Lynyrd and the Rez Car

"Hey, Sonnie, did you hear who is coming to Tulsa? Keno asked. "No! Who?" was my immediate answer.

I could tell Keno was excited about this cause his eyebrows always went way up towards the top of his head when he got that way. "Willie Nelson is bringing his 4th of July picnic up there, we should go!"

It was the summer of 1977, that summer in a young man's life when he starts venturing out, sometimes clandestinely, to taste what is out there, away from the mundane everyday existence a boy-man feels when he lives far away from the nearest hub of anything thought to be cool or exciting.

So, at this very moment, without thought to how we were going to get enough money or how we were going to get there, we decided to go. Keno lived way out in the hills, out by Coon Mountain. He had an old beat up '62 Chevy that his mom had given him to drive. It had sat out in the field since '72 after the engine had froze up in it. It had gone almost 32,000 miles since it's last oil change before it finally belched it's last gasp of black smoke. The car was originally white. The right rear panel had been replaced from a black Chevy found at a salvage yard. The hood was painted in primer for when Keno got enough money to get it a proper paint job. The windshield had a jagged crack in it from a misguided baseball that had found the old car too close to right field in a long ago game of baseball played out in that field.

The floor under the gas pedal was rusted out and the back seat was ripped.

Numerous animals had made the car their home while it lay dormant in the field and for some reason, granddaddy spiders still laid claim to it. It was a common event for these long legged spindly creatures to crawl out of any crevice in that old car, silently walking up your leg or across your shoulder until you felt those long legs tickling your neck and then slapping, thrashing and brushing wildly at them before you realized what it was.

"Relax, bro, it's just a daddy long legs," Keno would say through a laugh, his eyebrows arched up in peaks as if to exaggerate his humor. Keno had worked hard and managed to buy an engine out of Ol' Bruner's salvage yard to replace the dead one. His uncle was a self taught mechanic who through trial and error managed to bring the old beast back to life again.

Keno was the first of us boys to have a car, it was our ticket to freedom and he thoroughly enjoyed the rash of popularity that had come with it.

This was the car we were to take to the concert. We hauled hay, cleaned out those long chicken houses our neighbors tended that the big poultry processing plant over in Arkansas owned, picked squash and field corn during the day and at night went to work at our summer jobs at the canning factory.

Between the $2.05 an hour we got at the canning factory, we got a nickel extra for the night shift, and the odd labor that we could gather, and after our Moms garnishing part of our checks to help out at home, by July 3rd we had about, oh maybe 92 dollars and 30 cents in change, give or take saved up for the trip.

So on July the fourth, 1977, we struck out on highway 100 in the already blazing morning sun headed west towards the huge metroplex known as Tulsa.

Keno had brought an 8-track player that he had "borrowed' out of his uncle's car and rigged it up under the dash, it hung there by 1 screw, wires hanging up under the dash like so much spaghetti. I had bought a used eight track tape of Lynyrd Skynyrd and we listened to this all the 118 miles to Tulsa.

Now, this was Willie Nelson's event, but we were going to see Lynyrd Skynyrd, a southern rock band. We knew all the lyrics to their songs, played our air guitars in emulation of them, combed our long hair down in over our eyes and rocked our heads back and forth in beat to the wail of those guitars and then, "ddut=ddut=ddut=ddut', the 8 track would be changing tracks and we would pause in mid angst until the beat picked back up again on the next track and then try our best to wail "Sweet Home, Alabama" just like Ronnie Van Zant, the lead singer for the group. Somewhere outside of Coweta, the first hint of trouble became evident. "Hey, look at the needle on the temp gauge," Keno looked a little worried.

"That thing probably don't even work," I replied, even though it was touching the H on the dial.

So we stopped and got a Coke and asked for directions to the fairgrounds in Tulsa.

We got about 4 different opinions on the best way to get there before we decided to just go on and try our best to remember, "Twenty-first and Sheridan, Twenty-first and Sheridan.'

It was my job as co-pilot to remember this. "Twenty-first and Sheridan,"I repeated over and over in my head. "Look here,"Keno pointed to the temperature gauge now lying in the proper location on the dial, "must've been stuck." When we got into the outskirts of Tulsa we could see the skyscrapers and we traded wide eyed looks, and then whooped and hollered and beat on the dash and then whooped and hollered some more, "Sweet Home Ala-Bama, Lord I'm coming home to you, Yes it's true".

The road got wider and wider and then there was four lanes, and Keno said, "What street do we want?" and I said at the top of my lungs "41st and Sheridan!"

Eighteen stop lights later, Keno asked me again,"are you sure it was 41st and Sheridan?"

Well, we drove the entire length of 41st street, all the way to the river and back before Keno stopped and asked directions again, I sneaked a peak at that gauge while he was inside and it was spanking that "H" again pretty hard but who cared? We were in Tulsa!! Keno got back in the car, slamming the door three times before it caught, threw me a Slim Jim and a can of Coors. "Wow! How'd you get this?" I asked.

"It's just a Slim Jim, Sonnie, ain't ya ever had a Slim Jim before?" he said looking straight ahead.

We pulled out into the long line of cars headed up Sheridan, eight tracks blaring Waylon Jennings and David Allen Coe in unison with our "Sweet Home, Ala-Bama!"

We parked about 8 blocks from the fairgrounds, dollar a car, not responsible for items stolen, leave your keys with the guy in the red baseball cap in case someone needs to move your car to leave. I had never seen so many people in all my life at one time. Sixty thousand rednecks all sunburned and drunk, or high. The smell of marijuana permeated the senses, the sight of hundreds of tan, nubile, peroxide headed, blue jean cut-off wearing, halter top busting girls in sunglasses gave me a reason to yell in my best redneck impression, "Yee-Hawwww!!

Keno and I looked at each other, his eyebrows were now arched up to his hairline, "Yee-Hawww!!" we yelled.

We had seventy four dollars left in our pocket. Cost us twelve apiece to get in, a t-shirt each to prove we were there cost us sixteen dollars total, and we still had over thirty dollars to get home on. We walked around and gawked at all the pretty girls, and blushed when they looked back. Someone passed Keno a joint, and I was a little surprised when he simply passed it to the next guy. It was nearly two O'clock and time for the concert to begin.

Now, about two hours later something became glaringly apparent. Forty 'Job-Johnnies' wasn't going to cut if for sixty thousand plus people. The lines for the little green houses was a hundred deep. By now the rednecks had pretty well seen the ice in their coolers melt and the beer they had consumed was following nature's course of removal. This was when the men started forgetting the Job-Johnnies all together. Then, for no apparent reason, they started climbing the light poles, the tall 100 foot ones.

Not to be outdone, another one climbed up naked. And then another one. And then another one. The crowd was going nuts to the music of Jerry Jeff Walker, whoever he was, and that's when the mounties showed up. So, here Keno and I am, wearing our Lynyrd Skynyrd shirts, smelling the breeze filled with the smell of sixty thousand sweating, sometimes bleeding, people, spilled beer, the pungent odor of marijuana, urine, and if that wasnt enough, horse manure on a hot July day in Oklahoma. I believe this is when I got sick.

When I came to, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I heard Jessie Colter singing in the background and I was laying smack dab in the middle of a blue jean cutoff lap staring up at a buckskin fringe halter top about to bust it's last remaining button. "Yeee-haww!" I thought to myself, and closed my eyes again. Someone said something about dehydration and all these cowboy hat wearing do-gooders sat me up and started giving me beer. "Here, boy, drink this now, you gotta get some fluid in you quick". So, I downed about three of them real fast like and they threw me up on my feet away from the blissful lap of comfort I was getting accustomed to and she threw me her best, "Ya'll be careful, now," before that pot bellied shirtless old do-goodin' cowboy threw her over in a full lip lock.

Keno was standing over by the bleachers talking to a redhead from Wichita.

"Are you ok?' she drawled. I threw up on her feet.

Keno was pretty upset with me over that so we went back down to the muck and mire of the field in front of the stage. Lynyrd Skynyrd was next, this was the moment we had been waiting for. I was feeling much better when they opened up with their first song and I had never heard such a roar as that when the lead singer hollered, "Hellooo, Tulsa, How Ya'll doin'?

Halter tops came flying off, those same sunburnt peroxide headed girls were sitting on their boyfriends' shoulders waving confederate flags in the air, Man, all that hard work to get here was now worth it. There was ol' Ronnie Van Zant himself, up there singing away all the southern boy pride, barefooted and here I was as well, straight out of the hills of Oklahoma, out of the government Indian housing, raised on commodity cheese and fry bread, with my long hair flying in the beer stenched wind and we were all here at the same time, Yee-Haw! We stood and we yelled and we sang along with every one of their songs and when they were done they came out and sang an encore and we still wanted more.

And then they were gone.

Now it was the rednecks turn to get raucous and rowdy. Waylon and Willie and the boys were next, by now the Job Johnnies were either full or overturned, folks was passed out everywhere, laying in Lord Knows What, the halter tops came off again, only this time covered in dirt and mud. The first chorus of "Whiskey River' came and this is when it happened. The little redhead found Keno, "there ya are, Chief!" she purred. Keno was possessed or something because he plumb left me standing there and nearly stepped on three passed out drunks before he caught her hand and drug her over to where she could get up on his shoulders like all the others.

Three big old boys ran up, "Hey, Geronimo, whaddya think yore doin'? Well, it was quite a little melee there for about a minute and then the mounties showed up.

One of those horses stepped on my leg, and I went down in the muck. I got up on my knees, my Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt covered in filth, smelling like Lord Knows What, wishing I was back in that blue jeaned girl's lap when they grabbed me up and pushed me through the crowd to the gate. Keno was there waiting for me.

"Damn Injuns, get a little beer in them and look what happens," the bouncer said to the gatekeeper, "don't let them back in." Well, we cussed all the way to the car, changed our shirts, got the keys from ol'red baseball cap, and pulled out onto Sheridan. We got all the way to Broken Arrow before Keno broke the silence. "We didn't do nothin'! he shouted.

"I didn't do nothin', you was the one with that white girl on your shoulders", I replied.

Keno's eyebrows were down over his eyes in anger at this point and I shut up quick.

We got to Tenkiller Lake, and stopped for a swim, getting all the muck and stink off of us. Then we laid there and dried off in the setting sun, staring up at the pink and orange sky.........then the hiss of the radiator boiling over brought us up on our feet. We had to use the lake water to refill the radiator, Keno was pretty ingenious in repairing a radiator hose with his pocket knife and some bailing wire he had in the trunk.

We got to Hungry Mountain before the car died on the steep incline up the slope of the mountain. We had to push it over to the top by ourselves, having just enough left in us to reach the crest of the hill and then we coasted down the other side to the country store at Rocky Mountain where we discovered the float was stuck on the carbeurator. Keno was pretty ingenious in priming that carbeurator and getting it started again.

We was darn near old man Mankiller's house when Keno's handiwork on the radiator hose gave way and the whole inside of the car filled up with hot burning steam and he whipped the car to the shoulder and we rolled out on the grass, stop, drop and roll, thinking we were on fire. Grandaddy spiders were running around everywhere at this time. We walked on to my house from there and my dad gave Keno a ride home. Keno had to have his uncle pull his car back out into the field where it had been all those years before. He took the rest of our money for doing it. The Chevy hasn't moved since.

I saw Keno a few years back and we had a good laugh over this memory. I asked him about the old car and what had happened to it. His reply and raised eyebrows made me laugh and then in looking down at the ground, a grandaddy spider was crawling across my foot.






Lynyrd and the Rez Car
© Michael Walkingstick - 2002
gathered from the net

"Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd







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