Truncated Song to Woody-With Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody” In Mind
By Sam Lowell
If you happen by any state hospital these days, the ones
that are still left after some ill-disposed fool decided that these misfits
should walk the streets unaided to windup under newspapers on park benches
pan-handling dimes for doughnuts, sad, not them though you know a place for the
chronically sick not the mentally ill think about an old troubadour named Woody
who spent his last wasted days in such a place, a place in Brooklyn when the
deal went down but it could have been anywhere, could have been an old sailors’
merchant marine place of rest in some rundown seaport strewn across the globe since
he did his duty on those flimsy transport craft (build one a day in round the
clock shipyard and sinking one every other day on the icy North Atlantic seas) when
it counted in the dark days of World War II when such service not recognized
until much later by the government and the citizenry at large saved some bacon,
somebody’s anyway. Could have been out in the dustbowl hills rolling out to the
Okie plains ironically from whence our brave seaman came of age if you can
imagine a dust bowl refugee two thousand miles from the foam-flecked ocean
sailing the deep blue-green icy North Atlantic seas, so yes when it counted,
counted too for his old compadre Cisco Houston who roamed the seas with our
Woody, roamed the Village taverns and bedrooms too from all accounts in the
days when a good-looking man of the West would inflame the imaginations of many
a loose leaf city folk urban woman who tired of the run of the mill City
College boys or got nothing but frustrated hanging under the arches of
Washington Square waiting for some Long Island bravo to find his way, to find
his dick if you really wanted to know what the problem was. So this man of the
West came ambling, is there any better way to describe that funny sideway gait
those cowboys gathered around them to show the stuff they were made of,
cigarette hanging forlornly but intact from those dried country lips and took the town by a storm and took
the breathe away from those lonely exiles who found solace in the Village,
Greenwich Village for those who are not familiar with how important those oases
were for the misbegotten, the queer literally and figuratively, the outlaws,
the goofs , the holy goofs, and every sort of misfit who needed a way station
from Peoria, from Grand Island, from Utica I could go on but you get the
picture. Those who could not adjust to the coming wave, the chicken in every
pot, the roof over every head, the roof of a car in every garage. Yeah leave
behind the safety of the cottages, those forty acres and a mule farms, those
dry goods salesmen passing through smiling their slick smiles as they fatten up
their order books.
Some people wanted to hear his truth, had been waiting out
in the prairie dust since Sooner days in sod-built hovels, waiting out in the
Pittsburgh steel mills and shanty town existences, waiting out in the hobo
jungle and wine bottle for a friend to talk to and the smell of odd-ball thrown
together stews to satisfy that basic hunger the bottle hunger that unrequited
one, waiting out in the desperate dust bowl refugee sweated labor camps, the
sleeping under the stars riverbanks a rutted knapsack for a pillow, a few
sheets of yesterday’s newspaper for cover against the ill-winds of misfortune
living day by day, a beggar’s dread existence, waiting along the lonesome
railroad tracks for that midnight freight fearing for the ruthless bulls and
the sneaky peter companions, waiting in the bracero wetback border towns some
sour wine to savor their existences when the tequila ran dry, waiting in some
faraway townhouse trying to sneak out the backdoor to the Village to seek a
newer way one that would be frustrated until much later when the “beat boys,”
know loveless Jack, faggot Allen, street bandit Gregory, footloose Neal, brilliant
busted Bull the drugstore cowboy, held sway and made those acres safe for the
disinherited and the dispossessed. Yeah they waited for the herald who would
usher in the new age where they could breeze anything but the fatal air of the
big lie, the big red scare night, the, what did she call it, the ticky-tacky suburban
cottage lady who had the deal down pat, oh yeah, the cookie cutter one size
fits all existence.
So they all waited in their simple skins for someone to tell
some little truths like how this land was their land if they were brave enough
to take it back, take back, what did Scotty boy call it when the Dutchies
turned the corner from the washed up seas, yeah, that green fresh breast of the
new world that had been grabbed by the greed-heads of every age from the second
awakening hustle to the robber barons to the slick financiers who took their
cut of every deal or there was no deal, spoke to those ready to take back the
simple sense of innate solidarity that with each generation got dissipated with
each new loss of indemnity from the vultures and the night-takers. Grabbed the
land, the precious land that could only sustain so much abuse, could only find
service in reclamation and tender care. Waited for somebody to notice that the
desperately poor, the transient laborer, needed a voice, the voiceless needed a
voice in each generation and by the process of selection called Woody’s card,
called out for his innate sense of what aided the misbegotten world and what
they could count on. Explained, patiently explained that some folks robbed you
with a pistol but far worse that some did so with a fountain pen and maybe the
rage should have accompanied that sense as well. Some guys speak truth to power
without the accolades, without knowing they spoke to some common decencies spoke
to power and got knocked over their heads for their efforts and then got off
their knees and dust the pads going back for another round.
Some oracle, some later troubadour said it best that Woody
spoke to the free-born instinct of those who left the hard-boiled,
hard-scrabble East, the enclosed uptight East when you think about the matter
closely to head out to the unknown not really knowing what the new land would
look like not knowing whether they could hold the damn thing once they got
there. These were funny pioneers, the wanderers, the restless ones what did one
sociologist call them, yes, the master-less men who bore the backbreaking task
of freeing the new land after the old
land was exhausted (and which they had taken part of crumbling apart but that
is a story for another day), the gypsy rovers, the con man, the whoremongers
too but mostly those who could not hack it in the East or had been run out by
the hard boys (just as their forebears had been run out of the countries from
whence they came sometimes just before the nooses descended). So they sought to
get washed clean again, sought change the way truth was running against them
then. Grew tired of Mister and his wanting habits, his grab and his pleasures.
Grew fearful that he would be crushed under the weight of another man’s weight.
Thought about man’s misdeeds and madness too. A lot for a single man to roll up
that hill only to have it tumble down on his head.
And then the quiet, the silence, as Woody descended into his
own family-carrying madness, could no longer put pen to paper to speak his
truth (one wonders if he had had a word processer in those days fixed up to his
fevered brain what he would have been able to say to a candid world). Still
they came to learn of his words the way he put them, the simple chords that drove
the words, the three chords that got many a man a hearing, and looks from
startled girls in cashmere sweaters and write the words that put to shame the
breezeway denizens, the gold coast golf course country club loungers and the
drifters out of dreams. Yeah think of that coughing bleeding exile out in
Brooklyn where the hospital used to contain his last dreams. Think about Saint
Woody of the street of dreams and sharply-etched words.
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