Composed
Authors: Rosanne Cash
Table of Contents
ALSO BY ROSANNE CASH
BOOKS
Bodies of Water
Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale
Songs Without Rhyme
(editor)
RECORD ALBUMS
Rosanne Cash
(Ariola)
Right or Wrong
(Columbia)
Seven Year Ache
(Columbia)
Somewhere in the Stars
(Columbia)
Rhythm and Romance
(Columbia)
King’s Record Shop
(Columbia)
Hits 1979-1989
(Columbia)
Interiors
(Columbia)
The Wheel
(Columbia)
Retrospective
(Columbia)
Ten Song Demo
(Capitol)
Rules of Travel
(Capitol)
Black Cadillac
(Capitol)
The List
(Manhattan)
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Rosanne Cash, 2010
All rights reserved
Scenes from this memoir were published in different variations in
The Oxford American, Joe
magazine
, The New York Times Magazine, Performing Songwriter
magazine
,
and
Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000,
edited by Peter Guralnick, published by Da Capo Press.
Excerpt from “An Arundel Tomb” from
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin.
All photographs from the author’s personal collection Photo of Rosanne Cash with moon in background on page iv: Brad Barket / PictureGroup
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Cash, Rosanne.
Composed : a memoir / Rosanne Cash.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45769-6
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For John
INTRODUCTION
F
or my entire life I have been trying to give voice to the rhythms and words that underscore, propel, and inform me. Because my peripheral vision is more acute than my direct powers of observation, and my love of an A-minor chord is more charged and refined than my understanding of my own psyche, I have often attempted to explain my experiences to myself through songs: by writing them, singing them, listening to them, deconstructing them, and letting them fill me like food and water. I have charted my life through not only the songs I’ve composed, but the songs I’ve discovered, the songs that have been given to me, the songs that are a part of my legacy and ancestry. Through them I’ve often found meaning, and relief, while at other times I’ve failed to recognize or understand a rhythm or a theme until it became urgent or ingrained and I finally came across a song that captured the experience.
My life has been circumscribed by music. I have learned more from songs than I ever did from any teacher in school. They are interwoven and have flowed through the most important relationships in my life—with my parents, my husband, and my children. Songs have unfolded in my living room and under the spotlight. For me music has always involved journeys, both literal and metaphoric. Sometimes I took the journey first and found the song waiting at the destination. Some songs have led me to true love. Occasionally a song has been only a faint whisper at the periphery of a larger event, though it was always present. Many of my own songs have taken the long way around, as I circled the edges of an experience, examining the placement of the furniture or the color of the room, the backbeat and the verses, the chord progression and the melody, constantly roaming and constantly curious.
I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and back-beats. I dream of the Summer of Love and the British Invasion and the cries of Appalachia and the sound and soul of the Mississippi Delta.
I have resisted, so many times, correcting public misperceptions about me and my life—out of pride, out of pain, or out of a longing for privacy. But I relish the opportunity to write about my life in this book—not to set any record straight, but to extend the poetry, and to find the more subtle melodies and themes in a life that on reflection seems much longer than the years I have lived. Documenting one’s life in the midst of living it is a strange pursuit. I have always wanted to live as a beginner, and writing a memoir in some ways defies that notion, but I consider this book as a first installment in an ongoing story. I don’t know why some memories have persisted while others have faded, but I trust tenacity, so those are the memories I have written about. This is not a chronological fact-check of my life, and I am sure my sisters or my husband or my children remember some of these events very differently. I have abandoned my reliance on the external facts to support an individual truth, and everyone is entitled to his or her own.
This is mine: So far, so good. More to come. More is always to come.
I
was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 24, 1955, a month before my dad’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” was released on Sun Records. My mother had only two dresses that fit her in late pregnancy, she told me, and in her final month, during the most summerlike of the sultry late spring days in East Memphis, she would sit on the steps of the front porch and eat an entire washbasin of cherry tomatoes. It was her one craving. On the afternoon of May 24, my mother went to her regular appointment with her obstetrician, who examined her and told her to go straight to the hospital. “This baby is going to be born today,” he said. I was born after only four hours of labor, at eight o’clock that evening. My mother later told me that the loneliest she had ever felt was when she was wheeled through the double doors of the hospital maternity ward to give birth and looked back to see my dad standing forlornly in the waiting room. He paced and smoked there for the next four hours while she labored alone and chewed on a wet washcloth when the pains overtook her; she always spoke with great resentment about the fact that she was given a damp washcloth to suck and then left alone in a hospital room. She was awake for the entire four hours of labor and given nothing for pain, and then put to sleep for the actual birth. It all sounded like a mean-spirited, medieval exercise in physical endurance and emotional isolation. Her accounts of it were so cinematic and full of emotion that I grew up terrified of the prospect of childbirth. I had very few fantasies about having children or being a mother, because I could not get past the specter of childbirth, which seemed almost a horrible end in itself, with something only vague and indefinable on the other side of it. The fact that I eventually did bear four children, delivered both “naturally” and with pain medication, never really lessened my fear.
When my mother went back for her six-week checkup after my birth, the doctor informed her that she was pregnant again. My sister Kathy was born ten months and twenty-three days after me. Kathy was a fragile child who had mysterious illnesses and the worst versions of every childhood disease, and I have always felt guilty that I may have taken all the nutrients out of my mother’s body when I inhabited her womb, just before Kathy’s arrival there.
Two years after Kathy’s birth, my sister Cindy was born, and soon after that we moved from Memphis to Southern California. My sister Tara was born shortly after we settled in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. My mother’s fourth pregnancy and delivery were difficult for her. She carried Tara for ten months and endured a hard sixteen-hour labor. After the birth of her fourth daughter, my mother, in tears, informed my father that she was finished with childbearing, even though she had initially said she wanted six children. My father agreed, although he harbored a secret desire for a son, which he finally got when I was fifteen and he was married to June, not my mother.
My parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino. My most vivid memory of the three years we lived there was of the day a film crew showed up in our living room to tape a show called
Here’s Hollywood
. My mother was extremely nervous, and we children were made to dress up in poufy dresses, white ankle socks, and black patent leather shoes, with our hair pulled tightly back into bows. We had to sit absolutely still and silent on the sofa next to my parents while the camera was trained on us and the interviewer spoke to them. Then we were sent outside while Mom and Dad were interviewed alone. The whole experience was profoundly unsettling to me. It may have been the first time that I registered—at age five—how it felt to be truly angry. I didn’t like how my mother changed for the camera, showing only a social veneer that didn’t represent her true self at all, and I didn’t like it that my dad had even allowed them in our house. I recognized the falsity, and silently rebelled against the intrusion. Thus began a lifelong wariness of journalists.
But I loved the house.
It had a pool and a big yard, and the room I shared with my sisters had
Alice in Wonderland
murals on the wall behind the twin beds. We lived on the corner, with a school crossing in front of our house. Every morning and afternoon a crossing guard showed up in her car and waited for the school bus. As it arrived, she got out, slipped her plastic orange neon vest over her clothes, picked up her little stop sign, and positioned herself at the crosswalk to guide the children across the street. This was the most fascinating ritual in the world to me, and the first few times I saw her I ran out to speak to her. She was very kind to me, but after several days, when my mother saw me actually get into the crossing guard’s car to talk to her, she forbade me to pay her any more visits. At age four, seriously disappointed and with great longing, I stationed myself in the picture window at the front of the house twice a day to observe her and the children from afar. Part of the romance for me was the older children, for I badly wanted to go to school.
Sensing my frustration, my mother eventually enrolled me in a nursery school down the street for two or three days a week. Although I enjoyed it, I discovered that it didn’t provide enough to satisfy my curiosity. I would ask my mother to read me every sign, every paper, every milk carton and package I saw. I insisted she tell me every word and what it meant, nearly driving her crazy in the process, and then I tried to memorize their spellings and meanings. On learning that Europe was a place across the ocean, I asked her if “European” was a real word. She made a joke about going to the bathroom along the lines of “You’re peeing” and refused to say whether it was a real word, which made me furious with her. She didn’t take my intense need to learn about language seriously, and I was desperate for someone who understood my hunger. My dad would have understood, but he was gone much of the time, and during his recent visits home he had become strange, dark, and intensely distracted. Although I’m not sure why, I didn’t go to kindergarten; bored senseless, I began to create imaginary friends, all of whom were adults. Much later in life, a genial psychiatrist to whom I had confided this fact pointed out how unusual it was for a child to have adult imaginary friends, but it still seems perfectly natural to me. I felt safe with them, and they taught me a great deal. I still think of them fondly and I have a deep superstition about speaking their names aloud. They were my own personal crossing guards.
W
hen I was six years old, we moved to Casitas Springs, not far from Ventura and about seventy miles north of Los Angeles. That September I started first grade at the Academy of St. Catherine, which I attended until seventh grade. My sister Kathy began kindergarten there at the same time, and I felt both nervous and superior about being inside the main school building, in real elementary school, while she was in the Quonset hut outside that housed the younger children. I felt a particular sense of responsibility and protection toward her, since she was so much more fragile than me, or so I perceived.
A convent school, the Academy of St. Catherine was a rambling collection of buildings, surrounded by eucalyptus and oak trees and tucked into the base of a hill above Ventura. Boys were allowed to attend up until the sixth grade, and then it was all girls from seventh through twelfth. Even so, there were few boys in the lower grades; thinking back on it now, I can’t imagine why the parents of any boy would have sent him to St. Catherine’s when he would have been so outnumbered by females. I was taught by conservative, strict nuns, only some of whom were suited to teach children, or even be in the presence of children. I recall only two lay teachers, a Mrs. Husmann who taught third and fourth grades in one big room, and an elderly music instructor who came in once a week for a half hour to warble songs to us. We were required to repeat these tunes back to her, with great reluctance and embarrassment, while the nun who was our regular teacher stood by rigidly at the front of the classroom, ready to yell at whoever wasn’t singing.
On the whole I didn’t like my teachers and I didn’t like the Catholicism that was forced on me in the most punitive and pernicious way possible on a daily basis. I don’t remember having attended church or having been exposed to any kind of religion when we lived in Encino, but Casitas Springs was the beginning of the paring down of my life and the curtailing of my internal freedom. A punitive God took up residence in my home and school and mind. At the age of seven I was forced to go to confession every week, and so had to scour my memory for sins and transgressions I might have committed. On one egregious occasion, after a sexually experimental playdate with a little boy who was the son of a friend of my mother’s, in the heat of shame and urgency, I confessed adultery to the priest behind the screen in the suffocating little booth, not having a clue what adultery really meant. Believing my account, he kept me in the confessional for nearly half an hour, while my classmates waited impatiently in the chapel outside the door, and castigated me in severe, harsh terms. He gave me penances of multiple rosaries and other long, guilty, sweaty prayers, leaving me terrified and certain that I had been irretrievably damned to hell. I spent years hiding my secret from my mother, who I was certain would punish and humiliate me far worse than the priest if she ever learned the truth.
Not only did the religion I was subjected to as a young child translate all my natural inclinations—sexual and artistic curiosity—into forms of sin, but, even worse, it led me to believe that (my sins not with standing) as a Catholic I was someone special, someone blessed, someone who was privy to a true faith, someone who would be welcomed into heaven while others would be cast away. There was a box in my classroom to collect quarters for “pagan babies,” the front of which was adorned with a photo of an African baby, whose face I stared at with pity and awe. The entitlement of being Catholic just about ruined me. Thankfully, I am my own pagan baby now, with a bowl of quarters in my kitchen cabinet as a constant reminder that my soul remains unconverted and expansively unredeemed.
I remember myself during this period as a withdrawn, pudgy girl with a swollen face and a foggy head. At the time I thought that the other girls were real girls and that I was some kind of phantom of one, a counterfeit with a strange, hidden life who lived in close proximity to a den of rattlesnakes. That image is not intended as a metaphor; rattlesnakes wandered through our yard on a regular basis.
As a toddler, my little sister Tara once stepped on a baby rattler out in the yard. I was with her, and I saw the snake just as she stepped off it. I knew it was a rattlesnake because the babies were almost translucent. Everyone said the babies were more poisonous than the adults (which turned out not to be true, though I didn’t know it at the time), so I picked Tara up, ran into the house, and pulled off her high-topped toddler shoes, examining her feet carefully. No fang marks. Nothing. I was not satisfied, however, and worried for a week that she would fall ill with snakebite poisoning. I stared at her nervously when I came home from school and through the evenings, ever watchful for the unknown but surely telltale signs of sickness. My mother grew adept at killing rattlers in the front yard, some as long as six feet, by attacking them with a garden hoe. After chopping off their heads, she would hurl their bodies like a javelin onto the fence, where they were left to hang.
I ultimately developed a near-psychotic phobia about snakes, which resonates in me even now. After those years of forced rattlesnake immersion, when we left the mountainside I saw only one more snake in my entire childhood: a pet king snake that the boy next door brought over so he could tease me. He didn’t anticipate, nor did I, the effect it would have on me, and he stood openmouthed in disbelief as I jumped up onto a table, screaming and crying in hysteria at the sight of it. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then quietly turned around and took it back to his own home. I never again saw a snake, or even mentioned the word, until I moved out at the age of eighteen.
The other menaces on our land (besides the drunken folk singers who regularly wandered to our door looking for salvation and inspiration in the person of Johnny Cash) were giant poisonous desert arachnids, which I would trap in mayonnaise jars as my own private science lab and spider jail. I experimented with them, feeding them and not feeding them, letting them have oxygen and not letting them have oxygen, to see how long they would survive. I had no mercy. A scorpion or a tarantula was a nasty thing to find in your bedroom, and one could easily bite my little sister as she was toddling in the yard, or our mother’s Chihuahua. One of them did bite our German shepherd, causing his face to swell horribly. I remember my dad’s pity for the dog, and the dog’s oblivious expression as he walked around with his face almost double in size. My dad explained that the dog had been bitten on the head, and I corrected him, silently, to myself.
Not the head. The face.
I felt a great sense of power when I entrapped a giant tarantula in a large jar and put my face close to the glass, where it could do nothing to hurt me.
The Chihuahua, for her part, escaped any such attack, but gave birth to four puppies, all of whom died at birth because their poor little slip of a mother had whelped too many at once. My dad put them in a shoebox and set them on the low-overhanging shingled roof at the end of the house, near the outdoor stairs that led to the cookout area. I have no idea why he didn’t bury them in the ground. He might have been in his Native American obsessive phase and wanted to give the puppies a Choctaw burial on a scaffold. Perhaps he wrapped fancy little blankets and sacred beads around them as well. Every time I walked past that end of the house, I eyed the roof nervously. I couldn’t see the box, but I knew it was there, full of dead puppies decaying under the sun. I don’t really remember what happened to the mother dog. She just had too many babies, and there is no remedy for the body when it is too small and required to do more than it can manage.
Years later, when I had my first child at the age of twenty-four, I lived in similar mountainous terrain in a rambling house in Malibu Canyon. One morning I looked across the room at my seven-month-old baby crawling across the den, and then I spotted the scorpion she was pulling herself toward, thinking it was some kind of strange toy. It was at that moment, I think, that I began to become a New Yorker. I wanted nothing more to do with desert arachnids, venomous snakes, or brush so dry it would ignite just from the sun.