Hillbilly Heart (8 page)

Neither were the kind of man you said “Oh, shit” in front of. But in this situation, they were the most appropriate two words—and the first two that came to mind. Both men stared at Robbie and me, unflinching and stone-faced.

Robbie and I were both silent. I knew the best I could do was to anticipate the worst, and hopefully absorb the blow that was about to come from Mr. Baker. Silence filled the air. Then came the sound:
squirt… squirt… squirt.
I looked down and saw blood squirting from my thumb. It spurted all over my beige suit, reminding me of a scene from the movie
M*A*S*H.

“Mr. Cyrus, it looks like you’re bleeding,” Mr. Back said. “That trail of blood leads right to that broken window. Huh? Ain’t that something.”

Then came what every student at Russell High School dreaded most—Mr. Baker saying, “Follow me.”

He led Robbie and me into the office adjoining the Student Union, where the dance was taking place. The office was all windows, so when they flipped on the lights it couldn’t have been brighter: there we were, in all our glory, for the whole school to see.

Susie bawled her eyes out. Robbie’s date was none too pleased, either. Suddenly, the Sweetheart Dance wasn’t so sweet anymore. Robbie and I knew what was coming: we were asked to leave.

I don’t remember much of anything from the rest of that night, but in light of what happened, I do believe Mr. Baker let us off easy. He could’ve called the cops. He didn’t. As a man of faith, he left the discipline to
a higher authority
.

CHAPTER 6

A College Education

I
HAD NO REASON
to be angry with Mr. Baker for what happened that night. But I did blame him for ruining the dance for Susie, and I wanted to get even with him. After we lost a baseball game one night, I got drunk with our baseball team’s star pitcher and shortstop, Stewart Hensley, and then the two of us drove to Mr. Baker’s house and pelted it with eggs. We hammered the place.

As soon as we ran out of eggs, we jumped in my Camaro and sped away. In less than a minute, a police car was behind me. It followed me down Dick Baker’s road and into town, where I ran the one and only traffic light in Flatwoods. That caught the attention of another pair of cops sitting in their car outside Scott’s Drugstore.

Suddenly I had two cars tailing me and a slow, sleepy night in Flatwoods turned into a scene from
Smokey and the Bandit.

My plan was to beat them to 2317 Long Street and then duck in the back of the house. But they were right behind me as I circled my block, and I didn’t have a backup plan. So I went around the block a few more times. On my third pass, my mom and Cletis were standing on the front porch and I could hear Cletis scream, “Get your dumb ass outta that car, boy! Stop now!”

On my next turn around the block, I noticed the neighbors stepping
out to see what was going on. I looked over at Stewart for advice. “What do I do, man?” He shrugged. I turned up the stereo. I was blasting Earl Scruggs’s “Dueling Banjos.” How much more hillbilly can you get? I don’t recall how many times I circled the block, but the cops waited me out and eventually hauled both me and Stewart to jail.

My mom made my dad go down there and get me. She actually drove to his house and said, “I’m not dealing with it. You’ve got to go get him.”

My uncle Larry from Los Angeles was visiting my dad, and the two of them showed up at the station about 4 a.m. If Uncle Larry hadn’t been there, my dad would’ve probably whipped me then and there. But my uncle jabbed my dad with his elbow and said, “Ron, we’ve done far worse—and you know it.”

To make amends, my dad took me to Dick Baker’s house the next morning with a bucket and a scrub brush, and the real punishment began. Stewart and his dad met us there, and we cleaned the principal’s house from top to bottom. I also had to cut his grass for the rest of the summer.

Mr. Baker suspended both of us from the baseball team for two games. We lost both of them and it ended up costing us a regional tournament. I vowed that wasn’t going to happen again, not under any circumstances. As a result, I skipped my high school graduation in order to play in an important game that same day. My mom was crushed, but the game was part of a state tournament.

It was also against Ashland, our biggest rival. If we lost, the season was over, and none of us was ready for the season to end. We had the better team and went ahead 9–0. We were one run away from a “mercy rule,” meaning the game would stop if we went up ten to nothing. But all of a sudden my pitchers couldn’t pitch. No one could throw a strike, and as every catcher knows, walks will kill you. Ashland came back to beat us 10–9.

We lost the game, and I missed my graduation. It was a double dose of punishment for breaking my mother’s heart.

School wasn’t out more than a week or two when Robbie Tooley and two other guys from Bellefonte, the rich part of town, talked me into going with them to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was party central for high school and college kids, and most kids in Flatwoods made the trip down there at least once a summer. I agreed to make my maiden voyage with Robbie.

Susie did not want me to go; she was adamant about that. She was the one girl who wasn’t captivated by Robbie’s charisma, and she knew we’d be drinking a lot of alcohol and smoking a lot of pot down there. I went anyway.

Of course, Susie’s predictions were right, and as a result, I don’t remember much of what happened in Myrtle Beach. What I do remember is, on the car ride back, we were listening to a lot of country radio, and my three friends started singing along to Don Williams’s hit “Tulsa Time.” It had a catchy groove, no doubt why it had been a number one song. I started singing, too. I couldn’t resist.

To be honest, I wasn’t aware that I was singing out loud until Robbie turned around and said, “Damn, Cyrus, you’re a good singer.” He seemed surprised—almost as surprised as I was. I hadn’t sung in front of people since I was a little kid with my dad, and he’d quit when Papaw Cyrus died. His gospel quartet had broken up then, too.

“Thanks, man,” I said to Robbie, though I was too self-conscious to sing for the rest of the car ride.

Back home, Susie was upset with me for having gone to Myrtle Beach. I could tell something had gone down while I was away, and I was right. I picked her up the next day and drove someplace where we could talk. I’d barely finished parking when she dove in.

“Bo, my mom and dad won’t let me see you anymore if you don’t straighten up,” she said. “Mr. Baker spoke with my parents about you. They’re all worried about me being with you. My dad says you’ve got a chance to be a professional baseball player, maybe the next Johnny Bench. But they say you’re blowing it and better get yourself together before it’s too late.”

I might’ve argued with her if deep down I hadn’t known she was 100 percent right. I had just spent a few days doing nothing more than drinking beer and smoking pot. I couldn’t muster a response right away. The truth is your strongest ally, but it can also scare the crap out of you, which was the way I felt at that moment.

“And what do you think?” I asked.

“I agree,” she said. “And it’s not just because I’m agreeing with my parents. I really think you’re blowing it.”

“What do you think I need to do?” I asked.

“Let me help you,” she said. “I want to help you. Billy Ray Cyrus, my mission in life might be to save you.”

Recognizing the possibility that she was right, I went with Susie on Sunday to the Russell Christian Church, her family’s place of worship. The sermon that day was about getting a new chance in life, washing away your sins and starting fresh. Perfect. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. Maybe Susie’s mission was to save me. I leaned forward, taking in every word, and imagining what it would be like to be brand-new. The next thing I knew, I was in line to get baptized.

Susie sensed my nervousness.

She squeezed my hand and said, “You can do this.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m ready.”

And I was. I genuinely believed I needed to be saved—not only my soul but also my life. I felt changed afterward. It was more inward than out, and I have to thank Susie for giving me that gift. She saw good things about me when others only saw trouble. She also saw what I lacked—faith in God and, more so, faith in myself.

That summer, my life was Susie, the church, and American Legion baseball for the Ashland Post 76 team. I tried not to think about the fall, when I would go away to Morehead State University. Even though I was excited about the next phase in my life, particularly the opportunity to be the starting catcher on the school’s baseball team, it meant seeing Susie less. We talked about that, though.

By contrast, my friend Robbie continued on the downward path that I had been on until Susie wrangled me in a better direction. After graduating in May as the most popular guy in our class, maybe the most beloved student in the whole school, he received a scholarship to a technical school in Columbus, Ohio. Big things were expected from Robbie Tooley. But that summer, he began hanging out with a different crowd. They did a lot of drugs, including acid and something else called Crystal T, which I heard was an elephant tranquilizer.

One night that summer, Robbie took some acid and ended up at Russell High, where he busted all the school’s windows with a hatchet. He went row by row, taking out every window on the ground floor. In the midst of that destructive frenzy, he cut his forearm on the glass. Whoever he was with dropped him at the hospital drenched in blood. He thought he was going to bleed to death.

By then, the police had been called to the school. They saw the blood and checked in with the hospital, where they found Robbie. People couldn’t believe the news. Even I wondered why Robbie Tooley would do that. I also knew that if not for Susie and the church, I probably would have been with him that night.

Actually, it was more than Susie and the church. My turnaround began with Dick Baker telling Susie’s parents that she shouldn’t be dating me, and then Susie’s parents talking to her, and so on, until finally I woke up. I listened to my inner voice, telling me to take a walk down that church aisle and save myself. I’m not proselytizing here. Ultimately, the decision to help myself was mine, and mine alone.

My buddy Robbie made the wrong decision. After busting those windows, his stock dropped among those in town who had always admired him. By the time the newspaper wrote up the story, his girlfriend had broken up with him and he’d lost all his friends. I’d never seen people turn so quickly on a human being. In the fall, he went to Columbus, where he mixed with the wrong people and his drug problem got worse.

I went off to Morehead and didn’t hear about Robbie for a couple of months. Then one weekend I was home and heard a knock
on my window late at night. It was Robbie, looking all wild-eyed and disheveled. “Hey, man, I’m sorry to come by this late,” he said. “But I heard you started boxing, and I need you to teach me how to defend myself.”

In fact, I had taken up boxing to stay in shape, but that was beside the point. I was shocked that Robbie Tooley needed
my
help defending himself.

I got up, made us some hot tea and asked what was going on. He explained that he was mixed up with some bad people in Columbus who were after him. He didn’t offer many more details. We put on the gloves and sparred till the sun came up.

I looked to Susie for both counsel and comfort, which always made going back to Morehead hard. The space between us was more than I could handle. It drove me crazy. I spent most of my time thinking about Susie or waiting till I could call her from the pay phone in the dorm. Then one day while jogging through the woods near campus, I came upon a puppy shivering under some leaves. It looked half-starved and scared.

I guessed the poor thing had been tossed overboard from a car traveling down Interstate 64. I took him to my dorm room and, over the next few weeks, a couple of other guys helped me nurse him back to health. As he gained strength and trust, his spirit emerged, and he was a terrific companion.