On Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy
“It takes one to know one,” she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning
“You belong to Me I Believe”
And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave”
And the only sound that’s left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row.

You were there. In your own place and time. Close your eyes. For you, the memory is similar, but the scene is different. The smells are different. You are there and I am not. You are younger, more naïve, and, fearful – so cautious in peculiar ways. You are the things that you say now, “If only I had known it would turn out this way…”. And there it is: that sentence fades, incomplete. If only. But we do not know what.

There was the girl in high school. Brown hair just below her shoulders – a warming smile. That particular figure, that body type and the clothes she wore. She listened, and, it seemed, talked back in a way that was more beautiful than most.  She filled your heart with her laugh. You hadn’t, for the longest of times, had a chance with her. Because this is the way these things shake out when you’re sixteen. Then college happens, you move away.

You meet up again for a dinner in the late winter. It’s to catch up – see how your lives have shaken out differently, where the strange road has led us. And it had changed. She had seen you now, older, for the person you always were. The things you’d always been saying. Your heart seemed real now.

But those things exist only in a time. Though romance novels and drive-in movies have taught us, all of the time, that you go after the girl and you get her, eventually, the right choice, in reality, is not that way. You say no. It is different now.

Sports have a strange way of emulating, in our own minds, the things we see in ourselves – our various triumphs and shortcomings. The teams are the same amalgamation of microscopic faults and inadequacies that only the invested observer notices. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you see the various stray hairs, the ruggedness of your skin, and your life’s story in the lines of your face. And, when someone compliments you on your eyes, or your smile, you accept this compliment in a way in which no one else can empathize.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.

In Buffalo, things have changed. The unwanted are wanted now. There we are, as an acquired taste with patience and time. You are back in the seat at the dinner table, a girl, once a dream, extends her hand. And though you had once longed for it, it is time to go another way.

Of all the attention Buffalo is getting now, for it’s rich hockey owner, for its surprising 3-0 football start, for the underdog Harvard Quarterback and the season ticket deliveries, the thing I’ve failed to see in any article, any newscast, any fleeting highlight, is the fact that we’re the same. It’s always been this way. They’re just now seeing it.  They’re just now showing up.

It has never changed in this place, and the people that have left have never changed either, always kept Buffalo in their heart. There is no secret formula we have now adopted, and the teams that represent us, as people haven’t changed that.

It is important to remember, I think, that beauty fades and returns and fades again, takes new shapes, disappears and visits again for different reasons. But you are always the same.

And though you are reading articles now about the resurgent Buffalo economy, about the fiery, comical, endearing blue-collar spirit of a city, all of it interestingly happening around the time that your hockey team is nationally relevant and your football team is at last successful, remember that it is not them that makes you these things.

The local media, the national media, they mumble on now about the return of the once-great, the arrival of the new, all of these things. They’re talking about you, don’t you know? But they ought to know you never left in the first place.

Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains
They’re getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
In a perfect image of a priest
They’re spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get outa here if you don’t know”
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row.

The girl reaches out her hand and this time, it is not a movie. You say you’ve always been this person, always been this way. You say that you are better than that moment.

So you know what, tomorrow when you pick up the newspaper, or hit your local TV station, or catch the sports break on the radio, tomorrow when you click past the talking heads on this national show and spin by that national radio, you’ll probably hear a lot of things about how different things are in Buffalo. And the ignorance. Because we’ve always been this.  We are just the same. Change is not the story of these people, this place or these teams. The word, my friends, is perseverance.

In other words, fu#k ‘em. Who needs ‘em? This one is for you. For us. This is for the ones who never changed the channel, who never left the stadium early. This is for the ones who never called or wrote in and said ,“we deserve better”. This is for the city that never got the girl and got over it.

They say you can’t go home again. And from a million miles away, or next door, that is wrong now. We are all neighbors. Get behind one another, and make the best of this for each other. Relevance, value, attractiveness be damned. This is for us.

Yes, I received your letter yesterday
About the time the door knob broke
When you asked me how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke ?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can’t read too good
Dont send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row.

Yeah, they say you can’t go home again all right. But the road signs point due north, up I-90. There’s an old cassette tape of Van Miller calls on the stereo. The city lights, in the distance, break up the darkness.

Italics are “Desolation Row” by Bob Dylan

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