It’s always the same – sitting among men feeling that confluence of senses as energy accelerates from long-taut repression, followed by a collective breath, an unexpected silence, then they rise …
I’m inside a large room – no air-conditioning, no windows, no wall hangings, no tablecloths covering the square tables with four chairs in that peculiar configuration of places like this. They don’t even bother to post the rules – everyone knows to stand in a line against the south wall of the unmarked floor within a lane not much wider than a common window where men shuffle to receive metal trays – sparsely-laden. “Take the tray they hand you, ask no questions, walk to a table. Just look around, you’ll know where to sit.”
I have been here before.
#
Fourteen years ago, I was in my office at the state capitol building with its marble walls and gleaming columns reflecting shadows onto pristinely maintained floors. The halls abound with those on the rise, confident in their future. The subtlety-cologned, pin-striped, white-shirted, silk-tied – as uniform as teenage boys inside their group’s protective enclosure – interchangeable young legislative assistants, assistant attorneys-general, state supreme court law clerks all fulfilling their mothers’ greatest expectations.
My phone rang in that singular piercing of heavy black phones with dials. I picked up the receiver. My old law school friend, Larry, at the state Attorney General’s office, “Remember what we talked about last night? Just got the message. Johnny Cash is going to be there this afternoon. Wanna go?” Before I answered, he added. “He’s bringing the Carter Family, the Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, June, his entire band.”
Silence.
“Well, whadaya think?”
I was a law clerk working with the newest state Supreme Court justice who was never much interested in my research. I rested the phone on my desk, walked into his high-ceilinged, six-windowed corner office. “I just got a call. There’s an opening at the dentist this afternoon. My wisdom teeth. I’d like to leave now to eat lunch before I go in.” The justice nodded. Which was about as much communication as we had.
From the third floor to the second, then inside the attorney general’s lobby where I saw Larry fidgeting near the door. “Are we dressed for this?” I asked, fingering my silk tie then smoothing the lapels of my gray pin-stripe suit.
“We are, and we’ll take my car,” he said.
#
Before the show, out of curiosity and as a resume builder, Larry and I walked with guards winding through the pathways of work areas. Watching men dressed in denim with frayed collars, the blue turned a piebald of gray and dull white. A grizzled inmate strutted up to me. His whiskered jowls and unkept hair emphasized the angry glare of a man long-deprived. “How do you spell Habeas Corpus?” He asked, laughed, and retreated inside his group near the automobile license plates machines. I was left listening to the roll and clang of metal sheets pressed into rectangles – all the same color and design surrounded by the same border, identical except for the number on the front – stamped and dumped into boxes.
With an attorney general’s escort, a Supreme Court nametag, and access behind the curtains, I was introduced to the Statler Brothers – dozing on chairs near the edge of the stage – each one rose and shook my hand. A few steps later – Carl Perkins, standing tall and gaunt wearing blue suede boots, nodded. Then quickly over to Johnny Cash who called me “sir.” Mother Maybelle and her daughters smiled including the effervescent June as she was lifted onto a chair by a dungareed man with a shaved head. She balanced herself with her right hand on his shoulder.
The show was classic. Darkened stage, sudden lighting, then a turn. “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Followed by Ring of Fire and I Walk the Line. The Statler Brothers’ Flowers on the Wall. Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes. Boisterous laughter at asides about guards. Folsom Prison – with Lansing inserted into the lyrics. Cheers. The Carter Family’s May the Circle Be Unbroken. Applause followed by whistles and cheers.
Then shouts of “Where’s the baby?”
“At the other place, I’ll have to feed him soon,” June grinned and looked down at her blouse.
More whistles and cheers.
Curtains closed, fluttered, then parted. An encore. Johnny Cash in front. The electric guitar’s thrumming introduction to Jackson. June twirled onto the stage in high heels, her full skirt rising to expose her thighs. The scent from the audience was unmistakable. The men rose and continued to applaud while the couple sang.
After the show, Larry rushed toward me. “I’ll meet you outside. We’re driving her, so she can feed her baby.”
“No shit?”
“Yep. June herself going feed little John Carter Cash,” he said with a smile as wide as his face. The baby’s with the women’s warden in her office.”
Within moments. June in the front seat with Larry behind the wheel of his four-door 1968 Oldsmobile. I’m in the back absorbing her profile and voice as she talked about their tour, their bus, and their home outside Nashville. No documentary. No appearance. No television show. No tales of meeting other famous people ever rivaled that heady twenty minutes. Especially today, as I sit with shoes notched for easy tracking – in case I try to escape – among others of my kind at a table on the south side of the invisible line in the mess hall near a boarded-up stage entrance.
I watch a woman carrying a briefcase, her skirt rising above her knees, walking with lowered head escorted by guards within that narrow path near the wall, And again I feel that confluence of senses as energy accelerates from long-taut repression, followed by a collective breath, an unexpected silence, then we rise …
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