Stories Done by Mikal Gilmore

Author:Mikal Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

June Carter joined Johnny Cash’s stage show in late 1961. Cash first met her backstage at the Opry in 1956. He walked over to her and introduced himself. “I know who you are,” she said. Years earlier, Carter had toured with Elvis Presley and had a close relationship with him. Sometimes, when she and Presley were together, he would play Johnny Cash’s music for her. He was enamored of the singing and told Carter that Cash was going to be a big star. That night at the Opry, Cash took her by the hand and said: “I’ve always wanted to meet you. You and I are going to get married someday.” Carter looked back and said: “I can’t wait.” Both were already married—she to honky-tonk singer Carl Smith, with whom she had a daughter, Carlene. After her marriage with Smith ended, Carter married Rip Nix and had a second daughter, Rosey (who died shortly after Cash’s death in 2003).

In the meantime, Cash’s drug intake was starting to wear him down in these years—and he responded by taking even greater quantities. He began carrying guns and firing them off for little or no reason. (He got thrown out of a hotel in Australia when he and Sammy Davis Jr. staged a fast-draw duel in the lobby, firing off blanks and sending other guests fleeing.) He even carted a cannon around and occasionally fired it off in his dressing room. He chopped through locked doors in hotels with a hatchet just to wake his band members. After a night of dope and booze, he sometimes pissed on the radiator in his hotel room, creating an unbelievable smell when it came on. Other nights, he sawed the legs off the room’s furniture, so that “small people” might have a place to sit. He dumped a huge load of horse manure in one hotel lobby. He also wrecked every car he owned and was lucky to walk away alive from some of the smashups. His most destructive act in that time wasn’t committed under the influence of drugs, but it was a product of the neglect and contempt that his drug use was fostering in him. He was driving a camper, which he knew had a cracked bearing, in the Los Padres National Wildlife Refugee, near Ventura, when oil dripped from the crack onto sun-hot grass and sparked a fire. A wind stirred up, and the blaze went out of control. Before emergency crews subdued it, the fire had destroyed three mountains of forestry in the refuge area and drove out almost all the fifty-three protected wild condors living in the area. The government filed suit, and Cash went into the depositions high on amphetamines. When an attorney asked him if he felt bad about what he had done, Cash replied, “Well, I feel pretty good right now.” When he was asked if he felt bad about driving the condors from their refuge, Cash said: “I don’t give a damn about your yellow buzzards.

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