Bob and Dylan

(Originally published at joecsmolen.com 2/24/2023)

Bob knocked off Dylan’s Covid mask with the first punch, but he didn’t stop pounding on Dylan until he saw blood. They didn’t even get five miles from Bob’s arrival at the airport before they stopped at a truck stop and pulled behind the tire shop, and got into it. Bob’d always suspected it; Dylan really just never learned how to defend himself. Dylan was a “college boy” – U of W, Class of ‘73. Seeing the blood coming out of Dylan’s nose woke Bob up, though, and he got off Dylan and worked himself up on his foot and panted and hopped to keep his balance.

 The adrenalin took Bob back. He hated the jungle Insertions – how weirdly clean the decks of the Huey Slicks sometimes were – flying in. He felt stupid, too – at his age - pounding on his oldest friend, but he could see Dylan’s brain had atrophied. Told him so.

Bob couldn’t reach down very far, but he offered his hand to Dylan, who reached up, accepting. The muscles in Bob’s remaining leg seared with the effort, but he helped Dylan to his feet. Dylan’s glasses were busted and he started trying to staunch his bleeding nose with a wadded paper napkin he had in his pocket from their lunch at the airport after Bob’s arrival. There was quite a bit of blood. Fifteen more years had given Bob a cloudy arcus senilis circling each cornea that made Dylan feel like he was looking into the eyes of a stranger. Bob saw that the knuckles on both of Dylan’s now age-spotted hands were all nicked up, but he didn’t remember Dylan hitting back. Dylan twisted the napkin out long and thin and stuffed the ends up both sides of his nose.

“I haven’t felt this awake in years,” Dylan nasaled, “But I just realized. I’m super glad to see you, but we can’t go forward as friends unless we concede points to each other. Otherwise, it’s all just rants.”

That’s when Bob finally lost his balance and flopped over flat on his back. From his two-legged stand-up vantage point, Dylan could see Bob’s problem better than Bob could: the VA’s best prostheses chafed Bob worse than a Prick-25 plus the spare battery. Laying quite a ways off, over where Dylan finally stood his ground, was Bob’s old aluminum cane.

Dylan watched Bob start to crawl after his cane. He would have to crawl through a big puddle to get it, so Dylan kept his mouth shut and watched and Bob did! He crawled right through the puddle like - so what?  and it reminded Dylan that if a Marine is alive, he will not stop - ever. No question, in his seventies now, Bob wasn’t as lean, not as mean, but still a Marine.

Holding two-handed the bloody napkin tips up his nose, Dylan walked over and just as Bob was about to grab his cane, Dylan kicked it well out of reach. Bob’s jungle-memory took over; he just kept his head down and kept crawling.

“I’ll concede you, “ Dylan said, “The old U.S.A.’s not always the good guys!”

“Never are,” Bob grunted, stretching left-handed toward his cane.

This time Dylan kicked Bob’s cane even harder, farther and said, “Look, man. I had an easy time of it in the Navy, so I’m not worthy of telling you anything, but I guess you forgot.”

“Oh, you know me better, Dylan. I sprinkle fresh forget-me-nots on my salad every evening.”

When he got off the plane, for their reunion, Bob was wearing a really very nice, tartan-plaid suit. But back behind the truck stop tire shop, Dylan finally stood his ground for the old U.S.A., and Bob lost it.  Watching Bob crawl now, Dylan was reminded of the Marine bumper-sticker phrase, “...if it absolutely, positively must be destroyed over night.” Bob’s custom suit was – destroyed.

But Bob didn’t care about the suit. Dylan knew the signs. Dylan could see, as Bob crawled through the puddle, Bob was visiting with ghosts. From decades ago, Dylan remembered the details of Bob’s flash-back re-runs. In the 110-degree jungle heat again, Bob tried to give first aid to a friend named Stan Stanfill who’d just caught a machine gun burst in the abdomen. Lying waiting for the Med-Evac Dust-Off at the Landing Zone, Bob and Stan both clung to Stan’s life. The volunteer Dust-Off chopper pilots had brass balls. Right in front of their eyes there at the LZ, Stan’s first Dust-Off ignited in a ball of fire. The second Huey was too late.

And Dylan knew that coming out of his flash-backs, Bob always felt futile – like some sort of rich man’s tool. Now, crawling the tire shop puddle, after nearly fifty years, Bob was still pinned down. Bob forget? Worse, Bob was getting ready to lose even his boy-hood friend to friendly fire. Bob was trying to zip Dylan into a body bag and put him in the past along with Stan Stanfill.

But Dylan meantime, knowing the body language of Bob’s flash-backs, had walked over and picked up Bob’s cane and waited for the flash-back to play out. Dylan was standing there, the bright red blood-soaked napkin looping like a crimson bull-ring up his nostrils. Bob’s cane in one hand, he extended his other down to Bob, who was looking up at him kina dazed, blinking.

 “Stan again?” Dylan asked.

“I saw our stumps where we cleared the LZ – like yesterday – the trees Stan and I weed-whacked with our M-14s that same morning. Stan got waxed. That’s all. What’s the difference?”

“To you or to me?”

“You think I’m some sorta saint, but you’re fulla shit – you and your clean, college boy hands.”

“I’m not the only one. Suck it up, grunt. You’re a living icon.”

Dylan drug Bob up onto his foot. They stood there together a moment. They staggered in the years. They didn’t notice but somehow, the thin-walled, aluminum tubing of Bob’s old VA cane had gotten kinked in Bob’s fall. When Bob put his weight back on it, the weakened cane folded and he took another header, ending on his back, this time right in the same puddle he’d crawled through. The muddy water sloshed around him in mini-tsunamis and soaked the back of his head.  The cold, filthy water drained between his neck and his collar. Dylan looked down at Bob and their eyes met and Dylan asked Bob if he wanted to get up again. Bob, his eyebrows heavily flecked with grey, wanted to know why he should.

“Something I gotta tell you, Bob,” Dylan said, “I’ve got nobody else to tell. Nobody. Coupla weeks ago, on the radio, I heard ‘Werewolves of London’ again. Remember that Warren Zevon song?” Bob just blinked and nodded. Dylan didn’t know why, but Bob was listening – close.

“Been a long time.” Dylan went on, “I love Zevon’s deliberate alliteration in the mutilation part. I flat love it. I love it all! But see, the thing is Bob, the kid DJ proved right there on the radio he wasn’t even sure how to pronounce Warren’s last name. I couldn’t believe it! At the time, I just took it in. The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt lost – I mean, realizing I’m history hit me in the gut!”

“Like I told you, Dylan. Your brain has atrophied.”

Dylan stepped into Bob’s puddle. It was ankle deep. The cold, anti-freeze-contaminated water – the part that didn’t sluice down Bob’s neck - flooded Dylan’s low-top wingtips. Dylan dropped down onto one knee in the water next to Bob and pretty much made a mess of his own suit. Bob struggled onto the only knee he had left. They worked together, hauling and partially draping Bob across Dylan’s horizontal shoulders and back. They both panted and heaved with the exertion. It was a beast. Last, Dylan grabbed-up Bob’s damaged cane. As he forced himself straight up standing under Bob’s weight, Dylan could feel the stabbing spasms of his lower back cutting his breathing to short, painful gasps. Truth was, Bob was sorta fat now. Alone under Bob, Dylan staggered off toward the tipped-down tail-gate of his pick-up.

Bob was dead-weight heavy; Dylan panted and gulped and told Bob so. Dylan doubted Bob could hear him, but he was glad he had faced Bob and called a spade a spade. His lonely tears tasted really pretty good.

It was kina funny though. Having just flown in to visit Dylan for a week, for once, one-legged Bob couldn’t do a thing about any of what happened to him now. And Warren Zevon had died.

Dylan drove Bob to where Dylan lived. His neglected little, battle-ship grey Cape Cod crouched among giant Lilacs on an over-grown, dead-end street. By the time they got there Dylan’s spazzing back was completely locked up. He was lucky he could even get out of his pick up and climb his own coupla front steps and hobble into his house. He decided he’d just tarp Bob in the pick-up bed over night. Be glad to leave the jerk there anyhow.

Even in the loneliness of his lost friendship, Dylan had grinned as he drove them home. “Hmph!” he’d thought to himself. “Brain atrophied? I’ll check under the tarp about midnight. Let’s see what Bob has to say for himself when his own brain gets soggy. He’ll have to concede. I’ll be cruel. I’ll taunt him. Promise him a cup of nice hot cocoa if he’ll just concede me that if the old U.S.A. goes down, everybody does.”

*                *                *

But inside his house, all by himself again, Dylan couldn’t stop thinking about one-legged Bob sprawled in his soaked tartan-plaid, hard-grounded to the chilling heat-sink of the bare steel pick-up bed. Couldn’t stop thinking about how much he’d looked forward to Bob’s visit. His sense of loss was like a brick chimney fell on him. It’d been nearly fifteen years. After Dylan’s wife left him, just for something to do, he went out and got an MFA in Creative Writing. He’d been a lot older than any of the faculty. He’d even seen a need to educate one of his punk Profs on how to shave without getting carved up. He’d looked forward to being able to tell Bob all about it – to see Bob grin and snort in his re-assuring old way about “college boys” and then quote long passages from Thucydides. For some reason Bob, by heart, could recite big sections of the Mytilenaean Debate – Diodotus arguing before the Assembly at Athens, for the lives of the plotting Mytilenaeans.

Dylan just kept thinking and thinking about Bob. Bob would never concede. Nope. As he fell over onto his bed in pain, he reminded himself,

“Better not let him in.”

*             *               *

With his injured back spasming and yanking and screaming, it was a misery toiling and moiling out front under the midnight sun of the ancient, single-bulb street light, but Dylan eventually got shivering Bob into the house. Bob crawled out of his muddy suit – dripped his wet custom tartan and muck all over the place. He drug himself into Dylan’s shower and ran it hot a lo-o-ong time. Later, with Bob all bedded down and tucked in on Dylan’s couch, Bob in his black and red Marine Corps logoed pajamas in front of a crackling fire, Dylan sat in his favorite chair with a plug-in heat pad on his lower back and they sipped hot cocoa together and stared at the flames and didn’t say anything – just sipped steaming cocoa and stared at the fire - for a lo-o-ong time.

Dylan didn’t tell Bob what he was doing and Bob didn’t rat Dylan out, but Dylan hobbled into the kitchen, refilled both their cups and dumped a lotta pre-warmed Peppermint Schnapps in their hot cocoa.

They barked at the Moon.

“Remember that Zevon concert we went to? Passaic, New Jersey? When the hell was that?”

“Eighty-three. When I got out. No question. I’d do it all over again.”

Dylan grinned, tipped his head back and let out a long “A-A-A-OOOO!”

Thousand-yard-staring at the flames, Bob corrected, “I meant The Corps.”