I was jilted and I was stoned and I listened over and over to Bob Dylan. It was my drug of choice. The music felt like the simultaneous anticipation and afterglow of sex, coursing through me like the continuous caudal I had been promised in childbirth, like my mother’s blessing.
It was not only the music but the words that inspired me.
My novel begins. “Lately I dream I am stoned. Last night I was rolled in Bambu paper like Cleopatra in a Persian carpet being carried to Antony.”
1. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (album Bringing It All Back Home)
Your lover who just walked out the door,/ has taken all his blankets from the floor,/ and the carpet is moving under you.
(I remembered the line as: has rolled up his Persian carpet from the floor.)
Everyone gets dumped. Bob Dylan made my pain universal.
2. She Belongs to Me (album Bringing It All Back Home)
She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back
It wasn’t true. I had nothing. I was an artist and I was looking back. Emotion recollected in tranquility. Tranquility was the euphoria of melancholy, the harmonica snake-charming song out of sorrow.
3. You’re A Big Girl Now (album Blood on the Tracks)
And I’m just like that bird, singing just for you
As a poet, I liked that Dylan seemingly carelessly used the word ‘just’ twice in one line. It made it real and raw.
I felt I was singing a torch song not just to the male lead, Kazimir Noble, but to the famous artist he replaced, who had jilted Maud, Carl Vaggio.
4. Oh, Sister (album Desire)
Sister, when I come to knock on your door/ you must not treat me like a stranger./ Our father does not like the way that you act, /and you must realize the danger
Sister, when I come to lie in your arms/ you must not treat me like a stranger/ Our father does not like the way that you act,/and you must realize the danger
For some reason, this turned me on. It brought back the danger of adultery, which had led to Maud Diamond’s divorce and present circumstances: living with a man who her children hated while her lawyer-father informed her of the legal danger. She would lose her alimony. She was also in danger of losing her children.
Then she did lose them, her daughter in Chapter 6, “Pro and Con,” and her son in Chapter 17, “Phone Sex.”
5. Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright (album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look out your window and I’ll be gone
You’re the reason I’m a-traveling on
But don’t think twice, it’s all right
And it ain’t no use in turning on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
And it ain’t no use in turning on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
In Chapter 3, “Corinna,” Kazimir rides off on a horse. “I would just have to get high, I thought, as they cantered off to the carriage barn in his parents’ backyard in Lakewood.
“It seemed tragic for him to be in his white shirt on his white horse on the highway. I watched the white smoke curl its arms out the bathroom window. Like a woman longing for her lover. . . .I stayed stoned for two days.”
It is the music of abandonment, and the comfort of shared loneliness.
6. Mr. Tambourine Man
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me/In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you
Mr. Tambourine Man made smoking pot, despite “our father” saying to me, if you want to ruin your perfectly good health, go ahead and smoke marijuana,” seem triumphantly and deliriously all right.
I worked on Stoned for forty years. After a few decades I stopped listening exclusively to Dylan, I went on to Tom Waits and Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen but the songs and the words stayed in my head, like an unmade bed, always there in the smoke rings of my mind.