“Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?” Bob Dylan was singing to me, and I had to get away from it all. I needed to go far away for any reason I could find.
A Garbage concert in St. Louis was the first reason I saw. I boarded the Greyhound bus with Bob, and he sang me away from it all.
The sadness of the song didn’t break through the wall of excitement I had built up. It was my first journey by myself. I was young, almost 19, and saw the world with the naïve eyes of a child staring at the candy shelf, drooling over everything.
I considered myself the wandering poet finally. I was Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg’s illegitimate daughter. I was going to explore a new city, St. Louis. Its magnificent arch rising high. In the almost night it was tall and white, made bright by the illuminating light surrounding it. My neck was bent so far back to look at it through the bus window that I thought my neck would break any moment. I was not home anymore. “How does it feel/How does it feel/To be without a home? Like a complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?” pretty good, Bob, pretty good.
The bus pulled into the station. I had all I needed in my blue messenger bag; CDs, pencil, and paper. Paper with the start of a poem, “I wore my stark insanity like a Monday man’s tie.” I stepped off the bus with the innocent belief of my own greatness. The great child who does not realize the truth in the statement, “The stove is hot.”
The station’s past had been ornate and gilt, but the years had not been kind to the building nor the neighborhood it resided in. Peeling and Sagging. The turquoise and pink ceiling sky had faded, and the gilt struggled to sparkle and shine in the dim light. It was all beautiful to my toddler eyes because it was all new.
The cabs were waiting out in front of the station. They were like the bus station and the neighborhood, old and dingy. They were mostly yellow or white, but something made them seem grey. Singing their siren song, “Take me, take me. I’ll get you where you are wanting to go, little girl.” The cab driver I chose was an older black man with a greying beard; he kinda looked like Sanford from Sanford and Son. His cab was the traditional yellow. It made my romantic side swoon.
The Pageant was surrounded by small shops. Most were African in nature. I wandered in and out of a few of them before the show. I quietly browsed in one that sold jewelry and bright clothes. A turquoise-beaded bracelet caught my eye. There were five strands of tiny blue beads. Every now and then, a hint of pink and yellow would occur. Long silver beads kept the five strands of beads in straight little soldier lines.
The line that was barely there when I first arrived had grown into a long sequence of people, all different in the same way. In their little groups of friends, laughing and talking. I had gone by myself, and to talk and laugh to myself would only highlight my building-block insanity. I stood in the line and quietly read my astrology book, on a desperate mission to find myself amidst the line. “You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely.” Yes, I know Bob.
“You’re a Gemini?” The half-question, half -statement felt like it was addressed to me, but I was by myself. Oh no, I had started talking to myself. I thought I had more time on the right of the center of things. But it was not my voice, and when I looked up, a different person, not I, was addressing me. She was a young girl, my age. I remember she was an art student, but for her name all I can do is a cold-reading guess of an A or an S. She was tall and thin. Bitch. Quite pretty. Again, bitch. Brown curly hair, bitch, and wide brown eyes, bitch. She was what I imagined myself like in an almost perfect world; in a perfect world, I would have red curly hair. It was a weird, dreamlike quality, my childhood imaginary-world protagonist. My idealized dream self was a real person. She also had a sweet, wholesome, mid-western nature which made her almost impossible to hate, unless you were her ex-boyfriend. She had asked me the question because her mom, who was standing beside her, was also a Gemini. She was attending the concert with her mother because she and her ex-boyfriend had broken up the previous day. She had the envious relationship of friendship with her mother.
Walking through the door of the theater made me feel like Alice when she ate the cake. The inside of the theater was smaller than I expected, but the wonder was not diminished. The theater was dominated by two features, the stage and a bar. The energy was growing; it was like Christmas. We were all about to meet Santa. You had heard the stories and seen pictures, but you were actually going to see them in person. The voice would actually say something different, and respond to things in the crowd. Oh my God.
She said she thought someone’s shirt was cute. This was not on the cd; this was live.
I do not remember it ending. It sort of just faded from trying orange Fanta for the first time and exchanging contact information with my idealized dream self to waiting at the bus station with the painted sky and weak, overpriced coffee.
The lost daughter of the beat
I have found words, words, words again
At 1:35 am Tuesday
Under turquoise and pink gilded skies
I found the words that rang since my conception
In a dark, dank cup
While waiting to go home
I – I am a poet again
That’s how it feels, Bob: That is how it used to feel.
Tina Hoffman was born in San Diego and has nomadic tendencies. She is a Liberal Arts and Culinary Arts major who hopes to live in NYC and study literature and writing.
