Lost In The Rain In Tombstone On The Road To Desolation Row -With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind

Lost In The Rain In Tombstone On The Road To Desolation Row -With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind

By Jack Callahan

“I’ve met Einstein disguised as Robin Hood complete with his greedy band of lumpen brethren, wine swill drinkers, upper-class whores down on the low while the court was in exile, tavern wenches who are always with us, Tokay tokens breathers smelling of rat’s assess, gumweed, advance men setting up the next armed robbery of some dolt who dared against all reason to traverse Sherwood Forests when the boyos where in  high dudgeon, unpaid advertisers (this before printing presses so unpaid), free-lance press agents ready like all of their kind to lay a ton of bullshit on a candid world, gabacho defrocked friars listening to penny-whistles and sordid confessions, deflowered our lady of the flowers nun escapees, rough trade cock and bull wharf rats (loved to pieces later by one Jean Genet after he got out of the high sheriff’s Nottingham prisons or what passed from such), all banished when the Lion-hearted hit town and laid so much land on Robin for keeping some simple faith, not even Christian faith that most of the brethren serfed the lord’s manor or blew smoke rings of desire in some clammy Robin bed.”  “I’ve been in the tower of pizza, excuse me, Pisa with Ezra Pound pounding out tunes for Benny and the Jets  pretending against all Harvard Square reason that he beat some joker’s ass and with T.S. Eliot in an adjoining cell looking for straw men, absolution, that self-same Pound, Ezra first name, some modern coffee cup dreams with ancient junkie hooded eyes blinking the tunes that dear Ezra played out in three-forth time to while away the captivity,” declared dizzy in the night Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine was the only one in the room at the time. Jake a blind lady from the circus which left town some hours ago with some jealous monk, maybe that fucking defrocked friar who passed paper about one Robin Hood who took his manhood and rolled it in a copper-etched cup (nice that manhood bit after that defrocked friar played freely with the carriage trade after Cinderella balled the jack with old Robin and his crowd.)  

With those words Jake, Jake known as Jake since childhood to distinguish him or her who knows once the circus leaves town with some extra baggage from John Devine, Senior although that father a genial Irishman addicted to sports betting and drinking whiskey not always in that order was more the slap on the back Jake type while Jake in the throes of his high hippie moments was trying to shed that moniker for Be-Bop Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake and when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on either speed or LSD just then the drug of choice among the “hip” (not always the same as Hippie but Jake did not want to argue the fine points on that one since he himself had been on a two-day speed high-low) on the mind-expanding conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening to the whole of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row at least once, probably more than once if he was high since he would not have had the stamina to switch the sound system off that Captain Crunch had installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter and settled into Diego’s high on the hill mansion.

By the way in compensation  for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of which more in a minute, he had gathered some sense of respect because his latest flame, a serious “hippie chick” met on the road at Big Sur as they were heading south, Frilly Jilly, called him Be-Bop Benny,  called him a few other things once they high on grass, you know marijuana,  got down to the “do the do,” a term the guys still carried with them from the corner days in Riverdale after they had heard the Chicago bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having sex, what she called him in her high hormonal moments was left to them.              

 Yeah, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy named Josh Breslin they met from a mill town in Maine, from French-Canadian come down from Quebec farms to work the fetid textile mills along the Saco River a couple of generations before on Russian Hill in San Francisco where they were camped out in a small park when he stopped by the bus and asked for a joint had been on quite a ride since coming West to see what it was all about and were learning quickly it was all about “drugs, sex and rock and roll” at its core but also about getting out from under the old ways of thinking and living. So when they hit Frisco they headed like lemmings to the sea to Golden Gate Park where all the hell was breaking loose met a few guys who “turned them on,” got them invited to a few parties, including one Captain Crunch was throwing around the new yellow brick road bus that he had just purchased (allegedly in a trade for a big sack of dope but all the time they were on the bus they never had that rumor confirmed by the Captain or anybody else and mainly it didn’t matter by then). This bus was nothing but an old school bus that had been turned into a moving commune after the seats had been torn out, mattresses thrown down, a storage area for family living material like utensils, dishes, and pots and pans, the thing had been repainted in every day-glo  psychedelic color under the sun and best of all hooked up with a great sound system Dippy Mike, the guy who did the sound system for Fillmore West and the Dead, put together for any trips they would take. (Another rumor had it that Dippy did that set-up for a sack of dope from the Captain, later confirmed by his companion Mustang Sally, which got its way into a Dead concert and caused the freaking place to smell like Saint James’ Infirmary except everybody was getting well, was getting fixed up under the new dispensation rules.)

And almost from the start at Golden Gate Park the trips began once Captain had selected the Riverdale boys as part of his crew to head south with him. The reason for that heading south, the reason Robert was holding forth those lines from Desolation Row was to “house-sit” here in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged to Pablo Rios, who everybody called Diego since that was his alleged place of birth but who knew where anybody came from really or who was using, or not using their birth names, a friend of the Captain’s and a serious south of the border drug dealer who was in Mexico for the winter and the Captain had agreed to doing the sitting as we got into “winter quarters.” Now that the bus was not being used, was being refitted with a new engine and so not useable, the sound system had been transferred to the house for the weekly parties the Captain threw for his friends (and whoever happened to hear about the event and knew where to find the place, not as easy as it sounds when stoned in hideaway between the cliffs away from prying highways in La Jolla.                     

Robert, once settled in, once he got his own room with his lady-friend, Lavender Minnie, got heavily into the dope, got heavily into listening to the amped up music and Jake thought he had begun, like they had all heard about with kids who did too much dope, to go over the edge. To head to edge city where the flowers do not bloom and madness stands tall at the doorstep.       

Just as Jake thought that thought Robert rag out again with “they’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown,” and Jake knew that Robert had gone for the next something like eleven plus minutes to his own world. Eleven plus minutes if he was lucky, since more than once Robert had decided that he needed to give his own take on what the whole thing meant, what the various references meant to him. For example, that business with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two exile poets who almost single-handedly broke from the old forms and created modern poetry and were treated like gods among the hip at one point was Dylan throwing down the gauntlet, was sending these festering bum to the glue factory, telling those guys a new sheriff was in town. Well, maybe, if you think Dylan was a lyric poet rather than a song-writer, or maybe put the two together. For example that “postcards of the hanging” stuff was his political moment like Billie Holiday had with Strange Fruit about the scandalous open lynching of mostly black men in the South put together with a new sense of masculinity turned in on itself with sailor boys caught out on the seven seas who transformed themselves in boy-girls with those all male crews. For example, that stuff about Ophelia, you know Hamlet’s chick and how she was giving up the ghost (committing suicide) not because of some lost love but because she was pregnant and was not sure who the father was. Maybe Robin Hood for all Robert knew. I left the comfort of the old home yellow bus before long knowing that I already knew a million Robert “takes” on the deep meaning of the lyrics and even if he gave a few new twists who could reasonably sit by and take it all in.