Instead, he called Jade. She answered on the fourth ring. “It’s two in the morning,” she said, voice thick with sleep.
She flew out the next day. Not because she loved him—though maybe she did, a little—but because she’d seen too many countryboys burn out and blow away like chaff. She sat with him while he told Rickey he was done. Rickey called him a fool. “You’ll be back,” he said. “The crack always wins.”
“Some.”
The studio was a converted garage in East Nashville. For two weeks, Rickey worked him like a mule. “Faster,” he’d say. “That bridge? Trash it. Put a beat behind it. No one wants to hear about your dead well, they want to hear about getting drunk and getting laid.”
The spiral was slow at first, then fast as a rockslide. He missed a show in Memphis because he was too strung out to leave the hotel. He blamed the flu. He screamed at Jade when she showed up at a backstage door, worried. “You’re not my mama,” he said. She left crying, and he didn’t call. countryboy crack
“You play?” she asked, nodding at the guitar case.