Waylon (46 page)

When I stopped playing rhythm guitar on my tracks, even though I’m not a great guitar player, it was like I had suddenly started
to worry whether I was good enough to be part of my own sound. If you stop believing in yourself, your songs stop caring about
you as well. I didn’t realize at the time that the thing that had made me my own man was my inner confidence, the faith and
courage that allows you to get up before a group of strangers and articulate their hopes and fears. To take the guitar out
of my hands was like trying to sing without opening my mouth. I couldn’t make the tempo mine, or the words more than sentiment.

The feel. Sometimes you can’t see or hear it, but you always know when it’s there. Or not.

“Cash,” I said. I didn’t mean Johnny.

They had asked me how I was going to pay for the gold Cadillac. It had a wheel in the running board and was long-nosed, stretched
like a limousine. I had been looking for a Fleetwood. This was a Seville, one of only five made. I couldn’t resist. I had
told the dealer in Scottsdale, Arizona, that I was going to come back for the car, and here, on this Saturday morning, there
was a crowd of people waiting to see the transaction.

Jessi stood next to me. I reached in the top of her brassiere and pulled out a few hundreds. Then I pulled out a few more.
I kept reaching and pulling until I paid the whole forty-five thousand dollars. Every now and then I’d pinch her and she’d
squeal. The guy was so flustered, he had to keep writing up the order again and again.

It was a childhood dream. I had gotten to relive what I saw Jaybird Johnson do, back in Littlefield. When I was a kid, one
of my first jobs was at the local Cadillac showroom. One evening, as I was sweeping up, Jaybird came in, fresh from selling
bootleg whiskey at the Dew Drop Inn across the tracks. He was with his wife, and he sat in a few of the Cadillacs until he
found one that was to his taste.

“Do you like it, honey?” he asked her. She nodded yes.

“Well, pay the man,” he declared, and she started reaching in her brassiere and pulling out tens and twenties. Jaybird’s Cadillac
cost about two or three thousand dollars, but that was a lot in those days.

When Jessi’s chest returned to normal, we took the Cadillac for a spin. I knew it was expensive, but I had just kicked drugs
and didn’t mind taking it out of one nose and putting it in another. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I turned on the radio
and one of my own songs, “I May Be Used (But Baby I Ain’t Used Up),” was playing. We drove down the road, Jessi and I and
Shooter.

“It’s an omen, Dad,” said Shooter.

I had gone home.

First and foremost in my life was Jessi. For us, the healing came quickly. There was a bond between our two selves from the
moment I left drugs. Those holes that are empty in a relationship, because you’re married to something else, were filled.

Jessi lives in the gray area; with me it’s either all right or all wrong. She’ll look for the other side, the opposing viewpoint,
and then balance them with where she thinks she ought to be. When I’m mad, I don’t want to hear the other side. She’s a peacemaker,
and she’s proved she can survive better than me. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met in my life, because she does not
care about herself. It’s not first with her, and after looking for every way in the world to make me look right, she doesn’t
hesitate to tell me when I’m wrong. She’s not afraid of me.

She made me not afraid of me, as well. She knew that the little things I was confronting were not as big as I was making them
out to be, and yet that didn’t make them any smaller. I could see my own facial expressions, and those around me, in a mirror
that made me aware of the nakedness of being on stage before the world. The drugs obscured a lot, but they also masked my
creativity and stopped me from drawing on what could provide my greatest strength. Jessi had faith that I would keep on recovering,
walking through each day one at a time. I hadn’t lost my art; she knew I’d just misplaced it. She never stopped believing
in me. Jessi even wrote a song once in the early seventies, “Darling Darling It’s Yours,” after RCA had given me their Golden
Boot award as a consolation prize, which she thought was like “throwing crumbs to a king.” For her, I wrote “You Deserve the
Stars in My Crown.”

In her eyes, I was a paradox like King David, always questioning, arguing, trying to resolve the contradictions between this
life and the next, whatever they might be. David the musician and singer of psalms, having it out with David the military
and secular leader, a give-and-taking between Heaven and earth. I couldn’t help it. Even with old Hallowed-be-thy-Name, I
couldn’t accept anything for granted. I needed to find out for myself.

If I believed in reincarnation, I’d have to say that Jessi is on her last time around, just like my dad. You can hear it in
the purity of her voice, the playing of her piano, the way she writes songs that don’t rhyme but say everything that needs
to be said. She lives her faith.

I never did things halfway. When I quit drugs, that was it, but I probably doubled or tripled my cigarette smoking. I always
had one clenched between my teeth, dangling from my mouth, lighting the next. It was a standard prop on my album covers. I’d
be craving something, and the nearest thing I’d grab was a cigarette. I couldn’t go more than ten minutes without one. I smoked
up to seven packs a day.

My diet wasn’t any better. I was a big eater. My favorite breakfast was sausage, gravy, and biscuits. Cheese eggs and jelly.
Scrambled egg sandwiches. Three fried eggs with sausage or bacon. When I moved on to lunch, I’d eat three or four ham-and-grilled-cheese
sandwiches, piling on the lettuce and tomatoes, jalapeños and onions. Dinner would be a roast with potatoes and carrots cooking
in with the gravy. Before I went to sleep, I’d grab a few scrambled egg sandwiches and down a glass of milk. For a snack,
I’d refry a dozen doughnuts in butter.

That’s how you join the Zipper Club.

I was playing at the Crazy Horse. It’s a joint in Orange County run by the nicest man that’s ever been in the nightclub business,
Fred Reiser. I was booked to play two shows there, and the night before, as I was fixing to lay down, I coughed. Both my arms,
not just one, started hurting like I couldn’t believe. It wasn’t like the frozen shoulders that I’d had on and off for the
last eighteen months, a tendinitis that I thought I’d cured by getting a more flexible guitar strap.

Jessi rubbed my arms till they stopped hurting, but the next morning, when I went down to breakfast, the pressure had moved
to my lungs. I felt like I had water in there, and my arm had started hurting again. I went out for a walk. It was lucky I
made it back, come to think of it.

The pain subsided when I returned to the bus. We changed hotels to be nearer the Crazy Horse, and had brunch. After we ate,
the ache started again, really bad. I went upstairs and lay down. It wouldn’t quit. I took a hot shower; then I lay down and
started breathing really hard, just to get air in my lungs. I fell asleep, till about three o’clock, until Bill Robinson came
to the door with Jessi telling me they thought I needed to let the doctor check me.

“I feel wonderful,” I protested. “There’s not a thing wrong. That’s over with. There’s no need. Whatever it was, I don’t know,
but I’m fine and don’t have anything hurting.”

We went down to dinner. The first show was at seven o’clock. I ordered chicken fried steak with gravy; and they had a thing
called corn chowder that I loved. I took one bite of that, and one bite of chicken fried steak, and the pain hit me hard again.
I said, “I’m going to have to go and sit outside and get some air.”

I went and got on the bus. I was hurting bad. I sat down. My chest and neck felt tight. I lit a cigarette and took a big inhale.
It hurt so much I threw the cigarettes across the bus and lay down on the couch.

Jessi and Fred came out. “You don’t look good. Why don’t we get you checked?” I shook my head. I knew I’d be all right in
a minute. Sure.

The best they could talk me into was a cardiologist’s intern. He told me he wasn’t a doctor yet, but it didn’t take a specialist
to see that this had to do with the heart. I couldn’t keep saying no; it hurt too bad.

They gave me nitroglycerin, and sure enough, it made the pain stop. I could breathe again. We went over to the emergency room
and a doctor who looked like Larry Gatlin read my blood pressure. Larry and I have butted heads quite a few times, and Jessi
wasn’t sure he was the right medic for me.

“You’re in the process of having a heart attack,” he said. “You haven’t had one, and you’re not having one yet.” He gave me
a pill. Later on, I found out that the one pill cost eight thousand dollars. I wondered, if I hadn’t had insurance and money,
if I was off the street, would he have given me that wonder drug?

Bill came into the examining room with me. We had bet twenty dollars on a Dallas Cowboys-San Francisco 49er’s game, and to
show you what kind of friend he was, as they were strapping the electrocardiogram onto me, he asked me to wait a minute. “I’ve
been watching that game,” he said. “It looks like San Francisco is going to win. Why don’t you get somebody to hold that twenty
bucks, because you never know how these things are going to turn out.” It hurt to laugh so hard.

The nurses chatted among themselves while they took my vital signs. They were talking about a gang shooting that had happened
the night before. They’d brought the guy into the operating room and were working on him, and the rival gang came in and shot
him some more on the surgical table. I felt like I was in good hands.

The doctors tried angioplasty, where they try to open the blockages in your arteries like a plumber opens a blocked sewage
line, but I was the 1 in 4 it doesn’t take on. I relied on a stash of nitro pills and waited for the next symptom to show.
After one particularly bad night, in the fall of 1988, I got ready to do a Johnny Cash benefit on the other side of Knoxville
from Nashville, in Bristol, Tennessee. Sharp as a pistol.

Jessi was on the phone with the doctor, but as he was advising me to “come in,” I was saying “I’ll see him when I get back.”
We started out of town, but about twenty miles away, we had to turn around. Again, I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was about
to have it.

The truth was, I needed a bypass. Four of them, as it turned out; quadruple. I asked for time to think about it—I was overbooked
as usual—but I could see myself in Podunk, Arkansas, with some damn veterinarian standing over me saying “I ain’t never done
this before. You going to help us, Waylon? Hold this scalpel, and give us those knives when we need ’em.”

I was on the road all the time. I was scheduled to go to Europe in a few months. I didn’t want to be away from home and have
something happen.

One thing was for sure. It was the last I would see of banana pudding. Joyce Holland, the wife of Johnny Cash’s drummer, W.S.,
made up a big batch. I ate all of it I could, and the next morning, I checked into Baptist Hospital.

Every time I’ve been in a hospital, I wake up and there’s John Cash. I think he must make a habit of sitting by my bedside.
One holiday season, I opened my eyes at home on the couch and he was there, dressed like the spirit of Christmas future. He
spooked me. I was pretty messed up. “What’re you doing here?” I grumbled.

“I like to visit my friends on Christmas Day,” he said in that canyon-river voice.

I fell back to sleep and woke up again. He was still there. “Ain’t you got any other friends?” I asked.

I had watched John’s ups and downs with drugs over the years. He had never told me to straighten myself out, or got preachy,
though for a time he had to stay away from me for his own good. When I’d come out of the desert in 1984, he had talked to
me nearly every day, telephoning if he couldn’t come in person. We encouraged each other, though we were careful not to make
any claims or act like counselors from a treatment center. We were both savvy to the ways of the world and knew the best thing
was probably to stick close together, reinforcing our bond. When John was clean and sober six months, Jessi threw a celebration
for him. June and John did the same for me when I turned my half year.

At the party, June wrote a song for me and sang it. So did John, and a bunch of other people. He told me later that it was
the greatest night of his life, because his best friend was in wonderful shape. “We can look each other in the eye,” he said,
“and we ain’t hiding anything.”

We both had always known when the other was lying, denying, and concealing the drugs from each other. Now here we were, laughing
and singing, having fun and everybody witnessing it. Not scared of anything or anybody.

When you have people around you that love you, like him or Jessi, it really gives you courage. Nobody could have done it for
me. Nobody could have done it for him. We did it together.

Now we were about to have another shared experience. “I’m fine,” I told John as the anesthesia started to wear off. “But you
don’t look so good yourself.”

Sure enough, they had a doctor check him over, and before you could say “shot a man in Reno,” they put him in the room next
to mine. He had to have an emergency bypass, too.

I’d quit smoking. John hadn’t, and they were trying to clear his lungs before they operated. He had to wait a few days, and
all the while he kept asking “How ya doing?” and I’d say “Couldn’t be better.”

The fact was that I had seldom felt worse. I was allergic to morphine, though it took them a while to figure that out. Lying
in the recovery room, I couldn’t get my breath. The oxygen they were feeding me seemed hot. They tried changing the tanks.
Jessi was looking at me, and my eyes were wild, because I didn’t know what was happening.

They finally diagnosed the problem and put me on Tylenol 2. That was all. It figured; after all my drug use, I had to be allergic
to morphine. If I coughed, it felt like a herd of horses had stamped across my chest. I had told the doctors before not to
get me strung out on anything, because I didn’t want to repeat my addiction problems. They took me at my word.