Willie (13 page)

He told Curly to keep his job open for him, and he took off. You know, years later the Aspundh Tree Company offered Willie $100,000 to do a concert for their annual convention.

Willie started making a little money with his records, but he couldn't keep track of it. My brother Cliff was in the real estate and insurance business in Texarkana, which we figured meant he knew all about money. Willie asked my brother if he'd handle his affairs for ten percent. Willie had never met my brother, but they struck a deal and set up a company called Willie Nelson Enterprises. Cliff was to pay the bills, take care of the legal stuff, and I was to get a little cut out of the action. Willie was paying $300 a month in child support, so my brother took over that responsibility. Then I talked Cliff into letting Willie have all his credit cards—Texaco, Diners Club, everything. Willie started running them bills up.

My brother come to me and says, “How well do you know Willie Nelson, anyhow?”

“How come?” I says.

“Well, God damn, they're taking my credit cards away from me because of him.”

I called Willie and he came to Texarkana in a brand-new bus that he was driving his own self with his whole band on it. It was summer, the air conditioner was running on the bus, and Willie was wearing a bathing suit. He left the air conditioner on while we got quite drunk. I don't recall exactly how Willie and Cliff worked it out, but I do know it was many years before Willie had another credit card.

After Willie moved to Austin, we opened a pool hall on South Congress Avenue. It was a damn good place. Mom and Pop Nelson came down to help run it. We had a big beer garden in back—the Charlie Peepers Memorial Beer Garden—where we played dominoes and cooked barbecue goats with marijuana sprinkled on them. Every time we played music in the beer garden, the police showed up. Oh, we had fun at that pool hall. One night I lost the keys and had to sleep there on the couch. I woke up at seven in the morning and some girl was using the pay phone. She started living with me that day. Don't fate work in mysterious ways?

We had a big
NO SMOKING
sign in the back room. Willie would come in and say, “Let's go to the No Smoking Room and burn a reefer.”

One day much later, sitting in the No Smoking Room, high as raccoons, we was listening to Leon Payne's old song, “I Love You Because,” on the jukebox. That was one of our favorite songs when we was younger. It made me nostalgic.

I said, “Willie, do you remember that old song?”

He looked at me and said, “Son of a bitch, I should remember it. Ain't that me singing?”

Sure as shit, it was.

The reason my family came to the Pacific Northwest is we didn't have enough work in Arkansas. My husband and I ran a dairy farm back in Tindall, Arkansas, and there was a bad drought. It took what we made off the milk just to feed the cows. So we finally just settled out here in Washington State.

My sister Myrle had lived in Oregon for a long time. She moved to Washington when her husband Ken just practically went blind. He could hardly see at all. My son went to Oregon and got them and moved them up here. Myrle loved the scenery and the climate in this part of the country. She needed somebody to help her with Ken, but she didn't want to leave this area so she came to live near us.

Back in Arkansas our dad made moonshine mostly for himself and friends. The Greenhaws all played music and could sing, except for me. I happened to be the dumb one, I guess. Dad played the banjo. My youngest brother, Carl, was a really good piano player. Myrle sang and played the guitar like my other two brothers, but I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

The Nelson family lived not too far from the Greenhaws in Tindall. They were practically neighbors. The families got together to play music. I guess that's how Myrle met Willie's daddy, Ira. I was only five years old when Myrle married Ira and moved to Texas. We were a poor family, so I couldn't go visit her.

Willie's Indian blood comes from my mother Bertha Greenhaw, who was three-quarters Cherokee. I guess you would say three-quarters because Bertha's mother—my grandmother—was full-blooded Cherokee. My granddad was half Cherokee and half Irish.

So if Willie says he's an Indian, that's a fact. The Cherokees were about the smartest, proudest people that ever lived.

Martha is Willie's first wife and the mother of Lana, Susie, and Billy
.

Marge Lunde for forty-four years has owned the Nite Owl, a beer joint where Willie and Bobbie performed as teenagers
.

Zeke Varnon is a close friend of Willie's since teenage days
.

Sybil Greenhaw Young is Willie's mother's sister
.

PART THREE

When the evening sun goes down

You will find me hangin' 'round;

The night life ain't a good life,

But it's my life.

Many people just like me,

Dreamin' of old used to be's.

The night life ain't a good life,

But it's my life.

Listen to the blues that they're playin'

Listen to what the blues are sayin'

My, it's just another scene

From the world of broken dreams;

The night life ain't a good life,

But it's my life.

Even though they had given her the middle name of Jewel, it never occurred to me to wonder if Martha's parents might have spoiled her to the point where she thought she could always get her own way. I didn't consider it because I had been so spoiled my own self that I naturally assumed I would always get my own way.

Bind two spoiled kids together with a marriage license and mix in a heavy dose of passionate love along with a tendency to drink and party all night, and you come up with Martha and me—the battling Nelsons. Young and dumb and in love.

There was a frantic quality to our love. If I didn't know where Martha was at any time, I would get a feeling of anxiety in my stomach. When she walked into the room, my heart would pound like the bass drum in the Abbott High band and I would feel so elated I could hardly breathe. It was a coin toss whether love caused us more pain and anguish than it did pleasure.

Trust was not a part of our marriage. I think we thought we knew each other too well to trust each other. Basically I was just not that trustworthy. When you're young and have a guitar and are playing for dances and all those girls come after you, and you drink a lot, you are going to do things that your wife is not going to like. So I was
responsible for our early problems. Another woman would probably have divorced me long before Martha did.

Right from the beginning Martha suspected I was running around on her. She was wrong in the beginning, but she wasn't wrong very long. I accused her of running around on me, too. I don't know if she really was in those days, but she might as well have been because I kept throwing it up to her.

Our journey to Eugene, Oregon, to introduce Martha to my mother was not what you would call a huge success. Going up there, we'd drive a while, fight a while, make love a while, and then drive some more. When we got to Eugene, the only job I could find was as a plumber's helper. For a guy who thought he was a star, crawling under houses with a monkey wrench was not at all what I had in mind.

“You could have stayed home and worked for my daddy if you want to be a plumber,” Martha would tell me. She was right. W. T. Mathews was a plumber, and his wife Etta sewed all Martha's clothes. Her being right pissed me off all the more.

Martha worked as a waitress in Eugene. She could always find a job as a waitress anywhere we went, because she was so beautiful and smart and she worked hard. Even if she'd been the laziest-ass waitress in town, they'd have hired her. One look at Martha in her poodle skirt and sweater, bobby sox and loafers, her Cherokee black hair and black eyes shining, her laughter like music, it would have taken a blind eunuch not to hire her. You didn't meet many blind eunuchs who ran honky-tonks.

But I was not put on this earth to be a plumber, much less a plumber's helper. Also I couldn't stand the idea of being supported by Martha. It offended my notion of manhood. The man was supposed to be the provider. And Martha would kill me with her mouth when I laid around the house pickin' the guitar while she went off to work. She might have been kidding, but I was in no mood to take a joke.

Martha had a world of patience with me, and I don't mean to make it sound otherwise. After all, she stuck it out with me through ten years of rough times. So instead of constantly fighting, why didn't we sit down and talk over our problems like calm and reasonable people? Well, the words
calm
and
reasonable
would not have applied to either of us. And us two kids, both still in our teens, didn't realize it but we were facing the number-one problem that nearly all married people face: we didn't know how to listen to each other.

I have to smile when I see all the books and magazine articles that
say the biggest complaint most women have against their husbands is that the husbands won't listen to them. The problem is not that husbands don't listen to their wives as much as it is that not many people of either sex really listen to anybody.

There are important things men learn to be afraid to try to tell their wives, and I don't mean sneak fucking. Maybe it's a financial situation the man is ashamed to admit he can't handle. Could be some powerful feeling of insecurity that the man is afraid will make his wife think less of him or consider him an outright sissy. The man really wants to unburden his soul to a woman because he instinctively feels a woman is more sympathetic toward him, like maybe his mother was. What many guys do in this case is go to a bar and get drunk and pick up a woman who will listen to all his shit because she's new and never heard it before and thinks her turn will come to lay her own shit back on him, although by the time her turn comes the guy has usually gone home.

Any prostitute will tell you that they have lots of tricks who come in every week and pay money but don't want sex, just companionship. They need to talk to a woman and know what a woman thinks. She might be telling them only what they want to hear, but they need to hear it. Encouragement from a woman is the most inspiring thing a guy can hear.

Most people think communication is talking all the shit that comes into their heads all the time. They don't understand that they can communicate better if for a change they really listen to where the other person is coming from and give a response that is honest.

It's hard to communicate with somebody when you're screaming at them or have just roared away in the car and left them standing at the curb.

In 1953 Martha and I moved to San Antonio. San Antonio was the biggest city Martha and I had ever lived in. It was a wild, noisy, colorful place with a river that ran past the Alamo. There were five or six huge military bases in San Antonio, so the right nightclubs had a wealth of steady customers. San Antonio had more Mexicans in it than any town this side of Mexico City. Maybe Texas won its war for independence from Mexico, but you couldn't tell it in San Antonio. The streets were full of Indians, too, except they called themselves Mexicans because Texas real estate developers had long ago chased the Indians to Oklahoma. You'd see bunches of Indians on the sidewalks wearing headbands to denote their tribal backgrounds, and they'd hold Indian ceremonies in the ballroom at the old Menger
Hotel, where Teddy Roosevelt had organized his Rough Riders. Maury Maverick, the congressman whose last name has become part of our language, told me in San Antonio one day, “Willie, if all these Indians ever learn to quit calling themselves Mexicans and start voting as an Indian bloc, they could practically take over this town.”