Bare Bones (8 page)

I knew I was incredibly lucky to get that opportunity, but it also meant I was starting a full-time job just as I was starting college. I signed up for twenty hours of credits for the semester (about five hours more than required, just in case I failed anything) with the full knowledge that I had a job every weekday night an hour away from my college. My schedule was only one of the many new things I had to get used to. Although Henderson was by no means a huge, cosmopolitan campus, it was so different than the tiny place I came from.

That was pointed out to me on my very first day of school by Courtney, the one real friend I made in college. (Courtney is a dude, by the way.) We were both in an oral communications course, which I walked into wearing my high school letterman jacket. After class, Courtney, a hulking guy who had been recruited to play quarterback for the football team, took me aside and said, “Dude, we don't wear high school jackets anymore. We're in college.”

Humiliated, I felt like I was right back in junior high with everyone laughing at me. I might as well have had a boner. I stopped wearing the letterman jacket right away, but the problem was that I only had one coat—and that was it. So I ended up going to class in the freezing cold wearing just a sweatshirt until I saved up enough to buy a new coat.

Although I was embarrassed when Courtney called me out for wearing high school apparel in college, I also appreciated him for it. He was a college quarterback and I was a nerd in Buddy Holly–style glasses. But appearances aside, we had a lot in common. Courtney was from Hope, Arkansas, which was the same kind of place as Mountain Pine. We were both broke and busting our butts to get through school. After meeting in that communications course, we started to hang out. He was supportive of my career, rooting me on as I struggled to keep my job and get my homework done. I asked him how practice was and gave him free CDs. We were in it together.

(Courtney is still my best friend; if I were to get married he would definitely be my best man. Mainly, that's because Courtney is just a really good dude, and we've had a lot of good times together. But another reason is that he was my best friend when
nobody
wanted to be my friend. Now that I've achieved some success, I worry about motivations in almost every relationship. Why do people want to be my friends? Is it because I'm on the radio? Is it because I'm not poor anymore? I just have to trust that people like me for me, and it isn't easy. With Courtney there was never a question.)

The fact that Courtney was my only friend at Henderson was fine, because honestly, I really didn't have time for friends. Check out what was a typical day in the life of Bobby Estell's college career:

 
wake up at 8
A
.
M
. and go to class

 
spend most of the day in class

 
drive an hour to KLAZ to work from 4
P
.
M
. to midnight

 
get back in the car and drive three-quarters of the way back to college and stop at Waffle House, where I study until 3
A
.
M
.

 
get into bed at 4
A
.
M
.

 
wake up at 8
A
.
M
. and do it all again

And that was just freshman year. Because my scholarship required work credits, I worked at and eventually ran the college radio station, KSWH 91.1 FM, too. I pretty much had every job at the station from radio host to program director to general manager.

I remember people telling me when I was at Henderson, “Wait until after college, that's when life gets really hard.” Not for me. College was the grind. No matter how hard it got or how tired I was, I couldn't quit anything. While I was certain radio was going to be my career, it was also crucial to me that I get my degree. I was determined to be the first person in my family to graduate college. It was truly the first time in my life I had to “Fight. Grind. And repeat.”

The result was that during college, I never had five minutes to myself. Every minute of every day was full of something—including spending afternoons trying to lose my accent. Right across the street from Henderson's campus was another college, Ouachita Baptist University, which offered a speech pathology major. And I definitely considered the accent I got from growing up in Mountain Pine a pathology. I mean it was reeeeeal thick. If I was going to have a successful career in radio and break out of my little neck of the woods, I had to scrub from my tongue the Dirty South (note: it's not dirty South; it's Dirty South! I still represent). That's what I attempted to do, several hours each week, at Ouachita Baptist, where I got free speech therapy from students training for a degree in this area. My
i
's were “ahs” and
g
's at the end of a word just didn't exist. “Fishing” was “fishin'.” I spent years working on my damn
i
's and
g
's.

I wish I could say that my hectic schedule was the real reason that I wasn't exactly the most popular guy at Henderson. The truth is there was a much bigger impediment to me being the life of the frat parties (that I never attended): I had never touched a drop of alcohol and never intended to.

I don't remember ever making a conscious decision not to use drugs or alcohol. There was never that after-school-special moment where kids at a party were pressuring me to pound a beer, but I said to myself, I'm not drinking. No, my commitment to abstinence was always a part of my makeup. I have always known I would avoid drinking my whole life.

Clearly, my abstinence was a reaction to my mom. From early on, I saw the effect of alcohol not only on her but also on a lot of other adults around me. From that I took away a few lessons. When my mom came home drunk, I was scared—not for myself, never for myself, but for her. I never wanted to put others in that situation. If you have a certain genetic or psychological makeup like my mother, you can't control your alcohol intake. Any amount, no matter how little, is poison. And I suspected that if I tested it, I would find out that my mom and I were more alike than we were different.

Even in high school, when a lot of kids get into alcohol as a way to navigate the troubled waters of adolescent social life, I was never tempted. It should come as no surprise that as the kid with the nickname who had ketchup dumped on his head in the cafeteria, I did not get invited to a lot of parties. So that limited the amount of peer pressure I was exposed to. But even if I had gone to parties, I wouldn't have ever taken a beer. Peer pressure doesn't affect me. For me, pressure comes from within. Some guy shouting at me, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” is not pressure. That's just some idiot shouting. Pressure comes to me when I'm about to walk onto a stage where a crowd has paid good money to be entertained.

However, my choice not to drink made me an anomaly at Henderson. At college in the rural South, there isn't so much to do. So, there's generally a lot of time to drink and party. But for me it was never an option. To this day, I've never touched alcohol, an illegal drug, cigarettes. Nothing. I've never even tried coffee. I'm not morally against alcohol. No judgments at all. Matter of fact, if my friends aren't drinking, they're not fun. But I saw what my mom went through and can feel that demon inside of me.

Don't get me wrong. Despite my unwavering conviction, being a teetotaler wasn't easy. There was a part of me that was jealous when I watched people around me get drunk. I was envious at the way they could let loose and have fun. I knew I wouldn't be able to drink in any sort of moderation—that if I started it's all I would want to do, all the time. I didn't want alcohol to become a bigger influence on my life than it already was, and I knew that if I made drinking an issue (meaning not wanting to be around others while
they
drank), it would divide me from others.

It was (and is) my biggest fear that people would change their behavior on my account. I never wanted anyone to feel uncomfortable drinking around me, so one of my strategies was to fake-drink. I would order Coke or club soda with a lime in a small glass. There are many ways to make it look like you're drinking. I also made myself useful by being the designated driver.