Willie by Willie Nelson Page A

he was old and grown up, but he was in his twenties, a pal of Bud Fletcher’s. Pat would stay up all night and play dominoes and smoke cigarettes with me in a clubhouse we built that had a stove and a domino table in it. He would do anything. You could say, “Pat, why don’t you just go tell old so-and-so he’s a stupid horse’s butt,” and Pat would get right up and go tell them. I loved this guy.
    He fell off a truck and killed himself.
    I got out of high school and took a job trimming trees in East Texas with Zeke Varnon. I nearly went the way of Pat Kennedy much sooner than expected.

CHAPTER SIX
    Suffering is the wrong use of the mind. The reason I have a bad experience is to teach me not to do it again. Generally the cause of the bad experience lies inside of my own self, in the way I am thinking, and so I bring it on myself. Like, for example, climbing forty feet up into an elm tree with a coil of rope over my shoulder. I didn’t really have to do it. But just because the guy who was already up in the tree yelled down that he needed the rope, I decided to show the tree-trimming crew that I was the best athlete of the bunch.
    I scooted up that tree like a monkey. It wasn’t until I started back down, missed a grip, and found myself falling through the air that I realized this trip had not only been unnecessary, it was more than a little bit foolish.
    As I fell I thought, well, Lord, I have done it again, and if You will bail me out one more time I will use the brains God gave me and devote my talents to the musical arts instead of work that You never intended me to do.
    It had seemed like a good idea at the time to finance an old car with Zeke on a no-money-down deal in San Antonio and go to Tyler to become expert tree trimmers. This was in the summer of 1951. I was just out of high school. The Korean War had become real to mebecause of the draft. Now I believe there should be required national service for a year or so for all kids soon as they turn eighteen, with no exemptions. They don’t have to go in the army. They could work in hospitals and parks or whatever. This would force kids to realize they have a working stake in our democratic government. I don’t believe a democracy should have a totally professional military force. I believe the military should be in large number made up of people who don’t want to be there and will help make the generals honest.
    But when I drove to Tyler with Zeke, I was too young to understand this. All I knew was that I was I-A in the draft, prime meat, and the politicians could throw my ass into the infantry and ship me off to war. President Truman had fired General Douglas MacArthur a month before my graduation. I heard MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech on the radio. I didn’t know what the controversy was all about, but I liked the idea of a general getting fired if the president thought he was fucking up. If I was on my way to Korea, I wanted President Truman to put the best generals over there he could find.
    But here I was falling through the air in Tyler and praying, and then I felt a blow as I bounced off a branch and crashed through smaller branches and tangled in some wires that slowed my fall.
    I hit the ground and it knocked the wind out of me. My bad back that I’d gotten from baling hay struck me a punch above the right hip as I stood up and laughed and tried to make it look like, why, hell, I can fall forty feet any day, a tough rascal like me.
    Inside a voice was telling me, Willie, don’t you go back up in no trees, understand?
    I walked off that job and enlisted in the air force for a four-year hitch.
    This accomplished two things at once. It got me out of Tyler, and it solved the problem of the draft.
    The navy didn’t appeal to me. I could remember my sailor suit with the blood all over it, and I didn’t want to be on the water all the time. The army or