Steven Womack: Way Past Dead

A couple of minutes later I pulled off Demonbreun Street and into the parking lot of the Music Row Shoney’s. The Shoney’s breakfast bar is an institution in this city-one of those all-you-can-eat deals that runs until the middle of the afternoon on weekends. Eggs, bacon, sausage, grits swimming in butter, biscuits covered in gravy, coffee strong enough to make your nipples erect; my stomach growled and my arteries started clogging up with the anticipation alone.

The parking lot was packed with the usual conglomeration of tourists, Music Row hustlers, songwriters, good ol’ boys, musicians, drifters, and cowboys, urban and otherwise. I took a number, sat down to wait for a seat, and flapped open the Sunday paper. I had my head buried in a sidebar on the Pentecostal Enochians when I heard my name called from across the room, above the din of voices and the clattering of dishes, pots, and pans.

“Harry!” a voice yelled. “Yo, Harry! Ovah heah, boy!”

I looked up, stretching my neck in the direction of the noise. Sitting in a booth, halfway down the smoking side, were Ray and Slim, the two songwriters who were my next-door neighbors in our run-down Seventh Avenue office building.

The grin on my face hid the fact that I was gritting my teeth. I really didn’t need this, but I didn’t want them to think I was as snotty as I was feeling at that moment. I waved back and nodded my head.

“C’mon, Harry,” Ray yelled. “Come join us, man!”

Ray was yelling loud enough for the whole restaurant to hear, and heads were beginning to turn in my direction. Slim, on the other side of the booth with his back to me, turned around and stared. He motioned silently-his usual style-for me to join them, so I figured what the hell, it beats waiting another twenty minutes for a table.

I threaded my way through the crowd over to their booth. Ray scooted over and slapped me on the back as I slid in next to him.

“Where you been, fella? We ain’t seen you around here in a week or so.”

“I was up in Louisville, working a case,” I said, reaching across the table and shaking Slim’s hand. The remnants of a record-breaking chowdown lay scattered and messy across the table. I’d seen Ray and Slim eat and drink before, and neither one of them ever put on an ounce. It made me want to slap them.

“How’d it go there, Perry Mason?” Ray asked jovially.

“Perry Mason was the attorney, doofus,” Slim said seriously, his soft voice barely cutting through the restaurant racket. “Paul Drake was the detective.”

Ray stared back at him a moment. “Kinda anal this morning, ain’t we, Slim?”

“Everything went fine,” I said. “Glad to be back home. I was just reading about the morgue. Sounds like a real standoff down there.” Ray and Slim didn’t know I was dating one of the participants, so I chose to feign only casual interest.

“Yeah,” Ray said, picking his teeth with a ragged, well-chewed toothpick. “You know who them people are, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “No, who?”

Ray turned around and pointed out the plate-glass front window of the restaurant toward the hill up Demonbreun Street. “Up there the other side of Mickey Gilley’s place. The clothes store.”

The hill up Demonbreun across from Barbara Mandrell Country and just down the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame was a strip of tourist hangouts, tacky souvenir shops, and cold-beer-and-hot-dog joints. At the top of the hill, a multistoried gray building housing a saloon had Mickey Gilley’s name out front in lights. I’d never been in there, but it was popular. There was always a line of cars in front slowing up traffic.

“You mean Jericho’s, that place that sells the two-thousand-dollar rhinestone denim jackets with the airbrush paintings on the back?” I asked.

“You got it,” Ray said. “They own it. Not too many people know it, either. If they knew their money was going to a bunch of religious cuckoos, they might not be so willing to spend it in such great quantities.”

Jericho’s was as famous among country-music fans and stars as the Ryman Auditorium. For the past twenty years, the gaudiest, the brightest, the shiniest, the tawdriest of the tawdry, had been for sale at Jericho’s. A matador could outfit himself in the hillbilly equivalent of a suit of lights from Jericho’s, and all it would take is a fistful of cash. It was considered the height of country chic to show up at a place like the Stockyard Restaurant on a Friday night wearing one of their creations; the more sparkles, the better.

“Well, that certainly explains where they got the money to buy all those exotic weapons,” I said.

“Yeah, I hear they got some strange shit down there,” Ray said. “Hear the Metros are afraid to take ’em on.”

“They ain’t careful,” Slim, the master of understatement, said, “somebody down there’s gonna get hurt.”

The waitress stepped over, pad in hand. I ordered coffee and motioned for the breakfast bar.

“You guys going to stick around?” I asked.

“Sure,” Ray said. “We ain’t going nowhere.”

“Seems that way sometimes, don’t it?” I cracked. “Let me go load up.”

A couple of minutes later I was back at the booth with enough fat grams and serum cholesterol to send Richard Simmons into apoplexy.

“What’re you guys up to these days?” I asked. “That deal with Randy Travis ever work out?” The last time I talked to Ray, he was whooping that Randy Travis was going to run one of their songs on his next A-side.

Slim shook his head slowly side to side. Ray looked down at his coffee cup. “No,” he said. “We ain’t got much going on in that area these days. That’s all kind of fizzled out.”

“We’re writing a few songs,” Slim added. “But not much is happening.”

“Times are kind of hard everywhere, aren’t they?” I said, with a mouth full of pancake.

“Hey, why don’t you come out tonight and hear us at the Bluebird?” Ray asked. “We’re roundtabling with two other singers.”

The last thing in the world I felt like doing was fighting for a seat at the Bluebird Cafe on a Sunday night. With Marsha in trouble, I wasn’t going to enjoy much anyway. But sitting around pulling my hair out wasn’t going to accomplish anything either.

“What the hell …” I said. “Maybe. Let me see what else is happening. What time you playing?”

“We start at nine,” Ray said. “Oughta last a couple of hours.”

“Can the Bluebird pull a crowd like that so late on a Sunday?”

Ray laughed. “When’s the last time you went there?” I settled back, swallowed a mouthful of wonderfully greasy bacon. “Hell, Ray, I haven’t been to the Bluebird since I moved out of Green Hills. That part of town’s not my usual haunt anymore. Guess it’s been a couple of years.”

Slim spoke over the rim of his coffee cup. “Get there early if you want a parking space.”

Right, I thought, my girlfriend’s hunkered down in a concrete blockhouse with bulletproof windows surrounded by religious wackos with bazookas in Winnebagos.… And I’m going to go listen to country music.

You ask me, the world has become completely deranged.

“Oh, great,” Marsha spewed, her voice coming through the cellular ether crackling and strained. “I’m locked up here eating canned ham and crackers, drinking Nashville water, for God’s sake, and you’re going off to the Bluebird with your songwriting buddies.”

“I didn’t say I was going.”

Through the static, her laugh sounded like a titter. “I’m just kidding, Harry. Go ahead. Go to the Bluebird. There’s no reason not to.”

“You’re not taking this very seriously.”