Freddy Fender lost his battle with lung cancer yesterday. He lived in Corpus Christi, Texas. He counted the guitarist of ZZ Top as one of his many friends.
I had forgotten Freddy Fender crooning "Don't Be Cruel" and "Before the Next Teardrop Falls." It turns out he also had an active drug addiction in his younger years, thus acquiring Hepatitis C. He was the recipient of both a kidney and a liver transplant.
Back in 1978 when I was running wild in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I informed my work supervisor that I was going to Texas with my friend Irene whom I had brought to the office to meet her. Johnnie said, "Oh that's nice, sapphoq. When are you leaving?" "Right now," I replied. Johnnie was an older woman, a true southern belle. She was fairly old back then. She must be dead by now. She had taught me well, as she was also in the habit of suddenly announcing funerals of some best friend or other in order to go skiing in Colorado for a week.
Irene and I made our way down the east coast of Texas, stopping to see the two aunts of one of my party buddies. They lived in Freeport, Texas. For washing the dishes in their small Mexican restaurant, I and whoever was with me were given all we could eat and all the cervesa we could drink and a bed for the night on their beautiful screened in porch. We also spent a night in Corpus Christi at the Holiday Inn-- sleeping in the car in the parking lot. We were the last of the hippies-- so we thought-- and broke as the the real hippies had been.
From there, we made our way to South Padre Island. We slept on the beach there with all the other tourists. Cars and Winnebagos were allowed to be driven onto the white sands. We met some snow bunnies there from Minnesota who were baking themselves a brilliant red atop of their rented Bago. We also drove along the bay and met a guy who lived out there among the reeds in a tent. He was the rugged type. He showed us where he had stitched a huge wound on his leg himself. He may not have been a nice man. When the car balked at driving off the damp bay sand, he suggested that we let some air out of the tires. "That would help," he told us. Irene snorted and went back to pushing the car as I rocked it back and forth to free it.
We then went calling on the parents of one of her roommates in Brownsville Texas. They had a beautiful home. The next day, we left the car [reeking of pot and covered with the evidence of a lifestyle] at the shoe store parking lot in Pharr or McAllen for fear of being busted on the border. Clad in corduoroys in the Texas heat, we walked across the pedestrian bridge to Reynosa, Mexico to drink Tecate and buy fresh veggies for our host.
Reynosa was a different world. The taxi cab drivers were far more reckless than those I'd left behind in New York City. There were beggar children and smokey little storefront bars, haphazard streets, noise, a butcher shop, squat concrete buildings, and not too many tourists. Reynosa was a different world.
All of it was different then. It is hard to say what tricks memory plays on us unassuming humans. Those memories trickled back into my brain along with the memory of seeing ZZTop play at the New Orleans Blues Festival that August. That year I spent down south in Baton Rouge traveling around Texas and Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama seems wrapped in a haze of drugs. Drugged I was-- a chemist, mixing and matching all sorts of street drugs and the drug alcohol with abandon.
But I didn't find the "Better Living through Chemistry" as the old Dupont slogan promised. I found the throes of addiction, lonlieness drilling downward to a cellular level, the emptiness that drifting can bring to those who have not embraced their shadow-selves.
I don't regret moving to Baton Rouge and the adventures I'd had there. What I do regret in odd moments is my inability back then to make a go of it while living in health. Those who say that drugging oneself into oblivion is the way to freedom are among the most deceived on the face of this earth. I didn't know that back then. With the wisdom that comes from getting clean and staying clean for more than half my life, I certainly know that now.
~sapphoq on life
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