"I'd like to see the ol' man" I tell the nurse, comin' in outta the rain. The nurses don't think he got much more time. His fits are gittin' worse. "We don't think he's got more than a couple weeks," the nurse says and I take my hat off 'cause it's impolite not to greet a woman by takin' yer at off. She tells me that they think my playin' might doim some good, though, so they let me in even though I missed visitin' hours by a couple. He don't get many visitors these days. Except me, acourse. These halls and little rooms have surprisin'ly good acoustics. Not that it matters much to the ol' fella. She tells me they had him strapped to the bed most of the day, afraid he might go and hurt hisself real bad. Or someone else. Or worse. When I open his door, though, he quiets down a bit. He can't talk no more, she tells me. He just makes noises. Loud unes at that. Scares the whole damn place. He thinks there ain't no other patients or somethin'. He gave one of them nurses a real hard time a few days back, she says, and now that nurse, she won't go back in to see him. They think he can still write, but he ain't calmed down enough for anyone ta give him any writin' u-ten-sil in a long while. He only try to communicate by makin' noises and fast motions. He can still see and he can still hear, though, and I may not be much to look at, but I can give ya an earful if you can hear.
"You should start working here, maybe," she says. "He won't hush for anyone else." I says to her, "Thanks, but Ima geetar player. I play gigs in New York City. I ain't got the the brain matter for takin' care a ol' folk or folks whose heads ain't screwed on quite right. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful and much needed profession, but I ain't got the stomach for it." She grins and gives me the one-up and I grin back at her. "If ya ever find yerself if the big apple, though, you should look me up," I says to her. She smiles and her fair skin blushed faintly and she leaves me and the ol' man alone.
"So," I says to him, "one a yers or one a mine today?" I throw my hat down on the table and pull my jacket up over my head, the one with the broken zipper I never did get fixed. I take the stool next to his bed and start tunin' my music box up. "No opinions today?" I says to him. "Oh, right, you can't talk no more is what I hear. That true?" I ask, doubtin' it. He's a stubborn one. "I guess it is, huh? Well, how's about 'I Ain't Got No Home' then? One a yers. Standard tunin': E...A...D...G...B...little e."
I strum 'em all through once. That'll get the idear across anyways. And I plays him one a his own songs and then I plays him one a the ones I been hearin' up in New York City, 'round the folk clubs and beat bars and poets' pit-stops, and then I plays him one a my own songs.
"I wrote that one, there," I tell him. "That's right. That's my own. I've been writin' - you know - whatever been comin' into my head for a while. Just ain't really put tunes to it, but why not?" He wrote his own tunes. He taught me a thing or two about havin' sumthin' ta say and how a reliable geetar can help ya say it.
He just lay there, quiet, but grinnin' his little grin at me, maybe a little wider than usual. I won't let on how the nice nurse lady broke my heart tellin' me he can't talk no more. His stories are the stories ya listen to. He's been all over this land. He's been trapped in the dust bowl and stowed away in box cars. He's been east coast, west coast, Gulf coast, no coast. He's always been a workin' man, though. He always been workin'. Paintin' and singin' too.
Now they tell him he's crazy, legally in-sane, and they go an' lock him up here in this ol' buildin'. All them stories can't be just the ramblin's of an ol' crazy man, though. He was sane when he was singin' 'em, writin' 'em all down. It wasn't that long ago he was out there, on the road, in the corn fields, with the union folks. He's got all this history in him. Maybe that's what drove him crazy. Maybe that's enough for put a sensible man over the edge.
I know he's gonna die soon. He knows it too. I probably won't come back here no more neither. I don't just come for his stories - no, that ain't true - but the songs just don't mean as much just comin' outta my mouth as they do when he sings 'em along with me or when he tells me he was walkin' on a hot road out in Cali when he wrote it. He never told me where he was when he was writin' "I Ain't Got No Home." But I think I know where he was.
He was home. He just didn't know it. Some men's homes ain't where there stuff is or where their families sleep. Some men's homes are where ever they can get to with a sack a clean clothes dancin' against their backs and the sun beatin' down on their necks. Some men just ain't at home if they ain't sweatin' or bleedin'.
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I'm trying to write more prose, but shorter than my usual 20 - 40 pages "short" stories: a series of vignettes. I have already written one (that would need editing before posting) and am in the process of writing another. So, those are what you can expect in short term.
This is just a hypothetical account of an event that happened. In short: this is what I imagine Bob Dylan's last visit to Woody Guthrie to be like. Guthrie had Huntington's before anyone knew what Huntington's was, so he was diagnosed with various mental disabilities and Dylan would visit him at Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey. Woody's mother also had incorrectly diagnosed Huntington's and I believe she died in a fire she set, which also killed her daughter, Woody's sister (if I remember correctly from Guthrie's autobiography
Bound For Glory). I have no idea how debilitating the disease was to Woody, so he probably
was able to talk the last time Dylan visited him in real life, but - as I said - this is only hypothetical. In fact, the characters don't even have to be Dylan and Guthrie, as they are specifically left unnamed. The name of the song (and the title of this vignette) is a Woody Guthrie song, though. This is a scene I may visit again in the future as it's something about which I've considered writing a full story. So, we'll see.
"Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit." - Bob Dylan Chronicles [page 98 - 99].
"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, walking a road other men have gone down. I'm seeing a new world of people and things, hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings. Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song about a funny old world that's coming along: seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn. It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born. Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know all the things that I'm saying and a many times more. I'm singing you the song but I can't sing enough 'cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done. Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too and to all the good people that traveled with you. Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men that come with the dust and are gone with the wind. I'm leaving tomorrow, but I could leave today. Somewhere down the road someday, the very last thing that I'd want to do is to say I've been hitting some hard traveling too." - Bob Dylan Song To Woody [1962].
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