The Doctor and Mr. Dylan (11 page)

Or maybe they were rollerblading along Venice Beach, flirting and laughing together just like in the commercial. My stomach tightened. The clock ticked off the wall above the couch. I felt a surge of profound sadness. The four walls offered no conversation.

I checked the time. It was ten minutes to seven. What was Alexandra doing on her Saturday night? With her work done for the week, she was no doubt indulging herself. I imagined Alexandra reclining in a chair and having her toenails done while she turned the pages of the latest Glamour magazine.

I hadn’t talked to the woman since the airport in San Francisco. At the time I never wanted to see her again, but never was a fickle word. Now my thoughts tumbled like damp towels in a dryer. On an insane impulse, I dialed Alexandra’s number.

She picked up on the fifth ring. “Hi, Nico,” she said. “You guys OK?” She sounded bored. Preoccupied.

“We’re fine. We had a good week. Did Johnny talk to you?”

“He did. He sounds quite happy. He said he met a nice girl.” There was an awkward pause. I could hear her talking to someone in the background.

“Did I interrupt something?”

“I’m sitting at Claire’s Salon. I’m getting my toenails done.”

Bingo. My intuition was unfailing. There was another long pause. “Is Johnny with you right now?” she said. “He forgot to call me today.”

She had nothing to say to me, so the requested substitution of Johnny for Nico was understandable. Alas, I had to disappoint her. “Johnny went out for the night.”

“Good for him. What are you doing on your Saturday night in nowheresville?”

“I’m hanging out. Watching TV.”

“No news there. Same old Nico. Watching TV while the rest of the world frolics.”

Fuck you
, I thought to myself. “Can you go two minutes without cutting me down?” I said.

“I’m not criticizing you. I’m just the play-by-play announcer, calling it like it is. Who can blame you for staying inside? What is it, fifty below zero up there when the sun goes down? I could never live there in a million years. It’s unbelievable how different you and I are right now.”

I crushed my empty beer can in my fist. She was a champion at poking me with a stick until I snarled. I had no desire to engage in negative dialogue, but she pushed on. “I’ve had a great week. I’m a complete person when you’re not here, Nico. You and I are better off apart.”

“Who is he?”

“There’s no one person. I have a lot of friends who enjoy my company. We’ve had a dead marriage for a long time. I’m in the prime of my life. I need more from a man than I got from you. Stay where you are, Nico. We’re both better off.”

She was determined to make me eat shit and die, all before the toenail polish dried. I was getting more irate by the minute. I glared at what was now an irrelevant hockey game, and hated Alexandra more than ever. “I don’t know what to say to you right now,” I said. “I don’t even know why I called you.”

“I don’t know why either. Tell Johnny I miss him. Have fun up there. Bye.” The phone clicked off, and I stared at the television.

Have fun up there
, indeed.

On the television, ten young men skated in circles. Thousands of adults screamed and cheered them on.
Who cares?
I thought.
Who the fuck cares?
I’d known for a long time that my marriage was a disaster, but now it was worse than ever. I wanted Alexandra to miss me after I left. Instead she’d inhaled toenail polish and concluded her husband should stay away forever.

I circled Dom’s basement floor like a hungry tiger in a cage. I couldn’t stay there alone for another minute. I switched off the television, threw on my polar weather gear, and headed to the street. A thousand stars jumped out of a jet-black sky. I picked up a chunk of frozen snow and hurled it at the stop sign on 21st Street. The chunk hit the O with a resounding clang. I was twelve years old again, throwing snowballs to my Minnesota Twins teammates, posing as the stop signs of Hibbing.

My boots traced a path toward the brighter lights of Howard Street. The parking lot outside Heaven’s Door was jammed. I could hear the throb of live music from inside. The volume was louder tonight. Tuesday had been Bobby Dylan and an acoustic guitar. Tonight I heard electric guitars and a drummer. I took off my gloves, grabbed the doorknob, and entered another world.

The interior of Heaven’s Door was a dank, sweltering cave. The room smelled of overripe armpits and spilled beer. The noise from the stage was deafening—amplified rock music filled my head. I covered my ears in protection. Rangers were elbow-to-elbow as they jumped to a Bo Diddly beat. Bobby Dylan stood center stage. He was hunched over a red Stratocaster, driving the music on with a look of manic intensity. He wore the same all-black shirt, hat, and necktie outfit he’d worn Tuesday night, but the contrast in the two performances was striking. Tuesday was an acoustic music sing-a-long. Tonight was a rock and roll rave.

Dylan’s right arm swung in three wide arcs as he fired off a trio of windmill chords to finish off the song. The dance floor erupted in catcalls and clapping. A woman on my left rammed into me as she raised her arms over her head in a whooping celebration.

It had been an eternity since I’d had witnessed a scene like this. There wasn’t a dance club with live music within ten miles of my house in Palo Alto, and I never ventured out to a San Francisco or San Jose nightclub. I angled my body through the crowd to get to the bar. I bought a beer, and the bartender handed me a 16-ounce plastic cup with suds dripping over the brim. The woman who’d bumped into me minutes earlier leaned her head against my shoulder and said, “Drink that fast, handsome, and let’s do some dancing.”

She was a chubby girl in her thirties. Beads of sweat dotted her upper lip.
What the heck
, I thought. “I’ll take you up on that,” I said, and tipped back my glass. With a skill unused since my college days, I chugged the entire beer in ten seconds, and placed the empty cup on the top of my head.

“That’s talent, handsome.” She grabbed the back of my head and pulled my face against hers. “I’m Ruthie,” she said. “This your first time here?”

“Second,” I said. I wiped her wetness off my forehead with the back of my hand. The odor of liquor on her breath overwhelmed me. At close range, the pores on her nose were so wide I could count them. She grappled onto my biceps like I was her lifeline. Ruthie was going to be hard to shake.

Liberty came in the person of Bobby Dylan, who pushed his way through the crowd toward us. I yelled out, “Can I make a request, sir? Can your band play the
‘Beer Barrel Polka?’ ”

Dylan wrapped me in a bear hug, snaring Ruthie in the package. “I didn’t think you’d make it, Doctor,” he said.

“Best offer I had.”

“You’re gonna love it. Saturday night we rock. Your bass is right there.” He pointed toward the stage, where a blue Fender four-string was propped on a stand next to the drum set.

“How will I know the songs?”

“We’ll keep it simple for you. Everything we play will be in the key of G or B flat. You’ll get it.” He looked down at my companion and said, “You latched onto the good doctor tonight, eh Ruthie?”

“A doctor?” she said. “I was happy just looking at him. I didn’t know he was a smart one, too.”

Dylan peeled Ruthie’s hands off me and said, “If you’re lucky, the doctor will make a house call later on. Right now, he’s with the band.” His face blossomed into an evil grin. “Ready to hit it, Doc?”

“Let’s do this.” I followed him to the stage, and picked up the bass. I wrapped the strap around my neck, turned on the amplifier, and pounded out an 8-note riff from a time gone by. Ruthie moved to the front row and howled, “You go, Doctor!”

Dylan nodded in approval and said, “Is there anything you’re not good at?”

Over a thumping run of bass notes, I said, “My wife says I suck at everything.”

Dylan powered up his amp, hammered out a chain of power chords, and said, “Let her go, man. She’s full of shit. I’ve known you one week, and I can see that you’re a good guy.”

Beyond the stage, people were fist-pumping to Dylan’s chords. It was a vibrant young crowd tonight. Barrooms had changed. In my Minnesota youth, there were nine men to every one woman. Tonight Heaven’s Door was teeming with women, and the ratio was closer to 1 to 1. The average age looked to be 25—Dylan and I were the two oldest men in the club. With the twin catalysts of alcohol and dim lighting we’d appear as young as the others.

The drummer and keyboard player joined us on stage. Dylan said, “Mikey and Luke, meet The Doctor. Boys, let’s do a little rockin’ blues. Woogie Boogie in B flat. Here we go. Hun, two, three, hah!”

The three men broke into an upbeat 12-bar blues, with the drummer driving the tempo fast and hard. After three measures, I learned the chord progression and joined in with the bass line. I reached over and turned up the volume knob on my amp to the max. The power of my notes shook the floorboards beneath me. Dylan looked over and winked in approval.

The dance floor became a mosh pit. At my feet, a muscular dude in a tattered Minnesota Twins T-shirt gyrated with a blonde in tight jeans and an even tighter red sweater. She melded her scarlet arms around his torso and dug her chin into his shoulder. The couple bounced and rebounded off every dancer within ten feet of them. At one point, the girl smiled up at me, rolled her tongue across her upper lip, and blew me a kiss.

I took my right hand off the bass strings and caught the kiss. I feigned a look of amazement toward her and angled my bass to the ceiling to validate my masculinity. It all felt wonderful. This big-fish-in-a-little-pond rock star gig was the best thing to happen to me in years. I was floating six inches off the stage. I looked over at Dylan. His head was bobbing to the beat, and his knees were going east and west at the same time.

“Go, Doctor, go,” he shouted at me. My fingers flew over the strings to carve out a bass riff that blared through the refrigerator-sized speakers. I loved the power. From Elvis to Jagger to Maroon 5, this was what rock n’ roll was all about. Forget the words. Give them a thundering beat, a dark room, and a chance to escape.

The primitive urges of the music stoked my disdain for my wife. Alexandra—strutting like a prostitute in her spaghetti-strapped cocktail dress down the hallway of our California home. Alexandra—beautiful and ornery. I hated her and I loved her. The wedding ring on my left hand was the tiniest handcuff in the world.

The hottie in the red sweater gyrated below, and the spectacle she presented motivated me to man up. I took my hands off the bass for five seconds, long enough to slip the wedding ring off my finger and drop it into the front pocket of my Levis. I jettisoned the shackle of my wedding band here in a town where I had a clean slate—a town where I sensed I could become someone special.

Like Johnny.

The band took a break after the set ended, and Dylan said, “Time to go outside, Doctor.” We pushed through the back-slapping crowd, and I followed him onto the sidewalk facing Howard Street.

“Man, that was a rush,” I said. “The applause, the attention, the music. I love it.”

“Being on stage is a drug, Doctor. It’s been my drug for years.”

“You play here every week?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been playing clubs and concerts all around the world since I left high school, but now I just play here. Twice a week. Acoustic set on Tuesdays, electric with the band on Saturdays. There’s some nice tail here on Saturdays,” he said, lighting a Marlboro. “Glad you came out tonight. You need it. Can’t have you at home worshiping at the throne of the distant Mrs. Antone.”

“No, sir.”

“Tell her she needs to move up here or she’s going to lose you. If she saw you on stage at Heaven’s Door, her juices would be flowing. Bet on it.”

I rolled my eyes. “She’s too fucking good for this town. And she thinks she’s too fucking good for me.”

“Whoa. The doctor spews the F-bomb. Swearing like an iron miner.”

“Only when I talk about my wife. I had a fight with her on the phone tonight. I’ve had it.”

“Fighting with a wife is as predictable as the sunrise. She angry a lot?”

“Oh, yeah. Everything’s always my fault.”

Dylan chuckled, and took a big draw on his Marlboro. “No news there. Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.’”

“Where did you get that?”

“The Bible. Proverbs 21, verse 9. Thousands of years ago, Old Testament husbands had to deal with the same crap as we do. Those guys moved to the corner of the rooftop.”

I laughed. “Now you’re a Biblical scholar?”

“No scholar. Just a man who’s been around the block a time or two.”

“You married?”

“Separated.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “I was happy with my marriage. Then my kid was born, and it was like the baby sucked my wife’s brains out through her boobs. The woman was never the same after she got bit by the monster of motherhood.”

“You getting divorced?”

“Who knows? It’s been two years so far. We live in separate houses, but we still get together now and again. I still love her. I just can’t live with the woman. She’s crazy nuts sometimes.” Dylan exhaled smoke straight up into the winter’s sky, and looked forlorn. “When she was good, she was terrific. When she was bad, she was real bad. She seems calmer these days. They must have adjusted her medications.” His eyes roamed the street, where a circle of young girls puffed on cigarettes and giggled. A tall brunette met his stare and waved at him. Dylan waved back.