Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings From the Road (5 page)

Ray Price helped us out on the CD and sang great, as usual, but he’s been a little under the weather lately. He told me he had to cut back. His exact words were “I’m only living six days a week now.” Now
that’s
funny!

RAISING HOGS

I
spent some great years living in Tennessee. I first lived in Dunn’s Trailer Park in Madisonville, Tennessee, just north of Nashville. Roger Miller and Hank Cochran both lived there at one time for no reason that I can think of, except that it was twenty-five dollars a week, with everything furnished. Not such a bad deal.

Then I bought a farm in Ridgetop, Tennessee, which was some of the best and worst of times.

When I was married to Shirley Collie, we lived in Ridgetop, and Johnny Bush lived close by. One day, I decided to quit touring—I literally took myself off the market, because the only place I was doing good at all was in Texas—and to stay home a year to write songs and raise hogs. Why hogs? Because I had been raising hogs nearly all my life, starting out in the FFA at Abbott High School, where I raised hogs for show, food, money, or whatever. I even won some blue ribbons. So it wasn’t unusual for me to decide I wanted to raise hogs in my year off with nothing to do. I got Johnny Bush to help me build a hog pen. Then we went to the auction sale over in Goodlettsville, where I bought seventeen weaner pigs. I paid twenty-five cents a pound, put them in the back of my pickup, drove back to Ridgetop with Johnny, backed the pickup truck up to the loading gate, and unloaded the pigs in the pigpen we had just built. Unfortunately, the bottom rung on the pigpen was about two inches higher than the tallest hog. Consequently, all seventeen pigs hit the ground running. They went straight out under the fence and separated out in the woods. It took us days to finally round up all the pigs. By the time we got them back in the pen, they were almost too big to crawl out again, but we fixed the bottom of the pen and I started raising hogs. Another mistake I had made was having the hog feeders and the water trough too close together in the hog pen. The pigs wouldn’t get any exercise because they didn’t have to walk and got so fat, they were rupturing—they were literally falling out of their own asses. Long story short, I fed the seventeen pigs for three months and took them to the market to sell them, and the hogs that I had paid twenty-five cents a pound for—and had fed for ninety days—brought only twenty cents a pound. I lost a minor fortune my first and only year raising hogs.

ROPING

D
uring that same year I decided I would build a roping arena, and with the help of Johnny Bush, again, I did.

Johnny is a good friend. He played drums for me one time, fronted my band, and now he was helping me put up an electric fence.
That’s
a real friend. But to show you how bright we were, Johnny and I dug the holes, drove in the metal fence posts, and put up the wiring for an electric fence during a thunder and lightning storm. I was riding my black quarter horse Preacher, whom I dearly loved, over toward the roping pen we had just built, and when we got to the electric fence, Johnny Bush lowered the wire. My idea was to ride Preacher over the electric fence while Johnny Bush held the wire down to the ground. When we were halfway across the wire, John let it go, accidentally I’m sure. Hence the first Ridgetop Rodeo!

I had never roped calves before, but I knew it had to be a lot of fun. I bought a book called
Calf Roping
by Toots Mansfield. Toots was a many-times-over champion roper from West Texas. He had a calf-roping school that he ran in either Midland or Big Spring, Texas. He had a lot of young calf ropers to whom he taught the finer skills of roping, so I was sure I could learn from his book. I studied it and read it over many times until I was sure I knew what I had to do. I was to catch a running calf by throwing a loop over his head, throwing the calf, dismounting the horse, and tying the calf’s feet together, in as short a time period as possible. Unfortunately, my roping horse Preacher had not read the book.

D
ID
YOU
HEAR
ABOUT
THE
NERVOUS
BANK
ROBBER
? H
E
SAID
: “S
TICK
up your ass or I’ll blow your hands off!”

I
T
WAS
C
HRISTMASTIME
,
AND
THE
LADY
ANSWERED
THE
DOOR
. I
T
was the postman. She said, “Come in, I have something for you.” She took him to the bedroom and screwed his brains out, then fixed him a nice big breakfast of biscuits, gravy, ham, and eggs. Then she walked him to the door, gave him a dollar, and said, “Merry Christmas.” The postman said, “Lady, what just happened?” She said, “I asked my husband what to give you for Christmas, and he said, ‘Fuck him, give him a dollar.’ Breakfast was my idea.”

I
DID
AN
INTERVIEW
TODAY
WITH
AN
OLD
FRIEND
FROM
S
AN
A
NTONIO
named Paul Venema. He’s a great guy and an old friend. I’ll see him tomorrow night in Helotes, Texas, at our show at John T. Floore Country Store. John T’s is one of the better beer joints in Texas. John T. Floore was a really good friend of mine and loaned me money one time when I really needed it. I wrote a song about him:

SHOTGUN WILLIE

Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear

Biting on a bullet and pulling out all of his hair

Shotgun Willie’s got all of his family there

Well, you can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say

You can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say

You can’t play music if you don’t know nothing to play

Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear

Biting on a bullet and pulling out all of his hair

Shotgun Willie’s got all of his family there

Now, John T. Floore was a-working for the Ku Klux Klan

At six foot five, John T. was a hell of a man

Made a lot of money selling sheets on the family plan

Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear

Biting on a bullet and pulling out all of his hair

Shotgun Willie’s got all of his family there

M
AUI
, S
UMMER
2011

Annie and I are on Maui having fun. The weather is perfect; it usually is. Texas was getting a little warm, but Maui feels fantastic. Jim Fuller and I played chess and dominoes today. We will play golf in the morning. Jim is one of my best friends. He used to own a restaurant called Charley’s in the town of Paia, on the North Shore of Maui. I played music there a lot and had a lot of fun. Jim is not only a good friend but a good poker player, and a pretty good golfer now. I know he took some lessons, because I used to give him two strokes a hole and now he beats me a lot. One day I was playing golf and won Charley’s! Of course I immediately lost it back. I don’t need a restaurant.

Jim and I play chess and dominoes together. I hope to see him tomorrow night in Django’s, my clubhouse, or man cave, where we play all sorts of games, like poker, dominoes, and chess. Stan Cohn, Ben Holtz, Big Ben, Donny Smith, Roy, and Joe Gannon are regulars. Ziggy Marley showed up for a game and won a bunch. Then his wife, Orly, said they had to leave to take the kids home. Right . . . we will get Ziggy back! Anyway, all my pals will be there. I will win some and lose some, but at least I don’t have to fly to Vegas!

Jim Sanders is another really good friend of mine, and one of our regular poker players. Jim has been around the world nine times and remembers everything. He is a great storyteller and wonderful human.

Don Nelson, or “Nellie” as we call him, will be at the poker game as well. We are both Hall of Famers—he in the NBA, me in the Country Music—but we still remain humble. We are not conceited—although we have every right to be!

T
HE
HEIGHT
OF
CONCEIT
IS
A
FLEA
FLOATING
DOWN
THE
RIVER
ON
HIS
back with a hard-on, yelling, “Raise the drawbridge!”

Donny Smith will play poker with us tomorrow night. He is a good friend and a great guitar player; we have played shows together several times.

Sometimes Woody Harrelson and Owen Wilson play poker with us, but they are off the island somewhere for now. Woody has a new play that just opened off-Broadway called
Bullet for Adolf
—I hear it is doing really well—and Owen is off making a movie somewhere, but I wish they could be here. They could at least send money.

I
HAD
A
LITTLE
CONSTIPATION
PROBLEM
THE
OTHER
DAY
,
SO
THE
doctor gave me some of them suppositories. For all the good they done I might as well have stuck ’em up my ass!

A
GUY
AND
HIS
WIFE
HAD
BEEN
MARRIED
FIFTY
YEARS
AND
HAD
played golf together every day for those fifty years. This day was their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They were on the tee box, and the wife said, “Honey, why don’t we confess all our sins right here and start the next fifty years with a clean slate?” The husband said, “Okay, honey. Do you remember that pretty blond secretary I had about seventeen years ago? Well, I had an affair with her.” The wife said, “Oh, that’s okay, honey, the year before I met you I had a sex change.” The husband said, “Why, you lying whore! All this time you’ve been hitting from the red tees!”

Oh well, you win some, you lose some, and some get rained out; that’s an Abbottism for you literary types.

I
F
A
FROG
HAD
WINGS
HE
COULD
GET
BIRD
PUSSY
. I
F
YOUR
SISTER
HAD
balls, she would be your brother.

It’s getting late. It’s two twenty-five
A
.
M
. Maui time.
Signing off, aloha and mahalo.

I am in Hawaii again today with my family, counting my blessings . . . oh yeah, that and the money I won last night playing poker.

Django’s Orchid Lounge is my little hideout on the ocean, with poker, chess, and domino tables. Our sign says,
LIQUOR
UP
FRONT
—
POKER
IN
THE
REAR
and
HIPPIES
USE
THE
SIDE
DOOR
! My brother-in-law Joe D’Angelo named it Django’s Orchid Lounge since he knows how much I love Django Reinhardt—and it actually used to be an orchid house. He had the sign made up as a gift to me, and the name stuck. For those who don’t know, Django Reinhardt is the greatest guitar player who ever lived. He was born in a Gypsy wagon in Belgium. When he was a young boy, the wagon caught fire. His left hand was burned so bad he only had two fingers and a thumb to play with. But he did more with two fingers and a thumb than any other guitar player has ever done. He’s my guitar hero, so that’s why the lounge was named after him, just to keep his name alive. Every July there is a Django Reinhardt Festival in the South of France, which I will get to someday!

From where I am now on Maui, I can see six palm trees dancing on the water like six slender ladies. Plus an old monkey pod tree. That one monkey pod tree reminds me of the trees I grew up with in Abbott: the scrub oaks and cedar, the cottonwood tree in my yard that I loved to climb, and the tree in Aquilla Creek that we used to tie a rope to so we could swing out and drop into the water on Sunday afternoon . . . after the bumblebee fights. Our house in Abbott—the one we moved to after we lived at the house with the cottonwood tree—has seventeen pecan trees growing all around it. I don’t know if they still produce pecans, but they used to a few storms ago. And that’s all I’m going to say about trees.

A
USTIN
, T
EXAS
, A
UGUST
2011

We finally got some rain on the day I was going to finally get to ride my horse. One-hundred-degree weather for over seventy days is a little hard on the horse—and this old cowboy too. We were going to make a video for the song “A Horse Called Music.” I was going to ride through town on my horse Billy Boy, but no, it rained. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

If at first you don’t succeed . . . fuck it!

S
EPTEMBER
2011

I’m riding my horse Billy Boy around the town of Luck, in the heart of the great state of Texas. Why do Texans brag? They are just telling the truth.

We got to make our “A Horse Called Music” video, and I had a lot of fun doing it. The world looks better on a horse.