This is Bob Dylan memory from Carol Casper – Shared 6 May 2024 09:37 in Bob Dylan Photographs Facebook group
In summer 1975 my friend Barbara and I were heading to Greenwich Village every Wednesday night to see the current double bill from the Ingmar Bergman Film Festival that the Bleecker St Cinema was putting on that year. Driving in from NJ, we were heading down the West Side Drive and Barbara was skimming through that week’s Village Voice. An article she read mentioned how Dylan had been popping up repeatedly in the Village for the last week or so. Or as the writer menorably put it, “You can’t spit in the Village without hitting Dylan these days.” As it turned out, Dylan was there cooking up the Rolling Thunder Revue that summer. We got down to Bleecker and I started cruising around for a parking spot.
I was heading west on Houston St. when I spied a great spot just ahead. I was in the right lane with my blinker on, almost about to start nosing in, when a big, light-blue Oldsmobile sedan a little back in the LEFT lane zoomed in front and cut me off, grabbing the spot right out from under me. I was pretty mad, also stunned at how suddenly the other driver managed to swoop in and beat me out of the spot. As I was about to drive away, Barbara was looking at the guy who’d jumped from the car and run up to the door of a brownstone right there, practically exactly in front of his now parked car. “Now there’s a guy who looks like Dylan,” she said off-handedly.
I took a quick look to see who she meant. Then him yelled, “It is!” It was Bob Dylan all right, right there in the flesh, who’d beaten me out of that NYC parking spot. He quickly disappeared inside. I couldn’t just sit there blocking the right lane and still needed to park, so reluctantly we drove off. I found another spot pretty fast. We’d planned to have dinner before the movies, but decided to take a walk back to Houston St first, to see if the car was still there. It was. So now I couldn’t help myself. I had to wait a while to see if Dylan might come back out. So we hung out by the car. We passed some of the time looking it over. There was a slightly crumpled, color paper flyer for a massage parlor stuck under the wiper at the driver’s side corner of the windshield. Eventually out of curiosity I tried the driver’s side door handle. It was unlocked. Well, I figured now I’d have a hard time living with myself if I didn’t at least try to leave him a note.
I had a little pocket notebook with me, pulled out a pen, and wrote the best 5-minute poem about what it had been like to suddenly see him there that way. I added my phone number (you never know…) and put it inside the car on the front seat. By this time dinner was out of the question. Neither of us felt it was really worth missing the movies just to keep standing around on the sidewalk next to the car, waiting to see if and when Dylan might emerge. So reluctantly I hightailed it with Barbara the few blocks over to the theater. We got there just in time to go in and get seated before the first movie started. There was no time even to grab a snack. So we sat there pretty hungry for about four hours watching Bergman’s characters onscreen as they wrestled with fate, and all of the weighty challenges, dilemmas, and angst of the human condition – while I tried not to let myself get too distracted by thinking over the bizarre coincidence that it was Bob Dylan who’d beaten me out of that spot. Eventually I forgave him for being such a jerk with the way he cut me off to steal it. It was exactly in front of where he was going (which turned out to be the borrowed apartment where he was staying that summer.) Given the way he likes his privacy, finding that spot right out front so he could hop out of his car and be inside the door in under 5 seconds, was just so perfect for him. I reasoned that he needed it more than I did. Even if it was such a real jerk move to cut me off to take it, with me right there almost pulling in, with my signal on and everything!
Carol Casper – Shared in Bob Dylan Photographs Facebook group (Administrator: Uğur Oral)
Link to group : https://www.facebook.com/groups/BobDylanPhotographs
