Walk to Beautiful: The Power of Love and a Homeless Kid Who Found the Way

by Wayne, Jimmy

  One of those orphan train kids, a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy named William Bonnie, became one of America’s most notorious frontier outlaws, known as Billy the Kid. Legend has it that Billy was a mere fifteen years old when he shot his first victim. I could understand that.

  I moved in with Harvey’s sister, her husband, and their grandson a few days later, but my stay was short. The adults were kind, but I didn’t fit in.

  Harvey’s relatives hinted to me that I could stay with them only until I found someplace else to go. A few days passed before they told me that their grandson’s mother, who lived in another state, was coming to North Carolina and needed my room.

  I really didn’t want to leave—where was I to go? So I pretended that I didn’t understand what they were implying. I went on to school as if everything was all right.

  I was sitting in class when a woman’s voice came over the intercom, requesting that my teacher send me to the office—with my books.

  I knew what that meant.

  For a brief moment I considered running out the back door of the school. But, resigned to my fate, I reluctantly walked toward the school office. Sure enough, when I looked through the office windows, I could see Kathy Flowers sitting in the office waiting area. I walked in, and in an emotionless, matter-of-fact voice, Kathy told me why she was there. “I’ve come to take you to the Dallas receiving home, Jimmy.”

  I felt weak and betrayed. I’m not sure why, but that rejection hurt more than most. Harvey’s relatives had been so nice to me; they had convinced me I was welcome to stay in their home. But now they were asking me to leave. Actually, they weren’t asking.

  I turned over my books to the school secretary and trudged to the DSS hatchback vehicle parked out back beside the school cafeteria. As Kathy and I walked past the long line of kids standing outside, waiting to go into the cafeteria, I noticed several of them pointing and laughing at a pair of white underwear pressed against the window in the white DSS car.

  The underwear was mine, and I was totally embarrassed.

  When we got to the car, I found my other clothes, strewn on the floor and up under the hatchback window as though they had been hastily thrown into the backseat of the car. Another woman was seated in the front passenger seat, so I slid in the back and tried to collect my clothes.

  I turned to Kathy and asked, “Where’s my twenty dollars?” She didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained to her that I had hidden twenty dollars in the drawer under some clothes.

  Silence. Kathy wasn’t about to return to the house for my twenty bucks. In fact, as we headed down the road, Kathy looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “This is my last day at the DSS, so this is Carla Moore, your new case worker.”

  Carla looked not much older than a kid herself, around twenty-two years old, I guessed. “Hello, Jimmy,” she offered a smile. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  “Hello, Carla.” I didn’t say anything else to either of them. I sat in the backseat, seething about how Harvey’s relatives had done this, not to mention my hard-earned, missing twenty bucks.

  Looking idly out the back window, I suddenly realized Kathy was driving in the same direction in which Harvey’s relatives lived, the same folks who had just evicted me from their home. As we approached the road that led to their house, a crazy thought occurred to me: I decided to visit them one last time before being sent back to a group home. With the car still moving, I opened the back passenger-side door and jumped out. I hit the ground and rolled to break the blow of striking the surface.

  I heard Kathy slam on the brakes, the car sliding to a stop. She and Carla quickly got out, and Kathy yelled, “Jimmy! Jimmy, get back here. Get back here right now!”

  I brushed myself off and stood up straight. I cursed them and held up my middle finger as I walked backward and away from them. They continued to yell for me, demanding that I get back in the car.

  I turned and ran toward Harvey’s relatives’ home. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Kathy and Carla getting back into the car and driving away. I slowed to a brisk walk, continued down the street, up to the door, and rang the doorbell. Harvey’s older sister opened the front door, but when she realized it was me standing there, she quickly slammed the door closed. I heard her yell, “Call the cops!” and then the old man began yelling, too, telling me I’d better leave.

  I stood on their front porch and cried. I cried so hard I could barely breathe. No one came back to the door, so after a few minutes, I walked off their steps, still crying.

  The next-door neighbors heard me and called me into their home. We sat in the kitchen, and they talked to me and helped me calm down. Since I had nowhere else to go, they notified the police and told them where I could be found. Shortly afterward the same white DSS car pulled up in the driveway. Kathy and Carla picked me up and took me to the receiving home in Dallas, North Carolina, a home designed for about ten kids in transition. All the kids would be placed in another home within thirty days.

  ONCE I GOT CHECKED IN AT THE RECEIVING HOME, I WAS happy to see Marcus Ray. I hadn’t seen him since Faith Farm. But Marcus now acted very differently than he had when I first met him; he seemed much angrier. A black guy shared a room with Marcus.

  One night shortly after I arrived, Marcus planned an escape. He had taken a butter knife and had rigged the alarm system over the back door so the alarm wouldn’t go off when he opened the door to escape. In the middle of the night, I heard a loud scream from across the hall. It was Marcus’s roommate, crying out that Marcus had stabbed him with a dart. He kept yelling and crying until the staff arrived at their room. Marcus claimed it was an accident, and the staff permitted him to remain in the receiving home. His roommate’s outburst apparently scuttled Marcus’s escape plans for the time being, but I was too scared to sleep the rest of the night, knowing there was a chance Marcus might stab me too. He just was not the same Marcus I’d met at Faith Farm.

  The next day I contacted JR Wilson, the man who moved Mama, Patricia, and me out of Reed’s Trailer Park and into Sante Trailer Park. I had kept JR’s phone number on a three-by-five-inch card in my wallet. About forty handwritten phone numbers were on this card—contact numbers as diverse as Faith Farm’s to the number of the local hospital. I kept the card with me for years (and still have it).

  I told JR that I was at the Dallas receiving home and asked him if he would come pick up all my belongings. I didn’t tell JR, but I knew I was going to run away, and I didn’t want to leave my drawings and poems and letters behind because I feared I would never see them again. JR arrived that afternoon and loaded my things into his vehicle. “I’ll keep them for you in my lawn mower shed,” he promised, “until you find out where you’re going.” I had no way of knowing at the time how significant JR’s simple act of kindness would be in my life. (Had he not preserved my belongings, many of the notes and resources for this book would have been lost.)

  That evening, September 4, 1987, I slipped out the front door of the receiving home, ran away, and never went back. It was colder outside than I anticipated, so after walking a while, I found a pay phone and called JR again. He met me at a store up on the hill and took me to his home in Bessemer City. As we were riding down the long dirt road, I saw a Gaston County patrol car sitting in JR’s driveway. I guessed that the police might already be looking for me. “Please, JR, don’t stop. Please. Just drive to the bottom of the road and let me out at Reed’s Trailer Park.”

  JR reluctantly complied. As soon as he stopped the car, I got out, fled into the woods, and hid.

  Twenty-three

  MY WORST BIRTHDAY EVER

  LATER THAT NIGHT I WALKED BACK TO JR’S HOUSE, WHERE he and his wife, Jean, allowed me to stay the night. And the next night. And the next. I stayed with them for nearly a month, sleeping on their couch.

  I was unsure what I was going to do with my life or where I could go. I was fourteen. I was now officially a runaway. I hadn’t been to school in weeks.
I became depressed, so depressed that at one point, I didn’t even talk to JR or Jean for a solid week.

  JR got up each morning and went to work. Jean went out somewhere, so I mindlessly sat in their house the entire day, doing nothing, not even watching television. As far as I was concerned, my life was over. I felt useless and figured I’d never amount to anything. I hated living, and more and more, I just wanted to die.

  One day I asked JR if he’d take me to Patricia’s trailer, off Airport Road in Gastonia. “I’ll be glad to take you,” JR said. He took me to Patricia and Steven’s place and dropped me off, but when I called him to come pick me up, he didn’t answer.

  I visited with Patricia all day. When Steven returned home from work, I left Patricia’s and started walking down the road, hitchhiking to anywhere. An old man picked me up and took me to the corner of Airport Road and New Hope Road. I glanced at the road sign with a sarcastic laugh. If there was ever anyone who needed new hope, it was me.

  I continued walking in the cold, not sure where I could go. By nightfall I had made my way to Uncle Austin’s house in Crowders Mountain. Five years older than my mom, Uncle Austin was a crusty codger cut out of the same mold as Grandpa. But he was Mama’s brother, and besides my mom and sister, he was my closest kin. He lived on the mountainside with his wife, Diane; his daughter, April; and his son, Chad. I knocked on his door and told Austin I needed a place to stay. He refused to let me stay with them, but he told me that I could stay in Grandpa’s old, abandoned trailer, still on the hillside.

  Grandpa’s trashed trailer didn’t have heat, water, or electricity. It had been a wreck when Grandpa had lived in it, and now that he was in an old folks’ home and it hadn’t been used or kept up in the years since he left, the trailer had deteriorated even more. Austin told me to dig through the pile of junk in his backyard. “There’s a cot in there somewhere,” he groused, “and you can use that to sleep on.” I rummaged through the junk until I found the cot. Austin laid a piece of spun glass wall insulation on the cot and covered it with plastic. He wrapped the cot with string to hold the plastic and the insulation together, forming a makeshift bed.

  “The weather’s gonna turn nasty cold,” Austin warned, “so don’t sleep in your clothes, or you’ll be cold throughout the day.” He even gave me an old Sears and Roebuck coat. The coat was big enough for two people my size, but it helped keep me warm. (More than twenty years later, I wore that oversized coat in a music video for a song I wrote called “Paper Angels.”)

  Although it wasn’t exactly southern hospitality, I appreciated Austin’s kindness in allowing me to stay there. I stayed in that freezing cold, rundown trailer for two weeks.

  To help stave off the bitter cold, I bought a blue sleeping bag for $18.38 on October 17, 1987. (I still have the receipt and the sleeping bag.) It wasn’t much of a sleeping bag, but it kept me from freezing in that trailer. It was so cold that I could see my breath at night by a trace of light streaming in the window from the pole in the churchyard down the hill and across the road. I often would lie there at night, shivering and thinking about my life. Sometimes I wondered where Mama was . . . and I’d get angry, very angry.

  IN THE MORNING, JUST AFTER DAWN, I AWAKENED TO THE sound of Austin banging on the side of the trailer with his hand. That was my alarm clock. I got up, put on my thermal underwear, and went outside to feed the goat and chickens. That was part of the deal in exchange for my use of Uncle Austin’s luxurious accommodations.

  After I fed the animals, Austin sometimes invited me inside to eat breakfast, complete with eggs and tomatoes. Following breakfast, he always had a chore for me to do. I didn’t mind. I was accustomed to work, and I was glad for the food.

  Austin owned a lot of land, so we’d drive a few miles over the border to South Carolina and work all day, cutting trees and chopping firewood. My job was to clear out the brush from around the bottom of each tree with a heavy ax so Austin could get to the bottom with a chain saw.

  One day I grabbed a thick vine and started to chop it in half, but as I swung the ax downward, I missed, and the blade went through my knuckle on my left hand, nearly chopping off my index finger. Pain seared through me and blood spurted in every direction. Austin wrapped an old rag around my finger and pressed the knuckle back together. “Keep this rag on there till the bleeding stops,” he instructed.

  An injured finger didn’t get me out of work. Although chopping vines was impossible, I spent the next week working in Austin’s backyard. One day Austin gave me a small steel brush and told me to sand all the rust off the bed of his pickup truck.

  At first I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t.

  I spent the entire day scraping rust off the truck bed. It was a difficult job, done nowadays mostly by electric-powered sanders. The following morning Austin woke me up, yelling obscenities, beating the side of the trailer, cursing me and asking me why I hadn’t sanded down his truck as he had ordered.

  This guy must be nuts! I thought. Austin had watched me sand his truck bed the day before, but this was exactly how he treated his son, Chad, as well. He’d find a reason to get mad, and then he’d start an argument.

  Since we hadn’t painted or sealed the freshly scraped truck bed, the moisture had settled in it overnight, causing the bed to oxidize again. Austin probably knew that, but he just wanted to fight.

  I was not about to put up with him cursing me, and I sure wasn’t going to fight him. He was three times my size, and the Sears and Roebuck coat he gave me reminded me just how long his reach was. I had to fold the cuffs back twice.

  Instead of arguing with Austin, I quietly gathered up my things, put them in my backpack, and walked out of his yard, down to the dam in the creek, where I used to fish as a little boy. I wasn’t sure where I was going or how I might get there. I couldn’t do anything else—so I walked. I was wearing jeans and Austin’s coat. It was so cold the only thing I could think about was getting warm.

  I found a small cave, hollowed out in the rock, so I huddled in close to the stone for shelter. I remembered a pack of matches in my backpack and took them out; there were only three matches in the pack. I gathered some leaves and attempted to light them to make a fire.

  The first and second match went out as soon as I struck them. With only one match remaining, I knew I needed to do something differently. In my bag I had a small bottle of Stetson cologne that had once belonged to Tim Allen’s dad. I removed the cap and carefully drizzled cologne all over the leaves. Trying to keep from shivering, I struck the last match. Poof! The spark caught the alcohol in the cologne, and I had a fire at last. The leaves began burning, and I added more twigs and brush to my campfire. As I basked in the fire’s warmth, I realized the date. It was October 23, 1987—the morning of my fifteenth birthday.

  PHILLIP, ONE OF MY BEST CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, STILL lived on the mountain with his mom and dad, Duty and Lawrence Spicer. Occasionally, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, I sneaked up the hill through the woods to see Phillip and get some food. That morning I realized I couldn’t stay in the cave by the creek forever, so I crept up through the woods so nobody would notice me and knocked on Phillip’s trailer door. His dad let me in, and I told him what happened. Lawrence probably knew that I was on the run, but he was kind to me. “Are you hungry, Jimmy?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered honestly, still rubbing my hands to get warm.

  Lawrence grilled some cheeseburgers for his family, and a big one for me, and we all sat in the living room to eat together. I was famished, so I chomped right into the cheeseburger. It was delicious! I gobbled down two big bites, and was about to take my third when I heard a knock on their front door and the squawk of a radio, like the ones used in a police car.

  Lawrence answered the door, and there stood Larry Hamerick, a Gaston County police officer. “Sorry to bother you folks,” the officer said, “but I have a pick up order for a runaway that you might know, Jimmy Barber. His uncle says you might know where he is.” Lawrence stepped out
on the porch, and I could hear him talking to the policeman. I thought of running, but I was so exhausted and emotionally drained, I simply froze in my chair.

  After a while Lawrence and the officer came inside, and Officer Hamerick explained that he had come to pick me up and take me to the county detention center. Phillip sat pouting, and Phillip’s mom started boo-hooing, so Lawrence wrapped her in his arms, trying to calm her. “Can he finish eating?” Lawrence asked.

  The officer noticed the burgers and glanced at me sitting on the living room couch. “Sure, go ahead, Jimmy,” Officer Hamerick said kindly. “Finish eating your sandwich before we go.” I looked at my cheeseburger, but my stomach was whirling so badly, I couldn’t even eat any more. I put down the sandwich.

  “Okay, then, are you ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But let me go out back and get my backpack.” I fully intended to run for the hills, but the officer was no fool. The policeman followed me around to the back of the trailer, where my backpack was leaning against the porch, and then he escorted me to the squad car. He put my backpack in the trunk then told me to put my hands behind my back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to put handcuffs on you.” He snapped the cold steel handcuffs onto my wrists, and as he did, I heard Phillip’s mom burst into tears.

  Officer Hamerick helped me inside the backseat of the squad car, pushing my head down to avoid hitting the car’s roof. I looked out the window at Phillip, Lawrence, and Duty. They were standing on their front porch, and Duty was bawling.

  As Officer Hamerick drove down the hill, I saw Uncle Austin and his son, Chad, in the yard. Uncle Austin looked at me and laughed.