Wayne's big idea was to put up all the money we had and borrow the rest in order to finance the recording of “New Eyes,” and then travel all over the South with it ourselves, from radio station to radio station, which we did, talking them into putting it on the air, which they did, and then getting the local record stores to order it when the requests for it started coming in. We also sold the records ourselves, of courseâwe had the whole trunk of that Chevrolet full of “New Eyes.” Louis Carbone, the little fat guy, was our mail distributor. And I have to say, all of this happened just like Wayne said it would. We were still in that period when everything that Wayne said would happen did.
It was a crazy, close time, those months in the Chevrolet with Wayne, crisscrossing the South. I don't believe it is possible for two people to be any closer than we were in that car, which came to be our home, eating in it drinking in it fighting in it, sleeping on the side of the road. I remember waking up real early one morning someplace in north Georgia and looking up to find a grinning Negro's face pressed right up against the window looking in, and my skirt hiked up to my waist. I just kept on acting like I was asleep, because to tell you the truth, I was too tired to care. I lost fifteen pounds on that trip and missed Annie May something terrible even though I knew she was having the time of her life with Wayne's sister Rhonda, who was real fat and never had been able to have children and therefore loved Annie May to death.
Sometimes I puzzled over how Rhonda's husband had acted when I took Annie May over there before we left, how he sat me down in a reclining chair and said, “Now are you absolutely sure you want to go off with Wayne Ricketts thisaway?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “I mean, I reckon.” I looked at him, he was a man that drove a Merita Bread truck and went to church regular, you had to respect his opinion. “What do you mean?” I said.
Rhonda was hovering around us like a big old moth. “Now Don,” she said.
“Well, dammit, Rhonda,” Don said.
“This is a
big girl
,” Rhonda said, punching him. “She knows what she's doing.”
“I just think you ought to tell herâ” Don said.
“Tell her what?”
Rhonda snapped. “You leave her alone, Don. Wayne deserves a chance in life just like anybody else.” Rhonda thought Wayne hung the moon, and that he had been dogged by bad luck and bad women. Later, both Don and I would find out how much of their life savings she had put up for Wayne's and my trip. “Now you all have fun, honey,” Rhonda said, and hugged me. “Send us some postcards. Annie May, come over here and hug Mamma, she's a-fixing to go, honey,” and Annie May did.
I sent her about a million postcards from that trip, and Rhonda helped her put them all in a scrapbook which Annie May has kept to this day, it's real sweet.
I got to missing her awful bad one time in particular after we had been traveling about a month. It was raining, we were driving, and I started crying and telling Wayne I just wanted to go back on the Hayride and get that steady check again and forget it, forget this whole thing. Without even slowing down or changing his expression, Wayne reached over and slapped me hard. “You don't seem to appreciate what all I'm doing for you, girl,” he said. I fell against the door, and then I just grabbed the handle and flung the door open and leaped out, right as Wayne pulled over on the side of the road, zigzagging like crazy. Car horns were blowing everyplace, Wayne was yelling, then I went sliding down a wet leafy bank, and then I was out for a minute, and when I came to, Wayne was down there with me, saying, “Honey, are you all right?” over and over, and the soft summer rain was falling on my face. A couple of other men, truckers I guess, stood up by the road looking down. “Everything all right?” one of them hollered.
“Fine! Just a little accident, door came open,” Wayne hollered back.
Later that day, when we stopped for coffee, he let me call Rhonda. “Lordy, I'm so glad you called!” was the first thing she said. She went on to tell me that a special doctor had said that if Annie May could have two operations in Houston, she would be able to walk just fine. The operations would cost around twenty-five hundred dollars, Rhonda said, but that was cheap because it was a new procedure and they needed candidates for it. Annie May was an ideal candidate, the doctor said. The operations involved some kind of a nerve transplant.
I walked back out to where Wayne was drinking coffee, and told him I was sorry I'd got upset, and I did appreciate what all he was doing for me, and I wanted “New Eyes” to be a hit just as much as he did.
Well, it wasn't a
big
hit, but as a result of that trip it did get picked up and reissued on the Four Star label out of Nashville, and it got a lot of airplay, enough to where Wayne and me started getting plenty of requests for club dates and dances and such, and we went on to cut another one of mine, “Call Me Back When You've Got Time,” which did all right for me, but
really
hit when Dawn Chapel recorded it. That's the one most people have heard, Dawn Chapel's version.
Shoot, I didn't care! Annie May had those two operations in Houston, and they were a big success, and then she went into regular school at Pearson Town Elementary in Shreveport, just like anybody else. I don't know what I would have done without Rhonda during this period, as Wayne had us working all the time.
“When you're hot, you're hot, when you're not, you're not,” he'd say. “Come on baby, get with it.”
Wayne had kind of a genius for getting good bands together, he could talk anybody into anything, as I said. When we cut “Call Me Back When You've Got Time,” we had a great steel guitar player, Ralph Handy, and Emory Marlowe on the bass, and Roy Hart on drums. Later we had Little Billy Burnett. We had several different fiddlers. Now all of these were real nice guys that had been around the Hayride for years, and Ralph Handy was particularly nice. He was a big, solid man whose daddy was a preacher over in Arkansas, and he was still real close to his daddy and to his whole family in fact. He talked about them a lot, things they'd done growing up, pranks they'd pulled, and all of this made me think about Grassy Branch. I got to missing everybody, even Virgie and Mamma Tampa!
But I was not about to callâI couldn't, I knew exactly what Mamma would think of how I was living down there. I knew what she would think of Wayne. I couldn't stand to think about her praying over me. Wayne Ricketts and I finally did get married, though I don't know why we bothered.
By then it was becoming real clear to me how bad Wayne was to drink. It took a long time for me to understand this, because he was not a spree drinker like Grandaddy had been, or a falling-down drinker like Daddy, but a daylong drinker who gets to a certain point and keeps it there all day. Wayne used to refer to this point as his “plateau.” He used to say he was “plateaued out” when he got to where he wanted to be.
I couldn't do anything about it, because by then I was drinking, too.
And if you think that is awful, then you don't know anything much about life, or understand anything at all about this business. You get real tired, so you need a liftâyou've got to get up for a showâthen after the show you're real wired, you can't sleep, so you need a drink to come down. Then you start feeling bad, so you need pills, too. At first you get your pills from this doctor that a friend has recommended, then you just find yourself a pharmacist who will sell them to you when you want them, then you find yourself a man who will bring them around to your house. You get to where you need a lot of help. Don't tell me! I know all about it. I will never pass judgment on anybody. Believe me, I know all about it. It just happens, it all seems real natural at the time.
During this period Wayne went down to New Orleans and bought us a tour bus from a Cajun family, the Matilles. I
knew
we didn't have the money, but Wayne said we had to have the bus, it was an investment in the future, and he had already taken care of the financing. “How?” I asked him point-blank.
“Trust me,” Wayne said. Then he said, “Come here, baby, I want to show you this bus,” and he smiled that big smile and took my hand and led me outside to see it, and I had to say, it
was
nice, not really much of a bus by today's standards, but it did have nice maroon plush seats and a bar and bunk beds and the cutest little bathroom with a mirror that had lights all around it.
I was looking in the mirror when Wayne flicked the lights on.
“These here are
star
lights,” he said. “Just for you.”
“Oh, Wayne,” I said, looking at myself and at his face behind me in the mirror. “Oh no, honey,” I said, because then he reached around and started unbuttoning my shirt.
“I've got a bottle of champagne in this here little refrigerator,” he said, “just waiting on you.”
I followed him back in there and we got drunk in that trailer at two o'clock in the afternoon, me wearing nothing but capri pants and a bra.
This is how we lived.
So it was not altogether a surprise when the federal agents finally caught up with Wayne. It seems like he had been doing some real creative financing, under several different names, for a period of years. Well, to make a long sad story short, Wayne was given ten years. I got a suspended sentence and a fine. They seized the tour bus, our new Cadillac, the Chevrolet, our house, even Annie May's prize pony, Boots. Annie May just cried her eyes out when they took Boots. For four days, she was too upset and embarrassed to go to school. Annie May and me had to move in with Rhonda and Don, and then I had to go in the hospital for a while, as I was suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Most of this sad time is a blur to me. I remember two of these days real good, though.
One is while I was still in the hospital. I had been refusing to cooperate much with the nurses. To tell the truth, I had been just mostly laying there thinking about Wayne and trying to figure out how I had let him get such an awful hold over me, for I had to admit, in my own heart, that I
had
known, someplace deep down where I was not admitting it, that he was up to no good. I knew he was breaking the law. I reckon I had come to think Wayne was above the law, or beyond it someway. But I also knew better. You always know
everything
, don't you? Only you won't let yourself know you know it, a lot of times you
can't
let yourself know it, because you can't stand to know what you know. You can't stand what that knowing might tell you about yourself. And I was flat up against it there in that hospital. Every day I'd let myself know just a little bit more. This was what I was doing in my mind, opening a door, inch by inch.
I was also drying out, which is what is meant by “recovering from nervous exhaustion.”
So I already had plenty to deal with when the lady doctor came in my room very early one morningâour room, actually I had two roommates, it was the state mental hospital if you want to knowâand said, “Miss Cocker? Miss Cocker? Look at me, please.”
I looked at her. She had gray hair and looked like a fireplug. “Miss Cocker, are you aware that you are pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” I said.
“Yes, ma'am. Absolutely,” the lady doctor said.
I started crying. I believe I had known this, too.
“Well, what do you want to do about it? Do you wish to abort?” she asked. She had a northern voice but she sounded kind.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, I don't,” for in that moment it seemed to me like
something
had to come out of all this, all this pain and craziness which had been my life with Wayne Ricketts.
For a minute she put her hand, cool and smooth, on my forehead. She stroked my hair. “I'll be back,” she said. “I will urge you to reconsider. It's time you thought about yourself, I believe, Miss Cocker.”
So I lay there for a while, and then all of a sudden, the truth came to me.
Katie
, I heard a voice as clear as a bell.
Katie, sit up
. So I sat up. I looked around but nobody was in my room except my roommates sleeping their drugged sleep. The sun was coming up outside.
Katie Cocker
, I heard. I could tell it was a voice from home, from up on Grassy Branch. It sounded something like Little Virginia, a woman's voice, but it was not anybody I knew. It was a voice I had not ever heard before, yet it was as familiar to me as my own. Maybe it
was
my own, in some crazy way which is past understanding. I listened for more.
Katie, girl,
I heard.
You can either lay in this bed for the rest of your life, or you can get up and make something of yourself. It's up to you. You've got some more singing to do. Get up
.
So I got up. I got out of there. Of course it took me a little while. I had to convince the lady doctor that I was not going to have an abortion, and I had to convince everybody else that I was all right. I reckon I had been so far gone that this took some real effort on my part! But finally they let me go, and Don came and got me, driving the Merita truck. It smelled so good in there, he had just picked up the bread for his route.
When I got back to the house, everybody had something to show me. Annie May showed me a picture she had drawn of a horse, and I have to say it was real good. It was wearing a crown hat. “He is the king of all the horses,” Annie May said. “His queen is named Judy.” Annie May showed me some more horses she'd drawn, and then a bunch of drawings of houses with smoke coming out of the chimney, and I started crying. I was still weak from the hospital, and still taking tranquilizers. Rhonda brought out some of Annie May's writing, too. It was just as even and pretty as could be.