent Van Gogh?” with Bob, who wore a clear plastic mask which made him look like a wax facsimile of himself. When Ronee saw everyone getting dressed up, she put on rhinestone flame-shaped pixie glasses and a beret, and painted red hearts on her cheeks and a big black moustache over her pretty upper lip.
The band leader, Rob Stoner, was a handsome ambitious lad with sexy eyes and pockmarks, and he did a lot of acting in the film Bob was making of the tour. I heard about the film; unlike “Don’t Look Back,” the documentary made of the English tour of 1964, this one would supposedly have acting and plots and scenes and characters. I heard a rumor that I had refused to be in it. Everyone else was in it, the guitar pickers and drummers and light and sound people. So one day I put on a curly red wig, a long, belted T-shirt and high boots, slapped on some makeup (including a couple of oversized black beauty marks), popped some green gum into my mouth, and slinked, chewing and clacking, onto the hotel balcony where a scene was being filmed. Dashing Stoner was dolled up in a black sequined cowboy shirt, pompadour, and shades. I went up and perched myself on the balcony railing, wrapped my legs around him, took the wad of green gum out of my mouth and stuck it to his cheek. Then I grabbed his pretty pockmarked face and French-kissed him. That’s how I let it be known that I wanted to be in the movies.
One day I was trudging around in the snow on a farm in Canada with Dylan, doing a “scene.” I had spent half an hour gluing on synthetic eyelashes and had been given a new wig, long and dark and curly. Naturally, I was playing a Mexican whore—the Rolling Thunder women all played whores. The scene opened with Bob shoving me through the snow toward a shack. In fact there was neither a plot nor a script so the characters “developed” as we went along. I went into the shack and sidled up to the hero, Harry Dean Stanton, the only real actor we had with us. He’d been called in from Hollywood to play the good guy, and he and I were supposed to sing “Cucurrucucu Paloma” and talk in Spanish and fall in love and then start kissing. Then, to our horror, in would barge Dylan (or maybe it was Jack Elliot, I don’t remember), and emboldened by the newfound hero at my side I would chastise him in my heavy Mexican accent. It was a cold day, and I wondered what I was doing in this monumentally silly project, and if Dylan was taking it seriously. Sam Shepard was there, supposedly directing it, or writing it, but it was never written, and barely directed. Bob would stand in back of the camera and chuckle to himself and get everyone to run around and act out his mind movies. The filming happened in gleeful little happenings, enacting whatever dream Dylan had had in the night.
One day in the hotel in Portland, Maine, Allen Ginsberg read a poem to a ballroom full of mah-jongg players. The cameras filmed his performance, and the reaction of the startled Jewish community. They didn’t know how to respond to this world-famous literary figure with the long beard, who started out mildly enough but ended up shouting about bearded vaginas, his eyes growing round and wild behind his glasses.
Another day we all got in busses and went to see Arlo Guthrie at a gypsy’s place in upstate New York. It was a restaurant with a bar, and while everyone sat around drinking hot toddies Bob was wildly trying to get a scene to happen, and the old gypsy lady spotted me and said I must go up to her room. There she showed me the small embroidered smudgy pillow she slept with containing the ashes of her late husband. She told me she was never lonely. On the bed lay a faded, beaded white satin evening dress. It was ankle length and had lace straps over the satin bodice. Next to it were a little antique embroidered opera purse and a choke necklace of fake pearls and rhinestones.
“Put the dress on,” she said cheerfully, and I did. It fit perfectly. She brushed a tear from her grubby cheek and shook her head sagely, saying that she had known I would be coming that day, though she had no idea who I was, and that the dress and purse and necklace were mine. Then she kissed me and said to go down and join the crowd. I felt positively magical gliding down the stairwell, and everybody spotted me at once and said “Ooh” and “Ahh,” and Bob decided to do a “scene” with me. Before the scene started we walked down to a little lake. It was a cold fall day with a low sun in a grey sky. I was barefoot, and we stood under a tree and spoke softly (I don’t remember about what), like two normal people. For a very few minutes we went back to another time, when we were nineteen years old, standing with brown leaves falling all around and snow in our hair . . . I knew the magic would stop when we turned around, but I didn’t mind. We walked back up the hill to do the “scene.” In front of the cameras I said everything that came into my head. I asked Bob why he’d never told me about Sara, and what he thought would have happened to us if we’d gotten married way back then. He couldn’t improvise very well, so I answered my own questions. I said it wouldn’t have worked out because I was too political and he lied too much, and he just stood there with his hand on the bar smiling and embarrassed because he didn’t know what else to do, though what I said was no news to him.
On the train Sara sat on Bob’s lap. The kids were scattered up and down the seats, four Dylans, Gabe, and Gabe’s friend, Iggy. I was not jealous of Sara, as I thought I’d be. In fact, I felt protective of her. She was too frail to be a mom. Her skin was white and translucent, and her eyes were huge and black. Everything about her face looked frail: the rings under her eyes, the tiny dents in her forehead that would come and go when her mood changed, her hair thin and fluffy like black angel hair, her pouting lips and perfect nose, her high arched eyebrows. Sara was cold in winter; she didn’t seem to have enough energy. We smiled at each other, and one day began to talk about everything—meaning, of course, Bob. She was careful. She was loyal. But I felt somehow that we had formed an alliance of survival against her husband.
Bob and Sara were ill-equipped to handle the practical matters of everyday life. I was forever handing them towels, bringing them glasses of water and cups of coffee, lighting their cigarettes, looking after their kids, and trying to get them seated together at dinner tables. I don’t know what I meant to them. Sometimes I thought I was the male figure, or perhaps a caretaker for two floundering things from another space and time, slow-moving and strange beings, pale as wolves in winter, whom the gods had thrown together to fend for themselves.
Sara was afraid of standing on a bridge over water that didn’t move. I thought hers was a much more poetic phobia than my own fear of throwing up and I wrote her a song called “Still Waters at Night.”
One day I dressed up as Bob, complete with matching hat, flowers and scarves, shirt and vest, a cigarette and painted-on beard stubble, and cowboy boots. I ambled into the room where Bob was filming, sidled up to one of the security guards and said, in Bob’s voice, “Gimme a cuppa coffee.” The coffee appeared in a millisecond.
“Gimme a cigarette,” I said. Presto! A lit cigarette materialized in front of me at a respectful distance.
“You like it?” I asked in my own voice, grinning up at the guard.
“Christ! Is that you, Joan?”
“Uh-huh. Isn’t this a blast?”
Even Bob was impressed. We did a goofy scene which concluded with me singing, as Bob Dylan, the song I’d written about Sara. Bob was playing an unknown musician who’d come to pitch his songs to Bob Dylan, and I was playing Bob Dylan and being rude to the unknown musician. Sara wandered into the room, cocked her head and then shook it and laughed, and sat down to watch with her foggy quizzical look. I ended my song and made a few abrupt Dylanesque remarks and the scene was over.
“Ok,” said Bob. “That’s it.”
“I gotta do it again,” I said in his voice. He looked furious.
“Hey, c’mon. Bullshit, it was fine, it was great.”
“Hey, c’mon. Bullshit, whose fuckin’ scene is it anyway? It wasn’t no good, I gotta do it again.” I dumped some cigarette ashes on the floor, yanked at my wig hairs and looked nasty. We did the scene over again. Pleased with myself, I went to my room, put on a white turban, and practiced being Sara.
“You gonna sing that song about robin’s eggs and diamonds?” Bob had asked me on the first day of rehearsals.
“Which one?”
“You know, that one about blue eyes and diamonds . . .”
“Oh,” I said, “you must mean ’Diamonds and Rust,’ the song I wrote for my husband, David. I wrote it while he was in prison.”
“For your husband?” Bob said.
“Yeah. Who did you think it was about?” I stonewalled.
“Oh, hey, what the fuck do I know?”
“Never mind. Yeah, I’ll sing it, if you like.”
In Montreal I was supposed to be the whore again. Wearing a new wig, some fresh eyelashes, and a fire engine-red camisole with black garter straps and laces, I was lounging in my room, smoking and drinking red wine, getting ready for another step toward stardom on the silver screen when Bob called and said he’d changed his mind: I would be Sara and she would be the whore. I suggested that I be him and he be Sara, but he didn’t think I was funny. He was in a creative frenzy, visualizing the scene with the three of us. The wardrobe lady brought me Sara’s clothes, a white turban and winter coat and gloves. I was practicing Sara to myself by a couch in the lobby when a small voice asked me a question. It was not Gabe, but one of Bob and Sara’s kids, who continued telling me his little concerns. Keeping my back turned, I mumbled a response and then told him to run off, that I was trying to concentrate. He did, never knowing I wasn’t his mom. Pleased with myself, I stayed in character and headed off to do whatever the scene demanded. Sara was dressed in a slip and the long wavy wig, and was smooching in bed with Bob. I was supposed to walk in on them and cause a scene. To my disappointment, they kept stopping the cameras and telling me to change one thing and another. Apparently I was giving them the creeps being Sara, and since I couldn’t switch characters that quickly, the scene ended up even more ragged than usual.
That first Rolling Thunder tour ended at Madison Square Garden on December 9, 1975. With Bob’s agreement, the wardrobe lady fixed me up with everything, including new hat and flowers, Bob’s clothes, whiteface, and painted-on stubble. The second half of the show opened with two Dylans, with identical guitars, outfits, voices, and gestures, the only visible difference between us, seen from ten rows back, being the side view of our blue jeans. Mine were filled out in back.
During the show I did a twenty-minute set which included dancing to the old Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Streets,” and, of course, “Diamonds and Rust.”
The second Rolling Thunder tour did not start out well. I was feeling impetuous, thinking my status in the show, and the pay scale, should be altered to my benefit. Bob had a thing about wanting me to grow my hair long, the way it was in the beginning. He once told me I’d start selling albums again if I let my hair grow. But I had cut it all off between Rolling Thunders, and when I walked into the rehearsal room in Jacksonville, Florida, Bob said, “What the fuck have you done to your hair?”
“What the fuck have you done to your face?” I answered, and plunged into a pout. He wouldn’t rehearse with me or even set a time for later. I caught a cold and went to bed wallowing in self-pity, and wrote a dumb song about Bob. Somewhere it said, “We haven’t got too much in common, except that we’re so much alike.” That was the strangest part of it all. We have, and had, almost nothing in common, except that he was my mystic brother; we had been street twins, bound together by times and circumstances.
There I lay in bed, sniffing and glowering, just as I had done in England ten years before. Louis, one of Bob’s good and faithful servants, a Jewish fisheries tycoon who collected antique cars for a hobby, came over to see what he could do with Queenie. Louis was slightly perverted, but always kind and thoughtful to me when push came to shove. Push was now at shove, because the first concert was coming up in two days, Bob and I had not rehearsed, and I was threatening to go home.
I was easily cajoled back to reason and to the tour. Bob came to visit and was even sort of nice. After he left, Neuwirth came leaping into my room yelling in an Italian accent, “She ees going to LEEVE (live)! THE QUEEN EES GOING TO LEEVE!” and he threw open the window and shouted it across the whole grounds of the large and rambling hotel complex. I suddenly felt fine, but embarrassed at all the color that had flooded my face, and at the fact that I couldn’t stop laughing.
I poked my head outside like a mole in spring. In Bob’s compound a girl with henna hair and Salvation Army clothes was walking on a tightrope she’d stretched between two big moss-covered trees. She practiced her cult meditation discreetly and was a practical sort, and stayed with us for most of the tour. Musicians were everywhere. Bob was now wearing a sh’mata in place of the pretty cowboy hat, and everybody was wandering around with bandanas and torn sheets tied around their heads. I didn’t succumb until the end of the tour, and then only with an eight-foot-long red silk scarf from Spain, wrapped into a turban and adorned with a gaudy brooch over the center of my forehead, the spot where rajahs stuck their royal jewels. This Rolling Thunder wasn’t as pretty or as fun, I thought, and I began to realize that musically, spiritually, politically, and in every other way, I was limiting myself severely.
Sara showed up late in the tour, wafting in from a plane looking like a madwoman, carrying baskets of wrinkled clothes, her hair wild and dark rings around her eyes. In two days, she had regained what I called her “powers.” Bob was ignoring her, and had picked up a local curly-headed Mopsy who perched on the piano during his rehearsals in a ballroom off the main hotel lobby. Sara appeared airily at the front door dressed in deerskin, wearing her emerald necklace and some oppressively strong and sweet oils. She greeted me with a reserved hello and talked distantly about nothing in particular, all the while eyeing the closed door to the ballroom. I had the impression that she had her magic powers set upon that room, and that whatever plans Bob had would soon be foiled. The door to the room opened and Mopsy tumbled out.
“Who’s that?” said Sara, looking at the girl sideways with her big, lazy, suspicious eyes.
“Some groupie. No one likes her,” I answered. It was true. We liked the tightrope walker, who vanished quietly when Sara was around, but Mopsy was a lawless intruder and I realized how much I supported Sara.
The next thing I remember is backstage at that night’s show. Through a curiously wide-open dressing room door, tucked back from the neon lighting, I saw Sara in her deerskins and oils, perched on a straight-backed chair. Her husband was on one knee in front of her, bare-headed and apparently distraught. It was like a silent movie, Bob in whiteface and Charlie Chaplin eyeliner, Sara all ice and coal and bits of rouge. That night I sang “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and dedicated it to Sara.
Bob’s birthday came and ten thousand people sang to him in a stadium in the rain. He stuck his face into his amplifier until the song was over, and then plowed into “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” That night we had a disjointed party for him complete with a cake, but he got drunk and looked dead tired. I decided to walk him to his room. He started flirting ever so slightly, and I told him to wait right where he was and dashed off to find Sara and delivered her to Bob. They both laughed sheepishly and looked mildly pleased, and I said “Happy Birthday,” and went back to my room quite proud of myself.
The tour wound down rather ingloriously somewhere in the Northwest. The weather was turning cold. I didn’t like my room and was getting homesick and feeling that my life was being wasted in a madhouse. At the very last I hadn’t seen much of Bob and was surprised when he came to the table where I was dining with some of the other inmates. He tried to convince me to extend the tour, saying we should just keep booking concerts down the West Coast, and then, after that, go on booking wherever we wanted to go. He said we were the greatest road show ever. I said I wanted to go home.
“Why? What’s home got that Rolling Thunder ain’t?”
“My kid and my garden. And things I gotta do.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Start getting uncrazy, for one.”
“You ain’t tellin’ me that you’re gonna be any less crazy at home in your house, c’mon!” He was gulping something out of a hotel bathroom glass and had begun teetering.
“We kin git a bunch of maids and teachers and tutors and stuff and just stay on the road forever. It’s great for the kids. They’ll just turn into a little pack. Be great for Gabe. Can’t do it without you, Joanie.” It did sound exciting . . . And he went on a stunning tirade about how wonderful and special I was. In fact, I was the only one, and all them others didn’t never count anyway. They didn’t mean shit.
“You’re it,” he said, nodding definitively.
“Thanks, Bob. And you’re drunk.” He went on like that for a while longer, and wound up on one knee fumbling around for a pocket knife, saying we should be blood brother and sister. He had the blade out and was sawing away aimlessly at his wrist. I asked him to wait a minute and got a clean steak knife from the waiter, dunked it into the Scotch and made some little scratches on our skin, just deep enough to draw blood, and we stuck our wrists together. He nodded happily and drunkenly and said that now it was for life.
“What’s for life, Bob?” I asked.
“Me and you,” he said quite seriously.
In spite of everything, the Rolling Thunder tours had been a success, at least musically. I suppose it was because of them that years later I thought Europe 1984 would work out. Bob and I had talked occasionally over the years about touring Europe, and I figured he would like to tour if it were totally convenient and he could make piles of money. At our European promoter’s urging, I proposed a short tour with him, but he’d said no, no way. He was goin’ t’ Latin America with Santana cuz it was easy and cuz people down there didn’t know nuthin’ ’bout nuthin’ anyways, meaning, I guess, that he was less pressured to do music they demanded and freer to do as he pleased.
My promoter, Fritz Rau, and his associate, José Klein, both of whom I loved and with whom I’d worked for years, had a fifteenyear-old dream of organizing the great Dylan/Baez reunion in Europe. So when, a month after Bob’s and my conversation about Latin America, they called me and said, “HE’LL DO IT! HE WANTS TO DO IT!,” I assumed they had come up with a good enough offer to make the reunion attractive to Bob. I was suspicious because the tour was already being planned as a Dylan/Santana tour.
I insisted on approval of everything from size and order of the names on posters and ads to order of the show and length of sets. Mainly, I insisted that Bob and I have equal billing and perform together somewhere in the show, and that Santana open the show.
Much was promised.
Nothing was in writing.
Everything was insinuated, assumed, or simply wished for.
For weeks before the tour, I tried to reach Bob, but he was never available. I pinned José down.
“I need some reassurance that Bob intends to sing with me.”
“Bill Graham’s speaking to him about that today.”
“What’s the story on the order of the show?”
“Everything’s set for Frankfurt, and I think the others are coming together.” A personal manager would have pulled me out of the show at that point. I had not had a personal manager since parting with Manny in 1978.
At the request of Fritz and José, I did a press conference, a TV rock show, and special interviews to promote the great Dylan/Baez event. Like Fritz and José, I was heading into the reunion blind, and with growing excitement. I didn’t reach Bob until two days before the first show. Trying to reach my blood brother by phone went like this:
“Hello, this is Joan. I’d like to speak to Bob.”
“Oh, hi, Joan. Gee, I don’t know, he was around here earlier. I’ll have him call you back.”
“No, I’d like to talk to him now. I can wait.”
“Gosh, ummm. I just saw him somewheres, ummm . . .”
New voice.
“Hi, Joan. This is Stanley. What can I do for you?”
“Probably nothing, Stanley, because I don’t know you. Unless you can produce Bob . . .” Much clicking and covering of the receiver. Bob, realizing he can’t get me off his back, finally deigns to speak.
He sounds awful, but I jolly him along and tell him I heard he’d had a great opening concert in Venice. He is only grunting today. I suggest that we rehearse a couple of songs for the show. He has a terrible reaction and I realize that he is allergic to the word “rehearse.” He finally says we can “go over some stuff.”
I flew into Hamburg to meet him and “go over some stuff,” only to discover that he was not at the same hotel, and would not be in town until the next day. In fact, he would arrive in his private plane just in time to go onstage for his own set.
So started Fritz and José’s balancing act between Bill Graham’s organization and their own “schmetterling” (Fritz’s affectionate nickname for me, meaning “butterfly”). And so started one of the most demoralizing series of events I’ve ever lived through. It compared only to Ring Around Congress under Hurricane Agnes.
Somehow the first concert stuck to a crumbling semblance of all the things I had been promised. Carlos Santana, bless his heart, threw his ego out the window and opened the show. My set was very successful, even in a half-sold stadium in the rain. I went up to Bob during a break in his set. He had been unapproachable before, surrounded by bodyguards. Now he was standing by himself, picking his nose.
“Hello, Robert,” I began.
“We supposed to do sumpin together?” he said.
“Yeah, I think it would be appropriate to do sumpin together. I think they kind of expect it.”
“Shit. My fuckin’ back is killin’ me.” He stopped digging in his nose and began to rub the base of his spine. He hobbled off grimacing. I assumed that I was giving Bob a terrible pain in the back, but, still thinking that we were having a reunion, I told him I’d walk onstage and join him and Santana on “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as Bill Graham had desperately suggested.
“Sure, if you feel like it,” said poor Bob.
The results were ragged at best. My tour manager, Big Red, began a campaign to separate me from him. Soon I lost the battle to appear after Santana, who is also Bill Graham’s property, and I became the opening act. I was not in a financial position to walk out on eight well-paid concerts, but each new demotion overwhelmed me.
One evening in Berlin Fritz and José tried to get me to start my set fifteen minutes before showtime. There was a problem with a curfew, they said. The local act was on and off, and by half an hour to showtime, seventeen thousand soggy Germans were standing in the rain, blaming me for their discomfort. I went on ten minutes after showtime, and the audience was soaked, miserable, drunk, and nasty. Later, when the night had fallen and the rain had stopped, I went to watch Bob’s show. The stars were out and twinkling, and bright colored lights danced on the stage. I’d long since stopped bugging him about singing together. The curfew didn’t affect him, of course: he did his usual straight two hours. That night I lay in bed hurting from head to toe, mainly in the throat, behind the eyes, and in the stomach. At three in the morning I got up, went out and walked the streets of Berlin until six.
My suite had a picture window looking out on a huge maple tree. I lined up the couch pillows on the floor so that I could lie down and look directly into the leaves which were flipping gently like the pages of an abandoned book, their two sides of slightly different hues, and I entered those lovely branches and rested there in the kindly arms of that tree for four hours, dozing lightly, healing slowly.
At noon I got up and decided to concentrate on salvaging the French concerts. I called José and made him promise to personally investigate the posters and advertising for our three French shows. I demanded fair billing or I wouldn’t appear. He promised. He probably tried. He failed. In a sauna in Vienna, over the bony white knees of some distinguished Austrian, I saw an ad in an issue of Liberation, a Paris daily newspaper: In print barely large enough to read, Joan Baez was once again billed as a guest star.
I called Bill and told him I wouldn’t be going to Paris. He thought I wanted more money. I didn’t. Did I want to sing with Bob again? No, I said, it’s too late; I would probably never want to sing with Bob again. I hung up as Bill began to raise his voice. I felt as if I’d had a steam bath, an ice dunk, a facial, a manicure, and then been to Quaker Meeting. I was at peace for the first time in nearly four weeks. A storm of phone calls, telegrams and threats followed. I sent off a telex to the French press giving some diplomatic excuse for the unfortunate cancellation of my appearance in Paris. The Paris promoter called his own press conference and said that Madame Baez would indeed be appearing, and any rumors to the contrary were false.
Happily, for once, our own sloppiness worked to my advantage. We had no binding contract with Bill Graham. When it was clear that I was not making idle threats, the Paris promoter announced that if Ms. Baez didn’t appear it was because she was impetuous and felt like snubbing the Parisians and that she’d never play Paris again.
He was winning the public relations battle; I was losing sleep but staying clean. I went to Italy. Bill flew in from Spain to try to talk me into changing my mind. I was flattered. The way I had been treated I didn’t think anyone would notice if I left the tour. Bill tried everything, between pleas and lures setting me up for possible legal proceedings saying things like “I wish you thought you were capable of walking out on that stage,” and “Of course, there was never a guarantee that you were going to sing with Bob, it was just a hope.” When he finally gave up, I ordered him a big bowl of ice cream, four flavors, because he was not used to losing battles and needed some sort of compensation. In the end, I paid him a monetary forfeit, which I had expected to do. But paying money was nothing compared to the battering my ego and spirit had taken for over a month.
The last time I saw Dylan was backstage, in Copenhagen. That night I’d had a wonderful set and I was listening to a little of Santana, before catching the plane to Italy, where I had my own extremely successful tour in process. Bill came up and said he’d heard I was leaving.
Bob’s heavies began materializing.
“If you’re really leaving, Bob wants to talk to you.”
I laughed. “Not if I’m just pretend leaving?”
When “Bob wants to talk to you,” it means that you go to where he is. He never comes to you.
“Here I am,” I said cheerfully.
“He’s in his room, over past the stairway—”
“If I happen to pass his room on my way out, grab me. I’ll be leaving in about ten minutes, but I’ll be in a hurry.”
Guards were stationed between me and the sacred room, and as I passed, they converged upon me.
“He’s in here,” they pointed and I was ushered through his door in a reverent hush, as though I were entering a cathedral.
Bob was lying on a sofa with his head toward the door, dressed in what looked like a formal suit. His eyes were shut and his feet were up on the arm of the sofa. He had jumped when I walked in, so I knew he was awake.
“Don’t get up,” I joked. He didn’t move, except to look up as I approached.
“Oh, yeah, hey wow, I’m tired, real tired.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t look so hot. Have you been taking care of yourself?”
I leaned over and kissed his sweaty forehead. It was covered in whiteface. He looked, as the British say, as if he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards.
He peered sleepily around the room.
“I think I dreamed I seen you on TV. At least I think it was a dream. Hard to tell the difference anymore. You was wearin’ this blue scarf. That was some scarf!”
“It wasn’t a dream, Bob. That was a broadcast from Vienna.”
“Shit, you’re kidding. I must be more tired’n I thought.” Bob started running his hand up under my skirt, around the back of my knee and partway up my thigh.
“Wow, you got great legs. Where’d you get them muscles?”
“From rehearsing,” I said. “I stand up and rehearse a lot.” I took his hand out from under my skirt and placed it on his chest.
“So,” he said, stretching his arms out straight with a cat shiver. “You leavin’ already?”
“Yeah, I gotta go.”
“How come?”
“I have to catch a plane. It’s the kind of plane you have to go and get. It doesn’t come and pick you up.”
“You don’t wanna hang around and maybe do sumpin together later?”
“You mean sing?”
“Yeah, do sumpin together.”
“Naw, I don’t think so, Bob. Not that way. I wanted to do it right, you know, but it didn’t work out. Maybe some other time. I gotta go.”
“That’s too bad. You bin enjoyin’ yourself?”
“Yeah, Bob. It’s been my favorite tour in the world.” And I kissed him again and left.
Goodbye, Bob. You looked happy on Farm Aid. I thought maybe I shouldn’t write all this stuff about you, but as it turns out, it’s really about me anyway, isn’t it? It won’t affect you. The death of Elvis affected you. I didn’t relate to that, either.