Can’t Keep a Good Girl Down

The beginning of a tale on love, loss, grief, and(eventual) healing, set in the bars, clubs, and honky-tonks of mid-90s Nashville.

See what you lost when you left this world

This sweet old world…

— Lucinda Williams

The last time I saw John alive, he was holding a half-empty six-pack of Shiner Bock, crying.

He was about to leave my apartment after dropping a bomb.

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” he says. Just like that. He takes a pull off Shiner Bock #1.

“We’ve been together — what — a year? It’s been great, but the next step would be to move in together, and I don’t want that. I care about you — you’re great, you really are, you’re such a sweet person — but I don’t want that kind of commitment with you.”

So there it is. I’m frozen.

When he showed up at my apartment unannounced, six-pack in hand, I thought, ‘This is odd, but okay. Very much okay. Overly optimistically, I think ‘maybe he’s having a John Cusack moment. Like that classic scene in Say Anything, where Lloyd Dobler holds up the boom box outside Diane Court’s window. Maybe he’s having a moment like that.

Hardly. I can’t speak, which isn’t unusual. I rarely express my emotions with words, unless I’m writing in my journal. So many times I wanted to blurt out “I love you.” The words would not come. “What’s wrong?” John would say. Not a thing.

Tonight I’m thinking of bricks. I visualize a wall going up, brick by brick, between John and I as he starts on Shiner Bock #2, waiting for me to speak.

“Okay.” Finally, something comes out of my mouth. “I’m not sure what to say. It sounds like you made up your mind. I didn’t know there was anything wrong.”

He had been thinking about it for a while, he said. Is that why he cut his hair? Is that why he wasn’t going out as much?

“We can still be friends,” he says, like they all do.

“Right. Our friendship means a lot to me, but no, not for a while.”

And with that, I retreat behind my wall, fully built now. After not getting any more response from me, John leaves, his head hung, his eyes watery, a partial pack of decent beer under his right arm.

I would never see him again.

###

After one lonely week, which included my first Friday night at home in years, I call him. I miss sharing the minutia of the day with him. I hate that I miss talking to him every day, but I do.

“We started out as friends, and that’s the most important thing to me,” I say, peering through a tiny crack in my new wall. “It doesn’t make sense to never talk to each other again. So yeah, I’d like to get back to that, somehow.”

John seems relieved, even happy, that we can reconcile. He tells me about a party going on over Labor Day weekend. Probably for the best that it is with a flannel-Lynyrd Skynyrd crowd I don’t hang around with much; otherwise, I would have stayed there all night just to be near John while trying to act like everything’s fine.

I’m still broken by our breakup, but I’ll forgive him, in time. In more time, maybe we can joke around like when we all used to accidentally on purpose meet at the Gold Rush after a show at the Exit/In. Maybe we could get back together even…

I would never talk to him again.

Two weeks post-breakup. I’m easing into my new role as a 24-year-old single person. I spend more time with my roommate, S. — in the bars on the weekends, at home during the week. Today, a run-of-the-mill Wednesday, S and I watch an ER rerun. She gives me one of her skinny Capri cigarettes to smoke while we mull over the day, each of us flicking tiny piles of cinder into separate ashtrays.

When the evening news comes on, I say goodnight to S. and walk upstairs — those same stairs John clomped up two weeks ago — to my bedroom. I like to be rested for my admin job at Woodland Studios, one of Nashville’s many — and one of its most historic — recording studios.

One good thing to come out of the breakup: I’m sleeping like a champ. For much of the past year, I’ve gotten most of my shut-eye on the turbulent waters of John’s sloshy waterbed. Shifting position on that vessel could leave a weaker-stomached person heaving over the edge like a tourist on a whale-watching trip.

Comfortable and stable in my own bed, I nod off with my journal on the pillow beside me. In an hour or two, S. will retreat to her room across the hall with an Anne Rice novel. She’ll read for hours more from her king-sized bed with the black wrought iron frame.

I hear the phone ring, but don’t give much thought to a late-night call — at first. Most of the time, when the phone rings at odd hours it’s Michelle, my college roommate, calling S. to talk relationship drama.

With this ring, I don’t fall immediately back to sleep like I normally would. I linger in that in-between stage for a moment or two, as if I’m expecting the call to be for me. But why? Even if John and I were still together, he wouldn’t call this late. He works 9–5 as a broadcast engineer for Jim Owens Productions. He runs the mixing board for a talk show called “Crook and Chase.” Actually, no one would call me this late unless it’s…

A minute or more went by, then a knock on my door. “Heather?”

I mumble some syllable to confirm I’m awake. Is the call really for me? S. opens the door and steps into my dark room. I sit up in bed. She stands in the doorway wearing a white V-neck T-shirt and pajama bottoms, staring into the darkness. Her blonde hair is thrown up in a bun mussed from the pillow. She’s frowning. This is not unusual, but the room gets warmer anyway.

“That was Cat. John was in an accident,” she says, not moving. My ears start to ring.

“What?!” I sit up in bed, wide awake now. “Is he okay? Did he get hurt?” My heart thumps like a big bass drum. My cheeks burn.

“He’s dead.”

###

You know how when you stub your toe, or hit yourself in the shin, there’s a few seconds when you feel nothing, but you know something terribly painful is on its way? You hope that it won’t hurt, that you have somehow escaped the inevitable, but you know you won’t. Then, a second or two later, you feel the result of the impact move through your body and land at that toe or that shin and set it on fire. I’m in between the impact and the pain.

At first, shock, numb, nothing. This is not happening. The air hums. The world is on pause. My ears really are ringing. But it’s coming, I know it’s coming, like watching a tsunami rush toward the shore before it sucks me and everything around me into its deep, dark muck.

I don’t believe what S. just told me. Maybe Cat is wrong. Maybe John is just hurt really bad. Within seconds, the horror of this news crowds out my feeble hope that this is all a bad dream. I don’t know what to do with this much pain rushing at me.

Every word bores into my being as S. explains the accident. “Cat said John was supposed to record Java Christ at Neal’s studio. He left to go send the freight elevator down so that they could get their gear up to the third floor. He didn’t come back.”

I know that building well: Big Red Rocket, a large warehouse converted into live/work spaces. John and his roommate, Warren, have an apartment there, down the hall from Neal’s Poppy Studios. Big Red’s rickety elevator always scared me, the way it lurched to a stop and the way the up/down lever never worked right.

S. stays with me in my dark bedroom and holds me while I hyperventilate and dribble snot on her old, white T-shirt. S. knows loss deeper and more tragic than this. Whether that made these moments harder or gave her empathy, I can’t say, but she stayed.

After several minutes, I’m not sure how many, shock crowds out the sobbing enough so I can eke out a word or two.

“Are you sure? Are you sure he’s not just hurt?” I ask her, knowing the answer before I even sputter the words. She is sure. She calls Cat back for me so I can hear him for myself. S hands me the phone, and I huddle on the floor to listen.

“I stopped by Big Red to just hang out and see how things were going with Geoff and the other Java Christ guys,” Cat says. “When I got there, they were all hanging out outside, waiting for John. They said he went upstairs to get the elevator and hadn’t come back. They thought he just got distracted. Maybe he bumped into someone in the hall, or he got a phone call. Then Warren showed up — he was out with Erin…”

“Erin?” Warren’s ex-girlfriend who won’t eat anything with a face.

“Yeah. I don’t know why…anyway, so Warren went looking for him. He found John’s keys on the bar in their apartment. He knew something was wrong then, because, you know, John always has his keys. So Warren started looking around the building and…found him.”

Cat’s voice gets softer, yet more strained, as he continues. “Warren tried to give him CPR but he said it was no use…” I assume that means he died instantly. I can’t imagine an alternative.

Cat and I talk for a few minutes more. He can’t give me a good explanation as to why the elevator was down when it should have been up, or up when it should have been down, but I don’t argue the issue. I can’t.

“Thank you for thinking to call me,” I say. We promise to talk tomorrow.

Disoriented, I hand the cordless phone back to S., my mind spinning. She offers to drive me to Big Red to see Warren, but I say no. I don’t want to be alone, but I can’t move. S. sits beside me on the bed, letting me alternately talk, cry, and stay quiet.

When she senses that I’m somewhat stable, S. says good night and goes back to her beautiful bed with the satin sheets, though I doubt she will sleep. She shuts the door quietly, leaving me alone with this…thing. Did someone just whack me with a hammer?

Through the night, I cry some, stare into the darkness more, and float in a desolate space of disbelief. Slapped in the face with death, I go numb, as if buzzed but not in any way fun. I know I’m in my room, but nothing is the same, as if someone rearranged the furniture but didn’t. Jetlag without going anywhere.

The emotional ache isn’t raw, like a bad breakup, which would leave me blubbering and pitiful, but mostly fine and functional the next day. The shock of this loss seems to have lodged into every cell, leaving me a zombie. It’s an ache that’s too deep to be felt, at least right now. It will work its way through eventually, and, for me, slowly over time.

I spend the better part of what started out as a restful night’s sleep trying to get my mind around what could have happened at Big Red.

What the Hell were the Java Christ guys doing outside Big Red? Didn’t they wonder why John was taking so long just to walk up two flights of stairs and flip a switch? Didn’t they think it odd? And why didn’t they go and look for him? If the Java Christ guys had gone to look for John right away instead of just hanging around outside, maybe things would be different. Maybe someone could have saved him. Didn’t they care? John offered to record them for free. Why John? Why on a Wednesday? Why didn’t they just use the stairs?

Memories of us — out on Lower Broad in Nashville, the impromptu surprise party he threw me, hungover trips to Bobby’s Dairy Dip — so many memories flash through my head like a flipping photo album while I stare into the darkness. In the first hours of September 7, 1995, the weight of what occurred just a few hours ago bears down on me. In the first hours of September 7, 1995, I want to die too.