Steve Earle - I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive (2011)
There was always something spooky about Hank Williams. Maybe not in some of his jollier hits - "Hey Good Looking", "Jambalaya", "Lovesick Blues", that lot - but in songs like "Lost Highway", "Alone And Forsaken", "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle Blow", "Six Miles To The Graveyard", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", "Pictures From Life's Other Side", and of course the last song he ever recorded, "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive". It's as if there were two Hank Williams: the sharply dressed family entertainer, and the haunted storyteller who reported from the same half-ghostly world that would later pop up in Bob Dylan's lyrics, in David Lynch's films, in Cormac McCarthy's books. Maybe it's really there, maybe it's just something we think we hear since we know that one of the most influential popular musicians of the 20th century died 29 years old, broke, thin as a skeleton and packed to the gills with bourbon and morphine in the back of a car stuck in a snowstorm, only months before the rise of rock'n'roll. Everyone loves a good story, and it just fits entirely too well.
Lonely's a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell and then makes the sunshine seem even brighter after it travels along. Like when you're far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you're never going to see them again. But you will, and you do, and then you're not lonely anymore.
Lonesome's a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. So big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddamn world can fill it up because you dug it yourself and you're digging it still, one lie, one disappointment, one broken promise at a time.
So anyway, it's 10 years later now, and Doc is living in the poorest part of San Antonio, among whores, junkies and thieves. Doc was once Dr Ebersole, MD, the man who - among other things - gave Hank Williams his last shot of morphine and sat in the front seat as Hank quietly expired in the back. Now he's lost his license to practice medicine along with his name and he's just Doc, a heroin addict who lives for his daily fixes and pays for them by providing medical services to people who for some reason can't go to the hospital; illegal aliens, criminals with gunshot wounds, prostitutes with venereal diseases, and of course highly illegal abortions. And every time he shoots up, the ghost of Hank Williams comes to visit him and drive him just a little more insane. Because he is insane, right? Surely there's no such thing as ghosts?
But it's 1963, it's Texas, and another American myth is about to be created by Lee Harvey Oswald. And right about the time Jack and Jackie Kennedy step off the plane for the last time to wave at the masses come to greet the first Catholic president, Graciela arrives (Doc asks if he can call her "Grace" and she refuses). She's Mexican, she's 18, she's "in trouble", and after Doc helps her with that, she sticks around to help Doc treat the most wretched members of society... and something happens. Something nobody can quite explain. Surely there's no such thing as miracles anymore? So how come it only takes one touch from Graciela for people to, well, change the way they're living and stop doing all the things that they oughtn't do? And why does that upset Hank's ghost so much?
As a songwriter, Steve Earle has always been at his best when he writes about outsiders, and as a recovering drug addict himself, he knows all too well what he's writing about in his debut novel. And man, does he pull out all of the stops. His prose is feverish, prickly, musical, filled with harsh detail that never romanticizes but also never condemns. This is a cast of people who for the most part, by accident of birth or by their own poor choices, ended up at the ass-end of life,
The way Doc saw things, it was a crapshoot. Where you were born, who your people were—that's all that mattered. Law and morality had nothing to do with it, let alone anything like justice.
addicted, trapped, vilified, supposedly ruined, but still just human beings trying to get from one day to the next. And possibly, maybe, able to make a change - on their own, or by what they tell themselves are miracles.
But underneath all that, to the music of Hank Williams, runs a deeper story. America is a young country, it's why they've always been good at piecing together myths of their own.
I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive takes place both in a harshly realistic world and in that half-dreamed world just under it, a hodgepodge of folk heroes from Davey Crockett to Jack Kennedy, ancient Aztec legends and catholic dogma, song lyrics and Burroughs novels, all the stories people piece together out of the memories that haunt them and those around them to figure out who they are and how they can hope for something better. The end result isn't quite a perfect novel, Earle still has a few kinks to work out as a novelist, but it's one of the most inspired ones I've read in a while, and for all its grit and despair, a joy to read.
