Chapter 20
EIGHT YEARS LEFT
When The Cursed Woman came out, good Lord, you couldn’t imagine the noise it made.
You’d’ve thought I’d posed for Playboy the way people carried on.
It was just too much for a lot of country fans.
Maybe it made them feel something they didn’t know what to do with.
But instead of digging deeper into their own selves, they called me a devil worshipper.
A witch. This made me laugh. I’d known a real witch in the holler.
She was an old woman who lived in the woods and healed people all day.
She was like your grandma if she lived a little more free.
But there were those who loved the album. People outside the country world, like folk music fans and young people. I wondered if Hess had bought it, and what she thought about each song. I’d never recorded anything without her, and it was strange not having her there, as if it wasn’t quite real.
Don helped set me up with a manager, an old veteran who’d gotten tired of the system and started working on the fringes.
Only taking clients he really believed in.
He organized a tour across the country for me, and Martha and I put a touring band together, with Tate tagging along for the experience.
I’d only ever toured in the South and a bit in the Midwest. The conventional wisdom was those were the only places people listened to country music.
Of course, that was horseshit. People listen to it anywhere there’s sorrow, and a yearning to hear a story that we all live. A story we all tell ourselves.
New York was not what I expected. It was dirty, and everyone seemed poor and desperate.
Even some of the famous people Tate wrote songs for were hollow.
Strung out. It was the first stop on the tour, and I was fresh.
Maybe a little too bright-eyed for those folk, but I could tell they kind of dug it.
One night Tate, Martha, and I went to an apartment in SoHo called “The Loft” and paid $2.50 to get in. It was dark, and Aretha Franklin was playing. I’d never seen so many people of different races in one place, grooving together.
Tate pulled me into the bathroom and tipped out a little powder from a tiny glass vial.
He raked it into a single line with his license and showed me how to suck it up my nose without blowing it away.
It was bitter in the back of my throat, and it wrapped me in a fuzzy shine. We giggled and made out in the stall.
When we finally made it to the dance floor, I could feel it.
That elusive collective rhythm. We grooved together like limbs on the same body: foreheads glittering with sweat, cheekbones sharp and glowing, curves haunting with their swing.
I’d lose Tate for a song or two, caught up in my own movement.
But then I’d catch a glimpse of him, of his beauty in the darkness, and I would feel love in its heady, all-consuming warmth.
I forgot I was ever going to die.
Performing my music became its own kind of drug.
Tima and Mom couldn’t tour with us because they had their own lives, so I recruited local singers at each stop to perform “Lullaby.” At the first show in New York, both singers didn’t show up.
I thought, shit. Then I looked out in the crowd and saw all these women, and I thought, hell yeah.
We saved it for the last song, and I invited anyone up who knew the words and wanted to harmonize with me.
Then I asked them to turn off the lights.
The boot scuffing and drink clinking ceased, and it was silent in the club as all those voices came together, pooling into a deep well, telling their babies the truth.
I thought I might cry.
Our next stop was New Orleans, which always reminds me of back home in a way.
The veil over the natural world is thin there, and I have loved it since Clayton and I visited on our first tour.
They understand curses, the power of the land, the different planes of existence.
I could feel it at my show that night; we were all mourning our own curses, but also reveling in them.
Taking a drink, and toasting to them. I was serious in “Old Crone”—in another life, I would have happily settled down there.
Let myself go dry and gray like the Spanish moss hanging from the trees.
And then, there was Austin.
Austin was like traveling to the future. They were years ahead of Nashville. There were actual country fans there who understood my album.
When I played at the Armadillo World Headquarters, I got to feel seen by my own people. We were all dirty outlaws screaming into the void, looking for some comfort in the strange.
Just before Christmas, Tate and I came off the road and played it straight in Nashville for a week as a half joke. Neither of us wanted the easy life of cocktails in the den, five p.m. dinners, a kiss before bed.
What we didn’t admit was that we both needed it.
At some point on tour, the music had gone quiet in my head, and I needed to dry out and vibe on that sober high for a bit.
Martha had been hinting that I should slow down, and I knew she was right.
When you’re messed up for long stretches of time, sobriety becomes its own drug.
A world that is still and washed clean. Intriguing for its solidity and simple images.
One morning Tate and I woke to find a rare snow had fallen. A layer of pure, cold sparkle covered everything. No sound but the cardinals in the trees and our panting. Drugs would have ruined it, painted pink and paisley over its crystal simplicity.
We spent hours sliding down the hill on metal sheet pans and wrestling in the snow. When I couldn’t feel my fingers, Tate warmed them in his mouth.
On Christmas day, he blindfolded me with a silk scarf and pulled me out to the driveway. When he yanked off the scarf, I saw a black Ford Gran Torino sitting there shiny and sinister on the concrete.
“Tate, you damn fool, you know I don’t drive.”
He smiled at me. “I think we can fix that.”
He spent the rest of the day teaching me in an empty supermarket parking lot.
Once I got the hang of it, I took the car out on the snow-slushed road.
There was hardly anyone out; everyone was home for Christmas.
When the sun went down, I drove us around neighborhoods all over Nashville ogling the lights on the houses.
I imagined what the families were doing inside, but I didn’t envy them.
Freedom vibrated beneath my hands. I could go anywhere at any time, and no one could stop me.
That evening, we went to dinner at Mom’s house with Martha, Phoebe, and Tima. It was our yearly tradition, and I tried not to stare at the empty chair at the end of the table.
Christmas was a sad time for me as a kid; my aunt and uncle would always “forget” to get me a present, and I learned to sit quietly while my cousins opened their packages around the tree.
I remember waking my first Christmas morning with Hess and finding a pile of beautifully wrapped presents under a tree she’d set up in the corner of my suite at Clayton’s.
Each one was something she’d picked out just for me, and I finally understood why people liked Christmas so much.
It wasn’t about getting a pile of junk; it was about feeling that someone truly saw you.
Even with Tate by my side and all of my friends around the table that night, even with all of the blessings I’d been given, it didn’t feel like Christmas without Hess there.
New Year’s came and went, and my head was still empty. There was no new music.
When I finally confessed this to Tate one night under the covers, he said I just needed to get back out there. Get some new experiences. That’s what always unblocked him.
I’d been invited to play a small tour in England. Neither of us had ever left the country, and Tate convinced me this was exactly what I needed to find my music again. And this time, I needed to watch. Observe. Look for that next little spark.
I was surprised to find England wasn’t so different from where I’d grown up. The Brits had a real sense of humor that was dry and self-deprecating. Life was pretty simple and gray there, but they got a laugh out of it.
Martha and I played small clubs out in the countryside, and then afterward Tate and I got pissed on pints with the locals. There wasn’t much to do but drink.
Tate knew a band who’d rented a house nearby, and he, Martha, and I went to visit them. No one answered the door when we rang the bell, so after a while we just walked in.
It was this big manor house, and it was covered in trash and cigarette butts and splintered furniture. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off, so when we stumbled upon a bedroom with men strewn about it, I thought they’d truly gone and died.
Tate shook the shoulder of one with messy black hair, and he stirred a bit and finally opened his eyes. He shrieked at the sight of Tate, and at the noise, the others rose from the floor like zombies.
That afternoon a group of old women came in and cleaned away the filth. An Indian feast appeared, and we ate it with our fingers and drank red wine out of crystal goblets around a massive molding table.
They told us charming stories about Tate and their escapades, leaving out key details. They treated Martha like a fellow musician, but they were giving me the pretty-little-wife treatment. It was like watching animals pretend to be humans. It was really quite funny. They hadn’t even asked my name.
Tate eventually got around to telling them who I was, and only then did they finally see me. One of them prowled over to a stack of records in the corner and pulled The Cursed Woman from the top.
I was on the cover, but you couldn’t see my face very well. I was more of a haunting figure looming there, watching you as opposed to being watched.
“I thought you’d be, like, a witch.”
“How you know I ain’t?”
He studied me. “Too… pretty.” He brought a finger to his lips. “Although… there is something feral about you. I can see it in the way you watch everything. Me, the food, Tate. Like a big wild cat.” He curled his fingers into claws and lashed out at the air.
I laughed, and we understood each other then. There was no more of the gentleman routine.
Shortly before midnight, hordes of people descended upon the mansion. Young and old, glamorous and plain. I doubt they knew very many of them, but it didn’t seem to matter. As long as you were cool.
Martha warned me to be careful. She’d heard bad things about these guys. I pretended to heed her warning and left her in a corner talking music theory with a long-haired professor, eager to escape her watchful eye.
In the upstairs balcony, one of the boys gave me a piece of tin foil with a black bead in the center and put a straw between my lips. He lit the bottom of it with a lighter while I inhaled from the straw and chased the bead around, watching it create a tar-black design with its trail.
For a few seconds there was nothing.
And then there was pleasure. Everywhere, all at once. Searing, surging pleasure pushed to its limit, red and orange, like something held up too close to the sun.
I looked up at the sky above me with its endless black pricked with puncture wounds of light.
I used to feel like a little wound, like God poked a hole in the skin of reality and made me.
Now I felt infinite as the sky, and for a moment, it truly felt like I was more than just the curse.
That I could grow and widen until its evil was only a prick of light in my expanse.
No longer strong enough to bring me down.
The rest of the tour was like a dream, the logic of it just beyond my understanding.
There I was, singing onstage, doing lines in between songs off the amps.
We’d go out after and thrash around to frenzied rock in tiny clubs until daybreak.
Or if we were feeling mellow, we would light a dirty cigarette in the hotel bed and float out to sea.
One night, we woke to our room engulfed in flames, and we had to jump out our second-story window into the dumpster below.
At some point, Martha confronted me. She was worried. She wanted me to slow down for real this time, get clean. I thought she didn’t have a demon in her like I did, that she couldn’t understand.
I told her if she wanted to leave, she should leave.
So she did.
Tate and I traveled to Paris next, which filled my head with noise. A rich, billowing static. Sometimes a rhythm under it like stones dropped in deep water. But always, the static. I wanted to capture the sound and make music from it.
Tate had a friend of a friend with a studio in the city, and we spent a few heady days laying down tracks. We talked about how we were evolving: our sound, our lifestyle, our expectations. What had we been seeking all this time?
We couldn’t remember.