Hillbilly Heart (14 page)

With that, she walked out of the bar without saying another word or looking relieved for having talked to me.

I knew the girls she referred to. There were two of them, and they looked really good. I’d met them there at Changes, had some drinks and smokes, and they’d invited me back to their trailer, where they got out their Ouija board. The next time I went home with them, they got the board out again, and I was hooked.

I hadn’t crossed a sexual line with them yet, but things were looking awfully tempting. One more trip over to their place, and I knew we were all going to be naked. That’s when the fortuneteller showed up. Despite her warning, come Friday night, I set out for their trailer after I got off work at two fifteen in the morning.

I pulled in front of their place and noticed it was pretty damn dark and desolate. I thought, Shit, I wish they had some neighbors. This trailer was out in the woods. I saw a car… but it didn’t look like the car I’d seen them drive. I paused before stumbling up the wood stairs that led to the front door.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

I knocked… and knocked again.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

Something didn’t feel right.

“Cyrus, get the hell out of here,” I said to myself.

As soon as I turned around, though, the door creaked open. It was pitch-black inside the trailer. Something was telling me to go inside.
Come in… come on in… come in…
I debated whether to go. But if those girls were inside, they would’ve turned on the light. And said something.

I was fairly convinced they weren’t in there. So what was?

I remembered the fortuneteller lady said something in that trailer wanted what I had. What did she mean? My spirit? My life? I didn’t wait to find out. I got the hell out of there.

In the middle of the night on August 15, 1984, Changes burned to the ground. The fire broke out hours after I’d gone home with my then-girlfriend, Charlotte. I didn’t find out until I drove back to 2317 Long Street the next morning, walked in, and found my mom staring at the local news. From what I could see, the building and everything in it appeared to have been leveled by the blaze. I had to see for myself.

When I got there, the club was still wet and the smell of fire filled the damaged space. With a flashlight in my hand, I went straight toward the stage and saw that the drums looked like a melted candle. The rest of our equipment was burned nearly beyond recognition—J.R.’s classic Les Paul, all my guitars—everything except my guitar amp, a Bandit 65. It was charred but mostly intact.

I looked behind the amp where I kept boxes of our 45s and cash from our sales. There were four or five boxes altogether. The box with the cash was gone, burned. The 45s, it appeared, had all melted. When I opened the last box, though, I found a miniature book, a collection of twenty-five inspirational verses. I’d found it a few months earlier at the Brothers Four, a bar in Portsmouth.
Sometimes I would go outside between sets and read it and pray. I couldn’t believe it had survived the fire intact. With the narrow beam of my flashlight, I saw it was open to a verse:

With every adversity lies the seed to something greater.

Once again I felt the hand of fate. Or the hands. I was sure this testament to faith was a sign to keep on keeping on, except to do it someplace else. Over and over again I’d heard I was too rock for country, and so I took this as a sign to take my rebel yell out west, to Los Angeles and rock and roll.

Right before the fire, we were booked to open for country legend George Jones when he played Melody Mountain, an outdoor festival in Ashland, at the end of September. It was our biggest show to date, in front of more than ten thousand, and though our equipment was borrowed from friends, we played like seasoned pros after George lived up to his nickname “No Show Jones.” For nearly an hour, the promoter stood on the side of the stage and yelled at us to “play one more! Just one more!”

I was singing Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” (perfect, right?) when I finally saw George’s bus winding over the hill. By that point, I had nearly exhausted our repertoire, but I’d never had as much fun. Next, we opened for Dr. Hook at the Red Fox, another local venue. Then, after a two-week stint at the Roxy, a rock club in Ironton, I gathered Sly Dog together and announced that I was leaving the band and heading to Los Angeles.

I’d known I was going to leave since the fire at Changes, and the guys knew it, too. They understood I was going to head west after we made good on our bookings. I didn’t want to abandon them, but my single-minded drive to make it, to reach my goal and most importantly to find my purpose, no matter what, was unmistakable, stronger than anything I’d ever known. It defined everything about me. Interestingly, as we stood backstage after the gig, what kept
going through my mind was something I had memorized from the book
Think and Grow Rich
—a quote from Napoleon Hill: “Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.”

This was the quote that had kept me going through tough times and self-doubt, and now it was motivating me to go for it, to go to Los Angeles, and, well… in short, to never give up.

CHAPTER 12

Baby Toys and New Cars

T
HE NOTECARD ON MY
bedroom wall said everything about this next chapter in my life:

You will go to your cousin Saundra Sark’s house in California, where you will set up camp and begin to infiltrate the Los Angeles music scene. Within a month, you will surround yourself with the best musicians you can find, start a band, land a house gig, and strike a deal within three months with Capitol Records.

My dad gave me his car, insisting I drive cross-country in a vehicle more reliable than my truck. I drove most of the way by myself, with only the radio for company. In Albuquerque, I stayed with a cousin who made weird special effects. One of his creations was a life-size skeleton with its own wardrobe and a place in the back where I could stick my hand and swivel its head, like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

I called this character Charlie Ray, and stuck him in the passenger seat for the last leg of my drive to California. He was good company.

My cousin Saundra (she was my dad’s sister’s daughter) lived in
Long Beach, and after settling in and saying hello, I made a beeline for the beach, which I thought would look like a postcard straight out of a Beach Boys song. But instead of blond surfer chicks and golden sand, I found warehouses next to the beach and cargo ships idling offshore. The weather was cold and foggy—where was the fabled sunshine? I bought a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, sat on a bench, and fended off hungry seagulls dive-bombing my chicken.

When I drove to Capitol Records—a round building designed to look like a stack of records—I couldn’t even get in the front door. Nor could I get in anyplace else. No one cared about my demos, head shots, or pitches.

As my funds ran low, I landed a job as a forklift operator at Western Pacific Craft, a manufacturer of heavy-duty boxes that produce farmers used in the fields. The boxes were dipped in giant vats of hot wax and then I hauled them away. My coworkers were black and Hispanic men, many of whom were affiliated with Long Beach gangs that hated one another. The place was a cauldron of tension. One night a knife fight broke out and I almost got my throat slashed trying to break it up.

The funny thing about being there was that none of those guys knew my name. They heard my accent and called me “Country.” It was so ironic. Here I’d come out to L.A. to rock and I was…

Well, it was a rough six months. After working all day, I was too tired to spend nights hustling my music and looking for gigs. Then my cousin Jerry (son of my uncle Larry, who had been with my dad the night he picked me up from jail) drove me to the Palomino Club, a North Hollywood club whose stage was a West Coast home away from home for Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, and Hoyt Axton.

It was Wednesday night—open mic night.

“Hold on,” I said as we settled in at a table near the bar. “Where are we again?”

“The Palomino Club,” he said.

“No, I mean what city?” I said. “Because this is where I belong. No offense to you, but where I’ve been staying is the wrong side of L.A.”

I promptly moved from Saundra’s to Van Nuys, a suburb in the middle of the sprawling San Fernando Valley, only ten minutes from the club. I rented a room in the back of a house owned by an older couple from England. On my first Wednesday night living in Van Nuys, I showed up at the Palomino, guitar in hand and a batch of songs in my head. Oh, man, getting back onstage in front of people rekindled the waning flame in my soul.

Unfortunately, open mic night didn’t pay. Nor did I ever see any scouts from the record labels there looking for undiscovered talent.

I wrote a lot of songs in my room and answered ads for musicians in trade papers, but L.A. in the mid-’80s was all about heavy metal and hair bands. As soon as people heard my name and the twang in my voice, they gave me the usual thanks-but-no-thanks and advised me to go to Nashville.

I gave myself pep talk after pep talk. When I was a boy, my dad had frequently quoted Thomas Edison, who was once asked how it felt to have failed thousands of times to create the electric filament. “I have not failed, not once,” he said. “I have discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

I suppose I was making my own discoveries. Having quit my forklift driving job when I moved, I got a day job at Baby Toytown, a kids’ store that sold strollers, bouncy seats, changing tables, and everything else new parents would need. It was near where I lived. I didn’t know much of anything about stocking a nursery, but I tried to make up for it by being polite with a can-do attitude.

One day an expectant mom came into the store looking like she might have her baby any minute. I greeted her, and she turned out to be a talker. As I rang her up at the register, she declared that I was the best salesman she’d ever met.

“I didn’t do anything, ma’am,” I said.

“You were absolutely charming,” she said. “And a help. I want you to meet my husband. He runs the Guy Martin Oldsmobile dealership in Woodland Hills.”

“I appreciate the thought,” I said. “But I wouldn’t make a good car salesman. I don’t even know how to change the oil in my own car—or even where to check for the oil.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You go see my husband, Tim Richardson. He’ll hire you.”

Tim was from Alabama, and he liked my accent. It reminded him of home. But I imagine it was really his wife who had some powerful sway over him, because he hired me even though I didn’t have experience or own a suit, or even a pair of pants that weren’t blue jeans.

I was not a good car salesman. Just as I’d warned. In fact, the other guys in the showroom claimed that I actually drove customers away. One day, after I’d been there about two months without selling a car—without even getting a nibble—Tim Richardson called me into his office. I had a pretty good idea why.

“Bill, I love you as a human being,” he said. “But we’re losing a lot of customers who might buy a car. You gotta go.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I knew this was a bad idea coming into it.”

“Well, you tried,” he said. “Finish out the week and we’ll settle up.”

Fair enough. At least the pressure was off. As luck would have it, I showed up the next day and sold my first Oldsmobile. The day after that, I sold two cars; the following day, three more. All of a sudden it seemed like I only had to walk up to a customer and he’d open his wallet. I had no idea why, but I was making money, so I decided to stay, and Tim let me.

One Saturday I sold eight cars, a dealership record. The other salesmen continued to hate me, but now it was because I was the hottest car salesman in the Valley. In one month alone, I hauled in $20,000 in commissions. I rewarded myself with a couple of
expensive new suits, and Tim Richardson thanked me with a new Cutlass Chalet, a sports car with a super-modified engine and tinted windows that branded me as a badass.

My luck took more than a professional turn the day Tim Richardson fired me. On the way home, I was stopped at a traffic light on Van Nuys Boulevard when a Camaro pulled up next to me with a drop-dead-gorgeous girl behind the wheel. She had strawberry-blond hair, a beautiful smile, and sparkling eyes. She was wearing a football jersey that said
CALIFORNIA
above the number. If anyone belonged on team California, she did.

I smiled at her, and she rolled down her window. When her hand rose, I saw she was holding a joint. “Do you smoke?” the girl asked.

I nodded and followed her to a nearby park, where we stood under a tree, talked, got high, and talked some more. There’s the cliché love at first sight. For me, this was love at first hit.

I had a vague sense of having seen Lynne sometime before and, after a couple dates, I learned that she was an aspiring model who had once been a centerfold in one of my favorite magazines. When she told me, I blurted, “I
thought
I’d seen you.” Maybe not the best thing to say to a beautiful young woman I was just getting to know, but she understood.