by Dave Hickey
What I don’t tell them, however, is that, if the truth were told, I ran so hard and stayed so crazy during my life on earth that sad hardly mattered. Sad I could deal with. Sad I could put in a song, and if it was a good song, one that tasted good in your mouth when you sang it, and felt good under your boot when you tapped it out, there was a chance you might tear up and sniffle a little bit when you sang it. But otherwise, the sadness just stayed put, right there where you put it, in the song. So you could say, I guess, that those songs were like bus-station lockers where I stowed the pieces of my broken heart—and forgot them. Because, except when I was writing songs, I didn’t spend too much time worrying about the state of my heart. I spent a good deal more time trying to keep my liver and my lungs and my dick in working order, which, considering the way I lived, was no small task.
Anyway, I could deal with sad. Scared as hell, however, and guilty as sin, I couldn’t put out quite so easy—like the cat or like a fire. Scared as hell and guilty as sin, ate my insides so I could only treat them with the booze and the pills and the beautiful needle that I was so scared of and felt so guilty about, and, strangely enough, say what you will, they always give me the courage to seek what they made it impossible for me to get. And we did our little dance for twenty-nine sleazy little years, fourteen of them spent in skull orchards and blood buckets singing myself hoarse, drinking myself crazy, breathing smoke, and taking abuse off sweaty stinking field hands who hated me for being no different from them. So it wasn’t exactly your Texaco Star Theater Dream Vacation. But, at times, in places, it was better than nothing—mostly after midnight, in hotel rooms alone, on those few nights when I got the uppers and the downers and my old guitar in perfect tune, and all of a sudden the words, and the sound of the words, and the swiftness of the music, and the goddamn hurt in my heart all went click and cinched in there, permanently, so they’d never come apart again, and that was something. You be daffy and I’ll be dilly, we’ll order up two bowls of chili. And I never knew quite how it happened. It was my own true gift and it was the damnedest feeling I ever felt, of having things just fit.
The thing of it is, of course, I never got ahold of anything else nearly that clear, never got anything else under control, even. I kept expecting to, all along, but in the end I never even got to step back and look at things straight on. I started out looking up from under, and ended up looking down from above. I never even saw the everyday world most folks live in, not the way they see it, anyway. I used to dream about it, though, like I had a house on a street, and I’d go out and get the milk and the paper off the stoop and sit down in this shiny breakfast nook and have some Wheaties while I read up about the Dodgers. But I got all that out of movies and from the couple of times I went out to Fred Rose’s house in Nashville, but what can you do? You ride your own horses and go where they take you, and I come to the party on a herd of pale white ones, on dark green bottles, in the Book of Revelations, out in the paddock, and cooking in the spoon, and they ran crazy through my life.
I was about eleven, I think, when I found out that whisky kills shy. And since that was about the time that my mom, Lily, started kicking my ass out onto the stage with no questions asked, I began taking to the stuff as a private resort. Now I knew, even then, that I lacked the constitution and the stamina to be a drunk, but I damned sure had the inclination, the “proclivity,” as Fred Rose would say. So, finally, in total, I reckon I was drunk or doped two days out of every three I was alive, and that’s counting the time I was a little bitty baby and don’t recollect, which is just as well since the first thing I can remember was being sick with the croup. So, to tell you the truth, I’m probably not the best source of information about my own adventures, since I missed a good deal of them. As it turned out, I spent twenty-five of my twenty-nine years scuffling around on the bottom, maybe six months sitting pretty on top, and the last three years in dreamy slow-motion, just falling, off the wagon, off the stages, off the barmaids and the snuff queens, off that damn white horse in my backyard, which either hurt my back or helped my morphine supply, depending on how you look at it. And once I started, I kept on falling off everything I got up on, except, of course, the booze and the pills, and the beautiful needle. I got up on them, and I stayed up, getting higher and higher and tireder and tireder until I was so light, so frail, until there was so little of this world or this earth left in me that I just began to fade, like Gene Tierney in that movie about the sea captain.
You see, I figured I’d already been found out. I really thought everybody could see the decision that I had to make. If I give up on the booze and drugs, I’d lose my confidence, and my fame along with it. But, if I didn’t give them up, I’d probably lose my life. So everybody, I figured, would know that I didn’t really want to die; I just didn’t want to stop shining. I didn’t want lose my stardom. They’d all understand, I thought, that it all came down to the fact that I’d rather be nothing than a nobody, and, from that point of view, knowing what all I would’ve done not to be a nobody, I guess the luckiest thing in my life is that I got to be a Somebody, and still be an honest person about how I felt. Because I was going to be a Somebody, honest or not. That’s why I have to laugh at that silly old Acuff saying my music would have stayed “country,” no matter what, that I would have never “gone rock-and-roll.” Because, folks, I tell you true—and you can go to the bank with this—to me, being country was just one of them terrible accidents of birth. It was a disease my music was a cure for, and if I thought it would have helped me get a hit record, friends, I would have not only gone rock-and-roll, I would gone naked with a flower behind my ear.
And it’s hard for people to understand what it feels like, to be out there in the night at some cloudy crossroads, with your jaw clenched and your heart pumping, all full of jagged angles and wanting to be Somebody with every ounce of gristle and meat that bears your name. And it’s hard to explain what it costs. But I can tell you this, you get a lot on you. And I got a lot on me, which was the one thing my daddy told me not to do. Every time I was leaving the house to go out to play, or to go to Sunday school, or to run down to the store for Ma, that’s what he’d say. He’d be sitting there at the table, and I’d stop at the door and say, “I’m going out, Pa,” and he’d kind of halfway look around and say, “Well, don’t get any on you, squirt.” Fat fucking chance is what I say to that.
I remember this one time, it must have been ‘49 or ‘50, when me and Harley was making a swing up through western Pennsylvania. We was doing a string of package shows in them little mill towns. We stopped off in Johnstown one morning on our way to Altoona, so Harley could get something done to the car. Actually, it was just an excuse for Harley to sneak off and call his wife back in Goodlettsville and reassure her that, no, he had not been killed yet driving around with the notorious Hank Williams. But I thought I would take the opportunity to cash this Benzedrine prescription I had picked up in Uniontown a couple of nights before, so I left Harley with his head under the hood and strolled down the main drag to this dingy little drugstore.
There was a bell on the door and a fine looking woman of about thirty-five standing behind the soda fountain. She had black frizzy hair, a hefty front end, and “Madeline” stitched over the pocket of her apron. It might as well have said “Divorcée.” Anyway, I hiked myself up onto the stool, ordered a Cherry Coke and gave her my great big break-your-heart smile. She smiled back at me while I pulled out my flask and poured a little snort into the Cherry Coke, so I waved the flask in her direction. She shook her head no, but she kept on smiling. I recognized that smile. It was clear to her that I wasn’t nothing out of a steel mill. I was wearing my eight-gallon, white-felt Stetson hat, my pointy-toed, handmade, lizard-skin boots, and my brand new, custom-tailored, cream-colored, flannel western suit. And what’s more, my picture was on the cover of the Hit Parader magazine she was reading when I come in. So when I asked her if she might be able to fill this prescription for me, and handed it across the counter to h
er, it more or less confirmed what she suspected.
She said, “Yes sir, Mr. Williams,” and blushed right down into the front of her blouse. “You sure look a whole lot like your picture,” she said to me while she was tapping the speckled birds from the big bottle into the little one. And from there on we had a fairly breathless conversation, the upshot of which was that she’d give she didn’t know what all for the chance to go down on a living legend like myself. And I told her that one of the things that I was living for, and legendary for, was granting the wishes of handsome women. So without so much as a by-your-leave she led me back into this dusty storeroom, which I’m sorry to say was far from the least romantic place I’d transacted this sort of business. And after rearranging a couple of cases of Grapette I suddenly found myself the happy recipient of a Class A, New Orleans Bourbon Street blow-job, right there in Pennsylvania.
Needless to say, by the time she finished, my spirits had improved considerably, but for some reason she looked up at me, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and kind of smirked. “Well, you ain’t so much, Mr. Living Legend,” she said. And hell, I thought she was kidding. I told her that if we could take a short time-out for a milkshake, I’d be glad to rearrange the Grapette a little bit and fuck her brains out right there. At which point, she got huffy as hell. Drawing herself up, putting her hands on her hips, she squeaked at me: “Just what kind of a woman do you think I am.” And I said, I didn’t know what kind of a woman I thought she was, but I knew for a fact that she was a cocksucker. And, at this, she sneered down at the scene of the crime and said, “Do you call that a cock?” And I said, “No ma’am, I call it Little Hiram.” And she spit my own cum all over the front of my brand new, custom-tailored, cream-colored flannel cowboy pants, and stalked out of the storeroom.
When I come out behind her, zipping up, she was standing behind the counter glaring at me. So to get the last lick in, I pulled a couple of twenties out of my pocket and threw them on the counter as I marched by. She snatched them up angrily and cocked her arm like she was going to throw them at me. Then, all of a sudden, she stopped and burst into this beautiful smile. Her eyes were shining, and I couldn’t believe it! She was just smiling at me as I walked out the door, like I was Jesus, tucking those bills into the front of her blouse.
I walked all the way back to the service-station half expecting to be shot or arrested, with my coat buttoned up, wondering if there was any way I could hold my guitar that night so as not to show the pecker tracks all over the front of my pants. I didn’t see how it could be done. I could just hear old Lon back there in south Alabama saying, “Don’t get any on you, Hank.” Right, Pa. But I shouldn’t have worried. As we were driving off, I gave Harley a slightly toned-up version of what had happened, and he said, “Aw, no problem, Hank.” He reached into the back seat and grabbed the beautiful Mark Cross calf-skin toilet kit Fred’s wife got me in New York. He said, “Poke around in there. I’m sure we’ve got something to fix it.” So I did, and for the first time in my life I realized what it meant to be a Somebody. It meant you had a lot of different kinds of soap.
Back in Georgiana, we had one brand for all purposes. Homemade lye, cooked in the kettle and cracked off the scum. If that didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. And right there, on my lap, neatly tucked into that fancy toilet kit, I had special soap to wash my body with, special soap to wash my face with, shampoo to wash my hair with, toothpaste to brush my teeth with, detergent to wash out my nylon shorts with, saddle soap to clean my boots with, and goddamn it if there wasn’t this little bottle of something called Exeene, specially designed to get cum stains off cream-colored flannel britches. There was a beautiful logic to it, too, because in the process of getting to be a Somebody, you were gonna get a lot on you, and when you finally got to be a Somebody, you had all these special potions that purify you and leave you white as snow—to cleanse you of all the stains that show.
It’s such a damn shame, then, that we got to die of the stains that don’t show. But I should reassure you here, by way of consolation, that in the end, when it finally came some three years later, after all the shouting and shooting-up and guilt and greed and fear that preceded it, it wasn’t all that bad: Cruising along over the snow-white New Year’s breast of West Virginia, with the scrawl of the black bare trees undulating as they slipped across the steamed side-windows and disappeared into the past, with the old Driftin’ Cowboy faded, beyond fatigue, snuggled up under a fancy plaid blanket, on the good smelling leather of the back seat, in the warm embrace of Sister Morphine. It was so damned improbable, you know, for little Hiram Williams from south Alabama, as tired as he was, to be moving so warm and effortless toward the warmth of the people that loved him. And it was slightly wonderful, as it always was, to be nestled in the bosom of a powder-blue Cadillac in the heart of America, floating along without effort, along that shiny black ribbon of highway that might have been glass, a thousand-feet deep, with this clean-cut, thoughtful stranger at the wheel.
He was just a kid, really, the guy behind the wheel, with a collegiate crew cut, wearing a pale blue, oxford-cloth shirt under a dark blue, pullover V-neck sweater. He wasn’t my friend or anything, like Harley was. Friends couldn’t be trusted with me anymore. I was past that. He was just another chauffeur nursemaid, a quiet one this time, without a lot of fool questions. Just a guy hauling a load, gauging his speed so as to make the delivery right on time for the gig. Dead or alive, I thought vaguely. As a hot number or cold meat: It didn’t really matter which. Not to me, and probably not to the fans. Six of one, half-dozen of another, really. Either way, I figured, it would be a big thrill for the folks in Canton. I mean, wasn’t I the Driftin’ Cowboy? And wasn’t he always wanted dead or alive? You bet your bustle he was. But who the hell cares, really? I decided I’d close my eyes and listen to the big balloon whitewalls whir and swish on the ice-cold pavement, as it rushed under the chassis about eight inches below. Then, I could actually see the pavement rushing beneath me, as if it were a glass-bottomed Cadillac. And wouldn’t that be something, I thought. A glass-bottomed Cadillac. And why the hell not? I’d call Dwayne the very second my next single hit the charts, and I could afford it. Hell, if I could afford Audrey, I could afford a fleet of glass-bottomed Cadillacs.
But I let go of that thought and watched it drift away from me as if it were a balloon. And I was drifting, too, and gaining altitude. Pretty soon I was just beneath the woolly gray clouds looking down on the jumble of snow-covered fields, faint rectangles spreading away across the rolling country like scattered manuscript pages, defined by feathered snow along the fence lines. Seen from above, the bare black trees looked like calligraphy, like Fred Rose’s angular lead-sheet notation, which I never could read, and couldn’t read now on the snowy pages beneath me. Oh, yeah, I was really the Driftin’ Cowboy. No doubt about it, anymore. Do I start planning my entrance? Why not? It was always my favorite thing about being a star, that moment when I stepped out of the wings, just getting hit with all that heat and light and noise. It always felt so good that I wanted to go back and do it again: the whole idea of getting something before you’d done anything. It was almost like real love, I guess. “Hello, Ohio!” I would say tonight, stepping into that magic crackling light, “Did you know this old country boy has crossed your snowy heart?”
Then, at the very last damn second, right before there wasn’t any Hank Williams anymore, I realized what I’d done. I’d done the same damn thing to Bocephus and Audrey that poor old Lon had done to me and Lily. “Damn it,” I thought, and tried to crawl back. But my hands just flopped around until I died and disappeared. And that was the last thing I figured out too late. I was so slow, you know, about some things, to be so fast at others. Hell, it wasn’t until very shortly before that I figured out what Lon had done to me, without his really having a choice. I was writing this song about him being an engineer on the log train, and when I came to the line about hearing his whistle off in the distance, I suddenly remembered
an evening when I was about five. I was running on my cold bare feet across the no-man’s land of frozen red mud between the house and the facilities, hop skipping across rust gray puddles with ice around the edges, and all of a sudden I heard that log-train whistle. The minute I got into that outhouse I started bawling. I just sat there and cried, because my daddy was always off somewhere running that log train, or just off somewhere in his head.
I knew then that the sadness in every whistle I ever heard, every whistle I ever wrote up in a song, was that log train whistle telling me my dad was somewhere else. And I remember way back, before he moved to the VA hospital, how he’d sit there in the kitchen with his elbows on the table just staring at me with those big, blank, rabbit eyes of his, like I was a freak of Mars or something, and not his born son at all. And, sometimes, when I was feeling frisky and cutting-up as kids will do, he’d all of a sudden start crying, not making any noise, but really bawling with these big tears rolling down his cheeks. Later, I’d come to understand that Lon was wound kind of tight on account of his having been gassed in the Great War. But, by that time, I couldn’t stop being resentful of him.
The thing is, Lon didn’t tell me nothing about nothing—about how to act, or what to do, or how to dress, or even how to play a damn sport. He’d been over the Atlantic, clear to Europe, so I knew he knew that stuff. But he didn’t show me nothin’, not even how to bait a hook. I had to learn that like everything else, by looking out of the corner of my eye while my buddies baited theirs. And, naturally, they noticed that Lon hadn’t shown me how and had a real big time at my expense. And remember, back then, south Alabama was a whole hell of a lot farther back in the sticks then it is now. There wasn’t that much difference between whites and blacks on a day-to-day basis. And even stuff like electric lights and pavement was unusual. And Lon, damn it, didn’t even teach me nothin’ about south Alabama. I used to think it might have been different if my back hadn’t got banged up. Then I’d’ve been able to enlist in the Army like Lon had, and if I’d got some medals and all . . . But I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t Lon’s fault at all. Down deep, I was always a backwoods cat, shy and distrustful by my very nature, slinking among the darkling pines and cypress with a solitary heart and a soul like a spinster’s cunt—tender and empty and always waiting for that magic mysterious sparkling something to come fill it up—and knowing that it never would.