The Devil's Dream (44 page)

I may sound like I've got it together now, but this is not true either. One thing I
have
learned through my experience is that you never do get it really together, and you might as well quit waiting for that particular day to come. You'll die waiting to get it together. The best you can do is to keep on keeping on, and let the low side drag. I believe this.

But it took me a long while to learn it. I was so bitter at first, and so confused, and made several bad decisions that could have wrecked my life still more if God had not stepped in, in the person of Billy Jack Reems.

To go back to the accident itself, I had three broken ribs, a fractured bone in my ankle, lacerations on my face which required plastic surgery, and third-degree burns on my feet and legs. Mooney had a broken arm and a broken nose, the fiddle player had a broken collarbone, and Tommy was shook up but medically all right. Poor Frosty Duke got an injury to the spine that has made him gradually lose control of the whole right side of his body. This is heartbreaking to see, as it has made him give up music altogether. Now he runs a catfish farm in north Alabama, which is as good as anything else to do I reckon, if you get to where you can't perform.

God forbid I should ever get to that point, as it has become more and more my life, and especially since the accident. It was all I had left, so I threw myself into my work, bought a new bus, and Mooney helped me get a new band together of mostly young Texas boys.

I was neglecting my little twins, back home with Ramona and the rest of the family, they didn't even hardly know me. All I did was work. I was much more comfortable on the bus than I was at home.

I had a lot of men during this period of my life, because I was so angry, I know now, but none of them meant a thing to me. I needed somebody there with me in the dark, but as far as I was concerned, there was one side of the bed that would always stay empty. Right about then is when I wrote “What Happened to the Good in the Good Old Boys?” and “Single Girl.”

It don't take a genius to figure out where those came from!

It was during the session when we were cutting “Single Girl” that Mooney took me aside by the elbow and said he thought I ought to lay off the rum and Coke until we got it down on wax.

“Just what do you
mean
, ‘lay off'?” I got real mad at Mooney and made a little scene, which got blown up out of all proportion in the papers, of course, everything always does.

But it was not a month later that I wrecked my car on the way home from a party at a politician's house—I'm sure you know who, that made the papers, too—and ended up in Vanderbilt Hospital again, this time with a DWI and charges pending.

I agreed to go into a twenty-eight-day rehab program only after RCA made it clear that I had to. But I was mad as fire and would not participate in any of those dumb group things. I sat in my room and bided my time, thinking about Ralph Handy. I guess I still couldn't believe that there wasn't
some
way I could get Ralph Handy back, you see I had had my own way for so long. I was spoiled. I'd worked hard, but I had gotten everything I ever wanted. Ralph Handy was the first thing I'd ever wanted that I purely couldn't have, that had been taken away from me forever. He was the only thing I'd ever really wanted, the only man I'd ever loved.

Well, I was sitting in my room one day feeling sorry for myself and refusing to go to a group, when in pops the littlest preacher you ever saw. He put his umbrella down (it was early spring, and raining) and said, “Whew! What a downpour!” I got tickled at the way he talked, like a man in a cartoon. He pulled up a chair near the window where I was sitting and said, “Now. My name is Billy Jack Reems.” He looked at me good. “You can go ahead and cry now,” he said, which I did, literally
buckets
of tears, all those tears I'd held back because I'd been too busy working and drinking and messing around to cry. It was the first time I'd cried since I buried Ralph. I couldn't stop, either. I screamed and pulled on my hair.

When I wore out some, he held a big old-fashioned handker-chief out to me. “Blow your nose,” he said.

“You act like I'm a child,” I said.

“We are all children of God,” he said, “and God loves us every one.”

Naturally this made me furious. “If that's true, how come He treats us so bad? How come He would kill Ralph Handy for no reason at all? How come He would make me suffer like this?”

“He doesn't like to see you suffer, Katie,” Billy Jack said. “Your pain is His holy pain, and He will bear it all for you. He will take it all away from you right now if you will let Him.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Pardon my French.”

Billy Jack smiled at me like an angel. “I'll pardon your French, honey, and the Lord God who loves you will pardon your soul. As
well
as lift your pain, if you will only hand it over to Him.”

I stared at him sitting in that orange Naugahyde chair. His feet didn't even touch the ground.

“Let go and let God,” he said mysteriously.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “Well, just exactly how am I supposed to do that?”

“I'll help you,” said Billy Jack Reems, and even though he was about as big as a Barbie doll, I believed him. There was something about him that made me believe him. Rhonda's opinion was that I was just ready to believe
anybody
at that point, but she took it all back after she met Billy Jack, and now she's a Minister of Care. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Just then the nurse came in, and her face turned dark as a thundercloud when she saw who was in the room with me. “Mr. Reems!” she said. “You know you're not supposed to be in here! We've run you out of this unit before! This is a private hospital,” she said severely, and shoved him out of the room, but not before he had handed me his card. It read:

“I don't know how he keeps getting in here,” the nurse said as she left.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the card there were three telephone numbers, only one of them not crossed out.

When I got out of my twenty-eight-day rehab, I called that number.

Now I can understand that I was starving for God's love, that I had been denying that part of myself ever since I was a child, ever since I'd been cut off somehow from the love of God at the church on Chicken Rise. I'd
cut myself off
, to be exact—out of arrogance, out of pride, out of not wanting to be like my mamma. Anyway, I called the number, and I went to my first Hallelujah Congregation meeting without any particular hope, simply to have something to do on a Sunday morning, which used to be kind of a special time for me and Ralph, he would cook us a real big breakfast. You can just imagine.

Well, I went. The Hallelujah Congregation was meeting then in the YMCA on Hillside Drive, and as soon as I walked in, I knew it would be a joke. I had gotten dressed up like a person would normally dress up for church. But the other people had on every kind of thing you can imagine—blue jeans, shorts, overalls, work clothes, you name it! They were sitting in a circle of folding chairs. No sooner did I sit down than Billy Jack—for he was in the center of the circle—asked us all to hold hands.

Now this is the kind of stuff I just hate, and particularly with women. I don't believe I had held hands with a woman since I was a little girl playing Pretty Girl Station with Rose Annie and Georgia. I had never seen any reason to hold hands with a woman. But now I had gone and gotten myself in a situation where I had to hold hands, and I had a woman on either side of me, and one of them a Negro! Plus I had just recently learned that my nanny Ramona Smoot was one of
those
, when she asked if she could let her “friend” move in out at the farm and, to my surprise, this friend turned out to be a woman that Ramona Smoot went around holding hands with in public, in spite of being English! So you can understand how I felt about holding hands.

But somehow it wasn't too bad. I held hands with this little bitty dried-up woman on my right side and with the big heavy black woman on my left side, while we all sang “You Gotta Love One Another Right Now,” and when we were done, the black woman reached over and hugged me, squeezing me into her huge soft bosom like I was a little baby. My own mamma had never hugged me at all, you know, and here I was, over forty years old before I realized how needy I was.

The big black woman, Roberta Boyd, would sing “The Rose” later in the service, beautifully, and she would turn out to be one of the Ministers of Care that help in the Laying On of Hands ministry, which closes every service in the Hallelujah Congregation.

The message which Billy Jack brought to us that day was perfectly simple—“God is Love, God loves you, no matter how unworthy you are, no matter what you've done, and all you have to do is let Him into your heart. Just relax and let Him in. He will do the rest.” Then Billy Jack had us close our eyes, empty our minds, and just sit still for the longest time. At first this was hard for me. My head was spinning. And then it was like I felt something spiraling downward inside of me, down, down, down, and come to rest. I can't tell you how long it had been since I'd had a chance to just
sit down
.

Billy Jack stood in the middle of the circle and turned around as he talked. All the preachers I had ever seen before were old, and serious as death, and death was mostly what they talked about. But Billy Jack talks about life. He is young and full of joy. He cracks jokes. He laughs a lot. He wears a flowered gown with a rope tied around his waist, and sandals, like Jesus wore.

That day at the YMCA, the first thing Billy Jack said after we sat still was, “Everything we ever do in our lives has got something to do with the search for love.”

This hit me like a bolt out of the blue.

It is the story of my life.

“And today, my friends, I've got some good news for you, and I've got some bad news. The bad news is, we can't find divine love in the backseat of a Camaro, nor in a Sara Lee coffee cake, nor in a new dress, nor in a fat bank account, nor in a ranch-style home, nor in a hit record”—I knew he was talking right to me!—“nor in worldly success of any kind. We can't find divine love in the faces of our friends, nor in our own beloved families. We cannot find divine love in the dark night with our earthly lovers either, because the key to divine love is a paradox—we can't find it at all, if we go out looking for it.

“But the good news is,
God
will find
you
. He's out there looking for you right now, you don't have to look! All you have to do is slow down and be quiet, and open up your heart to Him.”

At the end of the service, Billy Jack had those who were ready to do this come forward and lay down while the Ministers of Care stroked their bodies to remove their pain and open them up to the Lord, and some boys strummed guitars in the corner. I didn't go up that time, I still thought it was all pretty weird, but I did sing with them and hold hands some more, and hug everybody at the end of the service. The hugging felt okay.

Billy Jack Reems came up to me outside and took my hands and kissed them. “I knew I'd see you here, Katie Cocker,” he said.

The place on my hand that his lips touched burned like fire and then turned red. It stayed red for three days. I went home that Sunday and told Rhonda and Don about it, and we laughed at how crazy it all was, but during the next week I felt
better
, somehow, like a cloud was lifting.

When I finally went forward and laid down to receive the Ministry of Care, I was ready for the cloud to lift even more, to be taken from me utterly, so God could enter in, and this is exactly what happened. I could feel my pain rushing up from all over my body, feel the shock when it hit the air, feel it shatter and blow away, nothing but dust in the wind. Then I felt God come into me, right into me through the mouth, like a long cool drink of water.

Since then, everybody has started saying how good I look.

Everybody has started saying my voice has never sounded better.

And though I continue to work too hard, I don't get so tired anymore, because God is an endless source of pure energy for me. What my God says to me is
Yes! Yes!
(which is what we have emblazoned on the hanging banners in the front of our new Building for Celebration) instead of
No! No!
which is all God ever said to anybody up on Chicken Rise, if you ask me! God wants us to express His love in our lives through using our creative gifts to the fullest, he wants us to
use
this life which He has given us. He wants us to be artists for Him. Of course the Hallelujah Congregation has grown like crazy, a lot of us in the music business, so it is like a great big family in a way.

I have furthermore come to realize that God never left me, I left God. I got dazzled by the things of the earth, while He stayed right there patiently waiting for me to come back and find Him again. This is basically the message of my recent gospel song “God Stood Waiting by the Side of the Road.” It is doing so good now that we are thinking about doing an album of sacred songs.

My whole career has been affected by these changes. At first, without Ralph, I seesawed back and forth between producers. Tom Barksdale came sniffing back around, slick as ever, also Cowboy Jack Clark and Billy Romaine. I put everybody off. I couldn't make up my mind.

I couldn't decide who I wanted to sign with, what I wanted to sound like, what I wanted to look like—what direction I wanted my career to take. I had been a dumb hick Raindrop with Virgie, I had been a honky-tonk angel with Wayne Ricketts, I had been a California pop singer with Tom Barksdale, I had been a good country woman with Ralph. For the first time in my professional life, I didn't have an image. I was alone again. And somehow, because of my new faith, I felt suddenly open to the whole world, stripped of all these past images, in a new and terrifying way.