Willie (12 page)

And that's why, I guess, I'm sitting here in Waco listening to “She Thinks I Still Care” on the record player, and knowing Willie and me are probably better friends now than ever.

Willie Nelson was just a little bitty redheaded pissant when he first came around the Nite Owl not too long after me and my late husband, U. J. Lunde, opened the place in 1943. He was too young to drink beer legally, and I sure as hell wouldn't sell it to him. But him and his sister Bobbie took to coming in there later and playing music with Bud Fletcher's band the Texans.

Many's the night Bobbie would be onstage playing the piano in the Nite Owl and I'd be babysitting her two little babies. Before I knew it, her kids would wet in my lap. But that was okay, we were all young—I was in my twenties and Bobbie and Willie in their teens—and having a big time. You could relax and have fun in the Nite Owl and nobody would ever bother you as long as you didn't get too drunk and show your ass. If you did that, I would throw you out the door before you could blink an eyeball. You could get as drunk as a dog in the Nite Owl as long as you didn't bother nobody. But there is a certain stage of drunkenness that will make anybody show their ass—and out they went. In forty-four years of owning the Nite Owl—running it all by myself after U. J. died of the sugar diabetes in 1969—the law has never had to close my doors for so much as a single night over any kind of trouble. I handled it myself.

After Willie and Bobbie moved on to the big time, we stayed friends. We didn't check on each other all the time, but we knew where each other was and what was going on even if we was miles apart.

I'd go see them when I could. One night I heard they was playing at a bar a Dallas Cowboy football player named Dave Manders owned outside of Dallas, so I drove up there. Well, that night was the worst damn brawl I have ever seen in any drinking joint in my life. Some 300-pound gorilla drop-kicked a woman off the balcony and she fell right at my feet. I thought she was dead. The ignorant bartenders began grabbing whiskey bottles off the display cases behind the bar and conking people over the head. In my joint I never hit anybody with a bottle. I could do the job with a fist or a forearm. But these Dallas idiots was bashing people in the skull, glass flying everywhere. I pulled Bobbie behind a post and said, “Stay beside me, honey. We're gonna call a cab to the Holiday Inn.”

Willie says that is the only night in his whole career, in all the thousands of joints he's played and fights he's seen, that the barroom brawl was so bad he quit playing music and got his band and us together and run out the door before he could finish his music. Good thing, too. As we was running out, the law was running in.

A good friend is somebody that's there when you need them, like Willie was for me a few years ago when I shot and killed my brother-in-law.

I had woke up on the couch in the middle of the night with my brother-in-law pounding on me with his fists yelling he was going to kill me.

I twisted away from him and got my pistol out of my purse at the end of the couch and shot him twice.

My poor sister was laying in the other room. She was an invalid, paralyzed on her right side. Somebody had hit her a blow on the head with a blunt instrument that caused a blood clot the size of a half-dollar. After surgery she was paralyzed. I took care of her.

Now I don't know if it was my brother-in-law who hit her. But he was a Korean War veteran who was being treated at the VA hospital in Waco for what they called paranoid schizophrenia. The doctors made him take Thorazine and other powerful tranquilizers. For three days before he attacked me, he hadn't been taking his medication. I don't know if that caused it, but I knew I was defending my life when I had to shoot him. I didn't have any other chance against him, because I was weak and recovering from gallbladder surgery on my own self.

They hauled me to jail and charged me with first-degree murder.

First thing after I got out on bail, my phone rang. It was Willie calling from the other end of the country someplace.

“Don't you worry about nothing, Marge,” he said. “I'll be right there as soon as I can.”

Willie flew down here and testified for me as a character witness. I said, “Willie, don't you tell no lies on my behalf.” He said, “Marge, I don't need to tell no lies.”

He told that jury of six women and six men that he had known me since he was a child, and if I had killed my brother-in-law, I must have had a damn good reason or I'd never have done it.

The jury decided it was self-defense from the word go.

Back in 1946 when Bud Fletcher and the Texans began playing at the Nite Owl, they was a hell of a show. Couldn't no girl pound the piano keys like Bobbie—except for Sissy Elaine Nix, a little-boned person like Bobbie—and Willie was just as cute as he could be. Bud, he was a story all his own. Couldn't sing or play, but he was the big bullshitter at the microphone who made people laugh and dance. Bud stopped many a potential brawl with his wisecracks from the stage. That Bud, he could talk a fur coat right off a grizzly bear.

Willie used to bring his first wife, Martha, in the Nite Owl when they was courting and for years after they got married. Martha was the sweetest, most beautiful girl you ever saw unless you made her mad. If you pissed her off, you had a Cherokee on the full warpath.

I have seen a lot of people grow up in the Nite Owl, and seen their kids grow up, too, and I've got a world of friends from forty-four years in the beer business. But how many of your friends get to be superstars and go off to Hollywood—and still fly home to help pull you out of a ditch?

That little redheaded pissant, he's a darling, I'll tell you. He never forgets.

Willie was about sixteen when we started hanging out with each other. I was twenty and just out of military service. What drew us together was we both liked to get drunk and chase girls, and we wore the same size clothes—boots, hat, shirt, pants—so if we wound up staying at my house on Saturday night he could wear my clothes on Sunday.

We would stand beside the highway in Abbott and hitchhike. If we got a ride heading south, we'd go to Waco. If we got a ride heading north we'd go to Fort Worth. We liked moving around a lot, but we didn't have no car. One time we decided to go to California, so we packed our bags and waited for a freight train coming through. We throwed our bags on a passing boxcar, and then the train started going faster and we run like bastards to catch it but we couldn't. Our bags went to California, I guess, but we wound up at the Nite Owl or someplace.

Willie liked jumping freights. I remember he had a big army coat with deep pockets in it. He was broke and starving to death. He went to a supermarket in Fort Worth and loaded up with sardines and crackers. At the cashier stand, Willie said he had to get his checkbook and would be right back. Instead he run straight to the railroad yard and hopped a freight train bound for California—but it turned out to be a local. The train stopped in Weatherford, Mineral Wells, and all points west. Willie got off and caught a freight back to Fort Worth.

Willie had more moxie in those days than anybody I ever saw. We were sitting in Scotty's Tavern, playing dominoes and watching the Monday night fights on TV. A guy at the bar is making comments like he is some kind of expert. Willie says, “I'll bet you ten bucks on the fighter in the white trunks.” They fought another round, and the guy at the bar says, “Let's make it ten more.”

Willie says, “Shit, let's make it thirty.”

We didn't have a dollar between us. If Willie had lost that bet, they'd have beat the pure hell out of us. I asked him later, “Just what did you intend to do if White Trunks got knocked on his ass?” Willie said, “Aw, I'd have thought of something.”

Willie had a job for a while wearing an apron and waiting on tables, if you can imagine such a sight, and he played in a polka band on weekends, and pretty soon we bought us a 1934 Ford that was a running son of a bitch. It was about three different colors with tires so threadbare and slick you couldn't take off without spinning the wheels. Trouble with it was, the gas tank leaked. On a Saturday we went by to pick up Willie's girlfriend at a government housing project. Willie goes inside to wait on the girl and I doze off at the wheel. I wake up to some kid pounding on the window and shouting, “Wake up, your car is on fire.”

I jumped out of the damn thing and the gas tank exploded. When Willie and the girl come running out, it was a hell of a blaze. The girl says, “What are we gonna do?”

Willie says, “We're just going to wait around like everybody else and watch this car burn and then go get drunk.”

That put us back on foot.

We went into the bootlegging business. You couldn't buy liquor in Waco. We scraped all our money together and went to Fort Worth and bought half-pints of whiskey. Coming back we stopped at the old Yellow Dog beer joint—run by Chief Edwards, who had practically raised me and never been seen to touch his lips to whiskey. We pull out a half-pint. Willie takes a drink. I take a drink. Chief Edwards grabs the bottle and drinks it dry. The Chief lets out a whoop, throws his hat on the floor, and stomps the shit out of it. We pull another bottle and kill it. Eventually we wobble to Hillsboro, where some drunk flags us down and asks if we've got any whiskey. We sell him a half-pint for $2. We got so happy we'd actually sold a bottle, we celebrated and drank some more. Before you know it, we was but of whiskey and had $2 left in the world. Willie and me wasn't cut out to be bootleggers is the lesson to that story. We was meant to drink it, not sell it.

Willie decided to get married. Not to Martha, his first wife, but another girl. Willie's mother, Myrle, come down from Oregon for the wedding. They was to get married on Saturday night. Saturday morning Willie says he needs a haircut. We set off to the barbershop in Waco. But on the way we stop at the Yellow Dog to see the Chief. We got drunk at the Yellow Dog and didn't come back for the wedding. Didn't see the girl again until years later when Willie was playing Panther Hall in Fort Worth. They had a sign outside that said
WILLIE NELSON TEXAS
. Willie walks up with this girl and asks if I remember her. I say I don't think I do.

“Well, I will sure as hell never forget you,” she says. “You're the reason I ain't Mrs. Willie Nelson Texas.”

Nothing would faze Willie, and even if it did he'd never let you know it. There was a truckstop near the Melody Ranch where they put hot peppers and homemade chowchow on the tables that would burn the gut out of a locomotive. The first time we went there, Willie ordered enchiladas and eggs. He took a spoon and heaped chowchow on top of his plate and poured hot peppers on top of the chowchow and stirred it into a mess that practically had smoke rising from it. All the guys were watching. Willie ate a bite. He started sweating. Knowing the guys were watching, he shoveled more enchiladas and peppers into his mouth. By now, tears were pouring down his cheeks. But he ate the whole damn thing, sweating and crying and acting like it was delicious. Finally somebody asked if he might like
a glass of water. Willie said, “Water ain't the right thing to drink with enchiladas. How about a glass of sweet milk?” He drank a gallon of sweet milk. But all he'd say was, “Man, I love them peppers. I just wish they'd get some hot ones in here.”

Willie has a way of wiggling out of tight spots like one of them lizards that you grab and the tail comes off in your hand. We were living at the Grandy Courts in Waco when a guy comes to the door Willie didn't want to see. Willie slithered under the bed. I let the guy in and said, “Willie ain't here, but he should be back sometime tonight. Sit down and wait, why don't you?” So I left, and Willie laid under the bed for hours until the old boy got tired of waiting and finally left. Another guy heard Willie had been messing around with his wife and came looking for him with a gun. Me and Willie borrowed a gun for self-defense from Chief Edwards. We sat in the Grandy with the lights out, watching this fellow parked across the street who had the full intention of shooting Willie full of holes. Eventually Willie decided the wisest thing to do was crawl out the back window and put some healthy distance between him and the Grandy Courts.

I took Willie to Tyler, Texas, when he got out of the air force and introduced him to my foreman, Curly Ingram. I had gotten a job with the Aspundh Expert Tree Company. The Aspundh Company hired Willie for 80¢ an hour. He started off driving a truck and immediately ran over some kid's red wagon, which cost Willie $16—two days' pay.

They put Willie on the ground crew with me. Aspundh is a huge company that does all kinds of things with trees—like cut them away from utility lines and such. As ground men, Willie and I didn't have to do no climbing. But there was one great big elm tree that was interfering with the electric lines and causing no end of trouble. A worker up in the tree hollered down to send up a bull rope. Willie says, “I'll bring it up to you.”

He slings the bull rope over his shoulder, climbs up an extension ladder, gets to the top of the tree, crawls out on a limb. The guy takes the bull rope and says, “No need to fool with climbing back down. You just catch hold of this rope on this limb and slide to the ground.”

Game for anything, Willie wraps the rope around his hand and bails out of the tree.

But instead of sliding, he got hung way up in the air with the rope twisted around his hand.

Willie starts yelling, “I'm a goner! I'm a goner!”

We yelled, “Hold on Willie.”

About that moment the rope comes untwisted and Willie starts
sliding down it like a cannonball, the flesh burning off his hands. He hit the ground hard with his hands peeled plumb to the bone, like he'd been sizzled in a fire.

Willie looks at me and says, “Zeke, I don't believe trees is my line of work.”