Waylon (43 page)

Creditors were beginning to send threatening letters. I owed a quarter of a million dollars to Lear Jet alone. My American
Express bill was the budget of a small state. I was giving the money away, literally. Salaries were overblown, padded out
with rent-a-cars and party floors in hotels. A lot of it was buying friendship and approval, and a lot of it was people taking
advantage. I got the leftovers.

During this time, an ex-IRS auditor came in and went through my finances. He didn’t look too happy when he finished unbalancing
the books. “There’s people you can put in jail for a long time,” he said. “They’ve stolen a lot of money from you. There’s
people right beside them who were not involved, but because they were there, they look involved. They’ll have to go too.”

I knew what he was saying, but that had never been my intention. “All I want to know is what happened,” I said. “I’m not prosecuting
anybody.”

How could I? The main one that was involved was me. Because I didn’t care. They’d come to me with a problem, and I’d say,
“Don’t ask me; go see somebody else.” Figure it out on your own. And after a while, no matter who they are, if they work for
you or love you or respect you, they say if he don’t give a damn, why the hell should I?

Neil had to go. I had a huge legal bill, rolled along for two years, with nothing to show for it. It had gotten to the point
where, rather than deal with me through Neil, people would rather not deal with me. He had fostered an enemy-camp mentality
with RCA, creating a Waylon that didn’t exist, enhancing the illusion that he was the only one who could keep me in line.
Even when I sent a letter to RCA telling them that Neil no longer represented me, they called his office to see if it was
okay. You can’t have that. I’m a loyal person, and when somebody does well by me, I tend to remember the good. Neil had helped
me and Willie in the beginning, but now it was going nowhere. My damn business was screwed up.

I couldn’t stand the thought of bankruptcy. There was no reason to hit bottom. I still had my drawing power. I could sing
and play guitar and lead a band. I could write songs. I could work anywhere.

Hell no, I told Bill and Richie in that October of 1981. I won’t go bankrupt. I have to find the hole and plug it, and then
go make the money to pay this off.

I shut it down. The office on Seventeenth. The gala touring. The too-many pals.

Marylou and Terry Lawrence, who came to work for us for eight days and stayed eight years, took what was left of our business
affairs and moved it into the attic of Marylou’s home. We couldn’t afford to keep the office running. Besides, all people
were doing was knocking on our doors with papers telling me I was being sued. We needed a place to figure out what was happening.

Marylou had worked her way up through my organization. She had started in booking, overseeing the agency contracts and riders
for our in-house agency, Utopia, run by George Lappe. She untangled the fan club and made sure the newsletters and 800 telephone
line were kept open, advising where and when we were playing. One day, all these boxes arrived at the office. It was the papers
of my music publishing company, Baron, which had been the subject of a lawsuit between Tompall and myself. Now resolved, Marylou
took over the day-to-day running of Baron, which had Jessi’s songs like “I’m Not Lisa” and “Storms Never Last,” and hits of
mine like “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.” She understood copyright law and publishing administration, and soon she took
over issuing licenses, subpublishing agreements, and general clearances.

Marylou had played bass for Keith Sykes and had grown up around the New England folk scene. She came to Nashville managing
Uncle Walt’s Band—she was married to Uncle Walt—and when they split up, leaving her with a nine-month-old baby girl, she answered
my booking agency’s want ad.

I came into the office through the back door one day, dressed in my regulation black hat and vest and boots, with a turquoise
shirt and a leather trench coat that reached to my ankles. I was buzzing. As I walked down the hall, I could feel her eyes
on me. “What are you looking at?” I asked. She had just started working for us and I hadn’t noticed her before.

“You,” she said. “I’ve never seen you up close.”

“You like what you see?” She said yeah. “Good.” I nodded and headed on my way.

Marylou used to hear me up in the office, singing “Slippin’ and Slidin’” in open D tuning, and make my hunger runs for a dozen
Krystal cheeseburgers and a couple of bags of fries. Sometimes, by the time she got back, I’d be asleep.

Marylou wasn’t used to the open cocaine use up in the office, and the stash-sharing cliques that went along with it. For a
time she felt like an outsider. Then one day she put a tiny bit of Coffeemate on her nose and walked around. She said they
treated her differently from then on.

After I got busted, and the girl who was my right hand left, Marylou became my personal assistant. No one could be more loyal
or show greater courage than she did then, especially after I gathered everyone in the organization and told them what was
happening. “It’s going to stop right here,” I said. “You people know me, and know yourself, and I don’t think you have to
be told whether you have a job or not. Some of you can come back, and some I don’t want back.

“If you feel you’ve done right by me, and if you feel like we’re close, see me later and ask for your job. You’ll probably
get it. Otherwise, forget it.”

Everything stopped for a sixty-day period. People started quitting left and right. One musician let me know that he wanted
his money in cash before the show, or he wouldn’t play guitar. “I don’t work too well under pressure,” I said, and he knew
he wasn’t welcome on my stage.

Marylou and Terry sorted out the financial ledgers in her attic. It took about three weeks of nonstop adding and subtracting
to find a way to make it right. When Marylou protested that she wasn’t a bookkeeper, I told her all I wanted was common sense.
If nobody could get paid for a while, I said I would make sure her rent was taken care of, and she would have money for food.
But there wasn’t to be one check written until we had gotten control of the situation.

I owed more than two and a half million dollars; almost eighty percent of those creditors could have been paid with five thousand
dollars, the bills that had been let go were so small. Some of them only amounted to fifteen or twenty dollars apiece.

Everyone knew that we were fixing to go through hard times. Marylou contacted all the creditors and set up payment schedules.
She gave me the option of working off the debt within a year, or one that would take two years. I decided to go for the year
plan and immediately left for Las Vegas, where I could make two hundred and fifty thousand in a week. I was determined not
to let this one beat me.

The newly trimmed version of the Waylon Jennings traveling carnival, featuring the Crickets and Tony Joe White, hit the road.
Slowly, show by show and month by month, I put money aside for the debt. While many people left, key members of the band,
like Jigger and Mooney, stayed; Carter was pregnant, and she went off with Barney. Most people I’d fired stayed fired.

Among those who left, much to my sadness, was Richie. There was never any question of my trust in him, or his faith in me;
he was simply burned out, in more ways than one.

He’d gotten in trouble again, for drugs, leaving some cocaine in his room in Washington, D.C., on the night we played for
President Carter. One of his friends had committed suicide that day, and he wasn’t thinking too clearly. He used to keep his
stash in his saddlebag, and it fell over on the couch. The maid discovered it and turned it in. There was a pill bottle with
his name on it next to the cocaine. How’d you like to be a cop with a confession like that?

While he was on probation, he had a fiery accident while priming a carburetor. He had to get skin grafts on his arms and was
in the hospital about seven weeks. We both thought it was time he had a rest; in the long run, we knew it was over for the
both of us. He didn’t quit, and I didn’t fire him. Richie just didn’t come back. We had run it through the wall. I couldn’t
go, and he could, so he did. We’re still close. He could still be with me today and he knows it. Richie named his daughter
after me, I named my son after him, and I’m godfather to his son. Still, after twenty years and not a cross word between us,
there was nothing left to do but split up.

We kept out on the road during 1982, playing state fairs and honky-tonks and anywhere that would have us. It was a vicious
schedule, but we knew we had to work so many dates in order to meet the payment plans. Finally, a week before Thanksgiving,
Marylou gathered the books and moved back into the office on Seventeenth. It had taken the year to straighten things out,
but everyone had been paid back.

I was lucky. Sometimes you’re in debt so far that you never have a chance to come out of it. I learned a lot of lessons, and
was helped by the fact that I could still work. Most country artists have been broke at some time in their careers; I wasn’t
any different. You’re out on the road, packing places and people are screaming, and you surely think everything’s okay. It’s
hard for an artist to remain creative and still keep on top of the business. If you get too concerned with assets and liabilities,
when are you going to write songs? Still, if you learn your lessons in the right place of your life, you might profit by them.

Willie, are you listening?

The Widow’s Walk is a four-sided rooftop balcony perched atop an old Southern house. In the Civil War, wives would go up there
and wait, watching to catch a first glimpse of the soldiers coming back from the front, their man hopefully returning from
battle.

For nearly fifteen years, Jessi had kept that vigil.

Jessi’s was a forgiving heart. She had to have that sense of destiny working itself out, of time bringing even the most lost
to their senses, to live with me. It was past the point of husband and wife. She wasn’t just trying to keep a marriage together.
She was trying to keep me alive.

The only normal thing about me was my home. I’d come in, hair plastered to my forehead, dripping wet from sweat, never without
a cigarette, having been up for days, and she’d be tricking me into going to sleep. She’d rub my feet and I’d pass out on
the living room couch. Sometimes I’d sleep for ten minutes, sometimes for two days.

She never gave up. She didn’t try to tell me what to do, but she didn’t need to. I knew how I felt at home. I resented the
orderliness, the normalcy. I felt unclean, like I shouldn’t set on any of the furniture. I might get it dirty. Like I knew
I was wrong.

Part of it was self-destruction. Maybe you feel a little guilty for having things other people don’t have—more than you need.
You don’t have to come from humble beginnings to understand that. Everywhere you look, some got and some don’t. I knew as
hard as I’d worked, fate had been on my side. That’s gambling: a little bit of card-counting and the luck of the draw.

Jessi looked on our home as a sanctuary. Nobody could bother me there. I wouldn’t bring my druggie buddies to the house. On
the bus, it was the opposite story. Anybody could get in there; some never got out.

I wasn’t home that much, anyway. I was working most of the time, or at least thought I was working. I spent hours and hours
and days and nights in the studio. I’d get an idea and keep chasing it. I’d think it was a smash. Most of the time I’d have
to do it over the next week. I couldn’t trust my instincts. Richie and Jigger saved a lot of tracks for me, just by holding
the music down, to stop it from flying off the track. I would have great ideas, but I just didn’t know how to implement them,
how to get them across, because I was too high. Later on I could come back and take that idea and make it work.

Sometimes, from the drugs, you’d get to hearing things in the studio. Richie was always chasing little buzzes and hisses,
and I’d be out there, waiting for something to happen. I didn’t want to lose the feel of the song because of some high-frequency
noise nobody could hear. I never knew a record not to be a hit because of some dirt on the guitar track.

One night at American Sound we were working on a song, but the board kept breaking down. They kept telling me to wait a minute,
and wait another minute. Finally, I muttered, “Goddammit, y’all hurry up. I’m about to sing in my pants. I’ve been dry-humming
all day and I’m gonna get the tune-aches.” Did I say that?

Jessi knew better than to give me ultimatums. She always wanted me to get off drugs because I wanted to do it, not because
she told me I had to. Someday, she thought, but she never told me outright to quit them. It was hard for her to wait, and
she knew in her spirit that the time was going to come. Through her faith, she had a vision that I would get clean in about
eight years, which means she started asking for my deliverance somewhere in 1976. “Lord,” her prayer used to go, “watch over
ol’ Waylon ’cause he’s so dumb.”

We talked about it sometimes, but I could sidestep any conversation and avoid the subject whenever it got too close for comfort,
outmaneuvering her. One thing I can always say is that even in the worst of my drug usage, I was never mean to Jessi. There
never was a time that I didn’t love her and that she didn’t know it. But I wouldn’t allow her to talk about drugs. If she
did, I would tell her off real quick and go about my business.

She kept poking vitamins down me. I really didn’t believe I would live past forty-five. It was a romantic thing. We called
it the Hank Williams Syndrome. Along with roaring on Hank’s road to ruin, you were expected to die young.

It was ironic. Rather than give me strength, the drugs made me vulnerable. People could have anything they wanted out of me.
I would try to buy their approval, playing the clown to get them to like me. I enjoyed my reputation as a wild man, and I
would joke about being a junkie and crazy. All I was doing was saying, I’m not really crazy. I’m wrong. Just like Jerry Gropp
was still whispering the word in my ear.