Entry 6: Love & Theft – Bob Dylan

I’ll never be confused for a prophet; if I could tell the future there wouldn’t have been any heartache, any bad decisions, I wouldn’t have invested in Beanie Babies.  But on more than one occasion in my life I’ve had these overwhelming feelings—a sixth sense, intuition, or whatever you call it—where I knew what was going to happen.  At 18, while sitting at work, I had an urge to play the numbers 349 in the Daily Numbers lottery.  I’d never played Pick 3 before, or gambled in any form really, but the urge was so strong I went with it, I spent fifty cents and I ended up winning $120.  A month later I had the same sort of feeling, only it was to play New York Yankees uniform numbers as NY Lotto numbers.  This time I didn’t give in to the urge.  Two weeks later, on the front page of the local paper, there was an article about a man who won the lottery playing New York Yankees jersey numbers the same night I had my urge.  When I was 20 I spent a week in Bangor, Maine trying to find myself.  I never did, find myself that is, but for that week, every turn I made I knew what was going to be around the corner, what the buildings were going to look like; I really felt like I’d been there before.  Maybe part of it, maybe all of it was coincidence: I’d seen the numbers 349 earlier that day on a price tag or something, or I had just watched a Yankees game, or I’d read so much Stephen King that the streets I was traveling were the same ones he often wrote about.  I don’t know.

A few weeks into the fall semester I was lost.  The girl I’d spent the summer counting away the calendar to see, after that first party her and I stopped talking.  I had five literature classes with a total of 84 novels to read, and one Fiction Workshop which I had no idea how to approach because creatively I hadn’t written anything longer than four or five stanzas since I was 15.  I had two jobs; I worked around 40 hours a week.  When I was home, I’d lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling, too worn down to focus on reading, too uninspired to write.  Sleep was scarce, and I started having nightmares.  One night I woke up drenched in sweat.  I was having this dream where I was tightrope walking between two skyscrapers; the cable was covered in grease and the sneakers I was wearing had no tread left on them.  Hundreds of feet beneath me were all of my friends from college and some other people from my past.  I could see all of their faces, their expressions.  They were whispering things to each other that I couldn’t hear.  After a while of watching me inch my way forward, they all started to scatter.  I yelled down to try to get them to stop but they either didn’t hear me or they didn’t care.  I considered jumping; I wasn’t doing that good walking anyway, but before I could talk myself into it I slipped and fell off the rope.  As I shot towards the ground I reached my hand back up in a desperate attempt to save myself.  I didn’t want to die; I wanted to see what was on the other side of the rope.  Unlike every other dream throughout my life where falling was involved this time I didn’t wake up before I hit the ground.  I felt the impact of the cement; it felt like twenty people simultaneously whacking me with baseball bats.  But I didn’t die; when I got my bearings I rolled over and looked up.  My past, the people from it, were staring through me.  Some were rolling their eyes, others were laughing.  From above them I saw something descending down like a rocket.  Right before impact I woke up.

That morning, on my way to work, I couldn’t shake the dream.  On top of that I had to have Emma, The Great Gatsby, The Cleveland Connection, and Tess Of The D’Urbervilles read by the end of the week; two of them I also had journals due on, the other two I had to write papers about.  For my Fiction Workshop, I had to write the first draft of a story.  My grandmother was sick; her mind was abandoning her.  I wanted to try and work things out with the girl, but I was didn’t feel confident in what I had to say so I didn’t say anything.  My job was mindless to begin with—mopping the lobby, vacuuming the hallways, changing light bulbs—and having too much time to think only made matters worse.  The only thing I was looking forward to was the release of Bob Dylan’s Love & Theft.  It was Monday; I had one more day to wait.  I’d been counting off the days like a kid does towards Christmas; even if everything else was doing me wrong at least there would be Dylan.  After my four-hour shift, as I was packing up my stuff to leave a current day’s newspaper was sitting beside my bag.  For some reason—beyond the Sports section I’d never really read USA Today—I grabbed the paper and stuffed it in my bag.

I drove back to campus; bs’d my way through my full day of classes, and went back to my apartment.  My roommates weren’t home, and I didn’t feel like being alone so I walked over to my friend’s place, which was more or less a gathering place for everybody around.  We had a few drinks, talked about the new Madden football, about the upcoming baseball playoffs.  Right before I’d gone over to their place I checked my email.  I got a five-word one from the girl: “We’re dropping out of school.”  Sitting on my friend’s couch, drink in my hand, staring into the TV I felt like a volcano about to erupt.  All of the pressure in my body was focusing on my head.  I tried to take a deep breath but I couldn’t get any air.  Panicked, I ran out the open door, down two flights of steps, and in between their building and the one next to it.  I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want anyone to see me doing it.  A friend of mine, my roommate that previous summer, he caught up to me just as the tears revealed themselves.  I was hysteric; one of those people you see in movies getting dragged out of the courtroom.  He braced me against the brick wall; to keep me from running, or falling, or doing whatever I had a mind to do, I don’t know.  He kept asking me what was wrong and after a while I shouted a bunch of gibberish about my grandmother being on the verge of dying, about how I couldn’t take six classes and forty hours of work each work, about how Thomas Hardy sucked, about how I couldn’t even afford the new Dylan CD, about how the girls were dropping out of college.  “They’re dropping out?” I heard him say over my own pathetic voice.  For some reason that calmed me enough to explain what I knew of the matter.  He had a vested interest; his ex-girlfriend, the same girl who’d sent me Jimmy Eat World lyrics and we became kindred spirits, she was one of the We’re, along with another mutual friend of ours.  In an instant, like some grand illusion, all of my emotion had transferred over to him.  Before I knew what we were doing we were on our way over to the dorm we used to live in, where the girls still did.  The three of them were sitting on the front stoop as if they knew we were coming.  Collectively they’d decided school wasn’t for them; they sold back all of their books, dropped all of their classes, and were on the way to purchase one-way bus tickets to Florida.  “Why?” we asked.  “Because,” was more or less their answer.  In the chaos of the conversation it ended up where the only two people left were the girl who, not even two weeks prior I thought was the one, and I.  We were sitting on the same bench we had six months earlier only the feeling in the air was an entire climate different.  The only thing I could really muster up to say was, “I’m sorry.”  And I was.

The next morning I was drained; tired from my lack of sleep, upset that I’d let my emotions show the way they had, betrayed by the fact that I seemingly had no control over the people I cared about.  As I walked out to my car the air gave me a boost.  The sky was clear blue as far as you could see; it was warm.  Despite my disposition it felt good to be alive.  I rolled down all my windows, opened up my sunroof, and tried to focus on how beautiful it was outside and the fact that in a couple of hours, one way or another, I’d be listening to Dylan’s new CD.  When I got to work, compartmentalized inside the cold walls of the hotel, the pep I had started to fade; reality was settling back in.

I was on the second floor vacuuming the hall when I heard a voice from behind me yelling something.  I turned the power on the vacuum off and turned around.  “You always talk about wanting to live in New York City but I don’t know why you’d want to live in a place where planes smash into buildings,” one of the maids said.  It took a minute to register what she was saying and even after it did I didn’t know how to respond.  “What are you talking about?” I asked.  “Some plane hit a building,” she said, “it’s on the news.”  The girl had always creeped me out, so instead of joining her in the room she was cleaning to see what she was referring to I took the elevator down to the lobby.  By the time I got there a few of the morning crowd were gathered around the television, their morning bagel or muffin in their hands.  Just as I got into position to see the television a plane crashed into a building.  I had no idea if this was a replay; if somehow what the maid was referring to had been caught on video.  For a second my eyes moved away from the fireball on TV to the right hand of the guy standing next to me, and the plastic cup of orange juice he just dropped.  Its descent towards the carpet I’d vacuumed just a half-hour earlier was like watching a DVD frame-by-frame.  By the time it finally hit the floor and erupted orange juice over everyone’s legs someone had screamed out, “Oh my God!”  It wasn’t a replay, or some Hollywood stunt.  This was real.

I don’t remember how long I stood in that same spot, my leg covered in orange juice, my eyes fixed on the television.  It was long enough for a third plane to crash into the Pentagon and a fourth one to crash a couple hours south of the hotel lobby where I was standing.  It was long enough to make me remember every last person I thought I forgot; the things I said to them, the things I wish I had.  It was long enough for me to reassess what the word love really meant, and how I wished more than anything that I had someone I was in love with right then so I could call them and make sure they were ok.  It was long enough for me to call my mother and tell her that I was alright, and that I loved her.  And it was long enough for me to breath and be scared just like everyone else standing around me.  After enough time passed, my boss came over and said, “We all have to go back to work,” I told her no; I couldn’t.  I walked back to the break room, started gathering up my stuff, and like the day before, the day’s paper was sitting next to my bag.  I threw the USA Today in my backpack, went out to my car, drove down the street to Best Buy and put Modern Times on my credit card.  I couldn’t really afford the CD, but felt like I couldn’t afford to not have the CD either.

There was a lot of uncertainty that day; classes were cancelled, everyone was told to spend time with their loved ones, with their friends.  Everyone gathered around televisions; we looked for answers, for a voice of reason: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Wolf Blitzer weren’t prophets either; they were just as lost as the rest of us were, but they would do, and they did.

That night, in the campus gym, there was a candlelight vigil for the people killed in catastrophes.  I went with the girl who, depending on who was looking at it, was my ex-girlfriend.  We held hands when they played “Taps” and “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes; we shared tears and “I’m sorry’s.”  When I finally retired to myself, I wrote a few lines in the journal I was trying to keep.  It said something about the attacks on the Twin Towers, about how my previous day’s antics were stupid and selfish, something about carpe diem, something about love.  In times of tragedy we always become soothsayers of change.  Regrets weigh on us; they feel like ships with broken rudders we’re hell-bent on fixing.  We see that life really does come with an expiration date, that we’re not going to live forever, and we panic.  I was no different; I became an arbiter of second-chances.

From the first listen, “Mississippi” blew me away.  Dylan had hundreds of songs, hundreds of songs I knew and loved by heart, but this one was like a dagger right through my heart, and given the day’s events it made that much more sense:

“Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around”

I laid on my bed and listened, thinking of those lines, how prophetic they were.  I thought about faces of people I couldn’t see, people who woke up feeling the same hope I had when they saw how beautiful and blue the sky was, people who, like me, couldn’t wait to hear Dylan’s new CD, people who in a flash of fire never had the chance to hear “Mississippi” or say, “I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind” one last time.  To this day this is one of Dylan’s most endearing lines to me.  It’s both beautiful and haunting, an endearment just as much it could be a threat.  That night, I picture couples sitting on swings, staring into each other’s eyes, listening to that song together.  Before it would get to the end one of them would disappear.

“Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too”

Regret is a motherf**ker; I never wanted to feel it again.

The next day I went to work.  I went through the motions.  When it was time to leave I packed up my backpack; I grabbed the USA Today again and put it with the previous two day’s editions.  That night, after another long day of watching CNN, I sat in my room, I listened to Love & Theft, and I looked over the three newspapers, at the sequence of headlines from one day to the next; from the self-important to the sublime to the surreal.

“Po Boy” was another song that from first-listen found my ears well.

“Knockin’ on the door, I say, “Who is it and where are you from?”
Man says, “Freddy!” I say, “Freddy who?” He says, “Freddy or not here I come.”
Poor boy ‘neath the stars that shine
Washin’ them dishes, feedin’ them swine”

As close to the apocalypse as people felt they were, sooner or later they were going to have to stop waiting for the knockout punch to come and start putting one foot in front of the other again; they had to move on.  After a week or so I turned off CNN and became a hypocrite like so many others did.  I went back to ignoring the library of books I had to read, to putting off papers I had to write, to pining over the one who got away.  In life, we all have a part to play.  Most of us aren’t as noble as we’d like to be, as sympathetic as claim to be, or as motivated as we promise to be in the future.  The future for me was already a thing of the past; I wasn’t ready for a new position just yet; it would still be months before I could truly appreciate “Summer Days” for what it could be, before I could give in to my feet and let them dance again.