I WAS TRYING NOT TO TAKE THE world at face value.
But everything was breaking. My computer, my car keys, the ceiling fan, the front door. I was twenty-five and living in rural Pennsylvania, in love with one man who lied to me, and another one who didn’t. I had a bad feeling I couldn’t shake. I felt jumpy, like a stretched wire. I kicked the front door when the lock stuck, when it refused to open in, blistered with humidity. I said aloud, What do you want from me? I might have aimed at the sky.
It was August. A heat index of 100. Five or more minutes waiting to cross the street because of truck traffic, watching the tar bubbles on the asphalt rise. I could not throw myself into work, my writing, because it was too hot to work. I would have braided my hair into chains. I would have worn a red handkerchief on top across my chest, that and only that. I would have driven all night to him. Or to him. I would have.
What calms me has always been walking, playing music and walking, listening to music, but sometimes even that won’t work. Sometimes, like that day, I cannot find the right song from the hundreds of songs. There are too many. There are iPods and downloads and mixed CDs and samples that bring too much music to us, all kinds, all choices and keys and degrees of newness and different-ness and sameness and moods.
Then I realized, not one of the new ones, one of the old: Johnny Cash.
Only Johnny would calm me. Only Johnny understood right then, that moment, whatever that moment was. In my case: the dying corn, crossing the railroad tracks, the storm. How? Because he was there. He wasn’t there, but he could have been easily, how easily, substituting the fields for the fields, the storm for the storm. The heartache for the heartache.
It was that real.
Everyone has that friend, the one you call at three in the morning and expect to come, the one that will come, the one that doesn’t mind if you’re crying and drunk and rolling on the floor, that doesn’t yell at you, that doesn’t judge, that drops her plans, that picks up a bottle in a brown sack, and the buzzer rings and she’s there.
I have been that person. I have dropped my plans. I have woken up at once. I have come, to him and to him. But sometimes even that person needs someone else. I needed him to come, Johnny, the Man in Black. I needed someone to come, crystallize from the fields, become leather, become flesh. And he did not.
The dream was a city. The dream was a stage. The dream was windows and leaving them behind. There were two windows together in a corner of my childhood bedroom on the second floor. Kneeling between them, I could see the neighbor’s peaked roof, and stars beyond. There was not a trellis, but an old TV tower rusted to the side of the house, spackled with ivy. I could climb it, slip in and out of my window. No one would know.
I did climb it. No one knew.
The dream changed as I grew: became hill, became country. Strike that, reverse it. It changed again, became mountain, became woods. Became more specific. On the mountain, we sat on the porch and drank wine in jelly jars, my friends and I, and someone was up on the deck, and I wanted to be the one up on the deck. The moon cracked open. We danced on the rug.
People did this, I thought to myself. People built houses, built decks just to lie on summer nights. That’s enough. That’s fine. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t cold.
Driving home from that party through the black woods and gray roads, three to a car, the least drunk in front, our headlights caught a leaping fawn. The day before, I had almost walked into a snake as it curled up in the cut grass in the path before me.
I kept interrupting nature with everything I did.
Still, I was sometimes amazed at the way it worked out, like earlier in the bright aisles of the grocery store with $117 in cash and a list of liquids to buy with it: two cases of beer, as much wine as I could, some not bad, if possible. I was once in love with a star chef who brought home bottles. I was amazed I remembered what he had taught me: this is drinkable, this is not, this is the right year, the hostess will like this one. Even with snacks for the long car ride into the mountains, we came out within a dollar to spare.
I knew some things still.
I wanted to learn more. I wanted to go back, to learn the ancient languages, how to can fruits, how to grow them. I wanted suddenly, in the liquor-store parking lot, looking up, to re-learn the names of the stars, their stories, the moon phases, memorize how to make good soup, memorize the old histories, memorize the worn lyrics to Dylan and Springsteen and Johnny Cash songs, always I wanted a way back.
I wanted to know him—know something—by heart other than my heart.
Like many things, I came to him late.
In fall of 2003, I was eating breakfast in my house in Michigan. The windows were open, the cats were in the windows. I turned on the television. For some reason, it was turned to a music channel, and for some even rarer reason, they were showing videos. I saw a music video: an old man sitting at a table, playing a piano, a guitar, a big house, a closed-down museum, a smashed record, lemons, a fish full of flies, a beautiful woman.
The song was “Hurt,” and the man was Johnny Cash.
I started to cry. It was instant and physical. The song and its sepia images prickled the skin on my arms, sharpened the skin on my neck. My heart sliced open. There were rings on his heavy knuckles, wine sloshed over the table.
I turned off the television and switched on the radio. I heard the news.
I ran down the hill without a coat to the store where my boyfriend, a musician, worked.
Johnny Cash died, I said. Johnny Cash died.
Johnny Cash was born in Arkansas. His older brother died in childhood. He listened to the radio and sang in church. On a school trip to the Grand Ole Opry, he saw former child star June Carter, and told his friends he was going to marry her. He joined the Air Force at eighteen, and four years later, married a girl he had met at the roller rink before he shipped out. Overseas, he started writing songs. Upon his return, he worked as a door-to-door salesman.
What he said, when homeowners opened the door, was: “Hi. I’m JR Cash.”
He formed a band made up of two auto mechanics, auditioned for Sam Phillips, and got a deal. His first tour was with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and June Carter. He met her backstage at the Grand Ole Opry when he was tuning his guitar. He got down on his knees and asked her to marry him.
Both were married to other people at the time.
He was addicted to amphetamines, tranquilizers, and pain killers. He was arrested for possession. He got divorced once; June divorced twice. He was attacked by an ostrich. He tried to kill himself by crawling into a cave. He found religion. He recorded a live album in a prison. He took out an ad in Billboard after he won a Grammy which featured a full page picture of him with his middle finger raised.
These are facts.
He was the first rock ’n’ roll star, before Elvis. Unlike Elvis, he lived. He did not die on a bathroom floor. He did not die of a drug overdose. He lived, which is much, much harder.
He was father or stepfather to seven children: six daughters and one son. He asked June Carter to marry him, onstage, in 1968, and she said yes. They were together more than thirty years until her death in 2003. He followed her a few months later.
And I?
I grew up wanting. I grew up in Georgia. I grew up, years later, a girl without heroes. I found them as a young adult. I found them in a poet who grew up in a factory town, and a pianist who had been raped, and a songwriter who lived. James Wright, Tori Amos, Johnny Cash, a motley crew.
My heroes lived, and the things they wrote, lived, and I want to live. I don’t want to write a good poem. I don’t want to write a good story. The world has enough good things. Pretty is not enough. Nice is not enough. It must be life or death. It must change. It must be a way to survive, to save. And live, and live.
You have five minutes. What are you going to say?
I am going to say this.
Nothing comes.
Sometimes I wish I smoked, like tonight. It’s evening already, dark. I hate smoke. I’m a young woman, and I hate it, the smell, the staleness. I’m allergic to it. I don’t want it, really. What I want is stillness. What I want is space. What I want is sitting, no questions, the time alone, the time. No one questions a woman smoking, slumped against a step. No one wonders what she is thinking, but she must be thinking, sitting there.
What will people think? I asked my boyfriend on one of many days when he dropped me off in the middle of nowhere to write, the mountains, the wilderness, because I wouldn’t do it otherwise, wouldn’t work in the house with its entrances and exits and TV and lights.
A woman alone with a notebook?
You have to stop worrying about what people think, he said.
No one would bother if I had ash in my hand instead of a pencil.
I forgot to mention: Muzak was invented in 1954. Then Johnny Cash came on the scene.
I forgot to mention: when Johnny Cash came on the scene, “How Much is that Doggy in the Window?” was the number one song on the radio.
Merle Haggard was in the front row of Cash’s Folsom Prison concert. After the show, every man wanted to play the guitar. Every man wanted to play the guitar, but I wanted to play piano. I wanted to be an actress, then a singer, then a dancer. I wanted.
I forgot to mention, I am eating a Pink Lady apple. I am eating a Pink Lady apple instead of smoking, my placeholder, my space.
Leave me alone, I am a woman swallowing.
Leave me alone, I am a woman thinking thoughts. I am a woman who came after a man, and I am not nearly as brave as that man, but I have loved two lives and ruined my life already and begun again, and I am here, here with time, here to start again, here to say something. If I could, I would sit on the back steps and listen to the rain turn to ice. If I could, I would stand out in the cold. I would have a small flame to keep me warm. I have a small flame to keep me warm and it is called this, this thing I do, this speech, this hope, this song inside, inheritance. It doesn’t burn.
ALISON STINE is the author of a poetry chapbook, Lot of my Sister (Kent State University Press, 2001), winner of the Wick Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, Tin House, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Her awards include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Formerly the Emerging Writer at Gettysburg College, she is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she is completing her first novel.