Uncle Vern likes to tell stories about how he saw this in me when I was still a tomboy growing up in Pokey. Because we were only a few years apart in age—he was an afterthought, my grandma used to say—Vern was often my principal playmate—and tormentor. I used to shadow him constantly and he was always looking for ways to tease or test me. One of his favorite memories along this line happened when I was five or six. My grandpa grew hot peppers in the garden he had at the time. They were so hot that all you had to do was smell them and your eyes would start watering. So Vern saw me playing in the garden one day and figured it was time to introduce me to the world of tongue-burning peppers. He broke a pod in half and told me to stick it in my mouth. Which of course I did, because even at five, I was game for damn near anything.
His mom—my grandma—was washing dishes in the trailer and heard my bloodcurdling screams (I already had a strong voice). She came running out of the house with a wooden ladle and whacked Vern on the head for what seemed like forever. Vern claims that was the only time she ever laid a hand on him. All I know is that I never bite into a pepper today without thinking about how Vern introduced me to my first one.
Part of whatever bulletproofing I developed had to do with being raised in the country where kids had a lot of time to just screw around and had few places to do so. Vern’s idea of a good time back then was to knock me down, get on top of me, pin me to the ground, work up a giant slimy hocker in his mouth, then get real close to my face, and proceed to shoot it right at me, then pull back at the very last second. Or he’d give me Indian burns until the skin would start to peel off my arm. Or, after he learned to ride a motorbike, he’d find his sweet little game-for-anything niece, stick me in a Radio Flyer wagon attached with a telephone cord to his 175 hp Kawasaki, and take off down a back country road going sixty miles an hour. Vern was a thrill-seeker and tried his best to turn me into one. I’d say he succeeded.
Also, Vern was a star athlete as a teenager. He played football and baseball in school at Greenville and was known by everyone who followed local sports. When he graduated from high school, he was offered a full scholarship from Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville to play baseball. His dad said, “Sorry, we ain’t got enough money for gas,” and that was that. For lack of gas money, Vern was denied a free college education. He got a job in the masonry business and started hauling bricks for a living.
A budding jock myself, I was always bugging him to play catch with me and as he got stronger and stronger, the pitches came faster and faster. By his mid-teens he was whizzing sixty- and seventy-mile fastballs at my head and though it scared the hell out of me, Vern claims I never walked away. I’d put the glove right in front of my face and take whatever he was throwing.
I don’t think I would’ve had any of these experiences with testing my limits if I’d grown up in the suburbs. You can get toughened by economic stress or people around you who abuse or mistreat you, but you also toughen up by taking risks. There is some connection, at least in my head, between taking that hot pepper from Vern and refusing to give up in the face of a lot of rejection when I got to Nashville. In both cases, you learn to take it and keep going.
Given the craziness surrounding me, I had to grow up fast. I had to walk into a new school in a new town every few months and devise a way to fit in and make the most of it. I had to fend off Cuban boys one day and whoop it up with good ol’ boys the next. It takes an entirely different set of social skills to order lunch in those two worlds, let alone make friends and avoid enemies.
My first real boyfriend was an Italian man from Miami named Christopher Salvatore Leone. He ran a pool hall with his father on Byrd Road in South Miami. He was a cross between Rocky Balboa and Tony Danza—exotic, fun-loving, and tough. The relationship didn’t last that long, but long enough to upset my grandpa. He especially hated Italians for some strange reason, maybe because they were Catholics or seemed to be having too good a time in life. My grandma, on the other hand, loved them all, even the New York mobster types. I, a crazy-ass hillbilly girl of thirteen or fourteen, had to figure it out all by myself. Without the guidance from an often spaced-out mother and a completely uncaring stepfather, I had to figure out how to handle many of the common problems of growing up. I also had to watch out for Josh, my little brother. And, given her state of helplessness and addiction, I often had to be the mother to my own mother.
The final episode in the sixteen-year-long saga of my mama and my hellish stepfather came after I had left home at fifteen and moved back to Illinois from Miami to live on my own. My mother and her husband had moved back soon after that, and my mom, in another fit of common sense, had separated from him again, hopefully for the last time. At the time she and Josh were living in Pocahontas with her parents, my grandma and grandpa, and Mom was tending bar at a tavern nearby. Her now estranged husband was living in a trailer in Collinsville, a few miles down the road.
As my mom tells the story, one afternoon he showed up at the bar where she was working and demanded that she accompany him back to his place in Collinsville. When she refused, he just pulled her into the car and took off. He drove to his trailer, threw her inside, and locked the doors. He had essentially kidnapped her and had no intention of letting her go until he vented his rage.
When I pulled up to the trailer, she came running out, panicked and completely naked for all the neighbors to see. She jumped in my car and we sped away from her irate husband. We immediately drove to the nearest hospital to have her examined. While we were sitting in the emergency room, her husband burst into the hospital and was ready to finish the job he had started in the trailer. Thank God hospital security and the police took over at this point, jumped him, and hauled him off to jail.
My mom went back to her parents’ home to stay and my grandpa now had his shotgun cocked and ready in case the jerk decided to drop by and “patch things up” for the four hundredth time. Finally the court handed down a substantial sentence for terrorizing my mom—thirty-two days in the Madison County jail. It wasn’t nearly enough time to justify what he had done over so many years, but it was apparently sufficient for him to finally give up and leave us all alone. He never really bothered my mom again after that.
To this day, my brother, Josh, still finds a place in his heart for this man. Maybe Josh is the one person in the family he managed not to hurt.
I feel differently, of course. I feel like a large chunk of my childhood was damaged by that marriage. My mom shares some of the responsibility, of course. I think she did the best she could under some horrible circumstances. But, hey, I’m a redneck woman, remember, and I grew up a redneck girl. I’m “Pocahontas Proud,” and as I say in that song, “You know, where I come from, we don’t give up easily.” I had plenty of strong people to help me keep going and not give up during my strange childhood, and the strongest of them all was my grandma.
CHAPTER 2
THE ROCK
I knocked on every door on Music Row
But they looked down at me and said “Girl go back home”
You ain’t got what we need in this town
But they couldn’t whup the fighting side of me
You know, where I come from, we don’t give up easily
“Pocahontas Proud”
The strongest, most dependable, most reliable people in my life have been women. I can’t really explain it, but when I was growing up in rural Illinois, a lot of men were troubled, irresponsible, or in their own male world. They were often more of the problem than the solution. I’m no man-hater—far from it—but from a very early age I learned that if you ever expected a man to step in and make your life run more smoothly, you could be setting yourself up for a big heartache. In my experience, not only does a woman not need a man to “complete” herself, she can often get much further along in life without one, or at least certain ones.
Where I came from, the women were simply a lot tougher and more resilient than most of the men. Many of the women would work at an outs
ide job all day—everything from waitressing to farming to road-building—and then come home and do all of the cooking, all the housework, and all the child-rearing. The guys around there didn’t know the first thing about washing a dish or adding bleach to a load of laundry. They’d do their own job all day, then come home and expect to be waited on by everyone else in the house. When I tended bar at Big O’s Tavern in Pierron, Illinois, I’d see these women come by for a drink and maybe shoot some pool. By the time they got to the bar, they’d already put in two days’ worth of work in one day and they were in no mood to put up with any crap from any guy in the place. One smart remark and they’d be ready to bash the guy’s head in. Literally.
I continue to have a very high regard for the strong, resourceful women who choose this life of work and family and have the guts and determination to pull it off. There was one woman in particular who epitomized this self-sufficient streak. Her name was Diane Jackson. When I was young, my Uncle Vern and I would spend a lot of time down at Diane’s house. She lived in a mobile home about a mile and a half down the road from our trailer. She and her husband, Jerry, an auto mechanic, had four or five boys and one girl, named Melissa. Vern and Jeff, one of her boys, were best friends and I just tagged along to start trouble. Even with all those kids, Diane was always happy to see us. The family lived in two mobile homes sitting next to each other. They were welded together, I think, the back door of one leading right into the front door of the other. The kids lived in one of the homes and Diane and Jerry lived in the other one. And these weren’t showroom trailers, either. They were beat up pretty badly.
Vern and I liked to go down there not only because of all the kids to play with, but also because they had an above-ground swimming pool behind their place. I don’t know how in the hell they afforded that, but they did. None of us could afford air-conditioning, so on a hot summer day, we’d head to the Jackson pool. It was an absolute luxury.
Jerry Jackson was a little guy, probably around five feet six and weighed no more than a buck twenty. Diane was short but very heavy. And she was a dynamo. On any given day of the week, you’d walk into her house and the scene would be pretty much the same. Her youngest boy, probably three or four, would have a pacifier in his mouth and a diaper on his bottom and be hanging on Diane like a monkey. She had really short red hair that she kept in pigtails, wore no makeup, and would usually be dressed in nothing but a great big Cross Your Heart bra and a pair of spandex shorts. It was invariably hot in those trailers and Diane dressed for comfort.
So you’d walk in and there she’d be, dressed in her bra and shorts, wrangling kids and usually talking on the phone. She had a phone with an extra-long cord that could reach all over both trailers and she would lug the receiver around, yakking away, as she was doing fourteen other things. Her main activity was usually frying cheeseburgers. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it seemed, she’d be standing over a hot stove, frying cheeseburgers. She was feeding eight to ten people all the time, not to mention the likes of Vern and me dropping by at suppertime, and she was usually so busy that she didn’t have time to dress, let alone sit down, have a cocktail, and watch the evening news.
Nobody’s ever heard of Diane Jackson, but she was a huge part of my life and an inspiration to be around. She ran the whole show. That whole household would’ve fallen completely apart if she had gotten a cold or decided to take a day off. Two trailersful of people depended on her in every way and she assumed the responsibility like that’s the way God intended things to be. She didn’t really have time to question her life. She was too busy frying up a new batch of cheeseburgers.
Jerry was a good man, as far as I know, but like many of the men I grew up around, he was silent and withdrawn. They didn’t talk much. They’d just do their job and come in at the end of the day full of grease and smelling like a workingman. They’d eat their supper, drink their two beers, and then go to bed, ready to get up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. You’d hardly hear anything out of them. They were just happy to be breathing. I’m not kidding. They were lucky that their wife didn’t kill them in the middle of the night. And many were exceedingly lucky to have a wife like Diane who kept things together.
A lot of these strong, self-defined women were farmer’s wives. My best friend in kindergarten was a girl named Nancy Gaffner and her parents ran a large-scale dairy farm. Nancy was one of five or six kids and they lived in a ranch-style home with a big basement that seemed like a mansion to me at the time. Everyone worked on the farm, keeping the milk flowing, and Nancy’s mom, Edith, a short, Susie-Homemaker-looking woman, worked like a dog to make sure the whole family stayed focused, healthy, and fed. All I saw her do every time I visited was cook and clean. Sounds boring, but it was absolutely critical to keeping the family enterprise going and she approached it like a mission. Three times a day the family would come in from the farm at a set time and a feast would await them. For breakfast, for instance, it was homemade biscuits and gravy and grits and bacon and eggs and sausage. The crew would come in, eat until they were full, and get back to the cows. They hardly spoke, including Edith. They were farm people. They didn’t have time for idle chitchat. They had work to do.
What struck me about Edith, even as a little kid, was the high level of respect in which she was held by the rest of the family. She never had to ask anyone to take off their hat or clean up before sitting down to eat. She never had to ask anyone to remember to say grace. In her quiet, unassuming way, she demanded respect and she got it. Her authority didn’t come from any external power. It came from inside, simply by the way she conducted herself. And as an example of dignity, she left a permanent impression on me.
My grandma, Frances Oneida Heuer, was the most solid person in our entire family. She was the rock, the stone. Her husband, my grandfather Vernon, was, for a good part of his life, a one-legged alcoholic with a nasty outlook on things and a general dislike for humanity. He spent years engaged in the time-wasting practice of drinking from eight o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock every night, then griping and bitching at anyone within shouting distance, then going to bed.
My grandma had a mysterious past. Her maiden name, Storey, was given to her when she was adopted by a woman who ran a home for wayward girls in Peoria, Illinois. Grandma was an orphan. She never knew the identity of either her biological mother or father. Her birth certificate was made when she was ten years old, so even its authenticity is in doubt. Our whole family has done a fair amount of investigation into her origins and we never came up with any definitive answers. My grandmother’s theory, which she believed in deeply, was that her adoptive mother’s brother was her real father and that her real mother was a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old runaway who was staying in their home in Peoria at the time of her birth. Though there is no hard evidence to back this up, Grandma held on to this belief about her origins until the day she died.
My grandma kept her most valued keepsakes in a small jewelry box, a little wooden treasure chest with lion’s heads on the front that I have held on to and cherished to this day. Among her meager possessions in that box were photos of her supposed father, whose name was Burt Wells, along with his death certificate and a newspaper clipping announcing his death. She felt her adoptive mother raised her out of guilt more than love. Her adoptive mother, she’d like to tell us, was hardly the nurturing maternal type. She was the kind of woman, Grandma would say, who would send you out after your own stick when you were about to get a beating. Apparently she carried a dog collar around her neck to whip my grandma when she acted up. It was a painful and confusing childhood.
Since none of us in the family know where my grandmother came from—including her ethnic background, her parents’ country of origin, their way of life, and so on—we don’t really know where we came from, either. It’s as if our family tree began all over again with my grandmother. If you know nothing about your forebears, you are always a little unsure of your own identity. Maybe this
is why I’ve always felt such a deep attachment to my roots in Southern Illinois and my closest blood relatives.
No matter her nationality, my grandma was a beautiful woman. She had jet black hair, hazel eyes, and very fair skin. To me, her adoring granddaughter, she looked like Snow White, a fairy princess. But her life was in many ways tragic. The love of her life, or so she told us, was a man who served in World War II and died shortly thereafter of leukemia. He was only twenty-three at the time. She loved him deeply, and for the rest of her life she kept every memory of him she could find—a folded American flag, probably the one that accompanied his funeral, was with her always, along with a few love letters and postcards that he sent her during their brief romance.
Shortly after this man’s untimely death, my grandma started going out with and soon married my grandpa. Before long, she divorced him, married another man, had a baby, then divorced him, and remarried my grandpa. Later on, my Aunt Vickie did the same thing: marry a guy, divorce him, then marry him again. It’s kind of a family tradition. For some reason, we all have trouble finding a good one!
In my grandma’s case, the reason for sticking with my grandpa was understandable, in a sad sort of way. My grandpa was the brother of the love of her life, the man who died of leukemia. She married the closest person she could to the man she loved the most.
Unfortunately, love and marriage don’t work like that. You usually don’t fall in love with the next best thing. My grandparents never seemed particularly in love, at least to me; they didn’t even seem particularly compatible. But their marriage stuck and together they had three children—my mother, Christine, my Aunt Vickie, and my Uncle Vern. (My grandma also had two babies die on her.) My Grandpa Vernon had injured his leg in the war, then crushed the same leg in a motorcycle accident a few years later. When gangrene set in, he had to have it amputated at the knee. He owned a prosthetic leg but for some reason, probably just orneriness, he refused to use it. He’d put an Ace bandage around his nub, fold his jeans up, tuck them in the back over his belt, and hobble around with a pair of crutches.
Redneck Woman Page 3
