In December 1988, Waylon Jennings was recovering from triple bypass surgery at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, and he was hurting worse than he ever had. Across the hall, Johnny Cash was waiting for a heart operation of his own. When Cash came over to check on him, Waylon looked his oldest friend in the eye and told him it was nothing. He was lying, and he was doing it for a very good reason.
A Visit That Turned Into an Admission
Waylon’s heart had been warning him for a while. In October 1988, doctors had already performed a balloon angioplasty to clear a blocked artery. Only weeks later, while his tour bus was heading to a show in Tennessee, the chest pains came back so hard that his driver turned around and headed straight for Baptist Hospital. Tests found blockages in three arteries. Waylon was 51, and he went into surgery around December 12.
Johnny Cash came to the hospital to see him. It was supposed to be a visit. Accounts differ slightly on how it unfolded. Waylon’s son Terry later wrote that the family remembered Cash comparing symptoms with Waylon and realizing he had been feeling the same things. Waylon’s own version was simpler: the doctors took a look at Cash, did not like what they saw, and checked him in. They gave him a room across the hall.
Cash, then 56, needed a double bypass. The man who had walked in as a visitor was now a patient on the same floor as the friend he had come to cheer up.
The Bluff Across the Hall
After Waylon’s operation, Cash wandered over to his room. Waylon was in agony. He later said the pain was so bad he felt like he was dying. But Cash had not had his surgery yet, and Waylon knew him well.
So he told Cash it was fine. Nothing to worry about. Waylon explained the reasoning years later while promoting his autobiography: if Cash had known how much it really hurt, he would have climbed out the window and gone home.
Waylon later insisted that some genuinely funny things happened in that hospital. Cash stayed, went through with the operation on December 19, and soon discovered for himself that his friend had been bluffing the whole time.
Two Old Roommates on One Hallway
The two men had been through worse together. In 1966, with his first marriage ending, Cash moved to the Nashville area, and later that year he and Waylon rented an apartment in the Fontaine Royale building on Milliken Bend Road in Madison, Tennessee. Waylon had just come east from Arizona after signing with RCA.
Both were deep into pills and amphetamines. They later insisted that neither one ever supplied the other. Instead, they hid their stashes from each other. One often-told story has Cash, desperate while Waylon was out on tour, searching the apartment and then Waylon’s new Cadillac for anything his roommate had left behind.
They split the chores, at least in theory. Cash cooked, usually biscuits, often in his black suit. Waylon cleaned. Waylon later joked that Cash got the better deal, because they hardly ate at all. Years afterward, Waylon summed up what was left after all of it.
“John and I are closer than brothers.”
How They Got There
By 1988 both men had already climbed out of the worst of it. Cash checked into the Betty Ford Center in 1983. Waylon quit cocaine in 1984, and he did it on his own, without a treatment program. On a 1985 appearance with David Letterman, the two men talked openly about how much money their habits had once cost them.
The heart trouble was the bill that came later. Waylon had smoked heavily for decades. They were sober and touring together as the Highwaymen with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson, and now they were sharing a hospital hallway.
“Next Time, You’re Going First”
On Tuesday, December 20, 1988, Waylon checked out of Baptist Hospital, eight days after his surgery. He told reporters he felt wonderful and promised to quit smoking and eat right. Cash, one day out of his own operation, was listed in critical but stable condition and was expected to stay another 10 to 12 days.
Waylon told the press he had already been in to see John twice that day. He had left him with one piece of advice.
“Next time, you’re going first.”
Cash’s recovery turned out to be the harder of the two. He developed serious complications after the operation and was not released until weeks later.
Who Went First
Both men got more than a decade back. The Highwaymen kept recording and touring into the 1990s, and Cash’s late career with producer Rick Rubin was still ahead of him.
But diabetes wore Waylon down. He gave up most of his touring, lost part of his left foot in 2001, and died at his home in Chandler, Arizona, on February 13, 2002. He was 64. Speaking about him that year, Cash said he could have afforded his own apartment back in 1966, but he roomed with Waylon because he thought it would be fun, and it was.
In the end, Waylon went first after all. Johnny Cash died on September 12, 2003, nineteen months later, at Baptist Hospital in Nashville, the same hospital where the two old roommates had once lain across the hall from each other, one of them pretending it didn’t hurt.