by Lee Smith
Sometimes when I think about my life, it all comes to me in pictures of the images I’ve had and gotten rid of—that dumb country girl in the Raindrops to start off with, and next, the girl I became with Wayne—a honky-tonk honey, which did fit the times. Wayne Ricketts was somebody who always knew what was happening. He lived on the cutting edge. He stuck me into a push-up bra and four-inch heels and the fanciest low-cut outfits you ever saw. He got my teeth fixed. At first I balked when he suggested the wig, it was so big, but then I started wearing it, too. I learned real fast, it’s a lot easier to wear a wig than it is to fix your own hair up good all the time, I have to say.
“People don’t want you to look like their neighbor,” Wayne told me, “or their wife. They don’t want you to look like their sister, either. They want you to look like all their dreams,” Wayne said.
It was Wayne who pushed me into asking Horace Logan if I could sing one of my own songs, after I’d only been on the Hayride for four or five months. I never would have done it myself. But Wayne rode me and rode me to do it, and eventually, of course, I did everything Wayne wanted.
And when I finally did ask Horace Logan if I could sing a number, he said, “Sure, honey,” like I had been doing it all my life. Well! I decided to sing a new one I’d just finished writing. I’d been fooling around with it for a long time. At first I called it “I Don’t Know What You See in Me but I Hope You Don’t Go Blind,” which was the first line but too long for a title. I got the idea for it one time when Wayne just happened to say this to me right out of the blue, and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. So it was a kind of funny-sweet rocker, you might say. Later I started calling it “New Eyes.”
So I was running through “New Eyes” the afternoon before the show, nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs, when Wayne came home and took off his work shirt that said Wayne on it and threw it out the trailer door.
He stood there in the middle of the trailer in his undershirt with his muscles rippling. He stood there looking at me. Annie May was over at his sister’s, so I could practice. But of course he was distracting me.
“Honey,” I said, “You’re distracting me. Also I wish you wouldn’t throw your shirt down in the dirt thataway,” I said. That old red Louisiana dirt was so hard to get out.
But Wayne continued to stand there in the middle of the trailer flexing his ropy muscles, so I said, “You’re home early, aren’t you?” which he was.
“Honey, I ain’t going to be wearing that shirt no more, for I have bid that job a sweet adieu.” Wayne always had such a way with words, this is one way he charmed me, I know, for Hank Smith never had hardly a thing to say. “I have told them to kiss my pretty ass good-bye,” Wayne said.
“Oh Wayne, why?” In the six months I’d been with him, I’d learned fast that “independent contractor” really meant “no steady job.” Oh, he’d lay carpet for a week or so, paint houses for a while, you name it, he could do it, there wasn’t anything Wayne Ricketts couldn’t do—but he never stuck at things. The people at work didn’t appreciate him, or they tried to cheat him out of some of the money he had coming, or something. It was always something. I had really hoped he’d stick with this new job at the Western Auto store. They gave benefits and everything.
“What happened?” I asked, getting that familiar funny feeling in my stomach, as we had just gotten a bunch of new stuff for the trailer, none of it paid for, of course, all of it bought on time.
Wayne hugged me. “Aw, I figured I’d better help my baby out,” he said. Then he reached for the guitar case in the corner, and my heart sank.
For our first night on the Hayride, Wayne had gone all out and bought a flashy western suit, a secondhand Nudie. When he unbuttoned the jacket and flipped it back, it said Hey Babe on the lining in sequins. The first thing that popped into my mind when he walked out of the bedroom wearing it was, What in the world would R.C. think of this? Or Miss Lucie? Or Durwood? For the Grassy Branch Girls had dressed plain as dirt by today’s standards. Sequins was not an item in that act.
“But you ain’t up on Grassy Branch no more, honey,” Wayne pointed out when I told him what I was thinking. “You left Grassy Branch. You are down here in Louisiana. That’s the whole idea.”
I see I have not said too much as yet about sex. But sex is a factor here, let me tell you. So is talking. A big talker who is great at sex can have his way in this world.
Wayne kissed me some more and then we went out and got in the new Chevrolet convertible he’d come home with the month before, and drove over to the Hayride.
When we walked in the door together, everybody turned around to look at us. Horace Logan walked over to me and said, “All right, Katie, who’s the cowboy?”
I said, “Horace, I’d like for you to meet my husband.”
So there wasn’t a darn thing Horace could do but let him sing.
We went on right after Del Wood. I was scared to death, but we were a big hit. Wayne was so natural on a stage, it was like he owned it—flashing that Hey Babe sign and flirting with this old lady in the front row who liked to have died from the sheer excitement of it all. The folks at the Hayride purely loved “New Eyes,” and they seemed to love us, too. “Katie Cocker and Wayne Ricketts” was how Horace Logan introduced the act.
After the show, a beady-eyed little fat man came up and proceeded to engage Wayne in intense conversation, ignoring me altogether, and then on the drive back out to the trailer park, Wayne told me we were going to cut a record.
“Honey, that’s great!” I said. Of course, I was just beside myself, this was my dream. “Who was that guy you were just talking to?” I figured it was bound to have something to do with him.
“Nobody you’d know,” he said. “Forget him, he ain’t important. The important one around here is Wayne Ricketts.”
Sometimes it was hard to tell when Wayne was kidding and when he wasn’t
“Well, is he a producer? a scout?” They showed up at the Hayride real frequent.
“Just relax, baby,” Wayne said. He put two cigarettes in his mouth and lit them, and gave one to me. “He’s just some little Jew with big ideas.”
“What big ideas?”
“Some ideas that Wayne Ricketts is going to adapt, you might say.” Wayne was staring real intently out into the night, his cigarette hanging off his lip. “With a little bit of initial investment, I believe we could have a hit on our hands.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wayne,” I said.
“No, you don’t know,” Wayne said. “You don’t need to know, either. All you need to know is what to do with this,” Wayne said, unzipping his pants and taking it out.
“Wayne,” I said.
“Come on, honey,” he said, all husky-voiced, waving it around.
So I went down on him, right there on the interstate highway. I always did everything Wayne Ricketts wanted.
Everything.
Wayne’s big idea was to put up all the money we had and borrow the rest in order to finance the recording of “New Eyes,” and then travel all over the South with it ourselves, from radio station to radio station, which we did, talking them into putting it on the air, which they did, and then getting the local record stores to order it when the requests for it started coming in. We also sold the records ourselves, of course—we had the whole trunk of that Chevrolet full of “New Eyes.” Louis Carbone, the little fat guy, was our mail distributor. And I have to say, all of this happened just like Wayne said it would. We were still in that period when everything that Wayne said would happen did.
It was a crazy, close time, those months in the Chevrolet with Wayne, crisscrossing the South. I don’t believe it is possible for two people to be any closer than we were in that car, which came to be our home, eating in it drinking in it fighting in it, sleeping on the side of the road. I remember waking up real early one morning someplace in north Georgia and looking up to find a grinning Negro’s face pressed right up against the window
looking in, and my skirt hiked up to my waist. I just kept on acting like I was asleep, because to tell you the truth, I was too tired to care. I lost fifteen pounds on that trip and missed Annie May something terrible even though I knew she was having the time of her life with Wayne’s sister Rhonda, who was real fat and never had been able to have children and therefore loved Annie May to death.
Sometimes I puzzled over how Rhonda’s husband had acted when I took Annie May over there before we left, how he sat me down in a reclining chair and said, “Now are you absolutely sure you want to go off with Wayne Ricketts thisaway?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “I mean, I reckon.” I looked at him, he was a man that drove a Merita Bread truck and went to church regular, you had to respect his opinion. “What do you mean?” I said.
Rhonda was hovering around us like a big old moth. “Now Don,” she said.
“Well, dammit, Rhonda,” Don said.
“This is a big girl,” Rhonda said, punching him. “She knows what she’s doing.”
“I just think you ought to tell her—” Don said.
“Tell her what?” Rhonda snapped. “You leave her alone, Don. Wayne deserves a chance in life just like anybody else.” Rhonda thought Wayne hung the moon, and that he had been dogged by bad luck and bad women. Later, both Don and I would find out how much of their life savings she had put up for Wayne’s and my trip. “Now you all have fun, honey,” Rhonda said, and hugged me. “Send us some postcards. Annie May, come over here and hug Mamma, she’s a-fixing to go, honey,” and Annie May did.
I sent her about a million postcards from that trip, and Rhonda helped her put them all in a scrapbook which Annie May has kept to this day, it’s real sweet.
I got to missing her awful bad one time in particular after we had been traveling about a month. It was raining, we were driving, and I started crying and telling Wayne I just wanted to go back on the Hayride and get that steady check again and forget it, forget this whole thing. Without even slowing down or changing his expression, Wayne reached over and slapped me hard. “You don’t seem to appreciate what all I’m doing for you, girl,” he said. I fell against the door, and then I just grabbed the handle and flung the door open and leaped out, right as Wayne pulled over on the side of the road, zigzagging like crazy. Car horns were blowing everyplace, Wayne was yelling, then I went sliding down a wet leafy bank, and then I was out for a minute, and when I came to, Wayne was down there with me, saying, “Honey, are you all right?” over and over, and the soft summer rain was falling on my face. A couple of other men, truckers I guess, stood up by the road looking down. “Everything all right?” one of them hollered.
“Fine! Just a little accident, door came open,” Wayne hollered back.
Later that day, when we stopped for coffee, he let me call Rhonda. “Lordy, I’m so glad you called!” was the first thing she said. She went on to tell me that a special doctor had said that if Annie May could have two operations in Houston, she would be able to walk just fine. The operations would cost around twenty-five hundred dollars, Rhonda said, but that was cheap because it was a new procedure and they needed candidates for it. Annie May was an ideal candidate, the doctor said. The operations involved some kind of a nerve transplant.
I walked back out to where Wayne was drinking coffee, and told him I was sorry I’d got upset, and I did appreciate what all he was doing for me, and I wanted “New Eyes” to be a hit just as much as he did.
Well, it wasn’t a big hit, but as a result of that trip it did get picked up and reissued on the Four Star label out of Nashville, and it got a lot of airplay, enough to where Wayne and me started getting plenty of requests for club dates and dances and such, and we went on to cut another one of mine, “Call Me Back When You’ve Got Time,” which did all right for me, but really hit when Dawn Chapel recorded it. That’s the one most people have heard, Dawn Chapel’s version.
Shoot, I didn’t care! Annie May had those two operations in Houston, and they were a big success, and then she went into regular school at Pearson Town Elementary in Shreveport, just like anybody else. I don’t know what I would have done without Rhonda during this period, as Wayne had us working all the time.
“When you’re hot, you’re hot, when you’re not, you’re not,” he’d say. “Come on baby, get with it.”
Wayne had kind of a genius for getting good bands together, he could talk anybody into anything, as I said. When we cut “Call Me Back When You’ve Got Time,” we had a great steel guitar player, Ralph Handy, and Emory Marlowe on the bass, and Roy Hart on drums. Later we had Little Billy Burnett. We had several different fiddlers. Now all of these were real nice guys that had been around the Hayride for years, and Ralph Handy was particularly nice. He was a big, solid man whose daddy was a preacher over in Arkansas, and he was still real close to his daddy and to his whole family in fact. He talked about them a lot, things they’d done growing up, pranks they’d pulled, and all of this made me think about Grassy Branch. I got to missing everybody, even Virgie and Mamma Tampa!
But I was not about to call—I couldn’t, I knew exactly what Mamma would think of how I was living down there. I knew what she would think of Wayne. I couldn’t stand to think about her praying over me. Wayne Ricketts and I finally did get married, though I don’t know why we bothered.
By then it was becoming real clear to me how bad Wayne was to drink. It took a long time for me to understand this, because he was not a spree drinker like Grandaddy had been, or a falling-down drinker like Daddy, but a daylong drinker who gets to a certain point and keeps it there all day. Wayne used to refer to this point as his “plateau.” He used to say he was “plateaued out” when he got to where he wanted to be.
I couldn’t do anything about it, because by then I was drinking, too.
And if you think that is awful, then you don’t know anything much about life, or understand anything at all about this business. You get real tired, so you need a lift—you’ve got to get up for a show—then after the show you’re real wired, you can’t sleep, so you need a drink to come down. Then you start feeling bad, so you need pills, too. At first you get your pills from this doctor that a friend has recommended, then you just find yourself a pharmacist who will sell them to you when you want them, then you find yourself a man who will bring them around to your house. You get to where you need a lot of help. Don’t tell me! I know all about it. I will never pass judgment on anybody. Believe me, I know all about it. It just happens, it all seems real natural at the time.
During this period Wayne went down to New Orleans and bought us a tour bus from a Cajun family, the Matilles. I knew we didn’t have the money, but Wayne said we had to have the bus, it was an investment in the future, and he had already taken care of the financing. “How?” I asked him point-blank.
“Trust me,” Wayne said. Then he said, “Come here, baby, I want to show you this bus,” and he smiled that big smile and took my hand and led me outside to see it, and I had to say, it was nice, not really much of a bus by today’s standards, but it did have nice maroon plush seats and a bar and bunk beds and the cutest little bathroom with a mirror that had lights all around it.
I was looking in the mirror when Wayne flicked the lights on.
“These here are star lights,” he said. “Just for you.”
“Oh, Wayne,” I said, looking at myself and at his face behind me in the mirror. “Oh no, honey,” I said, because then he reached around and started unbuttoning my shirt.
“I’ve got a bottle of champagne in this here little refrigerator,” he said, “just waiting on you.”
I followed him back in there and we got drunk in that trailer at two o’clock in the afternoon, me wearing nothing but capri pants and a bra.
This is how we lived.
So it was not altogether a surprise when the federal agents finally caught up with Wayne. It seems like he had been doing some real creative financing, under several different names, for a period of years. Well, to make a long sad st
ory short, Wayne was given ten years. I got a suspended sentence and a fine. They seized the tour bus, our new Cadillac, the Chevrolet, our house, even Annie May’s prize pony, Boots. Annie May just cried her eyes out when they took Boots. For four days, she was too upset and embarrassed to go to school. Annie May and me had to move in with Rhonda and Don, and then I had to go in the hospital for a while, as I was suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Most of this sad time is a blur to me. I remember two of these days real good, though.
One is while I was still in the hospital. I had been refusing to cooperate much with the nurses. To tell the truth, I had been just mostly laying there thinking about Wayne and trying to figure out how I had let him get such an awful hold over me, for I had to admit, in my own heart, that I had known, someplace deep down where I was not admitting it, that he was up to no good. I knew he was breaking the law. I reckon I had come to think Wayne was above the law, or beyond it someway. But I also knew better. You always know everything, don’t you? Only you won’t let yourself know you know it, a lot of times you can’t let yourself know it, because you can’t stand to know what you know. You can’t stand what that knowing might tell you about yourself. And I was flat up against it there in that hospital. Every day I’d let myself know just a little bit more. This was what I was doing in my mind, opening a door, inch by inch.
I was also drying out, which is what is meant by “recovering from nervous exhaustion.”
So I already had plenty to deal with when the lady doctor came in my room very early one morning—our room, actually I had two roommates, it was the state mental hospital if you want to know—and said, “Miss Cocker? Miss Cocker? Look at me, please.”
I looked at her. She had gray hair and looked like a fireplug. “Miss Cocker, are you aware that you are pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” I said.