Willie (3 page)

I had bought Dr. Sims's house early this year for $18,000 and started fixing it up to look as pretty as it did in 1933. I would have bought the house I was born in, but it had been torn down. Only our old bedroom was saved, and it has been moved to the other side of the highway and added to the house of a black family.

One of the first things I did after buying Dr. Sims's house was set about removing the big signboard outside of Abbott that says
HOME OF WILLIE NELSON
. Me and Zeke Varnon got drunk and tried to burn down the sign with a gasoline fire, but five gallons only singed those old creosote posts and blackened my name so it looked even worse. At least, I showed I was serious. I got them to change the sign to
HOME OF THE ABBOTT FIGHTING PANTHERS
, my old high School team.

I heard Lana and the grandkids sleeping. The sound of children sleeping entrances me: their slow, peaceful breaths, their little snorts and yips, the occasional words spoken aloud in their sleep, all coming from a soul that is living in sleep in realms that, not knowing how else to put it, we say dreams are made of.

Stepping over paint buckets in the kitchen, I let the screen door close quietly and slipped into the warm, purple morning and began to run.

I set a slow pace down the road by the house of my old childhood friend Jimmy Bruce, who still lives in the same house and is now the town postmaster. I ran past the old tabernacle—the scene, in my youth, of singing and preaching and playing knuckles-down marbles—and on past the Baptist church a few blocks away, and past the Methodist church across the street, where I sang every Sunday even though I thought I was doomed to hell, and way deep into the fields of Abbott, home of my heart.

When I was young in Abbott, on summer nights and early mornings like this you could look up and see the Milky Way and it was awesome. Kids in urban areas today have no idea how the Milky Way looked forty or fifty years ago. It was like Bill Russell had taken his brush and painted a wide white swath across the sky. We knew this white celestial highway was made of countless stars and constellations inconceivable distances away, yet the Milky Way looked like a solid white path near enough that you thought you could hit it with a cannon. And somehow you knew that the starlight reached you from glory, that you drew all your strength from the starlight, that eternity was immense and your knowledge was small. There are countless planets full of life out there among the stars. How do I know? I've been there. So have you.

Beholding the Milky Way in the night sky in Abbott when I was a kid would reveal me to myself—in a mystical sense—so strong that I could only reconcile my vision with real life in a broke farm town during the Great Depression by picking fights and showing off.

I ran towards Willie Nelson Road, a stretch of county road between Abbott and West, the town where I first played in a band when I was about eight or nine years old. It was funny to think about this road being named for me. If they'd named it for me fifty years ago, when I walked down this road to go pick cotton, they might have called it Booger Red Boll-evard. Booger Red is what they called me back then.

Running along the road, at home in my thoughts, I was aware that grass and trees and crops and animals are among the essence of life, and I am a part of them and need continual support from them. The Indians—which means me and my brothers and sisters of like mind—say only the spirits and the earth endure. When I see the destruction wrought upon our small planet by human beings who forget the supreme good of caring for our natural world that mothers us, I wonder if our species will last long enough to wake up to the truth that we must obey the old laws of cause and effect and treat the earth as our mother instead of as our gravel pit and garbage dump. The trash that washes ashore on Texas beaches—bleach bottles, syringes, plastic bags, ice chests—comes from Venezuela, France, Brazil, and Greece, among other places. West Germans and Saudi Arabians own half the buildings in downtown Houston. It is a small world, indeed.

The constant struggle between good and evil is approaching another great climax in our lifetime. By good I mean your inner voice that comes from God—maybe you call it conscience—and by evil I mean negative thinking, materialistic, greedy attitudes that you know
are wrong but can be reduced into acting as if you believe they are right. This is the Devil—to be overwhelmed by desire for things of the material world, to be swept under by negative thinking, to be selfish and petty, to use power and wealth to dominate others: this is hell and we make it for ourselves.

Running alone in the dawn, this is the sort of thing I think about. It's nothing mysterious. People may think I'm mysterious, but I don't plan it that way. It all seems clear enough to me.

The sunrise began to glow at my right shoulder, clods of earth and brown shoots taking shape in the growing light. I felt a real
déjà vu
. This is how it had looked when I had walked these same fields during the Great Depression with my grandmother and my sister Bobbie, filling our burlap bags with cotton. I turned and ran back toward the house with the sunrise over my left shoulder.

On a soft spring afternoon a few months earlier, the kind of day when I open the moon roof of my car and lower the windows and thank God for putting me in Texas, I was cruising along the back roads of Hill County in my silver Mercedes 560 SEL—I've always loved to drive a good car whether I could afford it or not—with my old buddy Zeke Varnon, who could have been the world domino champion if he'd been willing to leave home.

Zeke was drinking a beer and scratching the stubble on his chin. We had been up most of the night playing dominoes and passing the tequila bottle back and forth in Zeke's trailer house outside of Hillsboro. I've been close friends with Zeke since our teens, when we'd decided we were both insane, by the standards of the time. We loved being insane. We thought of ourselves as true rebels, living strictly by our own rules. Of course, when we had a sick hangover and a nagging piece of memory about some outrageous act we'd pulled the night before, it helped a little to think of ourselves as rebels instead of just nuts.

“Willie, there's a guy you ought to meet,” Zeke said after we had been driving a while.

I had been looking out the window at fields where forty years ago I had picked cotton and baled hay. I was remembering when cars first got air conditioners after World War II. I would look up, sweating like a pig in the field, and see cars zooming down the highway in the middle of the summer with their windows shut. That, for me, was what it meant to be rich—to drive down the highway in the middle of the summer with your windows shut.

“Who?” I said.

Zeke began to tell me about Carl Cornelius.

Talk about crazy. Listening to Zeke, I knew Carl Cornelius was some kind of brother. Actually, he was living one of my biggest fantasies: he owned his own town. I've
always
wanted to own my own town. We'd built me a town once in the hills outside Austin—an authentic, one-street Old West town like Texas in the 1880s—for our movie
Red Headed Stranger
and for the
Pancho and Lefty
album video I did with Merle Haggard and Townes Van Zandt. But when the cameras quit turning the citizens of my town went away, leaving the paint to fade and the brush to blow across the dirt road, except on Sunday afternoons when Lana gathers a group at the little church for nondenominational services. Somebody will play the piano and we'll sing hymns standing in our old-fashioned pews, and maybe somebody in the crowd that always includes lots of kids will want to tell a story. Or we'll get out a portable machine and play a tape of a lecture by Father A. A. Taliaffero of St. Alcuin's Church in Dallas. Father Taliaffero is a wise man. I listen to him as I would listen to a great teacher. I must have fifty of his taped lectures in a cabinet on my bus. It sort of surprises strangers who expect to hear music always blaring from the speakers on
Honeysuckle Rose
to hear a man telling them instead there is no such thing as death, and that creative imagination rules the universe.

But the rest of the week my town doesn't even have a sheriff in it. When I first built the town I wanted to hire a sheriff who would dress like Wyatt Earp with two big six-guns, and rock back in his cane chair on the porch in front of the jail with his spurred boots propped up on the hitching rail.

My fantasy was I would amble up to my sheriff and offer him a hit off my Austin Torpedo and the sheriff would squint at me and drawl, “Well, no thanks, Willie, I'm on duty. But you ain't harming a soul or tearing up nothing, so you go right ahead and smoke all the weed you want. Can't nobody bother you here, Willie—not in your own town with your own sheriff on duty.”

Carl Cornelius, however, owned a real town and his own gang of law officers who dressed like state troopers.

Until eighteen months ago, Carl's Corner had been just a big truckstop and cafe. But Carl dreams big. He took the circus-size, ten-foot polyurethane musical frogs down from the roof of a fancy Dallas disco and put them on the top of his truckstop. He erected a drive-in movie and a sauna and a swimming pool and surrounded
them on three sides with a bunch of mobile homes—“changing rooms,” Carl said.

Carl found some backing in Dallas and bought a couple of thousand acres of the flat farmland around his truckstop. He made it easy for 180 people to move onto the land in mobile homes and stay until they qualified under state law as local voters. At that point they called an election and voted themselves an official town called Carl's Corner with Carl as the mayor. Carl owned the liquor sale permit and the water well and held notes on the land. The only other business was Paula's Pet Boutique.

Approaching the town of Carl's Corner in my Mercedes, I saw a thirty-foot advertising billboard rising up from the highway—a huge painted cutout of three figures standing arm in arm and peering out at the landscape. The figures were Carl, Zeke, and me.

“Ah . . . there's something I ain't told you yet,” Zeke said.

I parked my Mercedes in the lot crowded with trucks. Zeke led me though the back door.

Inside the truckstop I could smell chili, an aroma of cuminos that watered my sinuses. There, in front of a big projection TV screen, were a dozen truckers eating chicken fried steaks and cheeseburgers, watching soap operas.

A burly fellow with a big open country face approached me, his cheeks blooming with whiskey flush, a straw cowboy hat pushed to the back of his head, his belly hanging over his big silver belt buckle on crumpled jeans over lizard-skin boots. He had a wide, yellow-tooth grin and eyes that looked like they had just been through a sandstorm.

Carl is not bashful. He cut straight to the meat of the matter.

“Hi, Willie,” Carl said. “Let's have your 1987 Picnic right here in my town this Fourth of July. Carl's Corner is ideal. There is not a single tree to block the view of the stage.”

I wasn't real sure I wanted to have a Picnic this year. I say that every year, and I always mean it.

“Why don't we start off with a beer and a bowl of chili?” I said.

Carl served Great Depression chili, the greasy red ambrosia that used to cost a dime a bowl with all the soda crackers you wanted. Dish of pinto beans on the side. Jar of jalapeño peppers on the table next to a bowl of chopped white onions. Not a trace of tomatoes or celery or other foreign objects that over the years have drifted into what people who don't know better call chili. Chili was invented in South Texas as a dish to make tough stringy beef taste good, and sold
by vendors on the streets on San Antonio before the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. Chili is a serious matter to any native-born Texan old enough to remember when a ten-cent bowl of red would keep you feeling feisty all day.

After our chili and a couple of beers, Carl drove me and Zeke to the Picnic site he had picked out—177 acres of grassland at Interstate 35E and FM2959 four miles north of Hillsboro. Like Carl had said, there was nothing to block the view—or to block the sun and wind. But the site was within easy driving range of maybe four million people, counting Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, and Austin. We went back to the truckstop and played dominoes in Carl's office where he kept glancing at his empire on ten television monitors

Carl is a good domino player. I am better than good. Zeke is better than me. We all drank from the ample supplies of beer and tequila. At some point during the night Zeke and I were about to win the truckstop and the town from Carl.

I got up to go to the bathroom and took another look around the truckstop. There was lots for sale: sacks of cookies, cans of motor oil, glass unicorns, bronze western statues, a rackful of books by Louis L'Amour, stacks of trucker logbooks. Coffee mugs and T-shirts with Carl's face on them. There was a jar of peanut butter on every table. Carl had been telling me his plans to open a trucker chapel for prayers and weddings soon, and then a trucker museum and a trucker bank. “Your Picnic,” he'd told me, “will put this place on the map.”

“Okay,” I said. I admire dreamers, being one myself.

I woke up the next morning on the couch at Zeke's house. Zeke was standing at the refrigerator making breakfast, which means, for him, popping the top on a can of beer.

“Do I remember telling Carl he could have the Picnic at Carl's Corner?”

“Yep. She's all done sealed, pardner,” Zeke said. “We're dedicating it to truckers.”

“We didn't win the town, did we?”

“Naw, the game sort of fell apart. We'll pick it up later.”

Carl announced the Picnic in newspapers and on TV. Crews showed up to dig ditches and lay pipe for water. Surveyors were sighting out the parking area. My old Austin Opera House pardner, Tim O'Connor, took over as the producer and built a stage, cleared the ground, chose the spots for concession stands and portable toilets.
The Hard Rock Cafe jumped in as official Picnic restaurant. Tim started selling tickets. The Picnic at Carl's Corner was rolling with its own momentum.