Like Me

by Chely Wright

  I knew what he was saying.

  He thanked everyone for being at the show, and then he gave me a strict order right into the microphone: “Get back to work and sing for these people!”

  The Boy Scouts of America

  In the summer of 2005 the band, the crew, and I headed to Dallas, Texas, for a private show.

  During my years at Opryland, I learned the ins and outs of doing private shows for companies like AT&T, Saturn, Ford Motor Company, Kimberly-Clark, and others. These shows are typically part of a once-a-year celebration or convention for a company or organization. I enjoyed the challenge of making their events memorable, and I take pride in customizing the show just for them.

  After the band and crew had the gear and the stage set up, my tour manager, Jan Volz, came to my hotel room to escort me down to sound check. As we were walking to the venue, he told me that the show was for the Boy Scouts of America. That night was to be the final night of a three-day conference. The people in the audience were the most prominent people involved with the Boy Scouts of America, and many of them had made significant financial contributions over the years and had traveled from all over the country to attend the special event. Jan made arrangements for me to speak to the person in charge of the entertainment for the evening so I would know who was sitting in front of me and so I could get a feel for the event.

  Jan located the man in charge, and the three of us stepped outside the ballroom to talk. He was a charming man in his early sixties, and he told me that the planning committee was excited about my performing for them. They liked my music and, more important, they liked what I stood for. I wondered what it was they thought I stood for.

  The organizer quickly added that the Boy Scouts of America knew that I must be one of them because of the support that I’d shown for the troops and the many times that I’d traveled overseas to perform for them.

  I asked him questions that I thought would help me best entertain the audience. Toward the end of my list of questions, he told me to have fun with the crowd but emphasized that I needed to be careful not to say anything that would be offensive.

  Jan and I looked at one another. The gentleman continued to talk. He told us that the Boy Scouts of America had been in the media quite a bit in the past few years and it wouldn’t be appropriate if I were to make a joke about the lawsuits and the media coverage, as it was still a sensitive topic to the organization. I nodded my head, listening. He laughed a deep belly laugh and said, “We’re a strong group with a strong set of history and morals. We don’t allow women and we don’t allow the gays.”

  A rush of blood went to my head. Even though Jan didn’t know my secret at the time, he shared my reaction to what had just been said. Jan and I didn’t make eye contact until we got into the elevator. We looked at each other, jaws dropped, and shook our heads from side to side in disbelief about what had just happened.

  I had a couple of hours before the performance, which was unfortunate, because it allowed me time to get all wound up about it. I considered refusing to do the show.

  I called my sister and told her what had happened, and when I told her that I was not going to do the show, she asked me what my excuse for canceling would be. Would I be willing to admit that I wouldn’t play for them because of their exclusion of women and gays? And if I did, wasn’t I afraid that that would draw attention to my sexuality? She was right. Not to mention that if I canceled, I would have been in breach of contract, and I would have incurred a huge expense for flights, hotel rooms, and employees who would still be expected to be paid for their time whether they played the show or not. I decided that I should do the show and take the money that I was paid by the Boy Scouts of America.

  As I performed that night, I was agitated. I purposely failed to say a special thanks to the committee and the gentleman in charge of entertainment, as I usually do at a private show. During the show, I got an idea about how I might be able to feel better about having gone ahead with the performance.

  Once I was back in Nashville, I had my business manager give me a spreadsheet showing the amount of profit I made on the job. I went to the bank and got a money order in that exact amount. I mailed it anonymously to a nonprofit organization that assists gays and lesbians with outreach programs in the state of Tennessee. Although I did feel some slight relief in having done that, I still felt shame. I felt like a coward for not fighting for what I really stood for; instead I made a gesture that went largely unnoticed.

  Now I have the courage to make my voice known to everyone, not just to me.

  Run, Jeny, Run

  There are two kinds of hot in the Midwest—dry hot and sticky hot. One particular summer was about to offer both. I was ten years old. It was late in the month of May 1981, and just like all the years before it, we’d ended the school year in Kansas with unseasonably high temperatures.

  The year before, my parents’ git’er done mantra once again spilled over onto the three of us kids, and our family of five found ourselves building a house on a tiny piece of land that a benevolent local farmer named Clarence Moldenhauer had given my parents on a handshake that they’d somehow, someday pay him back, which they eventually did. My folks had bought a used modular home, which was no more than a double-wide trailer, but before it was delivered, my dad brought in some heavy equipment and had an enormous hole dug in the ground. We put up steel panels and lots of wood to create forms into which concrete would be poured, and that gray, sticky mud would eventually become a basement and the foundation for our home.

  I recall that my sister and I had a specific job for several days that seemed never to end. Our task: each would carry a five-gallon bucket full of gravel back and forth about fifty yards up a hill, take it to the edge of the drop-off at the new foundation, and dump it between the outside wall of the concrete and the earth. In construction terms, it’s called backfilling—and it’s backbreaking. The combination of dust from the ground and chalk dust from the rock made it difficult to breathe, and every time I tipped my bucket over into the big gap below, it shocked me as to how much of a difference the new gravel didn’t make.

  Jeny was strong, and whenever my dad needed help lifting, pulling, or pushing—though obviously he could count on my brother—we all knew that my sister possessed the real brawn. Without anyone else’s help, she and my dad lifted and set the I-beams into place on that basement, and a day later our home would be lowered onto those beams. Once that phase of the project was complete, we moved on. We dug our own water lines and sewer lines and installed a cistern and a septic tank. At last, we were in the house we called home.

  That first summer, while working hard, we had our fun too. We’d come to love the huge pond on Clarence’s property that sat just behind our house; it was clear and deep, and it did all the things a good Kansas pond should do. It watered the horses that roamed the surrounding fields, and it gave a home to the sun-perch, the bass, and whatever the heck that big thing was that bumped into my leg twice while we were night swimming. The pond was our playground, and nearly every hot day we’d take a dip. Sometimes it was just a matter of getting our bodies cooled off, because we didn’t have air-conditioning in our house. (We did finally get central air my senior year of high school.)

  I remember one of the first days we got to enjoy the pond was the day after my mom had showed Jeny and me how to float on our backs. Chris was at the pond, too, but he was on the shore with Darren—Clarence’s grandson, who was just a year older than my brother and always around; they were trying to repair a dilapidated, homemade diving board made of 2×6’s.

  Jeny and I were floating side by side on our backs in the middle of the twenty-seven-foot-deep pond, and I was relaxed and perfectly buoyed. There was no wind that day and the surface looked like glass. My legs dangled in the abyss below (even though it freaked me out a little bit that that thing was down there), my ears were submerged, and the water line was just at my cheekbones. Jeny wouldn’t hold still, and her movement was annoying me beca
use it was causing the water to wave and lap up over my face, into my nose and mouth.

  “Stop moving!” I said, like a ventriloquist, so I didn’t cause more ripples myself.

  I opened my eyes to see if I could determine why she kept lifting her head up and out of the water. I caught her. She’d been stealing glances at Darren over by the dock.

  After that day, I started to notice other signs, and I could tell that Jeny had it bad for Darren. It was the first crush I ever knew her to have, and I don’t even think she told me she had it. At that time Jeny was eleven, I was nine, and although we had a normal sister relationship, she didn’t confide in me that she thought Darren was a stone-cold fox. Which he kind of was. He wore T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off, and he had crazy unkempt curly hair bleached by the sun, tanned skin, and a big smile. He was the apple of his grandfather’s eye, and everybody called him “Wild Man.” For such a young kid, Darren was responsible and a great help to his grandpa in handling the duties of the farm, which were many. But as hard as he worked, he played. Darren tooled around on tractors, in trucks, and on a red three-wheeler with huge tires that allowed him to drive it right into the pond and straight to the other side.

  If you were a young girl of eleven, and you were my sister, you were looking for a boy like Darren.

  So for our second summer in the country, there was no construction project and in a way, it was our first real summer vacation there. I had survived the stresses of my fourth-grade year, and because of the added anxiety of feeling like an alien, I needed a break. More and more, Chris had been helping Clarence and Darren with farm chores, and his summer, much to his excitement, would be dedicated to working and getting paid.

  Perhaps Jeny had to talk herself into being excited about the thought of a three-month summer break. Although she got picked on at school for being overweight, she didn’t get much of an escape from the ridicule when she was home. The difference was, at school if someone called her a name, she could tell them to “shove it.” She definitely could not do that at home.

  For years, my mom and dad had been hard on Jeny about being heavy, and in the months that led up to that summer, their fervor was ratcheting up. They called her names like “Jeny Pig” and “Tush Hog,” even encouraging and instructing my brother and me to call her by her newly given names. Instead of taking the time to seek out something special for her to wear that might make her feel more confident about her body, my mother made Jeny wear Husky brand jeans from the boys’ department at Sears, saying, “If she gets embarrassed enough, she’ll stop eating like a pig.” I remember thinking how weird it was for my dad to call Jeny fat, when we all saw him struggle with diets every day and knew that he had been overweight as a child.

  On the first day of our summer vacation, Jeny and I slept in as late as possible, but when we did arise, we had excitement rushing through our veins. There was so much to explore and so much to do. First, we did our chores. We mowed grass, put laundry on the line, then swept out the garage. The very garage, I’m convinced, that had an industrial dirt factory located beneath its concrete slab floor, and all of the workers below got a real kick out of the Wright kids as we tried to eliminate the filth.

  As soon as we were set free, we headed up to a small barn that sat atop a hill on our property. The lower two-thirds was filled with chickens and spools of barbed wire, and in a couple of years it would house my beloved western saddle along with my other horse tack. The top of that barn had a shallow loft, and that was our first destination of the afternoon. Jeny and I scaled the ladder leading up to the hideaway, and we nested ourselves alongside a couple of Banty hens who were less than impressed with our drop-in visit. There was a fresh layer of straw in the loft, and it poked at our legs as we sat, Indian-style, in our shorts. It was hotter than you know what in that loft. There wasn’t a shade tree around, and the tin roof over us was being punished by the three o’clock sun.

  Our plan was to sit up there, get hot and sweaty, then run like maniacs across the pasture and jump headfirst into the pond. I’m guessing it was at least 110 degrees up there, so it didn’t take long before we were drenched. We climbed down and raced for the water. It was as big a shock as we’d hoped it would be, going from that extreme hot to a cool country pond. We got acclimated to the temperature and then played the water games we always played; some we even made up on our own. Handstands; Who can hold their breath underwater the longest? (impossible for sisters to judge when no one’s wearing a watch); Dive to the bottom of the pond’s deepest part and bring up mud to prove you went all the way down; Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up underwater? Those were our games.

  After a couple of hours, we decided it was time to go home. We crawled up onto the one shore that was pebbles rather than mud and put our still-a-little-wet tennis shoes on our feet. We headed back to the house, only a hundred and fifty yards away, strolling along the pond dam that towered above our backyard. Just as we made it to the top of the dam and got a glimpse of our mom and dad in the backyard, I guess they got their glimpse of us too.

  “Jennifer!” they both shouted. “Get down here!”

  Jeny froze. She looked at me and I gave her my best “What did you do?” look. They both yelled again, similar versions of “Get your ass down here now!”

  She hurried down the incline of the dam, opened the gate that kept the horses from getting out, and latched the gate behind her. Although I was not in a hurry to walk in the direction of whatever it was that was happening, I did start to slowly make my way down. It was the only way to get to the house, which I desperately wanted to do. I was afraid I was next.

  They were clearly angry with her, and even though people’s homes weren’t in close proximity out there in the country, I’m sure every neighbor could hear my parents screaming and cursing at my then twelve-year-old sister.

  “If you won’t do it, we’ll do it for you.”

  “We won’t have it, Jennifer, you better believe that!”

  She was standing close enough to them to be hit, should one of them take a swipe at her, so she stood with both hands up high in front of her chest in preparation for what might come. She was not crying, but she looked scared, confused, and profoundly hurt. My brother wasn’t home, and I kept hoping that he or someone would come to the rescue.

  They were behind my mom’s car, and they said, “Put it on.” “Go ahead, Jeny Pig, put it on.”

  My dad handed her one end of a long, leather dog leash and told her to put it around her waist. The other end was tied to the bumper of the car. Jeny stared at them and didn’t move. There was strength in her stillness, and I hoped that my folks were smart enough or kind enough to see it this time and back off. Unfortunately, they were not and they did not.

  My mom said to my dad, “Get the strap.”

  My dad had a razor strap (a wide, thin strip of leather) in his shop that he kept for sharpening knives and lawn mower blades, but as helpful as that leather was for keeping implements in top form, it was more commonly used in our house as a tool for keeping kids in line.

  My dad had the strap, and I was praying that Jeny would take off before he could get her, but she didn’t. He smacked her hard across the back of her thighs. My mom got in the car, started the engine, and revved it up.

  “Now put it on!” they screamed over six cylinders.

  Jeny put the leash around her waist and fastened the brass hardware like she was told to do. I remember seeing the leash around her center and how it cinched her in the middle of that white tank top with the little blue anchors on it. Now she was crying, and her face was as red as her cotton gym shorts, still soaked with pond water.

  “We will not have a fat kid!”

  “You’re gonna run if we have to drag you.”

  My dad gave Jeny a couple more warning wallops on her legs to ensure that she was going to go along with her new workout regimen.

  And so on the first day of summer vacation, my mom drove her Mercury Monarch out of our drivew
ay, down the country road to the railroad tracks and back, with her oldest daughter, Jennifer, tied to the bumper of the car with a dog leash.

  I was scared Jeny wouldn’t be able to keep up and that she’d trip and fall down, but I was also afraid that Darren, the boy she’d quietly liked for the past year, would be driving that same country road at just the wrong time and see her like that.

  I felt thankful that it wasn’t me and also guilty that it wasn’t. Events like this didn’t occur with great frequency (about once a year), but knowing that something bad was coming and not knowing when it would arrive was nerve-racking.

  The worst of what was happening to Jeny was not being whipped with a strap or dragged with a rope but rather the slow attempted murder of her spirit.

  Down on My Knees

  When my thoughts would become too scary or dark, a beautiful image would appear as a counterattack. The images didn’t linger. They were stealthy—as suddenly as they appeared, they faded away.

  I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to take my own life. Not only was I scared to do it, but there was some part of me urging me to fight. I knew the old me, the strong me, was somewhere, trying to get through.

  I found it difficult to make it through even an hour without breaking down, though. I was exhausted from crying and I was exhausted from trying not to cry. When I finally got out of bed, days after holding a gun in my mouth, I didn’t make it much farther than the carpeted floor by my bed. I’d been saying prayers to God since the day it all began, but on this day my approach to prayer was different. I actually knelt by my bed, put my elbows up on the edge of the mattress, clasped my hands together, and rested my forehead on my hands. I prayed a different kind of prayer. I began to speak to God out loud. As I forced words to come out of my mouth, I realized that my voice was scratchy and weak. I knew God would hear me even if I didn’t speak the words, but I wanted God to know that I was committed to my plea.