The Other Side of Bad (The Tucker Novels) (3 page)

Chapter 4

Thanks to the generosity of
 Samuel Bench I have an office/workshop/apartment above a Japanese Restaurant and Sushi Bar on 2nd Avenue.  It’s located in the newly renovated downtown district, one block off the riverfront.

The versatile space has it’s own street level door that opens into a stairway that goes up the front of the building, over the sushi bar. There’s a window under the stairway that allows a view into the restaurant.

At the top of the stairs, there’s a left turn into a long hallway that goes back 43 feet, to the door of my office. Ten feet from the top of the stairs, there’s a door on the right, the door to my apartment. Most people who came up the stairs didn’t know this. The long hall is very mysterious. There’s a ten foot ceiling perpendicular to dry wall that’s painted a light Ralph Lauren gray. There are no pictures on the walls. My apartment door is an army green metal job that looks very janitorial, whereas the door to my office is stained red oak and inviting. On the office door at eye level is a gunmetal plaque with silver block letters making one word, ‘TUCKER’. There’s a video surveillance camera above the door that is capable of looking all the way down the hall. There are three monitors in my office and one in my apartment.  Most people don’t even notice the metal janitorial door. It’s what I had in mind when I remodeled the place.

The oak door opens into a 22x12 foot room. Along the left wall is a light olive green fabric couch I picked up at Pier 1. The left wall is the one that goes back 22 ft. The back wall is the 12 footer and is the original old red brick. The other two walls are half-inch burnt pine tongue and groove panels I salvaged from an old house on the South Harpeth River.

On the brick wall are two lithograph prints, a Rance Hood named Crazy Dog Warrior and an Archer Black Owl called Cheyenne Burial.  The Rance Hood is a number two of twenty artist’s proof that I’d paid $275 dollars and a couple of years later found out it was worth a little over $6000. Cheyenne Burial was another blind luck acquisition.

Under the prints are two oak and glass barrister book cases that house my collection of flint and museum quality Mississippian pottery. They look prestigious and interesting in my office. Clients always commented on them, creating an effective ice breaker.

Besides, the security room in my house on Barren Fork Creek wasn’t finished yet, so they were safer in town.

There’s an antique cherry desk in front of the right-hand pine wall. Behind the desk is another door. This door is noticed by everyone. Think of a door that looks like it went to an old bank safe, with a big wheel on the front. That’s exactly what it was. I found it at a salvage place that was run by a group of Mennonites down in Lobelville, Tennessee. It’s actually a safe door from the early 1900's. It had been cut off during a robbery and was too interesting to toss. No one had ever used it for anything useful, like an anchor for a floating dock. Other than that, it had no use. It was just heavy and interesting, until I saw it. I bought it for next to nothing. If they were anything but Mennonites, I probably could have charmed them into paying me to haul it off. My charm only worked well enough to get them to sell it. I know it was my charm because one of them smiled, I think. I had the door sand-blasted, painted, and the combination mechanism rebuilt and renumbered by a locksmith friend who has taught me a few things about locks. We framed it in with metal I- beams and oak 2x12's.

The safe door opened into a gray carpeted room that is 22x10. At each end of the room to the left and right, were two gun safes. In the middle of the room stood an old pine dining table that could seat 10 people comfortably. The table was strewn with split, tanned, deer hides. They were great to put guns on when making a sale or when clients picked up guns I had smithed.  

Above the safe door, facing the table, was another monitor. On the wall opposite from the safe door, another door opened into a smaller room, my work shop. My work bench sits in the middle of the room facing the door. A metal lathe, drill press, and other gunsmithing tools are arranged behind it. Above that door was another monitor facing my bench.

I get a good deal on surveillance equipment. People are always surprised to find how inexpensive black and white video cameras and monitors are. I can usually barter it out.

On the wall to my left, as I sat at my bench facing the door to the safe room, was a row of shelves housing tools, solvents, oil, etc. It looked like just what it was, a catch-alls shelf. However, it’s really a secret door to my apartment. It was quite easy to build, you just have to know how. I have a friend who knew how. Now after paying for eighteen hours of labor, I knew how. I would most likely never apply this knowledge again, but I am very proud of it. Unfortunately, it was one of those enigmas, I couldn’t show it off. It would defeat the purpose.

I pulled back the secret shelf, which opened into my bathroom between the toilet and shower. As it closed, I looked at myself in the full length mirror on the other side of the shelf and noticed I need a trim around the ears. That’s about all I get cut, but for a few times a year when I get a couple of inches cut off my ponytail. My hair is naturally curly and when I grew it long during my Harley days, I found I could pull it back into a pony tail and that straightened it out. From the front I almost looked distinguished, along with a sculptured beard I trimmed myself (the only artistic outlet I have),  I thought I look professorial. But for the remindful deep crescent scar starting just below my cheekbone and ending at the corner my mouth and depending on which profile your looking at, some said I look like a record producer, others said a pirate . . .  same thing.

I walked through the galley style kitchen, past the Nordic Track and Bowflex machines into the living area, with windows overlooking 2
nd
Avenue.

I have two futon couches arranged at right angles. They can quickly be turned into beds. One has its back to the windows; the other is along the left wall when facing the windows.

I stood and looked down at the street through the mist of the December afternoon. It was a blur of red, white and blue; cowboy hats and scarves, boots with doggin’ heels on people who didn’t know what they were for: a country and western Picasso; a freeze frame of expectant glances hoping to see someone famous. Tourists dressed like Hee Haw characters (for some that’s the only models they had), were not deterred by the inclement weather.

Once, this street had been mostly empty, with just a few businesses still open. The store front for Randy Wood’s fanous Old Time Pickin’ Parlor, where I worked as a custom guitar builder and stringed instrument repairman, would have been directly below me. In fact, the window I was looking out of was once the spray booth window, that used to contain a huge exhaust fan that blew the lacquer out over the street where it would dry and dissipate into a fine powder before doing any damage to the cars parked below.

There used to be a hardware store across the street and down to the left the Shobud factory where they made their famous pedal steel guitars. The other buildings were mostly abandoned two and three story brick buildings, but for a few small businesses like the old shoe shop where I bought dyes for my airbrush.

Now the street was bustling with street vendors and germs (said with a hard g). The word was coined by a pissed off songwriter or some such back in the late seventies. It was first said germs, like the bacteria we all felt they were when they invaded Nashville two or three times a year, clogging up streets and taking all the choice parking places. Then it was changed to the hard g sound so we could say the word in their presence. Then when country music went ballistic in the early 80's, the money became so outrageous, the word became a term of endearment. Here come the germs, God Bless them.

Since the renovation of the downtown district, the real-estate down here was untouchable. Now, there were wonderful restaurants. The famous Wild Horse Saloon was across the street and down to the left. There were street vendors selling everything from gold chains to popcorn. I could sit here and see just about anything I can think of. It was like a country music Bourbon Street, without the visible alcohol.

I heard the creaking of a baggage car door.

Chapter 5

Brad Spain. It was hard to think about him without the years and circumstances melting away and feeling like yesterday. My second encounter with him was a month after the first. It was in January of 1983, after the Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam. Brad had the occasion to stick his S&W .38 special service revolver in my ear and cock the hammer. There were many people that night on the 14
th
floor of the Hyatt Regency trying to get my attention, but that did it.   

As I watched a couple come out of the Wild Horse all duded up for line dancing, the linear reflection of where life had taken me since I went to work at the Picken’ Parlor in 1976, became lodged in my throat.

Now due to the generosity and gratitude ( I’m not sure which came first) of Samuel Bench, I have this great space in the high rent district of downtown Nashville, with a 99 year lease, free of charge.  

That night after Brad caught my attention at the Hyatt, he walked me to the elevator in handcuffs, walked me outside onto Commerce Street and around the corner, where he took the handcuffs off. He took me to a bar and sat me down. Of all the cops in Nashville, Brad was one of only two, who knew what I’d been through. He was there, and he was there for me that night. He saved my butt, in more ways than one. I’ve always been grateful to him.

I stayed in the music business for a couple of more years. Made a few more guitars, did lots of repair work, wrote a few songs, and then had to get out. When my friends in the Biz asked why I was getting out, I would just say ‘It’s not conducive to a healthy lifestyle’. That was true for me anyway. I was having too much fun not dealing with my grief. Fun in the way of Makers Mark, Grand Marnier, Marijuana and Cocaine. I was having so much fun I was incapable of taking care of my daughter and had to ship her off to her grandmother’s in Louisiana where she went to high school for three years. Irreclaimable years.

Before Dec. 11
th
, the booze, due to my livelihood, was in my life only in moderation. The drugs, well, let’s just say years before, were just business. I had handled grief and Post Traumatic Stress badly.

In 1984 I built my last two guitars for Amy Grant and her then husband, Gary Chapman. I used the money to buy a water sports business on the beach in Negril, Jamaica. After 3 years of traveling back and forth from there and three very close calls with the Rude Boys (the Jamaican Mafia called the Posse in the states) trying to get rid of me, I sold the business to an eager stupe from Long Island, who thought he was going to move to Magaritaville. Then I came back to Nashville and started shooting guns again. Something I grew up doing extensively and stopped when I started doing something else with my hands. Something legitimate.

That’s when I started running into Spain again. I would see him at the gun range, and a friendship ensued.

It was time to make one of those decisions based on the information available in the present moment. You could never tell when one would be a pivotal decision. I decided I was hungry, that sounded safe enough. I checked my multipurpose blackjack, and saw there was just enough time to give the office the once-over before going downstairs to catch some Sashimi prior to the big shootout.

After straightening up a bit, I threaded my custom-made Bellioni holster on to my belt, reached under a pillow on the futon, pulled out my 1911 Colt .45, and slipped into the holster. I decided to keep my black cherry, chip toed Lucchese cowboy boots on and not change into running shoes. They put me up over six-one, which would tower me over Spain’s five-seven, maybe intimidating some extra points for me during the impending shootout. I put on my Abercrombie and Fitch lamb skin brown leather jacket, donned one of my LSU caps, set the security code and went downstairs.

Chapter 6

    When people asked where you’re from, most usually reply by telling them the town they grew up in. Well, I grew up all over the world. I’m an Air Force Brat. My traveling dysfunctional family didn’t move to the States for good until the summer between my sixth and seventh grade years. Before that, it was just visits that went along with either duck season, summer fishing, or when my sister, brother and I lived with my mother and abusive step-father, also an Air Force Officer.

When my father regained custody of my brother and I, leaving my sister with my mother and step-father, he was a Major. He was a firm believer in the aphorism ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ so I didn’t have much opportunity to say the words ‘Dad’ or ‘Father’. He was referred to as ‘The Major’.

A year before the Major retired, we moved to Alexandria, Louisiana, his home-town. I did my junior high, high school and college in Louisiana. So, when people asked me where I am from, I said Louisiana. Most of the people who have known me for years associate me with Louisiana. The truth of the matter is, I’ve lived in Nashville and the surrounding area for over 20 years. That’s longer than I have ever lived anywhere, but I
am
wearing an LSU hat.

Alexandria, known locally as just Alec: the land where the rednecks met the Cajuns met the Army boys from Fort Polk, met the Air Force boys from England Air Force Base, all of which bordered the beginnings of some of the most perilous swampland in Louisiana. One of which was one of my personal stomping grounds, a place called the Devils’ Raceway. All in all, a very volatile and dangerous place. I had the scars to prove it.

I had a friend, Max Young, who ended up as a drill instructor at Fort Polk, sixty miles west of Alec. Every time a group of recruits would go out on their first leave, he would give the same speech. He told them that although they have been taught many ways to kill a man with their bare hands, not to think for one minute they were going to go into Leesville or Alexandria and whip up on any of the local boys. He informed his newly trained killers that the local boys grew up in a war zone, most carried guns and all carried knives, and ‘they will kill you!’. They didn’t always listen.