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

By Jack Callahan

“I’ve met Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, I’ve been in the tower with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, “ declared Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine was the only one in the room at the time. With those words Jake, Jake known as Jake since childhood to distinguish him from John Devine, Senior although his 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 the cooler one of Be-Bop Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether he liked it or not knew a couple of things about Robert’s condition with that outburst. [This whole moniker business, Robert’s was Prince Love for a while before he settled on Hash Man,  awaits its sociological doctoral thesis since almost everybody had a sea-change name change moniker as if that mere fact would wash away a whole childhood of learned behaviors far removed from the idea of seeking a newer world away.]

Jake knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on either speed or LSD the latter 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 just then 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, all eleven plus minutes including harmonica breaks,  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 that Captain Crunch had installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter and settled into Pablo ’s mansion. This Pablo was a friend of the Captain’s (not his real name obviously but a moniker like everybody then trying to reinvent themselves that he picked up along the way on the Pacific Coast Highway from some stoned chic when he picked up all and sundry in his yellow brick road bus and did his version of Ken Kesey’s merry prankster gig. Kesey a guy whom the Captain also knew and whom Jake and Robert had met when the bus swung through Kesey’s La Honda encampment on the way south). His mansion was purchased courtesy of many profitable drug deals in the south some of which the Captain had underwritten and hence the use of the mansion for the winter.     

By the way in compensation  for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of which more in a minute, Jake 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 boy days in Riverdale after they had heard the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having sex. What Frilly called him in her high hormonal moments under the sheets is best left to them.              

Yeah, Jake, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy whom they had met and taken as kindred from a mill town in Maine, Josh Breslin (who wound up taking the Prince Love moniker when Robert abandoned the title and it fit him better since he was the best-looking guy on the bus and a magnet for young women who wanted to “do the do” on that assumption),  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.

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” there in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged to Pablo Rios, 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 as it was located in a hideaway between the cliffs 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.      

Just as Jake thought that thought Robert ragged 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 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 self-imposed 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 out the gauntlet, 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 Robert explained that postcards of the hanging stuff was his, Dylan’s political moment like Billie Holiday had had with Strange Fruit about the scandalous open lynching of 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 into boy-girls with those all male crews. Once they hit port they hit the beauty parlors to freshen up their looks for the boys, the tough Jean Genet our Lady of the Flowers rough trade boys now that they had the taste for the seamy side, for the anal treats (truth be known not all the seven sea boy-girls once they hit the docks looked for rough trade or even ordinary faggots, a term of the time among Riverdale corner boys and not only corner boys, just like guys getting out of prison went back to their hetero dreams and left the permanents to the truly deprived girly boys, this in a time when all homosexual behavior was below the radar so who knows all Jake knew when Robert laid out his thoughts such talk about homos, faggots, guys light on their feet by old corner boys was usually derogatory and faggot was one of the kinder terms back then).       

Jake had made his fatal mistake by reminding Robert of the old days and of taking what Robert had to say as good coin rather than the ravings of a drug-addled junkie and so he now knew he would have to listen as Robert went through the whole litany. (Oh, don’t forget that Jake, pretty boy Jake now being called more frequently Be-Bop Benny and whatever Frilly Jilly called him behind closed doors when they made loud love was also high on some mescaline so fair game). Robert continued with his “deconstruction” before deconstruction was in fashion, literary or literal, about that blind commissioner who somebody had put LSD, acid in his whiskey glass and were leading him by the nose while he was playing with himself in public. Robert truly believed that this was the ultimate political strategy to bring in the new society that they all thought they were creating on the road in places like the Pacific Coast Highway.

What Dylan was saying was an early version of “drop out and drop acid,” get away from the nine to five life but do it quietly, don’t confront the bastards directly because they have all the guns and they will, they absolutely will, unleash those weapons once the gentle folk get righteously angry. So Robert was living that life, was a fugitive from bourgeois society which they more and more called the square life they had run away from and sit back and watch the action with his Lavender Minnie (and would do so for a while although not with Lavender Minnie who went back to Vassar to be Sarah Stein, graduate student in sociology, but with Red Rose, a girl who had dropped out of college to seek a newer world, she was under the influence of Robert Kennedy via Alfred Lord Tennyson just then).               

Robert, hell, Jake and all the other corner boys, maybe everybody except Captain Crunch and Ken Kesey were knee deep in the myths of their incomplete childhoods. Dylan probably too and so it was necessary to break with the illusions, forget Prince Charming, forget looking for midnight fled slippers, forget sleeping beauties live for black beauties, fuck little bitch red riding hood, kiss off Hansel and Gretel, blow off most of Western literature starting with the cause of more baloney and bullshit than one could reasonably understand, yeah, blow off Shakespeare and his rusty dime store nostrums and two bit philosophy, dig Buddha or Hari Krishna or Saint William Blake but lay off those heavy subtle literature messages. Let the bears eat their fucking porridge, let Cinderella end up an old charwoman, let snow white land inside her dreams with some sweet sister rolling a dollar bill off some mirrored image up her nose. Let the dead bury the dead. For a change.              

All is illusion, all is gypsy ladies selling plastic encrusted roses on drought ridden streets to harmless schoolboys and their bitch goddess dates. Ride the Ferris wheel baby and take a chance that you won’t come down in one piece, walk the midway and seek the geeks of truth hiding out from the law in Madame LaRue’s all-comers tent once that trip, that one way trip out of the garden [here Robert was thinking of the Garden of Eden, about getting  kicked out for good all for some unknown, maybe unknowable, reason just because Ma had bitten the apple of freedom, had taken the serpent for a ride and lost-the first adultery and you wonder, remember Jake how we wondered in Sunday school class with Sister Mary Kenny about why they got thrown out for one simple transgression and how later when we knew more about sex and sexual relations that Ma was just taking seed nothing more nothing less in case Pa was sterile. Remember too we laughed when the sons, the first sons went at each other tooth and nail that was to end in gunplay, something like that, what got killed anyway, who killed which brother and why didn’t that old man God give a goddam and save the situation instead of letting things get out of hand. Ironic ain’t it.]        

Jake had to laugh at the next part since this required some minimal idea about English literature of which Robert was woefully and studiously ignorant since he had barely slipped by and only be the good graces of Frankie Riley who whatever his shortcomings as a stand-up guy when things got heated on the midnight creep had done Robert’s senior paper for him and squeezed him by tassel and all.

Think about that stuff we all were hoodwinked on 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, even then they had ways of figuring that out hard fact by using some wild herb according to what Lavender Minnie said she had heard some professor postulate on in her Freshman English class in college, and was not sure who the father was.  She, Orphelia, had been, let’s face it, as young as she was Fontinblas’ whore and who knows who else and if you thing about how depressed that Hamlet dude was she was probably just puckering his seed anyway, wasting his manliness. You have to laugh about that iron vest, what did they call them chastity belts that all they did was make the locksmiths rich on both ends, locking them on some squire’s orders and unlocking them when milady was left alone for more than three days. Hell that little whore(Ophelia okay) had duplicates made and was giving them out like candy to every half-ass princeling in Denmark who had a codpiece that looked promising and maybe that was what it was like in that troubled tower. That Shakespeare was way too polite to tell the real story and let that asshole Hamlet grab the big lines and big story like we were supposed to bleed all over the place for a guy who couldn’t decide whether to have veal or chicken for supper. No wonder she gave up the ghost and every guy with a key to the kingdom was crying for weeks after she went to ground.        

I already told you about Einstein and his buddy Robin Hood splitting a tab of acid and creating atomic flowers out of rainbows made big bangs in the silent night and the heathens paid the price and thereafter bowed down so courteously every time some big bass drum went off in the Elysian Fields of dawn. What you didn’t know or I didn’t mention before is that Robin Hood was punking for the old man, was giving him his pleasure if that is what you want to call the madness. Learned the arts from a guy named Friar Tuck out in Hard Rock Candy Mountain along with some, servile sisters hiding in a convent which every Thursday night featured a bawdy strip show for the boys out in the woods adjoining the mountain. Yeah, that acid trip business would do old Albert in once Tim Leary got him over into that midnight Harvard University lab with the shrouded windows and the screams written off to the coyotes of the moon. And you laughed at me and Ophelia when we went our separate ways. The laugh was on you brother, the last laugh.

You ain’t heard nothing yet though because there was this dude that put Einstein, T.S. Eliot and that crypto-Nazi Pound into the deep shade, put them on cheap street remember we used to say that all the time when we were nothing but from cheap street ourselves with our Woolworth trinket dreams and our outsized appetites for everything that we could not have except maybe a trip around the world with Emma when she learned the fine arts although I don’t think she learned her trade from that Friar Tuck who hung tough around that candy cane mountain. What we didn’t know, couldn’t figure was why she was so passive when she showed her wares, didn’t know that she was seeping dope when that was nothing but a nasty habit and sent people to Lexington, places like that to dry out when all she wanted was to be able to feel, feel something, something beside her bread crumb sins. Still passive or not she gave a boost when it was needed and remember it was from her we learned what it was all about when somebody said she was going to play the flute, yeah, play the flute.      

Hell I am seeing ghosts, ghosts of Christmas pass if you let me focus on the scene with that little bastard, Tiny Tim, you know the crippled boy who broke everybody’s heart and got more graft than anybody living and he was a bastard make no mistake, since no way he looked like Bob Crackpot but more like Eddy Sneeze or whatever that hard-ass boss’s name was and he had been tipping the old lady, Bob’s old lady, all along and Tiny Tim’s older sister too just to get his way with skinny worn out factory girls who were looking to go off the clock. If that is what you like that is what you like, right Lavender Minnie. [Minnie nods her assent too fucking stoned to do more than lift her head just then.] Maybe they liked old geezers, maybe they liked the street outside their factory doors leading straight without detour to the desolate night, to the row if you really want to know what we really are looking for in those sunless nights when the stars seemed to have abandoned the heavens and words, man-invented silly words are not enough, don’t have enough energy to blow out a candle much less a starless night. If only they wouldn’t grab all the light, let the skinny girls fatten up on protein and sexual desire then we would not have to worry about strong-armed guys hitting on Lavender Minnie or Frilly Jilly and having to defend our turf when all we want to do is seek out some, what did that dandy Fitzgerald call it way back when-something like the fresh green breast of the new world an unspoiled world a world that had existed for eons without words or strong-armed guys hitting on taken womenfolk.

[Now Robert was definitely coming down from the high of his high as he attempts to wax poetic and philosophical and it will be easier to understand where he is going with all of this word play unless he takes another tab of benzene which is what we are reduced to until the Captain comes back with a fistful of drugs he has about six million connection to working the whole scene like some market owner.]     

Hey you know as well as I do that you, me, Frankie, Jack, Lavender, Frilly and a million other kids are trying to get out from under that nine to the five rattrap our parents were crazy to have us invest in, hustle us off to the white picket fence noise without a squawk, going like sheep to the slaughter. We put the brakes on that, everybody except old Bart Webber who just wanted to taste the fresh life for a couple of minutes before running as fast as he could to his Betsy Binstock and start paying life insurance, health insurance, mortgage insurance and whatever else the “man” had to entice him with a security blanket wrap. Funny those ten percent guys couldn’t light a candle to that brother who got me out a few scrapes when the deal when down or to Betsy either but played on that stuff, maybe genetic going back to the Stone Age when they first started hustling insurance against the dinosaurs and meteor showers. Yeah those guys, I guess women too, just can’t wait to have the big brother blanket put over the whole fucking world and make us like it too. Make us get down on our knees and thanks the mother-fuckers, make us like we don’t know from nothing just because our parents coming through the war got all ass-tight about having everybody do their vanilla routine. No thank you. [Apparently Robert got hold of some kind of interim dope because he was getting edgy, out on edge city a place he liked to be when he was in his Desolation Row high dungeon.]    

You know if I thought it would make a rat’s ass difference I would go on and on about how that pompous ass Eliot and that Nazi-boot licker Pound twisted up the language and good. Made us figure out that modern man, maybe women too, were spending their time counting coffee spoons when the ship was leaving the dock, turned what did we call it “stup” and “sim” when the deal went down and they had a chance to prison breakout except Eliot wanted to be the Queen and Pound wanted to do some shit with cantos and other Latin delights that we gave up on when we were altar boys and saw Father Lally sucking up the church wine before preaching to the brethren and before giving everybody some stale daily bread at the altar rail. Made us like it too according to my grandmother who wouldn’t brook anything said against the man, a man of the clothe like Eliot wanted to be if he could not be the stately queen of England and Pound trying on his very first pair of high heels Jesus this dope is getting to me and Lavender Minnie is starting to look at me like I just blew in from Frisco or outer space. Let’s never fight okay Min.

Hell I’m getting tired now, tired of the bullshit it took for me to get out here, tired unto death of the crap I took all those years from my mother who was always harping on something like I was some professor who was holed up with a book and could write letters to the four corners of the earth when all I wanted to do, all I ever wanted to do was blow some smoke, do dope until my brain got good and fried and figure out what my take was on Dylan’s lyrics and head out alone to the back alleys of Desolation Row, our home. Fuck it.