Cash: The Autobiography (15 page)

Gradually the binges grew longer, the crashes worse, the periods of sobriety shorter. Everything just got ratcheted relentlessly up its scale. It wasn't long until the crashes got really bad. As soon as I woke up, I started feeling little things in my skin, briers or wood splinters, itching so badly that I had to keep trying to pluck them out; I'd turn on the light to see them better, and they weren't there. That kept hap- pening and got worse—they started to be alive, actually twitching and squirming in my flesh—and that was unbearable. Then I had to take more pills. I talked about it to other people who used amphetamines, but nobody else had the problem for the simple reason that nobody else was taking as many pills as I was. I tried cutting back a little, and it quit happening. So I thought, Okay, I'll push my doses right up to the line, but no further. Sometimes I managed that. Other times I'd forget—well, I never forgot; I just didn't care—and I'd go ahead, get as high as I wanted, and end up trying to pull little creatures out of my body. Some people were trying to steer me away from what they could see was self-destruction. On the road there were performers like Sonny James and Jimmie C. Newman, both of whom warned me repeatedly that I was killing myself. I'd humor them. My feeling was that I knew a whole lot more about drugs than they did and about whether or not I was killing myself, and so I really didn't have to pay much attention to what they said. I went along and agreed with them, then did what I wanted. With Vivian it was harder, just as it's difficult for me to describe now. Many parts of my life are painful to recall—this book is hard on me in that respect—but as you'd expect, my first marriage is especially tough to speak about. I've made my apologies to Vivian and tried to redress the damage I did, and these days I don't carry any guilt about those days, so I can tell the stories (which

wasn't always so). But still I find myself resisting. Old pain dies hard. I met Vivian at a skating rink in San Antonio, Texas, before I shipped out overseas with the air force and began a romance that grew by mail. We wrote to each other almost every day, and as time went by more and more passion and intimacy went onto the paper—every word of mine written in green ink, a color reserved just for her. Vivian still has those letters in a trunk in her house, all but twenty-four of them; last Christmas she gave six to each of our four girls. That scared me at first, but I guess it's fitting. By the time I came home from the air force on July 4, 1954, ex-Sergeant Cash and Miss Liberto knew two things: we were going to get married and have a family, and I was going to be a singer. She encouraged me all the way in both ambitions, even though the only singing she'd heard me do was on a disk I'd made in a booth at the rail- road station in Munich for one deutsche mark—my first record, an unaccompanied rendition of Carl Smith's “Am I the One?” She wore it out. Unlike the Barbarian tapes, that one's not in the archive. “Am I the one who'll always hold you, 'til the end of time ...” In retrospect it's strange that I chose a Carl Smith song; he was June Carter's hus- band at the time. Vivian and I were married on August 7,1954, by her uncle, Father Vincent Liberto. Between then and mid-1955 we had a good time. Vivian would come along on the dates I'd arranged for Luther and Marshall and myself around the Memphis area in places like Lepanto and Osceola, then farther afield in Tennessee, Arkansas, and even Mississippi, and that was fun. Marshall's wife, Etta, and son, Randy, came along, too, and so did Luther's wife, and we were at each other's houses all the time, a happy gang. Vivian learned to make corn bread, buttermilk,

navy beans, pork chops—farmer food, the kind that'll make you fat if you're not out there plowing all day— and I began learning how to live with a wife. We were okay. The first big problem between us began on August 5, 1955, the night I played the first big concert of my career, at the Overton Park Band Shell, with Elvis headlining. I still have the newspaper ad, framed. THE ELVIS PRESLEY SHOW was in big bold type with Extra—Johnny Cash Sings “Cry, Cry, Cry” down below. The show went well, and Elvis asked me to go on tour with him. I accepted and took Vivian along, as usual, and it scared her. Once she saw how women went nuts over Elvis and realized that I was heading into that world, she cooled considerably on the whole idea of my recording and touring career. By the time our second daughter, Kathy (Kathleen), was born, I was well on my way to living the life of a rambler, and although life is a matter of choices, I didn't feel I had any control over that. Being a recording artist meant you had to tour, which meant you had to leave your family. My kids suffered—Daddy wasn't there for school plays, Fourth of July picnics, and most of the smaller but more significant events in the lives of chil- dren. Although Vivian handled it really well, being as much of a sister as a mother to the girls and taking very good care of them, my absence was a loss that can never be made up. The pills were of course a big issue. She saw them as deadly right from the start, when she'd get up in the morning in the little house on Sandy Cove in Memphis and there I'd be, wide-awake and red-eyed after stay- ing up all night in the den, writing and singing and putting things down on tape. She urged me not to take them, and of course that just drove the wedge deeper between us. I shrugged her off. Then, as my habit esca- lated, she actually begged me—"Please, please get off

those pills. They're going to destroy us both!“—but I hunched up into myself and let it roll off my back. By the time we left Memphis for California in early 1959 we had three daughters and a marriage in bad trouble. At first I rented a house on Coldwater Canyon; then I bought Johnny Carson's house on Havenhurst Avenue in Encino when he left for New York to start The Tonight Show—$165,000 then, worth a few million today—and finally, because Rosanne was allergic to the smog, coming home from school every day with tears running off her chin, we moved to the Ojai Valley about fifteen miles inland from Ventura. I built a house for us and bought one for my parents, and I loved it there. It was beautiful land. ”Ojai“ means ”to nest." Nesting wasn't what I did, though. Touring and drugs were what I did, with the effort involved in drugs mounting steadily as time went by. As well as with increasing demand I also had to deal with diminishing supply. In the early 1960s the American Medical Association began waking up to the perils of prescribing unlimited amphetamines for any- one who wanted them, and getting drugs started get- ting to be work, especially for a traveling man. It got harder than simply calling the hotel doctor and having him send over sixty pills. If I was going on a ten-day tour, I had to plan accordingly, and that could be com- plicated. How many prescriptions did I have? Four? Four times sixty divided by ten, make that twelve just in case, is . . . hmmmm, maybe not enough. Maybe I needed another local source. Maybe I should call another doctor before I left. Maybe I should drive to that druggist forty miles away and get a hundred or two under the counter. Maybe I should call a friend, or friends, and ask them to go get a new prescription. Ultimately, I might have to rely on whatever I could find on the road. By 1960, Vivian's resentment against my commit-

ment to the music business was very strong. Our expe- rience together at the Disc Jockey Convention in Nashville that year was typical. I wanted to go room hopping, dropping into all the various record compa- nies' and song publishers' hospitality suites, hanging out with my friends, singing songs and playing guitar, having fun and doing what you do, but that wasn't Vivian's idea at all. She wanted to be my priority. We had one of our worst fights that night. It didn't help at all that June Carter called our room to say that she and Don Gibson were singing and writing songs together, and why didn't I come over and join them? “Sure,” I said, and hung up, planning to go, but Vivian threw a fit (which wasn't surprising, given how it all turned out between me and June and her). I ended up room hopping anyway and stayed up all night. That was the night I heard about Johnny Horton getting killed. I took a lot of pills and I drank a lot, too. I was a mess, and the light of the following day made it worse. Hungover, strung out, in shock, full of remorse, my best friend dead, my wife hurt and sad and bitter and angry . . .

It was a sad situation between Vivian and me, and it didn't get better. I wasn't going to give up the life that went with my music, and Vivian wasn't going to accept that. So there we were, very unhappy. There was always a battle at home. It was hopeless for her because I just wasn't going to do what she wanted, and it was hopeless for me because she'd sworn that I'd never be free from our marriage. She was a devout Catholic; she said she'd die before she'd give me a divorce. Everything just got more difficult as time went on, with Vivian and with drugs, too. Amphetamines are hard to handle, and once you're into them to any extent you find out very quickly that you have a pressing need for other chemicals. I soon had to drink alcohol, usually wine or beer, to take the edge off my high if it got too sharp or knock myself out after being up for days, and after a while I got into barbiturates, too. I wasn't high all the time. Sometimes nothing I did would keep me in pills, and I'd be stuck somewhere out on the road, having to go clean. I feared that more than I feared my own death, but when it happened, I'd begin to feel pretty good after two or three days without drugs. Then, though, I'd get home, usually on a Monday, and I'd find the stress of my marriage so hard that I'd drive to that druggist, get two or three hundred pills, head out into the desert in my camper, and stay out there, high, for as long as I could. Sometimes it was days. Vivian, my preacher, and some of my friends fought for me, trying to make me save myself, but that just infu- riated me, and I started staying away from home even more. I'd go out on tour and stay out when it was over. All the time my habit just got worse, never better.

I knew that, but it wasn't something I wanted to admit to myself. The crashes were coming closer together and I was burning myself out more often, going up to and past the point of total exhaustion, doubling and tripling and quadrupling my intake and getting a smaller and smaller margin of advantage. That would all reveal itself to me, as would the logical destination—death—when I got to the end of a binge and found myself shaking, sweating, cramping, hurting, and scared beyond the abil- ity of any chemical on earth to take away my fear. Those states were temporary, though. The alcohol and barbitu- rates would knock me out eventually, and after a while, hours or days, I'd be able to get high again. I'll tell you about my camper. I called it Jesse, after Jesse James, because I was an outlaw and it had to be one, too. I imagined my Jesse to be a free, rebellious spirit, living to ramble in the back of beyond and carry me and himself away from people and their needs and their laws. I painted his windows black so I could sleep in him during daylight, but also because I just liked to spray-paint things black. I can't remember how long I'd been up when I wrecked him the first time. It was certainly more than a couple of days. I was alone in the night, driving down a deserted road near Santa Maria, California, at about forty miles an hour, when suddenly everything was quiet and still and crooked, and my jaw hurt. I'd run up on a berm of earth, and Jesse had flipped over and slid down the highway before coming to rest on his side. I'd been knocked out and cracked my jaw; he'd been scraped and dented. No big deal. Ditto for the next little disaster. Luther Perkins and I were approaching the covered porch of the old Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, when it occurred to me that Jesse was higher than the space into which we were heading. “Luther,” I said, "this camper won't go under that

porch.“ He was busy talking. He didn't pay any attention at all to whatever it was I'd said. ”Hey, Luther! This camper won't go under that porch !n He kept talking. “LUTHER!!” He was looking at me, startled and a little aggrieved by my tone, when we plowed into it. It was obvious right away that we'd done major damage. Not to ourselves, though, and not to Jesse either. The Sahara people pulled us from the wreckage dazed but unscathed, then let enough air out of Jesse's tires to lower his roofline a few inches, and pulled him out, too. The porch was destroyed, but they were very nice about that. They just tore it down, built themselves a new one, and never came after us for a nickel. The U.S. government wasn't as forgiving. They charged me plenty for the consequences when Jesse met his final fiery end. In fact, I'm the only citizen the govern- ment has ever successfully sued, and collected from, for starting a forest fire. 1 I'd been aware of the squeaky wheel for a while before I pulled to a stop in the Los Padres National Wildlife Refuge, over the hills from Ventura, California, but it really caught my attention once Jesse was station- ary. Oil from a cracked bearing dripped onto the wheel, which by that time was red hot, and it set fire to the grass. The fire spread quickly in the wind, and there was noth- ing I could do about it. It swept up the nearby mountain- side, and soon a major conflagration was in progress. My mind went to work. I grabbed my fishing pole

from the back of the truck and walked down to a creek, figuring that even though there was only three inches of water in the creek, I'd act like I was so engrossed in my fishing that I just hadn't noticed the fire eating up the scenery and my camper up the little hill behind me. I sat there while the fire-fighting crews arrived and headed up the mountain with their shovels and axes and chain saws, and then the fire-bomber planes swooped in to drop their loads of boron. I was still sitting there when a man from the forestry service walked up to me and, despite the fishing rod in my hand, asked me, “Did you start this fire?” I couldn't lie, but I tried. “My truck did,” I said. He asked me my name and address, and I told him. He wrote it all down and said, “Well, you'll be hearing from us.” Then he started walking away. “Wait a minute,” I said. “How am I going to get out of here?” My truck had burned up; I was temporarily without transportation. It was a long way back to civi- lization. He didn't seem to think that worrisome. “I don't know” is all he said, and then he and his comrades packed up their gear and left. I slept on the bare ground that night. Early in the morning I thought it was all going to be okay, because I heard a truck engine on the dirt road. I ran up there, and sure enough, along came a man in a long flatbed truck. I flagged him down and described my plight, and he seemed sympathetic. Moreover, he was going my way. The cab was full—he had two other men with him—but he was willing to take another. “You can ride on the back,” he said. I looked into the back of the truck. His cargo was