Waylon (50 page)

I’ll turn around and give them a thumbs-up after the first few songs, just to let the crew know I appreciate them. You can
almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief.

It’s close quarters, no doubt about that. There’s only so much privacy you can maintain, and whenever a small bunch of people
are rubbing right up against one another, you can bet that sometimes emotions will snap out of hand. You get mad quick, and
friends quicker. Everybody takes a turn being the butt of the day’s humor. You’ll get on somebody and ride his ass, and he
better laugh, too, because if he don’t, it’s going to be three days more of ragging.

Sometimes you go crazy. There’s a motel in Fresno that still has a flood line up the side of its adobe wall because we put
Blue Cheer in the water fountain. In Ohio, I stuck a duck from room service behind the heater grill; this was in the summer.
I never went back the next winter to see how it smelled. John Cash once cut off the legs of all the furniture in the room
and then called the bellhop, acting like nothing was the matter.

In 1979, for my forty-second birthday, the remaining members of the Crickets, Joe B and J.I., presented me with a special
gift: the motorcycle that Buddy Holly had bought on his way back to Lubbock in May 1958.

It’s always been one of my favorite Buddy stories. You can see him and the Crickets getting off the plane in Dallas. They
had been touring incessantly since early January, from a World Hit Parade tour that took them as far as Australia, to an English
jaunt and then back to America with Alan Freed and the Big Beat. Returning home after four nonstop months, they must have
been elated at the heights they’d ascended, and badly in need of blowing off a little steam.

They loved Marlon Brando in
The Wild One,
and when they got to Dallas as a connection to Lubbock, they decided on the spur of the moment to buy motorcycles and drive
back home on them. They took a cab into the city and walked into a Harley-Davidson shop. They had their eyes set on a trio
of 74-inchers, but the proprietor didn’t think they had any money and treated them like a bunch of bums. “Hell, you boys couldn’t
even begin to handle the payments on that.”

They then went over to Miller’s Motorcycles, which specialized in English bikes. There, Joe B. and J.I. bought a Triumph each,
a TR6 and Thunderbird, respectively, while Buddy picked out a maroon and black Ariel Cyclone, with a high compression 650cc
Huntmaster engine. They paid cash, bought matching Levi jackets and peaked caps with wings on them, and rode home through
a thunderstorm. For that moment in time, they were on top of the world.

Buddy’s dad had kept the Ariel until 1970, when he sold it to someone in Austin. J.I. and Joe B. found it, had it shipped
up to northern Texas, where on my birthday, I walked into my hotel room after the show and saw it sitting there.

What else could I do? I swung my leg over it, stomped on the kickstarter, and it burst into roaring life. First kick. It was
midnight, and it sounded twice as loud bouncing off the walls of that hotel room. I knew Buddy wouldn’t mind.

On another birthday, they got me but good. We were in Salem, Oregon, and as usual, toward the end of the show, I started “Suspicious
Minds,” at which point Jessi is supposed to walk in from the side of the stage singing it to me with a hand-held microphone.

That night, my road manager, David Trask, slipped on Jessi’s suede dress, her blouse, a wig, and a scarf and put a roll of
paper towel in his hand. I heard Jessi’s voice from the wings, but out comes this
thing
sashaying toward me. I almost swallowed my guitar pick.

David was with me almost eleven years, and I can never forget the first time he worked on my stage. He had come to Nashville
knocking on doors, and Randy Fletcher, our production manager, took a liking to him. He asked him if he could tune guitars.
David figured all you needed to do was line up the strings on a strobe tuner. That night we had a concert at the Houston Livestock
and Rodeo Show. I never did a soundcheck, and they have a custom of driving you around the arena, waving at the crowd, before
depositing you on stage. I walked up to my guitar proudly, slung it over my shoulder, and hit a chord. It was in tune all
right, except the strings were all an octave low.

David hid behind the amp line while I blamed it on Hank Sr.’s ghost. It was such a full-blown mistake that I had to forgive
him, but I told Randy to find him something else to do. About that time, in 1981, I had gathered everyone together and told
them that I was fixing to cut the payroll and scale everything back. Randy said David was honest, and he stayed on to collect
the money and settle the shows.

I didn’t trust too many people at the time. Especially promoters. I wanted my money in cash. Not certified checks. Not cashier’s
checks. Not checks in the mail. Cash. Half as a deposit, and the rest the night of the show.

After five or six shows a week, that would add up to a lot of greenbacks. Sometimes David would come off the road with a couple
of hundred thousand bucks. We had a safe on the bus, but that didn’t rest David’s mind any. Sometimes he’d stuff all the money
in a pillowcase and sleep with it.

You could bet he’d sometimes get paranoid. On another birthday, in Rockford, Illinois, a fan gave me a big mylar balloon.
We brought it on the bus and left it there, while the party traveled up to Minneapolis. About two o’clock in the morning,
my stomach felt upset and I called David looking for Rolaids. “There’s some on the bus,” he said. “I’ll get them for you.”

He went out to the bus, pushed aside the back curtain, flipped the lights on, took the Rolaids out from the drawer. Checked
the safe where the tour money was stashed. Switched off the lights. That mylar balloon had followed him down the aisle, and
as he turned to go, he stared it right in the face. We heard the scream up on the second floor of the hotel.

I’ll tell you how honest David Trask is. Once, in the course of organizing our finances, we audited four years of on-the-road
expenses, down to show percentages and gas receipts. In the end, we owed him a dollar.

We were pulling out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, when the posse surrounded us. Cops everywhere, lights flashing. They pulled out
our driver and held him at gunpoint while they checked identification and vehicle numbers.

I don’t know why they noticed us. I mean, isn’t a bus painted all black, down to the grill and bumpers, just another interstate
vehicle? It turned out a convenience store had been robbed a few miles back, and we fit their description.

When the Black Maria pulled up by the stage door of the theater, people knew who had arrived. Me, too. It was the first real
bus I’d ever owned, a Bluebird. Before that we’d had a succession of limousines and station wagons, beat-up motorhomes and
pickup trucks. Now we were going to travel in style; all of us, band and crew and me, on one bus. We looked ominous.

Hank Sr. rode that bus with us. We’d glance up from our stupors and card playing and he’d be sitting in the front passenger
seat, hat and all. Or we’d be going down a smooth road and hear a clatter from the back. It wasn’t that we were haunted; we
were proud to have his guiding spirit riding shotgun.

Over in the driver’s seat was Harley Pinkerman. He had a little bit of the dandy in him, like Porter Wagoner, with a fine
silver pompadour all puffed up, and he even dressed like him. The rest of us might straggle out of the bus like bums, but
Harley would have on his zipper Beatle boots and a finely decorated jacket. When we’d stop at a biscuit-and-gravy place to
have breakfast, they’d ignore me and go straight for him. “I know y’ins somebody,” they’d say. “Y’ins from the Opry.” They
thought he was the star.

I think Harley drove on the road just to play high-stakes poker. He tells people that he won my bus in a game once, but there’s
no way in his life he could beat me. He did seem to clean up on Bobby Bare, though. One time, there was fifteen thousand dollars
in the pot, all riding on one hand. Bare and Johnny Darrell had dropped out, and it was down to me and Harley. Every time
he would raise me, I’d say, “Harley, better think of the wife and kids.”

We were playing jokers wild. He had three aces showing, and had the good-looking hand, but I had a joker showing, and an ace,
three, four, and five in the hole. Mine was a straight flush. Sometimes you think your eyes are burning through the cards,
you’re looking at them so hard, making sure you ain’t made a mistake. But he’s raising me, and I know all he can have is three
aces. I’ve got his other ace. The only other thing he can have is a full house; you need four of a kind to beat a straight
flush.

“Goddammit, Harley, I’m telling you I got you beat. You knock it off. Quit raising me.” Everytime I said that, he’d pop in
another thousand. The pot was close to twenty grand. Finally, I had to say, “I’m going to call you. I could own you, but I’m
going to call you.”

He turned over his full house and I turned over my straight flush. He ate the fuckin’ cards. Chewed ’em right up.

Later, his daughter Kathy married my son Buddy. When we have a grandchild together, it’ll go to show that blood is thicker
than gasoline.

The Black Maria was a gas-burner, and Harley drove it until I needed to go diesel. Gasoline engines aren’t set up for high
mileages. You needed something to last a million miles. After I put a diesel in it, I gave it to Rick to use for the concessions.
When I decided to sell the Black Maria for good, every rock and roller tried to buy it. I wound up giving it to a local black
church in Nashville, and they still keep it going. That must take some powerful praying.

You got to love your bus. For a time, I never left it. The generator ran for eight straight years; we never turned it off.
We’d just wear them out and get another. When my RCA contract came through in the mid-seventies, I ordered one of the last
Silver Eagles made in Belgium. It’s a legendary bus in country-music circles for good reason, all torsion-bar suspension and
featherbed ride. They upped the luxury standard for country performers considerably when they became popular in the seventies,
just about the time that the interstate system started taking over from the four-lane blacktops. Ninety thousand dollars was
what they cost then, and I’ll never forget when they called me from the airport to say “Your Eagle has landed.” I went out
to look at it and there sat a bus with a seat in it. No tires. I guess all you had to do was flap its wings and it would take
you to Duluth.

After three or four years, we stepped up to a Golden Eagle. When Richie sold it to John Hartford, we bought our first Prevost,
which we called Shooter I. They’re the Cadillacs of tour buses, shifting by computer chip instead of by hand, and they’re
made up in Canada. We’re up to Shooter IV now, and to celebrate, we’ve gone to a forty-five-foot length instead of the usual
forty. That extra not-quite two yards will come in handy over the next hundred thousand miles, and works out to about an inch
every 1666.66 miles. Cheap at twice the price.

“Play ‘Japikta’!” yells some guy out in the audience. I don’t know what he’s talking about. We do one song and then another.

“Play ‘Japikta’!” he hollers again. I never take requests, but I’m curious to understand what he’s asking for. After the third
time he shouts it out, and figuring he ain’t going to stop, I say, “Man, we don’t know that song.”

“Oh, yes you do,” comes the response. “You played it last night.”

I turn back to the band. “You guys know that song?” They shake their heads no.

I’m about to go on with the show, when the guy lets fly with “Play ’Japikta’!” Okay, I think, Mr. Wise-ass. You sing the song.
Which he does: “Japikta fine time to leave me, Lucille.…”

Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule.

There’s always the threat of violence when you get up on stage. You don’t know when trouble will come your way or how you’ll
deal with it.

I recorded a Harlan song for
Nashville Rebel
called “Green River,” but I never liked it. Even when people yelled from the audience for it, I wouldn’t play it. “That’s
a terrible song,” I’d say, half-kidding. “I don’t do that no more.”

One night, I must’ve embarrassed a guy who called it out. I was starting back to the dressing room when he came at me, all
fire in the eyes. He turned me around with one hand on my shoulder and said, “I just wanted to hear ’Green River’ and you
smarted off at me. How’d you like me to slap some of that smartness out of you.”

I was staring at his belt buckle. He was big; he looked like he’d fight a circle saw. I knew I was in trouble. My adrenaline
started flowing. You’re only as fast as your fear carries you, and when you come down to it, there’s only a thin line between
cowards and heroes. Sometimes being one is smarter than going down as another. “Look,” I said to him, “I have had one hundred
and seventy-five fights in my life, and I’ve lost every one of them. You’d do well not to fuck with me because I’m bound to
win one someday.” He started laughing, and so did I, and we became friends after that.

Sometimes the endings weren’t as happy. Over the holiday week that Jessi first came to Phoenix to visit me, we were playing
at J.D.’s. It was traditional for us to celebrate our homecoming right before or after Christmas, and we had just finished
our show for the night. The place had cleared, it was about one-thirty, and I was getting ready to head for the front door.

“Chief!” yelled Jimmy Gray, who played bass for me at the time. “Don’t come out here. There’s a man with a gun!”

I had my black limousine parked by the entrance. Ben Dorsey was driving it. Ben Dorsey. I couldn’t leave the band. Sure enough,
a man was standing there waving a pistol, and he poked it toward me.

I thought I could talk to him. He wasn’t listening. He told me to get Ben out of the car. Ben just sat behind the wheel, frozen.
He had all the doors locked and wouldn’t let anybody in. The guy pointed his gun at my head. “You tell him to open the door
or I’ll blow your brains out.”