JUDY HAYES

"JUDY - 1981"

What happened to me in the early 80's as I worked diligently at divesting myself of alcohol and drugs is as strange as any story ever told. I had lain for several days without food or water, alone, deranged, detoxing, dehydrating and definitely dying. When I finally came out of it I ran into Judy. We were no longer `betrothed' but the alcohol often kept us running in the same circles, or at least into one another. For some unknown reason, we went together to a cornfield where we began to argue. As usual. It wasn't one of those petty lover's quarrels though, but this time something more substantial. Crows began to form out of nowhere, collecting overhead and mimicking our yapping. In no time their screams became overwhelming, finally mixing with voices and shouts that were no longer coming from Judy or me.

“Get out of my head!” came the most tangible sensation I had yet experienced in the 40 years I had been on the planet. It wasn't really a voice but a feeling, which permeated my entire body, swiftly taking my soul along with it. Somebody or something was in that cornfield with us. Something surreal. But that wasn't quite it either… where were we exactly? In a cornfield? In the middle of downtown Cincinnati Ohio?

When reality eventually reached us we were shocked to find ourselves not in the middle of a cornfield as we had first thought, but instead wandering haphazardly through the confines of someone's mind, a mind intensely focused on a cornfield. In fact, the preoccupation was so intense that the cornfield and the mind had both dissolved into one void from which neither of us could escape. Slowly that mind came into focus, and as incredible as it now seems I came to the realization that we were inside the brain of Vincent Van Gogh, at the exact moment that he'd put a bullet in himself. The poor man could not really perceive us as separate entities but rather as vague and detached voices he knew only as his madness. He was begging us to leave him alone. But Judy insisted we stay.

“But Vincent, you're dying… you've shot yourself!” Judy pleaded within his brain.

Finally Vincent righted himself, shook us from him, and that's when I awoke. Of course I awoke! Not from a dream, but from the week-long trance that had all but killed me. I awakened and I wept. Something earth shattering had occurred. Absurd as it now seems, I had just spent the weekend inside of Van Gogh's brain. Immediately I understood with Walt Whitman the amplitude of time, and with him I could also see vividly that we are “not contained between our hats and boots, after all.”

Later that day I got a call from Judy, who was in a hospital in Tennessee where she had just came out of a coma. For eight days she had lain near death as a bullet lay lodged between her heart and the main artery. She was pronounced inoperable and only a miracle had saved her. Where had Judy gone for those eight days when her body lay hooked to a life support system in Tennessee - those very same eight days that I had lain comatose in a pool of my own vomit in Cincinnati? By what mechanism had she and I traveled through time-space to initiate such an intimate contact with Van Gogh? How was it that she perceived that which neither Vincent nor myself had been aware of? Certainly it was she who awoke unperplexed, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Just another day in the life of Judy Hayes…

Judy, Wayne and Peacock had traveled to Tennessee to rob a bank. Wayne was Judy's new redneck boy friend and she'd just bought him a car with a piece of her disability check. Peacock had just left prison after serving ten years for killing his wife and needed a place to stay. Winos all! During one festive night of drinking Wayne and Peacock hatched up the idea of robbing the bank. Between them they had the pistol and the car, and it didn't take long for them to arrive at a random bank address from Wayne's hometown. Of course Judy wasn't going to leave Wayne or her car so off the three of them went, arriving in Tennessee two days later in the early morning hours. The bank hadn't even opened yet, so they pulled up across the street in the McDonald's parking lot and waited, sipping noisily from the stash of wine they had brought across the borders of Ohio and Kentucky.

“I'm going got some burgers,” wailed Judy, and off she headed for the bright yellow arches.”

“You never should've brought that crazy broad along,” Peacock droned, “we've got to get rid of her!”

“Oh yeah,” retorted Wayne, “what are you going to do… kill her, like you did your old lady? Hey man… she's my old lady. If anybody's got the right to kill her, it's me!”

And so, as she returned to the car with her bag of burgers and coffee, she was shot through the chest. Wayne and Peacock had been grappling over the gun when it went off. To this day, both men take credit for the shooting. According to them it was certainly no accident. In fact they were so proud of the shooting that they remained waiting inside the car, arguing the obtuse point as Judy lay on the cold concrete outside dying. Oblivious to all, they were still arguing a few minutes later when the cops showed up.

The first thing Judy did when she was out of the hospital was to appear at the arraignment of Wayne and Peacock, whereupon she demanded their release from custody: “I'm not going anywhere without that son of a bitch Wayne... I love him too much!”

Incredible! But then Judy had loved me too, so I understood what she felt. With some stretching of the law the judge agreed and dismissed the obvious charge of weapon possession and let the misfits leave his courtroom on the guarantee that they would also leave his State. And so it was that Judy accompanied Wayne back to Cincinnati, where she spent the next several months kicking his ass up and down the saloons of lower Vine Street.

And you can bet Judy couldn't wait to bring Wayne by my place: “This is the son of a bitch who claims he shot me… ha!” she murmured as she slapped him across the room.

“Yeah… well you know her better than I do man… did you ever see her suck a nigger's cock? Well I have. Right in front of me too! And if she ever does it again I'll finish the both of them good. No old lady of mine is gonna sleep with a black son of a bitch and live to brag about it!”

Judy removed the bottle from his hand, swigged down her share and passed it over to me, never taking her eyes off of Wayne: “Yeah, you asshole, and if you do you'd better load all six bullets into that gun of yours!”

Judy hasn't been in touch since 1983. But then, I moved out of town in '84. Still, she had that uncanny ability to track me down about anywhere in the continental 48 in a matter of minutes, since I was certain to be in one of a handful of cities that we'd carried on our not so distant romance in. So where are you now, Judy Hayes? Drunk again? Or are you finally dead this time?

BURKHART STUDIOS

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