Willie, how could you?
I was hungover, laying on the sofa, watching trash on tv. I was about to have the sort of revelation that only comes with a pounding headache and a dry tongue. It was creeping over me, slowly, slowly. I didn’t know it at the time, but that afternoon marked a change in me so great my friends questioned if I was the same person afterwards. Never again did I make a fool of myself over a man. My own skin became comfortable to wear. It has been ever since.
I was watching a documentary on Willie Nelson, for lack of anything but sport on the other channels. All the colours in the room seemed too bright. I could smell everything; bacon cooking two doors down; empty bottle of beer under the sofa; staleness of last night on my skin. The clarity of the morning after. There’s a tribe somewhere, I read, who get drunk purely for the insight of the hangover. Not for them wild dancing and dignity left at the door. Not for them nurofen and strong black coffee. They are in search of epiphany. And accidentally, I was
about to stumble upon my own.
Willie was singing, uptight in a suit, fifties hair not long enough to plait. But the song, it sounded familiar. I laid a cool hand on my forehead to ease my confused frown. He was singin Crazy.
Ka-ray-zee. Kah-ray-zee for feelin so lonely / I’m kah-ray-zee. Kah-ray-zee for feelin so blue.
I swapped hands. Why was Willie Nelson singing Crazy? Why was a man singing Crazy? It was not a man’s song. It’s a woman’s song. A song whispered as you lean your head on the kitchen window and wonder who your man is with tonight. A song soulfully howled by Scottish women on karaoke night. A song to be delivered glass in hand. A song to be sung by women like me. If you can sing Crazy and feel it in your heart then, girl, you are a woman. You know the pain of women, of love. You know to be a woman in love is to be crazy. To know
you are a fool, but to be helpless about it. It’s men who love as long as they want to. It’s women who wonder what they did wrong.
I stared at Willie in his suit. The information was filtering into my brain. Willie Nelson wrote Crazy. A man wrote my song. I felt as though I were piecing together a puzzle I should have solved at university. I would have solved at university, if I hadn’t been so drunk. I thought the song was about me. I wanted to be the woman in the song. Tragic. Romantic. Interesting. I’d been throwing myself around like a two bit literary heroine, embarking on reckless affairs and luxuriating in the drama of them, accepting I would always be punished for pleasure, expecting my men to leave, to cheat, to lie.
I wanted to be Connie Chatterley lying in the woods. Celia Johnson on the platform, Anna Karenina under the train. I wanted to be Ophelia, Julia in her blue overalls, Annie Hall. Where had it got me? Here I was. Beaten, tired, poor, unhappy. Childless. Imagining I was Sally Hardcastle in Love on the Dole. I wanted to be - I’d wanted to be - women who didn’t exist. Women made of men. Women with thoughts and feelings and voices that didn’t belong to them. All at once the books piled around the walls of the room looked like bars. I’d imprisoned myself in words.
Willie had changed songs now.
Well I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it / Cause I know just what I’m gonna do.
I was cold all over. It didn’t have to be like this. Names rose unbidden in my head; Esther Greenwood; Offred; Jeanette. I got up and walked unsteadily to the bathroom, stuck my fingers down my throat and purged myself of everything that had gone before. Then I went to bed and slept for a long time.
In the morning I bought my own paper and pens.