Waylon (11 page)

Sonny and I didn’t trust the other two to drive, so we took turns at the wheel. Goose couldn’t see, and we didn’t know about
Ronnie. That boy finally OD’d on glue. He was into drugs really strong, even then.

It was cold, and we were hungry. I think I had about ninety dollars rat-holed, and they gave us enough gas money to get home.
We bought popcorn and Cokes and tried to drive as far as we could without stopping.

As we passed through Ohio along Route 22, we looked up and saw what I thought was a town on fire. There was a hotel burning,
sitting on a hill. We stopped and stared at it awhile. Things going up in smoke; there was a moral there somewhere.

I slept for a while, and then woke as we topped a rise overlooking Cambridge, Ohio. The antifreeze in the car was only good
to five below, and it must have been at least minus fifteen. It was so cold we blew a freeze plug, and we coasted into the
town, silent as ghosts. We didn’t have enough money between us to fix the car. The airbags had gone out as well.

We waited until morning and pushed the car to a Chevy dealership. We didn’t know what else to do. Finally Sonny walked over
to the manager and asked, “Is anybody a Mason here?” The guy said he was, and though Sonny had only gotten to the second degree,
he agreed to fix the car for the thirty-five dollars that we could scrape together. “You’re on your way, boys,” he said, and
we took off.

It was Saturday night. A truck driver gave us some pills to help us keep going. We were listening to the Grand Ole Opry on
the radio, riding right over the top of it. We were so tired, but we wouldn’t let the other boys drive. To stay awake we got
to playing a game. If you could sell yourself right now, how much would you ask for yourself? I said ninety thousand dollars,
because I had ninety dollars that I was hiding in my pocket. Sonny always wishes he’d had enough money to buy me then. I sure
wasn’t feeling I was worth too much at the time.

We finally had to sleep by the time we hit Texas. We told Ronnie we were going to let him drive, but if we looked up and saw
he was going over fifty miles an hour, we’d take him out of the car and beat the crap out of him. We climbed in the back and
passed out. We were all over each other, flopping around. I woke up one time and my head was behind his back, and I’d done
fallen down in the seat. When we finally got to Amarillo, we broke out some of the money and bought Mexican food.

Sonny took me by my mother’s house in Littlefield, and he continued on to Lubbock. I got out of the car and went in the door.
It was like somebody who had been through a hurricane and survived it. I had no earthly idea what I was, or what it was all
about, or what had happened. I just knew I was back where I’d started.

M
y whole world was destroyed.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought it was all over for me, even though I was the center of attention. Everybody
wanted to talk about the crash, and why I gave my seat to the Big Bopper, and what Buddy was like in his final hours; but
I didn’t have anything to say.

How could I? He was the first person to believe in me. He was my friend. All I could think about was what a good soul he was,
and what a happy man. He loved living. He was in love with his wife and in love with his music. He was so young. To this day
it doesn’t seem fair.

He had all these plans. Instruments don’t make music, Buddy liked to say; it’s what you do with them. He thought Ray Charles
was the greatest, and wanted to use his arranging style, only move the licks over to guitars. It was like the strings on “I
Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” and “Raining in My Heart.” “That guy who put his name on as arranger, all he did is what
I do on the guitar,” Buddy told me. He made me see that music was personal, and it didn’t have anything to do with what people
called it. All through my life, there isn’t a couple of days that go by that I don’t think about him.

Buddy was the biggest thing to ever come out of Lubbock. His folks never got over his loss. It just broke them in two. You’d
visit Mr. and Mrs. Holley’s house, and it was always 1959, until the day they died. His pictures were on the wall, and everywhere
you’d look, there’d be something of Buddy’s. They were such sweet people. I’d go over to the house, and they’d show me his
shoes, and things they had in the closet. They gave me his guitars one time, but people would try to steal that Stratocaster,
so I took them back. Mr. Holley wanted to promote me, because he said Buddy believed in me, but I had enough sense to know
that wouldn’t be right. He bought me clothes and things like Buddy would. I wrote a song called “Buddy’s Song,” using all
of his titles, and I gave that to them. I also signed over any royalties I might receive from “You’re the One.” I said, we
didn’t write any of that; we just finished the one line and Buddy took it and straightened it out.

I went back to work at K-triple-L, but I was useless. All the sparkle had gone out of me. I was supposed to be a wildman disc
jockey, though I couldn’t turn it on the way I used to. Even if I’d play Buddy’s records, I wouldn’t say much. I had lost
my center of gravity. I wasn’t worth shooting.

I didn’t want to sing; I didn’t want to play guitar. I had no interest in anything. I left my guitar at Momma’s house and
couldn’t even pick it up. I was empty, drained of hope. Maybe I felt a little like my dream had slipped through my fingers.
I didn’t know that hard work and paying your dues was how you got ahead. I thought people like Buddy could just make it happen,
and now I’d blown it.

At the station, Sky and Slim Corbin tried to help me along, but the only one who made any sense was Hi Pockets. He knew what
was wrong. He was an older guy, and he understood what I was going through. Hi Pockets could see I was messed up, and that
I was feeling guilty, because I was the one who survived.

One day he sat down and talked to me. He spoke for over an hour, saying it wasn’t my fault and that I didn’t have anything
to do with what happened. “What makes you think you’re so powerful that you could cause something like that?” he asked. “If
you could bring them back here, and make them alive and standing in this room, would you do that?” I said yeah.

He said, “Can you do that?” I shook my head no.

“You couldn’t kill them either. You couldn’t will them to die. You don’t have that ability. Unless you take a gun and shoot
them, you can’t make them die. And you weren’t anywhere near them.”

Hi Pockets had to get it down to that level for me to understand. I had to admit he was right. He was kind of an old country
philosopher, though he liked playing the fool. Every once in a while he’d hit on something that would just raise the top of
my head off, speaking with the simple honesty and wisdom of a man who home-spun records and jockeyed discs, and made me feel
that maybe my life could begin again.

I came home. I’d been out working, and I was probably late. Maxine was standing on a chair with a necktie around her neck,
tied to a light bulb. As I walked through the door, she jumped.

Of course, the light bulb broke. She collapsed to the floor. Still alive. I don’t know what she was trying to prove; I knew
she couldn’t have been serious. It seemed more like a sick joke. She had a strange temper, and by this time, we both knew
we’d never get along.

Maxine and I shouldn’t have been married. I hardly knew her, and we were just kids; pretty soon we started having them. I
was nineteen when Terry, our oldest, was born on January 21, 1957, and Julie Rae followed a year and a half later on August
12, 1958. Buddy came along on March 21, 1960.

Terry had Maxine’s eyes on my face, and he was pure energy, a buzzsaw. If you let him, he’d stay up two or three nights running,
always on the move, a bullet tearing from here to there. He was a peacemaker. He needed to be, around Julie. She was the first
girl in the Jennings family in generations, and she showed a lot of my temperament, as in Bad Temper. Nobody could tell her
what to do. She learned to cuss from her Grandpa Shipley and me when she was about two years old. She was never afraid of
anything, and even then she showed she could switch immediately from mad to glad and back again. We used to call her Froggy
because she used to swell up when she got angry. Buddy was laid-back and easygoing, and we were worried when he didn’t talk
for years. He’d jabber, and his brothers and sisters would tell us what he said. Then we realized he didn’t have to talk,
since they were doing it for him; and he still doesn’t unless he has something to say. That’s why I always ask him for advice.

We both loved the children, but they were all we had in common. I felt trapped. Each time we thought we were going to get
out of the marriage, that we’d had enough of driving each other up a wall, we’d have another child. I didn’t see any way out,
and it wasn’t all her. I was doing my share of messing around, a hot-shot disc jockey with a lot of leftover guilt.

I wanted to do the right thing. I was determined to see the family through, even though I was on a downhill slide that kept
getting steeper. Things were going from bad to worse. I thought, that was a good try, but it just wasn’t meant to be. My hopes
had been in one little basket, and even though I went back to life as it had been before Buddy, it wasn’t the same. Especially
since he was my friend. What if he were my brother? I don’t see how you can get blindsided by some of these things fate hands
you, and come back from them. It was too sudden. It got to where I just didn’t give a shit.

There was a little irresponsibility in me, and I needed more money. They were kind of struggling at K-triple-L. I didn’t think
they were, though they were. They offered me more money at KDAV. Quite a bit more. I got mad and quit, and went over to the
other side. But that didn’t work out at all; I didn’t fit in over there. I could never be on time, and it was a whole different
thing.
Friends and Neighbors
…

They were from the old school, and I was a foreigner, in their eyes. And in my own, probably, as well. One in the middle of
the night, I left for Arizona.

Maxine’s dad got real sick, and we went out there to see him. He lived in Scottsdale, and her sister lived in Coolidge. It
was the first time I’d been that far west, and it took hold of me.

You look at the mountains, and you don’t know if they’re Indian or cowboy. The desert is still and strong. You ain’t got a
chance. You can’t push it back. You just surrender to the surroundings. When I got there, it was like I stopped pushing toward
something and just let myself go, floating where the winds would carry me. I felt lonesome.

You gain strength from the environment; you don’t try to destroy it. It was like I passed through myself, and all of a sudden
I came out of the desert into Phoenix, nestled in the Valley of the Sun, all palm trees and shadows. It was beautiful.

We moved back and forth. I couldn’t find a job in Texas. They’d hire me some at K-triple-L every once in a while to work holidays
and things like that. I tried Dallas. I couldn’t find anything, and went over to Odessa and found a job at KOYL. I had an
old ’51 Dodge with no left window; I had to put pasteboard over it, like in
The Grapes of Wrath.

I went to work for a little bit of nothing. Whenever I sent money home, I could choose between breakfast and supper, but I
could only eat lunch twice a week. Maxine and the kids were living back in Littlefield. I was trying to get enough money to
bring them down and rent a house. As it was, we were having to move every time the rent came due.

I don’t doubt Maxine cared about me in those days; but she could turn on the tears when she wanted to. That used to be one
of her things when her parents came by, to show them how Maxine could cry. I never knew for sure why. She could just stand
there and look at you and start crying. She didn’t know what to think when I went off on the road. I’d been there all the
time and now I was gone.

I still don’t manage money well, but I was worse then. I had to watch every nickel and dime. I was so broke I couldn’t buy
cigarettes. My old farmer friend Jimmy Stewart had to loan me a quarter once when we were sitting at the Chat ’n’ Chew in
Lit-tlefield, drinking coffee. I’d spent all my money buying gas to get to Odessa. When I got there, I’d call home person-to-person
to let them know I’d arrived okay. We had a code: If I asked for my dad, I’d made it; otherwise, I’d ask for Momma if I needed
to talk.

I was having a little better luck in Coolidge, Arizona, where Maxine and I stayed with her sister. There was a guy named Earl
Perrin that was buying a bunch of radio stations and tying together what amounted to an Arizona network out of them. In 1960,
that was ahead of its time. I was playing at a place called the Galloping Goose with a pair of local boys, Billy Joe Stevens
and Claude Henry. I was big-time when they found out I had been with Buddy Holly. I probably made as much as they did, which
was fifteen dollars a night.