Bare Bones (2 page)

With lunch over, it was time to be professional again. When I got my new panel, Deion was on it! He sat to the left, I sat to the right, and a random Housewife sat in the middle. Don't even remember who sat there, because I was in love with Deion.

We just clicked in that way people talk about when they find their soul mate (although I have no clue about that, actually, since I suck so bad at relationships with women, as you will soon read). Deion and I wound up working together for about five hours that day, much of it spent doing two-man panels. I thought we had formed a bond. But if I was at all unsure, what happened next made it irrefutable.

Deion and I were backstage talking when someone came around and offered us both a beer.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I don't drink.”

After refusing as well, I said, “I don't drink, either.”

“Let me guess. Messed-up parents?”

“Yeah.”

“I've never had a drink in my life.”

“Me neither,” I said.

In that very moment an ironclad bond was forged. It was clear that although we were from two very different worlds, we had experienced the same kind of struggles. Deion said he'd only ever met one other person who felt the same way about drinking. Neither one of us was morally against it; we'd just decided it wasn't for us, because of what we had seen it do to others.

We returned to the panels, and if we had chemistry before, we were killing it now. There was a new level of admiration and empathy between us. When he talked I just shut up, not because he was Prime Time, but because this was a dude who had been through tough circumstances. I totally related to and respected him—and wanted to hear what he had to say.

At the end of the day, after we'd been partnered up for hours, Deion Sanders said to me, “Let me give you my number.”

“Hey, man. I'm never going to call you,” I told him straight up. “So if I get your number, I'm just telling you now that I will never use it, because I would feel like I am bothering you.”

But Deion put his number into my phone and said, “I want you to call me.”

“I'm not going to.”

Now I'm back in Nashville, packing—just zipped up the ol' garment bag, which I hate doing; I can't iron worth crap, never could, and packing a garment bag means that something is going to need to be ironed—because I'm returning to L.A., where I'll see Deion again. This time, we were told, it's not an audition but a “chem test,” meaning they are looking for people who work well with the two of us.

As excited as I am, I also know how the game works. This is a fickle business.

At any moment Johnny Seacrest, Ryan's long-lost brother, could show up and take the job. And that's just how you do. Even if he doesn't, there are still many obstacles between getting the job and having a TV show. The network has to agree to make the pilot; I have to do well on the pilot; the pilot has to be picked up to run on TV; then viewers have to tune in. The likelihood of me hosting a show with my new good buddy Deion Sanders is slim at best.

But the way I look at it, every day that I'm moving forward is a day I'm not moving backward. Just the fact that I'm in the race at all is a miracle. It's crazy that a kid who grew up on welfare in rural Arkansas, with a checked-out mom and no dad, is now someone who finds himself in the same room with network producers and an NFL great, even if I am too weirded out to call him.

Above my bed, I keep a picture of my hometown's road sign—
MOUNTAIN PINE
,
POP
. 772—as a constant reminder not only of where I come from and how much I've gone through to get where I am, but also of the kind of people I talk to on the radio every day. I try to help and entertain them with my show and my stories and hopefully this book. They are people just like me. I'll never forget that.

THE BOY BEHIND THE
NINJA TURTLE MASK

It sounds weird to say this, but I've almost died a bunch of times in my life. The first time I was five years old, running through the rain in the woods of Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Although I really spent most of my life in the nearby and much smaller town of Mountain Pine, on this fall afternoon in 1985, my mom, dad, little sister, and I were living in a house in Hot Springs. It was only temporary, though. We might have been there for a month.

I was being chased by my cousin. I say “cousin,” but it was actually my mom's best friend's daughter, who we just called a cousin. That's a southern thing. And there were moments when we all lived together, so the idea of family wasn't such a stretch. Anyway, she was chasing me with a stick through the front lawn. Well, “lawn” isn't really accurate, either. In front of our house, there were a lot of woods, which is different. Rich people have lawns; country people have woods. So we had woods.

I ran up a ladder propped against the house and climbed onto the roof. No way was she going to get me up here. But up the ladder my cousin started, waving that stupid stick. Below me there was an old boat trailer. Why there was a boat trailer parked beside our house, in the woods, I have no idea. We didn't have a boat.

I moved to jump onto the grass. But my foot slipped on the rain-slicked roof and I did a belly flop right onto the base of the boat trailer. My stomach hurt so much I couldn't walk. My cousin scrambled down the ladder and lay down next to me in the wet grass. I wouldn't have slipped if it weren't for that damn rain! The same rain that rained out my first-ever Little League baseball game that my dad had signed me up for. That was where I was supposed to be, instead of getting chased around by my cousin with a stupid stick.

I didn't know any better, so like any dumb kid who grew up in Arkansas, I stayed outside and tried to ignore that I was hurt. Finally I got up and limped into the house and didn't think much about it. But my stomachache got so bad through the rest of the day and night that I couldn't eat or sleep. And it was hard to breathe. Where we came from, though, you didn't just go to the doctor. That's a poor-person mentality that basically comes from the fact that doctor visits are expensive without insurance (and one I still have today, even though I now have great health insurance). The medical protocol for poor people is: If something hurts, get over it. If something hurts real bad, put salve on it. Something has to hurt real,
real
bad to merit a trip to any kind of fancy-pants doctor. And forget about the dentist—I didn't step into one of those guys' offices until I was in my twenties (and I'm still paying for that).

The day after my fall onto the boat trailer, my breathing became even more labored. That's when my mom decided to take me to the hospital. I had only seen the inside of a hospital on TV. So although I was in terrible pain, getting to walk into an actual hospital with real doctors was exciting enough for me to forget about my injury for a moment. However, in the emergency room the pain returned and was so bad that I couldn't walk anymore. All the novelty wore off. A nurse rushed toward me with a wheelchair, which she immediately rolled into an examination room where people in white coats did whatever they do with X-rays and other big machines. Even at that age, I knew something bad was going on. It all ended when a doctor said to my mom, “We've got to get him into surgery immediately.” While a mask was slapped on my face, my mom began to cry. I passed out immediately. (I'm still a total lightweight to this day; a dose of NyQuil and it's like I've been hit by a tranquilizer gun.)

When I woke up hours later, there were people all around me. There was my mom by my head and my grandmother at my feet. But all along the perimeter of the hospital bed were people from our church. My grandma, my mom's mom, had us going to the First Pentecostal Church of Jessieville, another small town in Garland County, where Hot Springs and Mountain Pine are located. The older, mostly female congregants around my bed were all friends of my grandmother's. There was a lot of prayer. And a lot of love.

I had undergone emergency surgery to remove a ruptured spleen and wound up spending eight days recovering in the hospital. A deep, ugly scar ran from beneath my belt line all the way to the bottom of my sternum. But I was lucky. The doctor told my mom that if I had gone untreated for six more hours, I would have drowned internally in my own blood. At the time, I took it all as no big deal. But looking back now, I think,
Holy crap,
I almost died from my insides bleeding. I was pretty lucky, and also pretty stupid not to have let my mother know a little sooner how much pain I felt. If this had happened when I was twenty-five, I surely could have used the story to impress girls, right?

Falling on the boat trailer and the surgery after is the earliest complete memory I have. While some of my friends say they can remember things like coming out of their mother's vagina and into the light, I think that's a load of crap. (And not only do I not believe them, I don't like stories about my mom's vagina even if true.) But the events of that day and following week stand out clearly in my mind not just because I could have died or because I got to stay in the hospital or was the center of attention for a while—but because that was also the last time in my life that I felt like I had a dad. Whether there was any connection between my getting hurt and my biological father going peace-out, I have no clue. All I know is this: we were a family, I landed in the hospital, and when I got out he was gone for good.

At least that's how I remember it. Right at the age my memories started to come into focus, he faded out. Still, I know a few things about him—like how he got my mom pregnant when she was fifteen years old.

Although my mother, Pam Hurt, was originally from Kansas City, Missouri, she moved during her teenage years to Arkansas, where my dad, who was two years older than her, was from. The youngest of four siblings, my mom was best friends with her sister Cindy. In high school, they ran together in a group of kids that included my biological father and his brother.

Whenever I tell people that I'm from Arkansas and I have “double cousins,” they assume I'm talking about incest. (Shout-out to Arkansas stereotypes! For the record, I have never dated any of my cousins. Only made out.) What happened was my mom married my dad (I'm assuming because she got pregnant), and my aunt Cindy married my dad's brother Rick Estell. So my cousins, Mary and Josh, and my sister and I have the same two sets of grandparents. My uncle Rick, a wonderful guy with his own roofing, landscaping, and other businesses, was a solid influence on me while I was growing up—and the exact opposite of my dad, who vanished from my life.

I had no idea where or why my dad went and wasn't made to understand what happened. I didn't know what questions to ask when I was young; and then I was too resentful to ask them when I was older. But I decided that I wasn't missing anything. The only memory I have of him from before he left is a hazy image of being in a room with him and a bunch of other guys. He was trying to get me to say curse words in front of his buddies—I guess he thought it would be funny to hear a four-year-old drop the F-bomb—but I wouldn't do it. I was a prude even then. Pretty dumb memory, I know.

Once I got out of the hospital, my family became my mother and little sister, Amanda, who was four years younger than me. My sister and I were close in that way you are with someone you live with in a very small house. I tried to be a good older brother and protect her (not that I was a tough kid by any stretch; I was a huge nerd and wimp and quite small). But we weren't best friends or anything. Four years is quite the age difference when you are kids, especially when you are a boy and girl.

With my dad gone, we moved in with my grandmother into her trailer at the top of the big hill in Jessieville. Soon after that, the four of us moved to an apartment in Mountain Pine. Mountain Pine, Jessieville, and Hot Springs are all neighboring communities within a twenty-minute radius of each other, but only Hot Springs, with a population of about thirty thousand people, was “town.” So if you had to go to Walmart to get washing powders, or get groceries from the Piggly Wiggly or Sunny Delight from Food 4 Less, you would go into Hot Springs. (I particularly loved Sunny Delight and just assumed it was orange juice. It wasn't until years later that I found out there's a huge difference between orange juice and orange
drink
. But when I was a kid, SunnyD was a huge treat at our house. I would pour half of a new bottle into an empty SunnyD bottle, and then fill them both up with water. This way I managed to have two bottles of Sunny Delight for the price of one. Bobby: 1; being poor: 0.)

Mountain Pine, population seven hundred, was segregated when I grew up there and is still that way today. The black and white neighborhoods are actually divided right down the middle of what was once a company mill town. Dierks Lumber and Coal Company, which began producing lumber there in the 1920s, owned all the homes and commercial property, like the movie theater and hotel, through the 1960s. But Dierks eventually sold the mill to Weyerhaeuser, which, after years of layoffs, finally closed it in 2006—putting nearly half the town out of work.