Cash: The Autobiography (19 page)

A couple of days later, they couldn't wake me up. They'd get a rise out of me for a moment or two, but I'd drift straight off again no matter what they did. That went on for a while—I don't really know how long— until, in a flash of lifesaving brilliance, I understood the problem and managed, despite my slurring and blurring, to tell the doctor that he should investigate my dressing. He didn't get it at first—it looked fine, he said, he didn't need to take it off—but I insisted. When he peeled away what was left of the card of Valium, he found that about half the pills had already dissolved straight into my wound. I don't know if it was the Valium's fault, but that was a horrible wound; it took months to heal properly. As it happened, the Valium was superfluous, because they treated my postsurgical pain with such strong doses of morphine that I was just about as high as I could be anyway, lost in intensely vivid hallucinations. I half wrecked the ICU, upsetting IV poles and doing all kinds of damage, because I just had to make somebody under- stand about the commandos: they'd gotten into the hos- pital and were setting their charges all around the room. Finally, someone got the message and told the flight crew. The copilot came on the intercom to put me at ease. “We're going to fly this wing of the hospital away from here,” he said. “Get you away from these people bothering you.” “Good,” I said. “Let's take off.” No sooner said than done. I looked out the window and sure enough, our wing of the hospital had detached itself and was rolling on its takeoff run. Soon we were up, beginning our first turn over Nashville, and I could see the Cumberland River, then the green Tennessee country-

side. The pilot came on the speaker. “It looks like every- thing's all right now.” I didn't think it was. As I told the flight attendant— this was a full-service hallucination—“The charges still lead up here. They can still blow us up.” “No,” she said, “you're wrong. There are no charges aboard.” The woman was crazy, I realized, or dense, or blind, or a member of the conspiracy against me: the charges were right there in plain sight. “Look, you can see them!” I urged. “They're going to blow us up while we're still in the air!” Somehow I got word to the pilot, and he did a good job, turning back immediately and beginning his landing approach without further ado. The hospital buildings swung into sight, then slid up toward us as we made a faultless landing and eased back into our place. It was perfect, but pointless. The commandos came right back, moving grimly through the ICU and laying their charges all over again. “We're gonna get you, Cash,” said one. That was bad enough, but suddenly I was out of the ICU and in a ward, and a commando was standing in the doorway with his gun to John Carter's head (this was post-robbery). “We're going to kill you and your whole family!” he barked. I realized with horror that there wasn't any “if” or “unless” about it; they were just going to do it.

I started screaming.... When I hallucinated that intensely, the medics would respond by giving me even higher doses of morphine. They didn't know who they were dealing with, or what: more dope just made me more crazy. The people closest to me had had enough. Unbeknownst to me, they got together with a wonderful doctor from the Betty Ford Clinic, a great man who will remain anonymous, and in the parlance of the trade they “ran an intervention” on me. I knew the doctor was coming. I was semialert by that time, about twenty days after the surgery, so I'd understood fine when June told me that the doctor was in town with Gene Autry. Gene was in town to buy a base- ball player, and while he had to get back to California posthaste, the doctor would be paying me a visit the next day. That he did, along with June, Rosanne, my mother, John Carter, Cindy, Tara, Rosie, half the people who worked for me, and all the members of my band—about twenty-five souls in all. Every one of them had written out something they wanted me to know about my behav- ior toward them. So lying right there, literally a captive audience (unless I wanted to rip out a couple of IVs and risk spilling my guts on the floor), I listened. I heard about betrayals and broken promises, lies and neglect, love used and abused and abandoned and refused, trust destroyed, care turned to pain and fear. Everyone read, and all the letters had their effect on me. Again, though, it was John Carter who got through to me most clearly. His letter was about one night at the farm when I'd fallen, stumbled and staggered, and other- wise made a fool of myself in front of his friends, embar- rassing him and them terribly. I had to hold him and hug

him while he read it, to keep his tears back; he hadn't wanted to write that letter and he wanted even less to read it to me. The letters weren't designed just to vent their writers' anger, shame, or disgust at my behavior. Their greater purpose was to show me the depth of the trouble I was in, to express love and concern for me, and to ask me to accept help to save myself. As the doctor put it after everyone had read to me, “We all want you to get some help. We want you to go to the Betty Ford Center.” Simple request, simple reply. “I'm ready to go,” I croaked, barely able to get the words out. “I want to go. I want some help.” I wasn't conning anyone, even myself, at that moment. I knew how serious my situation was. I was wasted, weak, hallucinating on the morphine every day, very far out in the cold—just a degree or two away from the physical final end, to say nothing of madness, spiri- tual bankruptcy, and financial ruin. I also knew that I was so close to death that if I really wanted, I could give up and go there quite easily. All the way down at the doors of death, though, I'd discovered that I didn't really want to die; I just wanted the pain and trouble and heart- break to end, and I was so tired that dying seemed like the only way to get that done. I wanted to stop hating myself, too. Mine wasn't soft-core, pop-psychology self- hatred; it was a profound, violent, daily holocaust of revulsion and shame, and one way or another it had to stop. I couldn't stand it any longer. So when the inter- vention came, it was welcome. As my friends and family spoke, I was telling myself, This is it. This is my salvation. God has sent these people to show me a way out. I'm going to get a chance to live. I'm still absolutely convinced that the intervention was the hand of God working in my life, telling me that I still had a long way to go, a lot left to do. The amazing

encouragement I got, the testimony of all those people, made me believe in myself again. But first I had to hum- ble myself before God. * * * I was going to the Betty Ford Center. The doctor told me that John and Michelle Rollins were going to be in Nashville the next day with John's plane and pilots and that they'd fly me straight to Palm Springs. First I'd be checked into the Eisenhower Medical Center; then I'd g0 to Betty Ford. The doctor and June would make the trip with me. I didn't understand how it could be done. The wound in my stomach was still open, and the dressing had to be changed every hour. The doctor said it would be okay, though, so I took his word for it. He even told me I could have anything I wanted to eat—I hadn't had any decent food in weeks—and I took him up on it. I ate two sacks of peanuts and a Coke and was more surprised that that didn't kill me than I was about surviving every- thing else. At the Eisenhower Medical Center they examined me and promptly declared that I couldn't be released to go anywhere in the foreseeable future, let alone the few days the doctor had in mind. He stood his ground. “He's already spent three weeks in hospital,” he said. “He needs to be in a treatment center now.” It was his view that the sooner I got away from modern medicine's arsenal of mood-altering chemicals, the better. That was also the opinion of my treatment coun- selor, who must also remain anonymous. “I want Cash at Betty Ford,” he said. “We'll take care of him there. We'll take care of that wound.” I was still worried about that. I asked how they were

going to take care of it. He just told me, “You're not to w0rry about that. It'll be taken care of.” I accepted that, imagining nice nurses attending to me at regular inter- vals. That's not exactly what my doctor and counselor had in mind. It turned out that / was the one in charge of caring for my wound. I had to swab it out—stick a Q-tip a couple of inches into my belly to clean it and drain it— and then change the dressing. I got used to it after a while, and gradually the wound began closing up. Over the next four or five weeks it went from four inches down to three, then two, and finally became a single round hole that looked like it would never close, but it did. I was in the Betty Ford Center for three weeks before I started really coming to life, but when that happened I felt wonderful. It was almost literally like being reborn; I'd never felt so fresh. It was a great place. The food was good, the people were good, the lectures were fabulous. Betty Ford herself gave a daily talk that I attended, and my counselor backed it up. He was hard-nosed and very effective. He wouldn't give me an inch, and he got the job done with me. Neither I nor any of the other celebrities got any breaks in any way, especially not in the process of education and self-discovery, basically a concentrated $welve-step program that's the core of the treatment. I Wasn't allowed to get away with anything but “rigorous honesty.” The people running the program knew their business and the disease they were treating. Many of them knew it personally. The doctor certainly did. He himself had been so far along in his disease, alcoholism, that one night at a dinner party at his home, he'd walked out onto the front porch with a steak knife, rammed it into his stomach, pulled it around about eight inches to cut himself wide open, and then walked back into the dining room, hold- ing himself together and showing his wife that he was really badly hurt. He did it just to get attention, he told

me, kind of ignoring the possibility that he might be killing himself but not entirely ignoring it. I could relate. The doctor had been to some of the places I'd been call- ing home, so I couldn't shock him, or fool him, either. Betty Ford and all the others I can't or shouldn't name set me on the path of sobriety, teaching me the workings of my disease and showing me the way out of it, and for that I'll always be thankful and grateful. I am grateful. Now I know where to go to get help. I've gone and got it several times since that first awakening, at the Betty Ford Center and other treatment facilities, because my problem persists. It's an ongoing struggle. I do know, though, that if I commit myself to God every morning and stay honest with Him and myself, I make it through the day just beautifully.

I'm pottering about the house, as the English would say. I've been on tour again—Prague, Dresden, Diisseldorf, Oslo, Bergen, Bourges, Paris, Munich, Graz, Vienna, London, Berlin, Hamburg—and now I'm back home. As I usually do when I get off the road, I've packed my little suitcase and come on out to the farm to be by myself. Peggy Knight, our housekeeper, drove me out and readied the farmhouse for my stay, but now she's back in Hendersonville at the house on Old Hickory Lake, and for the first time in thirty days I'm all by myself. This is a great place for pottering. I can cook my own food, read my own books, tend my own garden, wander my own land. I can think, write, compose, study, rest, and reflect in peace. I can talk to myself. “Okay,” I can say, “where do you want to put this book of eighteenth-century hymns you found at Foyle's in London? Is it going to go in with the poetry books, or with the antiques you never look at?” “The poetry books, I think. Then I might pull it out and read it sometime.” “Are you sure about that? Remember what you paid for it. You really don't want to be handling it too much.” “Okay. I'll put it in the antiques.” “Good. That's settled. Are you hungry?” “Well, I certainly could be.” “Peggy left you that apple pie she baked, you know. That would be just about perfect right now, wouldn't it?”

“Oh, yes, it sure would. Wait a minute, though. What did I have for breakfast? Eggs, country ham, home fries, fresh-made biscuits with butter and jam? What's a big old slice of that pie, eight hundred calories?” “About that, yes. You don't care, though, do you?” “No, you're right, I don't, so .. . No, no, no. I'm going to care next time I put on my stage pants.” “All right. Later, maybe. Okay?” “Sure. Good idea.” And so on. The creative process to which my mind is sometimes open happens, usually, without dialogue. It's the more mundane stuff, where the ego meets the daily road, that makes up my internal chit-chat. I'll just go on pottering. The poetry shelves in my library have caught my eye. The kind of poetry I really love is the corny stuff: the epic poem about Columbus, I forget its title, that we read in high school—“Before him not the ghost of land / Before him only shoreless seas”— and in the last verse, after sailing on and on and on, there's “a light, a light, a lamp!” and he's found America. How that thrilled me. I love Emily Dickinson, too. Sometimes I go a little deeper, into Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Milton; as much as I can stand, that is, until my brain gets tired. What I really enjoy is the Bible. I love to set myself a test, give myself something to study. I find a passage I don't quite understand and chase it down in the concor- dance and the chain references until I learn what it means, or at least what the best-versed scholars have been able to interpret it as meaning. I don't listen to music much at the farm, unless I'm going into songwriting mode and looking for inspiration. Then I'll put on something by the writers I've admired

and used for years (Rodney Crowell, John Prine, Guy Clark, and the late Steve Goodman are my Big Four), or any music in any field that has real artistry, or something that promises a connection to what's essential in my own music: old blues, old country, old gospel. Most recently I've been listening to Rodney's Jewel of the South CD, one of his very best, and the chants of the Benedictine monks. I've also been playing with my Tibetan singing bowl, which has its own wonderful world of sound. It's made of seven different kinds of metals—gold, sil- ver, brass, bronze, and metals from the meteorites that land intact on the mountain peaks of the Himalayas, where there's less atmosphere than anywhere else on earth to burn them up before impact. The bowl pro- duces the most amazing variety of sustained, unearthly tones. It comes with an instrument, wrapped in chamois leather, resembling the kind of pestle you use to crush corn or rock salt in a mortar. You rub that around the rim—how fast and hard you rub deter- mines the pitch and intensity of the tone the bowl pro- duces—and then you put your face down into the bowl and listen. It feels like hearing a pipe organ in a cathedral. It's a wonderful tool for taking me to another, more peaceful place. I have a little garden here, an eight-by-twelve patch of ground in the yard where I used to grow veg- etables, okra and tomatoes and peppers, but I've given over to my grape arbor now. A piece of ground that small can produce a lot of food if you work it right, and I know for a fact that, in time, my vines will give me many more grapes than I can handle myself; they've already produced about half a bushel this year. I put them in three years ago, with cuttings I took from my vines at home in Hendersonville, which in turn grew from cuttings I took from my parents' arbor in California in 1968 and carried back to Tennessee wrapped in wet newspaper inside a suitcase. They're

black Concord vines, hardy, with delicious grapes. You take the cuttings when you start to have warm nights and hot days, around early or mid-May in Tennessee. You cut off five joints of second-year growth and plant them with two joints in the ground and three above, then give them enough potassium, phosphate, potash, manure, and water, and watch them grow. If you get some good hot days, the sun will just suck those leaves out. I can't tell you how much pleasure that gives me. I've read a lot of books on the subject, and now I almost know what I'm doing. The arbor at the farm is surviving and thriving, and so is the big one at home, and the grapes from both really are delicious. I love taking care of my vines, then having them take care of me. This farmhouse sits aside a hill a couple of hours from Nashville. There's nothing special about its location, nothing it's famous for, and nothing much to distin- guish it from hundreds of other places in this part of Tennessee. It has just the usual routine beauty, green and gentle, no spectacles. The spring from which it takes its name, Bon Aqua, is half a mile down the road. My farmhouse is an old, simple, two-story struc- ture, built in 1847 of yellow poplar cut with a broadax by a retired soldier of the Mexican War, Captain Joseph Weems. At this moment I'm sitting on the front porch, exactly where he sat in 1862 on the day, just after the surrender of Nashville to the Yankees, when two Union cavalrymen came riding up into the yard. Capt. Weems had a cow out in his pasture, now the empty field running up to the crest of the hill behind the house, and the Yankees wanted it; they were requi- sitioning chickens, pigs, cows, and whatever else they could find. They didn't ask politely, the story goes— they must have been feeling their oats—and neither did

they take kindly to the fact that Capt. Weems was wearing his full Mexican War uniform. He was a mili- tary-minded man. He spoke sharply. “You're not taking my cow. I've got babies who have to have that milk.” “Well, we're taking it anyway,” said one Yankee. “Are you armed?” asked the other. “You'd just about have to search me to find that out, now wouldn't you?” was the captain's reply. Dumb Yankees. “Well,” said one, “if you've got a gun, we're going to take it from you, 'cause we're not going to let you people keep your guns, either.” He started toward the porch. Capt. Weems didn't hesitate: he just pulled out his pistol and killed both those horse soldiers right there. They fell dead in the front yard, about where my Range Rover is parked right now. Their comrades never found out what happened to them. Capt. Weems and his family chased away their horses, burned their gear, and buried them in unmarked graves in the family cemetery up the hill. They're still there today, though nobody knows exactly where. Capt. Weems is there too, his grave site plainly marked. The Yankees sure tried to get to the truth, coming back through here day after day, but nobody breathed a word, and in the end they had to give up and go away. The whole affair remained a family secret for a long time; now it's a local legend. I first heard it when I started coming here in 1972, from an eighty-year-old called Red Frasier, who was part of the local color at the time. I was walking from my pickup into the feed store when he called out to me.

“Hey, boy!” I was forty years old, but I knew he meant me. “Yes, sir,” I said. “You got any frogs in that pond up there?” “You mean eating frogs?” “Yeah, that's what I mean.” “Well, yes. I got frogs up there I bet weigh two pounds apiece.” I knew the minute I spoke that I'd stretched it too far, though he didn't say anything. He just grinned, and I walked into the store. He got me on the way back out. “Hey, boy!” “Yes, sir.” “You pretty well eat up with frogs, ain't you?” After that I got to know him, and he told me all kinds of stuff. Back in Capt. Weems's day the family got their water from the Bon Aqua spring. That's what I do still; it runs year-round, and I pipe the water into the house. It feeds my ponds, too, the one with the frogs that was already here when I first came and the other I had made and stocked with fish. I like to go sit by the side of the new pond, sometimes fishing but more often just daydreaming, and every year I plant another two or three trees around it: pine, weeping willow, pin oak, willow oak, magnolias, cedar; handsome trees, pretty trees. I like to dig in the dirt. I like to work in the fields and the garden. I come up here and I wear a cap or an old straw hat, no shirt, no shoes in summer. I live the life of a country boy. I love to and I need to.

It was odd how I acquired this place. Sad, really. It came to me as a result of a crime by a man I trusted. June and I had just come off tour, and we went down to Hixon, Tennessee, to make a big furniture buy—a lot of the antique pieces, in fact, that are here and at Hender- sonville now. It really was a substantial purchase, even by June's standards, so when the man told me the figure, I called my accountant, whom I'll call Pete (a nice man, “Uncle Pete” to our children), and asked him if we had enough cash in the bank to cover the check. “Ooooh, I don't think you've got that much,” he said. “Oh, yes, I do too,” I replied. “I just turned in twice that much to you from the tour.” “Yeah, but there are a lot of bills to pay.” Well, there weren't that many bills to pay, and even if there were, he hadn't had time to pay them yet. When I told him that, though, he got nervous and started mum- bling, not making much sense. “Well, we'll just talk about it when I get back,” I said. “Right now I'm going to go ahead and write this check.” That made him even more nervous. “Go ahead, then, but I don't think there's going to be enough to cover it,” he stammered. I did write the check, and when I got back to the office I discovered that, sure enough, the current bills hadn't been paid. Neither had the past-due bills. The bills, in fact, hadn't been paid in quite some time. The man had been stealing our money, taking it for himself and buying prop- erties with it. His wife had been using it to buy jewelry. That was a hard lesson—harder for him than for me,

because all I had to do was never again choose an accoun- tant by driving down the main street where I lived and looking for a sign saying accountant, which is how I found Uncle Pete. Then I'd just have to keep at least peri- odic tabs on where the money was going, whoever was actually putting it there. Pete, on the other hand, had to give the money back and face the threat of prosecution. As it turned out, we decided not to prosecute—he had a lot of tragedy in his family around that time, and besides, he really was a nice man, well loved in the community. What we did was search out the properties he'd bought with our money and make him sign them over to us. We were doing that when it occurred to us that we should investigate his farm, where Carlene and Rosie had spent many a happy weekend playing with his kids. And sure enough, there it was: he'd paid cash for it, our cash. We sold all the other properties, but this one I just had to keep. For me in '7Z it was love at first sight, just as it would be at Cinnamon Hill a couple of years later: a place that moved into my heart immediately, a place where I knew I could belong.

The 1970s for me were a time of abundance and growth, not just in terms of finances and property, but personally, spiritually, and in my work. My mar- riage with June grew and flourished; John Carter came into the world; Bible study became an important part of my life and produced the most ambitious project of my career to date, the movie Gospel Road; and follow- ing the commercial success that began with my Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison album in 1968, plus the increase in public visibility my weekly TV show gener- ated, I was able to walk through all kinds of new doors and go to all manner of new places. On the other hand, the '70s also saw the implosion of my recording career. I ended 1969 with nine albums on the Billboard charts and began 1970 with “Flesh and Blood” moving up the country singles chart to its even- tual position at number one. I ended 1979 and the whole decade with only one more country number one to my credit, “One Piece at a Time” (in 1976). My singles spent a total of thirty weeks on the Billboard pop chart in the '60s; in the '70s the number was just eleven, eight of which came right at the beginning of the decade, in 1970. That was a trend, too; in the '80s, as I've said, I became invisible on the charts. No weeks at all on the pop charts, zero number-one country singles (unless you count “The Highwayman” with Waylon, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson in 1985; I don't). In fact, if you look at the arc of my whole career from the perspective most commonly used, that of purely commercial success, you have to conclude that my star came on strong in the mid-'50s, cooled in the early and mid-'6os, reignited with a vengeance in '68, burned brightly until '71, and then dimmed again, save for a brief flare-up in 1976 with “One Piece at a Time” and my current comparatively small-scale popularity as a record-

ing artist (which doesn't translate into “action” any- where except on the new, alternative-style Americana chart, plus, thankfully, at the cash register). Which is fine with me. I'm happy in my personal and spiritual life, and any commercial success at all is icing on the cake. My own version of my music's success or failure is a little different from that prevalent in “the industry.” For instance, one of the main reasons my record sales dropped off so dramatically in the early '70s is that mak- ing secular records simply wasn't my first priority; that's when I turned down recording “City of New Orleans” because I was too busy working on Gospel Road. Then, too, low record sales in the '70s and '80s didn't translate into low demand for me as a performer. I've never had any trouble working as many concerts as I want, and that goes for TV specials, too. I also disagree with the opinion that I didn't make good records in the '60s. That's when I did some of the work I'm most proud of today, particularly the concept albums I made between i960 and 1966: Ride This Train; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Bitter Tears; and Ballads of the True West. They brought out voices that weren't com- monly heard at the time—voices that were ignored or even suppressed in the entertainment media, not to men- tion the political and educational establishments—and they addressed subjects I really cared about. I was trying to get at the reality behind some of our country's history. I tried hard, too. For Ballads of the True West, I just about became a nineteenth-century cowboy. I attached myself to people, like Tex Ritter, who'd spent their lives researching Western history. I haunted bookstores, libraries, and record stores, looking at period newspapers and memoirs and listening to documentary recordings of old cowboys. I befriended a man named Joe Small in Austin, Texas, who published a magazine called True West, and spent endless hours talking with him and going through the mass of Western memorabilia and