Walking With Giants
It may come as a surprise to you as you struggle to just live through the day and suddenly realize that you have been walking with giants all along. As while I was doing those two years convalescing up in there in Screw-All Tennessee, trying to get enough courage to just jump off in the Cumberland River, I never thought that one day I’d be sitting here with one film on Amazon Prime, another in post production, a third on a storyboard waiting to launch, a new book out, and two music videos topping. God bless Texas!
In 2021 thirteen doctors crowded around me trying to figure out just what stage of dementia I was at. My family, and I use that term loosely, had put me in the Wellington Institute for non-intrusive dying and I was PROceeding with all possible dispatch. Then Pam sprung me, I’ll never know why.
I ended up driving a bobtail truck from Salt Lake City to Nashville with my son Wilbur giving me a little help toward the end but if he hadn’t shown up, I’d have made it anyway! I’d driven through a tornado in Amarillo that blowed the mirror off the right side of the truck and I just said a prayer each time I changed lanes after that. My legs hadn’t worked since the Wellington, so I just used the cruise control for an accelerator. I said I didn’t have dementia. Didn’t say I wasn’t stupid.
Well, I ended up in Dover Tennessee. Everyone is someone in Dover, but I was in my final act. My daughter in law came over to let me know that I wasn’t a “real” writer, never had COVID, and perhaps a nursing home might have been the best choice. I haven’t spoken to her stupid ass ever since!
As I was sitting there looking at the river, I was pretending that I was writing a story about The Wellington, but I was bluffing. The doctors had put me on blood pressure medicine, and I couldn’t drink whiskey no more or do girls any good, so I was studying that river. To tell the truth I wasn’t suicidal. I’d sank so low that I knew the Devil would be along shortly. Then I got a call.
Back in the day I made records. Well under a million sold, but I made ‘em! Vic was a songwriter that I had worked with. Pam put him up to calling me and he told me he’d been working with movies. I suggested we start a film company, but I was fooling. My life was over, my book was due, and I knew it, but I sent him the notes I was scribbling back at the Wellington while those sawbones were packing me up for the Austin State Hospital. I called it “Someday” because the Fogarty song “Someday Never Comes” was playing on the radio when I woke up one day and I concocted a story about a girl at a place like that. Well, I sent it to Vic, he began working on it and a real tale began to emerge. A formula that would prove productive. But I was done! Still, if you give me something to write I can do it through muscle memory. As we worked it, I stumbled across a five-page story I’d written twelve years prior that was so bad that I’d shelved it. I called it Kia-leía. Vic took those five pages, turned it into a ninety-five-page screenplay and ya’ll can watch it on Amazon Prime if you’re a mind to. It’s now called “Kialea.” “Someday’s” still out there somewhere.
The national and international awards began to come in, and I won’t give you a count but how many awards have YOU ever won? Vic was never one to let the grass grow beneath his feet, so he jumped right off into another thing I’d tried I had originally called “Centerville.” Same formula. Changed the title to “Blue Moon Rising,” we corroborated, cooked up another movie and dinner will be served shortly.
If you follow social media, you may see that we’re developing a thing we call “Karly.” There’s a song out there now and this one will rock the Devil’s boat. I have returned home to Texas and all the guys and gals I’d worked with back in the 80s are still here. Vic kept them together and they waited me out. That’s when I realized that I’d been walking with giants all these years. I’m not a giant, just a wordsmith but every castle needs a joker. So, while all the Yankees are fretting over the government’s next move we will give ‘em something to think about and teach their kids.
If you ever find yourself sitting on a porch some day, looking at a river, I have been there, done that. There is a God, and I don’t always do what He asks me to do, but I’ve learned how to take an ass whipping real good. And I always know the kids are watching. They’re gonna outlive us you know. Never forget: You don’t always get what you order, you get what He shoves through the window.
Click for reading from the book “Karly”
Comments
Post a Comment