Recently I received a blowjob while listening to my new vinyl of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. In the middle of it, I stood up and flipped the record so I could finish during Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. This was the second time I had done something like this—the first was the day I bought my copy of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Different girl.
If I could assign one man the moniker of “Otto Fischkin’s childhood hero,” it would be Bob Dylan. His music has been the soundtrack to my life. Growing up, Blonde on Blonde filled every card ride. On my birthday each year, my father would make CD’s of my favorite songs (which he would then replace with his favorite songs) and hand them out to my classmates—half of every playlist was Dylan.
The morning of my ninth birthday, my parents had been fighting with particularly accentuated vigor, and the CD “I” handed out to my friends was composed almost entirely of songs from Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan’s opus divorce album. I can only imagine my classmates’ parents’ reactions when they played my CD and, expecting a typical nine-year old’s collection of pop songs, were met with lyrics such as “My love, it stops and starts. Like a corkscrew in my heart.”
I didn’t mind. Even though I wouldn’t understand the lyrics for some time (I thought Tangled Up In Blue was a song about ocean litter), these were my favorite songs of all.
My senior year in college, I used to have a sex playlist that opened with Bob Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, which I would blast as loud as my speaker would allow. It made me laugh knowing that my roommate, Jonah, with whom I shared a very thin wall, would hear the song’s famous opening piano riff and know that I was beginning to make a woman not-orgasm. I’m not sure Jonah ever got to the end of the song.
My most recent time seeing Bob Dylan was in New Jersey, November of 2023. Hours earlier, I had met up an ex-girlfriend, which later inspired my short story, Winter Sonata. I cried more than once that day.
At one point, my brother and I didn’t speak for four years. He and I reconnected while listening to The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll in his car.
A few weeks ago I spoke to my mother on the phone, and she told me she had just started listening to Dylan again. It had been seven years since she and my father divorced, and much longer since they had been separated, yet she still couldn’t muster the nerve until very recently to listen to their favorite musician, simply because he had become exactly that—their favorite musician.
I possess no memory of my parents being happy together. When I was little, they always told us that they were in love; later, when it became clear they were not, they maintained they had once been in love, very long ago. Perhaps this was true at one point, I thought; but because I had never seen it, I could only hear this with the most skeptical ear, and soon grew to doubt it entirely.
I do remember my parents smiling a lot, but always in some fleeting moment—as a response to a movie or joke, or the greeting of an old friend that required a grinning façade. So often it is the saddest people who laugh the hardest. A laugh is created when tension is halted by some unexpected release; when a life is flush with tension to the point of being defined by it, its temporary release only holds that much more weight. I possess plenty of memories of my parents smiling, but in no image do they truly appear happy—except for one.
When I was in fourth grade, the year of my nine-year-old-birthday-party-divorce-album-gift-bag, we went as a family to see Bob Dylan at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. The show was opened by Amos Lee and Elvis Costello, both of whom I remember being fantastic, though I know this only as fact, as I was still too young to accurately recall the concert. All I possess is a kaleidoscopic series of faded stills like a scrapbook of wrinkled polaroids.
I do remember one image, though, every second of a particularly heartfelt rendition of Visions of Johanna, in which I couldn’t understand a single word out of the half-senile barking that Mr. Dylan calls a singing voice (in this regard, he might now be the voice of a generation more than ever.) I recognized the song from our car rides, and I could at least make out the times he croaked the refrain “These visions of Johanna,” his voice breaking pitch with the intensity of a prepubescent boy reciting a torah portion.
During one of these refrains, I turned to the side, and saw my mother standing with her head pressed against my father’s protruding chest, his arm resting gently on her shoulder. I knew even then that this image would be imprinted in my memory forever; it was the only time I can say they looked truly happy. When my father saw me looking at him, he threw his hand back to his side, as if embarrassed to be showing a shred of affection. But for a brief moment, I was evidenced with something I had previously doubted to have ever existed.
Visions of Johanna is, of course, a song about the speaker being with one woman, Louise, while fantasizing about a past relationship with another, Johanna. I used to wonder what made my father so receptive to this song. Who was this lost love, this Johanna he would fantasize about during his doomed marriage with my mother’s Louise?
I used to believe Johanna was a woman from long ago, some woman who had been left in another life well before their union, and certainly ages before Nate and I were born. I think this is half-true. As I reflect on the way my father held my mother that night, and listen to the way she today describes their relationship, I now believe that for my father, in that moment at least, both of these women were my mother, only in different times.
Otto Fischkin is the alter ego of Sam Frank Jr. Sam is a writer and standup comedian based in New York City. He has been published in The Bangalore Review, The Gramercy Review, and his standup comedy has been mentioned in the New York Times. He was named “Best Screenwriter” at the 2021 Austin Lift-Off Film Festival.
Sam is working on his debut novel about a traveling circus.
Sam can be reached at samfrankjunior@gmail.com
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Legal Disclaimer: For legal purposes, this work is fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Oops.
damn, Fisch, u always getting blowjobs. . .