Well, my eyes got pretty big then. “Mr. Ron,” I said, “you mean to tell me that Florida went and got themselves a ocean too?”
That wadn’t the last time I seen the ocean in Florida ’cause Miss Carmen invited me to come back again and again. Fact is, if I answered my phone ever time she called, she’d have me busy till the Lord came back to claim me.
One day in 2007, she bought me a ticket on a aeroplane and showed up at the airport to get me. And there she was, this blonde white lady drivin this flashy white-on-white-in-white foreign somethin-or-other. She wrapped me up in a hug like I was family. Color didn’t matter to her, but it did to me. My mind just kinda went back in time to the trouble I’d had with white ladies—like that time I tried to change a flat tire for one of ’em and wound up with a rope around my neck and white boys holdin the other end. I was scared, real scared, like a brother at a Klan rally. Then Miss Carmen pushed a button on the dash, and the whole top a’ that car come off and slipped down in the trunk. And there I was, sittin in the front seat of that white lady’s white convertible, and me stickin out like a hunk of coal in a snowbank. But Miss Carmen was real proud, and she drove me around town like I was one a’ them famous astronauts comin home from a moonwalk.
Now, bein in radio, Miss Carmen knows lots a’ famous singers. I ain’t really no singer, and I told her that, but that didn’t matter ’cause she’s like Miss Debbie. When I say I can’t do somethin, she don’t listen. Before I knowed it, Miss Carmen had done flew me up to Nashville and introduced me to lots of famous singers, like Chris Tomlin. I even got to do a little singin with ’em.
After I got back to Texas, Miss Carmen showed up again, this time at Mr. Ron’s ranch takin lots of pictures, askin too many questions, and bossin me around just like Miss Debbie did, thinkin she was gon’ make me be her best friend. I guess she did a purty good job ’cause today Miss Carmen is ’bout the best white lady friend I got.
20
Ron
By the end of 2007, Denver and I had crisscrossed the country dozens of times, speaking at least 250 events. I got so busy on the road, trying to change the world, that I never considered the possibility that I was as broken and needy as the homeless people I championed.
After nearly a hundred events during the first five months of 2008, I retreated again to Italy. I landed in Pietrasanta, an artists’ colony and the destination of great sculptors who for centuries went, and still go, to carve the famous Carrera marble. One evening I was enjoying a Cuban cigar and a local wine made from Tuscan grapes with a cadre of international artists when my phone rang.
It was my mama. Dad had fallen. Mom had called 911, and the ambulance had already whisked Dad away to North Hills Hospital.
“Come home, son,” she said, sounding at the end of her rope. “Your dad’s asking for you. He’s driving me crazy, and I’m praying he doesn’t make it.”
From anybody else, that might’ve seemed callous. But Tommye Hall had put up with a whole lot of grief from her husband over the decades. She was getting old, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave this earth with a little peace and quiet under her belt.
I hopped the next plane out of Rome, but Dad still beat me back from the hospital and was at home when I arrived in Haltom City. He was back up, ornery as usual, and complaining about the cost of the ambulance. “Tommye shouldn’t have called the ambulance; she should have called the neighbors! There wasn’t nothing wrong with me except I couldn’t get up!”
Then he said in that joking way that lets you know a person is at least half serious, “Maybe your mother and I will just move in with you. I’ll bet it’s lonesome in that big ol’ mansion with just Denver and you.”
I laughed and asked him if he was trying to audition as a stand-up comic.
Later that week, I was sitting on Mama and Daddy’s porch, talking with a longtime neighbor, David.
“I hate to tell tales out of school, Ronnie Ray, but I’m worried about your daddy,” David said. “Earl gets in his truck several times a day and lights out for who knows where. And whenever we ask him where he’s been, he can’t remember. Only time anybody knows for sure where he’s been is when he comes back carryin a fifth of Jim Beam.”
I glanced over at Dad’s little red pickup sitting in the driveway. I knew he hadn’t been sliding over to the Tailless Monkey since it had been shut for at least twenty years.
David looked me right in the eye. “He’s gonna kill somebody, Ronnie.”
I agreed.
That day, I confiscated my parents’ car keys. Mama took it in stride. Daddy screamed like a panther and fought me to get them back. “I ain’t never had no wreck or no ticket!” he hollered.
I looked at him and said, “Dad, that’s God’s mercy, defined.”
That night, he fell again. Mama called 911 again. After a few days at North Hills, I moved him to Life Care Center of Haltom, a nursing home. He wouldn’t have accepted that from me, but his doctor didn’t give him a choice.
I checked him into his room, which had two beds, one of which was empty. That was a good thing since a roommate would’ve given Daddy an accomplice in planning an escape.
Earl looked at Jerri, the head nurse, a fiftyish blonde, and said, “Honey, I gotta have at least two Jim-Beam-and-Cokes before dinner—not too much Coke—and a cigar for dessert.”
Jerri, who might’ve been a pageant queen in her younger days, had the sweet smile of a caregiver and the eyes of a drill sergeant. “You try that, Mr. Hall, and you’ll be out on the street.”
For the next three weeks, during what must have been basically detox for him, Daddy called me at least ten times a day.
“Why’d you leave me here?”
“Come get me!”
“If you love me, you’ll bring me some whiskey!”
I thought about that. The man was ninety years old and had been pickling his innards since before I was in Little League. He was at least ten years past being sent away for treatments and didn’t have much longer to live. Why make him spend his last weeks in misery?
So what the heck. I bought him a large Coke at a Sonic drive-in, poured out half, and filled her up with Jim Beam.
When I arrived at the nursing home, Daddy was sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed, watching TV.
I held out the Sonic cup. “Here, you want a Coke?”
He waved me off. “Nah, I don’t want no Coke.”
“You better take a drink of it before you turn it down.”
I handed him the Coke, and he took a sip. A big ol’ grin blossomed on his face; then tears blossomed in his eyes. “You really do love me,” he said.
A few days after I took Daddy the loaded Sonic Coke, I moved Mama in with him. It turned out he hadn’t needed an accomplice, and every time the nurses weren’t looking, he had tried to make a break for freedom on his own.
After sixty-five miserable years of marriage, Mama did not go willingly. But she finally agreed to occupy the other bed in the room.
My telephone rang at two the next morning. “Ron, there’s an old woman in my room that’s been chewing my ass out all night!” Dad warbled into the phone. “I haven’t done nothing to her. No sex, no nothing—hell, I ain’t even kissed her, and I ain’t goin’ to! Can you come down here and make her leave?”
“An old woman?” I said, ribbing him a little. “Who in the world is it?”
“Hell, I don’t know who she is!”
Then from across the room, I heard Mama yell, “I’m your wife, you ignorant bastard!”
Then, in my ear: “She says she’s my wife, but that ain’t right. I don’t know who she is!”
It was just like home.
The fighting raged for days, rocking Life Care like a rickety rowboat in a thunderstorm. Then one morning about three weeks later, the director called me.
“Mr. Hall, I’m sorry to tell you this, but we’ve had to evict your father.” She then described a pattern of domestic quarrels, escape attempts, and all-around unrulin
ess. “I’ll need you to have him packed and off the premises by sundown.”
I was irritated because moving Dad was definitely going to be a pain in my butt. Strangely, though, a note of pity sounded in my heart. When applied to my daddy, it was still an odd, foreign sound. But it was not unlike the compassion I felt for so many of the homeless men and women I’d been trying to help over the last eleven years.
Sure, many of them had made their own beds in life and, as a result, had wound up sleeping in rags under a bridge. But Denver had taught me that to love a man enough to help him, you have to forfeit the warm, self-righteous glow that comes from judging.
I had developed quite a do-gooder reputation for myself by refusing to judge “bad sorts”—bag ladies and vagrants, drug addicts, drunks, and runaway teenagers who sold their bodies for money.
Strangers.
But I was just now learning to do it for my own flesh and blood.
I had no doubt that an ornery cuss like Daddy deserved to be tossed out on his can like a drunk—like when Mr. Ballantine’s son pushed him out of his car, motor still running, on the curb in front of the Mission. I had all this compassion for Mr. Ballantine, but it had taken me all this time to muster up compassion for the man who gave me life. And more than that. Earl Hall had been an alcoholic absentee father, crappy husband, and all-around curmudgeon, no question. But he had provided for his family for sixty-five years, which wasn’t true of many of the homeless I’d reached out to.
As a boy, I never missed a meal. I had a roof over my head, a cosigner for my first car. And Daddy had never asked me for money except in joking, and that was after I remodeled his house and he knew I was stacking it up.
Dad’s drinking never caused him to miss a day of work. Now he was an old man, his body failing, mind not far behind, with a wife who loathed him and a son who for most of his life had held him at arm’s length with nose pinched, as though holding a dirty diaper. A troublesome thought formed at the edge of my mind: was I so shallow, my do-gooding so superficial, that I could only set judging aside and help a person as long as his sins didn’t affect me?
21
Denver
One day, I asked Mr. Ron, “Mr. Ron, all these white folks be invitin us to their Bible studies. How come none of ’em’s invitin us to their Bible doins?”
I ain’t sayin it ain’t all right to study the Bible. You got to study the Bible to know the rules of life. But I notice a lotta folks doin more lookin at the Bible that doin what it says. The book a’ James says, don’t just listen to what God has to say, do what He says. And Jesus said God is gon’ separate us, the sheep from the goats, based on what we did, not on how much we read.
I was havin a conversation ‘bout this with this smart fella I know named Mike Daniels. I says to him, “How anybody gon’ know, Mr. Mike?”
“How anybody gon’ know what, Mr. Moore?” he answered.
“How anybody gon’ know God when all the time folks got their head stuck in a book? I can talk to you ’bout this stuff, Mr. Mike, and you won’t get mad, but some folks thinks I’m a bad man or is blasphemin or somethin, but I ain’t. It just seems like lots of folks is tryin to pull God outta somethin or someone, and that ain’t never gon’ happen. You know what I mean, Mr. Mike?”
“Yes sir,” Mr. Mike said. “I believe I do.’”
“How we gon’ really know God if we trying to get Him out of a man or woman? How we gon’ know God for real lookin for Him in some kinda religion, in some kinda system? I don’t mean know about God, Mr. Mike. I mean really, honest know who God is?
“Mr. Mike, so many folks is tryin to get to God and know Him by doin somethin, like tryin to make a deal with Him. Thinks if they does somethin for God, He’ll turn ’round and do some-thin for them. Thinks that we is all way down here, and God is way off yonder someplace far off outta reach. Most people thinks that we all got to get a education or study all the time, then we know, but that just ain’t so. It ain’t so at all.”
“You’re right, Mr. Moore. That ain’t so. That’s not the way it works, not even a little bit.”
“Mr. Mike, everbody’s lookin for God everywhere on the outside. He ain’t in no book, and He ain’t in no preacher, and He ain’t in nothin or no one on the outside. You got to go inside ’cause that’s where God is—in the deepest place inside you. And ain’t nobody gon’ make God tell you nothin. Ain’t nobody gon’ have no wisdom ’bout nothin if they thinks they can read ’bout it or hear about it from some man or woman. That got to come from revelation. That got to come from the Holy Spirit inside us, Mr. Mike, and that ain’t somethin that can be bargained for. You can’t achieve revelation. You can’t work for what’s free.”
Since I been visitin a lotta churches, I hear people talkin ’bout how, after readin our story, they felt “led” to help the homeless, to come alongside the down-and-out. But when it comes to helpin people that ain’t got much, God didn’t leave no room for feelin led.
Jesus said God gon’ separate us based on what we did for folks that is hungry and thirsty, fellas that is prisoners in jail and folks that ain’t got no clothes and no place to live. What you gon’ do when you get to heaven and you ain’t done none a’ that? Stand in front a’ God and tell Him, “I didn’t feel led”?
You know what He gon’ say? He gon’ say, “You didn’t need to feel led ’cause I had done wrote it down in the Instruction Book.”
Let’s be real. A lotta folks on the list that Jesus calls “the least of these” ain’t the ones you gon’ find down at the country club. No, most a’ them’s the folks you gon’ find in the jail or in the street. But we got to go to all the people—the rich, the poor, the lowdown, and the dirty—and show ’em all we got the same thing for ever one of ’em: the love a’ the Lord.
I think part a’ this problem is that too many folks ain’t ready to face up to the fact that to love the unlovable, they got to face people that they fear. They is afraid to get out of their regular livin space ’cause they afraid it might be suicide, am I right? ’Cause you wouldn’t be scared a’ nobody if you didn’t feel like they was gon’ do you wrong.
Most people want to be circled by safety, not by the unexpected. The unexpected can take you out. But the unexpected can also take you over and change your life. Put a heart in your body where a stone used to be.
22
Ron
The Life Care director gave me the name of the only nursing home in that end of town that would take my dad, a lock-down facility for geriatric troublemakers. I checked him in that afternoon. Just after midnight, a nurse called to tell me Dad and his roommate had gotten into a food fight that devolved into a fistfight. I tried to picture two old farts pelting each other with strained peas and tapioca, then circling each other like a couple of WWF wrestlers with their skinny butts hanging out of their hospital gowns.
“We moved your father to solitary confinement,” the director said.
I went to visit him the next day and saw that he had a black eye.
I tried to talk to him, but he cursed me. A week later, I took Regan and my two-year-old granddaughter—Earl’s great-granddaughter— to see him. They brought him homemade cookies. He slapped away their offerings and cursed them. Silently, I asked God to take him before I started hating him again.
A few weeks later, on Christmas Day, I took Mama to see Daddy. Last time they’d seen each other, they’d turned their nursing-home room into a war zone. As I guided Mama into Daddy’s room, I braced for a hostile reception.
But I was shocked when Earl said, very sweetly, “Oh . . . Mama. Come give me a kiss.”
I helped her over to his bed, and she bent down and kissed him on the lips.
“I love you, Earl,” my mama said.
“I love you, too, Tommye.”
The moment was as rare as a da Vinci painting.
I sensed it was the last time they would ever see each other, and I was hoping to hear them reminisce about the good times, about what had sparked thei
r love so many years before. But it seemed they couldn’t remember, or they just wanted to forget everything but this moment. There was nothing left to say, so they simply stared into each other’s eyes.
Driving Mama back to Life Care, she told me about how, in October 1942, she had ridden the bus home to Blooming Grove, Texas, from Denton, where she was a junior at the North Texas State Teacher’s College. Her daddy—and my granddaddy,
Mr. Jack Brooks—ran a cotton farm in Blooming Grove, and he was the hardest-working man I ever knew.
When she got home that October, she told her daddy she was fixing to marry a soldier who had just shipped off to Phoenix—Earl Hall. Never one to pass up a chance to teach a lesson about hard work, he told her that if she’d help him pick a bale of cotton, he’d buy her a train ticket to Arizona. Five days later, she’d picked her bale, and her daddy drove her to the train station.
Listening to Mama tell this tale as we drove through Haltom City, I still couldn’t trace the roots of her love for Earl Hall. “So why’d you marry him?” I said.
She laughed. “Because it beat pickin cotton!”
So there I had it. I owed my very existence to my mother’s aversion to the cotton patch.
CAROLYNE
Not Just a Pretty Garden
Thirteen years ago, Carolyne Snow set aside a career working for entertainment mogul Barry Diller to become a full-time mom. Still, she and her husband, Robbie, a music marketing executive, kept in touch with entertainment industry friends. One of them was Mark Clayman, producer of The Pursuit of Happyness, the 2006 movie starring Will Smith.
In May 2008, during a visit to the Clayman home, Mark gave Carolyne a copy of Same Kind of Different as Me. By then, Mark had already optioned the book for film. Still, he regularly passed along the book to friends.
“Read it,” he told Carolyne. “I want to know what you think about it.”
Not only did she read the book; it set her to work on a project that is still underway.