Perfect from Now On (eBook)

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MY IMPRESSION NOW

'You're finding out that it's way too late to be happy around your friends.'

I hate Bob Dylan. Not with the kind of white-hot anger reserved for the asinine personalities of American Idol or the talk-to-the-hand disdain whipped out for the guy who replaced Michael Hutchence in INXS. This is no ordinary hate. It's primal. It's absurd. It makes me look bad. I mean, who doesn't like Bob Dylan?

Only a fool would resist the notion that Dylan might be a genius, would be reluctant to praise any of the 450-plus songs he's written, would fail to recognize that taking potshots at someone almost universally regarded as a living legend is a waste of energy. But until very recently, all of those fools were me. Every so often now, I find myself regretting my intense negative feelings toward him. There are times when I see images of him, especially as a young man, with his rat's nest hairdo and fluttering eyelids, and I feel bad not to be part of the club, many millions strong, that considers him a Martin-strumming Mozart. And then I imagine shaving off his hair and gluing his eyelids shut.

This is terrible, of course. But I've been moaning about Dylan almost since birth. Infrequently discussed, however, is the why. Why do I despise Dylan? Why do I want to press mute whenever I hear his incoherent bleating? Why am I tempted to seek out and club defenseless old ladies whenever someone plays that song about shit blowin' in the wind? The reason: I was abused as a child. Not in a way that will make this book a bestseller. There are no touchy-feely priests here, no overfriendly clowns, no despotic transgendered soccer moms. What I can offer you is a dad who took whacks at me every single day for nearly two decades. Only his weapon of choice was Bob Dylan.

The next time you hear 'Like a Rolling Stone,' try to picture a man in his early forties with a Tom Selleck mustache, clunky metal-frame glasses, and tufts of curly brown hair sitting shirtless in a cigarette-tortured, baby-shit-colored rocking chair. He's perched Indian style, a position that strains his threadbare denim cutoffs beyond their limit, revealing areas of skin that no kid should be made to witness. Now crank up the volume: In a deeper voice and with far better enunciation than Dylan's, he's singing emphatically along, occasionally puffing on a Carlton 100 or suckling at the Jar of Death, which contains a lukewarm admixture of Sanka, curdled milk, diet cola, and Carlo Rossi Chablis.

This is my dad. Or at least the version of my dad that slaps me when Dylan comes to mind. The image is seared into my brain: I saw him in this guise, or variations of it, nearly every night during my childhood. What I didn't realize then was that he was obsessed with Dylan. Totally. Actually, total obsession doesn't quite sell it. My dad was Bob Dylan's willing thrall. If Dylan had ever put a backwards message on one of his records urging people to take off their clothes, don their best blue bonnets, and skip like nancys across the Mackinac Bridge, my dad would have been the first to be arrested.

Sure, he listened to music by other artists -- John Denver, Jim Croce, the Moody Blues -- but specific examples stick out only because of their rarity. We were force-fed Dylan at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when my dad really got going, there were Dylan aperitifs. My mom, a high school English teacher with a preference for Chopin, the Carpenters, and nonconfrontation, had long stopped protesting by the time my memories kick in, she retreated to safe zones out of earshot of the living room record player, the epicenter of the problem. She knew...