Life in rural Illinois is tough even if you’re not moving every five minutes and running scams to stay alive. Everybody there struggles. Outside of farming, which is one of the hardest lives imaginable, there isn’t much around there that could pass for a local economy. The best you can hope for, if you don’t feel tied to the place and the people, is to latch on to some kind of skill or career that can take you out of there.
If you stay, your options are damn few. You’re going to be a pig farmer or a corn farmer, or you’re down at a diner or truck stop flipping eggs, or you’re an auto mechanic working in a small shop in your backyard, or a hod-carrier, or you’re pouring drinks down at Hoosier Daddy’s. At least while I was growing up, everyone was pretty much in the same boat—barely making it and trying to deal with all the side effects of barely making it, like alcohol, divorce, and despair.
Like in most people’s lives, there were good times and there were bad times. During the good times, when work was plentiful and the cash was flowing, we might move into a nice-sized house and feel almost like the people we’d see in the TV commercials serving Pillsbury biscuits in the kitchen or washing the new car in the driveway. During the bad times, I felt more like the homeless people you see on the six o’clock news. I remember, between houses or trailers, sleeping in the back of a pickup truck, more than once. The truck would have a camper shell on the back and we’d crawl into sleeping bags and call it a night. During those hard times, though, I never felt like a victim. I felt like a survivor. I knew things would change—they always did—and I was just anxious to keep moving and maybe find a place, for whatever length of time, where I could take a deep breath and try to enjoy where I was.
One day when I was about six, my mother’s husband decided that he wanted to move to Miami, Florida. He had an uncle down there who could line him up with some prospects and, according to my mom, he saw it as a way to get away from all our in-laws in Southern Illinois so my mother wouldn’t have anyone to run to when things got rough. In Miami, we were completely surrounded by strangers, often strangers who couldn’t speak English, and completely dependent on my stepfather for guidance and protection. Which is exactly how he liked it.
Even in southern Florida, we never sat still for long. In the five or six times we relocated there, we lived in South Miami, North Miami, and Coral Gables, among other scenic stops. Not only did we impulsively move from Greenville, Illinois, to Dade County, Florida, when things got tough, we’d often live in three different places in Florida in a six- or seven-month period. It was a way of life.
I could see why my mother wanted to live in Miami—she was still very young and wanted the wild Miami lifestyle of the 1980s. To Josh and me, it was pure culture shock. We didn’t move to postcard Miami; we moved to trailer-park Miami, a far different world than the one of the South Beach partygoers celebrated on Entertainment Tonight. We often lived down there among the lowest-income Cuban refugees you could find. At one point, our next-door neighbor was an old Cuban gentleman named Flaco. Flaco and his wife were in their seventies and kind of took Josh and me under their wing, for a little while anyway. They had a pet parrot that spoke Spanish. They were kind of a substitute for the grandparents we had left behind in Illinois.
The trailer park where we and Flaco lived was a big one—maybe four-hundred trailers in one enclosed area. It was way, way out of Miami, almost in the Everglades. It’s where civilization ended. Our rent-a-trailer was small—twelve by sixty—and housed four of us. It had a screened-off porch where Josh and I played Nintendo by the hour and even played pool on a pint-sized pool table. The pool cue would always be hitting a wall, making it impossible to really shoot, but we did it anyway.
Flaco made his living by selling roses on the street. His trailer was only a bush line away from a big intersection, so he would simply hop over his fence every day, grab a bucket of roses from his wife, and peddle them to the cars stopped at the red light. Even at his age, he stood out there in that traffic for hours on end. Again, this wasn’t fun-loving Miami. Flaco rarely hung out at the beach and neither did I. In the on-and-off four or five years we lived in South Florida, I bet I can count on one hand the number of times I went to the beach.
Miami and Southern Illinois were two completely different worlds, like living on Earth one day and Mars the next. And making the transition back and forth was always weird. I’d go from hanging out with a bunch of Spanish-speaking motorcycle friends at Lowman’s Plaza in Miami at twelve or thirteen to sitting under the bleachers at a high school football game in Illinois with some fresh-faced country boy trying to get to first base. The boy in the bleachers had never been anywhere as far as one county over and had a curfew. The guys in Miami were adept at surviving in all kinds of worlds, Cuban and American, and didn’t know what a curfew was—they couldn’t even pronounce the word. In fact, they couldn’t even say my name. They called me “G.”
I had no choice but try to fit in as best I could in both worlds. I learned enough Spanish so that I could understand my math teacher; her English was so bad that teaching in Spanish made more sense. Even today, I know enough Spanish that if I’m in a restaurant and some guys are talking trash in the next booth in Spanish, I can understand them and lip off to them in their own language. They always freak out.
Shifting back and forth between these places was always disorienting and often painful. It was very hard trying to grow up and come into your adolescence not knowing where the hell you were, let alone who the hell you were. Looking back, I can now see that the experience of living in Florida may have opened me up in ways that a more grounded existence in rural Illinois wouldn’t have. It gave me both a familiarity and a curiosity about the rest of the world, maybe even a taste for the new and exotic.
Many people growing up in small-town Midwestern America have no real sense of the world beyond their immediate surroundings. They are often fearful of the larger world and figure that if they ventured out, they’d be like the proverbial rube in the big city—scared, gullible, and an easy mark. At the very least, they think, they’ll get robbed and beaten for just walking down the wrong street. The city, any city, is foreign territory.
I learned early in life that the big city was often strange and different, but no more intimidating than downtown Pocahontas on a Saturday night. Both Josh and I often had to fend for ourselves in the urban environment of Miami while our parents were having a good time or plotting the next move. And as with all the other obstacles that were thrown in our path as kids, we survived just fine.
No matter where we were—Illinois or Florida—our family life was a constant merry-go-round of feast and famine. In Florida, for instance, with my mom working full-time at Tony Roma’s and her husband hitting a good streak in the deck- or dock-building business, we’d have a little spending cash. In a gesture of living large and probably stroking his own ego, my stepfather would go out and buy my mom a brand-new used car for her birthday. Two weeks later he’d have to sell the same car to pay the rent or to underwrite our next move out of the area. Perhaps that car would finance our way back to Illinois and another town, another trailer, and another short-term job to keep food on the table.
People often think kids don’t see the stress and anxiety in their parents’ lives or even if they do see it, can just roll with it and not be affected. In my experience, that is nonsense. Josh and I picked up on everything. We were smart enough to see that our school friends didn’t live like this, assuming we made any school friends in the three or four months we spent at any one school. We knew that it was weird to suddenly move into an apartment or trailer on the first of the month and be out of there before the next rent check was due. We knew that when my mom announced that we were off to Miami again and followed it with “we’re going to stay in one place and your dad’s got a great new job and this time it’s going to be different”—we knew it wasn’t going to be a bit different. After a while, of course, we’d pack up and leave with my mom making no such promises of a new life
right around the next corner. She realized we weren’t buying that line of BS after hearing it a dozen times. We all knew the truth: that life was a damn mess all the time.
And most of all, we could see and feel the abuse. My stepfather was never a big drinker, a drug user, or even a cigarette smoker, but he was often violent and abusive, especially toward my mother. My mom lived in fear from the moment she married the man. The verbal abuse never stopped and the physical abuse was always one sassy comeback away. As she sees it now, my mom describes her whole existence as like being in an embryo position—curled up and cowering. For most of those sixteen years she saw herself as weak and powerless. He had her in a psychological prison.
Mom, only in her early twenties when the abuse became constant, didn’t know what to do. As she’s said many times, she was too scared to get out of this awful situation. Especially after moving to Miami, she was completely alone in fending off his attacks as well as trying to shield her two children from his wrath. She did call the police a few times when she felt her life was in jeopardy, but then was too scared to press charges or use the incident to get as far away from him as possible. The police themselves would bring him up on assault-and-battery and he would do time in the county jail, but the sentences never lasted that long and when he got out, my mom would be there to take him back in.
This kind of relationship is an ugly, unbroken cycle of intimidation and compromise and only the people who have lived through it can understand it. And of course, ours wasn’t the only household in America where this cycle is a simple fact of daily life. All you have to do is tune into Oprah or Dr. Phil to know the widespread reach of domestic abuse in America.
My mom did try to escape this torment five or six times in their long marriage. On occasion, she would put Josh and me in the car in Miami and head back home for the love and support of her family. But he was always one step ahead of her. Before she got back to Pocahontas, he would have taken a flight from Miami and be there to greet her at the door. Then he would use his vast storehouse of charm and BS to lure her back, all the time telling her the same lie she was constantly telling us, i.e., “this time it’ll be different.”
Or, if that didn’t work, he’d resort to pure intimidation. He’d tell her straight out that if she didn’t come back, he was going to kill her, her two kids, her mom and dad, and any other jackass who dared to step in and tell him how to treat his wife or live his life. And she believed him. She had no doubt that he had the capacity to eliminate anyone who got in his way.
My mom tried to show us a normal childhood amidst all this craziness and fear. In Illinois, she signed us up for Little League baseball and kept us close to the loving influence of my blood relatives. In Miami, she kept me busy doing kid things. At times I felt like I was off to a different after-school activity every day of the week—Monday, ballet lessons; Tuesday, gymnastics; Wednesday, tap; and so on. I’ll never forget this dance studio in Miami run by this Cuban woman named Miss Jerry. My only English-speaking friend there at the time, Amber, and I were all of five years old and scared to death of Miss Jerry. She would never harm us, but she was strong and assertive in a way that I rarely saw other women, especially my mom. She definitely left an impression.
Throughout all the confusion of growing up on the move, my saving grace, then as now, was my family. When we were located anywhere in Southern Illinois, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, my Uncle Vern, only six years older, and my Aunt Vickie. They were my escape from the tension of living with my mom and even though their lives were occasionally pretty nuts, they seemed normal and stable compared to mine. I did things with them that remain some of the fondest memories of my childhood, whether picking wild berries with my grandma in the woods behind her trailer or learning to ride a motorbike with Uncle Vern. It didn’t take a village to raise me, but it took the love of my extended family to help me survive and grow.
When I was twelve, for instance, we were living in Miami and my mom thought I was running a little too wild with the urban kids I hung with. She was also having a particularly tough time with her husband and trying to leave him for the third or fourth time. So she packed me up and sent me back to Pocahontas, or Pokey, for the summer to live with my Aunt Vickie and her then husband, Eric Simmonds.
My Aunt Vickie was, and still is, a hard worker. For a lot of her adult life, she was a welder. She welded airplane parts at a sub-factory in St. Louis for use in military planes made by McDonnell Douglas in the same area. She drove to St. Louis every workday for twenty years. Depending on the exact location of her home at the time, it was an hour or so in and an hour or so back. Both she and Eric got up at 4:30 every morning to make the long trek into the city. She spent half her time welding steel and half her timing applying spray paint. She’s probably filled her lungs with plenty of noxious fumes.
So I went to live with Aunt Vickie that summer and what a great summer it was! Vickie and Eric lived in a double-wide trailer at the time and had a couple of kids. My job was to watch the kids during the day and have fun the rest of the time. A lot of that fun revolved around Eric’s major passion in life—racing stock cars.
Saturday nights in the summertime was racing season around there. There was a quarter-mile, all-dirt track in Highland, a much bigger town than Pokey, and a huge crowd would gather there every Saturday night to drink, fight, drink some more, and watch their local favorites speed around in the dirt. Eric drove street stock—cars called “bombers”—which was the down-and-dirty class at the Highland Racetrack. He had one old Chevy that he raced and a garage bigger than his home to work on it. The car looked like crap but the engine was a masterpiece. When he wasn’t working or racing, he was out in that garage working on his car. If half the men in the area on any given night were knocking back a can of Busch in a local tavern, the other half were in some buddy’s garage, knocking back a can of Busch and arguing about carburetors and spark plugs.
The races were a trip. You’d drive over to the track at Highland and sit in a great big tin-covered bleacher seat with chicken-wire fencing separating you from the track. For most people, it was like a big outdoor party every Saturday night, an excuse to get sloshed with their friends, cheer on their next-door neighbor, and forget about all the problems waiting back home. The drunk and disorderly would slip and fall into each other’s laps or spill beer down the back of each other’s shirt. The whole arena was one big mosh pit.
And the fights were worth the price of admission alone. Especially in the bomber class, there was a crash on almost every spin and every crash would foment an argument in the stands. The worst offenders tended to be the wives of the race drivers themselves, women like my Aunt Vickie. Wife #1 would say something about her husband getting rear-ended by someone else’s husband—“Why that dumb-ass SOB just ran into my husband!”—and wife #2 would leap over fifteen people to beat the crap out of #1. The stock car wives were a breed apart. I always thought there was a great movie about the wild lives of small-town stock car wives—along the lines of that movie about the murdering moms of Texas high school cheerleaders. These ladies of the track were a tough bunch of broads.
One photograph I still have and cherish sums up the sheer fun of going to those races for me. It’s a picture of Vickie and Eric’s son, Matt, my cousin, who today is still close by as one of the people working on my farm in Tennessee. Vickie, Matt, and I are in the stands at the races, watching Eric race his beat-up Chevy. Matt, all of eighteen months old, is sitting on his mom’s lap. He’s got on a hippie wig, is wearing earplugs to mute the tremendous noise of the cars, dressed in a diaper, and sporting an unlit cigarette in his mouth. At that moment, we were all in the Southern Illinois version of hillbilly heaven.
Along with watching others race around a track, I first learned to drive a truck that summer in Pocahontas. And an even bigger milestone took place—I drank my first beer.
One night Eric took off with his stock car buddies to drink and act up and he left Aunt Vickie home with me
. Vickie was mad as hell. As the two of us sat around the kitchen table, cussing out Eric, I decided to light up a cigarette, a habit I had recently picked up from my Cuban pals in Miami. Vickie, at that point a nonsmoker, was shocked. “A cigarette? You’re only twelve!” I told her I’d teach her how to smoke a cigarette if she would let me have a beer. She was just in the right mood to say yes. We then proceeded to go out to Eric’s shed, steal his cooler of Busch, drink every last one of them, and stack the empties in a pyramid on the table for him to see. Although I didn’t feel too good the next morning from all the beer and cigarettes, the whole experience was a whole lot of fun and something Vickie and I laugh about to this day.
How did my mom handle such a long-term abusive relationship? Unable, like many abused women, to walk away, she tried every way she could to block it out and numb herself from the fear and violence. She started working all night in a bar in Miami while her husband was between jobs. Before long she was hooked on cocaine and drinking heavily, addictions that weakened and tormented her for years. This only aggravated an already desperate situation and made her both more dependent on him and less able to take care of Josh and me. She was unhappy, depressed, and, in her own words, a broken person. And she pretty much remained this way until my stepfather was completely out of her life and she could finally see what a mess she had become.
The effect of all of this on me was pretty apparent: I had to develop a pretty thick skin—Vern likes to say that I became “bulletproof.” What he means by this is that, at least in my dealings with the outside world, I grew a protective shield to ward off an attack, either emotional or physical. Like many women who grew up in circumstances like mine, I developed a wariness about who to trust and who not to trust. I didn’t let someone get to know me or tell them anything personal until I was assured that they weren’t going to take that information and turn it against me. I was the opposite of a sheltered, pampered child. I was never someone’s little princess or “Daddy’s little girl.” Early on in life, I had what you might call a real hard edge.
Redneck Woman Page 2
