And amidst all the chaos and poverty, she found her ways to enjoy life. Around the skirt of every trailer they lived in, she’d build a beautiful little garden. She loved to wander the woods and to fish in the pond near her trailer out on Rural Route 2. She loved all animals and had a particular fascination with owls. She’d fill her trailer with ceramic and stuffed owls. That’s another one of her eccentricities that I picked up on and maintain to this day—a love of owls. When on the road, I decorate every dressing room with a collection of old ceramic owls I’ve gathered along the way. They’re like a good luck charm and I can’t imagine walking into a backstage room and not seeing them staring down at me.
My grandma had a gift for animals. For instance, she was the only person in the world I ever saw who could hand-feed a red fox. She located this fox living near her place, and over a period of maybe ten to twelve years she patiently worked on befriending that wild animal until it finally felt comfortable enough to just walk up and eat food from her hand. She always had two or three dogs running around, a bird or two in the kitchen, even a yardful of geese at one point. The geese were mean—they wouldn’t let visitors get out of their car—but Grandma loved them. She felt a connection to the natural world and a peacefulness that came in interacting with it. I hope I can pass that same affection for creatures along to my own daughter someday.
And she was a night owl. She’d wait until everyone went to bed and the house was as quiet as a church, and then she’d sit down to enjoy some television. She’d watch something like Court TV or The Jeffersons until three in the morning. That was her quiet time and she cherished it. Whenever she let me join her for these late-night retreats, I cherished it, too. She’d often decide to cook a full meal in the middle of the night and serve up cheeseburgers or a freshly baked blueberry pie. Feasting on my grandma’s home cooking and watching All in the Family reruns with her at two A.M. were some of the happiest moments of my entire childhood.
Which is probably why I do exactly the same thing to this day. The only time I watch TV is at the end of the night. I crawl in bed, treat myself to a bowl of Raisin Bran—the same cereal she often liked to munch on—and watch Court TV until I fall asleep. It’s almost like a late-night meditation, a time to do nothing and let your brain process everything that had happened that day. It’s also a ritual that helps me remember my grandma and how much I loved and respected her.
My grandma’s great dream in life was to outlive her curmudgeon of a husband and have a few years of unabashed pleasure. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. My grandfather became very ill with colon cancer and it seemed like he was going to succumb long before my grandma. Despite the fact that he started drinking again, and made everyone around him feel a little worse, she still took care of him like always. Then one evening in 2000, she sat down on the couch to watch some TV and fell asleep, never to awaken again. Apparently her heart skipped a beat and she had a massive heart attack and died quietly. There was no struggle. She had her lotto tickets in her hand when she died. She fell asleep while waiting for the local news to give the winning lotto numbers. She died, in other words, while waiting for a miracle to happen.
And Grandpa Vernon died a month later. He probably knew on some level that he couldn’t live long without her. And as he was dying, all the bitterness, anger, and disappointment of a lifetime seemed to disappear. During his last few hours of life, he made a point to call us all in, one by one, and tell us that he loved us. I don’t remember him saying those words to anyone in all the time I knew him, but he said them then and revealed the tender feelings he has always felt for his family. It was a grand gesture of healing, for all of us.
Well after Grandpa Vernon died, I came across his own little treasure box, a cigarette box, where he proudly stored, among other things, his Ford work badge. I also found a set of pictures he held on to for fifty years that gave me some insight into why he was so bitter about life. They were small black and white photos of the victims of Hiroshima taken only a few hours after the bomb had dropped. They included pictures of Japanese women, completely nude because the blast had blown their clothes off them, holding dead infants with their heads half-blown away. He wasn’t present there himself, but he had fought in the war, probably took down his share of Japanese, and never talked about it to anyone. Vern would constantly ask him, “Dad, how many Japs you kill over there?” and he would go, “I don’t want to talk about that shit.” He held on to those pictures, I think, to remind himself how awful that war had been and the scars it must have left with him.
On the night Grandma passed away, I remember getting a phone call from my mother at four o’clock in the morning in Nashville. She was beside herself with grief. “My mommy’s dead,” she kept saying, “My mommy’s dead.” It took me a few minutes to even figure out who I was talking to, since I’d never heard my mother call her mother “Mommy” before. I finally got the story straight, and then I got out of bed and went into the bathroom and threw up.
The very same night my grandma died, it turned out, I had conceived my daughter, Grace. To me, this was much more than a coincidence, as I’ll explain later.
My grandmother was cremated, as was her wish. There were only six of us at her funeral, the only blood relatives she’d ever known—my mom, Aunt Vickie, Uncle Vern, my stepbrother, Josh, me, and Grandpa. She had few friends outside the family, because she had no time for a social life. She was either working or taking care of someone. Her social life was her family. In a lot of ways, we’re still that way. That’s why Vern, Vickie, Josh, and a slew of other family members are so involved in my current life. We all learned a critical life lesson from Grandma—Job Number One is to take care of each other.
I have the urns of both my grandparents’ ashes on my mantel at home today. I see them as a constant reminder of what my grandma did to keep this crazy family together for all those years.
After she was cremated, I came across a wish list she had written and stashed away in her jewelry box, alongside family photos, the death certificate of her “real” father, and the flag and other mementos from her first true love. The list contained items she planned to buy or things she wanted to do after my grandpa no longer had the power to talk her out of them. This wish list is as close as I ever got to a window into my grandma’s private life and private yearnings, and that’s why I keep it near me as an invaluable touchstone. Grandma didn’t wish for a million dollars, a trip to Europe, or a new Cadillac. She just wanted the simplest of things to make her life a little more comfortable. She just wanted many things that the rest of us, forever hungry for more and more of the useless things that America often dishes up, would take for granted.
The top of the list reads, in quotation marks, “The Smile of Hope.” The first thing listed is “Cosmetic Surgery,” by which she meant getting her teeth fixed, not a Joan Rivers face remolding. Then there was an entry, “Dog doctor, nails, bath, and exam.” She then had a little dog named Coco—this was many dogs after Daisy, the demented, pill-popping Chihuahua—and one of her dreams was to have Coco checked out, bathed, and then have them put little ribbons in her hair. She didn’t want to look like a beauty queen—she wanted her little Coco to look like one.
Because she saw so many infomercials on late-night television, she picked a couple of products from TV that she wanted on her list—a Bose Wave “radio with built-in c.d. player,” and something every American should have, a “Ronco rotisserie oven.” And she wanted two other gifts for herself: a manicure, for the first time in her life, and a maid service to come in and clean up the trailer, once. Not every week—just once. The whole list probably added up to two or three hundred dollars in expenses, tops, but to my grandma, that was a fortune. She’d never dare spend that kind of money on herself as long as her priority was taking care of her family. Only after the prospect of Grandpa expiring would she even think of something so rash and indulgent as getting her fingernails pared and painted by a professional.
I learned a lot fr
om my beautiful, hardheaded grandmother, but probably the key lesson was that no matter your circumstances, your burdens, and your tragedies—life is what you make of it. In many ways, you couldn’t have been dealt a worse hand than Frances Heuer—no parents, no past, the love of her life killed in a war, a husband that was often maddening to be around, and few skills to rise above a lifelong level of poverty and need. But she did rise above it, way above it—she had dignity, grace, and perseverance and she found contentment where she could find it—taming a fox in the woods behind her house or laughing at George Jefferson at two o’clock in the morning.
I’m sure that Grandma dreamed of a different, better life and in many ways she was disappointed with her own lot—she could see that it wasn’t glamorous or, in her darker moods, probably felt that, for all the agony and struggle, it didn’t add up to much. I just wish she could have only lived a few more years and were here today. She would see the profound effect that she had on all the people she loved and nurtured, especially me. She would see how her example, as humble as it was, inspired me to achieve more than I ever thought humanly possible.
And if that wasn’t enough, all she would have to do was to look into the eyes of her offspring, including her great-granddaughter and namesake, Grace Frances, and see that, even if she didn’t come from an identifiable family, she created one that will live on, nurtured by her spirit, for generations to come.
CHAPTER 3
HERE FOR THE PARTY
Well I’m an eight-ball shootin’ double fisted drinking son of a gun
I wear my jeans a little tight
Just to watch the little boys come undone
I’m here for the beer and the ball busting band
Gonna get a little crazy just because I can
“Here for the Party”
Despite the hardships I’ve described, my life as a kid was not an endless nightmare. We moved a lot, of course, and there was often a lot of stress and anxiety wherever we were living, but like I said, I always had friends and relatives nearby to keep me semi-sane and make me feel loved and protected.
And I had music.
I can’t remember when music and singing wasn’t a part of my life. It’s funny, because no one else in my immediate family either sings or plays an instrument or has more than a passing interest in music. The only person who might have instilled a love of music was my biological father, but he wasn’t around long enough to have much of an influence. It was something that I feel came to me as much from the inside as from the outside.
My mom claims I started singing around the house when I was about three. Apparently I was pretty good at carrying a tune, because by the time I was four or five, Mom would set up little impromptu concerts in the middle of Kmart on a Saturday afternoon. We would go there to shop and find a Blue Light Special where a crowd was already gathered. Mom would then plant me on a box or something and announce she had a treat in store for all the weary shoppers. I would then belt out a Patsy Cline tune, a cappella. The crowd would go nuts. We didn’t pass the hat or beg for tips. Money had nothing to do with it. Mom just did it for the reaction it got. She was very proud of my talent and of course I liked doing it, too. I mean, who wouldn’t want a Kmart full of people clapping and cheering and patting you on the head at five years old?
By the age of five I was also entering local talent shows, most of them sponsored by whatever school I was attending at the time. Mom claims I won my first talent show at five. I don’t remember that one, but I do remember an early one where I came in fourth and the kid who won first prize did a great version of “New York, New York.” Don’t think I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into these competitions. By the time I was seven I was actively looking for any and every opportunity to sing. No matter what school I was in, whether in Greenville, Illinois, or North Miami, Florida, one of the first things I did after reporting to my new homeroom was to sign up for the school choir, or chorus, or any other creative program that would allow me to sing. If there was a talent show, I was there. If they needed someone to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an assembly, my hand went up high. I was the perpetual new kid at school who loved to sing.
And if I couldn’t muster up an audience at Kmart or at school, I’d make one out of the family. At any family gathering of more than five or six people, I’d likely find a hairbrush to use as a microphone and run through my repertoire of four or five Hank Williams tunes like “Jambalaya” or “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Or it would be the other way around. I’d want to go outside and play and someone would say, “Oh, come on, Gretchen, sing for us, sing for us,” and even if I were tired of belting out tunes that day, I’d do it anyway. At seven, I learned a very important show business lesson. Never disappoint your fans. The show must always go on.
Vern had an eight-track deck in his room—remember those things?—and I was forever sneaking into his room when he wasn’t home to root through his record collection. I knew it would piss him off more than anything else in the world; I guess I was getting back at him for all those Indian rubs and wild rides on the wagon behind his motorbike. Vern, in a way, introduced me to a much larger world of popular music at a very early age. He had quite a stack of records—Charlie Daniels, AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and even the latest album by Loverboy. Right next to the rock was Waylon, Willie, the Outlaws, Hank Jr., Ray Stevens, George Jones, Tom T. Hall, and Roger Miller. You have to be exposed to music to learn to love it and Vernon provided me with almost daily exposure to all kinds of wonderful music.
I can remember clearly when singing became something more than just a parlor game for my in-laws or some hurried shoppers. Again, I was about seven. My grandma had bought a console stereo on credit from a local department store without telling my grandpa; he didn’t like wasting money on such nonsense. It took her like five years to pay it off.
I was at her house one day and someone played a 33 1/3 LP recording by Patsy Cline of the song “Faded Love.” I listened to it and that was the first time that any song really got to my emotional core. It made the hairs on my arm stand up. It was like an electrical charge or something. I was absolutely stunned by it.
I had already been singing for a while, but the moment that I actually knew what I wanted to do with my life was listening to that song that day. My dream was born right then and there.
Later that evening, I was inspired to sit down and try to write my very first country song. With my grandma’s considerable help—she supplied words I had yet to learn—I cranked out a tune called “Winter Love.” I can still remember the lyrics today:
I hate these cold nights lyin’ in bed,
Thinkin’ about the winter love that you and I had.
I love you dearly,
I’m so lost and weary without you.
We had a love like the perfect romance,
Under the stars I was lost in your trance.
Grandma gave me the word “trance” to rhyme with “romance.” I didn’t really know what a trance was at the time.
Anyway, that was my first effort at a tear-jerker and actually my last effort at writing anything until I started writing songs with John Rich many years later. But I kept up the singing and the general showing-off. By the time I was eleven, I had expanded my around-the-house stage act to include anything I could pick up and memorize from television or movies. Gather the clan for Thanksgiving or Christmas and the after-meal entertainment might include Gretchen reciting entire routines from the onstage performance film Eddie Murphy Raw. These kinds of pop culture exercises would offend my grandpa greatly—they usually involved racy language, not to mention black people—but Grandma loved it and I got a kick out of shaking things up a little. Hey, I still do.
Music was not only a way that I entertained people and received a lot of praise as a kid. It was also the one thing I could hold on to when things got crazy, which was often. It was my getaway. I had to find a new getaway every time we moved. Sometimes in Florida, it was riding horses on a Cuban farm. S
ometimes in Illinois, it was playing pool for hours on end. No matter what was going on in the family and no matter where we had moved to and for however long, music was always something I could escape to and let me feel good about myself. Unlike a lot of precious things in life, you can carry music around in your head and always feel soothed, inspired, and reassured by it.
I have some very poignant memories growing up in the country that involved music as an escape valve. If I was bored, bothered, or just lonely, I’d occasionally slip out the back of a trailer with a jam box, or portable cassette player, in tow, and head out to the open fields nearby. I’d find one of those giant concrete drainpipes that ran under an overpass or just along a drainage ditch. They were something like four or five feet from bottom to top. I’d crawl inside the pipe, assuming it wasn’t full of muddy water, and I’d plant myself with my tennis shoes braced against one side and my back against the other. Then, away from all distractions, I would turn on my jam box and sing along to my favorite music of the moment. In those days, it was most likely a song by one of the great woman country singers of the time (and all time) like Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, or Tanya Tucker.
During this little concert for myself, the drainpipe would resonate like a big echo chamber and make my voice sound a lot louder, like it was being amplified across a giant auditorium. I was so happy in that little hideaway. I was in my own little world, just me and the coalminer’s daughter or that coat of many colors, miles away from all the uncertainty and unhappiness that was often waiting for me back in the trailer.
Redneck Woman Page 5
