Truck Stop HeavenTime never leaves anything alone -- take it from a natural-born road dog. |
This appeared in the Oxford American - March/April 2001 |
![]() The Red Hot itself was one of the last great truck stops in America. It didn't take a backseat to anything Route 66 had to offer. It was the Southern edge personified; a gathering place for all sorts of ramblers. A café society of good ol' boys in affordable cowboy shirts and the kind of good ol' girls who'd fetch you out of jail even though they had called the law six hours earlier to come lock you up. At the Red Hot, I met people like Trigger Thrash, Wirehead, Fats Domino, Percy Sledge's valet, Hank Jr.'s crew, Mama Rabbit, and Elly the Pinball Queen. It was an atmosphere where the lines on Merle Haggard's face didn't have to be explained, Hank Williams' words could be taken to heart, and the waitresses had a way of knowing your life story the minute you opened the door. I turned my memories of the Red Hot into a song called "Truckstop" that George Jones and Emmylou Harris sang on my album The Pilgrim.
The tune's kind of a pistol-whipped version of a Carter Family memory. The sort of song that only Earl Scruggs can properly play on the guitar. It only lasts one minute and twenty-seven seconds, and then it's gone. So is the Red Hot. I didn't see it coming. At the end of a twenty-eight-year tour, I pulled into the Red Hot a year ago and found it boarded up and left for dead. The coolest sign in Meridian had been unplugged. There I was, the owl-eyed driver of a tired Cadillac, badly in need of fuel, coffee, and conversation. I found myself sitting in a graveyard of silence. I felt betrayed, lonesome, and hurt. Then I got mad. The longer I sat there, the madder I got. I got mad at time itself because it never leaves anything alone. I got mad at myself for always being gone, and then I cussed the road for taking one too many things away from me. A dark angel laughed in my face and said, "You know the deal. If you never leave, you're never missed." The lines from Johnny Cash's "Big River" flashed through my mind:
I disappeared into the black Mississippi night, driving my black car, wearing a black hat and black gloves and a black coat, thinking black thoughts about black coffee and that never-ending stream of blacktop called the road.
By Marty Stuart |
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