Grossmont, California ignored the wistful man pacing back and forth in front of the discount furniture store that morning, his head thrown back like he’d been pulled from a car wreck.
He was attempting to sing a Bob Dylan song. It was a nonchalant attempt buried in layers of confusion.
His rendition of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” featured mangled lyrics and phrases repeated in a demented loop of disfigured fragments.
Mobile was replaced by Barstow. All he seemed certain of was that this could now really be the end.
It was unlikely anyone in Grossmont, California would have recognized the wistful man as the golfer whose game collapsed on the eighteenth green a few days previously in Chula Vista.
His idea of a fashionable golf sweater was replaced with a faded lemon sweatshirt and his jeans were heavily soiled, as if from rolling on damp ground.
The oilman had no idea he was in Grossmont, California. His ability to reason drifted well out of bounds after one of the two men who brought him back across the border from Mexico spiked his morning coffee with a generous dash of mescalito.
The oilman had never experienced the intricacies of mescaline before. The two men patted him on the shoulder and left him alone in the booth at Denny’s with his sausage and grits. He slumped into the naugahyde and watched two glistening angels soar through overexposed shafts of vibrating sunshine.
The oilman pushed his grand slam breakfast aside, emerged from the booth and somehow found his way out to the street. Forgotten was his relief, the thrill of release and being escorted back to America.
He never liked Bob Dylan or understood what the songs were about. If you asked him how he knew “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and he was honest, he would have told you that back in 1966, his sister played side two of “Blonde On Blonde” in her room every night for months on end.
But the oilman was far from honest.
All he had now was a wavering view of watching himself through a stained-glass window, stuck inside a swirling net only a song from long ago could tear away.
