Long Way Gone (12 page)

T
here was a bubbling inside me I could not describe. A rumbling, even. I could not tell you what motivated it or where it was coming from, why or how it got there, but I felt like Dad was holding me back. Crushing me under the weight of his thumb. And I was getting more than a little irritated. “Dad, are you saying I can't ever make a record?”

“No. I hope you make fifty records. I'll buy every one. But what you do with an instrument is only half of the gift that is in you.” He pointed to the black notebook that he'd given me, which I'd started carrying between my belt and the small of my back. “I've seen how people respond to you when you sing what's yours. The words you write reach deep. When a man in a shiny suit with a lot of money comes along and wants to cut a record with you singing your own songs the way you want to sing them, the way you want to play them, more power to you. Have at it. Big-Big and me will be in the front row cheering. Until then, guard your gift and guard that notebook. Day may come when you find it's priceless.”

One salesman or recruiter after another sought me out. They'd heard about my instrumentals, and the rumor of the hummingbird-blur of my fingers moving across the neck of the guitar and keys of the piano, and since they'd never heard anything like it from someone my age, they wanted to see for themselves.

But given that I was seventeen, they knew Dad was the gatekeeper. So they'd approach him. Shake his hand. Try to reason with him. Problem was, they had their box, and since I wasn't a very good fit in my
present form, they wanted to take the parts of me that they liked, run them through their music grinder, and then stuff what remained of my soulless body into their prepackaged form.

While I did not want to admit it, even I could see this. They wanted to completely eradicate any scent of the whole gospel, hymn-singing, Sunday-morning-music thing and saturate me in the cheap cologne of whatever they were selling. Make a rock-and-roll star out of me. Long hair. Mohawk and mascara. Tight leather pants.

Eventually they started sending midlevel execs in suits with cash. And over time, the wads got bigger. Dad would listen, figure out their angle, and when they wouldn't take no for an answer, he'd close the door.

One day a persistent man found us in a dried-up mining town in northern Colorado. He wore a funny-looking hat and carried a thick wad, and he decided to bypass Dad. He snooped around until he found me tying down tent corners. He never said a word. He just licked his thumb and started counting out the money. I wanted an electric guitar so badly I could taste it, so the sight of fifty hundred-dollar bills had a drug-like effect on me.

He said, “Can you read music?”

Thanks to Miss Hagle, I could read music about as well as I could read English. I nodded.

He spread some sheets in front of me. “Can you play this?”

It was about as complicated as “Happy Birthday to You.” So I signed some papers, took the money, and agreed to meet the man in town in a few hours. I found him in an abandoned gas station with a Fender Telecaster hooked up to an amp and what looked like an expensive tape recording machine. The man was savvy. He'd painted my name on the guitar. I spent a few minutes getting comfortable with it, and then he spread out the music in front of me. I'd play a number through the way it was scripted once, sometimes twice, and then he'd cut me loose and say, “How would you play it?” It was at that point that I saw the perfect intersection of the three corners of my musical training. When I cut loose, that's when he really started smiling.

This continued for an hour or so. And I will admit, it was a lot of fun. Addicting. At one point he excused himself, walked to a pay phone, and made an animated call to somebody who sounded equally animated. The two talked a few minutes while my new friend sipped from a stainless flask. When he hung up he returned to me, offering the flask and smiling. “Nip?”

What could it hurt? I took the flask, turned it up, and pretended to be as cool as he. I would learn shortly that it was not real cool.

We played another hour. He'd sip. I'd play. Then I'd sip. And play some more. I'd gotten pretty relaxed too. Finally, after I'd played everything the man could dish out, he smiled, packed everything into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and tipped his hat at me. “Stay close to the radio. I'll be in touch.”

The world was spinning pretty good, but I still had it by the reins—or so I thought. I nodded coolly, and the man climbed into his car and turned the ignition, only to discover that he had a problem. That problem was about six feet four inches tall, dressed out at about two hundred and forty pounds, and was standing in front of his car with a disapproving look painted across his face. I'd seen that look before.

The man sank down in his seat and stared beneath the top of his steering wheel and over the top of the dash and began to laugh uncomfortably. I was a little foggy, but I heard little humor in it. Nervously, he lit a cigar.

Dad looked at the man but pointed at me. “Did you ask his age?”

The guy talked around the cigar. “I don't give a rat's derriere how old he is.” As he spoke, he let out a cloud of smoke and slurred his way through
derry-air
.

Dad spoke softly. “Try seventeen.”

The man knew he was toast. But he wasn't about to go out without a fight, so he floored it, flipping Dad over the hood and burning rubber out of the parking lot—whereby he ran directly into a roadblock of four patrol cars.

As our venues had grown, Dad had employed the local police to help
keep order. Doing so had endeared him to the local deputies, who could make good overtime money just by wearing sunglasses and looking official. So when he'd told them that some salesman had hoodwinked me, they were more than a little protective. As the man was sitting there considering his options, Dad all but pulled him out of the window of his car and slid my “signed contract” from his coat pocket. He then dragged the man around the back of the car, retrieved the recording tape out of the trunk, and shook the guy like a rag doll. His shiny flask clanked on the pavement below.

“This all?”

The policemen all smiled. The man, now angry, began to spit venom. “I ain't telling you sh—”

The man sounded like he wanted to say
sugar
, but Dad applied enough sufficient pressure around his throat to choke off the rest, so I was never really certain.

Dad lifted the man off the ground and waited as he began kicking his feet and his face turned the color of a blueberry. Finally he nodded, and Dad let go. Dad dropped the tape onto the ground and stomped on it. Then he took the guy's cigar and lit the paper. The man was not too pleased, and began telling Dad how he would soon hear from his high-priced Los Angeles attorney.

Dad put him back in his car, smashed his hat down tight over his face, crumpled his cigar in his lap, and then held out his hand to me. Palm up. I put the five thousand dollars in his hand, whereby Dad quickly shoved it in the man's mouth and sent him on his way. Then he did the one thing I was dreading.

He looked at me.

And said nothing.

I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. It was one of those rare self-aware moments when I saw the whole of my life in a quick and clear slide show. Despite some real hardship, starting with the death of my mom, my dad had been nothing but good to me. He'd given unselfishly. I'd never lacked for anything. I'd had a better musical training
than kids coming out of Berklee. I'd seen more of the country than any of my friends, most of whom had at one time or another traveled with us, prompting responses like, “You get to do this every weekend? This is the coolest thing I've ever done.”

The only thing Dad had not given me was Jimmy, and that was because Mom had given it to him.

After a painful and angry gaze that lasted several years and bored a hole through my soul, Dad stepped into one of the patrol cars with a deputy and returned to the revival. It wasn't until both the man and Dad had driven off that I realized I was still standing there with that stupid Telecaster hanging around my neck. When I looked down, I saw my reflection in the mirrored surface of the flask at my feet.

I stuck my thumb in the air, and it wasn't long till an older woman stopped. “You need a ride, honey?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

A mile later her front right tire blew. I changed it for her, but not being much of a mechanic, I was soon covered in grease from fingertip to forearm. She grimaced a bit when I tried to get back into her car. I didn't blame her. I turned and started putting one foot in front of the other. Five miles is a long time to think.

The walk back sobered me. In every way. I returned to the revival at sundown just in time to hear Dad's “Dirty Hands” sermon. I won't bore you with the details. You can probably figure it out. In a nutshell, he talked about how sin stains your hands and how, because they're always in front of you where you can see them, they stand as a constant reminder of what you've been dipping them into. Lastly, he talked about how it's difficult to raise dirty hands to a holy God and how the only way to get them clean was to dip them in the blood. It made for some eye-opening illustrations. I wanted to puke just listening to him. And given the amount of rotgut alcohol I'd consumed, I was on the verge anyway.

His voice echoed out of the tents and found me on the highway. “Now, look at your hands. Palms up.”

The slide show of Dad's movements played in my mind.

“Take a long, hard look. Take your time. I want you to look back into the stuff you don't want to look at. You know what I'm talking about. The dark places. The closets you've shut. Be honest with yourself. What've you been dipping your hands into?” A long pause. “You got it? Picture clear?”

In my mind's eye I could clearly see him turning his hands over and back.

“Now ask yourself, what have you gained?”

He always asked that question twice. I mouthed the next words as he spoke them: “And what have you lost?”

For me, the answer to the first question was nothing but a mess. The answer to the second started and ended with a huge crack down the foundation of my father's trust in me.

The sinking feeling in me did not improve as the sound of his voice grew closer.

The sermon always ended with several thousand people sticking their hands straight up. Sometimes I'd squint my eyes from the piano bench, and all those hands looked like amber waves of grain.

I'd heard it all before. In the twenty-five years since, I've thought about it a good bit, and it's not rocket science. The problem was me. Despite my father's best wise counsel, his constant sacrifice, his warnings to the contrary, his five thousand sermons, and a deep knowingness in my gut that I needed to stay as far away from that serpent as humanly possible, there was something in me that couldn't stand the thought of my dad being right or of him telling me what to do. Said more simply: I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted it, the way I wanted it, because I wanted it. Period.

The older I got, the more I felt like I was under his thumb. Not that he was doing anything different. He was the same dad he'd always been. If
anything, he'd become more lenient and I had more freedom. That meant the change had occurred in me, and that made it even worse. Something in me hated my dad's “rightness,” and that he held me to some plumb line while most of my friends could do whatever they pleased.

The anger swirled, bitterness took root, and I began listening to whispers of what I could become if he weren't holding me back in some stupid traveling circus. I had more musical ability in my pinkie than he'd ever had and he was just jealous. Where the throngs once thanked him for his sermons and his prayers, they were now thanking me for my music. People were coming to hear me. Not him. He was riding my coattails, and he was beginning to feel like deadweight.