Was Ruby a slightly weather-beaten patriotic hero? Was he a sleazeball with a heart of gold? Was he, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, just another Joseph, following a star, trying to find a manger in Dallas? My old pal Vaughn Meader, who in the early sixties recorded the hugely successful The First Family album
satirizing JFK, probably expressed it best. After flying for most of that tragic day, oblivious to the news, he got into a taxi at the airport in Milwaukee. The driver asked him, "Did you hear about the president getting shot?" "No," said Vaughn. "How does it go?"
HERO ANAGRAMS
Bob Dylan: Bland boy—nobly bad
Hank Williams: Sank all whim
Willie Nelson: I swell online—nine oil wells
Oscar Wilde: Cowards lie—lad cries ow
Father Damien: Renamed faith
Jack Ruby: Back jury
Arthur Conan Doyle: Can try unload hero
Sherlock Holmes: Hell mocks heroes
Billy Joe Shaver: Behave, sir jolly—shy jovial rebel
ODE TO BILLY JOE
f Carl Sandburg had come from Waco, his name would have been Billy Joe Shaver. Back in the late sixties, when Christ was a cowboy, I first met Billy Joe in Nashville. We were both songwriters, and we once stayed up for six nights and it felt like a week. Today, he's arguably the finest poet and songwriter this state has ever produced.
If you doubt my opinion, you could ask Willie Nelson or wait until you get to hillbilly heaven to ask Townes Van Zandt, who are the other folks in the equation, but they might not give you a straight answer. Willie, for instance, tends to speak only in lyrics. Just last week I was with an attractive young woman, and I said to Willie, "I'm not sure who's taller, but her ass is six inches higher than mine." He responded, "My ass is higher than both of your asses." Be that as it may, you'll rarely see Willie perform without singing Billy Joe's classic "I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train," which contains the line "I'd just like to mention that my grandma's old-age pension is the reason why I'm standin' here today." Like everything else about Billy Joe, that line is the literal truth. He is an achingly honest storyteller in a world that prefers to hear something else.
Thanks to his grandma's pension, Billy Joe survived grinding poverty as a child in Corsicana. "Course I cana!" was his motto then, but after his grandma conked, he moved to Waco, where he built a resume that would've made Jack London mildly petulant. He worked as a cowboy, a roughneck, a cotton picker, a chicken plucker, and a millworker (he lost three fingers at that job when he was twenty-two. Later he wrote these lines:
Three fingers' whiskey pleasures the drinker Movin' does more than the drinkin' for me Willy he tells me that doers and thinkers Say movin's the closest thing to being free.
I believe that every culture gets what it deserves. Ours deserves Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura and Garth Brooks (whom I like to refer to as the anti-Hank). But when the meaningless mainstream is forgotten, people will still remember those who struggled with success: van Gogh and Mozart, who were buried in paupers' graves; Hank, who died in the back of a Cadillac; and Anne Frank, who had no grave at all. I think there may be room in that shining motel of immortality for Billy Joe's timeless
works, beautiful beyond words and music, written by a gypsy guitarist with three fingers missing.
Last February Billy Joe and I teamed up again to play a series of shows with Little Jewford, Jesse "Guitar" Taylor, "Sweet" Mary Hattersley, and my Lebanese friend Jimmie "Ratso" Silman. (Ratso and I have long considered ourselves to be the last true hope for peace in the Middle East.) Pieces were missing, however. God had sent a hat trick of grief to Billy Joe in a year that even Job would have thrown back. His mother, Victory, and his beloved wife, Brenda, stepped on a rainbow, and on New Year's Eve, 2000, his son, Eddy, a sweet and talented guitarist, joined them. Hank and Townes also had been bugled to Jesus in the cosmic window of the New Year.
I watched Billy Joe playing with pain, the big man engendering, perhaps not so strangely, an almost Judy Garland-like rapport with the audience. He played "01' Five and Dimers
Like Me" (which Dylan recorded), "You Asked Me To" (which Elvis recorded), and "Honky Tonk Heroes" (which Waylon recorded). He also played one of my favorites, which, well, Billy Joe recorded:
Our freckled faces sparkled then like diamonds in the rough
With smiles that smelled of snaggled teeth and good ol' Garrett snuff
If I could I would be tradin' all this fat back for the lean
When Jesus was our savior and cotton was our king.
Seeing Billy Joe perform that night reminded me of a benefit we'd played in Kerrville several years before. Friends had asked me to help them save the old Arcadia Theatre, and I called upon Billy Joe. Toward the end of his set, however, a rather uncomfortable moment occurred when he told the crowd, "There's one man I'd like to thank at this time." I, of course, began making my way to the stage. "That man is the reason I'm here tonight," he said.
I confidently walked in front of the whole crowd, preparing to leap onstage when he mentioned my name. "That man," said Billy Joe, "is Jesus Christ."
Much chagrined, I walked back to my seat as the audience aimed their laughter at me like the Taliban militia shooting down a Buddha. It was quite a social embarrassment for the Kinkster. But I'll get over it.
So will Billy Joe.
THE BACK OF THE BUS
met Willie Nelson on the gangplank of Noah's Ark. Like most country music friendships, ours has managed to remain close because we've stayed the hell away from each other. I've played a few of Willie's picnics and we've attended the same Tupperware parties now and then, but ironically, I didn't really start feeling spiritually akin to him until I'd phased out of country music almost entirely and become a pointy-headed intellectual mystery writer. Now that my novel Roadkill features Willie as a main character, our karma is suddenly linked—whether we like it or not.
Even when Willie produced a record of mine in Nashville in 1974 (and sang backup with Waylon Jennings and Tompall Glaser on "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore"), he and I were still only close enough for country dancin'. Of course, we'd come from different backgrounds. Willie had picked cotton in the fields as a kid in Abbott. For entertainment and income from local farmers, he'd go out with a little homemade paddle and kill bumblebees; he would come home looking like he'd just fought fifteen rounds with God. Willie grew up never having much money or much schooling and got married and divorced about ninety-seven times. All he ever wanted to do was write songs and sing them for people and maybe get one of those cars that roared down the highway with the windows rolled up in the middle of summer, indicating that the driver could afford that ultimate symbol of success; air-conditioning.
By the time Willie finally got that car, it was about ten minutes too late to make any difference, but he did get something else far more important: He got a bus. In fact, he got three buses. The one he lives in and calls home is known as the Honeysuckle Rose. The way I first really got to know Willie was by traveling with him aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. It's a floating city unto itself, with "floating" the operative word. Even the secondhand smoke has been known to make casual visitors mildly amphibious. (There is no truth, incidentally, to the widely held belief that Willie needs the other two buses to carry all the weed he smokes on the first bus.) By contrast, my own country music career never quite reached the tour-bus level. The closest I came was a blue Beauville van, out of which the Texas Jewboys poured like a thousand clowns at every honky-tonk, minstrel show, whorehouse, bar, and bar mitzvah throughout the South, to paraphrase Jerry Jeff Walker. The Beauville, like my career, was not a vehicle destined for vastly commercial country music stardom, though it did have at least one good quality: It broke down in all the right places.
Also unlike Willie, I came from an upper-middle-class home, which is always a hard cross for a country singer to bear. I got a guitar as a young teenager in Houston, and like Townes Van Zandt, the first song I learned was "Fraulein." By the
n Willie and his sister, Bobbie, were already playing in beer halls on Saturday nights and in church the next morning. By the time I had my bar mitzvah, Willie had sold Bibles and written "Family Bible," which he also sold, reportedly for fifty dollars.
Willie never went to college, but I graduated from the University of Texas's highly advanced Plan II liberal arts program. Then I joined the Peace Corps and worked in the jungles of Borneo, while Willie continued writing, singing, marrying, divorcing, struggling, and smoking. Like I said, I don't really know what Willie and I have in common—other than the fact that we're both pretty fair bumblebee fighters. Probably it has to do with what Johnny Gimble, the great country fiddle player, told me once aboard the Honeysuckle Rose. He said that when he was a kid he'd told his mother, "Mama, when I grow up, I'm gonna be a musician." His mother had answered, "Make up your mind, son, because you can't do both."
If Willie had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country because he refuses to leave his soulful locus at the back of the bus unless it's to go onstage or onto a golf course. Golf is a passion with Willie, and it's the one aspect of his life I find stultifyingly dull. As I once told Willie, "The only two good balls I ever hit was when I stepped on the garden rake." Willie, of course, responded to this news with a golf anecdote. He told me about a woman who'd recently come off his golf course at Briarcliff, went into the pro shop, and complained to the golf pro that she'd been stung by a bee. "Where'd it sting you?" asked the pro. "Between the first and second holes," she said. "Well I can tell you right now," said the golf pro, "your stance is too wide."
After writing a number of mystery novels and traveling extensively with Willie, the idea crossed my dusty desk to write a book with him as a central character, set the scene aboard the Honeysuckle Rose, and let the bus take the story wherever the hell it went. This meant I would be exchanging my New York loft with the cat and the lesbian dance class above for Willie and his crew. Willie had never been a character in a murder mystery, but he thought it might be worth a shot, so to speak.
We crisscrossed the country together. As the song goes: "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other." Willie sang, played chess, and smoked enough dope to make him so high that he had to call NASA to find his head. As for myself, I smoked cigars, drank a little Chateau de Catpiss, played chess with Willie, and wrote down many things at all hours of the day and night in my little private investigator's notebook. Along the way, I went to many of Willie's shows. Wandering around backstage at a Willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who's running the Ferris wheel. It's not the best seat in the house, but you see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody knows what the hell's going on. If you're sitting out in front, of course, it all rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring.
Backstage at any show has its similarities, whether it's Broadway or the circus or the meanest little honky-tonk in Nacogdoches—the palpable sense of people out there somewhere in the darkness waiting for your performance, or being able to pull a curtain back slightly and experience the actual sight of the audience sitting there waiting to be entertained by someone who, in this case, happens to be you. It's the reason Richard Burton vomited before almost every live performance of his life. It's part of the reason George Jones took Early Times, Judy Garland took bluebirds, and many a shining star burned out too soon. Standing alone in the spotlight, up on the high wire without a net, is something Willie Nelson has had to deal with for most of his adult life.
One night at Billy Bob's in Fort Worth, I was standing backstage in the near darkness when a voice right behind me almost caused me to drop my cigar into my Dr Pepper. It was Willie. "Let me show you something," he said, and he pulled a curtain back, revealing a cranked-up crowd beginning to get drunk, beginning to grow restless, and packed in tighter than smoked oysters in Hong Kong. Viewed from our hidden angle, they were a strangely intimidating sight, yet Willie took them in almost like a walk in the trailer park.
"That's where the real show is," he said.
"If that's where the real show is," I said, "I want my money back."
"Do you realize," Willie continued in a soft, soothing, serious voice, "that ninety-nine percent of those people are not with their true first choice?"
He looked out at the crowd for a moment or two longer. Then he let the curtain drop from his hand, sending us back into twilight.
"That's why they play the jukebox," he said.
Willie's character leapt off the stage and onto the page. I don't know if you'd call it Jewish radar or cowboy intuition, but during my travels with Willie, a story line began to evolve. He would be at the center of one of my most challenging cases. There wasn't a butler to do it, but Willie did have a valet named Ben Dorsey, who'd once been John Wayne's valet. This provided some humorous commentary, since Willie wasn't an enormous fan of the Duke's. Willie preferred the old singing cowboys. Of John Wayne he once said, "He couldn't sing and his horse was never smart." (That kind of talk never failed to irritate Dorsey and usually resulted in some sort of tension convention.) Other real characters who inhabit the Honeysuckle Rose and the pages of Roadkill are Bobbie Nelson, Willie's sister; Lana Nelson, Willie's daughter; Gates "Gator" Moore, his intrepid bus driver; L. G., his one-man security team; and a cast of thousands of friends, fans, and family, who, along with life itself, did everything they could to interrupt our chess games.
You can tell a lot about a man by his chess game, unless, of course, your opponent is smoking a joint the size of Long Island.
Edgar Allan Poe once said of chess: "It is complex without being profound," and it is because of that very complexity that a momentary loss of concentration or the entry of some foreign emotion, like a broken heart, can torpedo the game. When you take this into consideration, Willie plays with the evenness of the Mahatma, at a lightninglike pace, and rarely loses. (I, of course, rarely lose either.)
One of the things I admire most about the way Willie plays the game of chess, as well as the game of life, is his Zen Texan approach to inevitable triumphs and defeats. The endgame doesn't hold great interest for him because he's already thinking about the next game. If he comes off less than his best in one game, one show, one interview, one album, his next effort is invariably brilliant. This is one of the reasons I've always looked up to both Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, even though
they're both shorter than everyone except Paul Simon, who I also look up to.
I see Willie as a storybook gingerbread man: born into poverty, rich in the coin of the spirit, ephemeral and timeless, fragile and strong, beautiful beyond words and music, healing the broken hearts of other people and sometimes, just maybe, his own as well. Yesterday's wine for Willie includes personal tragedies, Internal Revenue Service audits, and a somewhat geriatric band that has been around forever yet to this very day undeniably takes no prisoners. The changing landscape of country music has made major-label support and generous radio airplay almost a thing of the past. For many legends of country music, this trendy tidal wave toward Nashville poster boys and modern, youthful "hat acts," plus the inevitable pull of the old rocking chair, has meant the end of careers that were supposed to last forever.
In the midst of all this, like a diamond amongst the rhinestones, Willie Nelson stays on the road.
LOTTIE'S LOVE
hen Lottie Cotton was born, on September 6, 1902, in the tiny Southeast Texas town of Liberty, there were no airplanes in the sky. There were no SUVs, no superhighways, no cell phones, no televisions. When Lottie was laid to rest in Houston, there was a black Jesus looking after her from the wall of the funeral chapel. Many biblical scholars agree today that Jesus, being of North African descent, very likely may have been black. But Lottie was always spiritually color-blind; her Jesus was the color of love. She spent her entire life looking
after others. One of them, I'm privileged to say, was me.
Lottie was not a maid. She was not a nanny. She did not live with us. We were not rich rug rats raised in River Oaks. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood of Houston. My mother and father both worked. Lottie helped cook and baby-sit during the day and soon became part of our family.
I was old enough to realize yet young enough to know that I was in the presence of a special person. Laura Bush, my occasional pen pal, had this to say about Lottie in a recent letter, and I don't think she'd mind my sharing it with you: "Only special ladies earn the title of 'second mother.' She must have been a remarkable person, and I know you miss her."
There are not many people like Lottie left in this world. Few of us, indeed, have the time and the love to spend our days and nights looking after others. Most of us take our responsibilities to our own families seriously. Many of us work hard at our jobs. Some of us even do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But how many would freely, willingly, lovingly roam the cottonfields of the heart with two young boys and a young girl, a cocker spaniel named Rex, and a white mouse named Archimedes?
What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Page 7