The Doctor and Mr. Dylan (15 page)

“Your wife wasn’t enough?” If I’d had a woman as pretty as Lena, there was no way I’d have chased bimbo groupies.

He shook his head. “My wife was impossible, like a woman adrift in the middle of Lake Superior, so busy trying to keep her head above water that there was nothing left for me. Always struggling to get happy. I got sick of trying to keep her up.”

I frowned. I had a difficult time picturing Lena as a drowning soul. It couldn’t have been easy, living with this guy. I tried to imagine Lena rubbing her bare foot across Dylan’s leg while the man lounged in full hockey regalia and bragged about the mirage of his rock star life. The image of Lena and Dylan together bugged me. Even though I’d only touched her once, I couldn’t let go. I needed to know more. “What’s your ex-wife up to now? It’s a small town. You must know what she’s doing.”

He scoffed. “First off, she’s not my ex-wife. She’s my wife. She lives a mile away, in the house we used to share. Lena’s a nurse. You must have seen her at the hospital. Best lookin’ woman at the General. Her last name’s Johnson.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve met her. She’s nice.”

“Not always nice. The night she threw me out, she met me at the front door after a gig and bludgeoned me with a rolling pin.” He peeled the hockey helmet off his forehead to reveal a well-healed longitudinal scar. “Twenty-five stitches in the General Emergency Room. When I came home afterwards, all my stuff was laying in a snow bank outside the front door. My guitars, my medical equipment, my clothes. Everything.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She heard I was at the Holiday Inn with Carla Finn.”

“Was she justified? Were you at the Holiday Inn with Carla Finn?”

Dylan took a puff on his cigarette and burped. “I don’t even remember. I already told you, the ladies at the club like me. It’s just sex. I love Lena, but she needed me on a short leash or else out in the snowbank. He bit at the imaginary shackles between his wrists again, and spit out the chain. “I prefer the snowbank.”

I tried to process what I’d just heard. Dylan was a boorish, self-centered philanderer. Lena was as radiant as any light bulb in this room, upbeat, kind, and maternal. Hot as the sauna she’d stoked. If she had a temper, I admired her for throwing her unfaithful husband out.

“Does your wife have a boyfriend?” I said.

“Nah. Lena doesn’t get out much. If she’s dating someone, it’s news to me. Another beer?”

“Sure.” I followed him into the adjoining kitchen, a small room the size of my closet in California. The walls were white as a blizzard, and the sole furnishings were a dented metal folding table and two folding chairs. A Mr. Coffee percolator and two Minnesota Viking laminated placemats topped the table. I didn’t see a dishwasher. A bottle of Ivory Liquid and a stained yellow sponge lay in the sink. It didn’t look like Dylan entertained very often. He removed a second beer from the refrigerator, and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Is there a quiet room where I can call my patients for tomorrow?”

“Why do you want to do that?”

“I always call my patients the night before surgery. That way they know what to expect, and they can go to bed with some peace of mind.”

“That’s what you do?”

“Yes. You don’t?”

“No way. I don’t want to think about tomorrow until tomorrow. Matthew 6, verses 33-34. ‘Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’ You can worry about Tuesday and Tuesday’s surgeries. I’m still working on Monday.” His voice dripped with contempt.

“Does it bother you that I’m a physician and you’re not?”

“I can do anything you can,” Dylan said. “You know it, and I know it too.”

The answer was blunt, confrontational, and false. It rankled me. “How about the guy with the facial trauma? The guy you put to sleep but couldn’t intubate?”

“I already thanked you for your help, Doctor. You got lucky with that nasal tube, and you know it. Next time, you’ll be in a jam and I’ll save your ass. Maybe in the operating room, maybe on Howard Street. Maybe you’d better go home and read some more anesthesia journals, so you can stay smarter than dumbass nurse anesthetists like me. You think it’s a mistake, letting non-doctors practice medicine, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Get over it. There aren’t enough docs who want to work in a rusty-ass mining town like this. Patients either get me or they get nothing. Embrace it.”

“Embrace this,” I said with a grin, flipping Dylan my middle finger.

“Nice gratitude, Doctor. I give you two beers, I let you watch my Gophers rip your Bulldogs, and you do me wrong. I think I’d better get back to my easy chair and have a good cry.”

“Where can I go to call my patients?”

“Be gone. Go to the other end of the house.” He pointed through a doorway. I walked toward the rear of the house, and found the hallway walls covered with an array of framed photographs, each one canted at various non-horizontal angles. All the pictures were vintage shots from Bob Zimmerman’s youth and the rock star Bob Dylan’s concert career. They were aligned in chronologic order, starting with high school pics on the left. I recognized some of the photos from Dylan biographies I had read, but several of them were unique snapshots I’d never seen.

“Hey, Bobby, can you come down here?” I called out.

“What’s up?” he said, leaning his head against the doorframe.

“I’m checking out these pictures. Where did you get this one?” I pointed to a photo of a youthful Bob Zimmerman sitting on a park bench with his arm around another kid. A golf bag leaned against the bench between them.

“That’s a picture of my brother and me waiting to tee off at the Hibbing Municipal golf course when we were kids.”

I did a double take. This was a picture of the real Bob Zimmerman. My nurse anesthetist friend didn’t appreciate that he and the rock star were two different people.

I pointed out this fact to my new friend. “But it’s not you. This is Bob Zimmerman as a boy.”

“It’s me.” Dylan yawned, tired of this interrogation.

“And all these of these other pictures?” I asked, fearing I already knew the answer.

“They’re different excerpts from my music career. I like this one of Neil Young and me backstage at The Last Waltz Concert. And I love this one of George Harrison and me at the Concert for Bangladesh. I miss George, God bless him.”

The look on Dylan’s face was serene and sympathetic. “This is my favorite in the whole collection,” he said, pointing to the farthest picture on his end of the hallway. It was an 8 X 10 black and white photo of a younger nurse anesthetist Bobby Dylan, dressed in scrubs. He was beaming and sitting cheek-to-cheek next to a girlish and puffy Lena Johnson. Lena was dressed in a hospital gown, and she cradled a tiny baby in her arms.

“That was the day my baby girl was born. Greatest day in my life.” He nodded his head in confirmation, and repeated, “Greatest day in my life.”

The entire collection of hallway photos left me perplexed and uneasy. The bona-fide picture of Bobby, Lena, and Echo hung alongside thirty pictures of the rock star Bob Dylan, and this nurse anesthetist could not distinguish himself from the rock star. My friend seemed to be out of touch with reality. He seemed delusional. It was possible the man was psychotic.

I spotted a copy of
No Direction Home
, a biography of Bob Dylan written by Robert Shelton, on the hallway bookshelf. I pulled the book out, and opened it. “The Bob Dylan in this book,” I said. “What do you think of him?”

He glanced at the cover of the book, and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s my biography, that’s what I think. Some parts are accurate. Some are bullshit.”

“You have the same name, but it’s not really about you. Right?”

Dylan face crinkled into an eat-shit-and-die expression. “What are you driving at? You don’t believe me?”

“I believe you’re a nurse anesthetist in Hibbing. I don’t believe you’re the world famous rock star.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I’m the rock n’ roll Bob Dylan. Hell, you’ve been on stage with me. Is it so hard to believe that I’d come back to roost in my old home town?”

I felt a chill go up my spine. He hadn’t just adopted Bobby Dylan’s name. He was living a fantasy that he occupied Bob Dylan’s life. I’d heard enough. It was pointless arguing with him.

I looked at my watch, and said, “I should be heading home.”

Dylan nodded in assent. “Game’s over, anyway. Minnesota’s ahead 7-2. Tough luck for your team. You working tomorrow?”

“Every day.”

“Me, too. I’ll see you in the O.R.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and said, “And tomorrow night we’ll be on stage.”

“You said Tuesday was acoustic night. You sing by yourself on Tuesdays.”

“I’ve got a stand-up acoustic bass just waiting to be plucked. Play with me. We’ll light it up.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Nico, this town is 16,000 brave souls on the southern fringe of the polar ice cap, on the road to nowhere. There’s nothing else for them or us to do on Tuesday nights. Turn off your TV, walk on over to Heaven’s Door, and we’ll make some music. On stage at eight o’clock. Deal?” Dylan grinned that twisted smile, and I was drawn in again. I couldn’t say no. The man was crazy, but he had one endearing quality.

He thought Nico Antone was special.

CHAPTER 12

PEEKING THROUGH A KEYHOLE

My suitcase was packed and stowed in the back seat of the BMW. Johnny jumped into the passenger seat and said, “When are you coming back, Dad?”

“I’m returning on the 7 p.m. plane from Minneapolis tomorrow night.”

“Business trip?”

“I have to meet with the dean of the medical school to talk about my job. I took a one-year leave of absence to come to Minnesota, and the dean needs a firm commitment for when I’m coming back. If I return within twelve months my job is secure, but to do that I’d have to leave you here to finish your senior year without me.”

“Can you get an extension?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m going back to meet with him.”

“If you have to move back to California, I could always live with Echo and her mom.”

“That gets complicated. Echo lives with her dad half the time.”

“I could stay with Lena full time, no problem. There’s no way I’m staying with her dad. He’s too creepy for me.”

“Why don’t we just wait and see what happens, Johnny. Tonight you’ll be staying with Echo and her mom. Let’s see how that goes.” I rolled the BMW up to the front steps of the Hibbing Curling Club, and turned off the engine.

“I’ll be fine while you’re gone, Dad. Studying and curling, that’s what I’ll be doing.”

“You enjoy curling?”

“I like it a lot, and I’m good at it. I’m almost the best guy on my team already. Echo’s friends—the boy’s team that won the State Championship last year—one of them tore his ACL skiing last week. They’re looking for a replacement, and they’re trying me out tonight.”

“Join the defending Minnesota State Champions? You’ve only been playing for two months.”

“I’ve been playing every day for two months. A team has four guys on it, and I’ll be the front man for the other three champions. I’m an OK shooter, but the guys say they’ve never seen anyone sweep as hard as me, and they like that.”

“A sweeping specialist?”

“No. Everyone on the team throws two rocks. My job is to make the first two shots, and then sweep the last six rocks. What time does your plane leave, Dad? Do you have time to come in and watch?”

“My plane leaves at 8.”

“Come in then. I want you to see us play.”

I followed Johnny inside the Hibbing Curling Club. The sign hanging over the entryway read:
Home of the 1976 World Champion Bruce Roberts Team.
I knew the Hibbing Club was a perennial contender for national titles. I’d forgotten club members had won a past world championship. Up North people were jazzed about curling, a winter recreation they could do after the sun went down and before the beer started flowing.

The interior of the Club resembled an inner city bowling alley. It smelled of stale tobacco smoke and spilled beer. Thirty or forty men were milling about, carrying brooms as they descended past glass doors leading to the curling sheets four steps below. There were seven curling lanes, or sheets, separated by pillars that held up the low-hanging ceiling. I sat down next to an old man in a fedora, and checked the clock. I had time to watch for fifteen minutes or so.

“Never saw you here before,” the old man said to me.

“First time,” I said. “I don’t know that much about curling. I’m just here to watch my son. That’s him with the wavy hair and the royal blue sweater.”

“The game’s like shuffleboard on ice,” he said. “See the bulls-eye targets at both ends of the sheet of ice? Players try to slide granite stones as close as possible to the center of that bulls-eye. The two teams alternate shots, and try to knock out the other’s stones. It’s a simple game on the surface, but it’s complicated as chess if you dig deeper.”