Cash: The Autobiography (14 page)

tainly got them excited. The whole house reverberated with their yelling and hollering at each other. Maybelle was my special fishing buddy, just the right kind of friend for the times when you want to get your line in the water and sit there and be quiet and easy until something bites. She was a worm baiter; she wasn't afraid to pick that worm up and get the hook through it, the way so many people are. It upset me that she caught more fish than I did, but then I had to drive the boat, so she got more fishing time than I did. That was my excuse, anyway. I used to run a shrimp boat out of here, or at least I used to own one, the Mister J. C, which was operated by my friend Bill Riffle. I bought it to replace his previous boat, which was neither big enough nor good enough. He'd been taking me out shrimping with him for years, so get- ting him a new one seemed like the best way of making sure I could still get on board with him and help out when I wanted to. I loved that. It's hard work and it can get dangerous, but it's one of those things that's another world, with its own customs and laws and language, its own unique rules about how you do things and unique reasons why. There's nothing anywhere else exactly like shrimping off the west coast of Florida. We were after bait shrimp, not table shrimp. We'd go out at night with our lights and radio, drop our trawls and let the nets drag for a few minutes at a time, then haul them back in and dump the catch into big bins on the deck. Then we'd use an ice pick to separate out the things in the bins that were going to hurt you—moray eels, squirrel fish, anything else that would bite or stick— and throw them overboard before we put our hands in to pick out the shrimp. The variety of life I saw in those bins amazed me. I did that for years until eventually the boat started wearing out, and I did, too. Shrimping has more to recommend it than picking cotton, but it's still a hard challenge to muscle and bone, even if you're doing it for

pleasure. They don't run shrimp boats out of here anymore. Sport and recreational fishermen won their fight against the shrimpers, whom they said were responsible for fail- ing fish populations, and the state of Florida legislated them out of business. So I don't get to watch them any- more and relive all those memories. I do get to watch the latest innovation, a gambling boat controversial for its size as well as what goes on aboard it—it's bigger than any vessel that's ever navigated the river mouth before. I guess I don't like it much. On the other hand, whenever I see it I can't help but imagine how it would have lit Mother Maybelle's fire if she'd lived to see it cruising out from right in her backyard, more or less. That brings a smile. Gambling was Maybelle's vice, but it wasn't much of one. She never played for high stakes, she never lost big, and she always enjoyed herself. Slot machines and bingo were her enthusiasms. Whenever we got into Las Vegas or Reno or Lake Tahoe, she'd head straight for the nickel slot machines and stay at it all night, but she always knew the deal. “If you could beat the house, there wouldn't be a house,” she'd say. She was a truly humble person, almost absurdly so. She never grasped how important she was to the music, how revered by everyone from Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan to Emmylou Harris and Michelle Shocked. We'd tell her time and time again, but she'd just say, “Naw, that's just stuff I did a long time ago.” You'd find your- self wanting to argue with her, even getting annoyed about it, but it never did any good. I used to try to get her to open up and tell me about some of the people she'd known and the things she'd seen, but she was very reticent, especially if there'd been any whiff of scandal or gossip about the people involved. When I asked her about Jimmie Rodgers, her

responses were typical. I knew they'd done some record- ings together in Louisville, Kentucky, in '32 or '33, as well as that first encounter in '2.7, so I thought that must have given her the opportunity to get to know him some- what. I was really interested in him—for a while he was almost an obsession with me—so I asked her what kind of man he was. Did she really know him? “Well, I guess so,” she replied, reluctantly. “I worked with him a lot.” “So what did you think about him? Did you like him?” She paused a moment. “Well, he was kind of a smart-aleck sometimes.” Knowing her as I did, I concluded that Jimmie Rodgers had probably made a pass at her. She'd never say it, of course, but she did fill in a little of the background. “Well, you know, he was really sick then. He had TB and he was dying, and everybody knew it, so we all took that into consideration. He was taking drugs and drink- ing because of the pain, and it just made him a little bit crazy.” I switched to purely musical matters. “Did you like his guitar playing?” “Oh, yes,” she said, “I loved it. I played with him, and I even played guitar for him on a couple of his records, I forget which ones, when eventually he wasn't able to play the guitar himself.” What she was telling me was as significant as, say, John Lennon admitting that he had filled in on guitar for Bob Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited and just didn't hap- pen to have mentioned it until now—though in purely musical, not cultural, terms, Maybelle was more influen-

tial than either Lennon or Dylan. She figured out a way to pick the melody on the lower strings of her guitar while she strummed chords on the higher strings, thereby creating the most influential guitar style in country and folk music. “Well,” I queried, “Did you get along all right?” “Oh yes, we got along fine at the recording ses- sions.” And that was that on the subject of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Very frustrating. Maybelle's husband, Ezra (Pop) Carter, was another good, solid, self-effacing country person, and he, too, was the soul of kindness and tolerance toward me during my drug abuse. He was also a Bible scholar, a self-made theo- logian, and that was a significant part of the relationship he and I developed; we became pen pals, writing back and forth mostly on matters of poetry and theology. Like Maybelle, he was no hater of fun. He was an accom- plished practical joker, legendarily so among his family and friends, and he appreciated that talent in others. It was he who told me my favorite story about the Carter Family in the early days. He, Maybelle, Sara, and A.P. were driving in the Model A Ford, encountering rough going—I believe it was when they were on their way to Bristol to meet Ralph Peer that first time—when they had a flat while fording a creek. (As Maybelle remembered it, A.P. had a flat just about every time he climbed in that car.) Tire technology wasn't what it is today; neither were road sur- faces. A.P. drove up out of that creek, cursing, and stopped the car. He and Ezra climbed out to get the patch kit and fix the tire, and as they did so, A.P.'s wallet fell out of his pocket. Sara picked it up and noticed immediately what

couldn't be missed: the circular shape of a condom impressed into the leather from inside. That was a com- mon thing back then: you carried a condom in your wal- let as a signal to other men, and yourself, that you were one of the boys, a rake at the ready, whether or not you had any genuine intention of using it. Sara understood perfectly. “Well now,” she said, plucking the condom out of the wallet and holding it up for Maybelle to see. “What does he think he's going to do with this?” She herself had no confusion on that point. She grasped it firmly in both hands, stretched out its mouth, and rolled it over the ivory ball on the gearshift protruding from the Model A's floorboards. “There,” she said, with a brisk little nod of satisfac- tion. Still fuming, A.P. came back to the car, found his wallet on the driver's seat, stuck it in his pocket, and climbed back in. Pop said he'd never forget the look on A.P.'s face when he laid his left hand on the steering wheel, depressed the clutch, and dropped his right hand onto the gearshift. “Whoooooaaaah!!” was all he said. Then, comput- ing instantly what must have happened, “Sara, why did you do that?” “Just to let you know I knew,” she said. They drove on in silence, nobody quite daring to laugh. Maybelle finally quit the road when a Parkinson's-like tremor she'd developed grew to the point where she was afraid she'd mess up on the autoharp. She never did mess up. She was playing just as well as she always had, but she didn't like having to be apprehensive that way, so she retired from the stage and took to the bingo halls. She died on October 23, 1978.

Sadly, I don't think there's any hope that Anita and Helen will ever be able to rejoin my show; their health just isn't up to it. The family tradition continues, though. Rosie Carter, June's younger daughter, shares our stage frequently, as does John Carter. Others have in the past and might in the future, notably Helen's son David and Anita's daughter Lorrie. So between however many Carters we have onstage and the voices that are always there—those of Bob, Dave, and Earl—June always suc- ceeds in doing justice to the Carter Family songs during her segment of our show. I pitch in too from time to time, but mostly I'm content—happy—to listen to the old songs of home, hers and mine, and let them take me back. I'm offstage during her portion of the show, but I always have a speaker in the dressing room and I always listen. That's all I really have to say, for now anyway, about the Carters, except perhaps for one final note about Pop, whose chair I'm sitting in at this moment, and Maybelle, wno sat with me here in this Port Richey house many a time. They were good Christian people, tolerant and kind. They were very important in my survival and recovery from the worst years of my life, which are the focus, however shifting, of the next part of my story: not just the worst years of my life, but survival, recovery, and the hope of redemption.

I clearly remember the first mood-altering drug to enter my body. When I was just a kid, proba- bly eleven years old, I was wrestling at school with a friend of mine, Paul East. Paul was a big guy, with big feet in big clodhopper shoes, and in the process of rolling over, his heel caught me in the side and broke a rib. It hurt really bad at first, but after a little while it didn't hurt at all, and I had no idea my rib was bro- ken—until, that is, I woke up in the middle of the night. I had turned over, and that rib had gone ahead and broken in two or splintered and was sticking me in the lung. The pain was terrible; every time I took a breath, I screamed. Daddy hitched up the mules, wrapped me up in blankets and pillows, put me on the wagon, and drove me the two and a half miles to the Dyess Hospital and old Doc Hollingsworth. At that point I wasn't scream- ing with each breath, but only because I was working so hard not to; the pain was still excruciating, worse than anything I'd ever felt. Doc Hollingsworth took one quick look and went straight to work. “Well, we'll stop that, right quick,” he declared, giving me an injec- tion that killed the pain just as soon as the needle went in. Not only that, but I started feeling really good. That's what morphine did, said Doc Hollingsworth; it worked well. I thought, Boy, this is really something. This is the greatest thing in the world, to make you feel so good when it was hurting so bad. I'll have to have some more of that sometime. Strangely enough, though, I didn't think about morphine again until many years later, when I was given it for postsurgical pain. Then I remembered how good it felt, and in time that got to be a problem.

And as I've said before, all mood-altering drugs carry a demon called Deception. You think, If this is so bad, why does it feel so good? I used to tell myself, God created this; it's got to be the greatest thing in the world. But it's like the old saying about the wino: he starts by drinking out of the bottle, and then the bottle starts drinking out of him. The person starts by taking the drugs, but then the drugs start taking the person. That's what happened to me. I took my first amphetamine, a little white Benzedrine tablet scored with a cross, in 1957, when I was on tour with Faron Young and Ferlin Husky, and I loved it. It increased my energy, it sharpened my wit, it banished my shyness, it improved my timing, it turned me on like electricity flowing into a lightbulb. I described the new world it opened to me in Man in Black: With all the traveling I had to do, and upon reaching a city tired and weary, those pills could pep me up and make me really feel like doing a show. . . . Those white pills were just one of a variety of a dozen or more shapes and sizes.... They called them amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, and Dexamyl. They had a whole bunch of nice little names for them to dress them up, and they came in all colors. If you didn't like green, you could get orange. If you didn't like orange, you could get red. And if you really wanted to act like you were going to get weird, you could get black. Those black ones would take you all the way to California and back in a '53 Cadillac with no sleep. And so it went. The journey into addiction has been described so often by so many people in recent years that I don't believe a blow-by-blow account of my particular path would serve any useful purpose. Perhaps in the late '50s or early '60s, it could have. Now it's just one tale

among many, the details different but the pattern, the steps, the progression the same as any other addict's. So while I do have to tell you about it, I'll try to avoid being tedious. Hit just the lowlights, so to speak. The first and perhaps the worst thing about it was that every pill I took was an attempt to regain the won- derful, natural feeling of euphoria I experienced the first time, and therefore not a single one of them, not even one among the many thousands that slowly tore me away from my family and my God and myself, ever worked. It was never as great as the first time, no matter how hard I tried to make it so. That doesn't mean it didn't feel good, though, and for a while the pills did their job just fine without too many obvious consequences. Doctors were prescribing them freely in those days for just the reasons I said I wanted them—to drive long distances, to work late hours—and though in truth I was taking them for the feeling they gave me, I started by taking them only when I had to travel and/or do shows. People in the music busi- ness, the people I worked with, got the idea right from the start that I was high all the time, but that was only because I was high all the time when I was around them. In fact, in those early days I was the equivalent of what alcoholics call a “binge drinker.” I don't know what addicts call it. It felt great while I was high, but even in those first days the mornings after weren't so hot. I'd wake up and the guilt would slap me in the face. I'd remember some- thing truly stupid I said to somebody, something insane and destructive I did. I'd realize that I'd forgotten to call home and say goodnight to my girls. Of course, some- times that would feel so bad that I'd have to take another pill or two just to feel okay again. The amphetamine would kick in and I'd start feeling okay, and then it would kick in a little more and I'd start feeling good, and then I'd start feeling good, and so on into the next cycle.