Waylon (16 page)

Before I’d left Phoenix, I’d talked with John Cash about sharing an apartment when I got to Nashville. But the closer I got
to calling him up when I arrived, the worse an idea it seemed. I was hanging out with Barbara, and even though I’d gotten
to know John a bit, there was still something of the starstruck teenager in me who had heard “Cry, Cry, Cry” over the car
radio, making the only left turn heading west on Highway 54: “Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down.”

I had met John through June Carter, who had crossed my path years before when I was still a disc jockey in Lubbock. I was
a little in awe of the Carter family, as you might expect. When I’d gone to record in Nashville that last year, Mother Maybelle
invited me to dinner. It was an even bigger thrill than having my records cut. It was like being given the Holy Grail.

My relationship with June had nowhere to go but up. The first time I met her was the first and worst time I ever got drunk.
She was on a package tour that came to Lubbock to play the state fair. Ray Price was headlining, and Skeeter Davis was also
on the bill. I was going to play bass for Ray.

When you played a fair tour, it was customary to visit about five or six towns around the fair’s location to publicize it.
That was part of the deal. We’d perform two or three songs, setting up one little microphone, and finish by telling the audience
to “come see us tonight” at the fairground. We did the circuit all day once, and June was riding with me. She and Carl Smith
had already split up; she was just the sweetest thing you ever saw.

We were in Spur, Texas; it’s the desert. They’ve got rattlesnakes seven feet long and more, and coyotes. Where the cap rock
starts heading down, that’s Spur.

The promoters told us we were going to have a hamburger fry at a nearby ranch. When we got out there and looked around, they’d
pulled up the rug, put a microphone in the corner with some amplifiers, and had a little bitty table plumb full of booze.
They were intending on us playing the music while they danced. There wasn’t no food nowhere.

I was starving to death. We hadn’t eaten all day. It pissed me off, so I just joined the party. I decided to drink the liquor,
and had a little bit of everything on the table. I got so drunk, I stumbled outside and passed out. They left me there and
put a pillow under my head, right in the middle of nowhere.

When I woke up it was getting dark. I opened my eyes, unsticking them one at a time, and looked right into the snout of a
black and white spotted hog that had come up and was snorting at my face. I must’ve let out a bloodcurdling scream. He took
off and hit the side of the house at full tilt, squealing and squalling.

June got me and walked me to the car and put me in the back of the station wagon. The next thing I knew they were letting
me out at K-triple-L. I had to work that day.

She came back through Lubbock a couple of times before I left for Arizona, cute as a bug’s ear and funny as she could be.
The next time I saw June was at J.D.’s around 1964, and she had John in tow. We hit it off. He liked me immediately. Beyond
what we saw in each other as performers, we had a mutual respect, centered around the songs we knew as kids. Our backgrounds
were so similar, sharing the poor cottonfields and a love of music back as long as we could remember. “You ever hear this
one?” was where our conversation started, and it didn’t stop until we challenged each other back all the way to Vernon Dalhart
and Carson Robison in the twenties. We shared the music more than anything else. We felt like old friends from the first time
we sat down together.

Later I went to see him in Albuquerque, with Tex Ritter opening. John told me he was thinking of moving to Nashville. He was
having some “trouble at home” trying to get June to marry him, and he needed a place to flop when he was there. “Why don’t
we get us an apartment together?” he asked.

I didn’t know if he’d still be into it when I got to town, but when I called around Mother Maybelle’s looking for him, she
told me “John’s really hurt.” I phoned him up and said, “If you’re serious, we’ll have no problem.”

It was just a regular one-bedroom, on the first floor of the Fontaine Royale Apartments in Madison, right off Gallatin Road.
Barbara moved down the hall, about four or five doors away, which made it real convenient. We were trying to keep our relationship
a secret until I got a divorce. Lynne wasn’t making it easy.

Mother Maybelle thought John and I would be “good for each other.” I’m not sure that’s the way I would describe our housekeeping
style. It was like a sitcom; we were the original Odd Couple. I was supposed to clean up, and John was the one doing the cooking.
If I’d be in one room polishing, he’d be in the other room making a mess. Making himself a mess. He’d be stirring biscuits
and gravy, dressed in one of his thin black gabardine suits, and the flour would be rising in clouds of white dust all over
him.

June and Momma Maybelle would come over about once a week to scrape the place down, and Maybelle would feed us whenever she
thought it was getting out of hand. She’d fix hush puppies, because she knew I loved them. After a meal there, we knew it
was her way of telling us to straighten up. She played a good game of poker, and she’d even have a beer once in a while. Maybelle
demanded respect, and John and I were only too happy to give it to her.

Both of us never slept. We put two king-size beds in one room, and there wasn’t space to walk around them. I don’t know why
we got such a small apartment. He’d have to jump over my bed to get to his if I was there. We hardly used them, though. We
were both always gone, and we usually only slept there as a last resort. I’d come in and find he was crashed, and he’d get
up when I’d stagger in from the road.

We were so much alike in many ways, it was scary. We both dressed in black, like Lash Lame. Later, when we met Lash on the
set of the
Stagecoach
movie, we were worried he was going to bust us for taking his style. Looking at John was like catching a reflection of myself;
driven, restless, searching for acceptance. We liked to get wild, but we were funny, and we didn’t get mean. We used to egg
each other on. It’s a worn-out word, but we were soul-mates, and our lives would continue to run parallel through all the
changes the years would bring. There was a connection between us we didn’t understand then, and may never still. It’s kind
of like knowing what someone’s going to say before they say it.

We flipped over each other from the moment we met, though at first we stood back. It was so sudden we were kind of afraid
of each other. John and I were both manly men, and we liked to walk macho and talk macho; but after a while we learned we
could be ourselves.

He had a defense when I first met him. I could break it down in minutes, just like we periodically kicked in the door. We
were always locking ourselves out. John would get home crashing and put the night latch on, or I’d do the same thing. Whoever
was stuck outside would have to batter his way into the apartment. We weren’t so much harmless as helpless. The landlord finally
turned the door around, opening it out instead of in, to keep us from doing further damage.

We’d just get giddy and silly around each other, and laugh a lot. That would be when I’d be calling him John. Or Maynard.
He had a lot of names. “Johnny Cash” was formal, as in “Mr. Cash.” There was Johnny when he was just lounging around. And
then there was Cash. Sometimes you couldn’t tease John or he would become Cash. He was very seldom Cash with me. Cash was
usually when he was mean, or when he was on drugs.

Me and John were the world champions at pill-taking, but we each didn’t let on to the other that we knew it. We never shared
drugs. I can laugh about it now, saying, hell, I knew he couldn’t handle it; but he couldn’t. I guess he felt the same way
about me. I had a problem, and he had a problem, but we never made it a mutual problem.

I hid my stash in the back of the air conditioner, while John kept his behind the television. He’d tear the place apart if
he ran out. If we had started combining supplies and sources, we probably would’ve bottomed out and killed ourselves, feeding
each other’s habits. We had enough mutual respect for each other, as human beings and as men, that we didn’t want to help
destroy what we had between us. He could get so messed up it was unbelievable; it didn’t matter if he had ten pills or a hundred.
He took them all. I wasn’t far behind.

I’d started popping pills back in Salt Lake City. Sheryl Millet, a guy who played guitar with me, was into them. When you’re
young, you’re bullet-proof, and I thought nothing of staying up all night, singing and trying to write songs. John and I could
never do that together. Two guys on amphetamines—we were too scattered. We worked at cross-purposes, trying to find a common
axis. Strung out, lying to each other about what we were doing, it’s a wonder we got along as well as we did.

I never liked downers. I was hyper as hell and taking uppers on top of that. I never hit the ground for twenty-one years.
I had incredible stamina; I prided myself on the fact that I could take more pills, stay up longer, sing more songs, and screw
more women than most anybody you ever met in your life. I didn’t know when to stop, or see any need to.

I didn’t know till later that they were addictive. I thought they were medicine. Playing six nights a week in Phoenix, I’d
use the pills as an energy boost. You’d be tired, but you wouldn’t know it. Later, when I got out on the road, and would have
to drive eight or nine hundred miles to the next show, and the next one after that, arriving just in time to put my clothes
on and hit the stage, they seemed the only solution to get where you were going. I was just trying to make it through the
night, the day, and the following week.

Almost everybody in Nashville took pills. When Roger Miller and I got to be close, it seemed like washing down a handful of
pills was a natural part of life. He was the cleverest and craziest man I ever met. He never quit being funny. He could think
faster than anyone and forget it quicker. I’d say a cliché, and he’d write a whole song around it. If I’d ask him to repeat
it, he’d shake his head and shrug. “Damned if I know what I just sang.”

If you listen to the songs he wrote, they’re like children’s rhymes. “You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd” or “Dang Me.”
Even “King of the Road.” They were just novelty things that he thought were funny when he wrote them down. “England swings
like a pendulum do.” It was like he decided to sing them as an afterthought. Kids love Roger’s music.

No matter how wasted he was, Roger always looked fresh. He might’ve been up for a week, but you’d never know it. Where we
would stay in the same clothes for days, he carried a portable iron and always rinsed his shirts in the sink and pressed his
pants.

He had briefcases full of pills, and we had as many names for them as they had colors. Roger took these things called Simcos,
so we called him Roger Simco. They were what was known as an over-and-under: one side was a tranquilizer and the other would
be an amphetamine, and they had a vitamin in them. There were Johnny White Crosses and Waylon’s Phoenix Flashes. L.A. Turnarounds
were the best. We liked to say that you could take one and drive to Los Angeles, turn around, and come straight back.

Speckled Birds. Little bitty Desoxyns. Desbutol pancakes. Somebody would want to trade a couple of “Footballs” for some real
“M&M’s.” Pills were the artificial energy on which Nashville ran around the clock and then some. They were the drug of choice;
and for a while, it seemed like eighty percent of the people in that town were comparing notes on who was taking which ones
and what they were doing to them. Pill talk.

In a way, they were a great leveler. “You got any pills?” was a query that drew Nashville’s elite and aspiring together, the
haves and have-nots, and after the bars closed, we’d congregate at Sue Brewer’s to share uppers and downers and guitars and
songs.

She called the place the Boar’s Nest. It wasn’t a club, but her apartment. The best music ever to come out of Nashville was
written right on her floor. Sue had come to Nashville in the fifties with a country music star, who got her pregnant and kicked
her out. Sue told him she’d screw every Opry star there ever was, the minute they hit town, and she’d make sure he knew about
it.

She had a wall of fame that went plumb up to the slanted ceiling, filled with men’s pictures that each had numbers on them,
in the order that she’d met them. I never got a number. We were too good as friends. She was the greatest country music fan
on earth, all big eyes and dark hair. One of her favorite sayings was “The only time I ever said no was if somebody asked
me if I had enough.”

Sue worked in a place called the Derby Bar until three in the morning, when she’d come home and set out the welcome sign.
She’d stock the refrigerator, and every once in a while one of us would come in and give her a little money for beer and food.
We’d sit on the couch and deal poker, talk about the new things we were working on, or maybe finish a song. Struggling songwriters
would stop by, like Kris Kristofferson and Dallas Frazier, and though it was an unwritten law that you couldn’t bug anybody,
if you had a good song you could sing it for Faron Young or George Jones, Mack Vickery, or Merle Kilgore. It was like a jungle
telegraph: If I came in early in the morning and sang a song, somebody might be talking about it in the afternoon to so-and-so,
and maybe they would think to give it a listen. A lot of songs got cut that way. The Boar’s Nest was open well into the daylight,
and sometimes, if she was taken with you, it could become a bed and breakfast. Finally she would grab three or four hours
sleep, get little Mikey off to school, and head back to work.

She was like a sister to us. She’d cook in the evening if somebody was hungry, or watch as we passed the guitar and sang.
Her heart was open to pickers and songwriters. When you’d play her a song, I don’t care if it was terrible, she’d go “Oh my
Goood
; that is so wonderful, you oughta show that to Webb Pierce.” I played her some bad songs, and it was the same reaction. She
saw me through some rough times.