Cash: The Autobiography (22 page)

ing down at my feet at the time, I looked at his, too, and said, “Mr. President, what size shoe do you wear?” “Twelve D,” he said. “What do you wear?” “I've got you beat,” says I. “Thirteen D.” So there. Another thing I noticed about Mr. Clinton was that he and his wife seemed to be in love. The way they held hands, the way they looked at each other—it had the feel- ing of real lovers together. June and I had attended a function in New York with Hillary Clinton a few weeks earlier. It was a very small gathering at which they asked me for a few songs and I obliged, singing “Tennessee Stud,” and some funny songs and spiritual songs and telling stories about Arkansas. That felt good, but I think Hillary was a little uncomfortable when I sang “The Beast in Me,” Nick Lowe's dark little acknowledgment of how far out people like he and I can get, but other than that it was a fine evening, and it reminded me that I've always liked her. I don't care what she did in Arkansas. I like her husband too, even if I've never voted for him. Come to think of it, I didn't vote for Nixon, either. Nor Ronald Reagan. He of course is a genuinely nice man—everybody knows that—even if he was also an actor above everything else. We had lunch at his White House, and I remember him as very friendly and down to earth. That affair felt strange all the same, though. Loretta Lynn and her husband, Mooney Lynn, were there with us, and she and I found ourselves hanging together amid people who were almost all strangers. Jimmy Carter and his people were recently gone from office, and we didn't know any of the new crowd. Loretta came up to me at one point and said, "It just

don't feel right, does it, Johnny?“ ”What doesn't?“ I replied. ”Reagan in the White House,“ she said. I had to agree. ”Yeah, it felt pretty good with Carter here, didn't it?“ ”It sure did,“ she said, sadly. Jimmy Carter is a cousin of June's and we've known him since I was playing a show in Lafayette, Georgia, and he was running for governor. We'd been seeing flyers with his name on them, and then we saw him going around pasting them up himself. He saw us, came over, and introduced himself; he made a good impression, so that night at the show I brought him on stage and had him take a bow. The people really liked him; the applause was strong. After that, he and his brother, Billy, and my friend Tom T. Hall got to be pretty close friends. Whenever he came to Nashville he'd stay with Tom T. and Dixie, and June and I would go over there for dinner if we weren't on the road. So he was family by blood, and just about family by heart. He was the busiest president I've known. Our first visit to his White House was a whirlwind. When June, John Carter, and I got there and were taken to him, he said, ”I've got a pretty crowded schedule today. Would you three run around with me to my meetings?" We barely had time to agree before he was out the door of the Oval Office and down the hallway, walking so fast we almost couldn't keep up with him. He'd duck into one meeting room where forty or fifty people were waiting for him, do his bit there, then march off to another. Each time he'd introduce June as his cousin and me as her hus- band, make his speech, then march off to the next room and do it again. He didn't seem phased at all when we finally got back to the Oval Office, but we needed a nap.

Gerald Ford, who had the same gift of focus as Nixon and Clinton, was also a very nice man—every- body knows that—and being with George Bush was like spending time with an old friend from home, talking about hunting the Texas hill country. It's not surprising, really, that all the presidents I've known have had a lot of personal charm. If they hadn't, they'd never have gotten to be president.

Anyone who talks about the early 1970s has to talk about Vietnam, of course. I've got a reminder right here in front of me on the wall at Bon Aqua, a print of the drawing from which the statue for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington was created. It came with a note from the artist, which is displayed beside it: Johnny, I specifically wanted you to have this print as an expression of my appreciation for the values and principles you have so eloquently represented through the years. Where you choose to hang this drawing you reserve a place for honor. From your heart you are saying “Welcome home.” Welcome home. So many of our boys never heard those words. I'll never forget standing with our friend Jan Howard at the funeral of her son and the terrible feeling that came over me as they folded up the flag that had been draped over the coffin and handed it to her. I loved that boy; I'd seen him grow from a baby. It just tore me to pieces to see him and other boys all around us, just eighteen, going off to fight those other boys in Southeast Asia. I had no really firm convictions about the Tightness or wrongness of the war; my mind just wouldn't approach it at that level when my heart hurt so badly. June and I went there, in the spring of 1969, just after the Tet Offensive. We stayed in a trailer at the big base at Long Binh the whole time, singing for different units of troops every night and visiting men in the hospi- tals every day, especially the ones who'd just been mede- vac'd in from the field. We watched them carry the soldiers out of the helicopters, torn and bloody and filthy, often reeking of napalm, sometimes burned almost beyond recognition as human beings. I almost couldn't

stand it. Long Binh at that time was “hot,” with patrols and sweeps going out and enemy rocket and mortar rounds coming in. One night in particular the incoming fire was so close that our trailer kept jumping off the ground as the rounds impacted; when dawn finally broke and we were still alive, we noticed in a dazed kind of way that our little home was a few feet away from where it had been when we went to bed. We'd go into the hospital and talk to the boys who could hear us and talk back, and June would write down their names and addresses and the telephone numbers of their loved ones back home, with notations about their wounds. When we laid over in Okinawa on our way back to the States she called all those numbers. Some- times she could say, “I saw your son, and he looks okay, and he's going to be all right.” Other times, when she'd seen that there was no hope, she'd say, “Well, he's hurt pretty bad, but they think he might be okay. He said to say hello, and he misses you.” The most vivid memory I have is of a night I sang in a big dining room full of soldiers who were going out into the boonies the next morning. They were all drinking— they were all drunk, as I would have been if I were in their shoes—and emotions were running pretty high. When I sang “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” one soldier down front started crying, and his buddies picked him up and put him on the stage with me. When he got beside me I could see that he was a Native American; we stood there together, with him crying all the time, and sang our way together through that song: Call him drunken Ira Hayes He won't answer anymore, Not the whiskey-drinking Indian Nor the Marine who went to war.

By Peter LaFarge, © 1962, 1964, Edward B. Marks Music Company We know what happened to Ira Hayes, who was a real person as well as a name in Peter LaFarge's song: he drowned in two inches of water in a ditch on the reserva- tion, another no-hope, forgotten Indian. Years before, he'd volunteered for the United States Marine Corps and, after fighting his way ashore on Iwo Jima in February 1945, survived to become one of the men who hoisted the flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi in that great symbolic moment of American victory, hope, and sacri- fice. We don't know what happened to the man who sang with me about Ira Hayes that night, or at least I don't. All I know is that he and his buddies went out in the Hueys at dawn. I have no idea how many came back alive. The hardest thing for me in Vietnam wasn't seeing the wounded and dead. It was watching the big transport jets come in, bringing loads of fresh new boys for the war. We were everywhere in the early '70s, all over the coun- try and the world, and “we” were quite a crowd. As well as June, John Carter, and myself, we carried a full com- plement of Carters, the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, the Statler Brothers, Lou Robin, Mrs. Kelly, and whoever else I thought we needed: makeup artists, hairdressers, security people, everybody. And for a time everybody flew first class. Our party alone would have the whole first-class section on some flights. I was sitting there in my nice big seat one time, and Muhammad Ali came by on his way toward the coach section. “Now I see why I can't get a first-class ticket!” he said. “Johnny Cash has got 'em all.”

I offered him my seat and meant it, but he declined. “Nah, I won't take your seat,” he said. “I won't take any of your people's seats. You got there before I did, so you go ahead and enjoy it.” That is one sweet, kind man, and not just because he let me keep my seat; he's just one of nature's best. He wrote a poem for me, “Truth,” which I still have in my vault. One day I'll set it to music and record it. Those were such busy, demanding days. Often they were exhilarating, but sometimes it felt like I was just a passenger on the Johnny Cash train, powerless over my destination, speed, or schedule. Still, I was riding first- class, and that made up for a lot. Considering what other people have to do every day to make a living or just to survive, I don't like hearing performers whine about the pressures of too much success, and I get pretty uncomfortable when I do it myself. There was no incoming on the road; nobody had to worry about napalm or B-52 strikes; nobody was being hunted or starved or tortured. I was going at it hard. I've got one of my old date books with me here, open to the first week of January 1974. This is what it tells me: Right after Christmas I left my family in Jamaica and flew to California to shoot an episode of Columbo with Peter Falk. While I was there, Kris Kristofferson came to my hotel room and sang Steve Goodman's “City of New Orleans” for me, which I declined as a recording prospect, as I've mentioned, to my eternal regret. Rosanne, too, came to see me on that trip; I remember the three of us, Rosanne, Kris, and me, sitting around trading songs. Peter Falk was good to me. I wasn't at all confident about handling a dramatic role, and every day he helped me in all kinds of little ways. I only got mad at him once. He was telling me how to deliver a line, and he said, "I'd do

it just like this—or however you people say it down there.“ I just gave him a look and said, ”Well, we people would probably say it just about how you people say it up there.“ To let him know I wasn't still fresh off the farm; I'd been to town. There was a part for the band in the Columbo script, doing ”Sunday Morning Coming Down“ on a lawn, and they were flying in to join us when I got the news that Clayton Perkins, Carl's youngest and only surviving brother, the wildest, funniest, and hardest-drinking of the original three, was dead. He'd shot himself—accidentally or intentionally, we'll never know, because he was always playing with guns and people were always telling him he'd kill himself that way. Carl, on the plane with the Tennessee Three, hadn't heard yet. I never did anything with so much regret, but I had to do it. I called the airport and talked to Fluke as soon as he got off the plane, told him the news, and asked him to bring Carl to the phone. Carl needed to hear about it right then, on the phone, because I knew he'd want to return to Tennessee immediately. ”Carl...“ I began as soon as he got on the phone. ”What's wrong?“ ”There's something bad wrong, Carl.“ ”Who is it? My mother?“ ”No.“ ”My daddy?“ ”No, Carl.“ ”Oh, no. It's Clayton, isn't it? What happened, John?“ ”Well, Carl, the report is that he killed himself. He's shot himself in his bed with his pistol." For a while Carl was off the phone, crying out of control, but finally Fluke came back on and said he'd

take care of putting him on a flight back home. He did that, then came on into Burbank, and he and Bob and Marshall did the Columbo scene without Carl. I finished my own work, and then I went back to Jamaica for a few more days with my family. About the only saving grace in that whole situation was that Carl wasn't drinking in '74.1 can't imagine him dealing with the weight of that loss, drunk. Well, that's not true; I can imagine it all too well. I'll turn some pages here, to March 31, 1974. That day I did a benefit for an autistic children's home in Sumner County, Tennessee. The home got no public funding because autism wasn't on anybody's list of favorite char- ities back then (and still isn't). April 2-7, I played the Houston Music Theater with the entire crew, Carl included. On the 10th and nth I was at home, but work- ing: recording in my studio at the House of Cash. It doesn't say here what I was recording, and I don't remember. On the afternoon of April 12 I made a free appearance near home in Hendersonville with a preacher, James Robison, as a special favor for my mother, who admired him greatly and wanted to help him get started in his career (he's big on TV today). That same evening I played a free show for the inmates of the Tennessee State Prison. Three days the next week, April 15-17, I taped a Grand Ole Opry TV special. On the 19th and 20th I had paying dates in Chattanooga and Johnson City, both in Tennessee. April 22 and 23 I was back again at the House of Cash, coproducing an album for Hank “Sugar- foot” Garland with my in-house engineer, Charlie Bragg. Hank, one of the great old guitar players, had been out of the business for a while following a bad car wreck and was trying to get back into playing. They were good ses- sions; we got some great stuff on tape, but we could never get a record company interested. Two days later I opened at the Las Vegas Hilton for

a week, and after that I went on tour in Australia. And so went a typical month. In those days I got as much criticism for playing Las Vegas, consorting with the whores and gamblers, as I did for doing prison concerts. My response was that the Pharisees said the same thing about Jesus: “He dines with publicans and sinners.” The aposde Paul said, “I will become all things to all men in order that I might win some for Christ now.” I don't have Paul's calling—I'm not out there being all things to all men to win them for Christ—but sometimes I can be a signpost. Sometimes I can sow a seed. And post-hole diggers and seed sowers are mighty important in the building of the Kingdom. Carl had become a Mason after he got sober, and for a while he was very eager for me to try that. “Come on, John. Come with me to the Hendersonville chapter,” he urged. “Let me introduce you to the men there. Then they can have a meeting and invite you in, and it will change your life. It'll be a wonderful thing for you.” Eventually I agreed, and we went to meet the Masons. I worked my way around the room shaking hands, and I'll never forget the way those men looked at me; it was as if they were being asked to kiss a rattlesnake. Right then and there I got the feeling that I wasn't going to become a Mason. Doubtless they had certain images in mind. It was only a couple of years since I'd gotten away from pills, and a little more than that since every newspaper in the country had carried a photo of me being led into jail in handcuffs after buying amphetamines from the wrong pusher. Evidently the progress I'd made since then did- n't count for much; I left the place with a less than lukewarm “You'll be hearing from us” rolling around in my head, gathering little charged particles of embar- rassment and anger, and sure enough, in a couple of weeks a letter arrived informing me that my applica-