Cash: The Autobiography (11 page)

7 It all blends together after a while. Yesterday seems farther behind me than 1955, last week's tragedy or triumph neither more nor less troubling or thrilling than one in 1949, or 1969, or 1989. Here I stand in a smart hotel in San Francisco in the 1990s, gazing out toward the Pacific Rim, remembering these skies, these hills, this town in other, almost interchangeable times: one decade, two decades, three, four. It's five now, isn't it? Here's a story from the '60s, the latish '60s I think, about Fluke flapping his mouth too hard at a San Francisco cabby and all of us ending up on a real ride. The cabby was die silent type. Fluke kept talking to him, but the cabby wouldn't talk back, so Fluke decided to taunt him. “I bet this cab won't go down these hills fast,” he said. “Will it?” No answer. He tried again. “Why don't you air it out? Let's see what it'll do.” He'd picked the wrong man. The guy didn't say a thing; he just chose his moment and floored it. We flew down that hill like a runaway freight, picking up speed as we went, blasting through the green lights—the driver had timed it just right—and spraying sparks everywhere. We grounded out at every intersection, just like in the movies. I'll bet we did some flying, too. It certainly felt like I spent time airborne, bashing my head into the roof and listening to June scream her lungs out above the roar of the engine and the grinding of metal on asphalt. I really thought we were all going to die. We made it to the bottom alive, though, and die dri-

ver finally spoke. Even then he didn't have much to say. He just turned around, looked straight at Fluke, who like me was shaking with fear and adrenaline, and asked mildly, “Was that fast enough for you?” I tend to remember that story at appropriate times, for instance when Unit One is struggling up or edging down some unholy downtown San Francisco gradient. A tour bus can gain an awful lot of momentum very quickly on those hills, so for long, long minutes you find yourself contemplating the state of your brakes, and perhaps also the strength of your transmission, with unusual intensity. Another odd little story of the traveling life comes to mind, this one from the mid-1950s when Marshall and Luther and I, plus Carl and his band, were headed out of Oregon in the opposite direction from the route that brought us here to San Francisco two nights ago. We were on our way to Alaska, as I recall. I think it was dur- ing that tour that we had a box of Bill Justis's new singles in the trunk of my '54 Plymouth. He'd asked us to dis- tribute them for him, and that we did. We stopped at a beautiful scenic overlook on Mt. Hood and distributed those big, brittle old 78s by hand, one by one. They flew really well. That record became a hit, too; we were always proud of being the first to distribute it. And here's another one, this one set in Dublin, Ireland, in the '40s and told to me in Hollywood in the '60s by Merle Travis, another very dear friend now departed. It's about Gene Autry. Merle, the source of the gui- tar style called “Travis picking” and a whole lot more— songs, stories, wit, wisdom, advice, encouragement, humor, pleasure, fun in all its forms—worked with Gene in his glory days, which by all accounts were indeed glo- rious. Gene, the king of the singing cowboys, was one of the biggest stars in the world. People of my vintage, myself included, remember him as being wildly popular,

probably the best-loved public personality on earth, a wonder of straight-shooting strength and virtue and an inspiration to children everywhere. His arrival in Ireland, Merle recalled, produced a reaction that would have put Beatlemania to shame: two million people were jammed into the streets of Dublin around his hotel making a sound like nothing Merle had ever heard before. Somehow the entertainers had man- aged to get from the airport to the hotel and in through a back door, and then Gene had invited Merle up to his room for a drink. Merle did like to drink. So did Gene. . Gene himself was a touch earthier than the character I who sold the movie tickets. They had several shots of whiskey without saying a word to each other, just sitting in the room listening to that incredible noise surge in through the open windows. Finally Merle spoke. “Gene, maybe you should go out on the balcony and let the people see you.” Gene grunted. “Hmm. You think I should?” “Yes, I do.” “Well, let's have another drink first.” They had another drink, and then another, and by that time the crowd was even louder—a constant roar, people frenzied for a glimpse of the hero. Merle was getting uneasy. “Gene, I really think you should go out there on that balcony and wave your white hat to those people. Let them see you.” “You think I should?” “Yes, I think you should.” “Well, let's have one more drink before I do.” They got themselves another drink, and Gene settled down again, not making a move. Finally, Merle couldn't

stand it. “Gene, come on. Come on and go out on the balcony and wave to those people!” Gene bestirred himself. “By God, I will!” he said, and strode to the balcony. He got out there and whipped off his hat, and the noise exploded. He waved the hat toward the people to his left, and hundreds of thousands of voices roared and screamed. He waved the hat to his right, and a million more yelled even louder. It was amaz- ing. The din was stupendous. Then he replaced his hat, turned around, came back into the room, poured himself a fresh glass of whiskey, and sat down. Gene finished his drink in silence and poured another. He was almost through with that one when he said, “Travis, you know something?” “What's that, Gene?” “Damn Irishmen love me.” Legends and lies, fools and drunks, old friends and angels. They all belong in this book. My worry is that I'll leave some out that should be in. An awful lot of people have been important in my life. Johnny Horton, there's a name. He was another friend like Carl and Roy, more of a brother than just a man I knew and liked. I met him at the Hayride, from which he'd refused to graduate to the Opry even after “Battle of New Orleans” was such a big hit for him in 1959, and we were drawn to each other immediately. I liked his wife, too: Billie Jean Horton, previously Billie Jean Williams, the widow Hank Williams left when he died on New Year's Day, 1953. She married Johnny after she lost Hank, and she and I stayed friends after we both lost Johnny. He died badly but very quickly, killed in a frontal

collision into which his car had hurtled at almost a hun- dred miles an hour. That wasn't unusual for him; he loved to drive fast. It wasn't a drinking or drugging thing with him, and in fact he was sober as a judge at the moment of his death. You could say that drinking killed him anyway, though, despite his teetotaling ways. The driver of the other car was drunk when he veered across the centerline and plowed head-on into Johnny. Tillman Franks, the Hayride bass player who'd become Johnny's manager, was in the right front seat, and Tommy Tomlinson, his guitar player, was asleep in back. They were both injured, but they survived. I loved the words Billie put on the tombstone: Here Lies My Husband, the Perfect Man. So simple and, though Johnny was a human being and therefore inca- pable of complete perfection, so close to the truth. He really was a wonderful husband and friend, faithful and true. He was a wonderful fisherman, too. When they called him “The Singing Fisherman,” that wasn't just a catchy gimmick. He was the best. He could put that bait exactly where he wanted it. If it needed to be three inches from that one particular stump across the river, that's precisely where he'd put it. He could cast over tree limbs hanging above the water, then start reeling his lure back in and, at exactly the right moment, give it just the right jerk to make it jump over that limb and fall back into the water just so. He and I fished together a lot, and I even had a small interest in a company he'd formed to sell a lure he'd designed. Ole Fireball, he called it, and it was indeed a ball of fire. That thing drove the bass crazy; they just couldn't stay away from it. He and I hauled in droves of them the last few times we fished together, and the same happened to everyone else who tried it, too, even if not many people got the chance to; just a few dozen fisher- men in Louisiana had become Ole Fireball enthusiasts

when Johnny got killed. I still have a few lures locked away in my safe. I'm tempted to try one on the bass in Tennessee, which to my knowledge has never been done, but I'd feel awful if I lost one, and I know I surely would. Johnny took Billie Jean fishing once for a whole year, or perhaps you could say that she took him. It was when she got her settlement check from the Hank Williams estate—just thirty-five thousand dollars, a ridiculous fig- ure, but it paid for them to go to Alaska and fish just about every stream from there to Mexico. Hank would have approved, I think. Billie Jean's marriage to him, just three months' worth, hadn't been too happy—how could it be, with no peace in his life, just the pain and the mor- phine and the booze?—and though I never knew Hank, I can't imagine him begrudging Billie Jean the happiness she found with Johnny. Those two made such a great couple, and a great family. They had three daughters, Jerry, Nina, and Melody. I named an instrumental I wrote after them, “Jerry and Nina's Melody,” recorded with the Tennessee Two in 1961. Melody was just a baby when her dad got killed. He knew he was going to die. In the last few months he told me several times that it wouldn't be long. “You can count my time to live,” he said. “Watch out for my little girls when I'm gone, will you?” “Yeah, I will,” I replied, “but what if I'm the first to go? Will you watch over my girls?” “No,” he said. “You won't be the first. I'm going to die soon. It's just a matter of days now.” And he was right. We were together in Saskatchewan when he told me that. He died less than two weeks later, when I was at the Disc Jockey Convention in Nashville the night before we were to meet in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and go duck hunting. I didn't make the trip to Stuttgart; his ended on that road in Texas.

Johnny didn't know just that his death was coming. He also knew it was going to be sudden and violent, and he thought that most likely it would happen on the road—which raises interesting questions, to say the least. I don't have the answers to any of them, but I do believe there's no chance that he willed his death. There wasn't any darkness about him. He was into autosuggestion, though, and he'd use it to hypnotize me. He'd tell me that I was going to relax so completely that I couldn't raise my right hand, and when I was into it he'd say, “Now you're so relaxed you can't even move. You can't even raise your hands. You absolutely cannot raise your right hand. Try to raise it. You can't.” And I couldn't. I was perfectly alert, quite aware of what was going on around me—this wasn't deep-trance stuff—but there was nothing I could do to raise my own hand. Once I was in that state, Johnny would start opening up my memory to me. That's how I was able to complete the writing of “I'd Still Be There,” the song I heard Webb Pierce singing in a dream. I'd written some of it down as soon as I awoke, but I hadn't been able to remember the whole thing, and I told Johnny that. He hypnotized me, then said, “Okay, get out your pencil and paper now. We're going into your mind, back into that dream.” I went there, listened to Webb sing the lines I was missing, wrote it all down as fast as I could, and had the song. It was pretty good, one of the forty or fifty you hear for every really great one that comes along: good enough to record, but not the kind of song that stays with people, not one of the titles I hear called out every night I take the stage. It sounded so much more like a Webb Pierce song than a Johnny Cash song that I was afraid Webb would cover me on it, but he didn't. It just sat there on the “B” side of “Ring of Fire” and began to be forgotten (or was never heard in the first place).

From Johnny I learned how to hypnotize myself, and these days I use that knowledge when I'm in pain. It's not a technique that has anything to do with the occult—I've never dabbled in the paranormal or had anything but an average amount of idle curiosity about that whole spec- trum of experience—but it is a spiritual kind of tech- nique, a way of traveling into myself to find God's peace. I find a place where I know I'm not going to be dis- turbed, sit down, go quiet, and then count down slowly from ten to one. That takes me away to where the pain can't follow. It's a very specific place, chosen because I think of it as the most beautiful environment I've ever experienced on this earth: a little spit of sandy ground in Alaska where two pristine creeks, Painter Creek and Salmon Creek, come together. I can sit on that ground and feel the sand between my toes and taste the salt in the air on my lips. The wind's blowing in from the sea, the Gulf of Alaska just a few miles away. About a hundred yards up the bank of Painter Creek, peeking out from behind a grove of trees, I can see one wing of the little float plane that brought me here. Salmon are jumping, and a beaver splashes into the water and swims across the creek, then dives beneath the opposite bank to the entrance of his lodge. I see seven wild ducks—always seven; I count them every time. The sun is warm on my skin. The air is crisp. Somewhere out on one of the Aleutian islands, a volcano is active, and I watch the far- away streak of smoke it sends into the air and think about how the water in Painter Creek comes from a vol- cano, too, inland from where I sit. This is water purified by fire; this is a place so clean and right and elemental that it feels sacred. In my mind's eye I stand up and music starts play- ing—that began about a year ago; before, there were just the sounds of nature—and it continues as I walk, bare- foot, over the sandy ground and then across patches of little pebbles that hurt my feet, up the bank of the creek toward the airplane. A male voice, I don't know whose,

is singing “You'll Never Walk Alone” accompanied by a full-orchestral arrangement of very great skill and beauty. The song of course has meaning. The song ends and I stop, then turn around to retrace my steps, and it begins again, so that when I get back to the meeting place of the two creeks, I've heard it twice all the way through. That takes about ten minutes. Ten min- utes in beauty, beyond pain. What's happened here is that only my body feels pain, not my spirit, and in going with my spirit to Alaska I've left my body behind. The next step, I think, is to take the pain with me and leave it there. Bury it by Painter Creek. Leave it with God.