Waylon (44 page)

Nobody made me feel worse than Shooter. Our little Waylon Albright was the joy of our lives, as you might expect. I would
sing to him and he’d just look at me; his momma would sing and he’d start crying. I loved to rib Jessi that he looked more
like me than her, but really, he was our love child, the symbol of our togetherness, from the moment we brought his baby bed
into the house.

He was a sensitive little guy, and he knew something wasn’t right with me. Shooter’s attention span was much longer than mine.
He’d be around me for a minute and he’d have to leave, because I was scattered. I think I made him uneasy. I was all screwed
up, trying to hold him, feeling like he was so little in my big arms.

I thought I could keep my drug use hidden around the house, but one day, when he was about three, he came in the room and
found one of my straws. He picked it up and started sniffing on it. I didn’t think he’d ever seen me do that, and it threw
me.

There’s a gap in there. There’s a lot I don’t remember. Both George Jones and I say that a lot, and maybe that’s a good thing.
We were both out there chasing our tails for a reason, to understand how far out we could spin and still find our way back.
You have to test your limits, whether they’re physical, mental, or artistic. That we did; the only problem is some of it happened
so fast it was over before we could start recalling it.

I don’t regret cocaine. What’s the use? It was part of the times we lived in, the songs we sang, and the drugs we took. Who
knows where one left off and the other started? We were having a fine ol’ time, and as long as we didn’t slip over the edge,
grasping at air as we slid down the slope, toppling over the precipice, well, that was the dues we paid. The only thing was
that it was hard to stop once you got your drug or alcohol momentum. Some never do; and that’s when you’re not around to write
your autobiography.

I knew how to live it up. I wouldn’t trade a moment of those wild times, and I still crack up whenever I think of just how
manic we could be. One half-time, we found ourselves in the locker room of the Oakland Raiders, who were down six-nothing
to Kansas City. I had gotten to know quarterback Ken “Snake” Stabler and defensive tackle John Matuszak. Matuszak was a crazy
man. I weigh two hundred pounds and he could pick me up over his head. With one hand.

The pressure in the locker room was unbelievable. Coach John Madden came through the room, took a bottle of Maalox, and drank
it straight down. Over on another bench, a guy was throwing up. Fred Biletnikoff, the great receiver, was walking around like
a zombie. He didn’t want to lose his concentration. I didn’t envy those guys; in that world, you’re only as good as your last
play.

I was down there with Deakon and a couple of friends. We got to tooting the Raiders up. We were in two stalls in the bathroom,
and we kept hearing “I’m a big man, pass that over here.” We handed it back and forth until pretty soon it was all gone. Oakland
went back out on the field and won 54–6. They gave Terry the game ball. Later that night, Deakon and Matuszak started eyeing
each other up. They were fixin’ to try one another. If that had happened, I would’ve stepped away a couple of hundred yards.
Luckily, they got to talking and settling down.

Not me.

I rocked and rolled and country and westerned. Nobody could have had more fun. I’ve always believed it’s your life, and you
can do whatever you want with it. If, that is, you live in a cave like a hermit. But when it affects other people’s lives,
when you destroy their lives along with yours, you have no right to make them suffer. None.

It got to where my music started to show the strain. I was doing bad records. Missing shows due to laryngitis. Not picking
up the guitar unless I was getting paid. Not caring.

I was feeling bad. I couldn’t get my breath. I was losing weight suddenly. I’d get dizzy spells at high altitudes. I’d be
driving and have to pull over and get out of the car. We’d be in Lake Tahoe, or Aspen, and I’d turn to Jessi and grab hold
of her arm, gripping her tight, leaning on her. We still couldn’t talk about it.

Robert Duvall had asked me to produce an album. He’s a good singer, but I had to tell him I couldn’t do it. “I’m too far in
on drugs,” I told him. “I’m going to have to pull up and pull back. I can’t even cut my own records.”

Jessi herself felt drained and depleted. She’d been my rock for so long, and she was at the end of her waiting. In her gift
of faith, she felt she had been tempered by her Lord, or she wouldn’t have been able to pull back and have the patience to
see us through. She had inquired about treatment centers and clinics, and talked to John Cash about how he’d wrestled with
his demons. I knew I was in trouble, and my friends and family had me cornered, but Jessi understood that I wasn’t the type
of guy to bag and throw in the trunk of a car and get committed. If you tried to make me be something, I was too stubbornly
defiant. Strength or weakness, this heel-digging probably caused me as much unnecessary trouble as it has kept me from compromising
my music.

She saw that the spirit was willing, but my flesh was weak, and getting weaker. Still, spirit can beat flesh, just like paper
covers rock, or match burns paper. Resolve only flows one way. At least I was heading in the right direction.

I’m not going to quit. I’m just going to stop.

I never said I’d quit. I’m not going to get off.

I’m just going to stop.

This time. This is the time. I wasn’t even aware my heart had made a hard decision until I said it aloud.

My body felt like a sewing machine. Always going. I had the frenzies. Every bone and every joint ached.

“Even unknowing,” as Jessi put it, I had crossed the boundary between my past and future. I thought I would take off the month
of April, clean up for thirty days, get my health back and my feet on the ground, and enjoy some of that looking-for-a-feeling
when I got back. I told Jessi I’d always be a drug addict, and do cocaine, and that this was just temporary. To slow it down.

I leased a house in Arizona with the help of my friend Bob Sikora, who was still running clubs like Mr. Lucky’s in Phoenix
and owned a string of Bobby McGee’s restaurants. It was out in the desert, and I’ve always respected the spiritual purity
of that stark land. Jessi’s dad had lived about eighty miles as the crow flies southeast from Phoenix, down below Superior,
around Rey copper mine. It was wilderness. He built a cabin along the Gila River, and in the morning you could get up and
see prints in the sand, where mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and wild boar had been.

I’d go out there to taper off drugs, and it seemed to help. The desert would soothe me; I could exist without stimulants for
weeks at a time, drawing on the desert’s silent company. Jessi’s dad built race cars in the twenties, and he had constructed
auxiliary motors that ran the electricity and water, along with other gadgets. He’d tinker with them, mining his claims for
molybdenum and copper, sure he was going to make a fortune. We knew he already had. In his own way, he was a genius. He had
found a piece of the world that he belonged in.

You had better respect the desert, because the desert leaves it up to you. It’s not going to help. There’s nobody you can
pay to find your answer and bring it to you. You can’t set back and wait on it. The desert is going to leave you totally alone,
to see if you can find the strength within yourself to survive. There are no distractions. You can’t outfox the desert. You’ll
die trying.

The house was on the desert’s edge, in Paradise Valley up by Tatum Boulevard. Though I didn’t know it, we didn’t yet have
a place to go to when we left Nashville for Phoenix. The hideaway we had originally wanted had fallen through, and Bob Sikora
literally talked this woman out of her home. By the time we got there, it had been stocked with groceries and was ready for
us. When Jessi went into the kitchen, she opened the pantry where the dishes were kept and saw a set of china that she hadn’t
seen since she was a small child and her mother had collected them from local gas stations as premiums. She couldn’t believe
it, and she took it as a sign, a way of telling her that this was where we were supposed to be.

On the night of March 31, 1984, I did all the cocaine I could and left twenty thousand dollars worth on the bus. I didn’t
think I could handle withdrawal without an escape hatch, though it must’ve been frightening for Jessi to know the drugs were
sitting out there, just waiting for me to have a moment of weakness. I parked the bus in the circular driveway and prepared
myself to wait it out. A doctor would come in and give me vitamin shots, but otherwise I knew I was on my own.

My body reacted as if somebody had pulled out the plug. I had sudden convulsions. It was like I was caught in a revolution,
with snipers on the rooftops and battles being waged on every corner. My nerves were in a constant grind of readiness, waiting,
every cell about to explode with anticipation, for some relief that just wouldn’t come. My bones hurt. I didn’t sleep. I’d
wake up at all hours of the night with toxins pouring out of my body. I got sick; it was the first common cold I’d had in
years, as my body flushed out the cocaine residues.

I’d sit out on the swing in the front yard, watching the sun come up. I’d still be there when the stars began to shine. As
my mind started to clear, I got to seeing the look on Jessi’s face. It was hopeless and helpless. She was so sad, watching
me vacillate between life and death, unable to do more than watch me go through it. I realized then what I was doing to her,
that it wasn’t just me who was under the influence of cocaine, and then I looked around at everybody around me who cared anything
about me, and basically, that same look was on their faces.

For two or three weeks, I learned how to feel my emotions again. When you’re normal, you can give as well as receive; on drugs,
it all goes inward and never gets let out. I woke up one morning, toward the end, and Jessi was sitting there, by the end
of the bed. I had only been asleep ten minutes. “Jessi, my spirit’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

There wasn’t anything she could do but wait, pray in her fashion, and let me know that she was holding fast, right by my side.
I couldn’t have done it without Jessi. She is the most giving person I’ve ever met, and anytime I felt like I just couldn’t
stand withdrawing further, she let me know, by her gentle presence, what would be waiting for me on life’s other shore.

There was a grand piano in the house, and she sang from a big
Reader’s Digest
book of old songs that was on the music stand. We went for short walks. I clung close to her. She knew I needed somebody
to be my partner. Shooter played in the front yard, and I watched him as I sat in the swing, knowing he was my greatest inspiration.
Back at the house, Maureen, our “administrator” at
Southern Comfort,
practiced her art of ritualistic feeding, serving my favorite meals, sometimes six or seven a day, topping them off with
peach milkshakes and little prizes for each milestone passed. I must’ve gained twenty-five pounds.

After about three weeks, I got to where I could sit for a time and feel my mind clearing out. I realized, that’s the end of
it. I waited another day to make sure about what I was thinking, though I still felt I had only “stopped.” That was my key
word.

I was in the car with Jessi one afternoon, watching the desert scenery go by, and I turned to her and asked if so-and-so knew
“that I quit.” She stared at me. I realized what had just come out of my mouth. I didn’t believe that I had said that.

“Did you hear me?” I asked her, though I was really directing the question at myself.

It had come from deep within, and we both understood it was absolutely true. I wasn’t ever going to do drugs again, as amazing
as that sounded. I had painted myself into a corner, and when I give my word, I don’t break it.

A month after entering my own halfway house, I walked out the door, slightly shaky, but feeling strong, at least physically.
I was anxious to see what life was going to be like, though I didn’t dwell on the mental hurdles that were sure to come. I
sniffed the fresh desert air, crisp in the morning, feeling it rush into my nose and lungs where once drugs had lived and
breathed. I felt washed out.

Back on the bus, there was still that twenty thousand dollars worth of cocaine waiting for me. The last temptation. I didn’t
want to deal with it, and I wasn’t about to pass along my troubles to somebody else. I was worried that we might have a wreck
and it would be found, or about the consequences if they decided to try and bust me, not knowing I’d quit.

I went in the back, unearthed the briefcase with the coke, and took it to the front of the bus. I handed it to Jessi. “You,
of all people, deserve to do with this whatever you want.”

She went to the bathroom, poured it in the bowl, and hollered, “Hallelujah!” She was the happiest girl in the world. And I
was the happiest boy.

I had to learn how to walk into a room.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to be like, who I was supposed to be like, or what was expected of me.

What I did know was that all I had to do was pick up the cocaine and the straw, and I’d get my old self back.

I would have night sweats about drugs, getting mad at myself while I slept because I usually took it in my dreams. I hated
the way I looked, because once I started gaining weight, I couldn’t stop. I thought I was nothing without cocaine.

For a long time, it was like I’d lost somebody close to me. I was in mourning, pining away. The best way I can explain it
is there’s a guy over there. He’s another person. You can do anything you want to because you can blame it on him. He’s a
good-time Charlie, and a lot of fun. You really like him, because he’s your escape from every damn problem you got in the
whole world. And when you quit drugs, he dies. Lay out a line, and he’s alive again.

That’s why you have to stay away from him. Change playmates and playgrounds. It’s like the crabs they sell on street corners
in Mexico. If you watch, they’re just milling around, with nothing to keep them in the pan but a lip about an inch high. Until
you see one try to get out and another pull him back. Your drug friends don’t want you to quit.