Nobody Reads This Page – “Cheated My Way”

 

c. 2024 Rod Ice

All rights reserved

(6-24)

 

 

I grew up on a potent mix of Blues, Folk, old-time Country & Western, and early Rock music. This informal education came from the vinyl record library of my father. A cultural pool that I dipped into many times over the years. His love of tuneful expression was one shaped by the honest passions of working-class Appalachia, from which he sprang as a young hayseed. Despite having accrued university degrees and a lifetime of real-world experience, he never lost affinity for such documents of earthy wisdom.

 

On guitar, banjo, and other acoustic instruments, he would regale the family with traditional compositions of all sorts. One that comes to mind, even today, is ‘The Blue Velvet Band’ which was written and recorded by Hank Snow, the Singing Ranger. When Dad would croon this ballad, it had a measured affectation of sadness that was palpable, even to my childish intellect. Only later would I realize that he must have been channeling the woeful residue from having lost his first wife on a honeymoon trip, out west.

 

He was only 19 when that sad event occurred.

 

Like many of my contemporaries in the 1960’s and 70’s, I grew up with an appetite for more provocative artistic themes than those of the hillbilly crowd. I leaned toward Iggy and the Stooges, or the Velvet Underground with Nico and Lou Reed. Punk Rock eventually became a focal point during my teenage years. Yet as I wrote lyrics and plucked away with amateur skills on my Japanese guitar, odd inflections would occasionally resound. A voice that I did not expect to hear warbled from my throat. Images of hardship, sacrifice, and working-class resilience appeared like visions in the twilight.

 

I wrote in the manner of Edgar Cayce having a clairvoyant experience. Then pondered the result afterward, with a great deal of confusion and befuddlement.

 

“Country music? Coming from inside of me?”

 

An early example of this strange phenomenon happened when I penned a redneck ditty while jamming in my tiny bedroom on North Cayuga Street, in Ithaca, New York. As I recall, sometime in 1979. I was experimenting with chords learned from a chart included with the index of a music anthology in our household library. My intention had been to create something along the lines of a Ramones or Sex Pistols anthem. But instead, I adopted a comic drawl, and improvised words that had no literal meaning. Only a sense of wanderlust, reflected in melodic form.

 

“I cheated my way across the United States...”

 

Being somewhat private as a writer in those days, it is doubtful that anyone else in our brood ever heard my vocalization. I did not confess to having manifested this rural vibe to friends. Somewhere, I must have jotted down stanzas of verse to document the odd happening. Though there is no evidence now, except for my own memory to indicate that it truly occurred.

 

Still, with echoes of that brief interlude languishing somewhere in my cerebrum for many years, I finally revisited the idea in a dreamscape. It ebbed out of the psychic void, while I was dozing on a Monday afternoon. Upon getting out of bed, to finish household chores, the cowboy groove took hold. And I scribbled what my brain cells could remember.

 

“Cheated My Way”

 

It started in a Cleveland bar

On the shore of Lake Erie

When I stopped in for a beer

Then I rolled down the highway

On the road to Kentucky

Figuring it’d be fun to disappear

By the time I told Tennessee goodbye

I’d met a dozen ladies

And breezed through towns never on my mind

When I got to the Georgia-Florida split

There was a hungering in my belly

For some whiskey lemonade and southern sunshine

 

Well, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear, no matter what the cost

Yes, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear no matter what the cost

I did it all, but you’re what I lost

 

I’d always wanted to cruise the streets

With a madam from New Orleans

And the deed left me smiling from ear to ear

Then I headed straight to Texas

Like a bandit chasing shadows

A pistolero running with no fear

In New Mexico I saw the land

Of Roswell and the bullseye

That attracted cosmic travelers to earth

Made a sidestep up to Nevada

To try my luck at the tables

Gambling with love for all that I was worth

 

Well, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear, no matter what the cost

Yes, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear no matter what the cost

I did it all, but you’re what I lost

 

On the California coast I stopped

To ponder ocean waves

And think about eternity, beyond

I’d had my fill of every kind

Of tender-hearted woman

Brunette and redhead, and platinum blonde

But a she-wolf with wild hair of gray

Set me back upon my bootheels

She turned a trick that I did not expect

That righteous femme bared her teeth

And took a bite of my heart

Made me linger for a day, then left me wrecked

 

Well, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear, no matter what the cost

Yes, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear no matter what the cost

I did it all, but you’re what I lost

 

By then I was so far away from home

That it didn’t seem to matter

My insides had turned hard as stone

I couldn’t feel so happy

About my journey anymore

So I found myself a truck stop telephone

The number that I called

Was listed in the white pages

A landline shared with my lonely wife

The call kept ringing endlessly

For what seemed like an hour

And then I knew she was no longer in my life

 

Well, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear, no matter what the cost

Yes, I cheated my way across the United States

I did it all dear no matter what the cost

I did it all, but you’re what I lost.”

 

The result was stunning in a sense. I seemed to know that these words deserved to be rendered in rhythmic form, with the accompaniment of a professional group. If collected with other ramblings of that sort, from my personal archives, I imagined recording an album that could be distributed through various means. Via streaming networks, or audio files. Most certainly, as a vinyl artifact, like those that were so important to me, during childhood days.

 

Yet could I squeeze myself into that role? The truth of course was that no great leap of faith would be required to connect with the mountain lore of my ancestors. They had made what I am, and what I will always be, in heart and mind.

 

Not a cheater, perhaps. But always a lyrical adventurer.