HIT THE NORTH part 2

bound to lose, bound to win

There’s a Hotel Androy on the main street in Hibbing, similar in appearance to the one in Superior, but this one functions as an apartment building for seniors. The one visible sign of the town’s most illustrious native son is a tacky Fifties-style diner called Zimmy’s, presumably named thus in an attempt to lure in the occasional Dylan tourist.

I enter the Sportsmen’s bar and sit at the opposite end of the counter from the locals. Scarface screens on the television above the bar. “You don’t have to do anything,” says an old man to an old woman at a table behind me, “all I’m asking you to do is to sleep with me.”

The barmaid is a vision of loveliness with big sad brown eyes and a Louise Brooks haircut, attired in a short-sleeved black-and-white polka-dot shirt and black pants. She washes glasses on the other side of the counter, directly in front of me. When I order another Budweiser she pushes a bottle of Summit across the counter. “Budweiser gives American beer a bad name,” she says. Then she comes out from behind the counter and plays a game of darts with a woman who, like many small-town Midwestern women, has the appearance of a big city lesbian.

Time passes slowly. It’s only 9.30 and I’m rooted to a barstool. The town’s resident punk takes the seat next to mine. The word ‘Libertine’ is tattooed on his right arm. He’s impressed that I know the meaning of the word, which happens to be the name of his band. There’s a well-known English band with the same name but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

“Women in this town are like parking spaces,” says AJ, “they’re either handicapped or taken. It tells you something about this town. I’m twenty-eight and my girlfriend’s forty-three.”

“Does she have any kids?”

“Yeah, but they all came out C-section, you know, caesarean. That unit ain’t never been stretched. Don’t tell me I don’t know how to pick ‘em.”

AJ formally introduces me to Stacey, the bartender. My mission, of course, is transparent: It’s the same one she was on when she drove into town a year earlier. She arrived alone, in a pick-up truck, knowing nobody, and landed a job in this bar. Dylan’s house can be identified, she says, by the Dorito’s truck parked in the driveway. She keeps coming over to talk and drink with us. “Would you care for a beverage?” she says, “Can I refresh your drink?”

A middle-aged man and two middle-aged women, all wearing blue jackets with the address of a local refrigerator company on the back, enter and take a booth. AJ refers to the locals as “sheep-pimpin’ goat-rapin’.” A loud hairy man behind us keeps shouting unintelligibly. “Are you feeling special tonight?” asks Stacey. “Appropriate,” he replies. His name is Toad and his sobriquet can be explained by his complexion, although Stacey also addresses him as Raskolnikov. “You’re about as baked and cagey as the man himself,” he says to me, referring, presumably, to the man himself.

‘Solitary Man’ plays on the jukebox and Stacey refers to it as “my song.” I’d like to talk to her more but other patrons keep engaging me in conversation. A skinny, sloppily drunk ex-army sergeant called Kevin, attired in an ill-fitting Minneapolis Vikings uniform, plants himself on the neighboring barstool. He is good enough to intercede on my behalf when a large bruiser appears behind me and loudly announces that he wants to “deck the Limey.”

Stacey says that she’s burnt out on men, that her exodus to Hibbing was expedited by the dissolution of a relationship that ended when she discovered that the man she’d been involved with for five years had impregnated another woman with twins. She mentions Echo Holstrom, Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’, and expresses a desire to meet her: Echo, apparently, still lives in the Iron Range and occasionally comes into town.

Stacey continually replenishes my glass with vodka kamikazes and plays ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ on the jukebox. She and Toad dance on the bar. Kevin joins them and collapses into a heap of chairs on the floor. “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much at work,” says Stacey. We linger in the bar until after closing time, talking at one end while Kevin and some other regulars occupy the other.

There are a number of rooms above the bar. Stacey resides in one of them, but it is to somebody else’s room that she invites me, after she shuts the bar down, for the purpose of further conviviality. We climb the rickety wooden stairs at the back of the building, carrying bottles of wine from the bar. “I don’t trust you,” says Kevin, slurring and flailing, barely able to make it. Now he too wants to hit me, but he’s in such an advanced state of inebriation that his threats aren’t too worrying. He seems to resent the attention I’m receiving from Stacey. “He’s got a good vibe about him” says Stacey, in my defense. I appreciated that.

She briefly enters her room, to get something. Through the crack in the door a portion of mattress can be seen on the floor. We proceed to the messy room of her neighbor, Jim, across the corridor, to partake of weed and wine.

Everything is spinning, including ‘John Wesley Harding’ on the stereo. Kevin makes repeated attempts to grab Stacey’s ass until she finally kicks him in the shin and insists he gets out of the seat so she can sit next to me.

How much encouragement do I need, for Mercy’s sakes? When the others leave, I also leave. Goodness knows why. I should have stayed. Madness or cowardice, either way it’s inexcusable.

At 3 a.m. a lone police car drives slowly along the deserted street. I wait for it to pass into the distance before getting into my rental car and driving back to the hotel.

It’s a struggle to get out of bed and out of the room by 11 a.m.. I grab a coffee and a couple of stale muffins at a bakery housed in an old theater but I’m too sick to eat. I find Dylan’s boyhood home and stand on the other side of the street from it for a while, attempting to savor the atmosphere, knowing I’ll never exactly be in this position again.

The clock strikes two as I sit in the library, groggily perusing magazines. Stacey had said, before I foolishly left, that she would be working in the bar until four o’clock this afternoon. I walk the few blocks to Howard, buy a vintage Nelson Algren paperback at the Goodwill store, and enter the Sportsmen’s with the wrong attitude.

AJ is sitting at the bar with his mother, whom I have yet to meet but who seems to know me. She calls out to Stacey, “Look who’s here… he’s back.”

Stacey evinces the same seductive shyness that she did before she started drinking the night before. She leans over the bar and tells a story about driving to Minot, North Dakota just to see what it was like, and finding the lumberjack-type men there so frightening that she didn’t dare leave her motel room.

I’m practically asleep at the counter, drinking tasteless Bud tappers on top of an all-consuming hangover. I should have eaten, it would have put me in better stead. But, really, there are no excuses. Stacey is getting off work in a few minutes; her replacement, Jackie, has already arrived.

I should have walked in with a plan, approached her directly, and asked her to take a walk with me. Nothing could have been sweeter than to walk the cold leaf-strewn streets of Dylan’s hometown with her at the tail-end of a hungover afternoon. That would have been enough… an echo of Echo. But I couldn’t allow myself even that much What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I walked out of there, turned my back on a dream, threw it all away..

“It’s been nice meeting you,” she said as I wrote down my phone number. She copied it down on a separate piece of paper, folded it neatly and slipped it into the back pocket of her gray pants.

Out on the highway, I succeed in forcing down half a Subway sandwich. Then I turn around and head back into town, pass Dylan’s house again and drive down Howard one last time. The good people of Hibbing have no idea how magical it was to me, and why should they? I hadn’t realized it myself yet. If anything, they probably viewed me as a slumming opportunistic elitist, and perhaps they wouldn’t be far off the mark.

Too tired, restless, hungry. No excuses. None whatsoever.