Willie Read online

  They hauled me to jail and charged me with first-degree murder.

  First thing after I got out on bail, my phone rang. It was Willie calling from the other end of the country someplace.

  “Don’t you worry about nothing, Marge,” he said. “I’ll be right there as soon as I can.”

  Willie flew down here and testified for me as a character witness. I said, “Willie, don’t you tell no lies on my behalf.” He said, “Marge, I don’t need to tell no lies.”

  He told that jury of six women and six men that he had known me since he was a child, and if I had killed my brother-in-law, I must have had a damn good reason or I’d never have done it.

  The jury decided it was self-defense from the word go.

  Back in 1946 when Bud Fletcher and the Texans began playing at the Nite Owl, they was a hell of a show. Couldn’t no girl pound the piano keys like Bobbie—except for Sissy Elaine Nix, a little-boned person like Bobbie—and Willie was just as cute as he could be. Bud, he was a story all his own. Couldn’t sing or play, but he was the big bullshitter at the microphone who made people laugh and dance. Bud stopped many a potential brawl with his wisecracks from the stage. That Bud, he could talk a fur coat right off a grizzly bear.

  Willie used to bring his first wife, Martha, in the Nite Owl when they was courting and for years after they got married. Martha was the sweetest, most beautiful girl you ever saw unless you made her mad. If you pissed her off, you had a Cherokee on the full warpath.

  I have seen a lot of people grow up in the Nite Owl, and seen their kids grow up, too, and I’ve got a world of friends from forty-four years in the beer business. But how many of your friends get to be superstars and go off to Hollywood—and still fly home to help pull you out of a ditch?

  That little redheaded pissant, he’s a darling, I’ll tell you. He never forgets.

  ZEKE VARNON

  Willie was about sixteen when we started hanging out with each other. I was twenty and just out of military service. What drew us together was we both liked to get drunk and chase girls, and we wore the same size clothes—boots, hat, shirt, pants—so if we wound up staying at my house on Saturday night he could wear my clothes on Sunday.

  We would stand beside the highway in Abbott and hitchhike. If we got a ride heading south, we’d go to Waco. If we got a ride heading north we’d go to Fort Worth. We liked moving around a lot, but we didn’t have no car. One time we decided to go to California, so we packed our bags and waited for a freight train coming through. We throwed our bags on a passing boxcar, and then the train started going faster and we run like bastards to catch it but we couldn’t. Our bags went to California, I guess, but we wound up at the Nite Owl or someplace.

  Willie liked jumping freights. I remember he had a big army coat with deep pockets in it. He was broke and starving to death. He went to a supermarket in Fort Worth and loaded up with sardines and crackers. At the cashier stand, Willie said he had to get his checkbook and would be right back. Instead he run straight to the railroad yard and hopped a freight train bound for California—but it turned out to be a local. The train stopped in Weatherford, Mineral Wells, and all points west. Willie got off and caught a freight back to Fort Worth.

  Willie had more moxie in those days than anybody I ever saw. We were sitting in Scotty’s Tavern, playing dominoes and watching the Monday night fights on TV. A guy at the bar is making comments like he is some kind of expert. Willie says, “I’ll bet you ten bucks on the fighter in the white trunks.” They fought another round, and the guy at the bar says, “Let’s make it ten more.”

  Willie says, “Shit, let’s make it thirty.”

  We didn’t have a dollar between us. If Willie had lost that bet, they’d have beat the pure hell out of us. I asked him later, “Just what did you intend to do if White Trunks got knocked on his ass?” Willie said, “Aw, I’d have thought of something.”

  Willie had a job for a while wearing an apron and waiting on tables, if you can imagine such a sight, and he played in a polka band on weekends, and pretty soon we bought us a 1934 Ford that was a running son of a bitch. It was about three different colors with tires so threadbare and slick you couldn’t take off without spinning the wheels. Trouble with it was, the gas tank leaked. On a Saturday we went by to pick up Willie’s girlfriend at a government housing project. Willie goes inside to wait on the girl and I doze off at the wheel. I wake up to some kid pounding on the window and shouting, “Wake up, your car is on fire.”

  I jumped out of the damn thing and the gas tank exploded. When Willie and the girl come running out, it was a hell of a blaze. The girl says, “What are we gonna do?”

  Willie says, “We’re just going to wait around like everybody else and watch this car burn and then go get drunk.”

  That put us back on foot.

  We went into the bootlegging business. You couldn’t buy liquor in Waco. We scraped all our money together and went to Fort Worth and bought half-pints of whiskey. Coming back we stopped at the old Yellow Dog beer joint—run by Chief Edwards, who had practically raised me and never been seen to touch his lips to whiskey. We pull out a half-pint. Willie takes a drink. I take a drink. Chief Edwards grabs the bottle and drinks it dry. The Chief lets out a whoop, throws his hat on the floor, and stomps the shit out of it. We pull another bottle and kill it. Eventually we wobble to Hillsboro, where some drunk flags us down and asks if we’ve got any whiskey. We sell him a half-pint for $2. We got so happy we’d actually sold a bottle, we celebrated and drank some more. Before you know it, we was but of whiskey and had $2 left in the world. Willie and me wasn’t cut out to be bootleggers is the lesson to that story. We was meant to drink it, not sell it.

  Willie decided to get married. Not to Martha, his first wife, but another girl. Willie’s mother, Myrle, come down from Oregon for the wedding. They was to get married on Saturday night. Saturday morning Willie says he needs a haircut. We set off to the barbershop in Waco. But on the way we stop at the Yellow Dog to see the Chief. We got drunk at the Yellow Dog and didn’t come back for the wedding. Didn’t see the girl again until years later when Willie was playing Panther Hall in Fort Worth. They had a sign outside that said WILLIE NELSON TEXAS. Willie walks up with this girl and asks if I remember her. I say I don’t think I do.

  “Well, I will sure as hell never forget you,” she says. “You’re the reason I ain’t Mrs. Willie Nelson Texas.”

  Nothing would faze Willie, and even if it did he’d never let you know it. There was a truckstop near the Melody Ranch where they put hot peppers and homemade chowchow on the tables that would burn the gut out of a locomotive. The first time we went there, Willie ordered enchiladas and eggs. He took a spoon and heaped chowchow on top of his plate and poured hot peppers on top of the chowchow and stirred it into a mess that practically had smoke rising from it. All the guys were watching. Willie ate a bite. He started sweating. Knowing the guys were watching, he shoveled more enchiladas and peppers into his mouth. By now, tears were pouring down his cheeks. But he ate the whole damn thing, sweating and crying and acting like it was delicious. Finally somebody asked if he might like a glass of water. Willie said, “Water ain’t the right thing to drink with enchiladas. How about a glass of sweet milk?” He drank a gallon of sweet milk. But all he’d say was, “Man, I love them peppers. I just wish they’d get some hot ones in here.”

  Willie has a way of wiggling out of tight spots like one of them lizards that you grab and the tail comes off in your hand. We were living at the Grandy Courts in Waco when a guy comes to the door Willie didn’t want to see. Willie slithered under the bed. I let the guy in and said, “Willie ain’t here, but he should be back sometime tonight. Sit down and wait, why don’t you?” So I left, and Willie laid under the bed for hours until the old boy got tired of waiting and finally left. Another guy heard Willie had been messing around with his wife and came looking for him with a gun. Me and Willie borrowed a gun for self-defense from Chief Edwards. We sat in the Grandy with the light
s out, watching this fellow parked across the street who had the full intention of shooting Willie full of holes. Eventually Willie decided the wisest thing to do was crawl out the back window and put some healthy distance between him and the Grandy Courts.

  I took Willie to Tyler, Texas, when he got out of the air force and introduced him to my foreman, Curly Ingram. I had gotten a job with the Aspundh Expert Tree Company. The Aspundh Company hired Willie for 80¢ an hour. He started off driving a truck and immediately ran over some kid’s red wagon, which cost Willie $16—two days’ pay.

  They put Willie on the ground crew with me. Aspundh is a huge company that does all kinds of things with trees—like cut them away from utility lines and such. As ground men, Willie and I didn’t have to do no climbing. But there was one great big elm tree that was interfering with the electric lines and causing no end of trouble. A worker up in the tree hollered down to send up a bull rope. Willie says, “I’ll bring it up to you.”

  He slings the bull rope over his shoulder, climbs up an extension ladder, gets to the top of the tree, crawls out on a limb. The guy takes the bull rope and says, “No need to fool with climbing back down. You just catch hold of this rope on this limb and slide to the ground.”

  Game for anything, Willie wraps the rope around his hand and bails out of the tree.

  But instead of sliding, he got hung way up in the air with the rope twisted around his hand.

  Willie starts yelling, “I’m a goner! I’m a goner!”

  We yelled, “Hold on Willie.”

  About that moment the rope comes untwisted and Willie starts sliding down it like a cannonball, the flesh burning off his hands. He hit the ground hard with his hands peeled plumb to the bone, like he’d been sizzled in a fire.

  Willie looks at me and says, “Zeke, I don’t believe trees is my line of work.”

  He told Curly to keep his job open for him, and he took off. You know, years later the Aspundh Tree Company offered Willie $100,000 to do a concert for their annual convention.

  Willie started making a little money with his records, but he couldn’t keep track of it. My brother Cliff was in the real estate and insurance business in Texarkana, which we figured meant he knew all about money. Willie asked my brother if he’d handle his affairs for ten percent. Willie had never met my brother, but they struck a deal and set up a company called Willie Nelson Enterprises. Cliff was to pay the bills, take care of the legal stuff, and I was to get a little cut out of the action. Willie was paying $300 a month in child support, so my brother took over that responsibility. Then I talked Cliff into letting Willie have all his credit cards—Texaco, Diners Club, everything. Willie started running them bills up.

  My brother come to me and says, “How well do you know Willie Nelson, anyhow?”

  “How come?” I says.

  “Well, God damn, they’re taking my credit cards away from me because of him.”

  I called Willie and he came to Texarkana in a brand-new bus that he was driving his own self with his whole band on it. It was summer, the air conditioner was running on the bus, and Willie was wearing a bathing suit. He left the air conditioner on while we got quite drunk. I don’t recall exactly how Willie and Cliff worked it out, but I do know it was many years before Willie had another credit card.

  After Willie moved to Austin, we opened a pool hall on South Congress Avenue. It was a damn good place. Mom and Pop Nelson came down to help run it. We had a big beer garden in back—the Charlie Peepers Memorial Beer Garden—where we played dominoes and cooked barbecue goats with marijuana sprinkled on them. Every time we played music in the beer garden, the police showed up. Oh, we had fun at that pool hall. One night I lost the keys and had to sleep there on the couch. I woke up at seven in the morning and some girl was using the pay phone. She started living with me that day. Don’t fate work in mysterious ways?

  We had a big NO SMOKING sign in the back room. Willie would come in and say, “Let’s go to the No Smoking Room and burn a reefer.”

  One day much later, sitting in the No Smoking Room, high as raccoons, we was listening to Leon Payne’s old song, “I Love You Because,” on the jukebox. That was one of our favorite songs when we was younger. It made me nostalgic.

  I said, “Willie, do you remember that old song?”

  He looked at me and said, “Son of a bitch, I should remember it. Ain’t that me singing?”

  Sure as shit, it was.

  SYBIL GREENHAW YOUNG

  The reason my family came to the Pacific Northwest is we didn’t have enough work in Arkansas. My husband and I ran a dairy farm back in Tindall, Arkansas, and there was a bad drought. It took what we made off the milk just to feed the cows. So we finally just settled out here in Washington State.

  My sister Myrle had lived in Oregon for a long time. She moved to Washington when her husband Ken just practically went blind. He could hardly see at all. My son went to Oregon and got them and moved them up here. Myrle loved the scenery and the climate in this part of the country. She needed somebody to help her with Ken, but she didn’t want to leave this area so she came to live near us.

  Back in Arkansas our dad made moonshine mostly for himself and friends. The Greenhaws all played music and could sing, except for me. I happened to be the dumb one, I guess. Dad played the banjo. My youngest brother, Carl, was a really good piano player. Myrle sang and played the guitar like my other two brothers, but I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

  The Nelson family lived not too far from the Greenhaws in Tindall. They were practically neighbors. The families got together to play music. I guess that’s how Myrle met Willie’s daddy, Ira. I was only five years old when Myrle married Ira and moved to Texas. We were a poor family, so I couldn’t go visit her.

  Willie’s Indian blood comes from my mother Bertha Greenhaw, who was three-quarters Cherokee. I guess you would say three-quarters because Bertha’s mother—my grandmother—was full-blooded Cherokee. My granddad was half Cherokee and half Irish.

  So if Willie says he’s an Indian, that’s a fact. The Cherokees were about the smartest, proudest people that ever lived.

  Martha is Willie’s first wife and the mother of Lana, Susie, and Billy.

  Marge Lunde for forty-four years has owned the Nite Owl, a beer joint where Willie and Bobbie performed as teenagers.

  Zeke Varnon is a close friend of Willie’s since teenage days.

  Sybil Greenhaw Young is Willie’s mother’s sister.

  PART THREE

  Night Life

  Night Life

  When the evening sun goes down

  You will find me hangin’ ’round;

  The night life ain’t a good life,

  But it’s my life.

  Many people just like me,

  Dreamin’ of old used to be’s.

  The night life ain’t a good life,

  But it’s my life.

  Listen to the blues that they’re playin’

  Listen to what the blues are sayin’

  My, it’s just another scene

  From the world of broken dreams;

  The night life ain’t a good life,

  But it’s my life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Even though they had given her the middle name of Jewel, it never occurred to me to wonder if Martha’s parents might have spoiled her to the point where she thought she could always get her own way. I didn’t consider it because I had been so spoiled my own self that I naturally assumed I would always get my own way.

  Bind two spoiled kids together with a marriage license and mix in a heavy dose of passionate love along with a tendency to drink and party all night, and you come up with Martha and me—the battling Nelsons. Young and dumb and in love.

  There was a frantic quality to our love. If I didn’t know where Martha was at any time, I would get a feeling of anxiety in my stomach. When she walked into the room, my heart would pound like the bass drum in the Abbott High band and I would feel so elated I could hardly breathe.
It was a coin toss whether love caused us more pain and anguish than it did pleasure.

  Trust was not a part of our marriage. I think we thought we knew each other too well to trust each other. Basically I was just not that trustworthy. When you’re young and have a guitar and are playing for dances and all those girls come after you, and you drink a lot, you are going to do things that your wife is not going to like. So I was responsible for our early problems. Another woman would probably have divorced me long before Martha did.

  Right from the beginning Martha suspected I was running around on her. She was wrong in the beginning, but she wasn’t wrong very long. I accused her of running around on me, too. I don’t know if she really was in those days, but she might as well have been because I kept throwing it up to her.

  Our journey to Eugene, Oregon, to introduce Martha to my mother was not what you would call a huge success. Going up there, we’d drive a while, fight a while, make love a while, and then drive some more. When we got to Eugene, the only job I could find was as a plumber’s helper. For a guy who thought he was a star, crawling under houses with a monkey wrench was not at all what I had in mind.

  “You could have stayed home and worked for my daddy if you want to be a plumber,” Martha would tell me. She was right. W. T. Mathews was a plumber, and his wife Etta sewed all Martha’s clothes. Her being right pissed me off all the more.

  Martha worked as a waitress in Eugene. She could always find a job as a waitress anywhere we went, because she was so beautiful and smart and she worked hard. Even if she’d been the laziest-ass waitress in town, they’d have hired her. One look at Martha in her poodle skirt and sweater, bobby sox and loafers, her Cherokee black hair and black eyes shining, her laughter like music, it would have taken a blind eunuch not to hire her. You didn’t meet many blind eunuchs who ran honky-tonks.