Cash: The Autobiography (17 page)

great thoughts exchanged; sometimes it didn't and there was a lot of dead air. Merle was truly one of the most interesting men I've ever met, certainly one of the most talented in many areas. He was a brilliant singer, songwriter, and guitar innovator—he developed “Travis picking,” a step further on from the style Mother Maybelle introduced. On the side, so to speak, he drew wonderful cartoons, told fabu- lous stories, possessed authoritative knowledge in many different areas, and was a skilled taxidermist, master watchmaker, and expert knife thrower (he's the one who taught me how to sink a bowie from twenty paces). That's an odd-sounding combination, I know, but Merle was indeed a man for all seasons, in many ways the ideal companion. After three days in that cabin, however, I was about ready to kill him, he probably felt the same way about me, and Gordon Terry felt likewise about both of us. It was a relief to get ourselves and our moose meat out of there and go our separate ways. I took myself and mine to New York City and met up with the regular gang, but by that time I was shot: voice gone, nerves gone, judgment gone. I did an inter- view with Mike Wallace during which I almost tore his head off (Question: “Country music at Carnegie Hall. Why?” Answer, snarled: “Why not?”). We made an arrangement with the chef at the Barbizon Plaza and served moose meat at our press party, which may have been a miscalculation (and may not; I don't recall). Then the concert itself came up on me. Merle Kilgore went on and did well, then Tompall and the Glaser Brothers, then June and the Carter Family. Finally it was time for the headliner, me. I was deep in my Jimmie Rodgers obsession at the time, so I'd thought up something special. Mrs. Rodgers, before she died, had given me some of Jimmie's things. When I walked onto that stage that night, not only was I

intending to sing only Jimmie Rodgers songs, I was also wearing his clothes and carrying his railroad lantern. I lit it backstage, had all the stage and house lights turned off, and made my entry in the dark with just the flame of the lantern on me. The plan was to set the lantern down on a chair at center stage, prop my knee up on the chair just the way Jimmie did, start in to “Waiting For a Train,” and wait for the roar of recognition. It didn't work out that way. If there were any people in the audience who knew about Jimmie Rodgers (and I'm sure there were at least a few), they were slow to make the visual connection. Nobody else had a clue. I thought they were going to be in awe—This must be something special. What's he going to do?—but they weren't. They were yelling for “Folsom Prison Blues” before I even got to the microphone. So I turned around, handed the lantern to somebody, and went into my regular opening number, whatever that was at the time. Which would have been fine, I guess, if I'd been able to sing. But I couldn't. I was mouthing the words, but noth- ing was coming out. All the people were hearing from me was my guitar. At first they laughed. They thought I was kidding, that this was a joke. Then they went quiet, and I had to do some- thing. I stopped the song. “I have laryngitis tonight,” I said. “I have no voice. I don't know if I can sing anything.” ' I couldn't, but I tried to. I kept asking for glasses of water to ease my dry throat, but it didn't help. I kept hop- ing the pills I'd taken would boost me up to where I didn't care anymore, but they didn't. It was just a nightmare, and I remember all of it with perfect clarity. June came out dressed in a beautiful white robe with a heart sewn into it for when I did “Ballad of the Heart Weaver.” I did “Mr. Garfield,” which isn't very funny if you're not on the right wavelength, and nobody was. I whispered my

way through “Give My Love to Rose.” I went back again and again to Jimmie Rodgers songs, hoping to pull it together somehow, but I failed. It was awful, start to fin- ish. The memory of it still gives me a headache. After the show June came up to me backstage, obvi- ously depressed, and said, “I thought you were very good, but your voice just wasn't there, and I really feel sorry for you about that.” I was in a very bad mood, angry with everybody and everything. “Well, J don't feel sorry for me,” I snapped. She backed off. The next encounter I remember was similar. A man I didn't know who'd been watching me from the corner of the dressing room came over and said, “It's called Dexedrine, isn't it?” “What is?” “What you're taking.” “Yeah. Why?” “I just kinda recognized it. I'm of a kindred spirit. I've been into all that stuff myself. I'm in a program right now and I don't take anything, but I recognize Dexedrine. That stuff will kill you, y'know.” I had a whole arsenal of flippant little dismissals for occasions like this. “Yeah?” I said. “Well, so will a car wreck.” He wouldn't give up. “You know, man, you can learn to sing around laryngitis a little bit. I'm a writer and a singer, I've been in this business all my life, and I've learned some stuff like that. If we spent a little time together, maybe I could show you how to take care of yourself a little better.” I rejected that out of hand, but something about the

man made an impression on me. After learning who he was—Ed McCurdy, the singer of Irish and Scottish folk songs, especially the bawdier ballads—I told him to come by the hotel in the morning. I was off for a while after Carnegie Hall, so I started hanging out with Ed, and for a few days I didn't do any amphetamines. One afternoon, though, Ed came by with a friend of his, Peter LaFarge, a Hopi Indian and a song- writer, and invited me to go down to the Village with them to hear some folk music at the Bitter End. “Okay,” I said, “but I'm not going down there with- out taking some Dexedrine.” That was okay with Ed, it seemed. “Go ahead, take some,” he said. It was more than okay with Peter, whose reaction was to take some, too. I'll always remember a conversation we had at the Bitter End. “Cash, you're getting screwed up again,” Ed told me. “You know that, don't you? You're losing it. You're going to blow it. You're just getting your voice back, and now you're going to lose it again.” I'd had two or three days of being relatively straight, so I was perfectly serious when I told him, “Hey, it's all right. I can handle this.” Ed and Peter just looked at each other and started laughing. I bristled. “I don't know what's so funny, but I don't like to be laughed at!” “Oh, Cash, you are a funny man,” said Ed. “What you're saying is funny—so stupid, you have to laugh. You can't handle it. There's no way you can handle it. It's handling you, and eventually it'll kill you.”

I discounted that—I'd heard it all before, time and time again—and the night went on. Peter got up and sang some of his Native American songs and Ed got up and sang an archaic Irish version of “Molly Malone.” I took some more Dexedrine and gave Peter some more. I also handed him some Thorazine I'd gotten someplace, for use when he needed to come down and crash. The next day I got a call from Ed. Peter had taken all the Thorazine I'd given him, he said, eight or ten pills, and now he couldn't be awakened. We were really wor- ried, but while Peter slept for three or four days, he didn't die. He and I went on to work together; he inspired me to do my Bitter Tears album and wrote “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The son of Oliver LaFarge, whose novel, Laughing Boy, won a Pulitzer Prize, Peter was a genuine intellectual, but he was also very earthy, very proud of his Hopi heritage, and very aware of the wrongs done to his people and other Native Americans. The history he knew so well wasn't known at all by most white Americans in the early 1960s—though that would cer- tainly change in the coming years—so to some extent, his was a voice crying in the wilderness. I felt lucky to be hearing it. Peter was great. He wasn't careful with the Thorazine, though. After he and I had become friends, he stayed in Nashville a while and he and Pop Carter formed a bond. Pop even went down to the reservation in New Mexico with him. Then Peter went back to New York, and the next news was another phone call from Ed McCurdy. Peter hadn't woken up again, Ed told me, and this time he never would. I wrecked every car I had in those days. I wrecked other people's, too. I wrecked June's brand-new Cadillac. In fact, I managed to get fired from the Grand Ole Opry and total my future wife's car all in the same night. Technically, I wasn't fired from the Opry because I

wasn't in fact a member when they asked me not to come back again. The Opry at the time required that perform- ers who'd been invited to become members commit themselves to appearing on the show twenty-six times a year, the equivalent of every other Saturday night. I'd never been willing to take that deal, which would have placed drastic limitations on my touring and therefore my income, and so my status with the Opry management was that of a frequent guest star. Technicalities aside, however, there was no mistaking the message that was imparted to me as I walked off stage on the night I smashed all the footlights with my microphone stand. “You don't have to come back anymore,” the manager said. “We can't use you.” I was pretty angry about that. This was just the same stuff I'd been doing for a long time, I thought, so why were they getting so upset about it now? June, as usual, tried to insert the voice of reason into the equation. “Go back to the motel and go to bed,” she said. “You'll feel better tomorrow.” Fat chance. Instead, I asked to borrow her car. She didn't think that was a good idea, especially since I'd been drinking a lot of beer as well as taking ampheta- mines. But I wasn't too concerned about what she thought, so I kept at her until she relented, and off I went in her nice new Caddy. I didn't know exactly where I was going, or even vaguely where I was going, but it didn't matter. I was just angry and driving and speeding. A blinding electrical storm was in progress, with torrential rain, and that fit my mood. I couldn't see the road ahead, but I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway, even on a clear, crisp night with unlimited visibility. I hit the utility pole head-on. My face smashed into the steering wheel, breaking my nose and bashing my front teeth up into my upper lip. Stunned as I was, I

looked up and watched as the pole snapped and began falling toward me. It smashed into the roof above my head, and the wires it was carrying spread out on the wet pavement around the car and lit up the scenery with high-voltage electricity. It looked like Christmas or hell, take your pick, a warm fiery glow all around the car. Being intelligent and sensible, I decided against step- ping out. As long as the rubber of the tires was between me and all those volts, I reasoned, I might be okay. And besides, I had a lot to do in the car. There were beer bot- tles and pills aplenty to hide, somehow or other, before the police arrived. Which they did very soon. I was in the heart of Nashville, just a couple of blocks from Vander- bilt Hospital. My main concern was that June would be mad at me, so while I told the police whose car I'd destroyed, I didn't tell them where they could find the owner to give her the news. I also had my own way with the doctor who set my nose. It was going to hurt, he said, avoiding euphemisms like “this may cause you some discomfort,” so he was going to give me morphine. “No,” I growled. “Don't give me any morphine. Just set my nose!” “You won't be able to stand it if I don't,” he argued. I wasn't having any of that. I'd show him how much I could stand. “Yeah? Well, go ahead. I want to experi- ence it.” He went ahead. I could hear the little bones cracking in there, and yes, it really was excruciating. I thought it was a fine test of manhood. I could really take it. June learned about her car soon enough, of course, and found me even though I'd gotten my friend David Ferguson to hide me away at his house, lying in the dark

with my face wrapped in bandages. She didn't try to come see me because she knew I didn't want to see her. She waited until I'd emerged back into the world, and even then she didn't harass me about it. “You know you totaled my car out?” was all she asked. “I guess I get a new Cadillac now.” And she did. Insurance paid for it, not me. I felt kind of bad about it all, especially since the police officer investigating the wreck had been Rip Nix, who at the time was June's husband. I didn't hear directly from him about it, but June mentioned that the incident didn't go over too well at home. June said she knew me—knew the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness. She said she could help me. She said we were soul mates, she and I, and that she would fight for me with all her might, however she could. She did that by being my companion, friend, and lover, and by praying for me (June is a prayer warrior like none I've known), but also by waging total war on my drug habit. If she found my pills, she flushed them down the toilet. And find them she did; she searched for them, relentlessly. If I didn't like that and said so, I had a fight on my hands. If I disappeared on her, she'd get Marshall or Fluke or someone else in the crew to go find me in the wee hours of the morning and coax me back to bed. If I'd been up for days until I'd finally had the sense to take a handful of sleeping pills and crash—there was always an instinct telling me when to do that, pointing to the line between “almost” and “fatal”—I'd wake up from a sleep like death to find that my drugs, all my drugs, no matter how ingeniously I'd hidden them, were gone. She gave up only once, in the mid-'6os in the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. By that time I was totally

reduced—I hate the term “wasted”—and it's incompre- hensible to me how I kept walking around, how my brain continued to function. I was nothing but leather and bone; there was nothing in my blood but amphetamines; there was nothing in my heart but loneliness; there was nothing between me and my God but distance. I don't know what exactly brought her to the point of leaving me. I'd been up for three or four days and I'd been giving her a really hard time, but that wasn't unusual. I guess there'd just been too much of it for her. She'd set out to save me and she thought she'd failed. We had adjoining rooms; she came into mine and said, “I'm going. I can't handle this anymore. I'm going to tell Saul that I can't work with you anymore. It's over.” I knew immediately that she wasn't kidding. I really didn't want her to go, so I went straight out of my room and into hers, gathered up her suitcase and all her clothes—everything, her shoes included (she was bare- foot)—and took them back into my room. Then I pushed her out and locked my door. That should do it, I thought. All she had on was a towel. I could hear her crying in her room for a long time, but eventually she came knocking on my door. She promised not to leave if I gave back her clothes, and I believed her, so I did. And through all the trials to come, before and after she became my wife, she never tried to leave again.