We played another hour. He’d sip. I’d play. Then I’d sip. And play some more. I’d gotten pretty relaxed too. Finally, after I’d played everything the man could dish out, he smiled, packed everything into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and tipped his hat at me. “Stay close to the radio. I’ll be in touch.”
The world was spinning pretty good, but I still had it by the reins—or so I thought. I nodded coolly, and the man climbed into his car and turned the ignition, only to discover that he had a problem. That problem was about six feet four inches tall, dressed out at about two hundred and forty pounds, and was standing in front of his car with a disapproving look painted across his face. I’d seen that look before.
The man sank down in his seat and stared beneath the top of his steering wheel and over the top of the dash and began to laugh uncomfortably. I was a little foggy, but I heard little humor in it. Nervously, he lit a cigar.
Dad looked at the man but pointed at me. “Did you ask his age?”
The guy talked around the cigar. “I don’t give a rat’s derriere how old he is.” As he spoke, he let out a cloud of smoke and slurred his way through derry-air.
Dad spoke softly. “Try seventeen.”
The man knew he was toast. But he wasn’t about to go out without a fight, so he floored it, flipping Dad over the hood and burning rubber out of the parking lot—whereby he ran directly into a roadblock of four patrol cars.
As our venues had grown, Dad had employed the local police to help keep order. Doing so had endeared him to the local deputies, who could make good overtime money just by wearing sunglasses and looking official. So when he’d told them that some salesman had hoodwinked me, they were more than a little protective. As the man was sitting there considering his options, Dad all but pulled him out of the window of his car and slid my “signed contract” from his coat pocket. He then dragged the man around the back of the car, retrieved the recording tape out of the trunk, and shook the guy like a rag doll. His shiny flask clanked on the pavement below.
“This all?”
The policemen all smiled. The man, now angry, began to spit venom. “I ain’t telling you sh—”
The man sounded like he wanted to say sugar, but Dad applied enough sufficient pressure around his throat to choke off the rest, so I was never really certain.
Dad lifted the man off the ground and waited as he began kicking his feet and his face turned the color of a blueberry. Finally he nodded, and Dad let go. Dad dropped the tape onto the ground and stomped on it. Then he took the guy’s cigar and lit the paper. The man was not too pleased, and began telling Dad how he would soon hear from his high-priced Los Angeles attorney.
Dad put him back in his car, smashed his hat down tight over his face, crumpled his cigar in his lap, and then held out his hand to me. Palm up. I put the five thousand dollars in his hand, whereby Dad quickly shoved it in the man’s mouth and sent him on his way. Then he did the one thing I was dreading.
He looked at me.
And said nothing.
I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. It was one of those rare self-aware moments when I saw the whole of my life in a quick and clear slide show. Despite some real hardship, starting with the death of my mom, my dad had been nothing but good to me. He’d given unselfishly. I’d never lacked for anything. I’d had a better musical training than kids coming out of Berklee. I’d seen more of the country than any of my friends, most of whom had at one time or another traveled with us, prompting responses like, “You get to do this every weekend? This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”
The only thing Dad had not given me was Jimmy, and that was because Mom had given it to him.
After a painful and angry gaze that lasted several years and bored a hole through my soul, Dad stepped into one of the patrol cars with a deputy and returned to the revival. It wasn’t until both the man and Dad had driven off that I realized I was still standing there with that stupid Telecaster hanging around my neck. When I looked down, I saw my reflection in the mirrored surface of the flask at my feet.
I stuck my thumb in the air, and it wasn’t long till an older woman stopped. “You need a ride, honey?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
A mile later her front right tire blew. I changed it for her, but not being much of a mechanic, I was soon covered in grease from fingertip to forearm. She grimaced a bit when I tried to get back into her car. I didn’t blame her. I turned and started putting one foot in front of the other. Five miles is a long time to think.
The walk back sobered me. In every way. I returned to the revival at sundown just in time to hear Dad’s “Dirty Hands” sermon. I won’t bore you with the details. You can probably figure it out. In a nutshell, he talked about how sin stains your hands and how, because they’re always in front of you where you can see them, they stand as a constant reminder of what you’ve been dipping them into. Lastly, he talked about how it’s difficult to raise dirty hands to a holy God and how the only way to get them clean was to dip them in the blood. It made for some eye-opening illustrations. I wanted to puke just listening to him. And given the amount of rotgut alcohol I’d consumed, I was on the verge anyway.
His voice echoed out of the tents and found me on the highway. “Now, look at your hands. Palms up.”
The slide show of Dad’s movements played in my mind.
“Take a long, hard look. Take your time. I want you to look back into the stuff you don’t want to look at. You know what I’m talking about. The dark places. The closets you’ve shut. Be honest with yourself. What’ve you been dipping your hands into?” A long pause. “You got it? Picture clear?”
In my mind’s eye I could clearly see him turning his hands over and back.
“Now ask yourself, what have you gained?”
He always asked that question twice. I mouthed the next words as he spoke them: “And what have you lost?”
For me, the answer to the first question was nothing but a mess. The answer to the second started and ended with a huge crack down the foundation of my father’s trust in me.
The sinking feeling in me did not improve as the sound of his voice grew closer.
The sermon always ended with several thousand people sticking their hands straight up. Sometimes I’d squint my eyes from the piano bench, and all those hands looked like amber waves of grain.
I’d heard it all before. In the twenty-five years since, I’ve thought about it a good bit, and it’s not rocket science. The problem was me. Despite my father’s best wise counsel, his constant sacrifice, his warnings to the contrary, his five thousand sermons, and a deep knowingness in my gut that I needed to stay as far away from that serpent as humanly possible, there was something in me that couldn’t stand the thought of my dad being right or of him telling me what to do. Said more simply: I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted it, the way I wanted it, because I wanted it. Period.
The older I got, the more I felt like I was under his thumb. Not that he was doing anything different. He was the same dad he’d always been. If anything, he’d become more lenient and I had more freedom. That meant the change had occurred in me, and that made it even worse. Something in me hated my dad’s “rightness,” and that he held me to some plumb line while most of my friends could do whatever they pleased.
The anger swirled, bitterness took root, and I began listening to whispers of what I could become if he weren’t holding me back in some stupid traveling circus. I had more musical ability in my pinkie than he’d ever had and he was just jealous. Where the throngs once thanked him for his sermons and his prayers, they were now thanking me for my music. People were coming to hear me. Not him. He was riding my coattails, and he was beginning to feel like deadweight.
Even now, when I hear myself repeat those things, it stings.
Life at seventeen seemed so clear.
I stood on the highway, out in front of the packed parking lot, and just shook my head. It was evident that I’d not though
t this through. I couldn’t fight my dad. I knew he was right. I also knew I hated the fact that he was right. I’d had all I could stand. Next to me was a bridge crossing a roaring river. I walked to the railing and threw that Fender as far as I could out into the water. The bubbles swallowed it and the current flipped it, turned it, and then smashed it on a boulder, snapping the neck off the body. Fitting, I thought. Then I unscrewed the cap on the flask, turned it upside down, and emptied the remainder of the whiskey into the river.
Then I walked the five million miles back to my father.
That night, after we’d straightened the chairs, swept up, and emptied the trash, I found myself staring at the piano. Sitting in the dark. Fingers touching the keys but making no sound. The piano bench was the only place where the argument inside my head fell silent. Where I knew which voice was lying and which was telling the truth.
Dad found me there. Neither of us said anything. He was hurting. I was hurting. I knew I’d betrayed him. This was on me.
He started. “I ever tell you about the time your mom found me drinking?”
This was not where I thought this conversation was headed. “What?”
He stared up at the mountains beyond us. “We were up at the cabin, we’d just found out we were going to have you, and for reasons that are still a little foggy, I’d gotten pretty far down into a Mason jar of moonshine. There was a cigar in there somewhere, but that too is foggy. Given that I don’t really drink or smoke, I was drunk as a skunk. The world was spinning like a top. Your mom found me out on the ridgeline walking around in my birthday suit. Stumbling like a pinball from tree to boulder. Naked as the day I was born.”
“So that old rumor really is true?”
“Every word.” He nodded several times. “The way your mom told it, I was actually howling at the moon.”
The thought of my enormous, naked, drunk father howling at the moon lifted a chuckle up and out of me.
“If you ever needed proof that your father actually did let his hair down at one time in his life, that would be Exhibit A before the jury.” He shook his head. “I woke the next morning with a sledgehammer cracking open the top of my head. It took me an hour to roll over. Your mom finally pried one eye open and said, ‘You alive?’ I think I grunted something, stood up, fell down, stood up again, and finally made my way to the creek, where I just fell in. After the shock of thirty-four-degree water shook some sense into me, I put together the fact that I had to preach in a few hours. She wrapped me in a towel, fed me some coffee, and told me to brush my teeth.” He laughed at the memory. “She kissed my forehead and said, ‘Cigars are not your friend.’ ”
“You had to preach?”
“And to make matters worse, it was Easter.” He palmed his face. “I’m still sorry about that.”
I looked out across the empty seats. “What’d you say?”
“The truth. It was written across my face, and I couldn’t have hidden it had I tried. So I told them what happened.” We were quiet awhile. Then he sat next to me. “Sing me something.”
I folded my hands in my lap. “Don’t much feel like singing.”
“Trust me, that’s usually when you need to.”
I played a few chords. Tried to make light of it. “Any requests?”
Dad rested Jimmy on his knee and said, “You lead, I’ll follow.”
I knew he was hurting. I was too. The tone of our voices spoke the pain in our hearts. But between Dad and me, we always had music. It was the concrete bridge no fire could burn. I played the intro and then started quietly singing. He joined in at “Tune my heart . . .” I held it together for a couple of verses, finally choking up at “Bind my wandering . . .” When I got to “Take and seal it . . .” I quit singing altogether.
That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and “out-of-date” could say words my heart needed to hear and didn’t know how to say.
I wiped my face with my forearm and then slid that empty flask out of my pocket and laid it on the top of the piano. We both stared at it.
Dad’s tone was soft, as were the notes he was quietly picking. “And then there’s that.”
“Dad?” I extended my hands, palms up. The recording and the drinking were minor. We’d get over that. The trust thing ran much deeper. “How do I raise dirty hands?”
“I asked your mother that same question on Easter morning as the sun was boring a hole through my pupils. I’ll tell you the same thing she told me.” He set Jimmy down, stood, raised his hands as high in the air as he could reach, and said, “Both at once.”
Several hours later, as the first rays of sunlight cracked the mountaintops, I was still playing. When the words “sung by flaming tongues above,” came out of my mouth for the umpteenth time, I actually heard what I was singing. Flaming tongues. The words painted a picture, and the picture got me to thinking. If someone had written that, then they’d thought that. Seen it in their mind’s eye.
Which was good. It meant I wasn’t crazy after all.
17
I would like to tell you that the conversation with my dad solved all our problems. It did not. A year passed. I turned eighteen, grew another two inches, which brought us nearly eye to eye, and my head swelled due to constant comparison of my talent with others in a relatively small talent pool. The record companies kept calling, and pretty soon I was letting the same anti-dad voices live rent-free in my mind. Fueling my discontent. Wanting what they were offering, which was money and the promise of adoration. I silently grew angry and bitter. I wanted my own stage. That stuff circled around in me, creating a tornado that had only one eventual place to go—out my mouth. Ezekiel 28 was the story of my life.
I don’t like talking about what happened next.
It was a Wednesday. We’d been in New Mexico. Dad had driven through the night to get me home for my four-hour lesson with Miss Hagle. I was working on a Bach piece, and it was important to him that I finish it. Miss Hagle worked days, so my lessons ran six to ten, and then I hung out with a few buddies. I’d get in between midnight and one, and Dad was usually asleep. I figured I’d see him the next day.
Wrong.
I got to the light at Main and Highway 24. Miss Hagle’s house sat a few blocks east through the center of town. But when the light turned green, I turned right and drove like a bat out of Hades to Salida, where my band was tuning up for a show. I hadn’t been to Miss Hagle’s in three months, and while I knew the Bach piece forward and back, I had little interest in playing it. Ever.
I skidded to a stop outside Pedro’s Mexican Restaurant and Bar, burst through the back door, grabbed my Fender—which I’d bought at a pawnshop with the money Dad had itemized for Miss Hagle, along with another thousand that I’d skimmed out of the cash box over the last year—jumped up onstage, and played two and a half hours of some really good rock-and-roll.
About a year before, some guys from high school had formed a rock-and-roll/country band and asked me to play lead. We’d been playing at Pedro’s for about six months and crowds were growing. Tonight the place was packed, standing room only, an hour wait at the door, and Pedro was smiling like a Cheshire cat.
Three months earlier, some music critic happened to be on vacation around here when he and his family stopped in for Mexican food. Turns out he was a columnist for several popular guitar magazines. When the article came out, he compared the speed of my fingers on the neck to hummingbird wings. My face had graced the cover and the headline had simply read: “Peg—The Next Great One.” The good news was twofold: my name was getting out there, and the magazine was such that my dad would never see it. At least not until such time as I returned the conquering artist and proved him wrong with awards and accolades draped around my neck. I could not have scripted this any better.
We played three hours. Pedro was ecstatic. The room was stuffed way past the fire marshal’s regulation, and the crowd chanted for three encores. When the show finally ended, I was nervously studying my w
atch and calculating how much time it would take me to drive home plus stop for a roadside bath to get the smell of smoke off me. I handed my guitar to my drummer for safekeeping, told the fellows I’d see them next week, and spun gravel out the parking lot. Just outside of Salida, I pulled off and bathed in the moonlight in a shallow pool. I stuffed the smoky clothes in a trash bag, put on the stuff I’d left the house in, and redlined the truck, getting home about twelve thirty. I shut the door and walked up the steps to the porch. There were no lights on. The only thing out of place was the smell. There was something different in the air.
I pulled on the screen door, and Dad spoke to me from a chair in the corner of the porch. The dark corner. “Some dinner in there for you. It’s hot.”
“Oh, hey.” I paused and let my eyes adjust. He was sitting there with a plate on his lap. A napkin tucked in his collar. I tried to speak calmly. “What’re you doing up?”
He took a bite of something, then spoke with his mouth full. “How’s Miss Hagle?”
I managed a fake laugh. “Still slapping me with the ruler.”
“How’s Bach?”
More laughter, hoping Dad didn’t detect the nervousness. “Dead.”
He pointed the fork toward town. “You pay her?”
“Yep.” The weight of the bald-faced lie wrapped around my neck like a millstone.
This time his fork motioned toward the kitchen. “Can you eat?”
I was famished. I could have eaten a cow. I also needed an exit from the conversation. “I can eat a little something.”
He took another bite. “It’s in there waiting on you.”
I walked into the kitchen and turned on a light, and my stomach jumped into my throat. I nearly threw up. Dinner was takeout. Takeout from Pedro’s.
I experienced several emotions at once: a searing pain in my heart, embarrassment, shame, and rage.