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 his new identity one Be-Bop Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake and when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on either speed or LSD 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 since he himself had been on a two day black beauty speed high-low) on the mind-expanding conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening to the whole 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. By the way in compensation  for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of which more in a minute, he 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 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 she called him in her high hormonal moments was left to them.              

 Yeah, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy, Josh Breslin, they met from a mill town in Maine 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” here 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 in hideaway between the cliffs 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 rag 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 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 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 on 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 that postcards of the hanging stuff was his political moment like Billie Holiday 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 in boy-girls with those all male crews. For example that stuff 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 and was not sure who the father was.

For example….but Jake knew Robert was merely babbling, merely going through the numbers and beside, taking another sweet swift hit of meth to jet fuel those two black beauties that had kicked in hours ago he had his own “take” on those lyrics and with the “fake” wisdom brought on by the speed, which would bring hours of high and low thoughts he started to write some stuff down (he would say later so he would not forget it since the thoughts were flying fast and furious just then) and as he drifted into himself here is what came out on those stained yellow legal pad sheets that held whatever was written on them….                

I have to admit Robert was on to something, something sinister and devilish in the American psyche but he was dead wrong on what that “postcards of the hanging” was about, who was being hanged and for what reason. Sure, Billie sang her blessed, goddamn blessed junkie heart out and not just on Strange Fruit, sang her heart out until near the end and the dope, the hop got the best of her voice and her psyche.  Sure I would have seen the fixer man for her if she would just sing one more song to chase my blues away, make them sail into this freaking Pacific wind to the China seas reminding me that many a lost high white note found its way along that path blowing out from North Beach joints but Strange Fruits that dirge to what the fuck was going on in the damn Mister James Crow South during her times, hell ours too since there is a loss of train of thought when Billie couldn’t squeeze anymore life out of the needle and put the lights of New Jack City out in the shade and my running around in cracker North Adamsville trying to drum up books, can you believe this, books for little black kids, then Negro, now Afro-American is gaining currency, but black, black as night like Billie with that sweet orchid hair in god-forsaken Alabama where goddam, Nina Simone was right, goddam hell was breaking loose and Mississippi was burning, burning white stick crosses and white steepled churches, Baptist churches too but it might as well have been some mongrel Buddha swings congregation because the flame was going down in Negro-town.

Yeah, Billie sang it right, sang about that lonely stick figure, black, black as coal swinging in the wind, head bent from that awful snapped neck which could be heard back in the far reaches of the crowd where the children, the very white children stood to learn about who was boss and who was crap, hell, shit in Mister James Crow’s house and about how that lonely stick figure would provide a brisk short-term trade in Mister Brady’s photograph emporium among the fucking hillbilly white trash come to see yet another black man put to the ground, going to see his maker if the fuckin n---ers [edited by Greg Green to conform with publication policy around that “word” and its implications when white guys, even white guys who scratched and cajoled  around white bread, white bread, white trash North Adamsville to get books, can you believe books for black schoolchildren in heathen Alabama] had a maker, had their very own high Jehovah black as night maker. No Mr. Bob, Mr. Dylan taking a righteous war name from drunken sot and Welsh poet, maybe a welcher at the bar tab in the Village too meant to take a look at some hand-press printed postcards of the hanging of the avenging angel, the righteous son of that high Jehovah that made him and those sullen black Baptists too, John Brown, Captain John Brown late of Kansas prairie fires and Harpers Ferry fight(never sure whether there is an apostrophe between the “r” and the “s” on Harpers so no) against the same bastards, against the fathers and grandfathers of those white trash (and not just white trash either once you took the hoods off if they bothered to put them on just to hang a lonely stick figure n—ger, and you know what that coded word means for Miss Scarlett O’Hara and her beau sweet boy Rhett, or her children, all who could be seen swarming around those barren trees), and maybe great-grandfathers of those later photographs per Mr. Brady who watched in heated glean at yet another example of the rightness of keeping Mister James Crow’s laws in place, maybe forever…

…Hell, I don’t know what to make of that “painting the passports brown” so somebody else can figure that one out, maybe and I don’t think I would be that far off he was just holy goof trying to get lyrical and maybe was too stoned to see that there were no passports from those hanging trees…

Leave it to Robert to get the sex stuff all mixed up, “the beauty parlors are filled with sailors” part although he knew, flat out knew and I don’t know where from about what really goes on in isolated male society [again by publication policy maybe “isolated female society” like on the  isle of Lesbos), aboard ships with cozy dark bunks and several watches to do whatever had to be done with sore asses and sore mouths a cause for doctor looks when on land), in prisons where the cells are small and the lights are dim with the howl of someone, some fresh young boy getting his baptism, his deflowering, and of course, honey to the bee what they call in England public schools but here for some reason private school where half of the British ruling class, half the literati got their own de-flowerings. What he didn’t know, maybe couldn’t know although we spent some time down in P-town, excuse me, Provincetown, the kingdom of those guys who are “light on their feet,” fags, sissies (the site manager said he would let this go even though it was a close call) where we drunk as skunks would bash a few for sport for looking at us with those hungry ravenous eyes was that the whole expression was coded, was some Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers  reference to “dilly boys,” the guys who hung around the darkened wharves, the low-light taverns frequented by home-bound sailors looking for a change of pace, looking for fresh new faces once they had been deflowered, once they had had their share of sore, asses, sore mouths, damn, sore cocks. What he didn’t realize was that not only sailors were lusting for a workout with dilly boys but those public- school graduates were as well, were searching for some rough trade. Here is what nobody knew, nobody wanted to know running the whole show, running those dilly boys through their paces was none other that Sherlock Holmes, yeah, the so-called parlor pink detective who couldn’t open a bottle of wine without a page of instructions and his honey, his girlfriend if that is the right way to say it [today husband if married-boyfriend if not but that is what Josh wrote back then so onward] Doc Watson, not the famous blind or whatever you call guy who lost his sight late bluegrass star but some stumblebum backwater quack. They ran the rackets, dope, robberies, women, dilly boys, art heists, everything that ran through London while the public relations firm they hired to cover their asses, ha, literally, shilled the story about how they were true blue to king and country (to the stately queens of England too-another coded reference) fighting the much maligned and heterosexual Doc Moriarty who almost thwarted these bastards before they killed him.

The rumor was that the whole thing started, the whole Holmes-Watson criminal enterprise which was protected by men in high places in government, business and society, you know those fellow public-school boys who worked the political racket when Doc Watson went to the beauty parlor to get a fresh do so he would look nice for Sherlock when they went on vacation to Scotland, some islands off the coast, and ran into a couple of pretty sailors just off HMS Pinafore or some such ship and were getting their do’s to look pretty for the rough trade running through the notorious Black Lantern tavern, public house, okay, near the notorious Clapper wharves. Doc pressed a couple of their buttons, showed them some opium he was in legal possession of and they were off to the tavern. That is where to his delight Doc learned about dilly boys and about looking “pretty” checked out some of the merchandise and came home to Holmes who was reportedly frantic with the Doc’s genetic sore ass, sore mouth and sore cock. Sherlock, intrigued, always intrigued I will say that for him after he calmed down went with Doc to the Black Lantern, feasted on the boys, including those two pretty sailors who escorted Doc to that location and the rest is history.

Fuck I have been in that place, have been down the hellish parts of the row, maybe better called the River Styx after old opium-eater Sam Coleridge started seeing sunless seas and went off the deep end about it forgetting Wordsworth’s advice to smoke that madness bong in freaking moderation. Typical junkie’s remorse, lament, you pick the word but don’t give me some twelve step higher power bullshit. Been down there by myself, alone, and with every kind of woman, lately Frilly Jilly, like that moniker, she curls my toes, likes to swallow my cum when she giving me a blowjob, says the stuff is filled with protein which we don’t get enough of doing serious dope, serious speed which takes away the hungers, food hungers anyway and so she will suck me dry, and it is okay with me except once she tried to kiss me with a load in her mouth, wanted me to taste my own cum, wanted to French kiss with that freaking mouth, I freaked out. Jesus. I was just thinking that when we hung around the corner, hung around Riverdale waiting for something to happen we would speculate, boredom I guess, about who, which girls we knew, if they gave head, you know blowjobs would they swallow or spit. Frankie Kelly, who left us a few days ago to head back to Riverdale to check about his draft status and about how to get out of the thing somehow what with the war raging, was the first guy to bring it up and while we knew all about blowjobs we at first thought about the question it seemed strange, seemed kind of esoteric and who gives a fuck but Frankie said that if a girl spit that meant she didn’t like your cum, didn’t have any kinky traits and so maybe was not going to go the distance. Like I say Jilly is a swallower and when I mentioned that conversation she said girls, her girlfriends anyway, talked about the same thing except since it concerned them more they took it seriously and Jilly said the first time she gave a guy a blowjob back in junior high school a couple of years ago when she started getting sexy thoughts and wanted to do something about it, to experiment, she didn’t like it and spit it out. The guy, older, went crazy when she did that. That is when she talked to some girlfriends, the ones who were sexually active or wanted to be, one who told her to swallow fast and it would be okay, which she did the next time with the guy she still didn’t like it but got it down okay and so she has been a swallower ever since. She said she only started to like it, to feel better about taking it when she read last year about the protein and that made her thing of it like a vitamin, a supplement and that was why she liked to suck a guy dry to get as much protein as possible.  (By the way we never even considered that crazy joint swallow Jilly was into who said she learned it from a college guy who was worried about losing his cum to the bed or wherever they did it and she got hooked on doing it, did it with a girl once when they were in a motel room with two guys and the other girl, not the guys though, was interested. But these day Jilly was mostly about the protein, was about swallowing the cum to keep her energy up, and about curling my toes).     

Some women really do like to take it on the wild side. Jilly does, has ever since we picked her up on the Pacific Coast Highway around Carlsbad, maybe Oceanside where the freaking Marines do their blow-up stuff. Likes to give blowjobs and is good at it although since she is only sixteen and does not want to get “in the family way” that is as far as she will go, maybe a sneak hand-job when we are riding along on the bus but I am getting away from what I was thinking about, about circuses, about Lilly Ann, about Madame LaRue ‘s daughter Lilly Ann, who shilled for the Madame, brought in the customers for mother’s fortune-telling racket (with Lilly Ann grabbingly wallets in the dark but I didn’t know that until later, until she, Lilly Ann trusted me enough to believe that I would not turn her in. Jesus, a snitch, no fucking way, excuse my English if I haven’t said that, excuse me, before). Lilly Ann and mother, Madame came to Riverdale with Jim Calhoun’s Mighty Midget Circus, that was how it was billed on the posters and advertisements around town. Jim had been coming to town and I had been threatening when things got tense at home to leave with the operation once they folded up their tents and split, although I never did. That tells you how tense things were at times in the house with wild woman mother and four older brothers crowding me out. The year I am talking about was the year I met Lilly Ann when I was sixteen, she said she was also sixteen but she was really thirteen, going on fourteen she said when she told me the truth after she told me about the wallet-snatching operations that provided the real dough for her and the Madame (Lilly always called her Madame as did everybody else including me).

That was the year, not with her, that would come later, when I first had sex with a girl, a girl from school who you would never think was into sex, had been since doing since twelve when an older brother’s friend “broke her in” she called it when she made me promise not to tell anybody or else she would tell her mother what I had done and get me in serious trouble, was into moaning and groaning and who would scream when she came, screamed right in my ear. Got all wet, sweated some she moved her hips and stomach so much while she was in heat, while she was getting ready to climax (which the first time she did it I didn’t realize that women could do, couldn’t understand why she was so wet). In those days, funny that was just a few years ago but since I have been on the West Coast, since I have been “riding with the king” as Captain Crunch calls it, we, meaning all the corner boys, Robert too were totally interested in getting blowjobs and maybe regular sex, what some girl told me was called the missionary position which she did not like, did not like the weight on top of her and liked to be on top where she could move her hips frantically which was alright with me and made me realize how square we were in high school with our little regular missionary position lack of imagination, if that was available but most of us agreed that a blowjob was easier to figure, easier to get, and less hassle than figuring out how and where to “do the do” our expression for what we called going all the way. I tried to get this girl to give me some head but she balked, she balked as I put my cock near her mouth. Said that thing, my penis, was nasty, she didn’t want it in her mouth. Had tasted some guy’s come after giving him a hand-job and didn’t like the taste, hated it. So no sale. Some young girls are funny you think like with Jilly they would be more worried about getting pregnant than worried about the taste of cum in their mouths. I wish I knew that protein line Jilly mentioned then maybe she would have gone for that, she was a science whizz.

Lilly Ann was actually easy to make, to get in the rack once I won her a doll at Skeets, my favorite game at circuses and amusement parks. When I asked her for a blowjob one afternoon down by the beach she put the towel over us and went to work. Not as good as Jilly since she bared her teeth too much, not enough tongue-lashing   and stopped when I proved to take longer than expected before she started up again but beforehand she had asked me if I liked a girl to swallow or to spit out when she was done. I asked her which she preferred, and she said she didn’t care-if it tasted good she would swallow, if not spit it out. So girls are different in that regard. Lilly Ann was the first girl though who said that if she liked a guy and his cum didn’t taste good and he wanted her to swallow but she had spit it out the next time she would chew gum or something to kill the taste. A girlfriend had told her that when she was younger after some guy almost slugged her for spitting out. Liked to use bubble gum she said so she could make bubbles afterwards and we laughed about that. She sucked me dry said I tasted like maple syrup. We went together for the three weeks the circus was in town and once again home life had me hankering to go on the road when the circus left town, go with Lilly Ann and all the kid stuff romance ideas attached to that. Then one day I went into their trailer and there on the couch Lilly Ann was fucking Mr. Leonard, the city permit guy who okayed Jim’s permit for the city grounds used by the circus. Seems Lilly Ann was the graft for Leonard’s okay. Fuck. I ran out and maybe ran out of naiveite. Never saw Lilly Ann again and lost my taste for circuses- for a while.     

I don’t even want to talk about riot squads, coppers after all the hassles I, we have had between the corner in Riverdale where the cops had seven eyes each on us instead of checking out real crime and criminals and the few demonstrations against the freaking Vietnam War we got knocked around  in at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco topped off by about seven stops of our home, of Captain Crunch’s cruising yellow brick road bus looking not for dope, not for sanitary violations or something stupid like that which would be the usual excuse to stop us although our ace driver Chuck Cassady has everything under control but whether we have underage girls, presumably girls, hidden away with mothers and fathers wondering frantically where their wandering charges were and whether they have been deflowered, nice word, the latter really of concern since they, those parents didn’t want to have to send their young things to the mythical “Aunt Emma” if and when they get pregnant by who knows who. That Aunt Emma thing code for sending the girl away to someplace maybe never to be seen in town again to avoid the obvious stigma of pregnancy not for the girl who after all was just doing what came naturally to humans, having sexual feelings and doing something about it. As I write this Frilly Jilly said if she was ever picked up when the cops stopped us she would take them in back and give them the best blowjobs they ever had, would suck them dry until it hurt. She said a girlfriend of her ’s, maybe the first one who told her guys like it better overall when you swallow their cum, shows that you are part of them the girlfriend said, told she had to do that once and everything came out fine. Had made sure both cops were there even though she felt funny with one cop watching so that she had them cornered if they tried to take her in. One cop said sorry to bother her after. The cops didn’t know she was only fourteen years old so she had something on them. Smart girl. Smart girl Jilly too since she would use the same ruse although I hope she doesn’t have to use it when I am around, or she is around me. I know it has to be done but I am still smarting from Lilly Ann way back having to get out of tight spot by fucking some guy’s brains out.

Jesus this screed in turning into a sex story, a  male fantasy sex story and not staying on the skids of what the bard was getting to and then he lays this Cinderella meeting some charming prince, or some sidewalk Lothario anyway and he gives us the whole thing in a short expression, Cinderella although it could have been Snow White, could have been the Fairie Queen from John Dryden or was it Pope, Alexander Pope, could, well, could have been any fairy tale is easy which turns this whole section into another free for all. Stick with me this Cinderella story is kind of cute, our girl is working the hard life for some bitch mother and her sisters, half- sisters I guess…

No, this screed is getting too weird, getting again into another sex thing Cinderella, Snow White whoever had to “do the do” to get out from under some horrible situation by giving herself, by getting de-flowered  one night to some prince, or a guy who claimed to be a prince. We have been down this road before, so finis. Well not finis since Frilly Jilly read what I had written and said it got her kind of horny, got her thinking about “playing the flute” as she called it lately after one of the young women we partied with a few days ago told her what she called it. That girl also said that Jilly should, well you figure it out, figure out Desolation Row lyrics too