by Rory Feek
Then one day I didn’t have the 12-gauge anymore. Dad said he needed it back for something. I don’t think he even told me why. He just needed it back, so it was gone. And overnight, my hopes and plans and dreams of birds and dogs and hunting also disappeared. I don’t think I was upset. It was what it was.
It happened again with the guitar he gave me. I had always wanted to play guitar, actually felt like I was supposed to—not because of Dad but because of God or some intuition. He gave me that guitar one year for Christmas. Finding it under the tree was incredible. I tried and tried to learn to play it. What I didn’t take into account was that you can’t play a really cheap guitar. Seriously, you can’t. The strings are too far off the neck, and it won’t stay in tune—so no matter how much you practice or try, it won’t sound good. You’ll end up discouraged and disappointed. I did.
Dad asked for the guitar back a few months later. He said he had traded with someone for it, and the guy needed it back. I gave it to him, and it went away. And with it, my dreams of playing guitar. At least for a while.
The biggest gift, though, that Dad gave me and then took back was a car. Dad lived on Division Street then, in a tall white house with his new wife, Linda, and her young son, Josh. I was fifteen at the time and would visit Dad now and then, when he would come get us for a couple of days or when Mom would take us there and drop us off. One day when I got there, a beautiful light green Ford LTD that hadn’t been there before was parked in the driveway. Dad took me outside, walked me all around it, and sat me inside. He told me the details of the car and said, “This is yours, son. I bought it for you.”
My father would have an extra car in his driveway from time to time, and it was no big deal. As I remember it, he was buying and selling cars for extra money or something. Just one here or there. And usually only one at a time so he didn’t have to get a car-dealer’s license, I guess. So one day this Ford was there, but this one was different, he said; it was mine. He said he would keep it at his place until I turned sixteen, and then it would be all mine. I spent hours in the sun, washing it in the driveway, and many, many more evening hours sitting in the front seat or lying in the soft backseat, taking in that old car smell that Dad had taught me to love and listening to the radio until the battery would run down and the radio would turn off, along with the dash lights and everything else. I’d go inside the house, and Dad would be upset with me for running down the car battery, but it was all I had. I loved to sit behind the wheel and imagine myself driving down Kansas Avenue or pulling into the Dairy Queen and looking cool. Or driving across the country in my LTD and pulling into Nashville in the early morning light. Parking her at a diner, then going inside and sitting at a booth, like my father would, drinking my coffee, alone, admiring my automobile just outside the window in the parking lot. Imagining that the Grand Ole Opry was just down the street and I’d soon be playing there.
Then one day I came to Dad’s house, and my car was gone. A different car was in the driveway with a For Sale sign on it. When I asked about the LTD, Dad said that he’d sold it. He didn’t say it with any kind of emotion, just kinda matter-of-factly. He didn’t say when or explain why he’d sold my car or apologize to me or even acknowledge that he’d sold the car that he’d given me. Honestly, I think he forgot he’d given it to me. Or, at least, he pretended like he did. And so, I guess, I did, too, and that dream and that car just went away. I think, maybe, looking back now, that those things were never really mine. They were still his. His gifts. The gift he received by giving them to me. And once that feeling wore off, he could just do something else with them. Again, I swore I’d never be like that. But, unfortunately, those patterns are hard to break.
In my late twenties I bought a mandolin for a girl I was dating and gave it to her for her birthday. She loved it and could play it pretty well too. I liked the feeling of giving it to her, and I could see in her eyes how much she loved the gift. And me. But months later our relationship became rocky and, ultimately, ended. When she broke up with me, I was crushed and hurt. So I drove over to her apartment and demanded that she give me the mandolin back. She did, but I could see that it hurt her. I didn’t care. I was retaliating the only way I knew how. A gift isn’t just a gift; it’s a tool. I used it to try to win her love, and then I used it to try to hurt her, and it did. It probably still does.
I later gave that mandolin to my oldest daughter, Heidi, when she was still young, and all these years later, she still has it. I see it hanging on her wall or next to her bed when I come to her house to visit, and I’m reminded of what a jerk I was then. I could probably ask for it back from Heidi, and she’d probably give it to me, and I could return it to that girl and tell her I’m sorry and ask her to please take it back, but that wouldn’t fix anything. The damage is done. All I can do is learn from it. And do my best to stop the crazy cycles that are inside of me.
I try to be a good gift giver now. I’ve been very blessed and feel a responsibility to try to be a blessing to others. To be generous when I can. It’s my honor, actually. I can’t imagine giving someone a gift these days and then taking it back. But that’s not how I was raised.
Eight
UNCLE GOOMBAH
In the winter of my tenth-grade year, we were again living with my Uncle Rod and Aunt Mary. This time in a brick house on Highway 7, somewhere outside of Greenville, Kentucky. I had left my guitar and most of my belongings behind with the auctioneer in Missouri a few weeks before, so I was desperately wishing I had a guitar to play. Like all of my mother’s brothers, Uncle Rod had a large Carnahan nose and a great smile. And he called everyone Goombah. I think it means “good friend” in German or Italian, or, at least, to him that’s what it meant. In a closet in his bedroom, Uncle Rod had a beautiful Alvarez banjo that he played a little. He could do simple thumb-and-finger rolls and play songs like “Cripple Creek” and “Oh! Susanna,” but that was about it. Though I had no idea how to play an instrument with only five strings, he generously let me spend my days trying to figure it out. I taught myself how to play three chords and was soon strumming it like a guitar and trying to write songs so I could sing along.
The banjo was a great substitute, but it wasn’t the same as a guitar, and Uncle Rod knew it. But times were very tough, and Mom couldn’t come up with rent for our own house, let alone buy a guitar for her youngest son to play. So I resigned myself to the fact that I might not ever have another one. But then one day my luck changed. Like most teenagers in the early eighties, my hair was long and feathered. Not sure how that fad got started, but it seemed that no one of high-school age was exempt from it. It started to get pretty unruly, so Aunt Mary took my cousin Aaron and me to get haircuts. Now, in Kentucky and most Southern states, there are lots of characters—and I’m a big fan of characters—people who are bigger than life, who take their own unique path and aren’t ashamed of it. Bob Bethel, the fiddlin’ barber, was one of those guys. He had a single-wide trailer where he cut hair, and while he was cutting, he was prone to breaking out his fiddle and playing a tune or two. I had never seen anything like it. I loved him right away. And lots of other folks did too. They would bring their instruments and hang around his barber shop and jam with him in the evenings or between customers.
The afternoon we were there, it was just him, Aaron, Aunt Mary, and me. And while I was in the chair with the barber cape on, I noticed a guitar case over in the corner, and I asked Bob about it. He brought the case over, opened it up, and showed me the Bentley guitar inside. I’d never heard of a Bentley before (probably for good reason), but she was a beauty. Dark brown stained plywood and imitation pearl inlays. He smiled and said, “She’s for sale.” I got a big grin on my face, but then he followed with, “Fifty bucks and she’s yours.”
He might as well have said fifty thousand. I sank back into the chair, and Bob finished my haircut. As we headed home, I rode in the backseat of that long Chrysler, deep in thought—having been so close to something I wanted so badly yet still so fa
r away.
When we got home, I didn’t say anything to anybody about it. Not even my mom. I knew she didn’t have any money, and it would only hurt her to hear about something I wanted that she had no way to provide. So all through dinner and that evening, I was quiet—trying not to let the heartbreak show. Sometime after the dishes were done, Uncle Rod came in and asked me if I’d come back to his room. He said he wanted to show me something. So I followed him down the hallway to his and Aunt Mary’s bedroom. When we reached the bed, he just pointed to a spot above the headboard and rubbed his chin. “The wall’s missing something, don’t you think?” he said. “A picture or a drawing maybe? The spot’s too empty.” I just nodded and told him I guessed so.
Then he snapped his fingers and said, “Hey, you’ve been doing some drawing, haven’t you?” And I had. I was always drawing something on notebook paper or in a little blank pad that I had. Then he said, “Can you show me what you’ve got?”
We walked back into the living room and to the couch where I slept, and I pulled a few sketches out from underneath. He thumbed through them and when he got to one of an Indian beside a buffalo, he said, “This is it! It’s perfect.” Then he took off with it toward his bedroom. I wondered what was going on and followed him. He took a couple of tacks, pinned my drawing on the wall above his bed, and said, “How much would you take for it?”
I said, “Aw, it’s free, Uncle Rod. You don’t have to buy it.” But he insisted. He pulled his leather wallet from his back pocket, fanned out two twenties and a ten, and handed them to me.
“Would this be enough?” he asked. “You’d be doing me a big favor. That empty spot’s been driving me and your Aunt Mary crazy for months!”
Big tears filled my eyes. I said, “Really?”
He said, “Yes, son, really.”
And just like that, I had a brand-new, cheap guitar to play. That guitar and that moment are a big part of how I’ve come to have the success in music and songwriting that I’ve had over the years. Because unlike many that I’d had before, that dream didn’t have to go away.
I loved my Uncle Rod. He’s my mom’s brother. My cousin Aaron’s dad. Aaron is now my manager and my best friend. His dad was the closest thing to a father that I had growing up. Like Bob Goff—one of my favorite writers—Uncle Rod had whimsy. He knew how to make life fun and could take the smallest event and turn it into something you’d remember for the rest of your life.
He did that again a couple of years later. He not only cosigned on my first car loan, but he also got me back on the road when I accidentally drove over a big rock that ripped the muffler system out from under it. But he didn’t just loan or give me the money to fix it. He told me an elaborate story about how he’d been speeding on the way home from work when a cop saw him and hit the blue lights. Uncle Rod said he’d tried to outrun him through the back roads and cornfields and finally lost him as he pulled in the driveway . . . so, anyway, he didn’t want to take his car to work the next day. He asked if he could borrow mine. I would be doing him a favor.
When he dropped the car back off to me that evening after work, it had a brand-new muffler and pipes, from the manifold to the bumper. And he didn’t say a thing about it. He just did it, leaving another beautiful memory in the mind of a seventeen-year-old who desperately needed a man to leave one.
Uncle Rod died last year. He was seventy-eight. He went in for a routine heart-valve replacement and didn’t come back out. My brothers, sisters, and I all either flew or drove to Oklahoma for his military burial. As a young man, Uncle Rod, I later learned, had been drafted into the army and spent a few years in the hell of Vietnam and brought some of that war back with him. In him. He was troubled but full of love. There isn’t a room that my Uncle Rod walked into from here to California that he didn’t light up with his smile and his laugh but mostly with his love. He touched a lot of lives, including mine.
On a gravel road outside a power plant in Paradise, Kentucky, he gave his son Aaron the big “sex talk,” knowing full well that I was sitting on the other side of his son in the front seat. And when Aaron and I found ourselves in the Muhlenberg County jailhouse, it was Uncle Rod who came in the middle of the night, bailed us out, and told us that he expected, no, that he hoped for more than that from us. And on the day I left for Marine boot camp and gave hugs to my mom and Aaron and my brothers and sisters, it was Uncle Rod who pressed into my hand a piece of paper with a typewritten note to me that I still have to this day. He knew that there are times a boy needs a father, and when that father isn’t around, it falls on the shoulders of the next man in line. Again and again, Uncle Rod proudly took the role of surrogate father in my life.
Before my time down here is over, I hope to make that kind of impact on someone. To have the gumption to not just help them but to go to elaborate lengths to make them part of a bigger, better story, like Uncle Rod did with me.
A story that will live long after the man who told it is gone.
Nine
FROOT LOOTS
Did I mention that I robbed a train one time? It’s true. No, it wasn’t at gunpoint, though a gun was involved.
I do my best to play up that line when I can. Being a country music singer, aspiring to follow in the footsteps of Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and others, I’m somewhat proud of the fact that I can tell folks that I once robbed a train. I usually prefer not to go into any of the details of the event, not because I’m ashamed of them (although I should be) but mostly because the details sorta change the power of my “time spent in the big house” testimony.
I was about fifteen years old, tall and gangly, still newly living in a little green trailer in the backyard of a nice older couple who lived right near the edge of Greenville, Kentucky. My cousin Aaron and I didn’t know many people yet since we’d both recently moved there and were pretty shy. Luckily, on the bus to school we made a new friend who was a fast-talker and much cooler than us. His name was Scotty, and as it turned out, he was a preacher’s son. That should be safe enough, I’m sure my mom figured, but not hardly. It seems that the children of the men who lead churches tend to like to lead lives that are a little different from the ones their parents preach about. This one did, anyway.
In the first couple of weeks, we started hanging around with him, we learned how to break into empty buildings at night using an unlocked window instead of a key; how to climb onto the roofs of other buildings, rip off the shingles, and throw them at passing cars; and even how to get free candy from vending machines by knocking them over. Once the glass shattered, we just tipped it back up, and everything was free. I am not proud of those things. But they happened. Those things and the Great Train Robbery of 1980.
Aaron, Scotty, and I had a hideout. Well, it was more like a ditch where we hid some beer that another friend named Bruce had stolen from his old man. It was pretty lame . . . a spot in a field where we would sit and talk; no one was around, so, technically, I guess we could call it our hideout. On one particular day we were walking down an alley and came across some grain bins near a railroad track. We proceeded to climb up on top of one and let ourselves in through the metal hinged door, then just sat in the big pile of corn that was inside. I played my harmonica until I accidentally set it down and lost it in all the corn. We eventually got bored and climbed out, looking for something else to do. Scotty recommended we open the doors of the train boxcars parked nearby and see what was inside. We thought, Sure, what the heck? So we took a pocketknife and cut through the little tab that said something about “private property” and “federal offense” and slowly opened the first boxcar door.
The first car was filled to the brim with cardboard boxes. We opened up one. Ketchup. Sixty million cases of Del Monte ketchup. We quickly tried another. Green beans. We bailed on that one too. Then we hit the mother lode. A boxcar filled from floor to ceiling with cases of Froot Loops. We dug in and stayed awhile. We laughed and talked and ate ’til we were almost sick. Then we decided we’d take a case each
and maybe stash them at our hideout ditch, just down the alley.
Unfortunately, about a hundred yards into our trip, we heard a car come barreling up behind us, blue lights flashing, so we dropped our loot and took off running. Halfway down the alley I peeled off to the right and ran around some houses, then found a spot between some bushes and somebody’s front porch. I wasn’t sure where Aaron or Scotty were until I felt Aaron land on my back. He and I just lay there in the dirt, listening to the sounds of our heavy breathing and the police radios saying, “I think they went this way!” and “Any sign of ’em?” Then we heard a gunshot. I checked to see if I was still breathing. Or dead. The adrenaline was pumping through my veins; I was so scared. Then suddenly the barrel of a pistol was against my cheek, and a knee was in my back and Aaron’s. I heard a voice say, “We got ’em. Over here!” And the next thing we knew, we had handcuffs on and were in the backseat of a squad car.
Now, I hadn’t ever been to jail or seen police officers up close, but I’d seen them on TV, and I’d seen what happened to suspects, and I could see my future. Seriously. I could almost feel an immediate shift in what was going to be the story of my life. I was going to be a hoodlum, and spending time in jail was gonna be normal for me. I hung my head and sulked as they drove us downtown, and so did Aaron. At the jailhouse it was much the same. He and I thinking we’d become hardened criminals for a few boxes of Kellogg’s cereal.
