by Bobby Bones
Music and poker and yard sales, that’s what we did. Yeah, my grandma and I had some good times. She wasn’t a strict disciplinarian (no one in our neck of the woods was), but she provided the stability I needed and lots of love. There were the late-night card games and early-morning rummage sales, but she also hugged me and said she loved me all the time.
Of all her children and grandchildren, I was the one closest to my grandmother. We even slept in the same bed for a while. In the place we lived when I was in elementary school, my sister and mother shared one bedroom while my grandmother and I shared another. We were that close.
It was years later, though, that I found out my grandmother had actually officially adopted me. I only discovered the fact when I saw a Social Security card on her dresser that said Bobby Hurt as opposed to my father’s name, Estell. I was twelve, old enough to understand it but still confused why she had done it and why I was never told. When I asked her to explain she said, “I had to be your legal guardian for a while because your mom was gone.” And that was the end of the conversation. As much as my grandma loved me, she wasn’t going to share those painful details. To this day I still don’t know why she did what she did, or where my mother went when she left. She clearly didn’t want me to know, because at some point my legal name was changed back to its original—Bobby Estell, which it remains today.
I wasn’t going to bother my poor grandmother, who let me sleep in her bed and kept a roof over our heads thanks to her Social Security checks, with a bunch of uncomfortable questions. I worried enough that it was hard for her to have a calm and peaceful life because she was forced to raise me and my sister. I didn’t want to make her life any more difficult. That worry was part of a larger anxiety I couldn’t shake, the sense that I shouldn’t be here at all, that I was a mistake. Maybe it was an overblown sense of self, but I felt responsible for my family’s problems. It started with my mom, who was never able to have a real life, because when you get pregnant at fifteen years old, how great are things going to get for you? In my book, she never had a shot.
I felt guilty that my mom was stuck with me. When I first learned about adoption the way any little kid might (sitting in church, listening to adults talk), I wondered, Why didn’t Mom do that? The thought wasn’t marked by sadness or even judgment. It was just a logical question stemming from my surprise that she kept me. My guilt wasn’t consuming but a low-level irritation, like a small rock hidden somewhere in my shoe. It stuck with me my whole childhood, even through what were supposed to be good times, like my tenth birthday party.
I didn’t have a lot of birthday parties growing up for a couple of different reasons. The first was the money issue. When your mom is stealing Manwich, there usually isn’t cash lying around to rent a bouncy castle. (Money, you’ll see, is a recurring topic in this book, and at some point in reading, I’ll understand if you yell at these pages, “WE GET IT, YOU WERE POOR!” But roll with me. It’s my book. And if you tell your friends about it, and they buy it . . . I’ll be even less poor!) My mom would always acknowledge my birthday with some kind of small celebration—usually just a cake. But when I turned ten it was a big deal to her, and she decided she wanted to do something special.
In the days leading up to the big party (a theme party: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), she was excited in a way I hadn’t seen before. Returning from the Dollar Store, where she’d gone on a major shopping spree, she unloaded bags with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle masks, birthday candles, paper plates, and napkins. She had also bought a mini wading pool and a bunch of plastic water guns.
All the fuss seemed crazy to me, but Mom talked about how important it was that I was turning ten. “Double digits,” she said. “You’re hitting double digits.” What did that even mean? That I was old enough to take care of myself? Maybe.
The party was held outside the Hot Springs house we were staying in with my grandma and a couple of cousins and was everything a birthday party is supposed to be. Food, cake, kids (mostly more cousins), water fights, balloons, and my mom running around and having fun. I was happy she was happy. But the party didn’t make me feel special; it made me uncomfortable.
I don’t mind birthdays as a concept. I don’t mind getting older. But I hate birthday parties—at least ones for me. Other people’s parties are fine. I’m just not a big fan of any sort of thing honoring me. Dinners, breakfasts, whatever; I don’t like celebrations of me. I worry that people feel forced to attend (“We have to go; it’s his birthday”), and I never want to be the one causing others to feel uncomfortable. I would rather do nothing than ask people to go out of their way for me.
That’s how I feel now and that’s how I felt when I turned double digits. Even as I watched a boy from down the road stuff cake in his face and my sister spray the weeds with a water gun, I was sure I was putting everyone out. Not to mention the fact that my mom must have spent every dime she had and didn’t have in order to throw this party. The only part I liked was the green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle mask that I could hide behind. (Cue sad music.)
If I was going to be the center of attention—something I wasn’t against and actually really wanted—I was going to have to earn it.
NERD ALERT
Though my dad was MIA, there were father figures in my life who I am really grateful for.
Although at times our biological dad lived only a few miles away, my mom, sister, and I never had contact with him again after he left. He came and went from Arkansas, moving around from state to state. I would occasionally visit his side of the family who lived over by Buckthorn Road, which snaked all the way up a big, densely wooded mountain. But not if he was in town.
How I knew he was there or not, I have no clue, because I never, ever mentioned him to anyone in my family and they showed me the same courtesy. I did such a good job of acting as if I had no interest in him that even I believed it. I didn’t want to be known as the kid who cared about his dad when his dad didn’t care about him. I’m sure there was a part of me that was curious about him, but there was no way I would ever give him the satisfaction of knowing that.
Some kind of force field developed where even in a town of seven hundred people and a family that included double cousins, my dad and I were able to completely avoid each other. It wasn’t unlike in college, when after I’d gotten a girl to go on a date with me, she’d somehow avoid me for the rest of the semester even though it was only a campus of a few thousand students.
Only once, when I was thirteen, did I run into my dad. I had been at my best friend (to be honest, my only real school friend) Evan McGrew’s house. There was a gas station/convenience store right next door. I had gone there for a soda, and when I walked in, there he was. It was as if I had seen an alien. I have no idea if he saw me or not, because I immediately ducked behind a shelf of candy bars and snuck out the front. He certainly didn’t follow me out or anything—I doubt he saw me, and if he did, he surely wouldn’t have cared.
My heart was thumping, though. It had been about eight years since I’d last seen his face. Anxiety overtook me in the moment, followed quickly by anger. I’m sure underneath it all was sadness. Now, I see that. But at the time I responded by making a dash for Evan’s, where I explained the fact that I had returned without any soda as my simply having changed my mind. I avoided confrontation like the plague. While I was willing to leave my actual father behind in the aisle of a convenience store without a word, I still wanted some kind of dad in my life. So I sought out father figures where I could. Luckily, a few kind guys took the bait.
Church was an easy place to look. Mountain Pine was a very religious place. Church was important to me because I needed somewhere to go, somewhere to have a group and fit in. I didn’t really have religious feelings; I believed what I was taught to believe. My grandmother had taken us when we were young. When I was old enough, I took myself, not out of love for Christ but because I wanted to be around adults who were consistent and cared. I knew by going to church I would stay o
ut of trouble. I knew what I didn’t want, which was to wind up like my mom: a teenage parent with no shot at a future. I enjoyed school, but they don’t really let you stay there much past 3 P.M. I needed a positive place where I could get some sort of guidance, so church was the best bet.
For me that place was Mountain Pine Baptist Church, where I spent Sunday mornings and nights and Wednesday afternoons as a member of the youth group. During summer I attended church camp, and later, in high school, I was president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I didn’t go to that church because of my family. My grandma kept attending her Pentecostal church. Mom’s church had become that chair in front of the television. I went to church by myself, mainly drawn to Mountain Pine Baptist because of its location (five blocks away from where we lived) and its youth director, Robert Parker, who was a great influence on me and many of my friends. He influenced us not by having one-on-one talks with us about anything deep but by taking us places. Whenever I was with him there were always a few other kids around at least, and we did all kinds of things from hunting to rodeos. I went to my first-ever concert with him when we went to see the Christian country band Diamond Rio.
We also hung out at his house all the time. Robert and his wife, Missy, would gather a lot of us from the area and invite us to stay at their home Saturday nights, so they could make sure we were at church on Sunday morning. Those nights were filled with movies and board games until we passed out in the sleeping bags they had thrown on the floor for us. Sunday mornings meant a full breakfast and lots of laughs around the table. Through Robert and Missy, I got a taste of the kind of home life I had only dreamed about.
Fans of my show are familiar with Vic Gandolph, who was my football coach from the eighth grade until I graduated high school. He still calls in to the show, and to be honest I’m not even sure I’d have a show without him. I know it seems hard to believe, but I was really dedicated to playing football, despite being a scrawny pip-squeak compared to most of the team. Coach Gandolph taught me to own up to your mistakes and that a lot of people have talent, but talent alone doesn’t win. “If you want to win,” he said, “you must outwork everyone else, every day, all the time.” It’s very much where my “Fight. Grind. Repeat.” mantra came from. He also taught me about adversity—that it’s not if we face it but how we react when we face it. “Tough times don’t last,” he said, “but tough people do.” I’m so grateful for my relationship with this man.
Then there was my best friend Evan’s dad, Jerry McGrew. Evan and I had bonded over baseball; we were both on the team and Jerry was the coach. I admired Jerry, a veteran, because he had been injured in combat and still kept such a positive outlook on life. He also loved coaching Evan and me, even though Evan was his son and far more talented than I was. But I worked harder. And I think Jerry respected that. The McGrews also took me on my only childhood vacation. We went on a van trip to Colorado. I don’t know if I had ever even been out of Arkansas at that point, and for sure my family couldn’t afford any kind of vacation. But they took me to the mountains and paid for everything. I’m not kidding when I say that it is still one of the highlights of my life, and something I am still incredibly grateful for.
But by far the most significant stand-in I had for a father was my stepdad, Keith. I got lucky as a teenager; my mom married a good guy.
When I was about thirteen years old, we moved into his house and instantly made it very, very crowded. There were six of us at one time in his nine-hundred-square-foot place: my mom, stepdad, his two daughters, my sister, and me. So, again, I slept on the living room couch, cramming my bedding behind it and my clothes underneath.
But for the next four years, until I left for college, Keith was a solid and consistent presence—meaning, he had a job. My stepdad worked at the mill, when there still was one. Although he worked a lot, he still found time to do those things that I had heard fathers were supposed to.
He played catch with me in the backyard and even let me play on his adult softball team, which as a young kid was a blast. He was a decent athlete, but his real passion was fishing, and he often took me with him. I had fantasized about fishing with my dad, but when the time came to do the real thing I found it pretty darn boring. It didn’t matter, though. Anytime Keith asked if I wanted to go fishing, I said yes, because I just wanted that father-son experience. We hunted, too, which I wasn’t into. I don’t like to kill animals, even though I like to eat them. (I recognize the hypocrisy of my statement. The deer we killed were good, and so was the pork I ate a few minutes ago.)
I was surprised whenever my stepdad showed up at one of my baseball games. I don’t think anyone else from my family ever came to one of my school or sporting events, which I used as a form of permission to try whatever I wanted to as opposed to as a reason to hold myself back. I was never told that I could do things, but I was also never told that I couldn’t.
Still, I had to admit it was nice seeing Keith in the stands that day, particularly since he had a job and therefore a good excuse for not being able to come to any of my games. I didn’t make a big deal of it, and neither did he, but I liked it when he was there.
Despite every sign that proved Keith was a reliable man, when it came down to it, I never truly believed he would be there forever. I liked the idea of having a dad, but I didn’t trust my mom to keep him around. I had no idea what their relationship was about. From my position, it was pretty dysfunctional. He worked a lot, and she sat home a lot drinking. My mom was who she was, and she was never going to change. Sadly, I too was hardwired by the time Keith came into our lives. I liked having him around, but as a teenager I’d already been burned enough by adults not to trust anyone but myself.
My mentality was very much that I was on my own, something that was reinforced by the fact that I had zero rules as a kid. I could do what I wanted, go where I wanted, see whom I wanted. As long I was on my couch/bed by eleven o’clock (and really, no one would notice if I wasn’t there by eleven), there weren’t any questions. You’d think as the kid with no rules I’d have some pretty cool partying stories. But I have none. I was and still am what most would consider a loser socially. I spend a lot of time alone. Even today my dog gets annoyed at me that we don’t leave my bedroom.
The flipside of all of this freedom was that I didn’t have anyone pushing me along, either. If anything was going to happen in my life, I knew I was going to have to be the one to put that into motion.
I was a really overachieving little kid, but not because I thought I had to be better than anyone else. Actually, it was just the opposite. Because there was no one to tell me I was any good at all, I worked hard to be the best so that there was no question I was good. This was particularly true at school. I was completely petrified of ending up like my mom and knew from enough after-school specials that if I didn’t get an education, that’s exactly where I’d wind up. (Yes, everyone below the age of twenty-five years old reading this, there used to be TV shows aimed at kids that included a heartfelt message. And they showed them at a specific time after school. I ate them up like Count Chocula cereal.)
Whether in school or out, I was super focused. I was lucky to have some natural ability when it came to academics. I was always able to pick things up quickly. That’s not to say I coasted through junior high and high school. I also worked very hard, because I enjoyed studying and learning. By working hard in school I knew I could get past the railroad tracks that led out of our town, and that is what I wanted to do. As my buddy Evan wrote in one of my high school yearbooks, “Those railroad tracks may only be four feet wide, but they are almost impossible to cross.”
One example of my push to learn as much as I could is my encyclopedia habit. Beginning at nine years old, I would save up all my money from mowing yards, raking leaves, and any other odd jobs I could get (“allowance” was only a word on TV, and I hated the kids who got allowance on TV. Those kids on Who’s the Boss? always pissed me off! And don’t get me started on Mr. Belvedere). As
soon as I had enough saved from my work around Mountain Pine, I’d get a ride from my grandma into town to go to the Piggly Wiggly, where I could buy an encyclopedia. Starting with Androphagi, I spent the next six years buying volumes of the encyclopedia, reading them front to back and building a wall out of them in whatever house we lived in at the time, until I wound up at Zymotic. For the record, I don’t know if it was really Androphagi or Zymotic. I seriously just looked those two words up to seem cool. I could have easily said A to Z.
But I read the full set the way kids today read Harry Potter. Or kids five years ago read Harry Potter. I don’t think kids read anymore. They watch YouTube videos. My buddy Eddie has a two-year-old who will spend an hour watching YouTube videos of a guy opening plastic eggs. Finding out what is inside each egg is the entertainment. Sounds dumb, but I watched a few and was totally hooked. Then I watched ten straight minutes of some weird dude with pale hands opening up plastic eggs that contained everything from candy to a Lego. Good thing YouTube wasn’t around back when I was a kid or I never would have learned a thing. Speaking of which, I may take a break and go watch those egg videos for a bit. You should do it, too. Trust me, at first you’ll think, This is stupid and meant for a two-year-old. But fifteen minutes later you’ll be saying, “Just one more.”
Back to the encyclopedia—my grandma got a real kick out of it. “Look at you!” she said one day when I returned from the grocery store with Volume 22, Islam to Life. “You got your next encyclopedia!” (I made up Islam to Life, too. But you get the idea.)
Always real supportive of my learning, my grandma started to give me a dollar for every A on my report card. But when report cards came out, I would have eight subjects and eight A’s, which meant eight bucks. That was a lot of money in our house. Eventually, my grandma said, “I can’t afford it anymore.” She had to lower the payment to a dollar per report card. The money was nice, but more than that I loved the acknowledgment that I had done a good job. I worked hard for those A’s, and like I said, in my family people were focused on getting food on the table. There weren’t a lot of pats on the back to go around, though I know my grandmother meant well.
