BY: JERRY P

Ray lived for four years after Cissy death in 1954. I found reading about his collapse and chronic drunken stupor difficult to take in. Cissy was his anchor in reality and without her he simply careened off the walls falling down all around him. He tried suicide and messed it up. He fired two shots in the shower while drunk and both missed his temple. Every woman he met he fell in love with and impulsively changed his will to favor the latest sweetheart, until the next one came along. But he liked to bore them with tales about Cissy. He was in and out of hospitals, trying to dry out. He went back and forth to England several times, not feeling at home there or in the U.S. and hating both. He wrote Playback, his weakest novel.

Like Jack Kerouac ten years later, he drank himself to death, dying in March 1959. His fame and riches meant little to him because of the emptiness he felt in the middle of his being, the space previously occupied by his strange but real love for Cissy, his elderly bride, lover and “momma.”