Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road (2 page)

He wore a truss the rest of his life until he died from pneumonia at fifty-six. I was seven years old at the time my grandfather died.

The next memory is my first introduction to gospel music. It is of a tabernacle that sat next to my house, where in the summertime we had revivals. The Methodists, the Baptists, and the Church of Christ all held their church services in the tabernacle. I am sitting at the table looking out the window, listening to them all. My first performance in church was when I was about five. I was wearing a white sailor suit with red trim. I start to recite a poem my grandmother taught me, but I have been picking my nose, which now starts to bleed. I hold my nose with one finger and while blood runs all over my little white sailor suit I recite my poem:

What are you looking at me for?

I ain’t got nothin’ to say

If you don’t likes the looks of me

Just look the other way

My next memory is of our bumblebee fights. On Sundays we would all go out and fight bumblebees. I was ten years old. The farmers around Abbott would run into bumblebee nests during the week while they worked their fields. They would let us know where to go, and eight or ten of us boys would go out and fight the bees. Some days I would come home with both eyes swollen shut from bee stings.

What fun we had!

We made paddles, sawed out of wooden boxes, that looked like Ping-Pong paddles with holes. One of us would go in and shake the nest and stir up the bees. Then, when the bees were swarming, everyone would start swinging. The bees always headed for your eyes.

The next memory is when we (the same bee-hunting boys and me) are all hiding behind a billboard sign on the main road, Highway 81, that runs through Abbott, which is between Waco and Dallas. We have tied a string to a lady’s purse that we laid in the middle of the highway. A car would come by, see the purse, hit the brakes, stop, and back up to get the purse. At that moment we would pull the purse back to us behind the billboard sign. The driver would then realize that it was a prank, give us the finger, and speed away. We laughed a lot.

Another great Sunday!

REDDY THE COW

R
eddy was a big brown milk cow that I literally grew up on. Reddy was my first “horse.” She was the first thing that I ever rode in my life, other than a stick horse. One of the first pictures that I ever saw of myself was of me sitting on Reddy’s back. I couldn’t have been more than two years old. I rode her all the time. It was my job, as I got older, to stake her out with a twenty-foot rope to graze on any grass I could find in Abbott. In the evening, I would go pick her up and ride her back home to her barn. On the way home, she always wanted to run because she could smell the barn, and she knew she was going to get fed, have some water, and get great treatment. It was also my job to take her to a bull about a mile away, when she came in heat. She seemed to sort of pick up the pace on the way to the bull. I never seemed to have any trouble getting her to go over there—Reddy was always ready!—but she walked a little slower on the way back.

A BETTER WAY TO MAKE A BUCK

O
ne day while I was picking cotton, on a farm by the highway that ran between Abbott and Hillsboro—it was about a hundred degrees in the hot Texas sun, and there I was pulling along a sack of cotton—a Cadillac came by with its windows rolled up. There was something about that scene that made me start thinking more about playing a guitar. Here I was picking cotton in the heat and thinking, There’s a better way to make a dollar, and a
living,
than picking cotton. Sister Bobbie and I picked cotton on all the farms around Abbott every summer and every day after school. In Abbott, the schools let out at noon during harvest season, so we could all work in the fields. That’s how we made our extra money. I did a lot more farmwork than Sister Bobbie, things like baling hay and working in the cotton gin and on the corn sheller, all of which was very hard work but in a lot of ways was good for me because it made me work harder on my guitar.

M
Y
NEXT
-
DOOR
NEIGHBOR
WAS
M
RS
. B
RESSLER
,
A
DEVOUT
C
HRISTIAN
lady who was very good friends with my grandmother. They lived next door to each other in Abbott all the time I was growing up there. She told me when I was about six years old that anyone who drank beer or smoked cigarettes—anyone who used alcohol or tobacco, really—was “going to hell.” She really believed that, and for a while I did too. I had started drinking and smoking by the time I was six years old, so if that was true, I’ve been hell-bound since I was barely out of kindergarten! I would take a dozen eggs from our chicken, walk to the grocery store, and trade the dozen eggs for a pack of Camel cigarettes. I liked the little camel on the package—after all, I was only six. They were marketing directly to me! After that I liked Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, even tried the menthol cigarettes, because they said it was a lot easier on your throat. That’s a lot of horseshit. Cigarettes killed my mother, my father, my stepmother, and my stepfather—half the people in my family were killed by cigarettes. I watched my dad die after lying in bed with oxygen the last couple of years of his life. Cigarettes have killed more people than all the wars put together I think. But like my old buddy Billy Cooper used to say, “It’s my mouth. I’ll haul coal in it if I want to.” I think I’d have been better off with the coal.

I
TRIED
A
HUNDRED
TIMES
TO
QUIT
SMOKING
. B
Y
THE
TIME
I
ACTUALLY
did quit smoking cigarettes, I had already started smoking pot, which I picked up from a couple of old musician buddies that I had run into in Fort Worth. The first time I smoked pot I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept puffing and puffing, waiting for something to happen, but nothing happened. So I went back to cigarettes and whiskey, which made shit happen. As I started playing the clubs around Texas, I ran into the pills: the white crosses, the yellow turnarounds, and the black mollies. I never liked any of the pills or speed, because I didn’t need speed; I was already speeding. So I quit everything but pot. Cigarettes were the hardest. My lungs were killing me from smoking everything from cedar post to grapevine, but I wasn’t getting high off the cigarettes, so it was good-bye, Chesterfields, and I haven’t smoked since. It’s one of the best decisions I have ever made.

The day I quit, the day that I decided that I was through with fucking cigarettes, I took out the pack of cigarettes that I had just bought, opened it, threw them all away, rolled up twenty joints, replaced the twenty Chesterfields, and put the pack back in my shirt pocket, where I always kept my cigarettes, because half of the habit, for me, was reaching for and lighting something.

FAMILY BIBLE

There’s a family Bible on the table

Its pages worn and hard to read

But the family Bible

On the table will ever be

My key to memories

I can see us sitting round the table

When from the family Bible Dad would read

And I can hear my mother softly singing

Rock of ages

Rock of Ages cleft for me

This old world of ours is filled with trouble

But this old world would oh so better be

If we found more Bibles on the table

And mothers singing rock of ages cleft for me

THE NIGHT OWL AND BUD FLETCHER

T
he Night Owl was hell—at least that’s what Mrs. Bressler told me. It was the first place that my best friend, Zeke Varnon, and I used to hang out, get drunk, and play music. There was a lot of drinking, smoking, dancing, cussing, and fighting. Margie and Lundy ran the Night Owl. In the middle of all this confusion and fighting was music. It’s what brought everyone there. It was one of the first beer joints that I played. Me, Sister Bobbie, Whistle Watson, and a little harelipped drummer. Bud Fletcher, who was Sister Bobbie’s husband—she married him while she was a senior in high school—was a very good friend of mine. He was my first promoter/booker. He was about half hustler. We had a band called “Bud Fletcher and the Texans.” We played the Night Owl, Chief Edwards, the Bloody Bucket, and every beer joint in Texas at least once. Bud was the bandleader, but he was not a musician, even though he looked like he was. He was in the band with us and he played upright bass. Well, not really
played
it. He spun it and kicked it a lot, but I never heard one note of music come out of it.

I would always hock my guitar during the week at a pawnshop in Waco and drink and gamble up all the money, and Bud would always have to go get my guitar out of hock before the weekend so we could go play our music gigs. I used to say I hocked my guitar so many times that the pawnbroker played it better than I did. But Bud would always get it out of hock, because he would have already booked us in a place, and we needed to go play.

I remember one night we played some bar for the door (meaning we got the money people paid to get in—the bar got the money from the booze). There were six of us and we each made thirty-seven cents. That was not an unusual night. We were always getting booked into places that weren’t quite ready for us. I’m not saying we were bad, but our music just didn’t quite fit in in places like the Scenic Wonderland in Waco, which was a huge dance hall that held about two thousand people. We could never manage to get more than twelve or fourteen people in there.

We also played a radio show each Saturday in Hillsboro at KHBR studios. It was a lot of fun, a great experience, and allowed us to plug the shows that we were playing around the state. We played in places like Whitney, West, Waco, and San Antonio.