Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley

Chapter 22: Departure

22 Departure T he nation’s bicentennial year arrived. By January of ’76, Depty Dawg had a full bag of brand-new songs; he was writing and practicing constantly . His confidence was growing and with it, his ambition. He was eager to get out in the world and become Blaze Foley. He said we couldn’t stay in the tree house forever; we had to make lives, not to mention money, if we were to realize our goals of family and careers. It would be hard to leave paradise. We debated it constantly: should we stay? Should we go? In the end we resorted to flipping a coin. Dep held a nickel on his palm. “Heads we stay, tails we’re gone.” The coin somersaulted through the air and landed on his open hand for me to read. “Tails.” I smiled up at him. “Guess it’s meant to be, honey.” He lifted me off my feet. “Austin, Texas, here we come!” To his mind, Austin was the true home of country music, not Nashville, not any more, with its rhinestone cowboys churning out watered-down, prettified tunes. The gritty, authentic sound was coming from Texas now, where a red-haired renegade named Willie Nelson had single-handedly turned redneck rock—a fusion of country-western and rhythm-and-blues—into a national pastime. It sounded good to me. In Austin I might be able to act again, and maybe even write. Dep thought I could do whatever I put my mind to. It made sense that we would have to leave Udo to take on grown-up lives. We were ready to move on; I believed our love could survive anything. The prospect of adventure , and the fulfillment of our dreams, was intoxicating, irresistible. So what if they were Depty’s dreams? I’d hitched myself to his star, and I was willing to go anywhere to see it rise. His gift was so real, and so rare, success felt inevitable. 93 94 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley Our friends were not convinced. Margery, especially, was disconcerted. She was still two months away from giving birth. “Why do you have to go now?” she argued, pulling a sweatshirt over her rounded belly. “Depty feels ready,” I explained. Frowning, she put a hand on her stomach. “I’m ready too, but I have to wait.” I smiled. “He can’t do here what he wants to do musically.” “What about Atlanta?” “He says Austin’s the place. Besides,” I went on, “the door fell off the tree house this morning.” Margery’s blue eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “You didn’t tell me that.” And so it was decided. The dogs would stay with Grody Mike who’d be moving into the tree house after us. Having finally paid off Ethyl, we sold her for fifty bucks; we didn’t have the money to keep her on the road anyway. In a few weeks, Grody would drive us to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Afterwards , Dep and I would hitchhike to Dallas to see his younger sister. From there we’d thumb to Waco, where we could make a little money working for friends before going on to Austin. Our final days in the county ticked away. Roxanne the witch came down to say good-bye, and to ask if I had borrowed her enema bag? I had not. We said tearful farewells to Bubba, Helen, and Seth, to Margery and Billy, to Glyn and Sas and the family at Waller. We would miss our friends immeasurably. The last morning in Whitesburg I went to a local nursery. The old man in charge tried to put his rabbity little tongue in my mouth, but he had just the thing I was looking for: jasmine. Udo had given us so much. It had sheltered and nurtured us and we, in turn, had loved it as best we could. Now we wanted to leave something of ourselves there, the lingering scent of our life together. That afternoon we planted the fragrant vine at the foot of the tree house. Kneeling, we pressed our hands into the wet earth and gave our blessing to the star-shaped flowers whose common name was poet’s jasmine. “We’ll be back,” Depty whispered. ...