Exclusive Excerpt: Without Getting Killed Or Caught — The Life And Music Of Guy Clark

When Townes and Guy caught the flu, Susanna looked after them. She made chicken soup and doled out cough syrup. While they slept, she conceived a new painting called The Bouncing Apple, a statement of her happiness at having a little time and space for herself.

Halfway through her work on The Bouncing Apple, Susanna ran out of white paint. No extra money existed for such luxuries, and the painting sat unfinished until one day when the threesome was flipping their last quarter to decide whether to spend it on a Coke or a Popsicle. Mickey Newbury called to tell Townes that Buffy Sainte-Marie had cut one of their songs and that a $500 check awaited him at the publisher.

“Jesus Christ! Five hundred dollars!” Susanna says. “We were so broke we were down to drinking apple Malt Duck or grape Malt Duck. Every time we got a little money Townes would give it to a veteran on the street corner.” After they picked up the check, Guy, Susanna and Townes climbed back in Guy’s new Volkswagen double-cab truck to go to the liquor store. Townes insisted they stop at the art store first to buy Susanna white paint.

“Townes said: ‘The first thing we are going to do with this $500 is get a tube of white paint for Susanna.’ I couldn’t believe it,” Susanna says. “We went up there and slapped that money down. ‘We want a tube of white paint.’ And by god we got it. It was the most important I’ve ever felt in my life. That’s what the household needed, was me getting some white paint.”

At the liquor store, they bought good vodka, and Townes looked around for a pretty girl to pick up. There was no one. They went home without a girl for Townes, so he called the Old Quarter in Houston.

“A girl came to the phone, and Townes said, ‘Do you want to come on up to Nashville? A plane ticket is waiting for you,’” Susanna says. “He blew the rest of the $500 on a plane ticket. Mickey Newbury was just horrified when he found out what Townes had done with the money. Mickey thought he was going to save all of us, that we’d buy chicken and rice and make it last for a long time.”

Living together in close quarters wasn’t always a party. One night Townes threatened to kill himself. He took an X-Acto knife and cut a sideways slice through his chest.

“I yelled ‘Townes!’ and I jumped over the table,” Susanna says. “I wrestled with him with all the strength I had, and I was sitting on him in the kitchen. I had his hand and was pounding it on the garbage can to make him let go of the X-Acto knife because I knew he wanted to do more with it. I kept saying ‘Let go of it, let go of it.’ He finally relaxed and said, ‘Susanna, why would I do that?’ I said ‘Drop the knife.’ Townes said later: ‘I just want you to pay attention to me.’ The next day or so, Townes wouldn’t take care of this thing. I went out and bought all this ointment and pads and stuff. I said ‘Look, Townes, we’ve got to take care of this thing. It’s going to fester.’ I fixed him up. He said, ‘You know I was going to make an X but you stopped me. Susanna, how am I going to explain this thing on my chest to the girls I’m going to fuck? I’m going to tell them I was bobsledding down a hill and ran under a barbed wire fence. What do you think?’ I said ‘Townes, tell them you were attacked by a psychopath. That’s true, you were.’”

But Susanna loved Townes and began writing poems about him in her journal:

It was just after we said I do
That I ever knew there was anyone but you
It was one of them parties they give us newlyweds
That I started to crave another man’s bed
He told me he’d rather give his own life
Than take the love of his best friend’s wife
Now we’ve lived this way for a thousand years
Measured with tears for my husband and his wife
Now he comes to visit and we all play cards
And study the pear tree in the back yard
Then 12 o’clock comes and he must depart
One is my soul, the other my heart

Guy and Susanna were married. Guy and Townes were best friends. Susanna and Townes were soulmates. Many times, Susanna and Townes spoke their own language and it annoyed Guy. One day, Guy was so pissed off at Susanna and Townes that he nailed himself into the bedroom. “Townes and I can do a deal that’s above Guy’s level, and Guy does not know what to do with it,” Susanna told Louise O’Connor. “At the same time, Guy’s going to do something. It’s going to be dramatic, because he learned drama from his mama. He just fucking had enough. Townes and I were sitting there, and we were talking, and we were on the same level. We were just eyeball-to-eyeball, and all of the sudden, we hear this boom, boom. He knew we would come after him, so he nailed himself in the room and nailed the window shut too.”

“It all involved alcohol, I’m sure,” Guy says. “Something pissed me off about the way Townes and Susanna were denigrating my intelligence, and I was offended. I had enough of those two idiots, so ‘fuck you.’ I took a bottle of whiskey and some ten-penny nails and pounded those nails into the oak frames with this small hammer.”

“Naturally, being a woman, I was concerned about his food,” Susanna says. “So we decided to make a tuna fish sandwich and flatten it so we could slide it up under the door. We tried and tried but it was one of those little bitty doors and we couldn’t get it under there. I said ‘Guy, listen, there’s a tuna fish sandwich here if you really want it.’ No response. By then, he’s not even talking. Townes and I sat there all day long figuring the whole thing out. ‘What do we have to do?’ ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ We’d pound on the door. Nothing. Zero. We decided to write a note and send it under the door. ‘I love you, Guy. Tomorrow will be okay.’ No chance. Nothing. Not even a howdy-do. We’d write everything clever we could think of. Finally, about four o’clock in the afternoon, we heard nails being pulled out of the door. Townes looked up and went ‘Oh, wow!’ We thought he might come and speak to us. Oh, no. He went straight to the bathroom. Then back to the bedroom and slammed the door. By now we were just terrified, so we left him alone.”