TumbleDweeeb

Cocaine Caroline
By: Emmitt Owens
—Buzzard Dust, 2012
(Index #2012)

We all knew
What it’d do
When I took those shots with you…
We both passed out onto the floor.

And I didn’t know what to say
When you said your love or my cocaine
So I said “what the hell”
And began to drink away.

When I took that blow up my nose
I thought of all my past loves
And how none of them ever seemed to work for me.

I knew it wouldn’t feel so right
For me to stop now and change my life
So I let you go
I let you leave.

And when you left
You said ” It’s the whiskey, cocaine and Tennessee.
You loved them more than you loved me.”
And I said “Yes. That Jack, Jim Beam and Hennessy.
But what I really needed was just a line…
of my… Sweet Cocaine Caroline.”

You said “I watched you choose it
Every single night
I handed you my heart…
You traded it for white.”

You know, I never needed much of a reason
And I needed just a line
I know you’re tired of coming second
Every single time.

I’d look right through her
Like she wasn’t even there
Just hunting for a feeling…
Like she wasn’t standing there.

I read that note three times
And poured myself a drink
Some truths don’t need explaining
They just settle an’ make you think…

And when she left
She said “it’s whiskey, cocaine and Tennessee.
You loved them more than you loved me.”
And I said “Yes. That Jack, Jim Beam and Hennessy.
But what I really needed was just a line
of my… Sweet Cocaine Caroline.”

Author’s Note:
   I was digging through an old notebook, an old journal, and I came across this.
     I wrote this in 2012, sitting alone in a little trailer on Slaughter Pen Road in Haleyville, Alabama. And I mean alone. No company, my relationship was falling apart, just me and a couple bottles keeping each other’s time.
   I’d been listening to a lot of Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash — paying attention to the way they told the truth without dressing it up, the way their words hit you flat in the chest before you even knew what happened.
     I had my own relationship with drinking at that time. But I wanted to write about addiction without writing about myself. I didn’t want people thinking I had a cocaine problem when that wasn’t my poison.
   “Call the whiskey cocaine” because addictions mirror each other in ways that matter more than the substance itself. I needed to put it at arm’s length, give it a different name, a different poison. That’s what writers do.
To add to my issues during this period… I done a shit ton of Speed. Not meth but over the counter speed, Adderall, Vyvanse & Daytrona. I did it so much that I had massive weight loss, I did it so much that I swear I met the Devil three dozen times in a two-year period. It’s what makes the *Buzzard Dust Era the most magical era of my whole silly Music Career.
     I never physically recorded this song.
   This piece came from that loneliness. The honesty of it. The way a person and a poison can blur together until you can’t tell which one you were really in love with.
     The funny thing is, not much has changed. Still just me. Different home, different year, different quiet, not as much drinking and speeding as it once was. But the writing still means what it meant then.
   Some things are meant to be spoken in a room, not produced in a studio.
          This is one of those things.

… And oh yeah… We do recover; we can recover so much that nobody would even see that we had a problem in the first place. Not even I … would call myself an Addict or a Recovering Addict.

— Shared DNA with Johnny Cash (David Alan Coe) Cocaine Caroline, (1975)
— *Buzzard Dust, Foxfire Series Vol. I, (1972) Home Remedies and Herb Doctors