by George Jones
Nancy, Adina, Nancy’s dog, and I started out for Helen’s house in Texas. Nancy was driving while I sat in the back, drunk and snorting cocaine. I had gotten to where I would do that in front of Adina, who couldn’t stand the sight or sound of it. She covered her ears each time I sniffed the stuff.
She was sixteen.
Nancy wasn’t sure of the route but couldn’t manage to look at a road map, drive, and watch me in the backseat. I guess she was afraid I’d take off on foot if she stopped the car to study a map.
She suddenly began to plead with me for the thousandth time to stop using cocaine. “George,” she said, “it’s a good thing your mama’s not alive to see you doing that. It would break her heart.”
Nancy had touched my weak spot.
“You can whip that stuff. Just throw it out the window. Go ahead, throw it out.”
“Please throw it out, Daddy,” Adina begged. “Please.”
The two of them worked on me for miles. I took a big snort, then, during the few seconds of resulting courage, I threw a big and expensive bag of cocaine out the window. Nancy and Adina clapped and cheered.
None of us knew that a mere trace of the stuff had blown back into the car. Or perhaps it fell while I was snorting.
In a short while I was missing my cocaine. I wanted it back pronto, and there was no way to get it. So I pulled harder on the whiskey, while Nancy struggled to find her way to Helen’s and the hospitalization I had promised to undergo.
The accelerated drinking and my frustration at wanting the missing cocaine made me mean. I climbed over the front seat and sat next to Nancy.
“You don’t even know how to drive,” I told her. I put my foot on top of hers and pushed the accelerator to the floor. In no time we were going ninety-one miles per hour. At least that’s what the newspaper reported was on the radar belonging to the cop who stopped us. He arrested Nancy for speeding, reckless driving, and driving without a license. (She had no license from that time she was stopped in Florence for supposedly running a red light.)
And then the cop saw me.
“Isn’t this George Jones’s car?” he asked Nancy.
It must have killed her to admit that it was.
The cop immediately called agents for the Bureau of Narcotics. They brought a drug dog.
“Why are you calling the drug dog?” Nancy, in handcuffs, asked.
“ ’Cause that’s George Jones’s car,” he said. “He’s a dope dealer.”
Let me say that in all I’ve ever done I’ve never once sold narcotics or illegal drugs. I’ve given away plenty but never sold any.
The cop was joined by a posse of other cops and agents. They turned the drug dog loose, and wouldn’t you know it, he smelled a trace of cocaine on the floor of the car or in the cracks of the upholstery. I was arrested for possession of cocaine and public drunkenness.
We had a convoy of stopped cars, red lights, Nancy’s barking dog, a barking drug dog, a crying teenager, and two adults in handcuffs about twenty miles south of Jackson, Mississippi, on Interstate 55.
GEORGE JONES CHARGED WITH COCAINE POSSESSION, screamed the headline in the next day’s Jackson newspaper.
If I hadn’t thrown away the cocaine bag, they would have caught me with enough to charge me with distribution. I might still be in prison.
Nancy, Adina, and I were taken to the Hinds County jail. I was put into one cell and the women into another. Nancy, naturally, began raising hell. That woman can be as loud as she is tender, and she is the most tender woman I’ve ever known.
“Who the hell put this woman and kid and dog in this cell?” said the sheriff, who had walked in and wasn’t amused. “Let them out right now.”
At first he didn’t say a thing about me. I wondered if I’d been too quiet. Maybe Nancy knew what she was doing with all of her yelling and screaming.
But then we were all released on our own recognizance, and Nancy again took the wheel of my 1991 Lincoln. They had popped me for public drunkenness and then turned me out while I was still drunk.
Nancy and I have scratched our heads many times over that. I just think the sheriff, deputies, and jailer got tired of hearing her cuss and scream. I’ll bet the cop who arrested us wished he had stopped public enemy number one instead. It would have been more peaceful.
Tom Binkley eventually made some kind of deal with the district attorney and judge. I was sentenced to return to that part of the country and give a show whose proceeds went to a charity or police fund. Meanwhile, a newspaper reporter wrote a story in connection with the incident that said, in part, that I was “a loser beyond help, Godless and friendless, a moral pauper who is perpetually ashamed of himself and you wouldn’t take him home to meet Ma either.”
How dare they say that about me? It was all true, but how dare they say it? I sued for libel, claiming my character had been defamed and my good name smeared. I forgot whatever came of that lawsuit. I know I didn’t win any money. The defendants might have used truth as a defense and had an open-and-shut victory. Or maybe it was just thrown out of court after the judge stopped gasping in disbelief.
Nancy, Adina, and I stopped at a motel after we were released from jail. I started drinking Bloody Marys and breaking the glass as I finished each one. Mother and daughter were crying, and I eventually passed out. I don’t know if I was that drunk or if I just wanted to get away from their noise.
I awoke with a terrible hangover and decided I didn’t want to go to Texas and drug and alcohol rehabilitation after all. So I took over the driving and headed back to Muscle Shoals. My system was filled with that day’s booze and yesterday’s cocaine. And I got crazy. I accused Nancy of setting up the arrests and suddenly stopped the car. I pushed her, Adina, and the dog out and took off. They started walking and came to a farmhouse. A woman answered the door, and Nancy told her she had been riding in a car with George Jones.
“Well,” said the woman, “I got a police scanner and he’s just had a wreck about two miles from here.”
And I had.
I was put into an ambulance, and someone brought Nancy and Adina to it. They rode with me to the emergency room and the detoxification center at Hill Crest Hospital in Birmingham. That’s how I arrived for my second thirty-day span of rehabilitation.
I met someone in the hospital who was a George Jones fan. That fan knew someone who Nancy thinks was a relative. That relative “befriended” me and brought me cocaine while I was undergoing treatment for cocaine. The drug showed up in my urine.
The hospital had no authorization to keep me after thirty days. The doctors realized that I was scoring the drug inside the hospital and released me.
You might more accurately say I was expelled.
Chapter 24
This may be my favorite chapter.
It has to do with the beginning of the end, the actual end, of my alcohol and drug abuse.
I went home after the 1982 hospitalization and immediately got some cocaine from a vial I’d hidden in the refrigerator. Moisture ruins cocaine, and it’s a wonder that frost or thawing hadn’t ruined mine. I held the powder under my nose and snorted as I’d done thousands of times.
And something inside me clicked. I hated the drug. I had hated it for a long time but craved what I hated. Only persons who’ve undergone an addiction will understand that. But after that single blast by the refrigerator, the craving was gone. The stuff suddenly sickened me.
Maybe all of the treatment that had saturated my subconscious mind suddenly burst into my conscious mind. Maybe it was nothing less than an old-fashioned miracle. After all, most miracles unfold gradually, and I had been gradually struggling against cocaine since the first night I had tried it in the back room at the Possum Holler club.
I didn’t finish that vial that day. I put the powder down the sink and haven’t used the drug since. The master monkey was off my back.
Unfortunately, the struggle with the booze went on awhile longer.
My last hospitalization, in Bi
rmingham, where I had stayed coked up, had served to create a desire in me to want to quit drinking more than ever. Even though I got staggering drunk for several days after the hospitalization, I asked Nancy to take me to Florida, where I had briefly been treated for alcoholism years earlier.
Nancy had watched a lot of films about alcoholism in Birmingham, had attended a lot of classes, and had generally learned a lot about living with an alcoholic. Maybe she sensed in me a different kind of desire to quit drinking. I don’t know.
I said earlier that maybe I just got too old to drink. By that I mean I might have finally gotten wise, or my body got tired, or both. Who knows why I suddenly wanted sobriety so badly. I was consumed with getting sober. With getting well.
Nancy called the Florida facility, but the head doctor didn’t want me.
“Won’t you please do something to help him?” Nancy pleaded. “I know this is saying a lot, but he is worse than he’s ever been. Please help him.”
“There is no help for George Jones,” the doctor told her. He didn’t want her to bring me. Nancy took me anyhow.
She and I entered the hospital and immediately got into a loud argument. I was drunk, of course, but even so was astonished at the filth. There were cigarette holes in the bedding, lint on the floor, and other signs of neglect. Nancy said the place looked like a drunk tank in a small-town jail. I was so drunk, and so outraged, that I didn’t hear her stressing that she wouldn’t let me stay there.
She took me out almost as quickly as she had taken me in. I was dry for a few days afterward. But then I’d start to drink on and off and get so drunk that my system couldn’t process any more booze. I would throw it up as fast as I swallowed it.
After a day or two of that, I might pass out, then wake up sober enough to tough out a two- or three-day hangover. After that I wouldn’t touch the stuff for a few days. Then I’d resume drinking, and each resumption would be for a longer period of time than the previous binge.
I didn’t know it, but I was wobbling on my last drunken leg, going down for the final time, truly preparing to drown in a sea of alcohol.
I got drunk in a motel and lost my spirit more than ever. I lost my will to drink more, I lost my will to get sober. I would have just as soon been dead but was afraid to die. For a few days I drank to the point of unconsciousness, awakened, groped for a bottle, and drank more. Nancy thought I was going to die of an alcohol overdose. She could do nothing with me. She couldn’t even call the police. I wasn’t drinking publicly, so I was violating no law.
I strongly resisted her suggestions that we go. back to the hospital in Birmingham. She reached out to me over and over, and each time I returned her compassion with hostility.
And still she stayed with me.
She wanted to call Pee-Wee, but I wouldn’t let her. So she tricked me by saying she had to check on her mother.
Pee-Wee answered the telephone.
“Hi, Mom,” Nancy said, not sure how much of her conversation I was understanding.
“Nancy?” Pee-Wee said.
“Yes, Mom,” she said. “It’s me. How have you been? How are you feeling?”
“What’s the matter with you, Nancy?” Pee-Wee asked. “You’re talking to Pee-Wee, not your mother.” He might have thought she had grown tired of fighting my drinking and decided to join me by getting drunk herself.
Debbie Doebler, our financial manager, was there, and she figured out what was going on.
Debbie took the telephone, and Nancy began to speak to her in code. She mentioned the names of the motel and city where I had holed up. She talked about Birmingham, and Debbie knew Nancy meant the alcohol rehabilitation center.
Help was on the way.
Debbie translated for Pee-Wee, who, like the trusted and loyal friend he is, drove with Ron Gaddis, my bass player, for hundreds of miles to the motel. He said he walked in to see me sprawled on the bed, unable to rise. He picked me up as if I were a child, put me in the front seat, and, with Nancy and Ron in the back, started the drive from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Birmingham.
I continued to abuse Nancy, so she got on the floor, where I couldn’t see her. She rode over the hump for several hours. She wanted me to forget she was around, thinking that if I saw her, I might insist on turning back.
I had lapses into and out of consciousness. When I was awake I was profane and aggressive.
Then Pee-Wee stopped and bought a Hank Williams tape. Years later he remembered that whenever he played it, I settled down and sometimes even went peacefully to sleep. The instant he took it off, however, I awakened and became hard to deal with all over again.
With Pee-Wee manning the tape deck, Nancy on the floor, Ron in the backseat, and me out of my mind, we rolled into Birmingham. The doctors and nurses were waiting.
Understand that I wouldn’t let anyone take my bottle from me. So whenever I awakened in the car, I drank straight from the bottle. I didn’t know at the time that these were my final drinks on the last lap in the race against death by drunkenness.
I was lifted from the car and placed into a wheelchair, the bottle still in my hand. No one tried to take it. My heart rate, blood pressure, and all the rest were measured with the booze in my clutches.
Of course I argued with the staff and showed them the rude and shameful behavior they’d seen countless times in drunks. A doctor eventually gave me a shot and told Nancy she could rest—I would be asleep for about two days.
And I was.
My blood alcohol level, upon admission to the hospital, was a blink from being over the fatal line. When the doctor did his calculations, he told Nancy and Pee-Wee that officially I would have died from a mere two more ounces of liquor. I’m sure I consumed an ounce or two with every swig.
My departure from alcohol had been decades late. But it had come in time to save my life, my tired and shattered life. That life, from that day to this, has been drastically different.
While I can swear there has been no cocaine, I won’t tell you I have been totally sober from that day in 1983 until now. There were slips early in my sobriety, when I thought I could still play with the drug of alcohol. I was wrong.
A lot of nosy people are obsessed to know the day and the hour that I pitched my last drunk. I can’t answer that and probably wouldn’t if I could. I didn’t record the date because I don’t want to remember. Just let me say that I’m so thrilled with sobriety that it hasn’t been long enough since I last was drunk and never will be. But I will say that I’ve been sober for several years now.
There are still some things I haven’t learned about this disease called alcoholism. I was taught that a true alcoholic can’t ever have any alcohol in his system without craving more. If that’s true perhaps I’m not an alcoholic in the modern sense of the word. Perhaps I was always just an old-fashioned drunk.
I still drink today.
I’ll have a beer on a hot day, and during the summer I might consume as much as a six-pack in a month or two. Nancy and I rarely go out to fine restaurants, as I prefer the down-home, meat-and-potatoes places. But when we do, I occasionally have a glass of wine before dinner and drink no more. I don’t squirm in my seat, fighting the urge for another drink. I don’t have any urge.
I don’t drink whiskey at all. I don’t like the taste. I’m not sure I ever did. I used to drink whiskey because I wanted to work up a good drunk. Whiskey is less work than beer or wine.
People write me letters and ask how to help a friend or loved one stop drinking. I’ve never understood why they would ask someone who took so long to achieve sobriety himself.
They should be asking Nancy. I had been drunk for thirty-five years before meeting Nancy. I was mostly sober within two years afterward.
I think the most solid advice I could give anyone is to try to find ways to like yourself. The chronic drug or alcohol abuser hates himself. I’d also encourage trying anything, anything that might work. Don’t be shy about seeing a minister or professional counselor or undergoing rehab
ilitation.
Alcoholics Anonymous, which I never attended regularly, has worked wonderfully for millions of people around the world. When you participate in those meetings, you leave your ego at the door. The first thing they teach you is to admit your problem, which is easy for a lot of folks. After all, they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t think they had a problem.
Most of all I’d remind anyone who wants to get away from drug or alcohol addiction that they can, no matter how many times they’ve failed in the past. If George Jones can get sober, anyone can.
Remember that a stumble is not a fall. If you’ve had the problem and think you’re permanently sober, only to get drunk again as I did, the next day is a new day. It’s the first day of the rest of your life. Sobriety has nothing to do with your past and little to do with your future. It has everything to do with the moment at hand. Seize it.
There are many proven routes to sobriety. Each is a journey of different steps. No step on any of the paths is harder than the first one.
Take it.
Then take another. Take the steps one at a time. Be concerned about nothing other than the current step. Only after completing the step should you take another, then gradually another, and gradually another on the only road to true personal fulfillment, a life that is free of substance excess.
Chapter 25
It was a sweltering August night in Nashville, where I was doing one of two evening shows. I did the first at Opryland, where I had played five nights a week since April. I was scheduled to rush to the Nashville Network studios later for a guest shot with Lorianne Crook and Charlie Chase on “Music City Tonight.”
The first show was important to me. Its audience was filled with talent buyers from across the nation for fairs, concerts, and the like. I wanted to do a great show so they would be inclined to buy my services for 1995.
But the sound was terrible. I had done a sound check and was using a soundman who worked for me regularly. Yet my monitors weren’t right, and the air was filled with feedback and distortion. There was simply no excuse. A singer can’t give his best through a sloppy sound system. I politely apologized from the stage, urged the soundman to get it right, and went into another song. The sound was still terrible, and I was becoming increasingly embarrassed and frustrated. But I was determined to make a good impression in front of the standing-room-only crowd of very important people.