Bob Dylan as a Contemporary Female Writer in New York, 2019
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~This is a fun one (but I can tell you it WASN’T fun in real life!!!). I posted this 2 years ago when I had 25% of the subscribers I have now. Enjoy. If you appreciate my work, please consider recommending Sincere American Writing, re-stacking, sharing with friends and family, or going paid for only $35/year (discounts available as well).
Enjoy the ride.
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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.
~
After an hour Chad’s iPhone ringer went off and he announced that time was up. He said his usual routine and then the room erupted into sound as we took our ten minute break. Before I knew what was happening I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around and there was Bob Dylan, smiling, gazing up at me. She wore the shades.
“Hi,” she said.
I grinned. “Hi.”
“Corey,” she said. “Corey Renner.”
“James,” I said. “James schofield.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched, delicate, conventionally feminine. I found it attractive. Something thrummed through my body, along my spine. Excitement?
“You as well. Your first time, huh?”
“Yes,” she said. She dug around in her inner vest pocket and pulled out a turquoise pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She had a red bic lighter.
“What kind of stuff do you write?” she asked.
I shrugged, felt that insecure shame I always do. I always feared people would judge me, based on my work, because it was so raw and real, and because it was not politically correct. It was animal. Primal. Human. Messy.
“Autobiographical fiction. Gritty stuff.”
She grinned wider. “I love it. That’s what I write, too.”
“Sweet,” I said. “Are you going to read tonight?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s my first time. But if I did I’d write about my ex husband. I’m working on a novel about the bastard.”
“Sounds hardcore.”
She shrugged. “He used to beat me up. Badly. In Manchester. He was a Brit. I wrote for the Manchester Telegraph in my teens. Grew up in Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and, when I was only seventeen, I moved to Manchester to be a journalist. My folks taught English Lit at NYU and Barnard. They knew everyone. I grew up knowing Susan Sontag; Norman Mailer; Joan Didion; V.S. Naipaul; Lionel Trilling; Allen Ginsberg; you name it.”
Info dump, I thought. Over-share. Red flag city. And yet, she was interesting. Was she telling the truth?
“Sorry to hear about your violent ex husband. That’s horrific. I’m glad you survived it. Writing about it must be…tricky? Hard? Cathartic?”
“All the above,” she said. She held her cigarette between two fingers. “I’m going to walk downstairs and smoke outside. Want to come?”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. Five minutes until we started reading. I had the second slot. “I better stay. I read second. See you soon?”
She nodded. “Look forward to hearing your work.”
*
She was still not present—her chair conspicuously empty—when the reading segment started. Adam read first. He was working on a crime novel and he read a section to us from that. He finished and people clapped and then a few of us critiqued it.
Right as Chad was announcing me as the next reader, I heard the door creak open and, as if she knew exactly when I’d read, Corey appeared. She grinned at me. Her shades were on again. How odd. She snatched them off. She wiped the lenses.
I picked up my pages. I gave some minor context. Then I read, my voice loud, my heart thumping.
When I finished everyone clapped. Then a deep, long silence ensued. Seconds ticked by like hours. At last Corey said, “Wow. That was incredibly powerful. The word I’d use is profound. The way you nail down the exact instant where the abandonment occurs, and the moment you and your mom became alien and separate to each other, is nothing short of startling. Your writing is very strong. I’m impressed.”
I felt my cheeks flush. I cleared my throat. I nodded. “Thanks.” Then slowly other people began commenting.
~
Then the writing group was over. It was ten. I was glancing out the windows at the Brooklyn Bridge, at the sparkling buildings across the East River in Manhattan, when I felt a presence. I looked up. I still sat in my seat.
Corey.
“That was an amazing story, James.”
“Thanks.”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Harlem.”
“No way! I do, too. Broadway and 149th. You?”
I pushed my seat back. Stood. I towered over her. I could practically lift her with one hand.
“130th and 5th Ave.”
“We live close. Want to travel back together?”
“Alright. Yeah. Sounds good.”
She smiled. I realized then that her teeth were yellow, jagged, stained. From the smoking.
On the street it was dark except for the tall street lamps. No cars seemed to be around us on Jay Street. I assumed we’d take the subway but she shook her head and said, “I don’t ride the subway.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why?”
She lit up an American Spirit, holding it with two fingers, her posture like some 75-year-old Upper East Side wealthy woman. She seemed sophisticated somehow. Well-read. Well-traveled. Cultured. She had lived in Manchester for a decade.
“I have Fibromyalgia,” she said. “Autoimmune issues. Can’t be around that many people.”
It seemed odd but I didn’t argue.
“My phone is dead,” she said. “Can you get us an Uber?”
I pulled my phone out and looked at the Uber app. My phone—an old iPhone 6—needed to be replaced. Sometimes it did this thing where it un-downloaded certain apps and I’d have to re-download them. It had done that now with Uber. I pressed the app to re-download it but it was going severely slowly. We stood in the darkness, under the street lamps, and it began to lightly drizzle. It was a bit cold.
Her bag over her shoulder, sucking on her cigarette, her cheeks sunken in, she exhaled smoke and said, “Fuck it, let’s just get a cab. I’ll pay.”
We walked down a few blocks to Prospect Street, near the underside of the bridge, covered in dark shadow. Two young black men wandered around in there, laughing, playing music on their iPhones, drinking forties wrapped in brown paper bags. This reminded me of my early twenties.
We tried to hail cabs for twenty minutes. No luck. Hardly any passed.
Half an hour later—it was taking forever—I heard her calling, jogging towards me in the shadows underneath the bridge. I heard cars rushing along that bridge and it reminded me of the sound from in the writers meeting, from the subway trains pushing back and forth on the tracks going over the Brooklyn Bridge. It had sounded like wind rushing through millions of trees in the mountains. Or like the tide rising and falling in the ocean. Ironic, given that it was chaotic, urban New York City.
“Hey,” she half yelled, out of breath. “I found one. C’mon.”
I followed her back. I saw the yellow cab as we approached, still a ways off. It was one of those Priuses. It had an ad for “The Invisible Man” on top. The ad said, “He’s in this car right now.”
But, as we got close, the taxi suddenly lurched away and drove off. Boom: Gone.
Corey screamed. She stood in the middle of the street, shaking her fists.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!!!” She yelled. “My bag was in the back seat. He told me he’d wait. I said I was running to get my friend.”
“Shit. What all was in the bag?” I asked.
She shook her head. She faced me. I led her off the road. We stood on the sidewalk. “Everything. My cell phone. Passport. Credit cards. Cash. Three journals with my novel-in-progress. Fuck.”
“Alright,” I said. We hugged. It just happened. She was shaking, her tiny body thrumming. “Did you get the guy’s name? License plate? Anything?”
She pulled back, wiping tears from her cheeks. “No. I just dropped my bag into the back seat and told him to wait. He said fine. I left to grab you. And then he just took off.
Fifteen minutes later I’d hailed us another cab. We got in. We took off.
“My apartment keys were in my bag,” she said. She had no phone. No apartment keys. She didn’t know any friends’ numbers by heart. She had no money. It was all in her bag.
“Alright. You can stay with me tonight,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said. “Thank you. This is so fucked.”
~
The cabbie dropped us off at my place on 130th. I paid him with my credit card. I opened my heavy building door and we trudged up the three flights of stairs. It was past midnight.
Inside my apartment I boiled water for Chamomile tea. I turned the oven on and put in chicken to bake. We were starving. We hadn’t eaten. My apartment looked disheveled. Hardly anyone ever came here. I lived alone in a small two-bedroom apartment. My books were everywhere.
We sat at my table. We ate the chicken. We drank the Chamomile tea. I filled out a missing property report at the New York City Yellow Cab website for her. We called two numbers. We gave them information. We did all we could. It was now beyond two in the morning.
We sat at my small kitchen table. She smoked with the window open. I watched the smoke rise and run out the screen. The cool night air filtered in. She gazed off into nothingness and then looked at me, serious, and said, “Thank you for helping me. You didn’t have to.”
“You needed help. It wasn’t your fault. That cabbie shouldn’t have taken off.”
Suddenly she leaned forward, her hands on her face. She started crying. “My work. My writing. Fuck. My novel. I don’t care about the credit cards or the money. Or the bag itself or the passport even. I can cancel that shit. Start over. But the writing.”
I was silent.
“When I was a kid I met Truman Capote. In the early eighties. A couple years before he died. My dad knew him.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “He seemed like a cold-blooded asshole. He had no heart. No soul. Neither did his writing. All intellect. No emotional depth.”
“Hemingway once lost a manuscript. His wife brought it to him and she lost it on the train. He never recovered it. Didn’t have a copy. He later wrote that every serious writer needed to lose at least one manuscript. You only lost a few journals.”
She stared at me. “Hemingway wasn’t a writer. Neither was Capote. They weren’t as pathetic as Kerouac. But still.”
“Kerouac was my hero when I was in my early twenties. On the Road changed my life. I followed in his footsteps.”
She squinted. “It’s crap. Kerouac couldn’t write. Even Capote said that. His prose was lethargic and creepy and misogynistic and…had really nothing to do with depth or meaning or internal exploration.”
“I’ll grant you that he failed according to conventional literary standards. And that most of his books were badly written. But a few—On the Road, Dharma Bums, Big Sur—were massive statements. They were before their time. They influenced a whole generation.”
“They may have been ‘statements’ but it wasn’t serious literature.”
“What, according to you, is ‘serious literature’?”
She smiled. She leaned back. She inhaled her cigarette. She sipped Chamomile. She twisted her white mug. “Dostoevsky. Flaubert. Proust. Genet.”
“Alright,” I said. “Sure. That’s true. But more modern.”
“Flannery O’Connor,” she said. “James Joyce. Baldwin. Ta-nehisi Coates. Zadie Smith.”
I nodded. “I’m with you there. Fine.”
Silence. She sighed. I glanced at the stove. The green digital numbers of the clock said: 3:02am.
“We should sleep,” I said.
~
I’d told her she could sleep on the tiny couch in the office room. She looked disappointed. I felt like having her sleep in my bed but I also didn’t trust myself. I wanted to have sex with her and I didn’t want to. She seemed emotionally unstable. The shades-at-night. The past of physical abuse from her ex. The anger seeping from her pores. The diatribe a la Kerouac. But then I realized I literally didn’t have an extra blanket.
My bed it was.
We got in. I took the spot next to the window, by the radiator. We kept our clothes on. The light was off. I’d cracked the window. I smelled the lingering cigarette smoke from her clothes and hair. I felt my eyes starting to close, sleep drawing me slowly into its gentle caress.
“Do you like me?” she said, out of the darkness.
“What?” I said. Pulled back from the dead.
“You heard me.”
“I like you, sure. You’re smart. Sophisticated.”
“But I mean, do you find me sexually attractive?”
She shifted and I felt her scooting closer to me and then she placed her head on my chest. I didn’t stir. Her hair was nappy and reeked of American Spirits. A feint whiff of body odor wafted. Her hand touched my stomach over my thin shirt. She lowered her hand and felt my belly, underneath. It tickled and felt good. I wanted her to stop. And to keep going. And to lower her hand.
We lay there like that for a few minutes.
“What do you think it means?” she said.
“What?”
“Me losing my journals. My writing. My work. My stuff.”
“I don’t know. Maybe life is trying to teach you about acceptance.”
She didn’t speak. Then she said, “Do you want to fuck?”
I swallowed. I felt my beating heart, pounding. Blood churned in my ears. “Yes. No. I mean. I think not. Let’s wait. I don’t know.”
“Jesus.”
“Sorry.”
“I thought guys were always horny.”
“I am. But we don’t know each other.”
“Since when did men care about knowing a woman before screwing them?”
“You’re right. There’s something about you. I like you but…I want to go slow.”
She felt my stomach some more. We didn’t talk.
“You think I’ll get my shit back? Realistically?”
“Honestly? No. I doubt it. Too many cabs. Too many possibilities.”
“Fuck. I can’t believe it. Months of work. Months! Probably thirty-five, forty-thousand words-worth.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry, Corey.”
She lifted her head from my chest, looked at me. Our faces were an inch apart. She leaned in, trying to kiss me. I backed my head away.
“What?” she said.
“I just don’t want to. Ok.”
She gaped at me and then leaned her head back onto my chest. What did I want?
“Why’d you move to New York City from California?” she asked.
“For my writing. Make important connections. Get my novel published.”
“I can introduce you to important people. My publisher is Macmillan. I have two books out.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I know a lot of people. I can take you to literary parties. Show you around.”
“That would be fantastic.”
“What’s your novel about?” she asked.
“Love. Life. Death. Hope. Redemption. Abandonment. Addiction. Everything. All of it. It’s about my first big Kerouacian hitchhiking trip around the country, and taking a train across the nation to New York City for the first time. Age 23. And a relationship that went bad.”
“Sounds juicy,” she said.
“It is.”
“James?”
“um hm.”
“Fuck me.”
“Corey. No. I’m sorry.”
A few long moments passed. And then she said, “It’s been two years since I left my ex. I have a restraining order against him. He’s still in Manchester. I own our old apartment in Harlem from the divorce. He beat me regularly—even when I was sick with Fibromyalgia—but my family and friends loved him. I think they didn’t believe me when I told them what he’d done. It was always in private. Never in public. Never in front of anyone. He was wealthy. He owned a theatre company. Came from a well-off British family. His father was a CEO. He’d been a trader for a while, and a hedge-fund investor. He went to Oxford. What a goddamned prick.”
I waited, brushing my fingers through her hair, slowly, rhythmically, and then said, “Sounds like a real piece of work.”
“He was.”
“Think you’ll ever get married again?”
“No,” she said. “It’s an institutional scam. It’s anti-woman. It’s rape. Never again. Ever. I will be free and alone and independent. I am married to my writing, that is all. That is enough. Period.”
“Ok,” I said.
That final statement echoed throughout the room and my mind. We grew quiet. I breathed slow. I closed my eyes. We didn’t talk.
When I woke up it was nine-fifteen in the morning. She was gone. No note. No number. No nothing. Just an empty apartment. And the lingering smell of American Spirits.