My wife bought me Johnny Cash's autobiography as a Father's Day present. I've been flipping through it. I was hoping for more information about his first wife, Vivian, but she supposedly asked Johnny to keep her out of his public life, and he honored the request. I get the impression he never got over the guilt of what he did to her.
In any event, I ran across the following passage recounting an episode from his wild days in the late 1950s (which extended into the late 1960s):
When that Caddy hit the tree, the flames shot up a hundred feet or more and burned until the whole propane tank was empty. The valve had been wide open, knocked loose when the tank started rolling around in the trunk.
I was okay: bruised and cut and scraped and burned--my skin looked like an alligator's--but basically sound. They covered my face with vitamins A and E and I healed up nicely, with no scarring at all.
I looked terrible at first, though--so bad that when a friend of mine visited me in the hospital with his pregnant wife, she got very upset, and later that evening she miscarried.
You might have been thinking my wrecks were pretty amazing in a live-fast, die-young, hell-bent kind of way. What I think is that the life inside that woman was too young to die. I also think it's a good idea to dwell on the literal meaning of 'hell-bent.'
Pro-life and devil-fearing. Not bad for a man who took more drugs than a beatnik. He's a puzzle.
