Victor Maymudes - Another Side of Bob Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and off the Tracks

Bob Dylan and Victor at The Castle in LA before the 1965 world tour. (Credit: Lisa Law/The Archive Agency)

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For my sister. I know how much you miss him.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This memoir came to be through a series of unfortunate events that rocked me to my core. It was not a book I felt I could writetoo painful a task, too emotionally jarring. My love and admiration for my father pulled me through the process. After the fire I was convinced that he was deserving of his moment in the spotlight, that his voice and all that was left was worthy of finally being heard. Throughout my journey I was inspired, loved, critiqued and encouraged by a few wonderful peoplemavens to their industries, lifelong friends and family members: my mother, Linda Wylie; George Witte; Adam Gauntlett; Emily Schriber; Andy Greene; and Aaron Ungerleider and his family. With much love and respect, I thank you.

It felt like we were on the point of the arrow that was going to pierce the dust.

Victor Maymudes

INTRODUCTION

On the Rivers Edge

by Jacob Maymudes

My dads ashes in the rubble of my mothers burned stone house, January 2013. (Courtesy: Jacob Maymudes)

Im standing at the edge of the cliff looking down into the canyon. I can see the winding river that was home to my childhood. Snow covers the pine and cedar trees lining the river, as it snakes around the New Mexican red clay and brown dirt that is abundant in this part of the world. The dozen or so frozen square miles before me were once my playground; some of my fondest memories were found under rocks, in trees and splashing in the river of this magical place. The Land of Enchantment is the state motto and I believe its solely because of this placethis secret place that only a small community of a hundred or so knows about.

My home is just below me, about five hundred feet down and half a mile ahead, centered in the middle of this majestic area. This house is our family home, my mothers home. Its a fortress of flagstone built by my mother Lindas hands over the course of fifteen years. She found the land while visiting Gary, her boyfriend at the time, now her ex and a man whom I consider my stepfather. He lives nearby on an adjacent ridge. Back then my mother decided to go to medical school for nursing in her mid-thirties; as a side project, with no money, while raising two kids on her own, she set out to design and fashion a two-story house using free flagstone she had access to from a rock quarry an hour south of here. The technique she employed was called dry stacking, which is as simple and painful as it sounds. You take flagstone, you stack it. No mortar or cement between the pieces yet. She and Gary would stack two walls about six inches apart and then fill the gap between with cement and rebar. It took a small level of artistry, but not much. It mostly took hard work. Its the kind of long-term plan your friends would make fun of you for attempting, and chalk it up to wishful thinking. There was no time limit for construction and hardly a schedule. Many people have come to understand that my mother not only is unbreakable, but her interpretation of the impossible is merely an exercise in patience. She will achieve the impossible; itll just take a while.

Fifteen years of construction with various helpers along the way. Bag of cement by bag of cement, and finally the house was finished. During this time she earned a masters degree in nursing and moved the family from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, New Mexico, then to Santa Fe, and finally to the house she had built stone by stone. From the start of construction to its completion, Id gone from being a student in the fourth grade to college and living on my own in Boulder, Colorado.

My older sister, Aerie, and I would come and go from the house. Sometimes wed make it our home while my mother was off exploring the world as a medical officer for the Peace Corps, which she did intermittently during the late 1990s. From her world travels the house became a museum of antiquities, shrines to lost loved ones and handpicked mementos placed in any worthy spot.

My tears have frozen to my cheeks. Ive spent a mere ten minutes standing on this cliff this afternoon and Ive been crying the whole time. Its not the home I remember visiting for my birthday in August five months ago. This is my first view of something I cant quite comprehend. That seemingly immutable fortress of stone with three-foot-thick walls had burned to an unrecognizable pile of rubble. We were wrong all those years for calling the house a bomb shelter, always eliciting a lighthearted laugh from my mother, for claiming it would be around longer than humans would occupy the planet. The house had succumbed to its one weakness, exploited by a singular design flaw. A lone wire buried deep in the wood ceiling of the bathroom sparked and ignited in the dead of winter. My mother awoke three days ago to black, billowing smoke in her bedroom. She sprang up and ran outside to fetch the hose.

It was a bitter and relentlessly cold night that only the high desert could provide. The hoses were frozen. With the house on fire, the nearest operating phone was a quarter mile up the dirt road at Garys house. She sprinted up the road and took the shortcut through the forest, waking him and calling the fire department and local friends, who with trucks and shovels descended back down the canyon to the house. When they arrived the thick stone walls that were built to protect the house from every possible disaster became their own worst enemy by locking in the fire and encouraging hotter flames to engulf every last shred of our family history, a history marked by losses that my mother bore with stoic grace. By the early morning our family had sustained yet another catastrophic loss. Once again, my mother would be stripped down to the core and be required to start all over again with nothing. The shock would set in rapidly, and the pain would replace that shock in the days to come.

Three days have passed. One more deep breath and its time to meet my mother in the house shes staying in. This house on the cliff was offered to her as an emergency refuge in the canyon. She could have picked a hotel or some other place that didnt have a perfect view of the charred remains of her collected life, but instead she chose to stay here. Her friend has similar style, so it was a less jarring change than a hotel. Friends of my mother would often receive unconditional gifts from her travels, so several of the items decorating the interior and exterior are actually things she had once owned and loved herself. Its the best possible transition considering the circumstances. Despite the painful view.