A lot of people to this day want me to hate my father, and I never did. I never liked him, but I didn’t hate him. I loved my father, he was my dad. We never had a conversation that I remember. I remember just little pieces of things where he actually did something with me. Like, he would take me and my brothers to see the blue herons during the time of year they were flying through this marshy, swampy area out in this field.
My dad was a little bit like the Great Santini. He just loved football and thought I had to be a football player or I was an idiot. He would throw a baseball around with me a little bit and come to my games, even though he always thought baseball players were pussies. He’d say, “You piano players and baseball players are all a bunch of queers.” I could live with that. But if I lost one of his tools, I was fucked.
In his defense, his dad was like that, too, all those guys back then were. Willie, my son, will have seven of his friends over here at one time playing video games and hanging out on the porch. Coming down the stairs, I’ll see some kid I’ve never seen in my life at my refrigerator and I just let him do it—I’m nice to them and all—but when I was growing up, you’d go over to your friend’s house and you prayed that their dad never saw you. You’d go hide in another fucking room. I was scared of everybody’s dad, and to this day I have a problem with older men. Robert Duvall is like my mentor, and I desperately want him to like me, but at the same time I’m scared to death of him.
But when my dad was dying, that was it. I saw him deteriorate into this little bitty skinny bald-headed guy that weighed eighty pounds or whatever, and I still looked at this mean motherfucker as some kind of hero, because he played football, because he was a coach, because he was my dad.
I used to carry him, get him under the knees and under the arms and literally carry him to the table to eat, because he didn’t want to eat in the bed. He looked like somebody out of Auschwitz if you saw him, but he still wanted to do things like a regular person. I can remember many times carrying him to the table, and we would crumble up corn bread that my mother made for him in a glass of buttermilk—it’s a Southern delicacy—and he’d eat it with a spoon. But he would take two or three bites, puke all over the table, and I would carry him back to his room.
I guess when the cancer gets in your brain you start thinking all kinds of crazy shit because he started to think he had spiders and snakes on him all the time. He would yell in this weird voice that didn’t even sound like him, and I would have to go in there and pretend I was getting the spiders and snakes off of him. But once I said I got them all off, he was pretty satisfied.
He also started admitting all this shit to me, but I don’t think he knew he was doing it. One time he went, “Don’t ever call him Daddy.” And I said, “Who?” And he said, “That man your mama’s going to marry, don’t ever call him Daddy.” I said, “All right, I won’t.” Sure enough, she married this man and I never called him a fucking thing.
I didn’t cry until years after my dad died. I forgave him for all the shit because now, looking back, I understand all that he went through. He was a guy who couldn’t articulate things, and he was trapped inside a head that he felt like he was more than. I forgive him for everything, and I love him, these days, because I saw his fire and his passion, about sports, at least I always thought he was all right.
CHAPTER SIX
Uncle Don and Them
MY MOTHER’S BROTHER BO WAS IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE IN World War II. We had all this military history around the house. That was real big back then because before rock and roll, soldiers—the boys returning home—were actually like rock-and-roll stars. Of course, when Vietnam came along they were treated like dirtbags on the corner begging money from people, which is unfortunate.
The first time I ever had a drink of beer was with Uncle Don and Uncle Roy when I was about five. Those were the days when you had to have a church key to open the cans, so Uncle Roy took out his church key, and they opened up their beers and poured them into their jelly jars. It was like whatever jelly you had, when it was gone, you just washed out the jars and those became your drinking glasses. Uncle Don had his Jax beer, and my uncle Roy was drinking his Schlitz. It was the best-looking shit I ever saw in my life. It looked like apple juice.
I asked my uncle Roy what beer tasted like, and sure enough he said, “Tastes like apple juice, you want a drink?” If I told anyone now that I gave my five-year-old a drink of beer, I’d be in jail. Anyway, Uncle Roy said, “You want a drink?” and I said, “Yeah.” Of course, I nearly puked because I expected apple juice and I got that bitter beer taste.
But Uncle Don was my hero. He was like a god to me. In reality, he was an alcoholic who got into knife fights, but to me, he was just this cool guy. Later on, when I was in my twenties, I got compared to him a lot, which was good to me and maybe bad to some other people. Uncle Don was a country musician. Sang like Jim Reeves and played the guitar left-handed, upside down, like Jimi Hendrix. He looked kind of like Errol Flynn, dark, with a little mustache. He was in the Army in the Korean War.
Uncle Don taught me about music and he taught me about life. He was the most charming son-of-a-bitch in the world. He was married like six times or something, and he always married chicks who could play bass.
Uncle Don and his friends stayed drunk a good deal of the time. They’d drink the vanilla flavoring, the cough syrup, whatever was in my grandmother’s cabinet. One of his friends drove around in a brand-new truck with no passenger door on it. The passenger door was missing because, after they lost their jobs, they took the door off and sold it to a parts place in Hot Springs to get money to buy liquor.
Uncle Don had a friend from down the road who drank some canned heat or kerosene—I can’t remember which—and he died from it. I’ll never forget when that happened. They came running out of the house—my grandmother, all of them—and went running down the road because somebody found the guy swollen up and dead out in a field.
I remember another time being on the porch—we had a screened-in porch, as most people did back then, with a swing on it—as a little bitty kid, two or three years old, and watching my uncle Don in a knife fight with a guy in the front yard, which was mostly dirt, because it was just a road that came up to the front door. My grandmother was in the middle of them, screaming, “Please, Don, don’t do this!” and Don screamed back, “Mama, get out of this, you don’t need to be out here!”
At some point during all the commotion, he accidentally cut her hand real bad. She came back into the house crying and saying, “Yeah, he’s cut me.” Everybody gathered around her, putting bandages on her hand while Don was still out there in the knife fight. But then I remember him coming in, and just the look on his face from having cut his mother … I’ll never forget that look that he had.
Don was a carpenter by trade, but when he would lose his carpenter job, he would come back and stay with my grandmother, too. So, just so we’re clear, there were times when in one house we had my dad, me, my brother Jimmy, who was two years younger than me—my youngest brother, John, was born years later; my grandfather, who was up on the tower looking for fires and killing shit; my grandmother, who was doing people’s taxes; my uncle Don and one of his wives; a few cousins; and my mother, who would see images in the well. That was what my house was like as a kid.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Testifying Turkey Ass and Pawn Shop Prosthetics
KARL FROM Sling Blade WAS PARTIALLY INSPIRED BY ALPINE CHARACTERS. As I said, there were a lot of characters there.
Then there was my grandma’s friend, this old lady who would write little articles for the paper in Arkadelphia. Arkadelphia is the town closest to Alpine, and when I was a kid it was home to about ten thousand people. We would go into town one Saturday a month to get supplies or whatever, and ultimately I would go to college there at Henderson State University, where my parents had both gone. Anyway, one time there was a dispute over some property issue where some guy was mad at another guy because the guy
put his fence row too close to his place, or something. So the guy who was mad about the fence decided to take matters into his own hands. The guy with the fence raised chickens and turkeys and had some prize turkey he was fattening up for something, so the first guy sodomized the other guy’s turkey and killed it. I don’t know if he choked it while he did that, I don’t know if he killed it just by screwing it, I don’t know, but one way or the other, the first guy fucked the other guy’s turkey to death, and they went to court over it.
This friend of my grandmother’s came running up to my grandmother’s house, saying, “Maude, you never gonna believe this! They’ve saved that old turkey’s butt for a witness!” Now what it really was, to my understanding, is that they froze it or put it up in bags so they could examine the anus to get the guy’s stuff, or whatever, as evidence. But she said witness. So my mother always said she had this image in her head of this turkey’s ass on a witness stand testifying.
MY COUSIN MARK WAS THIS BRILLIANT HYPERACTIVE KID WHO MOSTLY hung out with my brother Jimmy. Mark was inventive and real crafty. His head ran faster than most people’s, but he just couldn’t control himself and always found himself in some kind of mess.
He ended up having a motorcycle wreck and lost a leg. One time, Mark came into my aunt and uncle’s, and he didn’t have his leg. He had gone down and pawned his artificial leg to a pawn shop. My mom said, “I understand Mark pawning his leg because he does stuff like that. What I don’t understand is what the pawn shop owner wants with an artificial leg.”
Mark is the guy who introduced me to this sort of semi-retarded guy or whatever he was, who lived in town up in Arkadelphia. Every town’s got a guy who’s what they used to call shell-shocked. Now there’s some other term for it. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Used to be shell-shocked. Anyway, this guy could have been one of those, but there was something wrong with him, maybe it was like autism. We didn’t know about autism or anything like that in those days. Regardless, we used to pick on him some, because kids do shit like that—you know, pick on the retarded guy. He wasn’t a kid, he was an older guy. Now, when I say older guy, when I was a kid, somebody forty was an old man to me. My dad died when he was forty-four or forty-six, I can’t remember which, and I thought he was an old man. In any case, kids can be pretty cruel.
Anyway, this guy would just kind of mumble and shuffle around town, and he had a root that he could hang out the side of his overalls, where they dip down by your hip. He could pee outside his overalls. He used to chase us sometimes because we fucked with him, but if any of us had any loose change we would pay him to pee outside of his overalls because this son-of-a-bitch, he had a fucking joint on him, it didn’t even look human. It literally looked like it came from an animal—like a mule dick or something. I don’t remember exactly what it looked like, I didn’t look that close, but it was a hunk. Anyway, we would give him dimes and quarters, shit we were going to buy Twinkies with but instead pay this guy to pee out the side of his overalls.
THERE WAS THIS ONE FAMILY MY MOM KNEW BACK THERE IN ALPINE. The old man worked in the logging woods while his wife, like a lot of women at the time, would birth kids and work to the bone keeping the house, working in the field, working in the garden, that kind of stuff. She was twenty-nine or thirty but looked real old.
A lot of guys were jealous and would keep their wives away from everything, but this particular guy was so jealous, when he would go to work in the logging woods, he would board his wife up. His kids would go to school, and he would nail two-by-fours over the doors so she couldn’t get out while he was gone.
Years later, when they started getting more modern things, his wife got a douche bag—I guess she’d been to a doctor and he said, “You should use this douche”—but the old man cut it to pieces with scissors and threw it out in the yard. He didn’t want her putting anything in her. “You’re not using shit like that,” he said—because I guess a douche bag has got a little nozzle on it, stick it in your whatever. But anyhow, he would board her up while he was at work.
The kids would go to Carmie’s store after school, and they would ask if Carmie—who was a real nice old guy—had seen their daddy so they could get in the house, but the daddy would be hiding behind the freezer with ice cream. Carmie told us about this. Their daddy would buy ice cream, and he would hide behind the meat freezer while he wouldn’t let his kids eat anything but mustard and biscuits. That’s what he sent them to school with, and that’s where I got the thing with Karl in Sling Blade where he eats mustard and biscuits.
When kids used to go to school back in Alpine—this was in my mom’s time, not mine—they would take their lunch to school in a lard bucket. Only we called it the dinner bucket, because in the South we didn’t have lunch. We had breakfast, we had dinner at noon, and we had supper. So we never heard of lunch. Anyway, kids would take a dinner bucket of biscuits because we ate whatever was cheapest. And if you’re at school all day, butter and mayonnaise would spoil, so my grandmother used to put mustard on the biscuits because mustard wouldn’t spoil quick. But a lot of kids would only have biscuits. There was a lot of beauty in Alpine, but there was also a lot of poverty.
So the jealous guy’s kids would just get to eat beans, corn bread, stuff like that. They never got anything from the store that would be considered a luxury, like bologna or anything from the meat counter.
But the dad would go buy an ice cream at the store and hide behind the freezer if his kids came into the store looking for him. He would tell Carmie to tell his kids he hadn’t seen their daddy because he didn’t want the kids to see him back there eating an ice cream.
People like that. That makes you want to write shit. Tom and I wrote a screenplay called The Sounds of Country, which I’ll probably never make because I don’t want to make it for Hollywood. I’d rather just be satisfied knowing I wrote the story of my uncle Don. Anyway, when I tell people some of these things, they look at me like I’m from another planet, but I lived in this.
“THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON
(AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)
Part I
I was born in 1951 in the little southwest Arkansas town of Nashville. My family moved to the somewhat larger town of Malvern a year later, and that’s where I grew up. My father was a lawyer and judge. My mother, like virtually all mothers in those days, was a housewife. I had three sisters.
I was a bashful little boy who hated school and didn’t make very good grades. I loved to read comic books (we called them funny books) and to fish on Lake Catherine and to go to the Ritz Theatre and see neat movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Creeping Unknown.
When I was twelve, the Epperson family got some new neighbors. The Thorntons. Billy Bob was eight. He wore glasses and had buckteeth and looked remarkably like the Ernie Douglas character in My Three Sons (and he actually was one of three sons). We had some things in common—we both liked sports and monster movies and funny books—but a four-year age difference is a vast chasm when you’re a kid, and I certainly didn’t regard him as an equal. When my friends and I needed a body to round out the sides when we were playing basketball or touch football in the backyard, Billy Bob was brought in.
We had a nickname for Billy Bob. “Silly Slob.” We played mean tricks on him. Once when Chuck Shryock and I attempted to retrieve an errantly tossed football from some bushes, we encountered a yellow-jacket nest and were driven away. We were standing around trying to figure out how to get the ball out of there, when who should come walking down the sidewalk but little Billy Bob. We told him we couldn’t get our football out of the bushes because we were “too big” to get in there. Billy, always eager to be included by the big kids, was happy to help us out. He crawled back into the bushes, and then an instant later tore out of there with the football under his arm, screaming as yellow jackets swarmed around him and stung him repeatedly. Chuck and I laughed our heads off.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Dangerous News in Safe Town”
Safe town, safe town
The shiny surface binds
Dig down underground
What do you think we’ll find?
—“Dangerous News in Safe Town”
(Thornton/Andrew)
WE MOVED TO A LITTLE TOWN OUTSIDE OF ELDORADO DOWN IN THE southern part of Arkansas. There was a paper mill there that made the whole town smell like shit all the time. One of my memories of that place happened during the time when my brother and I had mono, which we got real young—I was in the second grade and he wasn’t even in school. There was a big storm coming, and it was just pissing down rain. The lightning was the kind that lights up the whole fucking world and you can see everything at midnight. Something happened outside the house, and my dad went to check on it. There were all kinds of people milling around our front yard, and I’ll never forget going out on the porch in my Roy Rogers pajamas, me and my brother Jimmy. We weren’t supposed to go out there, but when you’re a kid you’re curious. It’s like, “Daddy went out in the front yard, what’s going on?”
We lived right next door to the elementary school, and there was a ditch out by our front yard in the road there. A guy had gotten hit by a car, and it killed him—cut his head half in two, and he was lying over in the ditch. We couldn’t see him very well because it was pouring rain, but it happened so close to our house that people were walking across our yard to get a better look.
Jimmy and I were standing out there in the rain in our pajamas watching this when some guy walked by and said, “Aw hell, it’s just some nigger.” When people heard that comment, all of a sudden they weren’t really interested anymore. That was the first time I realized, wow, some people don’t think black people are as important as white people.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 3
