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8. Don’t You Take It Too Bad
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8 Don’t You Take It Too Bad T OWARD THE END OF THE year, during a trip to Oklahoma City to play some coffee-house gigs with Guy Clark, Townes and Guy met a woman who was to become a major part of both of their lives. “Townes claims that he was the one that introduced me and Guy,” Susanna Clark recalls, “but I think Townes met my sister first somehow. I met Guy and Townes both exactly at the same time…. I was living with my sister. And apparently they had become friends with my sister…. I walked in and they were both sitting on the couch. And boy, did they look bedraggled. I introduced myself, and the first thing I did was offer Guy a vitamin pill. They both had hair down past their shoulders, and skinny as rails, both of them. My easel was set up in the living room, where they were sitting, and I was painting a painting. Townes was just still very, very quiet. And I was painting away and trying to kind of chat with them, and I said, ‘I just don’t know 92 Don’t You Take It Too Bad 93 what to do with this foreground. I just don’t know how to bring it forward. I just don’t know what to do.’ And Guy said, ‘You know what to do.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, I can’t drop my artistic hanky in front of him, because he ain’t going for it.’ And he got up and started showing me these things to do. So I really liked Guy because he knew about painting.1 “When I met Townes,” Susanna Clark says, “he had decided to leave home and decided not to call home for help for any reason whatsoever, and to be completely self-sufficient. And, by hook or by crook, he did it, even though we were all starving to death.” Shortly afterward, Susanna’s sister died unexpectedly, and Susanna decided to move to Houston with Guy. “Townes came over practically every day in Houston, whenever he was in town,” Susanna recalls. “I remember one time that there were a lot of people down there I didn’t know. And Townes came up to me. He recognized my forlorn-ness; I had just lost my sister and I was quite lost…. Townes came over to me and put his arms around me, and then held me by both shoulders and stood back and looked at me, and he said, ‘If Guy loves you, I love you.’ And for the first time I felt welcome and I knew I had a friend for life. And he stuck to his word. No matter what happened, he was always there for me.” On January 16, 1970, Townes and Fran made their split final with a divorce. Together, they went to the courthouse in Houston , filed the paperwork, then drove back to the house. “Townes said something interesting to me when we finally got the divorce ,” Fran recalls. “We were coming home from getting the divorce, and we were still friends. It wasn’t an angry thing. And he said, ‘I may have been physically unfaithful to you, but you were mentally unfaithful to me.’ I’ll never forget that. I said, ‘You’re just trying to make me feel bad.’ But after I started thinking about it, I realized he was probably right, in a way. I always had a guilt complex over not sticking with him, feeling like I let him down. It’s that mother–protection thing. And he really went off the deep end for a while after that.”2 [54.196.27.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:52 GMT) 94 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt According to Townes’ friend Bianca, “After he broke up with his wife, it was a steady downhill.”3 He continued to drink heavily , and more and more he supplemented the drinking by ingesting a wide variety of drugs, including heroin, persistently. He was engaging in edgy, dangerous behavior, and according to friends, his treatment of others, particularly of women, started to grow increasingly abusive. “When he was drinking, he’d needle people mercilessly,” one friend recalls. “He would just go after somebody, and he’d smell blood, and he wouldn’t let up, sometimes until the poor guy—or, yes, the poor girl—was in tears.”4 That spring...