by Dave Kindred
He told her, “I’m in. I’m going to die before I’m thirty anyway. I might as well have fun doing it.”
They came to White Settlement, Texas, a Fort Worth suburb. That day, off the train and panhandling on a city street, Stray and Goblin made a discovery unfamiliar to travelin’ kids. A cop can be a human being. They weren’t certain of that until, stopped by a patrolman walking his beat, they decided to entertain him with what Stray called “our wet-brained stupidity and strange lifestyle choice.” The cop brought out his video camera to capture the travelers “singing GG Allin songs and acting wing-nut for his amusement, hoping it would buy us a get-out-of-jail-free card. Sure enough, he got off on our witty retorts and tone-deafness and gave us a bunch of coupons and a free pass to make whatever money we needed and then please leave the city’s streets safe for the civilian population.”
Afterward, Stray called an old friend, Dee, an Asian, her first road dog, and now a stripper, and told her, “Four of us just climbed off this steel death-ship machine. We’re looking to get housed up for a couple days.”
“Honey, you came to the right place,” Dee said.
The place had no electricity, no water, no nothing. Goblin, Feral, and Booze Cop brought in six half-gallons of vodka despite Stray’s warning that even a little alcohol would make Dee “go bat-shit crazy.” Which it did. For no apparent reason other than the shenanigans seemed inevitable, Dee did a striptease, screamed in Japanese, danced in dizzying circles, and closed the show by throwing acrylic paint all over the walls. That performance set off a fun-house melee with everyone face-slapping paint on everyone else. Soon enough, Goblin and Booze Cop found themselves turned upside down by the naked Dee, whose unseen attributes included a black belt in karate. At night’s end, the boys wore paints of many colors.
First thing the next morning, Stray’s crew caught out on a freight running north and east and moving them 217 miles to Texarkana. They rode in a “Viking ship,” a car with a porch that was big enough for all of them but also presented the terrifying possibility of sliding down the car’s side wings onto the track and under steel wheels turning at fifty miles per hour. A sudden storm dumped rain on the riders as they moved fifty-seven miles south, to Jefferson, Texas, where they disembarked by a bridge that crossed a lake and swamps. Soaking wet, tired of the cold, covered in chiggers, isolated by floodwaters, drinking cheap vodka for three days, they slept under that rickety, rusting-steel bridge. Slept? With eighteen-wheelers roaring overhead all night? Clink clank clunk bang bang, BANG BANG screeeeeech bang BANG. On the fourth morning, to preserve an ounce of sanity and a gram of dignity, the crew chose to walk through a swamp rather than endure another night of death-metal cacophony. They soon spotted a McDonald’s. “Civilization at last,” Stray said.
She announced they would next move to Shreveport, fifty-five miles south and east. There they hiked five miles into the city center, slogging through swamplands while the demon creature Feral scared Goblin with every step, telling him the swamp’s alligators could crawl up on the shoulder of the road and the bastards ran so fast on those short little legs that they could snatch off a hitchhiker’s leg before he saw the thing coming. For all the five miles, Goblin walked in the exact middle of the road. By the time they got into town, Feral needed to feed his addiction and split off from the group to find crack, Stray tagging along. Goblin and Booze Cop left the pair a note, “See ya in NOLA,” which was another 327 miles southeast. Jared and Booze Cop moved from Shreveport to Baton Rouge and on to New Orleans, hopping off at the Gentilly yard, six miles north of the Café du Monde, a long, happy walk for the boys who had left Los Angeles two months earlier and come more than two thousand miles. That night Goblin and Booze Cop met up with Stray, Feral, and another dozen travelin’ kids on a Mississippi River wharf.
The bonds you make out here are thicker than blood. It’s a family. We accept each other for who we are, no matter how weird it gets. Jared and me, we were together under bridges, drinkin’ bottles, rollin’ down the track, reminiscing life and times, and that’s what you get, true family, living life with a person on an everyday basis, not just on occasion. Next time I saw Jared was on the wharf in New Orleans. Two months we’d been on the road. He saw me, gave me that great big gorgeous smile he’s got, and he asked, “Got any Old Crow?”
On the wharf, there was bottom-shelf vodka and someone had a guitar, and the motley crew gathered cheek to cheek on the wooden steps in the chill of the night. They were homeless and happy, and Goblin snuggled against an old girlfriend named Lyndzy, a sprite from Asheville, North Carolina. She wore her hair in dreads, and they looked so much alike she might have passed for a sister he didn’t have. She had left home and an alcoholic father, looking for anyplace and anyone else. Lyndzy was fourteen when she walked into a liquor store and heard a clerk ask, “Are you looking for your parents, little girl?” She said, “If they cost $12.95 and live on the bottom shelf, yeah, I’m looking for my parents.”
Lyndzy first met Goblin in Savannah, Georgia. She thought he was “cool and smart and sweet and goofy.” They’d done a lot of hitchhiking together up and down the East Coast and across to New Orleans before losing touch. Now he had chased a different girl to San Diego and circled back to NOLA just as Lyndzy had rolled into town. As always, she drifted to the wharf for good times with old friends. There she saw Jared and shouted, “Goblin!” They embraced and she stood back to say, “Fuck me! Goblin, that tat! I love it! Maggie, come here, you gotta see this.”
Maggie was Lyndzy’s road dog. Over Lyndzy’s shoulder, Goblin saw her and didn’t move his eyes off her. She was small and pretty with faint tattoo lines on her cheekbones. She carried a mandolin. The instrument was an iridescent green that sparkled in the night’s flickering light. Not often on the road do you see a pretty girl with a mandolin. Jared would remember her if he saw her again.
“I’m Goblin,” he said to Maggie.
“Yeah, I heard Lyndzy,” Maggie said.
Whoever had the guitar played a chord, and Maggie lifted her green mandolin into place, and Jared and Stray and all the travelin’ kids sang the song they lived by, no hip-hop for them, but a rousing rendition of the hoboes’ national anthem:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
TWO
Jared’s story begins more truly not inside the thunder of a freight train in the southwestern night but on a soft, silent summer evening when Lynn Ann Sigda came to my desk, upstairs at our house in Georgia, where the windows were open and a breeze moved across the room carrying the sweet smell of magnolia trees.
I was writing. I was always writing. By Lynn’s account, she had been standing by my desk for some time, waiting, before she dared speak.
At last she said, “Can I interrupt?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Is it okay with you,” she said, “if Jeff and I get married?”
The next words spoken were ones I had never imagined saying. “Sure,” I said, “and I hope you have twins tomorrow, a boy and a girl.”
Me, a grandfather? Really? I wanted it that much? Me? Grandfathers are old, decrepit men. They’re not young, strong guys like me. They get called Gramps. I never knew my grandfathers. Dad’s dad died young, long before my birth. Mom’s father had been kicked to the curb, and I saw him only on the street outside Grandma Lena’s tavern when he sneaked me a dime for ice cream. Being a father was hard enough. A grandfather? Someday maybe, when I was really old and had time to kill between whittlings. Yet here was a girl who’d come to Georgia to ask us—Cheryl and me—if she
might marry our son. And before I understood what was happening, I was imagining the fun of what could come next.
Jeff and Lynn were married in April 1986. I remember the day in the way that workaholic sportswriters remember important life events. It was the Sunday of the Masters golf tournament. I had covered every Masters for twenty years. That day, however, as the father of the groom, I knew nothing of the Masters until I turned on the television at eight o’clock and heard, “Jack Nicklaus today shot a sixty-five to…” Which caused me to say, “Oh, shit.” Nicklaus had created Masters history by winning, at age forty-six, one more major championship.
I have recovered from that collision of life events—mostly because I liked Lynn. She had been one of those Kewpie doll gymnasts bouncing around in imitation of Olga Korbut, the Russians’ 1972 Olympic darling. To say Lynn loved some derring-do is to underestimate her sense of adventure. At twenty-five, she rode motorcycles, tended bar, answered to “Hey, Tiger,” and had spent a month in jail for selling weed to an undercover cop. “Damn narc entrapped me,” she said. “He begged me for weeks until I found a source.”
There was also the day she swam into a river to save some cats. Her fellow workers at a seafood restaurant along the Occoquan River in suburban Washington, DC, saw a man stop his car on the Route 123 bridge and drop a cardboard box over the railing. They saw it splash down and then saw cats flailing in the water. They did what anyone would do if they knew Tiger. They started shouting, “Hey, Tiger, Tiger! Do something!” They knew she was the resident cat lady, with six of her own at home. They also knew she would do something.
In the water about halfway to the cats, Tiger realized she was well dressed for serving customers but not for swimming. “My jeans were getting heavy,” she said. The cats—a mother and three kittens—had caught onto a concrete pillar in midstream. She handed two to a man in a boat, then began swimming back to shore with the other two. Worn out, she thought to ask for help. Not that she often asked God for anything. She believed in God, she just didn’t make a big deal out of it. But there comes a time when God comes to mind, and this was such a time for Tiger, who remembered saying, out loud, “God, please don’t let me drown. I haven’t had any babies yet.”
Lynn later told me the cat-rescue story as preamble to the day’s news: “Remember what you said when I asked if I could marry Jeff? It’s happening. A boy and a girl.”
A second sonogram corrected the record. It would be two boys. We drove to Virginia the week after their birth. Jared and Jacob were wrapped in blue swaddling blankets and turned face-to-face in their basket, their hands touching. Jared’s hands, tiny as they were, suggested my father’s thick carpenter hands. Cheryl placed Jared and Jacob on my arms, and I took them into my heart forever.
The next day a friend called.
“Gramps,” he said, “it’s nine o’clock. Shouldn’t you be having your milk and cookies and be headed for bed?”
“Tom,” I said, “it’s amazing.”
For the first time, I understood what a miracle life is. Yes, I was a father and I’d held my son that way. Hadn’t I? Surely I had held my son in my arms just as I held my son’s sons. But I had no memory of such a moment. I was twenty-two years old then, a kid myself. Me, a father? That wasn’t on my list of ambitions, and yet there it was. But now? A grandfather? A miracle, twice over—those babies were proof certain of life’s wonders. I looked down on them, tiny and perfect, one on each arm, and I prayed they would find joy forever and ever, amen.
A grandfather? Me? Hooray. Beyond putting me in the presence of miracles, the babies gave me a second chance of sorts at fatherhood. I was a newspaper reporter and columnist, home only when I couldn’t find a story, always writing or thinking about writing, absent in every room even when present. Maybe I could get life right as a grandfather. I indulged myself in imaginings of life with the grandsons. I would see Jared and Jacob fall and rise. They would kick ground balls and drive in winning runs. They would read Shakespeare, rock with Springsteen, and chase pretty girls until the right one caught them. To cradle my son’s sons on my arms was to imagine a world without end, for the twins would be eighteen when I was sixty-five and they would be sixty-five with grandchildren of their own when I was gone. Of course, because writers write, those imaginings were put to work in my column. For Christmas Day, seventeen days after their birth, I wrote that Jared and Jacob “had made it healthy through the first daring steps of a long journey that will be full of hope and peril, sadness and joy.”
I began a campaign to bring Jeff, Lynn, Jared, and Jacob to Newnan, Georgia, a lovely little town just south of Atlanta. The stars were aligned. Across the street from us, a house was for sale. The Ford dealership in town needed a mechanic, Jeff’s dream job. On Virginia’s gray, chilly, rainy days, I called my son and daughter-in-law to report that it was bright and warm on our pool deck. Later they would say they moved south because, as first-time parents, and with twins besides, they thought they might need help. It’s just as likely they moved so Gramps would shut up about it.
We had moved to Newnan four years earlier. I had been the Washington Post’s sports columnist in the Hollywood years when the newspaper was so famous that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman made a movie about its Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men. Some of the Post’s glow rubbed off on me in a way that caused the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to offer me a job. One of my Post bosses thought to end such conversation by invoking prestige. “There’s psychic income here,” he said. “You move with the heavy hitters.”
When the Atlanta managing editor, Ed Sears, came to DC, we met at a hotel so fancy it had a woman in diaphanous white finery, apparently an angel, plucking at a harp in a high alcove in its luncheon room.
I asked Sears, “Did you hire the harpist?”
“Wish I’d thought of it,” he said.
The day I decided to leave the Post, that psychic-income-preaching boss came to my office door.
“Bad for you,” he said, “and bad for the paper.”
“Just something I felt I had to do.”
“Yeah, like the Baptist preacher following the call of God to more money,” he said, as if the poor, pitiable Post were some going-broke rag. Maybe a decade earlier, I had asked Red Smith, my hero and the best sports columnist ever, why he had never written a memoir. “I’m saving it in case I get fired,” he said. I expected a laugh. There was none, and I decided that if Red Smith worried about the future, I ought to worry too.
So we traded the nation’s capital for the county seat of Coweta County. Cheryl was happy to get out of Washington. “Everybody thinks they’re so damned important,” she said. Newnan had its share of self-important people. But when the mayor’s name is Gandy and he drives around town in a Cadillac with a deer-hunter’s stand attached to the grill, it’s the kind of important that can be tolerated. The mayor also had a possum etched into a tooth, an etching he requested in a moment of envy after a fishing friend showed off a molar with a trout.
You couldn’t go farther south than Newnan and get any more southern. In the DC suburbs, Cheryl and I had never met a neighbor. In our first week in Newnan, a young woman from across the street studied a picture of Abraham Lincoln on our living room wall. “It’s okay, I guess,” she told Cheryl. “Y’all are Yankees.”
That summer I watched a Ku Klux Klan rally on the courthouse square and asked an old black man about the chrome-handled revolver shining at his belt. “Had ’er a long time,” he said, and I counted that as his opinion of the Klan. I never met Scout’s sainted Atticus Finch in Newnan, but I did imagine her Boo Radley in every shadowed corner. I quickly learned that the Civil War—known in Newnan as “the War of Northern Aggression”—was a fresh wound. A store clerk once turned down my $50 bill. “We don’t take that here,” she said even as she took the bill bearing the likeness of Ulysses S. Grant. Our neighbors included a corporate lawyer, a portrait artist, a professional photographer, two airline pilots, the mayor of Newnan, and Miss Lill
ian, a skeletal old bat in a ratty house dress who thought to spy on the invading Yankees from behind a stop sign at the corner of College and Wesley Streets.
We lived three blocks from the town square. Our house was a Victorian with a wraparound porch that could have accommodated a Confederate encampment. Rising above the roofline, a spire topped a turret room. The house was too ostentatious by half and too expensive even before considering the money-pit problems that come with a structure a century old. We hadn’t been looking for a castle. But now that it had found us, we moved in.
Cheryl and I were forty-two years old. We felt like we were starting over.
We met in high school. She had moved from the next town over and immediately became the prettiest girl in Atlanta High School. She was also a member of the National Honor Society. I say I “met” her because surely we met in a school that had only twenty-eight students in its senior class. I just don’t remember meeting her. I mean, what would I have said to a smart, pretty girl? I knew batting averages, not girls. I would never have said a word if my sister, Sandra, hadn’t insisted I ask Cheryl for a date. I guess I did, and it likely involved a 19-cent ticket to the Palace Theater followed by a milkshake at Louie Deuterman’s restaurant next door. I have no memory of a date, though I do remember a moment. The other night, a lifetime later, the moon reminded me of that moment. I had gone out for a walk. It was a warm night in August. The moon, a half-moon, sat high behind thin clouds. On that kind of night, in 1958, I first asked Cheryl if I could kiss her.
The next spring, a matchmaking English teacher, Clarice Swinford, cast Cheryl and me as the romantic leads in our senior class play, It’s a Great Life. Cheryl was a debutante, I was a doctor. In the last scene, we kissed. (Extracurricular rehearsals became mandatory.) A great life: Cheryl became my wife, the mother of our son, a renovator of historic houses, and the charge nurse in a locked men’s ward at a private psychiatric hospital. (Think One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) A great life: We walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and we had dinner in the Eiffel Tower. We drank tea in London, wine in San Francisco, and beer in Munich. We slept in Zürich, Madrid, Rome, and Stockholm. We saw the ovens at Dachau and Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome. We lived in Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia, each of our homes made distinctive by Cheryl’s work, taste, and eclectic style that she called “Early Barn.” All of it was done with common sense, uncommon decency, and an inexhaustible tolerance of my failings.
