Why there is country music, I now think I know.  Before I went to jail, I don’t think I did.  It was a painful swish down the social drain. 

 

After years of playing folk, bluegrass, and country, I once performed on the Grand Old O'Pry in 1971, when Bud Wendell was the General Manager and ran the show from the Ryman Auditorium.  This, of course, was before Opryland - back when men were men, unless they weren't white, women in the front rows nursed their children seemingly up to the age of twelve, and “country music” actually had, on occasion, something to do with rural life. Everybody in the world who liked country music in 1971 was tuned to their radio every Saturday night to listen to the Grand Old O’pry.

 

I was in a trio called The Drambuies, if you can believe it. (My ancestral family played a small role in the story of Charles Edward Stuart -Bonnie Prince Charlie - for whom the concoction now called Drambuie was created: it is honey and scotch, for the most part.  Whether that excuses the choice of name for the group, it is the only explanation.)   My soon-to-be wife played the bass fiddle, which was an unusual instrument for a woman back then.  I played guitar, and our partner doubled on guitar and banjo.  We all sang, and we had been chosen best college act the year previous in a national competition sponsored by Budweiser.  We were actually far from that, but we weren’t that bad, either.

 

We decided, for one of our slots, to do a medley: a song by the Osbourne Brothers called Roll, Muddy River and medley it with Proud Mary, a song by Credence Clearwater.

 

It was a fun and exciting medley, and we had a terrific banjo player.  The crowd was appreciative (there are no better audiences) if totally ignorant they were listening to a rock song for a verse.  For the first time in my life I had people waiting for autographs.   Actually, for the only time in my life.  Everyone, it seemed, liked us.  

 

But not Bud Wendell, who was politely apoplectic.  We were not going to be asked back, whatever the audience reaction.  I was not then cognizant of mysteries like music publishing concerns, and who owned the rights - and who did not - all covered by the gossamer of Respect for Country and Western Music, which we did not have in his correct opinion.

 

Not that I cared, really.  I rather openly disliked country music, because I thought it then, as now, a melodramatic reading of existence by yowling women and men with affected catches in their voices emoting on boring, drunken, and rather stupid lives reeking of false sentiment and hypocrisy, all under the looming threat of violence. I mean, really.  How many people lived like that, for God’s sake?  What melodramatic fiction. 

 

That D-I-V-O-R-C-E was a shocking word to Southern Baptists in Tammy Wynett's audience I took as my illustrative example.  Of course, so was E-M-A-N-C-I-P-A-T-I-O-N to the same group. In the early 1990’s, by the by, the Southern Baptists finally apologized for their rather interesting views on slavery, which could best be described as tepid enthusiasm.

 

This was, and is, fascinating from just about every point of view, especially hypocritical ones.

 

First, that it took a century and a quarter for anyone with pretensions of civilization to reach the conclusion that slavery might have been, you know, wrong. And second - please correct me if I’m incorrect here - aren’t these the same people parading around outside abortion clinics and claiming their fight for the rights of the unborn were equal to the struggle of the Abolitionists in the last century? If so, the huge sucking sound you here is the intake of breath from John Brown’s ghost.

Stay on message…….  I used to hate Country Music.  It rang no bells with me.  For others, I guess.  Because, bluntly, I was above that sort of thing.   

When the Boulder Theater was open under my management, I found myself, at the end, having simultaneous affairs with four women, only three of whom endured for any length of time.  Does that sound like pathetic bragging?  Let me assure you it was true and nobody was more surprised than me.  Least surprised were later mandated therapists who said it wasn’t all that odd for bi-polars to go into rut under stress, as it were, and see what the market would bear.  It was far from typical for me.

Two of the three were married.  By the time I went to jail, I was down to one devoted friend.  Within two weeks of my incarceration, she announced she was involved with two men not her husband or myself, was getting divorced, and didn't want to come see me any more because it was too depressing. 

Indeed. 

During that last visit, she said nothing unless in direct reply to my labored conversation.   Only the visit from a very ill relative was worse.

‘Visiting’ at the jail is under both physical and camera surveillance.  My module, G-Pop (General Population), had a morning visitation period and an evening one.  Guests are searched, and you yourself receive a full body search at its completion, including an anal inspection.  Whatever happiness was granted by the visit can sometimes vaporize during the final process. 

 But at the point of my friend’s departure, the stripping and search by an annoying guard seemed almost a friendly gesture.  Of course, this wimpy and odd deputy couldn’t resist his natural sadism.  “Have a nice visit?” he asked, having sat four feet away and watched what must have been an awful scene.   I remember that.  He had blonde hair cut somewhere between a ducktail and a butch, glasses, and an eerily creepy manner. (He made me think of the villain in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, minus that worthy’s speech impediment).  Many of the inmates thought - or chose to think - that he was a predator.  Regardless, I’m willing to believe that my fleeting contact with women when I was in jail exceeded his in his life. 

When you get back to your cell after such an event, and memories come crowding around you, and all your mental energies go into staying sane, and your senses take on disproportionate intensity, and you feel The Black Dog breathing round your neck, and all your thought goes towards fighting it off - when that happens, and you find yourself sitting on the  bunk with your hands out in the air before you, palms down, and you tell yourself and gesture to yourself to just calm down, for God’s sake, you can handle this - because you have to - you sense and hear things not noticed before.  For example, something could, you know, happen in here - you could lose it and hit someone - and if you live you’ll never see anyone you love again. 

 

For example, you are now in jail with seemingly everyone you had ever thrown out of your bar or had ever tried to extort money from you for presumed indiscretions (man, were they in need of remedial target selection...) or who had ever threatened you.  Fortunately, they had either been too drunk to recall or were now too smart to mention it.

 

For example, there is a large spider, probably poisonous, climbing the wall by your bed.  It is now directly overhead.  Only recently I had written a silly poem about a spider and sent it to a child I knew.   This one looks ominous. (Everyone’s a critic....)

 

For example, your cellmate actually drools.

 

For example, the train...

 

The Boulder County Jail is up on a rise by the airport east of town, and all sound is received.  There is a ridiculous railroad spur that runs not far from the Boulder jail; there is a north-south track around 33rd St.  And another out by 47th.  There may be more; I don’t notice them in a car very much; for all I know, their entire contribution to the nation’s economy may be causing ten thousand autos a day to idle their engines for eight minutes per crossing.

 

I wondered if my visitor was stuck at the 47th Street crossing, and if she would have to wait it out on her way home, or if she had any thoughts for me at all.  At all.  Had she ever, in fact.  Did I have any for her?  Had I ever?

 

Nearing fifty, my heartbreaks now were indistinguishable from those at sixteen.  I wanted to kill, I thought.  I wanted to shred somebody.  I wanted a drink.  I wanted a bad band playing “Willing” and a lovely, compliant woman with large breasts, no bra, and red lipstick to dance with slow and close, and sigh with desire against my chest while I ran my hands up and down, down her back.  Every corny folk and pop song in the world suddenly and momentarily again attained deep significance to me, all written in blood obtained by a lousy poet’s botched suicide.  In past times, singing those songs to myself proved an effective emetic for the blues.  I started in...

 

...and they didn’t touch or move me at all that night.  Could not believe they had ever moved me. They weren’t remotely real in my actuality.

 

That night in the Boulder County Jail, while I heard a diesel’s whistle echo deeply against the Rocky Mountains like a riverboat distant in miles and time, I sang to myself the cliché-ridden songs requiring drone notes on strung instruments, and that there never be audio compression so that the strain and vocal cracks remain, and a room with wooden walls smelling of cheap grain booze and papered with memories of another’s heartache.  I sang the songs of Ernest Tubbs, and Bill Monroe and Patsy Cline and thought about where I had been a year, two years, three years ago.  And where, oh god, I would be next year if I just made it to tomorrow.   (I never thought, think, or talk like that.)  I sounded like a dreadful made-for-TV movie.   It was surreal, and painful, and never-ending, and oh my sweet Jesus Christ please help me make it through the night.  Because I had twenty-two years to go, they told me.

 

I had again seen the proverbial Elephant.  He was, in fact, leaning on my shoulder in a jail cell and wanted a drink as much as I did.  I now had finally heard the aching whistle blow, and the solemn whippoorwill, and I was so lonesome I could cry.    

 

I really was.