I Lived to Tell It All Read online

  In show business people often say that someone is “crazy” when trying to explain his or her irrational behavior. The word is used loosely. But for some time I had seriously thought I was losing my mind, literally going over the edge. That was another hard thing to face, and harder to face while sober. Still another reason to drink.

  I had always had a few supporters who said I wasn’t uncommonly crazy. They said I was just a common drunk. Those people were gone in the late 1970s.

  No one could any longer deny the descent of George Jones because I often refused to be George Jones. I took on two additional and dominant personalities. I even named them. One was “Deedoodle the Duck,” and the other was the “Old Man.” I quacked like the duck while speaking English, and I moaned like the old man, again in English. I went on for hours, and occasionally for days, unable to speak in my natural voice. I instead spoke only as Deedoodle and the old man. I was a person possessed. The duck sounded like Donald Duck and the old man something like Walter Brennan. They had personalities and passionate convictions of their own. Neither would take shit off of the other.

  Sometimes I drove down the road and the duck’s voice began to come forward, antagonizing the old man. He’d call him a bad name, and the old man would fire back.

  “What the hell do you know?” the old man would say. “You’re only a young duck.”

  “I’d rather be a young duck than a useless old fart,” the duck would insist.

  Their voices would rise until they were shouting at each other. Their language was hard and aggressive. I’d try to steady the wheel. At times the car would veer under my shaking hand because the two voices were screaming so loudly and violently. They leaped out of me, and I trembled in vain to contain them.

  My sanity was regularly taking a leave of absence. On more than one occasion, I struggled to pull the car to the side of the road, crying because I couldn’t make the voices stop. The duck and old man made fun of me.

  “So you’re the great George Jones,” one might say. “Wonder what the people would think if they could see you now, dirty and stinking and bawling like a baby? World’s greatest country singer, my ass. You ain’t nothing but pathetic shit.”

  I couldn’t make them stop.

  Maxine Hyder, my friend in Lakeland, Florida, remembers leaving a show in tears because I stood in front of thousands of people talking like a duck. I sang some of my hit songs in the duck’s voice, and the audience returned a chorus of angry boos. I could hear myself talking that way, and with every word I tried to stop.

  But I couldn’t. I honestly couldn’t. For years my mind had not been my own. In 1978 and 1979, neither, at times, was my voice.

  I knew then that I was going insane. I didn’t have far to go. I was totally without emotional or psychological defenses. I had been beaten into submission, but didn’t know where to submit. I wanted to rest in someone, but trusted no one.

  That’s when the financial world fell in on me. And the press jumped on it all.

  My only semblance of sanity was my recollection of my roots. When I least expected it, for example, I’d hear the voices of Sister Annie and Brother Burl singing the songs of Christ in a wood-frame Pentecostal church when I was nine. I’d see the arched back of my daddy, ax raised over his head, and hear the crashing of steel against wood that made logs into kindling. I’d hear my mama praying.

  And I’d remember how I was always taught, since I was old enough to remember, that a man pays his debts. My daddy was no stranger to credit. But he paid his bills, not always on time, but always in time.

  I put a lot of shame on myself for the legal action I was about to take, listing myself as insolvent before my creditors. I sought full-fledged bankruptcy protection. I just knew my daddy and mama were weeping with the angels about their youngest child’s reckless ways, ways that had cost me all of my money. Now they were about to cost the people who had trusted me with credit.

  A Nashville bank had sued me for $56,966.70 in overdue loans. I owed $9,000 to Master Charge, $3,500 to Visa, $40,681.14 for a bus loan, $77,901.01 to CBS Records, about $200,000 in lawyer fees, $300,000 in default court judgments, and lots more.

  When my lawyer filed the bankruptcy petition, it listed forty-six creditors. I owed $1.5 million.

  My net worth was $64,500.

  Most of that was equity in a mobile home in Lakeland, and most of the rest was in the plywood furniture inside. And I didn’t even live in that house. Nobody did.

  I had to go to court time and time again and talk about who I owed what. The proceedings didn’t move as fast as I wanted. I didn’t like the regular press coverage and wanted to get my name as a deadbeat out of the paper.

  I fired my lawyer and hired a new one to speed things along. But the new lawyer’s having to familiarize himself with the petition took time, and eventually things were actually slowed down.

  Bankruptcy court was much more informal then than it is now, I’m told. I just sat at a table with Tom Binkley, my new lawyer, and listened as he and the judge went over my financial records. No other people, except maybe a court reporter, were inside.

  But two things delayed the hearings. First, I couldn’t find most of my records. The court would not accept as a legitimate debt something I couldn’t document. I’d always done business out of my hip pocket. I had no filing system. I had bought and sold such things as cars, houses, and even a giant boat but had no records to validate the transactions. I could forget about bankruptcy protection, I was told, for money whose spending I couldn’t prove.

  The second delay came from my drinking and drug use. I was regularly high inside the courtroom.

  I’m sure the judge had no idea I was under the influence of alcohol and drugs or I would have been held in contempt of court, but he must have thought I had an awfully weak bladder. I excused myself about every thirty minutes to go to the men’s room. Tom said he could see the flask in my pocket, but the judge couldn’t.

  Neither Tom nor the judge saw my tiny vial of cocaine. I hurriedly guzzled enough booze and took enough cocaine blasts to get a buzz inside a rest-room stall, then floated back to my seat. There, I did nothing but sit quietly and tune out talk about money I didn’t have. From that stuffy courtroom, I took mental journeys around the globe.

  Old friends who owned music stores, recording studios, and the like listed themselves as creditors. So did members of my band. One Nashville motel wanted $5.64. That must have been for a room service charge.

  Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings helped me. Together, they gave me about sixty-four thousand dollars in cash. I put most of it in a grocery sack, bought an ounce of cocaine, and gave the rest to the court in currency.

  The judge got tired of hearing that I could not account for the spending of more than one million dollars. He said I was the most financially irresponsible person he’d ever seen. But I wasn’t lying. I just didn’t know where it went. How could I have known where my money was when most of the time I didn’t know where I was?

  Bankruptcy was denied.

  I had been in bankruptcy court about fifteen times over six months only to lose my request. I missed a few court dates because I was too drunk to go. I knew the judge wouldn’t be amused if I fell out of my chair.

  Tom appealed the judge’s denial to a Tennessee district court, and I got a judge with a heart, who granted the bankruptcy with an unprecedented payback plan. Tom, who later became president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers’ Association, said he has never seen a district court work so flexibly with a bankruptcy applicant before or since.

  Most of my creditors, after the ruling, were paid twenty cents on the dollar. I paid the court five thousand dollars a month until I got permanently sober a few years later, and then I increased the amount of my installments. The court ruled that my royalties from CBS, United Artists, Pappy Daily, and Broadcast Music Incorporated were to be applied to my creditors through the court.

  I paid the court’s demand in full, and some people who had once tru
sted me to pay my debts in full took an 80 percent loss.

  I didn’t even pay Tom right away. In fact, he had to sue me to get his legal fees. He’s a kind and forgiving man who is my friend today, and he was extremely cooperative when I asked him to refresh my memory for the writing of this book.

  There were many people, such as background singer Jennifer O’Brien, who didn’t take a dime. Time and again they were offered the chance to put their names on the list of creditors, but they refused. They said they felt too sorry for me. I’m telling those people here and now how much I appreciate their compassion for the sick sot who was the old George Jones.

  I must add a note here about Jennifer and the guys who were in my band from about 1976 until 1980 (except when one or two got mad and quit for a day or two). They were a family who bonded in the way that only traveling show people can. People who live and breathe inside four hundred square feet of motorized steel get closer than biological family and for a very simple reason. They spend more time with each other than they do with blood relatives.

  I had missed four shows in a row when the Jones Boys and Jennifer played somewhere in southern Illinois. Jennifer got a call that said her mother, who Jennifer knew had cancer, had only a day or two to live. Jennifer reacted instinctively. She ran to the bus and her family of musicians.

  Ernie Rowell took the show to Illinois, fought the fans who were angry about my absence, and worked a deal with the promoter, who agreed to pay the Jones Boys and Jennifer fifteen hundred dollars to perform without me. After the show, Ernie and the other boys told Jennifer they had held a meeting and decided to take her to northern Illinois near the Wisconsin border to be with her mother during her final hours. They drove my bus and arrived at daylight. As a result, Jennifer saw her mother during her last moments on this earth.

  “Now here is an envelope,” Ernie told Jennifer. “You keep this. Don’t open it until we’re gone. The Jones Boys and I are going to take the bus and go back to Nashville.”

  After they had departed, Jennifer opened the envelope to find fourteen hundred dollars. The boys had kept only one hundred dollars to buy diesel fuel and food to get back to Nashville and given Jennifer the rest of their performance fee. She’ll never forget that.

  I haven’t seen Jennifer or most of those folks for years. To tell the truth, I’m a little embarrassed to go around them. Today I’m sober and debt-free. I’ve got a ways to go before I’m guilt-free.

  Linda was living in a rented house in Florence, and I went to see her during the bankruptcy turmoil. I got little solace, as she had me arrested for assault and battery. I think she was just angry because I’d been away. I got out on a three-hundred-dollar bond and went to Texas to see my kinfolk.

  Except in my mind, I hadn’t been home for years. I visited two of my sisters and went to the graveyard and talked to my mama and daddy’s tombstones. My thoughts were melancholy, and my soul was straining to purge itself. I became easily upset, and when I did, the duck and the old man surfaced.

  During a blinding thunderstorm, in the blackness of midnight, I wept bitterly over my parents’ coffins and wailed as a duck and an old man. The rain splattered mud from their graves onto me. It mixed with the tears streaming uncontrollably down my face.

  In that dark and silent cemetery, I wondered where the bottom was. How can I go any lower? When will things ever get better?

  All the lawsuits brought against me by creditors were invalid in the wake of my working out a payback agreement with the court. There were still some outstanding Tennessee criminal warrants against me, but I returned to Nashville anyhow. I kept a low profile, and the law didn’t catch me. Of course, as I indicated earlier, the law wasn’t looking too hard.

  Isn’t it amazing that all of the people who’d won financial judgments against me, and who could have had me arrested before I was awarded bankruptcy, didn’t? Maybe they knew they’d never get their money if I was behind bars, but I don’t think so. I stiffed some good friends who somehow knew I didn’t want to. And they didn’t want to put me in jail. I had better friends than I knew at the time.

  So I began to hang around Printers Alley, where all of the Nashville nightlife was still centered in the late 1970s. I often didn’t get out of my car. I just watched the tourists or sent someone inside a nightclub to fetch an old friend who I thought might be inside.

  I had somehow gotten a used yellow Cadillac when Peanut Montgomery saw me one night. I had a lot of my clothes in the backseat, and he later said he wondered if I was living inside that car. I wasn’t. There was no way you could call that living.

  By that time I had gone so long without eating much that my stomach had seriously shrunk. It must have been about the size of a baseball. About every three or four days I’d try to eat a sandwich but usually got no more than half of it down before I was full.

  I had a case of whiskey, an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Hank Williams, and some of Hank’s cassette tapes in that car. I stared blankly at the picture and listened thoughtfully to the music for hours on end. I didn’t speak, unless it was in the voice of the duck or the old man.

  Most of my “nutrition” was from the vitamins and minerals inside blended whiskey. My weight had dropped from about 165 in my prime to about 105. My breath stank from the constant lack of food, the way some folks’ stinks when they go on a religious fast or rigid diet. I could smell myself.

  On the night Peanut saw me, my skin was oily from my not having bathed. My hair was matted by its own natural grease. My clothes, a far cry from the days when I always had a pressed suit no matter how drunk I was, were dirty and wrinkled, as if someone had slept in them. Someone had.

  Peanut had been a friend for years, despite my arrest for his attempted murder, and in the space of a moment he’d had enough. Knowing I’d eventually return to Florence, he contacted an Alabama district court judge about having me committed to a psychiatric ward and drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.

  But he didn’t tell me.

  On December 11, 1979, I was in Florence when some men in white coats came to see me. The judge had exercised the legal maneuvers to have me committed.

  “Do you love this man?” Peanut said the judge asked him about me.

  “Yes, I love him,” he said he answered.

  I had no relatives in my state of residence. I had none in Texas who were willing to take the necessary legal action. Peanut had to get a court ruling that gave him custody over the life he said I couldn’t control. He must have been mighty convincing. If I’d have known what he was up to, I wouldn’t have returned to Alabama.

  I was taken against my will to the Hill Crest Hospital in Birmingham by the men in white coats.

  I think that’s the first place I heard that alcoholism is not a moral failure but a progressive disease. The doctors told me I wasn’t evil or weak but sick. They told me I had an infirmity that could be treated. They had definite steps toward recovery, which they said was a gradual process.

  “It’s taken you years to get into this shape,” the counselors said. “It will take you years to get well. Don’t be in a hurry or impatient with yourself. Recovery is a gradual process that is taken one day at a time. In here and later, when you’re out of here, live life one day at a time.”

  My IQ was measured at seventy-four.

  After testing, the doctors said my capacity to rationalize or reason was gone. I didn’t know why things worked. I couldn’t solve problems put before me. I couldn’t perform simple arithmetic. I would have done well to put round pegs in round holes.

  The staff tried to teach me practical matters, such as not to let myself get upset, or sleepy, or even hungry. Any of those situations prompted an alcoholic to drink, I was taught. They explained that food intake affected my body chemistry. If certain chemicals got in short supply because of hunger, I would crave a drink and go off the deep end. So I should keep a full stomach, they said.

  They told me that alcohol was mostly sugar. They said I had therefore
developed an addiction to sugar and that I should try to feed that addiction with lots of sweets, which would help take a part of the place of booze. The hospital was overflowing with cakes and candy that I could eat whenever I wanted.

  I couldn’t sleep. I had been used to staying up for days on cocaine, never sleeping unless I was drugged with exhaustion or alcohol. During the first few days they gave me sedatives. Mostly the staff gave me love, or at least the appearance of love.

  Doctors and counselors tried to determine why I drank and took drugs. They explained the theory of self-hatred to me: Many men who had been beaten by their fathers hated themselves. My young mind felt I was worthless as a human being and therefore deserving of the beatings my dad had given me.

  When Dad was no longer around to beat me, I strove to beat myself through various forms of abuse. They said I felt unworthy of anything good, that I had recklessly wasted money, even flushed it down the toilet at times, because I subconsciously felt unworthy to have it. They said I lashed out against women who loved me because I felt unworthy to be loved. Some of their teaching made a lot of sense to me.

  I wish it had taken.

  Peanut came to see me after two weeks. By then I was dry, but I was far from sober. He entered my room, and I didn’t say hello.

  “What are you trying to do, kill me?” I yelled.

  “No, George,” he said. “I’m trying to save your life.”

  “I’ll run my own damn life!” I said. “I don’t need you or anybody else to do it!”

  Of course I was wrong.

  “You put me in this place, and now you get me out,” I stormed.

  I resented Peanut’s involvement because I knew he, at times, had been as big a drunk as me. He had found religion and used to preach to me. That, as I mentioned earlier, made me furious. I’d get drunk and call him “Little Jesus.” I threatened to pull out his beard one hair at a time.