Pete Able
The first few songs weren’t my particular favorites and they were played in a hurry. Though the arena boasted high ceilings that went up thirty feet or more into darkness, I felt claustrophobic. Six thousand people were seated around me and I swore I could feel their breath on the back of my neck. My armpits sweat under my hoodie and I was sadder even than before I left the house.
Sitting directly behind me was what had to be a lost soul—the ghost of a woman who wailed in a high-pitched, shrieking voice. She masked the agony of her unfinished life with apparent jubilation, but I could tell. Fakers can always tell another faker.
“Oh yeyeyeyeahhhhh!” she cried.
I didn’t turn around to face the ghost—I didn’t have the nerve—but my mental picture of her was as a small, gray, drowned corpse with messy black hair, like the girl from The Ring. She screamed again and again, kicked the back of my chair and there was nothing to do but prepare myself for a long, painful concert experience.
The date was November 17, 2018 and Bob Dylan was performing at the Hard Rock Arena in Atlantic City. At 77 the iconic figure drew a mixed crowd of all different ages. My roommate and I, at 24 and 26, observed the senior citizen ticketholders and goings on almost like it were an episode on the History Channel.
The first song Dylan and his band played I got at all excited about was “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” but I couldn’t really enjoy it. Maybe it was fitting the ghost screamed and howled with enhanced volume as if she held a megaphone pointed at the back of my head. Maybe she really was “tryin’ to get to heaven.” Maybe she screamed and howled because she loathed being stuck down here with the rest of us.
My roommate, David, sat on my left because his right ear was his good ear. Born stone deaf in the left, he liked to joke it was a good thing the defect hadn’t been in his right because it’d feel too weird to hold the phone in his left hand. On this occasion I thought him lucky because he couldn’t hear the ghost as well as I could and appeared unfazed by her shrieks.
Periodically throughout the show David leaned over to ask me the names of the songs and what I thought of the performance. Ooh I like this one, he’d say. What’s this one called again? He deferred to me so often, and seemed so unfamiliar with Dylan’s music, I started to wonder why he’d even wanted to come along.
“Who do you think ‘and His Band’ are?” he asked.
“What?”
“The ticket says, ‘Bob Dylan and His Band.’ That must be pretty demeaning for those musicians, don’t you think? They don’t have names of their own.”
“I think it’s probably an honor just to share the stage with such an icon,” I said, speaking clearly into his right ear.
David frowned and was quiet, then: “But what about after Dylan is gone, what then? They don’t have a name to trade on.”
“I see what you mean,” I said patiently. “But I think this tour will still look good on their resumés.”
David seemed satisfied. Maybe he was thinking this concert would look good on his resumé. Maybe when he got home he’d add it to his LinkedIn profile, I thought.
Dylan played a lot of the songs I wanted to hear but not the way I wanted to hear them—not like the studio versions I knew so well. I guessed after playing the same songs for thirty, forty, or even fifty years he had to make changes to entertain himself, to give the songs new life. On a fundamental level I understood this but still would’ve killed to hear “Desolation Row” played just how it was on the 11-minute, 21-second, 1965 recording on Highway 61 Revisited.
During a sedate, second-leg of a less popular song, while most everyone in the crowd was quiet, the ghost behind me, seated in row 26 seat F, screamed an earth-shattering scream from nowhere, causing me to jump and bite my tongue. I glanced up into the darkness, thinking the sky would fall but nothing dropped. I turned to David but he made no response. He sat leaned forward, staring down at the stage so intently you’d think the performance were a basketball game he had money on.
Later, David became fidgety and upset. He wanted to know why they weren’t using the big monitors that were set up on either side of the stage. A fair point. No doubt for other shows they were used to show close-ups of the performers, but they weren’t using them then.
Annoyance crept into his voice. “There’re right there, you got ‘em, so why not turn them on?”
He issued several complaints, and, really, he was right—we had no way to know for sure what we were looking at. The small figure down on stage dressed in the baggy suit sounded like Dylan, he was doing Dylan’s songs, but we couldn’t see his lips moving, or even his face in any detail.
What if it’s all a pantomime? I thought. Could be the audio is prerecorded and the real Dylan is on the other side of the country in sunny Palm Springs, sipping iced tea poolside, playing dominoes with Joan Baez. Stranger things have happened. Take Tupac’s hologram performing at Coachella.
The turning point in the show for me came when the cute, twenty-something girl sitting on my right began singing along to Dylan’s new version of “It Ain’t Me Babe”. Her voice had the totally opposite effect on me than the ghost’s. It didn’t grate but rather felt like the emotional support of a parent and I peered over at her from the corner of my eye to see if she in anyway resembled my mother. She was leaned way over into the crook of her boyfriend’s neck, softly crooning into his ear.
The couple seemed an interesting microcosm of the crowd. Young Dylan fans like myself, they wore jeans and dark flannels that more or less matched. The boyfriend wore glasses with thick black frames low down on his nose as if reading, and the girl’s hair was all but hidden under a formless gray knit hat, which suggested to me she might be unwell, a terminal case. Anyway, no sickness affected her voice. She sang with the gravity and intonation of the studio version while Dylan did his own thing down on stage.
I quickly realized this girl was performing the Dylan song more like Dylan than Dylan, and I opted to listen to her rather than old Bob himself. I slouched down in my chair and began to enjoy myself for the first time, or at least, relaxed to some degree. The girl represented some beautiful continuity. That she could sing Dylan’s song this way made me feel more secure, more optimistic about the future.
“When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Make You Feel My Love,” and “Simple Twist of Fate” were all performed. Dylan played the piano and the harmonica but not the guitar, which made me wonder if at 77 Bob had arthritis in his elbows or shoulders. Whatever the case, it didn’t bother me. I watched him down there singing into the microphone—with what was more or less the same somewhat-nasal, gravelly voice that first sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963—and that was enough.
Despite his advanced age, arthritis or not, Dylan kept up an energetic pace. Without breaks between songs, he moved rapidly around the stage, flirting with the microphone, interacting with the band, generally putting on a show. Personally, I wanted a more mellow vibe. I wanted to sit quietly and observe in the dark like I would at a movie or play, not whoop and holler like the ponytailed man three rows up playing air drums, or scream my head off like the ghost in 26F.
The highlight of the performance came when Dylan slowed way down and played a meandering version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” He rattled off the first couple verses then blew a nice, sly harmonica solo in the middle. People whistled and cheered. Green and blue lights twinkled down on stage. The sound of the harmonica reverberated through the air. This was what I’d waited in line for, I thought. This one song made the whole night. It made up for the drive, the cost of the ticket, gas and parking fees, the anxiety and discomfort caused by the crowd. It even made up for the past couple months of depression. I’d suffer through it all again if that meant I could arrive at the exact place I was now.
Near the end David leaned over and said, “I wish he’d play ‘All Along the Watchtower’.”
I don’t know why, but the comment irritated me. I guessed it was the only Dylan song David actually knew.
“Not a chance,” I said. “He’ll never play that.”
“He might,” David countered hopefully.
“Not likely. He’s gotta be sick of it by now. In fact, if he plays ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ I’ll do the dishes every night for a month.”
As the Dylan expert of the two of us, I was so sure of myself. But soon I’d regret saying that.
I half-expected someone as legendary, as time-tested and proven, as old as Bob Dylan would skip the encore, that he’d just walk off stage straight into a limo to be whisked away to some quiet, luxurious apartment but he didn’t leave right away. The lights shot back on and Dylan and His Band performed two more songs.
Like the rest of the show, some of the words were hard to hear and the rhythm different, but there was no mistaking the notes of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
The crowd made a riot of appreciative noises, but none rivaled the noise of the ghost behind me, who alternately cackled like a wild monkey and broke out in shrill, haunted laughter. Just as I’d been sure Dylan would not perform “Watchtower,” I was sure of this ghost’s hideous appearance. I felt if you saw her you’d be so repulsed you’d vomit, or feel so queasy you’d double over, but I was wrong again.
As the applause died down, I thought of my job, my ex-girlfriend, my expired gym membership, and of washing dishes, and it all seemed so easy and trivial, nothing at all to worry about. Surely none of it warranted the drowning feeling of even the day before.
The arena lights came on and it was all over. People stood up, rubbed their eyes and stretched as if just waking up. David and I made our way to the aisle and I caught a glimpse of the ghost who’d kicked my chair and taxed my nerves all night. She took the form of a living woman—a normal, attractive young woman talking with a girl who must’ve been a sibling, if not a twin.
She had smooth skin and a pointy nose. Straight white teeth peeked out from under full, moving lips as she whispered something to her sister. Average height and slender, she wore a fuzzy red sweater and a few strands of her hair were died orange and held back with a metallic star-shaped hairpin.
To her sister, the ghost spoke up and said, “That was really something! I needed this.”
The younger girl, a mirror image only a few inches shorter and with different hair, replied, “I told you you’d have fun. Things aren’t as bad as you make them out to be sometimes.”
The ghost’s mouth was pouty, which seemed an old habit, but her eyes were bright like high beams on a car.
“I guess you’re right. I’ve been focusing on the wrong kinds of things.”
“I’m glad you came,” said the sister, as she put her arm around the taller one’s waist.
“Sorry I’ve been so hard to be around lately,” said the ghost.
Because of the blood-curdling sounds she’d made it was difficult to see the woman as completely alive, but of course she didn’t look anything like a ghost, drowned or otherwise. Her body looked firm to me, soft but ultimately firm. If I reached out, my hand would not pass through her.
In truth I didn’t know what to think, but as I went before her down the stairs I shot a smile in her direction. She smiled back and my whole body went cool and crisp. I became a piece of ripe fruit and it’d been a long time since I felt so fresh and so clean.
Walking down to the arena floor, thinking of Dylan’s Nobel Prize and the ghost-woman’s transition, I felt on the edge of a revelation.
In the wide corridors of the gaudy hotel/casino we were swept along by streams of elated, chattering people. I allowed myself to go with the flow of the crowd, feeling like a leaf cruising down a small stream on the side of the street after a rain.
Waiting at the elevators, where I was deposited, David chattered too but I couldn’t make out what he said. I watched his mouth move but heard only the whir of a dozen overlapping voices then, for a while—silence. Was I leaving this plane of existence?
Soon David’s mouth closed and the elevator doors opened with the ding of a welcome chime.Pressed up against the back wall, sucking in my gut, I stared up at the mirrored ceiling and had that breakthrough. I couldn’t go back into the past, and really, I couldn’t go lower in the present, so there was nowhere to go but up. With the tune of “Don’t Think Twice” echoing in my head, I decided that’s what I would do—I’d go up. I’d ride this new wave as high as it’d take me, which I hoped would be at least as far as Parking Deck 4.
PETE ABLE’s stories have appeared in Literally Stories, Philadelphia Stories, Blue Lake Review, Spillwords Press, Johnny America, Idle Ink, The Fiction Pool, Thorn Literary Magazine, among others. He lives in southern New Jersey.