Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Read online

  —And the immortal: “I gave her a ring and she gave me a finger.”

  I also believe that all country music should fall under one of the following categories:

  —CHEATIN’ SONGS: She ran off.

  —LOVIN’ AND FORGIVIN’ SONGS: She came back.

  —HURTIN’ SONGS: The hussy ran off again.

  —DRINKIN’ SONGS: Nobody here to cook me anything to eat, so I might as well get drunk.

  —TRUCKIN’ SONGS: She run off on a train. I think I’ll derail that sucker.

  —PRISON SONGS: They take derailing trains serious in Mississippi.

  —RODEO SONGS: Soon as she got out of the hospital after the train wreck, she took up with a bullrider.

  —NEVER-GIVE-UP-HOPE SONGS: I wonder if her sister still lives in Tupelo.

  * * *

  I’ve taken a lot of abuse in my lifetime for being a country music fan, but it’s all been worth it. Quite frankly, country music has helped me through many tough times. Whatever the problem, there’s always meaning in country music, something to lean on.

  Want to know what’s really important in life? Country music has the answer to that in Tom T. Hall’s “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine”:

  “Old dogs care about you,

  Even when you make mistakes.

  And God bless little children,

  While they’re still too young to hate.

  I tried it all when I was young,

  And in my natural prime.

  Now, it’s old dogs and children,

  And watermelon wine.”

  Freedom. There are times I have paid dearly to get it or to regain it. Perhaps I should have listened to Kris Kristofferson:

  “Freedom’s just another word

  For nothin’ left to lose....”

  There is something about country music that should appeal to every writer, to everyone who has something in his heart and wants others to feel what he feels.

  I’ve written lots of country songs, myself. Unfortunately, nobody has ever bothered to record one, but that still doesn’t stop me from having a few beers occasionally and knocking out a few country lyrics — which is the way most country songs come to be written. People who write rock songs, on the other hand, apparently do so while being stoned (in the Biblical sense).

  I’ve written some very poignant country songs, as a matter of fact. After a six-pack one night, I came up with this one:

  “Singles bars ain’t no place,

  Ain’t no place for a lady.

  It’s dark, talk is cheap,

  And the men are all shady.

  But where does she go,

  And is it so wrong,

  When a lady’s been single too long?”

  Impressed? That’s nothing. I also wrote:

  “You say she gave you her number, friend

  Well ain’t that just fine.

  I know it’s Heartbreak six, fourteen-ten,

  ’Cause that number used to be mine.”

  I even wrote a train song once, and it went something like this:

  “Sweet, sweet Jesus,

  I never gave you thanks

  That once as a youth,

  Through the middle of Georgia,

  I rode the Nancy Hanks.”

  Sometimes when the lyrics won’t come, when the beer won’t go down easy, I write titles instead. I have some wonderful new titles just waiting for words.

  How about, “I’d Marry Your Dog Just to Be a Part of Your Family”?

  Or, “Who’s Gonna Cut My Toenails After You’re Gone?”

  I like this one, too: “You Threw Up On the Carpet of My Love;” or, “You’ll Never Get Away From Me Darling, Because Even When You’re Taking a Shower with Somebody Else, I’ll Be the Soap on Your Rag.”

  The words to that one will probably go something like this:

  “I know I whine a lot

  And occasionally I nag,

  But you’ll never get away from me, darling,

  ’Cause even when you’re taking a shower

  With somebody else,

  I’ll be the soap on your rag.”

  I admit it needs a little work, but at least you get the idea.

  Perhaps the real point here is that when Elvis and rock ’n’ roll came along and caught me as a boy, I followed them off despite my parents’ rages against them. But when they led too far, country music called me back, and I forevermore will be grateful. Without it, who knows? I might have wound up one day with hair down to my shoulders, sandals on my feet, a ghetto blaster over my shoulder, and smelling like The Goat Man.

  The Goat Man? He may have been the original hippie.

  7

  Hairy Ode to the Goat Man

  TAKE IT ALL down to the lowest common denominator, shake off all the dust and heave out all the bull, and most of the problems we had with each other in the late sixties and early seventies really were about hair.

  Think about it. Let’s suppose that student protesters who were burning buildings and marching and demonstrating against the war in Vietnam had shown up at the rallies wearing khaki pants, nice button-down, blue Oxford-cloth shirts, Weejuns, and short hair. I contend we wouldn’t have had near the commotion that we did.

  Older people would have looked at them and instead of saying, “You godless, bed-wetting, pinko, Commie, nasty, long-haired hippies,” they might have said, “Gee, those youngsters certainly are vocal against the war, but isn’t it wonderful to see boys and girls that age taking an active interest in government.”

  I’m not certain why, but most rebellions, however small, usually start with somebody doing something funky with their hair. Remember that at the Boston Tea Party, American revolutionaries grew their hair long, put it up in ponytails, donned feathers, and went out and started a war. Almost two hundred years later, a bunch of actors started a rebellion on Broadway with a musical called Hair. Some things never change.

  The history of my own hair is one of coming and going.

  When I was a baby, so my mother says, I had blond curls. She cut them off and still has them in a box somewhere. She can keep them.

  When I was old enough to have my first haircut, my father, the soldier, took me to a barber shop and had them cut all my hair off. I doubt that he asked the barber to sweep my chopped locks off the floor so he could keep them in a small box, because like most military men, my father had no use for hair whatsoever. I never would have attempted to grow Elvis ducktails, had I lived with my father at the time, for fear he would have called me “Louise” instead of the name they gave me.

  After I got over the ducktails thing, I went back to a crew cut because that’s what all the other boys wore. I allowed the crew cut to grow out before I started college, but I remained a relative skinhead through college and into my early adult years. I didn’t want anybody to think I was having anything to do with the hippie and anti-war movements.

  Actually, I never saw a live hippie until after I was out of college. Come to think of it, I didn’t see any dead ones, either. The University of Georgia was not exactly a hotbed of activism when I was in school there between 1964 and 1968. We were too busy enjoying the school’s recent upsurge in football success after a long Dark Age. The only drugs I knew about were those pills you took to stay up all night and study because you’d been drinking beer and partying all weekend, celebrating Georgia’s victory over Auburn.

  I distinctly remember the first hippie-in-the-flesh I ever saw. The year was 1968. I had just taken a job in Atlanta. One day I was driving along Peachtree Street and entered the 10th Street area, once known for a country music juke joint called Al’s Corral. Often had I been to Al’s, where the beer was cold and the music made you want to cry.

  But by 1968, the 10th Street area had changed. It had become the Deep South’s answer to Haight-Asbury.

  Hippies were everywhere — tall hippies, short hippies, boy hippies, and girl hippiettes. Gaggles of hippies sat on the sidewalks; one played guitar, while the others
sang along or sat quietly listening to the music or picking their feet.

  I must admit that I have done, and still do, my own share of foot-picking, but I consider it an exercise that should take place only in private and only occasionally. A person who picks his feet more than twice a month probably has some serious mental disorder, possibly dating back to his youth when he went around barefooted in the front yard and suffered stubbed toes or came down with planter’s warts from stepping on places where frogs went to the bathroom. (It is common knowledge that one thing that causes warts is frog pee-pee. You probably could look it up in a medical book somewhere.)

  Foot-picking, I also admit, can be an enjoyable experience. When I pick my feet, maybe once every three or four months, I first dig under my toenails and remove any foreign matter such as sock lint. Then I rub my fingers between my toes, which also removes weird stuff that hides in there. Rubbing between your toes makes you tingly all over.

  Next, I pick at any callouses on the bottom of my feet. Since I rarely go barefoot anymore, especially outdoors where I might step into some frog pee-pee, I don’t have to worry about warts.

  I conclude my foot-picking by washing my hands thoroughly.

  As I sat at a traffic light on Peachtree Street in the 10th Street area that day back in 1968, I watched one hippie in particular who apparently thought nothing of picking his feet in front of five o’clock traffic on the busiest street in town.

  He had taken off his sandals and parked them next to him on the curb. I never could have been a hippie, if for no other reason than because I refuse to wear sandals, the official shoe of hippiedom. Sandals look awful, especially if you wear long, dark socks with them.

  As a boy, I had noticed tourists from up north who were driving through Moreland on their way to Florida and had stopped at Bohannon’s Service Station for gasoline. Yankee men tourists inevitably wore Bermuda shorts and sandals and long, black socks they pulled up almost to their armpits. Occasionally, however, a yankee tourist would come through and go to the other extreme. He would roll his socks down all the way to his ankles, which made him and his sandals look even sillier. I vowed never to wear sandals, even if it meant walking through a frog latrine barefooted.

  I continued to watch the hippie pick at his feet. He dug under a nail with concentration and resolve. Since he wore no socks at all, I knew it wasn’t sock lint he was removing. Perhaps it was road tar or some sort of animal leavings. The man looked as if he’d been sleeping with goats.

  After completing his nail work, the hippie turned his attention to between his toes. I don’t know what causes strange substances to get between your toes, especially if you’re in an urban setting and far from the nearest chicken yard. But I do know from personal experience that if you don’t wash your feet often and your feet sweat a lot, you will have a gooey material between your toes. This substance normally is referred to as toe jelly or toe cheese. Since hippies seldom washed their feet, I figured he had a blue-ribbon supply of toe jelly between his toes.

  At any rate, the light finally changed, and I drove away convinced that besides the political differences between me and hippies, there was one other major difference: I don’t pick my feet in public.

  That was just one of the reasons I never considered becoming a hippie, of course. Another was that they reminded me too much of The Goat Man, who is another story.

  * * *

  Once or twice a year, when I was growing up, The Goat Man would come through Moreland and park his goats and the wagon they pulled in front of the Masonic Hall, where he would camp for a couple of days.

  The Goat Man had a long beard and wore tattered clothing and a pair of high-top tennis shoes, which he probably slept in. When, and if, The Goat Man ever got around to picking his feet, he probably found all sorts of things between his toes — even small animals that had gone there to hibernate for the winter.

  The Goat Man was a fairly nice person, if you could stand the smell. Herds of goats give out a distinctive aroma, reminiscent of chitterlings while they’re being cooked. People who live with herds of goats and sleep in their tennis shoes in the back of wagons take on the smell of their goats, which mixes with their own noxious odor, thereby creating a blend that would shock the olfactory nerves of a buzzard.

  The Goat Man always carried around chewing gum for the children who came to see him and his goats, and we normally could hold our breath just long enough to get a couple of sticks of Juicy Fruit from him before we had to run for fresh air.

  The Goat Man told great stories, though.

  “Been all the way to Alaska and back since I was here last,” he would say. “Got so cold, I had to sleep between my goats to keep warm.”

  Somebody would ask how long it took him to get to Alaska and back.

  “These old goats here,” he would answer, pointing to his herd, “were just babies when I left. They were great-grandparents by the time we got back.”

  The more I think about it, perhaps The Goat Man was the original hippie. He spurned the establishment life and indicated that he would rather share his being with goats than with other people.

  I’m not certain if The Goat Man is still alive, or if he even lived long enough to see the hippie movement. I sort of hope he did, and I hope he took credit for starting it. A man who has spent his life huddling against the cold between goats needs to know he has left some sort of legacy, no matter how much it might smell.

  * * *

  There were certain beliefs, whether real or imagined, concerning hippies that were strongly held by those of us outside the movement.

  There was the hair thing, of course. It was The Beatles who first hid their ears under their locks, but the hippies took it further and grew their hair over their shoulders and down even to their rears. And they grew long beards. That is, the male hippies grew long beards. Girl hippiettes, most of whom couldn’t grow beards, allowed the hair under their arms and on their legs to grow.

  In some cultures, men find female underarm hair to be quite desirable. Not so with American men — not even hippies, I would wager. That makes me somewhat suspect of one of those beliefs we had about hippies, that their “Make love, not war” ideas meant they were spending a lot of time having sex with one another.

  I really doubt that now. Sleeping with goats is one thing, but making love to a hairy-legged girl with hairy underarms is an even more disgusting notion. I suspect that when we thought hippies were having all that sex, they probably weren’t doing anything more intimate than picking one another’s feet.

  We firmly believed that hippies didn’t wash their hair often and probably had cootie bugs roaming around on their scalps.

  I’m not exactly certain what a cootie bug is, but there was a boy in my school whose head was allegedly infested with them. He was always scratching at his scalp, and he soon absorbed the nickname (or should I say nickmane?) of “Coot.” The teacher finally called the health department and they came and got “Coot” and gave him some sort of treatment. He never scratched his head much after he was de-cootied, which was one of the first miracles of modern medical techniques I ever saw.

  It was the fact that hippies wore their hair long and probably had cootie bugs that caused me to begin shampooing every day. Previously, I had not shampooed more than once or twice a week, because when I did my hair would become quite dry and stick up all over my head. A date once remarked that it looked like I was wearing a cocker spaniel on my head. I decided, however, that it would be easier to get another date than to get rid of cootie bugs.

  It was the order of that day to make fun of hippies’ long hair. The most popular game was to question the gender of a male hippie whose hair flowed down his back like Trigger’s tail.

  “See that?” somebody would ask, pointing to a nearby hippie.

  “I see it, but I don’t know what it is,” would come the reply.

  “Is it male or female?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “It’s wearing a man’s cl
othes.”

  “But it’s got hair like a girl.”

  “Maybe it’s one of them she-men. They got those operations now, you know.”

  “Naw, it’s just one of them nasty-headed hippies.”

  “Yeah, see it doin’ that peace sign? All them hippies give that peace sign.”

  “Yeah, well give the son of a bitch half of it back.”

  The truth is, those of us in the straight world didn’t like hippies and didn’t trust them and wanted them to go away so our world could go back to being normal.

  We wanted to win the war in Vietnam and bring the boys home victorious and have ticker tape parades for generals and show the evil communistic world that you don’t mess with the United States of by-God America. Hippies wanted peace, even a dishonorable one. The cowards.

  Hippies smoked dope and took LSD and God knows what else. We wondered why they couldn’t be satisfied with beer like the rest of us.

  Hippies liked flowers. We liked football.

  Hippies listened to musical groups with names like Led Zeppelin and Cream and Jefferson Airplane and Blind Faith and The Grateful Dead and The Moody Blues. We still liked Merle Haggard and “Okie From Muscogee.”

  “Leather boots are still in style if a man needs foot-wear.

  Beads and Roman sandals won’t be seen.

  And football’s still the roughest thing on the campus.

  And the kids here still respect the college dean.”

  Hippies looked filthy. We smelled like Aqua-Velva men.

  Hippies didn’t work. We busted our tails for promotions.

  Hippies wore sandals and patched jeans. We wore wing tips and three-piece suits.

  Hippies joined communes. We joined the Rotary Club.

  Hippies danced nude in the mud. We worked on our golf games.

  There were, of course, many people in my age group who broke away and went off to become hippies. I knew of only one, however. He was Stinky Drake, who was from Moreland and was a couple of years older than me.

  As I look back, I can see now that even as a child Stinky showed evidence that one day he might grow up to be a hippie. He never played baseball with the rest of us. He spent his time making belts and Indian moccasins from a kit he had ordered from an ad in the Grit newspaper. He did other strange things, too, like the time we went on a Boy Scout trip and we caught a large number of catfish and tied them on a stringer. When nobody was looking, Stinky took the fish off the stringer and set them free.