TDN Weekend December 2016 Issue 9
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066556
"I'm allergic to alcohol: I break out in a drunk." Most of the time, he could enjoy the camaraderie, the highs; but sometimes things got out of hand, there were wrecks, fights, and usually the wrong place at the wrong time. Eventually he recognised he would be better off without. "What was that Edith Piaf song?" he says. "Je ne regrette rien. And I don't. It was terribly painful, to start out. Sure, I was wild. But I always worked really hard, and it's all turned out just fine. I wouldn't have had it any other way, really." His mantra, throughout, has been bor- rowed from the Waylon Jennings song: "I've always been crazy, but it's kept me from going insane." "I believe in karma, in what goes around comes around," Hancock says. "I think ev- erything you do, the way you treat people, the way you treat animals, comes back. And what a lot of people take for luck, chance, and coincidence is really that oth- er realm. "The Shawnee Indians believe everything has a soul. Even animals. At my moth- er's one time, there was this big wasp in there. So I just took a glass, and a piece of card to slide under, and put it outside. My mother was incredulous. 'Arthur, you're crazy,' she said. 'Kill that little son-of-a- bitch!' And I said, 'Mama, he's not hurting anyone.' He didn't ask to be in the house, and it was so easy for me just to put him out." A thought occurs, irresistibly. You have to tell him. That was you, Arthur. When you were a young tearaway, just too darned hot for Phipps and the rest of them. You were like an angry wasp, trapped against the window. And the place you built, Stone Farm, was the glass and card that carried you to freedom. "That's probably well said," he says slow- ly. "I never thought of that. Hey, you're just as crazy as I am." Should you take that as a compliment? "Yeah," he says with a smile. "That is a compliment."