My Cross to Bear (3 page)

A typical day at Castle Heights would start with the bugler blowing that damn reveille at six o’clock sharp. You’d get up, get dressed, go outside, and hit formation. You’d march to breakfast, and after that was over, you could go down to this little area called the “butt hole,” which was the only place you were allowed to smoke. People did everything there, man—they chewed tobacco, and there was one guy who would go the drugstore and get oil of cinnamon, and take toothpicks and soak them in it and sell those sons of bitches. This guy was a real go-getter. By the time he left that school, I don’t know how much money he’d racked up, but he had it going.

After breakfast, you’d go back to your room. You’d have about an hour to shower and clean up your room, then you would have a quick inspection. There were two guys to a room, and me and my brother were roommates. There was no air-conditioning, and the mattress was only about two inches thick, over a thing of tightly wound springs, so it was like the valley of fatigue, because you never slept well.

After break, the bell would ring for your first class. We’d have three classes, then break for lunch. After lunch, we had an hour break, so you could go read your mail or whatnot. Then another class or two, and then you’d go to drill instruction. You’d go down this huge field, and you’d see big old groups of kids getting ready for war, and that was a dismal sight. We’d carry a damn M1 rifle that weighed nine pounds. It was terrible.

The instructors were retired army personnel, and a lot of times we would talk behind their backs, saying, “These guys couldn’t make it in the army, so they sent them to us.” Some of them were really rough, man—they’d scream at you, and you’d have to answer with all that “Sir, yes, sir” bullshit. That’s probably where I developed some of my voice, because when I had earned a little rank, they gave me the “Sir, yes, sir” right back.

If you look at pictures of me and my brother while we were there, I look sad and depressed while Duane has this look of defiance. That’s how he was—he was probably feeling the same way as me, but that’s just the way he came across. Me, I just hated the whole idea. I hated being away from home. I was just too young. I learned how to cuss, and in the third grade I knew every word there was.

One good thing was that I didn’t get hazed too much, because I had my big brother there, and he wouldn’t let nobody fuck with me. He made friends with some of the bigger guys, so that helped too. Then later, when we came back, we had them guitars, and they saved us. Still, you could plan on a scuffle or two at least once a month. Sooner or later, there was going to be an all-out fight, especially after Christmas, because nobody wanted to be there, and it had turned cold—that’s when all the fights usually started.

But Duane couldn’t do anything about the instructors. If your grades weren’t good enough, they would beat you with rifle straps or a canoe paddle, which is pretty heavy. They would drill holes in it to make it hurt more. The worst one was the coat hanger—they’d pull it out straight, and start at the back of your legs and end up at your shoulders. Oh man, that was a beating. The one thing you did not want to hear was “Bend over and grab that table, boy.”

It sounds like a sob story, but I have to say that it did make me stronger in certain ways and weaker in others. I spent a lot of time alone there, and to this day I don’t like to be alone. The thing was, I really dove into my studies. I was first in my class two years in a row. There was nothing else to do but study. I had a real interest in medicine, and I often wonder how it would have been if I had kept on with my interest in medicine or gone to dental school and come out an oral surgeon.

My brother also tried to get something out of it. He read a lot, and I should have followed his example. When he died, he was reading the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy for the fifth time. He was crazy about J. R. R. Tolkien. He also was a big Kurt Vonnegut fan. That came later on in his life, but his love of reading started at Castle Heights, because it took you away from what was going on around you.

My biggest cross to bear, my biggest worry, during the first part of my life was school, and all the changes that came with it. Life for me was not knowing what was going to happen the next day. It seemed like nothing would happen for a long time, and all of a sudden a great change would come down. I was always kind of afraid of that, because change hadn’t always been a good thing.

For years I held my mother responsible for that. I wanted to hurt her, because I felt that she hurt me. I cried myself to sleep at night for a week after I first got to that place. I know it sounds like I was a real pussy when I was a kid, but at that age, half a hundred miles away from home might as well be ten thousand miles. I would sneak off someplace, find a phone, and call home, collect, about eight times a day. I did it just to mess up her day, because I was so angry at her.

I said to her one day, “Mama, people step on ants, because they just didn’t see them. They didn’t mean to kill them, and that’s kinda like the situation we got here, with you stepping on me.” I said shit like that to her all the time—I just wanted to fuck with her. Underneath it all, I wanted her to understand how badly I wanted to come home, but it didn’t work.

I can only imagine how she must have felt when she hung up that phone, because there was nothing she could do about it. There were times when she would have enough of it, and she’d go into a rage and try to explain it to me, and she’d be yelling and crying at the same time. She tried to beat it into my thick head that she was doing this for me, not to me. In later years, I came to understand that, but it took me a long time to get over it.

A
FTER FOURTH GRADE, MY MOM HAD HER
CPA
LICENSE, SO WE
could come back and be with her. For a long time after coming out of Castle Heights, I was still kinda shell-shocked, like these ghosts were around me. I was so afraid of having to go back to that damn place that it lingered with me. After being in military school, public school seemed really loose and jive. I thought, “Shit, how does anybody learn anything around here? Everybody is talking to this person or that person and throwing spitballs.” In military school, you walked into class in single file and stood at the chair until the instructor told us we could sit down. Adjusting took a long time.

Back in Nashville, I had to deal with this girl who sat behind me in the fifth grade. Fifth grade was kind of rough for me—I only did half of it in Nashville. I was starting to get into clothes, and I loved cowboys. I’m not sure if it was my mother or my grandmother or one of my uncles who got it for me, but I got a Gene Autry shirt for my birthday. It was one of those shirts that buttons around, and it was black. That was my favorite shirt.

Remember those little round things with sticky stuff on the back that you would put on notebook paper? If you accidentally ripped the paper out, you would get one of these things, and just lick ’em and stick ’em, and it would heal up the hole in the paper. Well, this girl had a little box of those, and she was licking them bad boys and sticking them on the back of my favorite shirt. I could feel every time her little hand would just barely touch me, and I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t trying to do anything malicious. She was just flirting with me, but I didn’t realize that.

I turned around to her and said, “If you stick one more of those things on the back of my shirt, I’m gonna knock the hell out of you.”

Well, the fact that I said the word “hell” really took her aback. She couldn’t wait, she couldn’t
wait
, to stick another one in the center of my back. I came around real quick, and bap! I gave her a haymaker that knocked the shit out of her. I turned back around, and the teacher hadn’t seen anything. Oh God, was that a mistake. I put it out of my mind and forgot about it—and was that another mistake. I didn’t know about vengeance and shit, you know?

These other two guys and I kinda hung together. One guy’s name was Win Dixon, and the other guy was Lee Craft, who actually came to one of my gigs not too long ago. We walked around the side of the school to the bike rack, and when we got there, all the spokes were kicked out of my wheels. Everybody else’s were fine, and one of them guys said, “Man, looks like somebody’s got it in for you.” And right then, bang! It felt like a hammer had hit me in the temple. But it wasn’t a hammer, it was that girl’s pocketbook—I don’t know what she had in there.

For what seemed like the next three or four hours, she just danced on my head, man. All I could see was shoes and petticoats. I was getting my ass whipped for the first time in my life—by a girl. My partners were sitting there, and they couldn’t do nothing, so they were laughing and clapping. I mean, she was hurting me, man—she was banging on my head, and she wouldn’t stop. She would jump in, do a number on me, and jump back out. So my bloody ass pushes my bike home, and my mother asks, “Honey, what happened?” I said, “Oh … never mind.” God knows if my brother had found out—oh boy!

Now, my brother did kick my ass pretty much every day for the first few years. There were times that me and Duane just hated each other’s guts. You know how it is with brothers. He got me to do what he wanted, and if that required a beating, then I got one. As a matter of fact, when we were really little and they took him off the bottle, I was still in the crib, and if one of my extremities, say a finger or a toe, was poking out where he could get to it, he would grab it; even though he only had a few little teeth coming in, he would bite down to the bone. I still have a few little scars on my hands from him. From that time on, little by little, he was toughening me up.

My brother had a great sense of timing, and he used to pull shit on me all the time. We were sitting down at the table one night, and my mother was already a little bit pissed at me. I think I had gotten some bad grades, and she was on my ass about it. I was remaining silent, hoping that if I didn’t think about it, it would go away.

So we’re all eating in silence, and we’re sitting on these hard, flat chairs. My brother was wearing a bathing suit, and it was still a little bit wet. All of a sudden, he farted like a fucking moose, and that wet bathing suit on that hard chair amplified it even more.

The thing is, Duane was able to keep a straight face, and he went, “Gregory—at the table?”

My mother gave me one look and said, “Get up from the table and go to your room.”

All I could get out was “But, but …” as I tried to tell her that his butt did it, but my mother was like, “Shut up.”

So I go without supper because he farted! It’s a wonder that I didn’t get the belt as well. He had the devil in him, boy.

Duane actually hung me one time. My brother had light skin—people with red hair should not get out in the sun. Every time he got a sunburn, he’d get big bubble blisters. One day when we were real young, he had one of those blisters on his shoulder, and he had his shirt off. He didn’t want it to pop, because the skin underneath was raw. We were climbing a tree, and I put my foot down on what I thought was a limb, but it was his shoulder. That blister popped, and he was screaming. All I thought was “Oh shit”—I knew he was going to whip my ass.

He went in the house for a minute, and then he came back outside. He had this long rope, and he could tie a knot, man—Duane loved rope. He made a perfect hangman’s noose, and he told me, “Try this on, man.” He put it around my neck, and it was real rough rope, real stiff. He tied the other end around a limb of the tree that he could reach, and he said, “I’ll be right back.”

He went inside the house, and then came out and said, “Bro, they made some cookies. C’mon inside!” I come running after him, and I got to the end of that rope and—bam!—it jerked me right off the ground and tightened around my neck. My mother came out, and I’m choking, because I can’t get a breath of air. She got it off my neck, and she wore his ass out for that. “What do you mean by hanging your little brother? Where did you learn to tie a knot like that? What is wrong with you?”

Duane was only a year older than me, but in his mind it might as well have been twenty years. He was a world traveler compared to me, even at age five. I was a bigger kid than he was, and when we got older, I was a bigger man than he was. His chest had no definition at all, and had one little patch of hair on it, while I had a whole chest full. He hated that. Later on in life, when everybody found out that the girls loved hair on the chest—like Sean Connery as James Bond—he was not happy with me.

But the thing was, I respected him and I loved him, and he didn’t have to beat me to get that. He was my hero, even while he was beating me. That sounds a little sick, but I knew that he wouldn’t let nobody else mess with me. Most of the time, he’d only give me one lick, just to let me know who was boss. I’m not holding a whole lot of scars from it, just a few—some inside, and some outside.

I suppose it could have gone the other way, and I could have believed that he didn’t love me or care for me, and we could have grown up just hating each other’s ass. Who knows, though, because the guitar might have solved that.

W
E MOVED TO
D
AYTONA
B
EACH
, F
LORIDA, IN
1959,
RIGHT SMACK
dab in the middle of the fifth grade. My mother loved Daytona Beach. I guess she’d been there when she was a teenager, and she always wanted to go back and live there. It’s funny: to this day, my mother doesn’t ever complain of pain, except for her sinuses; she’s always had sinus problems. Later on in life, I said to her, “Mama, you moved from Nashville to Daytona Beach, Florida—hell, you should have gone to Arizona! You moved to the damn humidity capital of the world.”