Open Lettres is a new series in which Full Stop editors Alex Shephard and Jesse Montgomery write letters to country superstars with whom they have had mystical encounters.
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Dear Mr. Haggard,
Hey Merle, it’s Jesse and Alex. First off, we had a really great time at your concert. You sure did light up the Patsy Cline Theater at Handley High School, and though we were dirty stoned, we still “got” what you were saying about being an Okie from Muskogee and supporting the troops by not smoking marijuana or wearing sandals.
Looking around at all of the high school kids in the audience who were wearing their Slipknot t-shirts and playing on their Motorolas we really felt that the message of personal responsibility in that song is still super relevant today. So what if we spent some of the money we made from our really popular listicle webseries “.Gifnotes: 18 Books That Are 2 LONG as GIFs” on some sticky Acapulco Filibuster, but we also worked hard, just like you. So, yeah, we do smoke marijuana here on Main Street, but we keep our hair cut above our ears and do push-ups almost every day. Not like these kids today, texting and subtweeting the college dean, who’s actually really cool. Our friend Gary told us he did a keg stand with him at a rush party three semesters ago and that rules. We really respect that.
Merle, even though you might be getting on in years, you’re still our hero. Boy was it great seeing you up on that stage, even if that pizza faced teen doing the lights kept screwing things up. Shoot, it was all great! And, you know, if all we did was see you, that would have been just fine — we had a pretty good night lined up and all. Same thing we do every night, really — smoke Darth Yoakam behind the Winchester Bowl ‘N’ Shoot and go knock over the Little Debbie snack racks at the Shell Station — but a good night nevertheless.
But listen, Merle, the real reason we’re writing is about the quest. Remember? After you played that encore with the kids from FFA (who woulda thought that dobro could really liven up “Stinkfist” by Tool??? You, Merle. That’s who.) we were hollering, and the assistant principal asked us to put our shirts and ponchos back on. Normally, we woulda taken him out back and pulled HIS shirt over his head, but we didn’t. Out of respect for you. (Also because one of us might have an open warrant in Virginia.)
But look at us, getting ahead of ourselves like a couple of nervous teens on prom night or something. And you wouldn’t of picked us for such an important quest if we couldn’t get to the point, right?
Anyhow, you’d just finished, and we’d put our shirts back on, and there we were, sort of stumbling toward the door, feeling around for some support because that Acapulco Filibuster sort of sneaks up on you and pokes holes in your brain, when our little cousin (and high school FFA president) Jeff shows up. Jeff said something about how he’s grounded on account of some illegal farm subsidy scheme and also that we’re not allowed to crash at his mom’s place because she just washed the couch cover. But that’s neither here nor there, Merle. What really matters is that Jeff slipped us twenty-five greenbacks and said we could go backstage in his place, on the condition that we “got the hell out of Winchester, ASAP.” We said, OK, Jeff, sure, we’ll get out of town right away, you betcha. But that was before we found out that you knew how to do magic.
So that’s how we wound up back stage, and that’s why your bouncer Butch had a little extra bulge in his leather vest (the bulge was the aforementioned greenbacks, nothing nasty). Butch is a real nice guy, by the way. We hope he didn’t get in any trouble!
Before we get into the nitty gritty, though, a quick word about why you found us crawling around in the dark like a couple of dang nightcrawlers. Shortly after we made our arrangements with Butch, we decided to spark some Beefheart’s Anger, having run out of the Acapulco Fillibuster during “Mama Tried.” But Alex’s fingers are mighty gnarly, on account of tapping up potent viral content from a real young age, and he dropped our holographic Zippo underneath a rack of lap steel guitars.
So there we were, scrubbing around on the ground, when we look up, and dammit! Guess who’s standing there, Merle? You are! And all around your head there’s this crazy glow, sort of like when you microwave styrofoam.
“You boys lookin’ for something?” you said, and then, out of nowhere, there’s Alex’s lighter! You summoned it straight out of thin air. Needless to say, Merle, we were pretty amazed. But then we saw what was sitting right next to it: an evil looking doob as big around as a sick kid’s forearm. We were basically drooling at this point, hoping you’d set that sucker off, but then you turned and looked at the lighter sort of funny, screwing up your eyes — and poof! It disappeared in a little cloud of smoke. (Later, Jesse would swear he saw Hank Jr.’s face in that smoke.) Anyway, I’m not gonna lie to you Merle: we were pretty tore up. Our rotten old brains were fixated on sucking down that wicked smoke, but the floor of that particular dream disappeared with that dang lighter.
Or so we thought.
Quick as a flash you waved your hands in front of our faces and hey, presto!! Right there, under our noses, was the sharpest little sparkplug we’d ever seen: a jet black Zippo with mother of pearl inlay in the shape of an old, broken-down boxcar smoking a joint.
“Heh,” you chuckled as you twirled the piece between your fingers. “My buddy Rabbit gave this to me back in San Quentin. Day before he busted out and I stayed behind. Old Rabbit said he wished I were coming with him but knew I wasn’t ready yet. Told me that when I was, this here lighter would show me the way.”
Without missing a beat of your story, you started roasting that joint.
“See, Rabbit wasn’t just out to escape,” you said. “Before he wound up in the pen for selling dirty Bazooka Joe parodies to kids, Rabbit was hot on the trail of one of the greatest — if not the greatest — artifacts of western swing: the golden dobro, said to have been given to Bob Willis by the devil himself in 1937.”
Look Merle, we love country music — Willie, Waylon, you, old George Jones; hell, David Allan Coe — but right then at that moment we didn’t give a hoot about no dobro. We just wanted a drag on that demonic doob. We wanted a hit of that heavenly hay. And you must have known that, Merle, ‘cause you looked us straight in our red, watery eyes and passed us the torch.
But we shoulda known Merle, we shoulda known that nothing in this world comes for free. As soon as that sweet smoke hit our lungs you started to tell us a tale, and as soon as you started to speak, we heard beautiful songs about leather saddles, dusty cowpokes, and silver belt buckles as big as the hooves of a prize Texas steer. They music echoed in the air as if sung by an angel chorus, Merle!
That’s when you told us about how Chet Atkins, the Nemesis, found old Rabbit one dark, moonless night somewhere along the sepulchral banks of the Mississippi, did him dirty and stole the dobro away to the nylon streets of Nashville and locked it in the vaults beneath the Grand Ole Opry. And you told us you wanted it back, Merle — at any cost! ‘Cus this wasn’t an ordinary dobro — and not just because it was gold. It made alimony checks disappear; it took all them keyboards off your crummy records from the 1970s; it turned Pepsi Cola into Pappy Van Winkle.
But you couldn’t get it back yourself, could you Merle? Partly on account of you being too conspicuous (on account of you being famous) and partly on account of the fact that you had to keep your legions of fans happy by playing high school auditoriums, like the one we saw you in, all over America, and partly on account of the dragons. And the wargs. And the kobolds. But you said we were the only two fellers for the job, and we were mighty flattered to hear that.
The way sounded scary as hell. Harrisonburg was thick with wyrms, you told us, and Roanoke lousy with goblins. Kingsport seethed with bedeviled adders and Murraysville was overrun with a buncha wild boys who went and allied themselves with Atkins in exchange for magical powers back in ‘63. And Knoxville? Shit. To get out the other side of that bastion of wight power we’d need some bigtime holy magic and a pound of some of that fine kush you were carrying — to heal the inevitable injuries we’d garner on our journey (and because we both suffer from glaucoma; what are the odds?!).
But Knoxville? Knoxville was a cake walk compared to damn Nashville. Guarding that vault in the Opry was the biggest damn dragon you’d ever seen — so big it made those Harrisonburg wyrms look like a couple of bitty little geckos. Like that Geico gecko, Merle, though they didn’t have the same wit! But there was a trick to getting past that dragon: you just had to play “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” backwards and he would just go to sleep! We didn’t learn that ‘til afterwards though, at the precinct, so we just had to strangle the ancient beast with some old Dixie flags they keep locked down in the vaults. You could have given us a heads up there, Merle! Not that we’re ungrateful or anything.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Merle. After you told us what we’d have to face and gave us a couple of fine swords — magic katanas made by an elf you said you knew down in Shreevesport — as well as the aforementioned marijuana, we lit up and then lit out! Boom, boom, bam! We sailed through those towns, murdered that dragon, and snatched up the golden dobro, just like you asked. It took two damn months and Jesse lost an eye, but we got that dobro and brought it back safely. We felt like kings, Merle, and so we went to Applebee’s.
Now where we come from, Applebee’s is near-sacred ground. But looking back now, that’s where we got f’d. We took what was left of our eyes off the ball, Merle, at just precisely the moment we needed to have what was left of our eyes on the ball (in this case the ball is the golden dobro, though we’re sure you get that, on account of your skill with metaphors).
We hit that 2 for $20 menu like a sack of bricks! Potato twisters, salad shooters, Oriental salads — you name it, we ordered it. We were drinking Budweiser out of chilled mugs like it was going out of style. No expense was spared. (Alex did order heavily from the Under 550 Calorie menu, as our itemized expense receipt will reflect, because he was bitten by a poisonous wyrm in Harrisonburg and had started to bloat.)
Two months may not seem like a lot of time, especially to a fella who keeps as busy as you, Merle. But a lot had changed while we were gone. All our dogs had been rescued when we came back, for instance. And our cousin Jeff had beat the rap on that farm subsidy scheme he pulled back in the fall and was now managing the very Applebee’s we were supping at. Now we probably should have been on our toes, we agree, but our battle instincts had abandoned us; we felt like men of peace, basking in the warmth of Blazted Blizzard Mojitos™ and stuffing ourselves full of every fritter we could think of — we were feeling cocky, on account of fetching that dobro for you, and I think we even ordered a few off-menu items, like a couple of big shots! At some point, Jeff came out from the back, recognized us, and then the drinks really started rolling in. We must have had three Sam Adams Boston Lagers apiece, Merle . . . on the house!
Now we were celebrating, Merle — hence all that beer and midshelf tequila — and we might’ve opened our mouths a time or two about fighting a warlock outside a Waffle House in the shadow of the Blue Ridge or slaying the Goblin King in the labyrinthine corridors beneath Roanoke, and it’s possible that a certain magic dobro made out of pure gold came up in conversation. We can’t tell you for sure because our memories get a little fuzzy at this point. The next thing we remember clearly is peeing in the bushes between the Applebee’s and the McCafé, and the next thing after that Sheriff Richards was shining a flashlight on us. We thought we were super smart because we’d tucked our gnar into a potted plant back in the ‘Bees but kept that golden dobro close to our proverbial vest (like Kenny, we too know when to hold ‘em), as we wanted to ensure it wouldn’t tarnish in that diseased dirt they use.
So there we are, tucking our weenies back in, relieved we’d ditched the doobs, when the Sheriff says he’s patting us down. Being peaceful veterans, we obliged, figuring this would be over soon and we could just curl up under the bushes we hadn’t peed on and sleep, with your precious dobro clasped to our chests. But as the Sheriff was searching Jesse he gave a little chuckle and our stomachs turned.
“What’s this?” he asked, holding a baggie of brown powder in front of our noses. We swear we’d never seen that crap before, Merle, so we just stood there mystified as he shook it at us.
“You boys bovine bloaters?” he asked, as he shone his light in our red, swollen eyes. “‘Cause this here experimental growth hormone is mighty illegal, and we don’t take kindly to beef cheaters in these parts. Word from the Obungler administration is it’s trickling in from China, and while I don’t hold truck with that Trotskyite snake, I’ll gladly take you boys downtown on two sweet international smuggling charges.”
Now Merle, just two hours before, we were chock full of Large Hadron Collidor, Sticky Little Ricky, and a bit of that Acapulco Fillibuster from before we left that was floating around, but we don’t know nothing about juicing cows. (If you recall, we spent our formative years tapping out viral content for the world wide web and thus avoided the backbreaking manual labor done by our forebearers and also our little cousin Jeff.) But we had been AWOL around Winchester these last two months, and couldn’t exactly say “No, sir, we haven’t had time for smuggling any heffer hormones, as we’ve spent the past two months fighting goblins with elf swords and magic,” could we?
So we just ambled down to the County Jail with ol’ Sheriff Richards. We figured the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding and we’d be out in no time. Boy were we wrong. As soon as we got to the slammer they took all our stuff: our bics, Jesse’s puka shell necklace, Alex’s tie-dye headband, and — over our very vocal protestations — the golden dobro. They took it all, Merle. And they threw us in that dirty slammer without a word of explanation. We asked to see our lawyer, Rich Jeff Jenkins, but Richards told us they called him and he was drunk, which shouldn’t have surprised us, as we knocked back more than a couple Blazted Blizzard Mojitos™ with him back at Applebee’s earlier in the evening.
To be 100% honest, Merle, the whole situation was very Kafkaesque. We stayed in that darn cell for what felt like months, starving, and nearly going insane. When they finally let us out we felt like wildmen, totally feral and deranged, no different from the very men we had slain back in Murraysville. As they were giving us our stuff back during check out we asked the officer what had changed while we’d been in. Would we be able to reenter society? Was Applebee’s still open and, if it was, was the potted plant we had stashed our weed in still in good health? But he just laughed and told us that we’d only been in there for two nights. Then he got real rude and pointed to the exit like we didn’t know how to show ourselves out, and we were like, “whatever!” and walked through the door while flipping him four savage birds with our middle fingers.
The light outside was blinding, and we almost barfed because of the Margarita withdrawal, but slowly our beady eyes adjusted, and there, sitting astride a mud-spattered, Truck Nutted™ dirt bike and cradling the golden dobro, was our little cousin Jeff.
“Thanks, you old dipshits,” he laughed, as he revved that sweet ass engine. “A few notes of ‘Hot Cross Buns’ on this bad boy and I’ll be able to make all kinds of incriminating farm subsidy paperwork disappear; and with the bassline from ‘Seven Nation Army’ I’ll get the Model U.N. defunded. I could have never done it without you two idiots, so thanks a mill.”
“That dobro isn’t meant for that,” we told him. “It’s meant for clearing up alimony, among other noble uses. And it’s not yours. It’s Merle Haggard’s and he’s magic.”
But Jeff didn’t listen. He just reared up on that bike of his, the dobro glinting in the setting sun, and shot out of the parking lot, ramping off the hood of a car in a totally sweet move and displaying double middle fingers as he went.
We’re sorry, Merle. We let you down and now your dobro is being used to make illegal, prize-winning heiffers and defund Handley High School’s once proud Model U.N. And if we don’t get it back soon, there’s no doubt in our minds that our little cousin Jeff will turn his mind to darker pastures. Today the FFA and Model U.N., tomorrow, what? The actual, present day, farmers of America? The actual United Nations?
We can’t let that happen, Merle, and we won’t. But Sheriff Richards stole our lighters and Alex’s tie-dye headband and Jesse’s puka shell necklace and our little cousin Jeff went and took your dobro and our bud. And, look, not to toot our own horns: even taking two months off, we’re still tapping out viral content with the best of them. But even our hit list “66 Family Guy Gifs That Will Restore Your Faith in Representational Government” won’t give us the necessary capital to finance taking on Jeff. We have enough cash on hand to buy snacks for our bus trip, but could really use money for bus tickets, kush, earplugs (Jesse is a light sleeper); also, if you’re passing by Shreeveport, a couple more of those elf katanas would do a world of good.
It’s a dangerous business, Merle, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to: Applebee’s, O’Charlie’s, Outback, a damn Tennessee Goblin lair, you name it.
Two months ago, you told us, “Boys, it’s the job that ain’t never been started takes the longest to finish.” Well, Merle, we started our job. Now it’s time to finish it.
Please send cash, weed, and elf katanas ASAP.
Yours in Christ/Number 1 Fans,
Alex and Jesse, founding editors of Full Stop
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