Long Way Gone (14 page)

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out had I turned right. Or better yet, made a U-turn.

Twenty-one hours and one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four miles later, I pulled into Nashville. Eighteen years old, dumb, wet behind the ears, naïve, and ignorant. Not the best combination. At a downtown motel I sat on the bed, hung my head in my hands, and stared at the sparseness of my life. Next to me sat the leather money purse. I unzipped it, and when the money spilled on the bed, my jaw fell open.

The cash was wrapped in a map and held together with a green rubber band. I'd never seen that much money in my life. I counted it. Twice. Twelve thousand eight hundred dollars. I glanced at the motel door to make sure it was locked, bolted, and chained.

Then I looked at the map. It showed the state of Colorado. A
hand-drawn star covered the spot in the mountains where our cabin sat. Next to it Dad had written:

No matter where you go, no matter what happens, what you become, what you gain, what you lose, no matter whether you succeed or fail, stand or fall, no matter what you dip your hands into . . . no gone is too far gone. Son, you can always come home.

I stared at my dad's words. They did not comfort me.

I
t took me about twenty-four hours in Nashville to learn what most everyone else there already knew. The talent pool in Music City is more dense than most anywhere else on earth. And while I might have been something standing on the stage at Pedro's, in Nashville I was just one more dumb kid with six strings and a dream.

After a week I'd gotten nowhere. Fast. Learning the hard way that it's not what you know or how good you are, but who you know—and I didn't know anybody. Given so much life on the road, I did know how to stretch a dollar. My motel cost twelve bucks a night if I rented it by the week. Eating ramen noodles and canned beans, I figured I could last a couple of years—though I might lose a few pounds.

At the end of another discouraging day I opened the door of my motel.

Whenever I left I took Jimmy with me, but the cash I had stashed inside the back panel of the air conditioner. I thought I'd get settled before I went through the hassle of opening an account. You know, choose my bank carefully. I was further emboldened in that the panel of the air conditioner had to be removed with a specific screwdriver, one of those weird six-sided heads that required a trip to the hardware store for the right fit.
Nobody just carries that bit around in their pocket,
I thought.
My money will be safe. Right?

Wrong.

When I walked in, I saw at once that I'd not been the first to think
of the whole hide-the-money-behind-the-air-conditioner thing. The panel door had been unscrewed and was lying on the floor. The screws were lined up in a row.

That night the manager, a petite lady who wore an apron and pulled her hair back, came knocking, asking for next week's rent. She found me sitting on the edge of the bed, my head sunk in my hands.

The reality of my life hit me like a train that night as I sat in the cab of my truck, unloaded my pocket, and counted out every penny to my name—seven dollars and forty-nine cents. And while that sight was painful, it was not nearly as painful as the deeper reality: it would be a long time before I could go home.

I spent that night, and many more just like it, in the cab of the truck with my arms wrapped around Jimmy, thinking about what I'd had with my dad, how I had taken it for granted, and how everything my father ever told me was absolutely true.

After two weeks of trying to sell my soul to anyone who would listen and trying
not
to think about what I would give to be back on the bus with my dad in any town other than this one, I got a gig at a Laundromat. That's right, ten bucks plus tips at the Spin and Twirl. One night a week. Plus they'd let me wash my clothes for free, and it sat two miles from a truck stop where I could take a shower for a dollar.

Within a few weeks my reputation had spread and I got a second gig at the Fluff and Fold. After three weeks someone actually came looking for me: Dietrich Messerschmidt, owner of a car wash called the Sudsy Schnitzel. And no, I didn't make that up.

He drove a giant green Cadillac, wore a terrible comb-over toupee, and even had one of those little wiener dogs, named Sweet, or “Sveet” as he said, that made all his commercials with him. Most irritating and meanest dog on the planet. I guess if I had to live with that man I'd be angry too.

Dietrich had a virtual monopoly on Bavarian Alps–style car wash/hot dog places in Nashville. German name or not, he apparently didn't know what Wiener schnitzel actually was, and I didn't correct his mistake. It
seemed to be working for him. If you bought a deluxe or platinum wash, he'd throw in a free drink and foot-long dog at half price while you waited.

Between these three jobs I made about fifty bucks a week. At least I wouldn't starve. Or if I did, I would do so slowly, and my clothes and my truck would be clean, and I wouldn't be any more of an embarrassment to my father than I already was when he came to identify the body.

One night I looked down from the little stage at the Schnitzel and recognized a man I'd seen the previous three weeks in a row. He was neatly dressed, but he definitely had his own style: Sansabelt slacks, white shoes, green socks, hat, golf shirt, and enough eyebrow, nose, and ear hair to cover half his head. Each week he bought two “schnitzels” and then spent several minutes preparing them: one with onions, peppers, and spicy mustard, and a second with cabbage, onions, and this strange cheese that smelled like the nasty stuff you pick out of your belly button. He would arrange these on two plates, with two napkins and two drinks, and then he'd sit quietly and eat one of them. Occasionally he would mumble quietly to the other schnitzel.

When he was finished he'd stand, run his hands along the inside waistband of his slacks, wipe the corners of his mouth, fold his napkin neatly, and wrap everything—including the uneaten dog—in the aluminum foil in which it had been served, then drop it in the trash can. I thought to myself,
This is where the lonely come to die
.

This week the sight of the old man talking to somebody who wasn't there, and clearly hadn't been in a long time, got to me, and I said, “Sir, can I play you a song?”

He wiped his mouth, folded his napkin, and turned slowly, rotating on the axis of his backside. He cleared his throat and spoke with a bit of an accent. “Do you know ‘Danny Boy'?”

I swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

The old man took off his hat and shot a glance at the uneaten dog. “That was one of her favorites.”

Sitting there on a stool in Dietrich's combination hot dog and car wash joint, I sang “Danny Boy.”

I sang it with all my might. When I looked up, the car wash had stopped, literally. Someone had pulled the lever and stopped the mechanical tracks from pulling the cars through, and everyone was staring at me.

When I reached the last verse and sang, “And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me . . . ,” the old man stood, set a hundred-dollar bill on the floor at my feet, and cracked a quivering smile as the tears puddled in the corners of his quivering lips. Then he tipped his hat and walked out. I never saw him again.

When he'd driven out of the parking lot, I stared at the trash can, wondering if it would dishonor his wife if I were to eat her untouched dinner. Disrespectful or not, I dug through the foil and devoured that uneaten dog. Given that I lived like a vagrant in the cab of my truck, the resulting wind and odor were a small price to pay.

At night I would walk Broadway listening to the bands. Lower Broad is maybe a half-mile long, incorporating a couple square blocks, and all the bars and honky-tonks are packed in there like sardines. At any given time more than forty bands or singers, songwriters, and musicians are playing. They play four-hour shifts, there are three shifts in a day, and most everybody plays for tips. Some bars are three and four stories, and they'll stage a different act on every floor.

Two of my favorites were Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and Robert's Western World. Both were world renowned for the talent they would put on the stage, and a virtual breeding ground for some of the greatest performers ever. I couldn't afford to eat or drink in either, so I'd stand outside and listen.

One night some guy walked out of Robert's and dropped some papers. I picked them up and handed them to him. “Excuse me, sir?”

He was too drunk to care. “You can have 'em, kid. Them's the keys to the kingdom.”

He staggered away, and I looked at the papers in my hand. They
were song sheets, but unlike any song sheets I'd ever seen. I stood there studying a page like a monkey holding a Rubik's Cube and realized it must be the Nashville Number System. I'd heard of it, but never seen it. No reason to. But I knew enough to know that if this was the language musicians spoke in this town, I needed to learn it.

The next day I dug through some books at the public library and figured out that it wasn't as complicated as it looked. Actually, it made good sense. In the 1950s many of the Nashville studio musicians couldn't read or understand formal musical scores. They were phenomenal musicians, but formally transcribed music was as Greek to them as Nashville notation was to me.

It wasn't uncommon for them to play for four or five artists in a single day, and often an artist would come in and want a piece of music played in a different key than scripted. The studio musicians needed a quick way to change the key without spending hours rewriting a score. So some guy devised a musical number system, and Nashville notation was born. Given its simplicity and the way in which it solved a problem before it became one, fellow musicians adapted the system and developed it into a complete method of writing chord charts and melodies—combining Nashville shorthand with formal notation standards. The NNS uses whole numbers in place of chord names, parentheses, hash marks, circles, up and down arrows, underlining, positive and negative signs, fractions, colons, semicolons, and a host of other punctuation marks. It looks more like a math problem than music.

Soon my nightly trips to Lower Broad included sketching out a song's structure in my notebook using the system. But the books had only taught me so much. I needed to see some real song sheets with comments in the margins.

Standing on Broadway, listening to music, and attempting to write the NNS in my head, I had a thought: Certainly not everyone took their music home. Some of it had to end up in the trash.

I was right. The trash cans behind the bars were gold mines for discarded sheet music. At first I just picked from the edges, but soon I
was knee-deep in nastiness, digging my hands through leftover nachos and chicken bones.

It did not escape me how far I'd fallen. From the spotless ivory keys onstage with Dad and Big-Big, playing before fifteen or twenty thousand, doing something I was pretty good at, to standing in muck and mire at the bottom of a Dumpster, my hands draped in melted cheese and sour beer. Every time I threw my leg over the side and climbed down into a bin, I heard the echo of my dad's “Dirty Hands” sermon.

Bouncers would throw me out, thinking I was just some drunk, but one night the bouncer at Tootsie's saw me holding rolled-up sheets of paper covered in ketchup. The guy looked like he'd been born in a weight room.

I hopped down. “I know, I know, I'm gone.”

“Pal, I've thrown you out of here every night this week. You're either the most persistent drunk on Broadway or real hungry.”

I dusted myself off. “I am hungry. I could probably eat most of a cow right now, hoofs, horns, and all. But to be honest, I'm looking for these.” I held out the sheets.

“You're digging through that . . . looking for those?”

“Yes.”

“That's a first.” He considered me. “You from around here?”

I shook my head. “Colorado.”

“You play?”

The smell of me was wafting up and starting to make me gag. “Yes.”

“You any good?”

Funny how so simple a question can get right to the heart of the matter. I could have told him about my history, the thousands of times I'd performed, the hundreds of thousands of people I'd performed for, my training, my knowledge, my mastery of piano and guitar, and how I was so confident in myself and my abilities that I'd thumbed my nose at my dad, stolen everything he held dear, broken his heart, and shattered his trust, then driven twelve hundred miles because I believed I was as good as anyone. I could have told him about my home and how I now
knew I could never go back there until I had become what I believed I could become. That my life was riding on the wager that I was as good as anyone. And not only that, but that when I opened my mouth to sing, I could melt hardened defenses and make people believe that what I was singing was true.

But I have a simple rule about musicians. Don't tell me what you know. Don't tell me how good you are. Just play. And since I couldn't do that standing in a Dumpster in the alley behind Broadway, and since I didn't feel like blabbing out a sob story I was sure he'd heard a hundred times before, and since I didn't like leaving my truck unoccupied past midnight, I just said, “Yes.”

His eyes walked up and down me. Then he held up a finger. “Wait here.” He disappeared inside and returned three minutes later with a stack of clean, white, neatly stacked papers. “When you want more, come see me.”

“Thanks.” I turned to go.

He stopped me. “And, pal, take a shower, 'cause you'll never find a girl in this town smelling like that.”

“Tell me about it.”

I reached the river, walked a few blocks, and turned the corner to where I had parked the truck in a dollar-a-day grass lot. If you paid a month in advance, it was half that.

No truck.

I walked to the spot where I'd parked it, and nothing but grass stared up at me. I turned, scanning the lot. Making sure I was in the right place. I stared at the number on the fence. R07. Pulled the receipt from my pocket. R07. I wanted to scream, cuss, and shake my fist, but at who?