Never Mind the Pollacks Read online

  Soon he’d write about his experiences, hundreds and hundreds of pages, probably without punctuation, pouring out all his grief and joy and frustration, as well as his hatred and love for those elusive things called America and rock ’n’ roll, all the while thinking, knowing, understanding, telling himself the sad singular truths he had learned during all his hard years in Memphis and now beyond.

  There ain’t no breakfast.

  And there ain’t no trees.

  PART TWO

  THIS STATE HOUSE OF DETENTION

  1961–1965

  I returned home from Memphis early one stale evening in July. The loft was silent save the hum of the central air. In her office space, Ruth worked on an essay for Cultural Studies Today in which she wittily deployed found quotations from the scenarios of Ashley Judd movies to comment on cable-television coverage of the Robert Blake trial.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I had a bag full of Elvis presents from Graceland, barbecue from B. B. King’s restaurant, and a plush Robert Johnson doll from the Clarksdale, Mississippi, historical society. I couldn’t wait to give them to the children. After all, I hadn’t seen my kids in six months, and I had to make good.

  Their rooms were pristine, untouched. The beds were made and the GameCube had been put away. Looking in the refrigerator, I saw only vegetables, yogurt, and Italian soda.

  “My god, Ruth!” I said. “The children! Where are the children! What have you done with the children?”

  I sat on the sofa, turned on MSNBC, and started to sob. I’d been away so long, and now the children were gone!

  “My babies!”

  “Paul,” Ruth said, “it’s summer. They’re at camp.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thank god. Music appreciation camp, right?”

  “No. Zoe is at horse camp, and Paul Jr. is at Derek Jeter camp.”

  “Then let’s go get some dinner.”

  Over a delicious bowl of basil-infused miso corn soup, I said, “So are you teaching next year?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “How’s your book going?”

  “Pretty well. And yours?”

  “Not bad.”

  We didn’t speak for the next two courses. When we got home, we turned on the TV and sat on opposite ends of the couch.

  “Do you wanna have sex?” I said.

  “OK.”

  Ten minutes later, Ruth was asleep, but I was restless. I took a long bath, because the slate tub and massage jets usually relax me. Not this time. My book wasn’t really going that well, I admitted to myself. After all those hours in Memphis, I felt that I barely knew Neal Pollack. If the story ended here, Pollack would be a sweet, sad, but incomplete kid, a footnote to a footnote to a parenthetical citation. There was little connection between the Pollack I’d researched thus far and the grizzled monster he became at the end of his life. What about the world could wear a man down so? What in his own time had drawn Pollack away from himself, made him seek veracity in a country—a country, if you were honest, both old and new, barely a country in name alone, more like an Übermensch skulking out of the Bible—when before him lay nothing but the future? Why was rock ’n’ roll destined to destroy us all?

  Neal Pollack’s ghost lingered above me. This was not what I needed to see in the tub. I got out and blow-dried my hair, which was still full and handsome, and slapped some Lotrimin on my loins.

  Only one man had the answers I needed, and he was more legend than man. It was nearly midnight. If I started driving now, I figured, I’d be in Woodstock by dawn.

  I knelt next to Ruth. She was still attractive to me, but barely. I whispered, “Honey, I’m going away for a while.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said.

  “I have to talk to Dylan,” I said. “It’s been too long.”

  There’s an old man who lives in your neighborhood, or maybe the next neighborhood over, who spends his days smoking cheroots as if they were cigarettes, then tosses them in the bushes, which catch on fire, so he has to put out the fires with big pitchers of homemade iced tea, spiked with whiskey, but the booze makes the flame burn ever higher, so you have to call the fire department, and the neighborhood gets noisy and the trucks wake everyone up and you’re pissed off at the man, who doesn’t seem to care.

  A strange character, this man, and if he asks you into his house, you’re not sure if you should accept, because he passes his time singing you songs or playing you old records, and sometimes you’re not sure if it’s him singing, or if it’s the record. He’s that kind of man. There are hundreds of CDs in his parlor, an actual parlor by most standards except there are posters of the man everywhere. Many of those CDs are bootlegs of a fellow named Lyman Mathis, who was a prison preacher in Alabama in the 1920s, the man will tell you. The strange man, who has a weird, wispy mustache, plays a song, either on his guitar, a piano, the CD player, or all three at once. Jesus murdered my wife, you think the lyrics go, but they sound vague, indistinct, apocryphal, lost words from a lost era. There is menace in the words, and myth in the woods, but you can imagine the lyrics being sung on a street corner or in a swamp-bound tar shack. Jesus murdered my wife, and I’m gonna take his life, come on down to the church, ’cause the flood is rising higher…

  I arrived in Woodstock around 7:30 A.M., with an offering bag of Krispy Kreme. There was no answer at the main house, so I went around back, to the barn. An old hound dog lay tethered to a post. Chickens pecked freely around the rusty remains of a vintage tractor. A raccoon, stuffed, leered at me, perched on a vintage anvil. There were poplars in bloom and plump tomatoes on high vines that crawled up a wooden fence. The air brimmed with fecundity and low-lying summer dew; the ground was festooned with auto parts and rusted tools. It was like I had stepped onto the set of a movie based on a murder ballad.

  The barn doors were bolted. I knocked. The bolt came undone, automatically, and the doors swung open without my touching them. Bob Dylan sat inside, atop a purple velvet cushion, which itself nestled in a broad-framed oak chair, big enough for a king, all perched on stilts eight feet off the ground. Dylan’s head rested contemplatively in his right hand, and his guitar lay beside him. He wore a black suit, white shirt, black tie with yellow spots, and bowler hat. He always chose interesting headgear. You could say that about him.

  I bowed.

  “Hey,” he said, cryptically. “How’ve you been, Paul?”

  “You remembered me!” I said.

  “Of course. Man doesn’t forget a guy who’s written three books about him, now, does he?”

  “Do you like me?” I said. “I mean my books? Do you like my books?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re pretty good. I see what you’re getting at when you talk about me. Hey. Wanna hear a song I just wrote five minutes ago?”

  “Oh, yes. Please,” I said.

  I thought to myself, Bob Dylan wants to be my friend!

  He played his guitar, focused intensely on the chords, and from his mouth came words infused with tradition and historical allusion. Yet they were also stamped with his unique poetry. As always with Dylan, meaning was subordinate to art, making it somehow stranger and more meaningful, and also more artful. Listen, now:

  People say I’m old, but are you old, Mrs. Watkins?

  My sugar baby’s lonely by the side of the road

  Love is an animal, a humpbacked spiny monster,

  Somewhere down the line you’re gonna lick the toad.

  The Serpent king is livin’ on the wrong side of the tracks,

  Followin’ the ward boss for a cup of powdered soup

  We were carryin’ the mayor on the workin’ people’s backs,

  There we went, here we go loop de loop de loop.

  All down the line.

  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  My dear sweet lonely spinster girl

  Lookin’ out the window

  Give this ugly man a whirl. />
  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.

  Come on over and rest a while ’Cause loving is injustice

  And living is a sonofabitch.

  People say I’m young, but are you young, Mrs. Watkins?

  My lovelorn lovely’s near the back of the plane.

  Passion is illusion, abrasion, and contusion,

  Somewhere down the line, you’re gonna feel my pain.

  Pancho Villa ridin’ ponies to traverse the dusty land

  Followin’ the border for a money train to rob

  Carryin’ our freedom to El Paso across the Rio Grande

  There we went, here we go, lookin’ for a job.

  All down the line.

  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  My dear sweet lonely spinster girl

  Lookin’ out the window

  Give this ugly man a whirl.

  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.

  Come on over and rest a while

  ’Cause loving is injustice

  and living is a sonofabitch.

  People say I’m dying. Are you dying, Mrs. Watkins?

  My darlin’ darlin’s at the edge of the field.

  The dawn is yellow, the corn is ripe and mellow

  Somewhere down the line, get a dollar on the yield.

  Cesar Chavez was always boycottin’ the vines

  Lookin’ for his followers and lookin’ for a home

  All the handsome people must drink their handsome wines

  So they can pay their tithes to the Emperor of Rome

  All down the line.

  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  My dear sweet lonely spinster girl

  Lookin’ out the window

  Give this ugly man a whirl.

  All down the line

  Down the line,

  Mrs. Watkins.

  Dancin’ by the side of the ditch.

  Come on over and rest a while

  ’Cause loving is injustice

  and living is a sonofabitch.

  “My god,” I said. “That is beautiful. It emerges from the lost murk of Americana like a clear diamond.”

  “I didn’t choose the song,” he said. “It chose me. I’m just channeling something in the air. But who cares about me anyway?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I know,” said Bob Dylan.

  “I’m working on a project.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s about music, but also not about music.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It’s about a man.”

  “Neal Pollack,” said Bob Dylan.

  “Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

  “I know,” he said. “Because I knew Neal Pollack. Oh yes, I did.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “But I wasn’t sure. There aren’t any pictures of you two together.”

  “I had them destroyed,” Dylan said, “to protect my reputation.”

  I was overcome, and I genuflected.

  “Now, then,” Bob Dylan said. “If you’re willing, I’ll tell you about Pollack.”

  One morning in January 1961, a bus pulled up in front of the Greystone Park Psychiatric Facility, an ordinary building in an ordinary northeast New Jersey suburb. A young man, handsome in a hairy, unwashed way, got off the bus, which he’d ridden all the way from Salt Lake City. He wore a royal-blue cowboy shirt with a light blue fringe, decorative flowers adorning the collar and sleeve, as well as fading work dungarees, a fisherman’s cap jaunted to the side, and a bloodstained pea coat. When asked about it later by a female reporter who was in love with him because she thought he was someone else, the young man said he’d retrieved the coat off a dead sailor during “the siege of Cyprus.”

  He’d slung a banjo over one shoulder and a guitar over the other. In his knapsack he carried a washboard, a fiddle, some powdered eggs, a fraying copy of Gregory Corso’s poetry collection The Happy Birthday of Death, and several harmonicas that he’d stolen from dying hobos in and around Bakersfield, California. The temperature outside was twelve degrees Fahrenheit, which froze the lice that had burrowed into the young man’s clothes. He hummed a coolie work song that he’d learned from a ninety-five-year-old Chinese tailor in San Francisco. Opening the doors to the hospital, he went inside.

  “Mornin’, sweetheart,” he said to the desk nurse.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I’m here to see Woody Guthrie,” he said.

  The nurse sighed, and picked up the phone.

  “Betty,” she said, “another one for Woody.”

  Another one? the young man thought. Why, he’d found a copy of Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography, Bound for Glory, at City Lights Bookstore. Reading it, he was sure he’d stumbled onto a forgotten American treasure. He’d memorized vast passages of the book, though he’d forgotten most of them during an unfortunate cough syrup binge with some merchant marines in El Cajon, and then even more of them in that Tijuana jail cell. Nonetheless, the image of Woody Guthrie, hobo, poet, patriot, two-fisted troubadour fighting fascists across America, stuck like an old work shirt to the young man’s skin after a day’s hard labor.

  The nurse broke his sublime waking Woody Guthrie dream.

  “Go on up,” she said. “Can I have your name?”

  “I’m Neal Pollack,” he said. “But they call me the Fishin’ Cowboy. They used to call me the Singin’ Fishin’ Cowboy, but that was hard to fit on a record jacket.”

  “You have a record?”

  “Not yet. But my day is coming. I know a lot of songs. Learned ’em out there, on the open road. Also, I write really good music criticism.”

  Pollack took the elevator to the third floor, to his hero’s room.

  Bob Dylan, just as young, was already in there. He had one hand on Woody Guthrie’s throat, another on his sternum, and he was slamming Guthrie down on the bed, hard.

  “Stop it!” Pollack said. “Stop trying to kill Woody Guthrie!”

  He leapt for Dylan, grabbed Dylan’s arms, and kicked at his shins. Dylan wrenched away, both hands plunging for Guthrie’s midsection. Guthrie was turning blue.

  “Goddamn it!” Pollack said. “Nurse! Nurse!”

  “You fucking idiot!” Dylan said.

  Woody Guthrie spit up a chicken bone.

  “Urrrrgh!” he said. “That’s one tough chicken.”

  “Holy god,” Pollack said.

  “You almost killed him,” said Dylan.

  “He didn’t mean it, Bob,” Guthrie said.

  This Bob, Pollack noticed, was also wearing a fisherman’s cap, and denim clothes filthier than his own. Still, compared to Pollack, whose skin had been leathered by months of scorching Southern California dock work, and whose arms were covered in cigarette burn scars from rumbles in train yards half across Texas, the kid was a pallid, sour glass of milk.

  “I came all this way to see Woody, you damn rubbernecker,” Pollack said.

  Woody Guthrie rubbed his sore sternum.

  “They all come to see me,” he said.

  They did, indeed. Guthrie was pretty sick of them, in truth. He just wanted to watch a Yankees game on TV, or to read a novel, or go down to the pond and watch the ducks. A hot bath in a claw-foot tub would be nice, he thought. Or maybe a blow job.

  “I’m a songwriter,” Pollack said.

  “Of course you are,” Guthrie said.

  Bob Dylan had turned to the window. He stared out, almost sulked, silently. Pollack thought, Is he ignoring me? Suddenly, Pollack really wanted Bob Dylan to like him.

  He unslung the guitar and sang, improvising his own words to an old miner’s melody he’d picked up at a rest stop in West Virginia.

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

  Dyin’ in the hospital while the nurse is on the phone

  I came a ways out east, a hobo all alone

  To see this Jersey loony bin or wherever you call home.

  “I can’t remember the rest of the tune,” Pollack said.

  “Oh, thank god,” Guthrie said.

  “Hey, man,” said Bob Dylan to Pollack, “I like your song.”

  “The music is old,” said Pollack. “Older than I am. I write lyrics. I’m a writer.”

  Dylan studied Pollack, his eyes steady and considerate.

  “Mind if I play that song tonight at the Café Wha?” he said.

  “Hell, no,” Pollack said. “It’s a folk song.”

  Guthrie, pretending to sleep, rolled his eyes under his lids.

  “It’s the singer, not the song,” he mumbled. “Folk, my ass.”

  Neal Pollack had arrived in New York. From then on, a Friday, or a Monday, or a Sunday, or any day at all, really, you could find him in Washington Square Park in his blue cowboy shirt, playing one of his instruments, impressing Columbia sophomores with his rope tricks, talking up women, passing around packets of brownish-white seeds that he said he’d smuggled from Mexico. He told people to grow them in damp soil, under good light, and to never smoke the stems. Bob Dylan joined Pollack from time to time, and they passed Pollack’s hat, which he called Old Cecil, for money. Pollack had a patter that went like this, “I’m the Fishin’ Cowboy. They used to call me the Singin’ Fishin’ Cowboy. Now this here is the music of the people, coming up the mighty Mississip to the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge. Lots of blood and sweat went into these songs, many of which are about murder. Donations would be appreciated….”

  One afternoon Pollack walked over to Washington Square Park. There was Bob Dylan, sitting on a bench, a woman on either side of him.

  The women listened as though Dylan’s words meant something to them, and his words did, because they were the essence of meaning distilled into words. It was the dawn of the morning of a new afternoon in America. From the suburban earth came these men and women in their work pants and thick-black-framed glasses and serious gazes. Soon they would sing and march and transform the social and political consciousness of the entire world.