The Dylanologists by David Kinney Page B

that in a million years,” Weberman told me. “Yet it’s true. That’s it, man. That’s where the guy is coming from.”
    Even he, A.J. Weberman, father of the Dylanologists, could barely believe what his long search had uncovered. “I wasted my fucking life on this shit.”

3
    THOSE WHO SEARCH
    T he man liked to talk. He would smile and tell weird, wonderful stories about people he met in Woodstock and Afghanistan, in the Dylan universe and just around the block in Greenwich Village. But Mitch Blank, one of the world’s preeminent collectors of Dylan material, didn’t get where he was by having loose lips. When he spoke, some great percentage of his mental energy went toward protecting his reputation as someone who could keep secrets—or, as he would put it, a man whose “hipness credentials are still in order and can be trusted in a ruthless society.” When some sensitive matter came up, he fell into a language of thinly veiled hypotheticals and plausible deniability. He would not name names. He himself might have done this or might have heard that. He would use a lot of words to say something, all the while cultivating the air of a man who knew things he could never say without putting his carefully constructed state of affairs in jeopardy. “Understand,” he acknowledged once, “that when I say anything, it isn’t far from the truth.” Mitch Blank was something of a legend among those who followed Dylan.
    On a Saturday afternoon in his apartment, rain slapping against the windows, he hitched himself up on the arm of a couch and held forth. Guests were over. Nina Goss and Charlie Haeussler, the Hibbing pilgrims from Brooklyn, had arrived at his doorstep for the same reason everyone else did. They needed something, and he had it.
    Mitch’s place was on the top floor of a redbrick four-story walk-up in the Village, around the corner from the tavern Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan frequented a half century ago. He’d bought it in the 1980s when real estate was cheaper. That’s the only reason he could live in a zip code so ridiculously expensive that Jennifer Aniston had moved in. Like many visitors, Nina and Charlie were goggle-eyed. They could spend a week in this room and not be done digesting its contents. Something claimed every last inch. Binders strained shelves, boxes were stacked in piles on the floor, autographed artifacts hung on the walls. In a glass case behind them rested a harmonica holder Dylan used years ago, and the case sat atop piles of crates holding milk bottles from Max Yasgur’s farm, authentic Woodstock artifacts that Mitch salvaged in a moment of great foresight, for they are worth something now. Hanging on the wall in the corner was a copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan from 1963, the one with the singer walking arm in arm with his girlfriend up Jones Street, a few blocks south. It’s signed by Dylan.
    Nina and Charlie sat politely, hands in laps, resisting the urge to manhandle his fabulous artifacts. In a moment, as if to put them at ease, Mitch stood up. “Let’s go walk around the apartment and see what’s going on,” he said. They hadn’t asked for a tour. But people visit Mitch all the time, and everyone wanted the tour. One awed visitor marveled, “There’s mojo in that apartment.”
    He padded in stockinged feet toward the kitchen. He had a bushy Vandyke and wire-frame glasses. In the 1970s he had a massive nimbus of hair, but now his curls were orderly and gray. “Please excuse the bomb that’s gone off in here,” he warned his visitors. They walked past a full-size sign that someone stole from Highway 61 in honor of Dylan’s most famous record. They passed a button that read BOB DYLAN FOR US PRESIDENT 2008 , and a belt buckle from a long-ago Dylan tour. They passed by Superman statuettes, concert posters, pictures of his friends, assorted dulcimers, and