“Hello walls,
How’d things go for you today?
Don’t you miss her,
Since she up and walked away?”
Count These as Good Times…
There once was a breakup so bad that part of me still waits for the headlights of a Ford Ranger to throw shadows across the bare walls of a San Antonio apartment so many years ago, time thrown down a well I could’ve found myself stuck in for good.
Part of me waits yet, warmed by feeble embers of heartbreak, for certain someones to save me from walls collapsing and windows tunneling into poignant specks of yesterday.
“And I’ll bet you dread to spend
Another lonely night with me,
But lonely walls, I’ll keep you company…”
At times like this, the walls even tire of my company. This is when I imagine myself in a “brown funk” like Richard Rodriguez: “I am alone in my brown study. I can say anything I like. Nobody listens” (Brown).
And my only consolation, then, seems the few pieces of vinyl that help me see a Texas sunset, a crushed and emptied can of Tecate, a jukebox where Flaco Jimenez and Hank Williams duel over my heart heaving all its gusto out onto a bar stool on the dusty dead-end road of every dream faithlessly and fecklessly running out on tomorrow’s hopes.
“Hello ceiling,
I’m going to stare at you a while.
You know I can’t sleep,
So won’t you bear with me a while?
We gotta all stick together
Or else I’ll lose my mind,
I got a feeling she’ll be gone a long, long time.”
–“Hello Walls,” Willie Nelson
Sunsets in SanAnto always felt like the most solitary. Listening to Bob Wills still takes me “Across the Alley From the Alamo,” and I imagine walking broken rail ties through yellowed fields of stray cats and Pearl brewery fuzz. Sir Doug tells me even now that “you just cain’t live in Texas if you don’t got a lotta soul,” and so I long to gather the shattered pieces into enough small change for a Lone Star tall-boy and a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast taco, with some to spare for a VIA ride up Broadway to a dead-end motel.
I wonder if I’ll ever find myself already there waiting, down Old Austin Highway on a plywood mattress watching flies land on my eyeballs and hearing the inevitable knock on the door that brings news that surely can’t be good.
And again, I’ll dread to spend another lonely night with me, while lonely walls keep all my company. Static crackles, and another 45 falls onto the platter, with Stevie Ray making it flood, Patsy Cline sashaying my madness about like flies on a horsetail.
I can’t undo the wrong or the right. And besides, I’m not even here, but left horseless at some roadhouse far southwest, sweat and sorrow my only compass for where to go from here. So let’s have another Lone Star, pop it open over the majesty of a steel-pedal and fiddle, and let’s see how that neon lights up a long, dusty haul down south.
“Here I sit with a drink and a memory,
But I’m not cold, I’m not wet, and I’m not hungry.
So, classify these as good times …”
–“Good Times,” Willie Nelson
I thought it was Ferlin Husky who actually had the hit with "Hello Walls" - Willie probably wrote it though. I remember the FOX Nascar honkies refering to the song when a car hit the retaining wall hard. Maybe I'll Google it.
I remember a long walk from an intern paramour's digs near Northwestern University Hospital on Chicago and Michigan all the way down to my post-apocalyptic loft on Cermak and Canal. I'd spent the night with her, but having just gotten fired from my job, this overwhelming feeling came over me - that I wouldn't ever see that little studio again. I cut across the deserted fields of train tracks between Union Station and Pilsen - not even any rats to worry about, let alone thieves - no 'action' to speak of out there - no rotting garbage, no bums to roll. The weed fields were almost turning back into prairie as the tracks had gone unused - maybe even since the 50's when people started driving cross country instead of taking trains.
It was beyond premonition - it was deduction. Nature and women can be ruthless - they heap favors on the favored and spurn the spurned. It was one of those hours when you just realize that the hard times were inevitably fated to get even harder.
Posted by: Robert Harless at August 22, 2006 01:36 PM