(part 157) BUSTED FOR SALES OF COCAINE IN NASHVILLE

WANTED

In Nashville, I began realizing that I was living to drink and drinking to live. One day, when I was lying on a bed, I heard an audible voice say, in a completely empty room, "You're an alcoholic."

It scared the crap out of me, and I figured God himself had uttered the words out loud personally, because there was no one there except me. Nothing else was said, just, "You're an alcoholic!"

After it happened, I looked through every part of that room for the source of the voice; under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom, etc. I was on the second floor, so I knew no one had said it from an open window trying to screw with my head.

This didn't cause me to stop drinking, but it did implant, for the first time, a sense that drinking had become a serious problem for me. It was now a conscious realization that I never forgot from that day on; I was an alcoholic.

During this time in Nashville, I acquired some cocaine from DP so I could sell it and make some money; It was a quarter ounce of coke. I set up a time and place to meet some guy named Hugh on a lonely back road at night.

This turned out to be a full-fledged disaster. Not only was it dark, and completely unfamiliar to me, I'd borrowed somebody else's car to get there.

It was out in the country, but it appeared to be completely safe when I drove up. I waited around for awhile for Hugh, and when he got there, I pulled out the coke so he could sample it. He snorted a line, and within minutes said he'd buy some.

After giving me a couple of hundred bucks, Hugh said he was in a hurry and had to leave. He watched me put what coke I had left, which was in a small bottle, underneath the dashboard, and then drove off.

Feeling good about making some money, I started the car and swung around to head back down the deserted road to Nashville. But all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, flashing blue lights appeared in my rearview mirror.

"Shit," I said out loud, "That asshole set me up!" I pulled to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and waited for my world to fall apart, again.

Sure enough, two plainclothes undercover narcs were on me in an instant. They yanked open the door and dragged me out of the car with their guns drawn, screaming at me to lie face down on the ground.

As I lay with my face in the dirt, one of them pulled my arms around to my back and handcuffed me. He then pulled me up on my knees and continued to scream that I was a piece of shit dope dealer.

I said nothing, and watched as the other one searched the car. I thought I'd been set up, and became convinced of it, when the guy searching the car seemed to know exactly where to look for the bottle of coke, which Hugh had seen me put there before he split.

I thought to myself, "Hugh must have been in deep shit with the law and made a deal with them to save his own ass. What a punk!"

The cops called a tow truck to haul the car I was driving. They put me into their car and headed back to town to the Nashville City Jail.

I stared out the window of the police car, and once again felt as though my life was over. To get busted for drug sales in the South, I thought, was about as bad as it could get, particularly if you were from California, which I was.

We pulled up to the Nashville jail, and I saw for the first time a nine or ten story building that was in part being renovated. I was taken into an office for interrogation, where I sat for a couple of hours and was repeatedly asked where I'd gotten the cocaine I'd sold.

I wouldn't tell them where I got it, because DP was the source, and I wasn't about to give up that info. I told them I'd bought it from some guy on the street, and stuck to that story.

Finally they got fed up with my answers and moved me into a multi-prisoner cell with about fifty or sixty other guys.

I was just in time for chow, which consisted of two pieces of half-stale white bread, a single slice of warm bologna, and a single slice of processed cheese. To drink, we were given watered down cold coffee, served in a garbage can, set in the middle of the cell floor.

While I was in that jail, a young black kid worked his way around some loose-fitting steel plates that covered the windows at the time they were being re-barred. He either fell, jumped, or was thrown nine stories to his death.

The rumor was that he wanted out of the place bad. He was so afraid of being locked up in that white man's jail, that he either committed suicide, or, as I said, was thrown from the window by someone else.

It was a piss poor place, believe me, and I was white.

(part 156) LAY ME DOWN

LAY ME DOWN EASY
LAY ME DOWN SLOW
SOMEDAY I'LL GET THERE
SOMEDAY I KNOW

ALL OF THE MISERY
ALL OF THE PAIN
WILL VANISH FOREVER
AND WON'T COME AGAIN

I'LL TAKE A WALK
OUT ON THE SEA
AND STAND ON THE OCEAN
TOTALLY FREE

SO LAY ME DOWN GENTLY
LAY ME DOWN LONG
CRADLE MY HEART
AND SING ME A SONG

SING ME TO SLEEP
WITH A SWEET LULLABY
HOLD ME AND KISS ME
AND DON'T SAY GOODBYE

AND IF I CROSS OVER
BEFORE YOU AWAKE
THEN LAY ME DOWN EASY
WITH THE PEACE I COULD MAKE

I WAS FOREVER
YESTERDAY'S CHILD
AND ALL MY TOMORROWS
HAVE ALREADY SMILED

SO LAY ME DOWN EASY
LAY ME DOWN SLOW
SOMEDAY I'LL GET THERE
SOMEDAY I KNOW

Bobby Jameson Mar, 2009

(part 155) NASHVILLE: MUSIC CITY

I didn't want to go to Nashville, but I did want to leave L.A. I felt like a walking target after escaping the clutches of Camarillo State Hospital and those who were trying to keep me in there.

I was too hot. Everywhere I went people would make comments about my escapades on the Hyatt House and the tower. A number of these moments turned into physical fights in public places around West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

I knew it was just a matter of time before one of these occurrences turned out poorly, because the local cops were still gunning for me. I can't blame them for their attitude, but I didn't want to stick around and see how far they were willing to go.

When the Nashville offer came up, it was a way out of town, nothing more. If you recall, I'd gone to Ohio with John Rhys for the same reason in 1970.

I just needed to get away from L.A. for awhile, and figure out what to do. In DP's mind it was Nashville, the center of country music, which had been getting more outlaw oriented, because of Waylon Jennings and others.

He felt the environment was ripe for what I was doing musically. It may have been a good call at some other time, but in the condition I was in, it never panned out to be anything more than a long hard drunk.

I didn't know the town or anyone in it, and had been somewhat abandoned by DP as soon as we arrived. He went off to see about his own business, because he was from Nashville.

I would sit in some stranger's apartment and try to figure out what I was supposed to do, other than wonder where the hell DP was. As usual, I didn't stay in one place very long and took to the streets of music city in search of something, anything.

I ended up near Vanderbilt University, and began frequenting two bars on a daily basis, the Exit Inn and Fridays.

I had no money, so I would do impersonations of famous people at the bar, in hopes of getting my audience to buy me drinks, which worked pretty well some of the time.

Later on my mother would send me small packages of cheap American Indian jewelry, mostly turquoise rings, which I'd wear ten at a time, in hopes I could sell them to interested customers for a little cash.

DP was kind of pissed off about this, because it prevented him from being able to keep me tied to him and his otherwise total grip on me if I was broke.

I'd been on the streets too long to allow myself to be maneuvered into poverty's corner where someone, anyone, was my single benefactor.

This kind of hold on a person was practiced in the music business a lot. They'd give you just enough to keep you coming back, but not enough to make any real difference in your life.

I learned this the hard way, so I developed my own plan in Nashville outside of DP's grasp. I always seemed to feel like someone was trying to control my movements, thoughts, and emotions by hanging little bits of raw meat out to keep me interested.

I resented the treatment, and did whatever I could to even the playing field a little. Over time DP was forced to realize that he was not in control of me.

I met a lot of dope dealers, musicians, politicians, and females in Nashville, but never got my act together enough to make anything work.

I found it hard to walk on my busted feet and ankle, so I drank all the time to bear the pain. When I say I drank all the time, I mean, if I was awake, I was drunk. I consumed more booze in Tennessee than I ever had in my life, and it just kept adding to the tortured state of my body and mind.

I was drinking in Fridays Bar one time, with a bunch of dope dealer friends of DP's, when some guys I 'd never seen before showed up at the bar.

One of them pushed me out of his way, so I pushed him back, not knowing or caring, that he was one of the main cheese balls in the area. He whirled around and said, "Who pushed me?" to which I responded, "I did." He eyed me for a second and punched me in the face, and I went after him in a heartbeat.

The crowd at the bar grabbed a hold of me before I could inflict any damage on this asshole, saying to the guy, "It's OK, so and so, he doesn't know who you are, he's a musician from L.A."

The guy looked at me, clearly pissed off by my willingness to get into it with him, and said, "OK, but keep him out of my way." With that a couple of people pulled me aside and told me, "Bobby lay off, he's a friend of ours."

"OK", I said, "But he's the asshole who started it." "Yeah, well he doesn't know you," they said, "and he didn't mean anything by it." "OK, Ok, I got it, let's have a drink." This in fact was the way much of my time in Nashville went. One questionable moment on top of another.

I had reached the point where tempting fate on any level became a game of mine. In a store in Nashville, a local mini-mart, I would play a game.

Me and some other idiots would take the power cord from an electric lamp, and strip the rubber off, leaving the copper wire exposed. We'd then take the double wire and split it into two single wires attached to the plug. Grabbing one wire in each hand, someone would then plug the cord into a wall socket.

The electricity would run up through your hands and arms and tend to seriously flex the muscles in each one to the point of twisting both of them inward like pretzels.

The object of the game was to see who could hold these live wires the longest; I almost always won, because I didn't give a shit if it killed me. I wasn't afraid of dying, so I'd just stand there like an dumb shit, holding the wires until the electricity wrenched them out of my hands.

These kinds of things tended to give me a local reputation for being nuts, because I had no inclination whatever to spare my body punishment. So when challenged to a drinking contest at Fridays I accepted without question. Not because I wanted to have a drinking contest, but because it was free booze for the participants, nine shots of free booze.

The drink was called the petrifier. It contained nine shots of different kinds of hard liquor in a single tall glass, and who ever could finish it first won.

The effect of this stupidity was an almost instant blackout. Some of the alcohol included in the drink was 180 proof white lightening, which I experienced for the first time in Tennessee.

After the second go round I ended up in a ten hour blank from alcohol poisoning, and was told I'd been standing in the middle of the street with my pants down around my ankles, hitchhiking, near Vanderbilt University.

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(part 154 ) LONELINESS SPEAKS WITH THE ENEMY

THE GUARD CANNOT HEAL MY HEART
HE CAN ONLY PROTECT IT FROM FURTHER HARM
HE IS SAD WHEN THE CHILD IS SAD
THERE IS NOTHING HE CAN DO

TO BE SO CAPABLE YET INCAPABLE
TO BE THIS LOST YET INESCAPABLE
TO BE SO CLOSE YET SO DISTANT
TO BE THIS VULNERABLE YET SO RESISTANT

I AM A RIVER WITHOUT A BED
BLOOD WITHOUT RED
DEATH WITHOUT BEING DEAD
A VOICE NEVER SAID

SO COMPLETE IS MY MISERY
IT GOES UNNOTICED BY THE WORLD
LIKE A HOMELESS MAN
I AM PART OF THE LANDSCAPE

IT PAINS THE GUARD TO FEEL THE CHILD'S MISERY
HE WISHES HE COULD HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE
BEFORE THE DAMAGE CAME
BEFORE THE CHILD WAS RAVAGED

THE CHILD WEEPS TEARS OF BLOODY SALT
AND CRIES OUT TO THE WORLD
THE GUARD KNOWS THESE ARE DANGEROUS TIMES
WHEN LONELINESS SPEAKS WITH THE ENEMY

HOW CAREFUL THE GUARD MUST BE
TO ALLOW BUT BE READY
TO DISALLOW
AND BE STEADY

SO MUCH PAST
SO LITTLE FUTURE
SO MANY VOICES
SO FEW OPTIONS

I AM BUT A BLOTCH IN THE DIRT
A THING SO HURT
THAT I CANNOT FIND THE PIECES
TO MEND

BROKEN INSIDE AND OUT
TORMENTED BY CONSCIOUSNESS
LIKE A BAD DAY
THAT LASTS A LIFETIME

Bobby Jameson

(part 153) CROSSCUT SAW

CROSS CUT SAW
RIPS AND TEARS
FACE A WOODEN
BLANK THAT STARES

CHILD INSIDE
CAN PLAY SOME MORE
WHILST THE GUARD
IS AT THE DOOR

PEOPLE COME
WITH TWISTED LIPS
WORDS LIKE BLOOD
ON FINGERTIPS

LIES OF SMILES
ARE STACKED WITH NUMBERS
BY THE GUARD
WHO NEVER SLUMBERS

LEAN LIKE STEEL
CABLE STANDING
CARBON GRAY
THE GUARD COMMANDING

EVERY NAME
AND LINE OF FACE
OF THOSE WHO DARE
TO FIND THIS PLACE

SACRED CHILD
DIAMOND KNIFE
PROTECTED BY
THE GUARD'S OWN LIFE

KNOWS EACH HEART
THAT COMES TO CALL
ALLOWS OR
DISALLOWS THEM ALL

FROM SEEING THE CHILD
OR FEELING LIGHT
THE GUARD ALONE
DECIDES THEIR PLIGHT

Robert Parker Jameson

(PART 152) GETTING DANGEROUS

In 1974 I was dangerous. I'd come to the understanding that I was not wanted or needed by anyone in the music business in L.A.

The city was not going to tolerate any more of my public performances on their buildings or any other structures. For the first time in eleven years, I felt as though there was no purpose for me in Hollywood.

This psychological blow was at the heart of what I would do in the next year or two. The danger for me was, that I was me, and couldn't be anyone else, though at times I truly wished I was.

I was stuck inside my damaged mind, and it was doing the thinking for my damaged body and emotions.

In a setting that was on the one hand hostile, and curious about me on the other, I was an accident waiting to happen.

It was a love-hate relationship that existed between me and L.A., and I was a sideshow event that people said things about like, "Hey, there goes that jumper guy." I was now no more than a curiosity with an even more curious past.

I knew who I had been, and because of it could not put myself into an average-Joe pair of shoes, anymore than I could fly to the moon.

I walked around with the ever-playing movie of my own life history swirling in my head, while it tapped constantly into my emotions.

This disorganized process went on willy-nilly, and still continues today. Every now and then I'll run into someone who says, "Well I never heard of you," to which I occasionally reply, "Yeah, well I never heard of you either."

I mean there isn't a lot I can do with this shit, it's just there in my head playing.

Eleven years of the progressive disease of alcoholism had done a real job on me, but I continued on anyway, with the deep belief that booze and drugs were the only thing keeping me together.

This, in fact, is the delusion of the disease itself: that what is literally destroying you is your only true ally and friend. It's there when you are afraid, lonely, happy, angry, sad, etc.

It is the single constant and consistent fact, other than breathing, that one is aware of while in the grips of the disease.

In your mind, or my mind, to be exact, this is the one thing that makes all other things possible, and without it one could not exist.

The word "substance" includes any and all things ingested, by whatever means, for the purpose of altering, in any way, one's own consciousness.

It is the manually applied version of an automatic process, in other words, the user takes over the daily job of how they feel, by adding substances not normally present at all, or in the amounts being added.

Who I was in 1974, was not a pretty picture. There had been no help of any kind, but my problems kept compounding themselves, and were further complicated by an expectation of the world that I act right.

At the point at which I was, in 1974, that was highly improbable, if not downright impossible. I had no ability to rationally view my life, or options, since I continued the destructive process of pouring gas on the fire by using.

As mentioned, I had ceased trying to kill myself. The killing of one's self is an act of murder. If one gives up attempting to carry out that act on one's self, it does not necessarily mean that one has given up the willingness to commit such an act on someone other than himself.

This is at the center of my position that I was dangerous. I was obsessed with protecting myself from others, who in my mind were out to do me no good.

Whether this was true or not, is irrelevant, because it was what I perceived to be true, thus causing me to be on constant alert.

Since the world had rejected me, in my opinion, the world was my enemy. It didn't want me, but I had nowhere else to go but the world.

My sense of not being a part of anything, and with no clear alternative, I was just a machine that kept going with no concept of where I was going.

I was stunted emotionally and developmentally, and in many ways was like a child in the way I viewed things. My emotional read on the world around me was not that of a an adult , but of a damaged or abused child.

The only times in my life when I'd been at all responsible, were when I was writing music and working in the studio. Without that, I just wandered aimlessly through each successive tragedy.

I had no money, no job, and surrounded myself with dope dealers, con-men, prostitutes, and others, who were similarly disposed to view the world with disdain.

In 1974, because I had no idea of what to do, I accepted an invitation to go to Nashville, Tenn. with a cocaine dealer, whom I will just refer to as DP.