Summary of Rickie Lee Jones's Last Chance Texaco

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 I named the book Last Chance Texaco because I spent most of my life in cars, vans, and buses. I watched life approach and recede. I was always running away from and moving to new life, but I could never lay down roots.

#2 I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door. I escaped, of course, and I carried my heart out in a birdcage. But she was burned, and she cried so loud, casting wild notes over water and cloud.

#3 I grew up in the Arizona of the 1960s. Phoenix was a quiet place in the desert, and the radio was our only means of touching the larger world. I knew America was succumbing to an expanding postwar pressure of social symmetry: be alike, fall in line.

#4 The desert is a remnant of countless millions of years of other living things. The skeletons of their lives are the dirt of our cactus gardens. We too will become fossilized pages in some unimaginable future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822532960

IRB Media

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Insights on Rickie Lee Jones's Last Chance Texaco

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I named the book Last Chance Texaco because I spent most of my life in cars, vans, and buses. I watched life approach and recede. I was always running away from and moving to new life, but I could never lay down roots.

#2

I did drugs like I did everything else. On fire, with no back door. I escaped, of course, and I carried my heart out in a birdcage. But she was burned, and she cried so loud, casting wild notes over water and cloud.

#3

I grew up in the Arizona of the 1960s. Phoenix was a quiet place in the desert, and the radio was our only means of touching the larger world. I knew America was succumbing to an expanding postwar pressure of social symmetry: be alike, fall in line.

#4

The desert is a remnant of countless millions of years of other living things. The skeletons of their lives are the dirt of our cactus gardens. We too will become fossilized pages in some unimaginable future.

Insights from Chapter 2

#1

I had killed a thing, and I was inconsolable. I had made a first song, and it made its home in me. I sang: I wish, I wish, that wishes would come true. I wanted to play the piano.

#2

I had a brother who got a red bicycle for his 11th birthday. I was allowed to ride his bike only if I was able to reach the seat, so I balanced on the ungainly apparatus and rode the five houses to the end of our street. A car came suddenly and stopped in front of me. The big man in the car was swearing as he pushed the redheaded boy against the window.

#3

I was five years old when I saw a man rape a five-year-old girl. I was told not to testify, but I did anyway. I was very young, and the experience changed me. I began having boils and headaches, and I was not able to enjoy school.

#4

I was always pretending I was a horse, no matter where I was. I was a confident and happy child until my mother led the Singin’ Swingin’ Blue Birds troop to a triumphant live performance at the father-daughter banquet.

#5

My mother was raised in orphanages around Mansfield, Ohio. Her parents, James and Rhelda, were unable to care for her. Her grandfather, James Glen, was the youngest boy in a family of women and a doughboy in World War I. He survived the Battle of Argonne in France.

#6

The story of how my grandmother, Peggy, got me is a harsh one. She ran from the authorities after losing her