What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (11 page)

THE BACK OF THE BUS

 

met Willie Nelson on the gangplank of Noah's Ark. Like most country music friendships, ours has managed to remain close because we've stayed the hell away from each other. I've played a few of Willie's picnics and we've attended the same Tupperware parties now and then, but ironically, I didn't really start feeling spiritually akin to him until I'd phased out of country music almost entirely and become a pointy-headed intellectual mystery writer. Now that my novel
Roadkill
features Willie as a main character, our karma is suddenly linked—whether we like it or not.

Even when Willie produced a record of mine in Nashville in 1974 (and sang backup with Waylon Jennings and Tompall Glaser on "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore"), he and I were still only close enough for country dancin'. Of course, we'd come from different backgrounds. Willie had picked cotton in the fields as a kid in Abbott. For entertainment and income from local farmers, he'd go out with a little homemade paddle and kill bumblebees; he would come home looking like he'd just fought fifteen rounds with God. Willie grew up never having much money or much schooling and got married and divorced about ninety-seven times. All he ever wanted to do was write songs and sing them for people and maybe get one of those cars that roared down the highway with the windows rolled up in the middle of summer, indicating that the driver could afford that ultimate symbol of success; air-conditioning.

By the time Willie finally got that car, it was about ten minutes too late to make any difference, but he did get something else far more important: He got a bus. In fact, he got three buses. The one he lives in and calls home is known as the Honeysuckle Rose. The way I first really got to know Willie was by traveling with him aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. It's a floating city unto itself, with "floating" the operative word. Even the secondhand smoke has been known to make casual visitors mildly amphibious. (There is no truth, incidentally, to the widely held belief that Willie needs the other two buses to carry all the weed he smokes on the first bus.) By contrast, my own country music career never quite reached the tour-bus level. The closest I came was a blue Beauville van, out of which the Texas Jewboys poured like a thousand clowns at every honky-tonk, minstrel show, whorehouse, bar, and bar mitzvah throughout the South, to paraphrase Jerry Jeff Walker. The Beauville, like my career, was not a vehicle destined for vastly commercial country music stardom, though it did have at least one good quality: It broke down in all the right places.

Also unlike Willie, I came from an upper-middle-class home, which is always a hard cross for a country singer to bear. I got a guitar as a young teenager in Houston, and like Townes Van Zandt, the first song I learned was "Fraulein." By then Willie and his sister, Bobbie, were already playing in beer halls on Saturday nights and in church the next morning. By the time I had my bar mitzvah, Willie had sold Bibles and written "Family Bible," which he also sold, reportedly for fifty dollars.

Willie never went to college, but I graduated from the University of Texas's highly advanced Plan II liberal arts program. Then I joined the Peace Corps and worked in the jungles of Borneo, while Willie continued writing, singing, marrying, divorcing, struggling, and smoking. Like I said, I don't really know what Willie and I have in common—other than the fact that we're both pretty fair bumblebee fighters. Probably it has to do with what Johnny Gimble, the great country fiddle player, told me once aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. He said that when he was a kid he'd told his mother, "Mama, when I grow up, I'm gonna be a musician." His mother had answered, "Make up your mind, son, because you can't do both."

If Willie had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country because he refuses to leave his soulful locus at the back of the bus unless it's to go onstage or onto a golf course. Golf is a passion with Willie, and it's the one aspect of his life I find stultifyingly dull. As I once told Willie, "The only two good balls I ever hit was when I stepped on the garden rake." Willie, of course, responded to this news with a golf anecdote. He told me about a woman who'd recently come off his golf course at Briarcliff, went into the pro shop, and complained to the golf pro that she'd been stung by a bee. "Where'd it sting you?" asked the pro. "Between the first and second holes," she said. "Well I can tell you right now," said the golf pro, "your stance is too wide."

After writing a number of mystery novels and traveling extensively with Willie, the idea crossed my dusty desk to write a book with him as a central character, set the scene aboard the Honeysuckle Rose, and let the bus take the story wherever the hell it went. This meant I would be exchanging my New York loft with the cat and the lesbian dance class above for Willie and his crew. Willie had never been a character in a murder mystery, but he thought it might be worth a shot, so to speak.

We crisscrossed the country together. As the song goes: "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other." Willie sang, played chess, and smoked enough dope to make him so high that he had to call NASA to find his head. As for myself, I smoked cigars, drank a little Chateau de Catpiss, played chess with Willie, and wrote down many things at all hours of the day and night in my little private investigator's notebook. Along the way, I went to many of Willie's shows. Wandering around backstage at a Willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who's running the Ferris wheel. It's not the best seat in the house, but you see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody knows what the hell's going on. If you're sitting out in front, of course, it all rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring.

Backstage at any show has its similarities, whether it's Broadway or the circus or the meanest little honky-tonk in Nacogdoches—the palpable sense of people out there somewhere in the darkness waiting for your performance, or being able to pull a curtain back slightly and experience the actual sight of the audience sitting there waiting to be entertained by someone who, in this case, happens to be you. It's the reason Richard Burton vomited before almost every live performance of his life. It's part of the reason George Jones took Early Times, Judy Garland took bluebirds, and many a shining star burned out too soon. Standing alone in the spotlight, up on the high wire without a net, is something Willie Nelson has had to deal with for most of his adult life.

One night at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, I was standing backstage in the near darkness when a voice right behind me almost caused me to drop my cigar into my Dr Pepper. It was Willie. "Let me show you something," he said, and he pulled a curtain back, revealing a cranked-up crowd beginning to get drunk, beginning to grow restless, and packed in tighter than smoked oysters in Hong Kong. Viewed from our hidden angle, they were a strangely intimidating sight, yet Willie took them in almost like a walk in the trailer park.

"That's where the real show is," he said.

"If that's where the real show is," I said, "I want my money back."

"Do you realize," Willie continued in a soft, soothing, serious voice, "that ninety-nine percent of those people are not with their true first choice?"

He looked out at the crowd for a moment or two longer. Then he let the curtain drop from his hand, sending us back into twilight.

"That's why they play the jukebox," he said.

Willie's character leapt off the stage and onto the page. I don't know if you'd call it Jewish radar or cowboy intuition, but during my travels with Willie, a story line began to evolve. He would be at the center of one of my most challenging cases. There wasn't a butler to do it, but Willie did have a valet named Ben Dorsey, who'd once been John Wayne's valet. This provided some humorous commentary, since Willie wasn't an enormous fan of the Duke's. Willie preferred the old singing cowboys. Of John Wayne he once said, "He couldn't sing and his horse was never smart." (That kind of talk never failed to irritate Dorsey and usually resulted in some sort of tension convention.) Other real characters who inhabit the Honeysuckle Rose and the pages of
Roadkill
are Bobbie Nelson, Willie's sister; Lana Nelson, Willie's daughter; Gates "Gator" Moore, his intrepid bus driver; L. G., his one-man security team; and a cast of thousands of friends, fans, and family, who, along with life itself, did everything they could to interrupt our chess games.

You can tell a lot about a man by his chess game, unless, of course, your opponent is smoking a joint the size of Long Island.

Edgar Allan Poe once said of chess: "It is complex without being profound," and it is because of that very complexity that a momentary loss of concentration or the entry of some foreign emotion, like a broken heart, can torpedo the game. When you take this into consideration, Willie plays with the evenness of the Mahatma, at a lightninglike pace, and rarely loses. (I, of course, rarely lose either.)

One of the things I admire most about the way Willie plays the game of chess, as well as the game of life, is his Zen Texan approach to inevitable triumphs and defeats. The endgame doesn't hold great interest for him because he's already thinking about the next game. If he comes off less than his best in one game, one show, one interview, one album, his next effort is invariably brilliant. This is one of the reasons I've always looked up to both Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, even though

they're both shorter than everyone except Paul Simon, who I also look up to.

I see Willie as a storybook gingerbread man: born into poverty, rich in the coin of the spirit, ephemeral and timeless, fragile and strong, beautiful beyond words and music, healing the broken hearts of other people and sometimes, just maybe, his own as well. Yesterday's wine for Willie includes personal tragedies, Internal Revenue Service audits, and a somewhat geriatric band that has been around forever yet to this very day undeniably takes no prisoners. The changing landscape of country music has made major-label support and generous radio airplay almost a thing of the past. For many legends of country music, this trendy tidal wave toward Nashville poster boys and modern, youthful "hat acts," plus the inevitable pull of the old rocking chair, has meant the end of careers that were supposed to last forever.

In the midst of all this, like a diamond amongst the rhinestones, Willie Nelson stays on the road.

LOTTIE'S LOVE

 

hen Lottie Cotton was born, on September 6, 1902, in the tiny Southeast Texas town of Liberty, there were no airplanes in the sky. There were no SUVs, no superhighways, no cell phones, no televisions. When Lottie was laid to rest in Houston, there was a black Jesus looking after her from the wall of the funeral chapel. Many biblical scholars agree today that Jesus, being of North African descent, very likely may have been black. But Lottie was always spiritually color-blind; her Jesus was the color of love. She spent her entire life looking after others. One of them, I'm privileged to say, was me.

Lottie was not a maid. She was not a nanny. She did not live with us. We were not rich rug rats raised in River Oaks. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Houston. My mother and father both worked. Lottie helped cook and baby-sit during the day and soon became part of our family.

I was old enough to realize yet young enough to know that I was in the presence of a special person. Laura Bush, my occasional pen pal, had this to say about Lottie in a recent letter, and I don't think she'd mind my sharing it with you: "Only special ladies earn the title of 'second mother.' She must have been a remarkable person, and I know you miss her."

There are not many people like Lottie left in this world. Few of us, indeed, have the time and the love to spend our days and nights looking after others. Most of us take our responsibilities to our own families seriously. Many of us work hard at our jobs. Some of us even do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But how many would freely, willingly, lovingly roam the cottonfields of the heart with two young boys and a young girl, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a white mouse named Archimedes?

One way or another for almost fifty-five years, wherever I traveled in the world, Lottie and I managed to stay in touch. I now calculate that when Lottie sent me birthday cards in Borneo when I was in the Peace Corps, she was in her early sixties, an age that I myself am now rapidly, if disbelievingly, approaching. She also remained in touch with my brother, Roger, who lives in Maryland, and my sister, Marcie, who lives in Vietnam. To live a hundred years on this troubled planet is a rare feat, but to maintain contact with your "children" for all that length of time, and for them to have become your dear friends in later years, is rarer still.

For Lottie did not survive one century in merely the clinical sense; she was as sharp as a tack until the end of her days. At the ripe young age of ninety-nine, she could sit at the kitchen table and discuss politics or religion—or stuffed animals. Lottie left behind an entire menagerie of teddy bears and other stuffed animals, each of them with a name and personality all its own. She also left behind two live animals, dogs named Minnie and Little Dog, who had followed her and protected her everywhere she went. Minnie is a little dog named for my mother, and Little Dog, as might be expected, is a big dog.

Lottie is survived by her daughter, Ada Beverly (the two of them have referred to each other as "Mama" for at least the past thirty years), and one grandson, Jeffery. She's also survived by Roger, Marcie, and me, who live scattered about a modern-day world, a world that has gained so much in technology yet seems to have lost those sacred recipes for popcorn balls and chocolate-chip cookies. "She was a seasoned saint," a young preacher who had never met her said at her funeral. But was it too late, I wondered, to bless the hands that prepared the food? And there were so many other talents in Lottie's gentle hands, not the least of which was the skill to be a true mender of the human spirit.

I don't know what else you can say about someone who has been in your life forever, someone who was always there for you, even when "there" was far away. Lottie was my mother's friend, she was my friend, and now she has a friend in Jesus. She always had a friend in Jesus, come to think of it. The foundation of her faith was as strong as the foundation for the railroad tracks she helped lay as a young girl in Liberty Lottie, you've outlived your very bones, darling. Yours is not the narrow immortality craved by the authors, actors, and artists of this world. Yours is the immortality of a precious passenger on the train to glory, which has taken you from the cross ties on the railroad to the stars in the sky.

By day and by night, each in their turn, the sun and the moon gaze through the window, now and again reflecting upon the gold and silver pathways of childhood. The pathways are still there, but we cannot see them with our eyes, nor shall we ever again tread lightly upon them with our feet. Yet as children, we never suspect we might someday lose our way. We think we have all the time in the world.

I am still here, Lottie. And Ada gave me two of the teddy bears that I sent you long ago. As I write these words, those bears sit on the windowsill looking after me. Some might say they are only stuffed animals. But, Lottie, you and I know what's really inside them. It's the stuff of dreams.