I Lived to Tell It All

by George Jones

  Nancy took fourteen-year-old Adina and hit the road with me. (Her other daughter, Sherry, lived with her father.) The Jones Boys traveled in the bus, and Nancy, Adina, and I traveled in a recreational vehicle.

  Nancy was looking forward to spending the rest of her life with me. Then she discovered my addictions. She hadn’t heard that much about my behavior. She is not a nosy person and didn’t care for the tabloids or gossip magazines. I had made plenty of police and court news, but none in Shreveport. She hadn’t followed my life and career with the closeness of a devoted fan. She had heard that I drank heavily, but by 1981 that was common knowledge in this country and abroad. I mean, there are people who have no interest in Santa Claus, but they know he wears red. She certainly had no idea that I had been in drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

  After spending some time with me, she decided I drank too much. She developed a plan to help me because Nancy always wants to help the people she loves, and she never has to be asked. But before she could pursue the drinking problem I pulled out the cocaine. She had never seen that drug.

  I’ve already told you how cocaine altered my mind, often making me mean. Real mean. Nancy was exhibiting nothing more than a naive country girl’s curiosity when she asked me what cocaine was. Remember, this was 1981 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Nancy was an untraveled person who worked in a closed and controlled environment. I had spent my life in the fast lane, and she had spent hers working, paying her bills, and going to bed at a regular time. I took none of that into consideration.

  I was high and thought she was making fun of me when she asked about the cocaine. As I’ve explained, the cocaine user is paranoid and insecure. I stupidly thought she thought she was better than me because I felt I needed the drug and she didn’t.

  So I hit her.

  I would have never done that sober, and my heart was broken when I sobered up. I had physically hurt a woman who, in a matter of months, had made more sacrifices for me than many women I’d known had made for their men in years. I begged her forgiveness.

  She gave it and then decided there was a “devil” living inside of me. I don’t know if she meant that literally, but “devil” is the word she used. She even used the word years later when she talked to Tom Carter about that time of my life.

  She said she was bound and determined to get the devil out. Little did she know that the project would take years. Little did I know that once Nancy finally got me straight, it would last indefinitely.

  Some folks think she saved my career. She did. She also saved my life.

  Although I was “officially” living with Linda in Alabama, I hardly went there again except to leave forever.

  Linda supposedly has told folks that one night someone called and warned her that people were on the way to kill her or me. I don’t know if that’s true. I sure don’t know who called, if anyone. But I do know she left. I guess she thought she was running for her life. When she took off, I wasn’t far behind her. I never saw her again.

  I gave Linda a lot of grief. She got a lot of cash, cars, furniture, jewelry, and other things out of me. I don’t have anything bad, or anything else at all, to say about her. I understand she eventually married.

  I can’t remember if I was doing cocaine, but I was slobbering drunk once when I went to Waylon Jennings’s house. He was really high himself; at the peak of his cocaine addiction, he was consuming fifteen hundred dollars’ worth each day.

  I was raising hell inside his place and finally began to doze off. Some folks think people can’t sleep if they’re using cocaine, but they can if they’ve used it for three days and nights because they finally reach a point of exhaustion that even the stimulating drug can’t dent.

  Waylon never drank and doesn’t know much about alcohol. He decided that since I was almost asleep, I would pass out if he gave me an enormous straight shot of booze. He sat me upright, and I drank a tall glassful. The sugar in that much alcohol quickly energized me. But then Waylon and a friend of his did the wrong thing by leaving me alone, thinking I would nod off. They heard me raising hell seconds later.

  Waylon came into the room to see about me, and I hurled a picture with a solid metal frame from off of his wall directly at him. He said later that the frame, because it was so heavy, could have killed him.

  I proceeded to demolish much of his furniture and art. I did all of this in the home of a man who’d been a longtime and proven friend, to a man who had been there for me when no one else, except Johnny Cash, had been.

  Waylon jumped on me and called for the help of his friends. One was his guitar player. I kicked that guy in the hand and broke his thumb. That put him out of work.

  Meanwhile, I continued to tear hell out of Waylon’s house. Waylon sat on me, but even though he out-weighed me, he began to tire. He later said he was probably exhausted from his own drug consumption. So he called for a rope, and someone brought him something, perhaps an extension cord.

  He tied me up and threw me on his couch. I was helpless but cussing him all the while. He left me there alone and called my manager, who probably took his time getting to Waylon’s house to get me. Not a lot of folks wanted to be around me when I went into one of my drug-induced rages.

  By the time my manager arrived, I had settled down or maybe had even partially slept it off. Waylon said they untied me and walked me out and I acted as if nothing had happened.

  My point is I wasn’t acting. I didn’t immediately remember the ordeal. Later, when reminded, my long-term memory gave it all back to me.

  The same was true during that first of a few times I hit Nancy. The next day I never remembered. Blackouts, by then, had long been a part of my booze- and cocaine-soaked life.

  Nancy, Adina, and I eventually moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a neighboring city to Florence. Adina saw me drunk and wasted on cocaine and was certainly old enough to know what was going on. She couldn’t handle it and sometimes left to move in with her daddy in Shreveport. But each time she returned to Nancy, and each time I was glad.

  I fell in love with that girl as quickly as I did her mother. On a few occasions I got on a rampage and no one except Adina could settle me down. I felt strangely compelled to obey her and not abuse her youth and innocence.

  Nancy began to look after me around my friends who she thought took advantage of me. She recalled that one Saturday night I was passed out from a binge and Peanut and Charlene Montgomery came to my house wanting a few thousand dollars to air-condition the church where he was pastor. I gave him the money, and Nancy and I went to the church the next morning for a service. The place was so cold Nancy said she nearly froze. She wondered out loud how Peanut had gotten the place air-conditioned overnight, and I think she asked him about it. Maybe Nancy and I misunderstood and Peanut had had the church air-conditioned earlier and needed me to pay for the work after it had been done. But that isn’t the way Nancy remembers it. She thought Peanut was trying to hustle me financially, and she and the Montgomerys didn’t hit it off.

  I hadn’t been to church in years, and when Nancy and I went Peanut preached against people who aren’t married but live together nonetheless. He knew that Nancy and I were shacking up, and she felt like he was intentionally preaching directly at us. That made her and me angry. I was in a foul mood and raised hell for the rest of the day, she recalled years later. “That wasn’t a very good Sunday,” she simply said, and never complained.

  I continued to mistreat the woman who loved me. I bought drugs in the Florence-Muscle Shoals area from a man who ran a recreation hall. Nancy occasionally went with me to visit his place of business. At first she had no idea I was going there to score cocaine. She said she wondered why so many people who never participated in recreation visited this recreation facility. They just went into a room in the back. She began to suspect that it was a drug outlet, but she became confused when she saw Peanut and Charlene come and go. She didn’t think a preacher would be around any illegal behavior, so she couldn’t figure out what wa
s going on. Many times I left her sitting on a bench in the recreation hall while I went into that back room. When I kept coming out with a very changed personality, her suspicions were finally confirmed.

  As I’ve said, Nancy was naive. But I also think she just always wanted to believe the best about me, so it was easy for her to kid herself about what I was really up to at times.

  She finally came face-to-face with the proprietor, my drug connection. Nancy has the courage of a sky diver when she’s convinced about something. And she was convinced this guy was trying to earn money at my physical and emotional expense. She told him what she thought about drugs and about him. It wasn’t a mild sermon.

  Nancy was never one to speak her piece and quit. She wanted to get me off of drugs, and she decided to cut off the flow at the source. She made friends with a guy whose nickname was “Big Daddy,” who knew my dealer.

  The dealer and his cronies, I decided, were watching our house. The instant Nancy would go to the grocery store or some such place, the dealer or one of his runners would come to my door. She’d come back, and I’d be gone. Then she’d begin a fruitless search all over Florence and Muscle Shoals to find me.

  Big Daddy, for reasons neither of us know, intensified his friendship with Nancy. He would call her and whisper my whereabouts over the telephone. He told her never to tell anyone that he was her informant. She would go to where he had said. She often walked in as the dealers were shoveling cocaine up my nostrils, while I sat there in a helpless haze. I was often a zombie, sometimes barely breathing.

  It wasn’t long until Nancy heard that the dealers had taken out a life insurance policy on me. She suspected they were trying to kill me through an overdose: Given my reputation, any coroner would simply think that I had ingested the overdose by myself. He’d never suspect murder.

  There was another reason why those hoods were determined to keep me on cocaine. While they weren’t my managers, they were their business associates. Once again it was that tired old story of men owing me money and paying me with cocaine.

  And I’m positive they felt it would be easier to cheat me out of the money they owed me if they could keep me high. They could more easily manipulate me when I was wrecked. That’s why, when I couldn’t buy it or they didn’t owe me anything, they would give me free cocaine. They wanted to keep me wasted so they could get their way with me.

  Nancy got wise to their methods and quickly got to the place where she wouldn’t leave me by myself. She sent Adina for groceries or to run errands, even though Adina wasn’t old enough to legally drive. Adina, like most teenagers, was eager to drive a car, but it didn’t matter. Nancy insisted that Adina learn to drive so she could stay with me to protect me from the thugs.

  They quickly grew to hate her. At last they decided they were never going to catch me alone so they could pump me full of cocaine, so they boldly walked into my house when Nancy was there. That made her furious, and the cussing and screaming were on. She called them everything she could think of—right to their tough and lined faces. I can’t believe one of them didn’t put a bullet through her head.

  Sometimes they brought me things, such as a guitar, with cocaine hidden in its case. They’d leave, I’d open the case to see the instrument, and come face-to-face with the white powder. I was too weak to resist, especially when I had been drinking. They knew that because they knew I was an addict. They had helped sustain that.

  Other times when they marched unannounced into our house, one would sneak me into a bedroom while the others distracted Nancy, who was kicking and screaming. It’s easy to distract someone who’s hysterical.

  Then the men would quickly leave, and Nancy would start looking for me. Her search ended when she found me babbling, cursing, and screaming in the voices of the duck and the old man. Today I can only vaguely remember her falls into tearful pieces. To this day I can’t believe she stayed. A hundred reporters have asked her why she did.

  “Because,” she always said, “when he was sober he was the best man I ever knew. All I had to do was find a way to get him permanently sober.”

  I’ve only told you the beginning of her travails. Nancy thought she was hopelessly outnumbered, and she was. By now she was aware of the power held by the criminals who hated her and wanted to possess me. They had strong ties to local law enforcement and owned several “legitimate” businesses that they used to launder drug money. The cocaine addict feels totally helpless. People have asked me why I didn’t go to state or federal authorities. My altered mind was convinced that those people would be of no help either.

  Nancy’s only ally was Big Daddy, who continued to call her secretly. One night he told her these men wanted her out of my life permanently. He stressed the permanent part, and she knew what he meant. Nancy feared for her life.

  I think I was out on the road when Nancy drove across a bridge over a river that runs through Florence and Muscle Shoals. Adina was in the car.

  Suddenly, the car was rammed from the rear. Then it was hit again, and again. Nancy lost control, the car began to veer toward the railing, and Nancy and Adina thought they were going to plunge into the water to their deaths. Adina became hysterical.

  Nancy struggled with the wheel, and to compensate for the thrusts pushing her to the right she turned sharply to the left, into the face of oncoming traffic. The traffic had nowhere to go, as there was no shoulder on the bridge. So each time Nancy was about to have a head-on collision, she turned instantly to the right. She got the car straight, only to have the car behind her try to force her again into the water below.

  The drive across that bridge should take about sixty seconds. Nancy said she felt it took her a year. As she drove her battered car off of the bridge onto land, the mysterious car behind her turned abruptly and vanished.

  Nancy could not kid herself. She knew she had just undergone a serious attempt to kill her and her daughter.

  I had failed miserably at quitting booze and drugs by myself and had responded to professional treatment mostly while I was under a doctor’s supervision, not when I was on my own. I had never had a companion, a friend, whose sole mission in life was to save mine. Nancy was relentless. She was going to see that I whipped my addictions if it killed her.

  My bouts with paranoia returned. I was often positive that I saw and heard things. I was terrified of those sights and sounds. I wondered if they were real or just my cocaine-prompted delusions.

  I sometimes became convinced that my enemies were walking around my house. I thought I heard footsteps in the grass. I would bolt the doors and windows and sit with a loaded pistol, waiting for them to burst through the doors and try to kill Nancy and me.

  I just “knew” that platoons of criminals were stalking me by circling my house. The fact is they might have been, but not every night, as I imagined when I went on my week- or two-week binges.

  I wouldn’t let Nancy and Adina go outside, which made for a real problem at sunrise, when Nancy had to take Adina to school. She couldn’t let Adina, an illegal driver, drive to a public school. So she asked Adina to sleep outside our house, in the car. That way Adina didn’t have to dress in the house and Nancy wouldn’t hear me rant and rave the whole time, insisting that I wasn’t going to let her leave.

  I’d go to sleep at sunrise. I felt safer then. And Nancy would quickly ease through the door to drive Adina to school. It was a taxing and trying routine for both of them.

  And still Nancy stayed with me.

  She was preparing to leave the house to pick up Adina from school one day when the telephone rang. By this time I loved Adina even more than I would have had she been my very own.

  “Nancy,” said a voice on the line, “we want to come over and see George.”

  Nancy recognized the voice of one of the drug pushers and told him to go to hell. She told him not to bother coming because there was no way she would let him inside.

  “But what about Adina?” the man asked.

  “What do you mean?” Nancy
said.

  “We have her,” he said.

  The line went dead.

  Nancy’s daughter, the girl who would become my stepdaughter, had been kidnapped by drug dealers wanting to get to me. Nancy lost it. She began to cry and scream uncontrollably. She tried to call back the man who she thought had called her. There was no answer. Thank God that on that particular occasion I was straight. I was able to try to comfort Nancy for a change. But nothing I said or did worked. Calling the police, in bed with the criminals, was of no use, we agreed. Nancy was obsessed as she feared for the life of her first child.

  Within minutes the telephone rang again. This time it was Big Daddy. He had intercepted Adina. He told Nancy not to ask how. He said that she was safe with him inside a nightclub he owned. Nancy was instantly relieved and started to race out the door to get her daughter when I told her not to act so fast.

  “This is a setup,” I said. “They know that nothing could get you away from me except Adina’s safety, right?”

  “That’s true,” she said.

  “All right,” I continued. “They probably know that Big Daddy has told you where Adina is. You’ll go there, and while you’re inside, they’ll plant drugs in your car. Then when you start home, the police will stop you, search your car, and you’ll be arrested.”

  Nancy understood my theory. She understood that the police were not only no help but also a big part of the threat. But more than that, she understood that her daughter was in trouble. Nancy would march into live gunfire for a loved one, and she bolted into Big Daddy’s dive yelling, “Where is my girl?” I think she had a pistol in her purse.

  Nancy parked her car so she could see it while she was inside the club. Big Daddy gave her the sign, and she walked immediately to him. There, tucked under the bar, quietly sat Adina. I think Big Daddy had given her popcorn and Coca-Cola, and the hoodlums in the joint might not have known she was there. If they did, they didn’t bother Adina under the protection of that giant man.