Willie (38 page)

Inside the main house a wooden plaque said “He who lives by the song shall die by the road”—a saying of Roger Miller's. Above the sink Connie had hung a sign: “An equal opportunity kitchen.” Willie was quick to wipe the table, fix his own breakfast, soak his dirty dishes, whip up a pot of English tea.

I have to give Connie a lot of credit. She did everything to make the Colorado place somewhere Willie would want to come to. It had every toy Willie wanted, like that huge computerized chess game with a robot player. It had the teepee. Where the dining table would be in most houses, Connie put a pool table there for Willie.

The Colorado compound should have been heaven for Willie, except it wasn't in Texas.

I haven't got a clue how Willie knew I was in jail in Taos. At the time I couldn't imagine how Willie Nelson even knew who I was. This was during the middle seventies. To me everything that happened in the seventies was moment-to-moment reality. “Anything that is not a mystery is guesswork,” my fellow Mad Dogs used to say in Austin.

In Taos I had gotten real drunk and proceeded to win a lot of acid in a poker game, so I swallowed the acid and saw weird dangerous shit going on, and I pulled my pistol out of my boot and shot up the plaza. I was ranting and raving in the jail, people were out to get me, man, and here came the sheriff saying Willie Nelson had come and paid my bill and was waiting outside. I was free to go with him.

I freaked fucking out. Willie Nelson? Come on, man, who do you think you're kidding? You're gonna lure me out and yell jailbreak and blow my ass away! But I thought, hey, be cool, you are after all hallucinating all this.

So I walked out of the jail and got into Willie's Mercedes with him and his wife Connie and his golf pro, Larry Trader. We drove off across the desert toward Las Vegas.

Later I remembered I had met Willie and Connie a few years earlier when a couple of fellow Mad Dogs took me backstage at the Austin Opera House and introduced us. Willie and I stayed up and partied together for three or four days. Sure, I knew Willie Nelson. This was no hallucination. These were my friends!

Willie and Trader and I nearly drove Connie nuts with our laughing and shouting. Connie is an angel, but we were too much. At one point Connie said, “I'm going to stop the car. Either you guys get out, or I'll get out. Who do you think has the best chance of hitching a ride in the middle of the desert?”

It was the first time Willie played the Golden Nugget downtown in Vegas. We didn't sleep for a week. Sam Peckinpah got us barred from the casinos for throwing pesos against the walls. One night it was to be Elvis Presley's final show on the strip. I had a front-row table, but Willie didn't want to go. I took Mickey Raphael. Elvis canceled at the last minute. Jesus, did I get paranoid!

I've stayed friends with Willie over the years. After I cleaned booze and drugs out of my life, I went to Austin in 1985 and started learning to play golf at Willie's Pedernales Country Club. Playing with Willie
and the boys out in the hills among the deer and the rabbits is a great way to take up golf. You don't get too self-conscious about your golf swing. It's too laid back to worry about that.

Life is good at the Pedernales, man. Playing golf there one day just at sunset, we gathered on the seventh tee to witness Larry and Linda Trader's wedding ceremony. I cried like a baby.

Someday the Movie God will let Willie and me make a movie together. It's got to happen.

Don Cherry is a nightclub singer, recording artist, and noted golfer
.

Tim O'Connor is Willie's longtime business partner in the Austin Opera House and other ventures
.

Tompall Glaser is a songwriter, performer, producer, and a leader of the Nashville “outlaws.”

Bill Wittliff is a movie producer, writer, and director—who worked with Willie on
Honeysuckle Rose, Barbarosa,
and
Red Headed Stranger—
as well as old friend and co-director of Farm Aid
.

Jim Wiatt, president of ICM, is Willie's first and only movie agent
.

Mark Rothbaum has been Willie's manager for ten years
.

Joel Katz is Willie's deal-making lawyer in Atlanta
.

Sydney Pollack is a producer-director who got Willie into the movies with
Electric Horseman.
He also produced
Honeysuckle Rose
and
Songwriter.

Cheryl McCall is a former writer for
People
and for
Life,
a movie producer, and now a law student at Yale
.

Dennis Hopper is a movie director and star
.

PART SIX

It's not supposed to be that way;

You're supposed to know that I love you.

But it don't matter anyway,

If I can't be there to control you.

And, like the other little children,

You're gonna dream a dream or two;

But be careful what you're dreamin',

Or soon your dreams'll be dreamin' you.

It's not supposed to be that way;

You're supposed to know that I love you.

But it don't matter anway

If I can't be there to console you.

And when you go out to play this

evenin',

Play with fireflies 'til they're gone;

And then rush to meet your lover,

And play with real fire 'til the dawn.

It's not supposed to be that way;

You're supposed to know that I love you.

But it don't matter anyway

If I can't be there to console you.

You may have noticed that I haven't said much about my kids so far. After fathering five children in the past thirty-five years, you'd think I should be some kind of expert on the subject of fatherhood. So I have been trying real hard to figure out what I have learned about fatherhood, and I have come up with one important lesson. I learned that my own father was doing the best he could. You probably have to reach middle age and experience all the problems and joys of fatherhood before you can understand the truth in such a simple statement. I was, before I realized it.

It's certainly tough for a kid to understand that the guy they call Father who is out there screwing up right and left is really just doing the best he can.

The guy you call Father is just a kid himself in his own mind. Maybe he's got some gray hairs and his face is wrinkled like a road map, but inside he is wondering how it can be that the mirror tells him he ain't young any more. The face he sees in the mirror changes from being a little kid or a teenager into being a grown-up and then an elderly person so fast it seems impossible.

I wake up feeling eighteen years old physically and somewhere in my thirties mentally, and then half a dozen children come to the door and say, “Good morning, Granddad.” It's kind of a shock,
really. I love being a grandfather, but how could I possibly be old enough to be one? When I was in my twenties, I was pretty sure I'd be dead by age forty. John Derek said a line in a movie we thought was romantic—“live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” I remember turning thirty seemed like a big deal at the time. We were raised to regard thirty as some kind of watermark. By thirty you were supposed to be full grown and in command. You were either an up-and-comer, or you weren't going to make it in life. Forty was the dreaded beginning of middle age and fifty was when you finally got it all together just in time to turn sixty and die.

I think the Indians had the best way of talking about age. An Indian was a baby, then young, then prime, then old. They never referred to years. When a guy was prime, he was expected to be out doing the hunting and the fighting. It was not his job to sit and dispense wisdom to the young, because he was still out there learning what life was about. He sat around the campfire and bragged about how much meat or loot he had brought to the family, and how many enemies he'd knocked in the head. The Indians had big families around them, all moving together from place to place, with a lot of wives to tell the kids what to do. An Indian child looked upon all the mothers and grandmothers in the family as the child's own mother or grandmother. The child's real mother's sisters were just naturally considered as close to the child as his real mother. The old people sat around the fire and told long stories about their lives and what they had learned, passing on the knowledge of the tribe to the following generations.

The “Willie Nelson and Family” that grew together over the years was not consciously modeled after the Indian family concept, but, as you can see, it has a number of similarities.

My daughter Susie had a hard time adjusting to our constant moving around and our financial ups and downs. When she was in high school in Nashville, a cheerleader and in love, we jerked her out and stuck her in Travis High in Austin. Susie dropped out of school and took a job at Mr. Gatti's pizza parlor. I asked her why she had done it.

“To pay for my car,” she said.

We both knew she wasn't responsible for car payments.

I asked Susie to go for a drive with me. I told her to take the wheel. “Just head west,” I said.

Susie drove us through the Hill Country, past the peach orchards and the old stone farmhouses with tin roofs, and the sheep and goats in the meadows with the creeks running through and the hills rearing
up higher as we went farther west. I wasn't saying much, just listening to Susie and picking at my guitar.

“Why don't we go see Freddie?” I said after a while. Freddie lived near Evergreen, Colorado. I sang all the way—songs I was writing for my
Phases and Stages
album. This is the story album that tells about divorce and discovering how to love again. One song I had written directly for Susie: “It's Not Supposed to Be That Way.” The song is a father talking to his daughter, saying to her what I was now singing to Susie. Instead of trying to give people advice, I am better at putting my feelings into a song.

By the time I finished singing “It's Not Supposed to Be That Way,” Susie and I were both crying.

I wasn't really trying to talk Susie into or out of anything. I just wanted her to know I loved her and was thinking about her.

A man likes to believe his wife is his best friend.

But when children come along, your wife doesn't have time to be your best friend. She has babies that must be taken care of. They may be very small people, but they are real, and they require a lot of attention.

When Martha and I started having children, all of a sudden she had to stay home and change the diapers. She couldn't go out with me as much as she had before. And she had to work because we needed the money to support our family. I'll admit that I was jealous of the kids because they were stealing time away from Martha and me. I'd come home off the road and have two days I wanted to spend with Martha, and with the kids too, but there was very little time. People used to tell you that two kids were no more trouble than one. We rapidly found out that two kids are ten times more trouble than one. With three kids, you can triple it. You could pack up one kid in ten minutes to go to Grandma's house or the babysitter, but three kids took an hour and a half. We spent some good times as a family. But the little things that Martha used to do for me, like wash my hair or scratch my back, she didn't have time for anymore. I'm sure my jealousy had a lot to do with some of the asshole stunts I pulled.