You Oughta Run

One hand's got a bourbon and the other's got a gun

One hand's got a bourbon
The other's got a gun
I'm looking for some trouble
Somebody's time has come
If it's you, that's lieing in my bed
You oughta run.

When I sing this song in the right atmosphere it gives me the chills and makes the hair on my arms stand on end. When I performed it in a bar and the audience had a few drinks, they would sometimes sing the hook with me, which was cool. Like a lot of songs, it has a different sound depending on whether it is a solo, or who is accompanying me. This recording was done at home with some sax backing from my friend, the late Charly Nice.

This grainy image is me playing You Oughta Run at the Sunspree Resort in Montego Bay, Jamaica with the house band.

Have a listen while you read.

It all started many years ago. A guy I knew through dirt track racing rang and asked to meet me at the Titirangi Shops in Auckland, near where I lived in my early teens. It’s one of those townships where everyone knows everyone.

I drove to the village on an overcast Saturday morning and met with him at the spot we all used to ride to on our motorbikes, at the entrance to the village. It was a spot where you could see people driving past in all directions. You could pretty much guarantee that if you waited for half an hour or so, you would see someone you knew, either driving past or getting off the bus, as you might do in a country town, and they would stop for a chat. Other times it was me doing the stopping.

He was there waiting for me. We greeted and lit up a cigarette, reminiscing over the good old days, when he started with, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your girlfriend (who I had lived with for almost 7 years) is cheating on you. She’s a slag man!”

I didn’t believe him for a second and we had a fairly loud argument, with him calling her a slut and other names, and asking me why I thought he would bother to contact me and ask me to meet. What possible motive could he have, other than doing the right thing? He had no dog in the fight.

As they say, love is blind. So I left, angry and a bit bewildered. I never told her about the conversation. We had lived together for close to 7 years and been through a lot.

It niggled for a week or so and then I compartmentalized it in my hippocampus, in that place where we file things we don’t want to deal with. It’s still there, but you have to deliberately draw it out if you want it.

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Flash forward maybe six months later. Everything seemed fine. Really good in fact.

A couple of friends invited me away for a long weekend of fishing in the seaside town of Leigh to the north of Auckland.

I left early for the drive up in my Mk 5, canary yellow company Ford Cortina, with a speed limiter called CNG gas. I would have to switch it over to petrol if I wanted to overtake other vehicles. On the plus side, my contract with Tait included reasonable personal mileage and a tank of gas for personal trips. It was pretty generous, given I could travel 1,000 km without having to fill up when using both CBG and petrol.

We played a bit of tennis on the local court which was empty. We had a few laughs and did a lot of chasing balls around the court, which fortunately had high wire fences to contain the many that got away. It was good exercise. Use of the court was free and it was within walking distance of our lodgings.

That evening around twilight, as clouds obscured the moon above the turning tide in the harbour channel we caught a decent-sized kingfish, or ‘kingie’ in the vernacular.

Kingfish

We enjoyed some decent kingfish steaks cooked on the BBQ, which was a highlight of a good day, that left our taste buds and bellies feeling pretty satisfied. Fish always tastes better when you have caught it yourself.

That night for some reason, I was restless and struggled to sleep. I had no idea why, but I felt the need to drive home. So at about 4 in the morning, I packed up, had a black coffee, left a note for my sleeping mates, and drove home, a trip of about an hour and a half.

The sun was just starting its daily climb over the horizon as I arrived home to our house on the edge of a share milking farm. There were a couple of cars in my driveway that I didn’t recognise. “Strange”, I thought. “Has Y had some friends over for the night?”

I went inside quietly so as not to wake her or any guests who might have been in the lounge. The back door opens into the kitchen dining room and our bedroom, one of 3 rooms in the house we shared with our cat, was on the left.

I had thoughts of snuggling in beside her. I heard a muffled urgent conversation as I pushed the door open and found 2 heads on the pillows where my head should have been. One on each side of my partner, who lay nestled between them.

I stood there as the guys jumped out of my bed in their jocks, and there was an uncomfortable silence as they responded to my WTF. I knew the guys. One was the younger brother of one of my best mates, whose partner was in fact Y’s sister, and the other was his cousin, also a friend, or so I had thought.

This was not a normal situation. While I knew them, neither of those guys had been to my place before, and we had 2 spare beds in other rooms. They tried to act normal, but it was clearly an awkward situation to put it mildly because I wasn’t expected back for another day and a half.

I put it to them, quietly, letting them see that I was far from impressed, that it was time for them to get dressed and go. I went and made myself a coffee while they scarpered.

Sitting in the kitchen, I waited for her to get out of bed, while trying to slow down my heart rate, which was resting at around 120 bpm. While I had felt uneasy, I was now seeing the future I had expected for us slipping away at a rate of knots. Coming from a family that had imploded when my parents split up at the age of 9, and everything that came with that, it felt like impending doom.

Now at this stage, I was dealing with doubt, but I didn’t know for sure that she had been cheating on me. My discussion with my biker mate came back to me as I confronted her and asked what was going on.

I asked if she had been sleeping with one of those guys, they had seemed so comfortable in my home. They weren’t just getting acquainted, even if nothing had happened that night.

She admitted to me that she had been sleeping with one of them on and off for a couple of months, and was full of remorse. I became calm and cold and let her know that the best thing to do was leave straight away. She could go and stay with her new beau and give me a ring when she wanted to pick up her things.

So we parted suddenly, and all my feelings of betrayal when my father cheated on my mother, came back to me. He left my mother with 4 kids to cope with life going forward. We didn’t cope very well.

I can only say that it was lucky that I came home armed with a fishing rod.

A few weeks later I ventured out to a party, and surprise, she was there with her new boyfriend. She asked if we could talk. I turned around and wished her the best of luck, as I took a U-turn out the door.

A couple of days later she rang and asked if I would take her back. She had made a terrible mistake she said, and realised that it was me she wanted. I told her that I would never be able to trust her again. What we had was broken.

So we split up, and other than working out who got what, we didn’t see each other again. I kept the station wagon and she got the Spitfire, which was my pride and joy. I didn’t have the energy to argue. I just wanted out.

I was saddened to hear that about 3 weeks later she wrote the car off, drunk driving and losing it hitting a tree, going down the bank. Not so much about her, but the car that I had loved, driven all over the country, reconditioning the engine, sitting on the front wheels while grinding the valves. She was OK.

For months after that, I would imagine I saw her driving on the motorway behind me, and I would get angry about being betrayed. It had taken me a long time to trust someone, because my childhood still lingered in my mind. Leaving home at the age of 11, to live on the other side of the world after some tough times at home, when I couldn’t adjust to the new way of life, had left indelible scars on me.

I never saw her again, but my muse dealt with the situation with this song You Oughta Run. It’s my Frankie and Johnie song.

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