Bob Dylan as a Contemporary Female Writer in New York, 2019

Auto-fiction

Photo by Dorothee Hübner on Unsplash

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The first thought I had when she walked into the room was: She looks like Bob Dylan. A younger, circa 1963, thinner, more disheveled Dylan, but Dylan.

            I was at my writers’ group meeting which occurs roughly twice every week. I’d been coming for about a month-and-a-half. Ever since I’d arrived in Manhattan—a year ago in March—I’d been feverishly searching for a writing group to join. I’d used the Meet-Up app and had found several but I hadn’t liked any of them. Until this one.

            I sat around an unfinished beige-colored rectangular table. There were about twenty-five of us spread out all over the room. We were in Dumbo, Brooklyn, in a member’s work studio. She worked for a boating company. I smelled the wood dust everywhere. Several people had been sneezing.

            Outside—beyond the windows—I saw the Brooklyn Bridge, and the gorgeous skyline of Manhattan, reds and golds and greens pulsing like a diamond-emerald explosion. It reminded me of Kerouac’s On the Road, his “cool jeweled city” of San Francisco. That’s where I’d moved from in California. After the breakup. After everything.

            I’d been staring at Caroline, a poet who worked in the publishing industry, when I heard the door creak open across the room and down the long narrow hallway. It was ten minutes to seven, which was when we’d start writing for an hour. Then people who’d signed up on the list would read their work aloud to the group. I always signed up. It made my heart slam against my ribcage, my pulse quicken, my fingers shake. But I loved it. I always read my deepest, most visceral work. I’d been revising an autobiographical novel—about my lurid, wild early twenties—and had been working on several stories. Tonight I’d read a section from the novel.

            The form which had come from the creaking door appeared. Bob Dylan. She was maybe five-foot-one. Thin. She wore skintight black jeans. Black motorcycle boots. A black long-sleeved shirt with a brown leather vest, black fur protruding around the brown leather. It was nighttime, and indoors, but she wore aviator shades. Her hair was what really made her look like Dylan: It was maybe three, four inches long and protruding out in all directions just like the singer-songwriter who’d changed a whole generation. She briefly whispered something to Chad, at the far side of the table, the guy who runs the group, and then found an empty chair and sat down.

            She pulled a filthy egg-white L.L. Bean bag from her shoulder—blue straps—and sat it on the table. She extracted three black leather moleskin journals. She kept the shades on. I scanned around the room, seeing the other members, including Frank, a man in his sixties with a white beard and an open dark-green collared shirt exposing gray chest hair. He was a strong writer. He was working on a long civil war-era story about a young soldier who loses his leg.

            A few minutes later she removed her shades. She had green eyes that nearly matched Frank’s shirt, but they were sort of a mix between violent and spectacular. She looked around the room and we caught eyes. She held my gaze. Her lips were thin and red and tight. Her face was small and narrow and oval. She looked almost like a little boy with a sexy woman’s demeanor who was 30 years old. She half smiled at me. It was somehow unsettling. I half smiled back, feeling uneasy in some unexplainable way. I felt drawn to her for some reason. And yet wary.

            The writing hour began. Silence ensued. I started writing (by pen, in my black and white composition notebook) about politics at first—Biden, and how Buttigieg had dropped out—but soon found myself going into a more personal rabbit-hole and before long, despite my intentions, I found myself writing about her. Bob Dylan. I stopped for a moment and glanced up, seeing her. She was fiercely concentrating, writing quickly in her little leather-bound moleskin. I kept writing. I wrote about her intense green eyes. I wrote about the way she dressed. I wrote about her boots, her leather vest and her moleskin journals. I imagined who she was and where she came from.