Bare Bones

by Bobby Bones

  I went back to my doctor and he prescribed sleeping pills, more precisely a pill called Edluar. Again, we talked all about it, the pros and cons, my fear of abuse. But I was at the end of my rope, and the fear of not being able to work outweighed my anxiety over becoming addicted to sleeping pills. So I started to take them, one or two every day.

  It wasn’t miraculous, but I did sleep—without nightmares. Many sleeping pills don’t get you to REM sleep, the most restful type during which you dream, and this was one of those kinds of pills. So when I woke up, it didn’t feel like I had had a full rest. But it was better than dreaming I was getting murdered in my own bed or not falling asleep at all. I was able to function, but if I didn’t take a pill, the nightmares returned. I wanted to stay fixed. So I kept taking them and taking them and taking them.

  Then on May 19, 2015, the FCC finally made its determination about the Million-Dollar Bad Thing that had happened seven months earlier. iHeartMedia, which agreed to a three-year compliance and reporting plan, was fined the million dollars.

  One million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but the relief of having a resolution was priceless. I was deeply fortunate and grateful that my company paid the fine willingly and didn’t ask for my head on a platter by way of compensation. As if a mega Band-Aid had been ripped from a wound, I was ready to heal. I said to myself, “You know what? Things really sucked for a while, and I’m not going to let them suck anymore.”

  It was time to change my attitude and get back to it.

  By this point, we had fallen all the way from number one to out of the top ten in ratings. We bottomed out because I had bottomed out. If I didn’t fix the situation, The Bobby Bones Show was going to be over. Just as I had caused the problem, I had to fix it.

  I talked to my CEO, Bob Pittman, the man who gave me my current contract and had invested so much in me over the past couple of years.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m going to turn this around. I’m not even going to say, ‘Trust me’; I’m just going to do it.”

  And we did. We turned it around. It was one step at a time, one hour at a time, one show at a time. I started to crank up the machine again, keeping notes every day, all day, of things that popped into my head:

  My grandma getting arrested once for playing bingo in a van

  New smart chips in credit cards

  How Amy can’t keep a secret

  The prevalence of farts in cartoons on Nickelodeon

  Anything that seemed interesting or I had an opinion on, I wrote down in the Notepad app on my phone. There are thousands of them there now.

  Slowly but surely, I started to right the ship through good old-fashioned hard work—but work done with joy and lightness—until we were back to number one in Nashville.

  Being on top again was great, but the real success was what I learned from the whole experience. I had started to get, as my grandma would say, “too big for my britches.” I was making money, sticking it in the face of my old bullies and the detractors with high ratings and awards, dating lots of girls. And then I made a technical error that put my career in jeopardy, sapped my confidence, and led me to stop sleeping altogether. I thought of myself as a great innovator and then right quick, I almost lost my job.

  I saw which relationships—not just romantic ones—remain when times are bad. You know, who sticks around when things are rough. There were a lot of folks who just went peace-out on us when we were down. I won’t forget that. The most profound and inspiring lesson I came away with, however, was that as rotten as life and your situation may seem, if you just put your head down and continue to fight through, you’ll come out the other side.

  I do believe that the Million-Dollar Bad Thing, as hard as it knocked me down, saved me. It taught me not only to stay humble and continue to work hard, but also to appreciate what I’ve got.

  Once I dug my show out of the ratings hole I had created, I turned toward digging myself out of the chemical dependency I found myself in. I had to get off the sleeping pills, which I had continued to take each and every night. I announced to my doctor, “I am not taking these anymore,” and like I had done with golf, poker, Subway sandwiches, etc., I went cold turkey with the sleeping pills.

  The difference with the pills was, when I stopped playing cards or golf, I didn’t go through any withdrawal. With the pills, however, I got really sick.

  As soon as I stopped taking my sleeping medication, my body went crazy. It had become used to getting something every night that suddenly was no longer there. I vomited violently for days, shaking and convulsing so badly I couldn’t walk or see straight. It made me feel really terrible for people who try to get off drugs like heroin or OxyContin. I was just detoxing from sleeping pills and I felt like I was going to die. It gave me some empathy for why people fail to get clean. Sadly, it made me understand my mom a little more.

  Just like with everything else, I fought through the withdrawal and emerged on the other side, and once I was back on my feet, I vowed I would never go back to the place I had just been.

  EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY

  I was driving down the small country road leading into Mountain Pine on an overcast afternoon in late May 2015 when I noticed in the distance a green road sign with white writing on it. I hadn’t seen a sign on that road for a while; I think it had been stolen or something. I had no idea what the name of the road was, either—probably Truck Road 379 or whatever. It didn’t really matter, since there’s only one way into and out of Mountain Pine.

  As I got close enough to make out the writing, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The sign read:

  MOUNTAIN PINE, POP. 772

  WELCOME TO THE BOYHOOD HOME OF BOBBY BONES

  The new addition to the sign came as a total shock. I was back home to speak at the high school graduation ceremony and to present the scholarship I had created to its first recipient. But I had no idea that Mountain Pine had done this.

  I immediately pulled over to check it out. There it was for whoever happened to find themselves going to this tiny town in Arkansas: “The Boyhood Home of Bobby Bones.” It was awesome, but also weird. I mean, I’m not dead yet. You never know what’s going to happen with someone who’s still alive. You should definitely never, ever name a school or institution after someone living in case that person screws up big time. All those Bill Cosby elementary schools right now are like, “Oh crap.” I guess they can always take down the sign outside of Mountain Pine if I go off the rails.

  Joking aside, I didn’t feel like I had done enough to deserve my name on that sign. The sign outside of Hot Springs says, THE BOYHOOD HOME OF BILL CLINTON. He was the president of the United States. Me? I was Quiz Bowl captain, and I play Miley Cyrus and Brad Paisley records. It’s quite the difference. Still, I wasn’t going to ask them to take it down, either. It felt good to see my name up there.

  The town put up the sign in tandem with my scholarship fund, which is called the Don’t Be Skipping Class Scholarship. That’s really the name of it. Because, as I’ve said, success is mostly about just showing up (and being on time), and I wanted to honor those who did just that in school.

  I consider the scholarship as one of my top three accomplishments, none of which have anything to do with my career other than that they’re cool things I’ve been able to do since becoming moderately successful. I mentioned the other two already. First there was getting my teeth fixed. I never went to the dentist until I got insurance in my twenties. So there was a lot of retro pay to pick up in the form of surgery after surgery after surgery, root canal after root canal. While it was never pleasurable, getting my teeth fixed was a big deal to me. It didn’t make me prettier—as my grandma would say, “You can’t polish a turd”—but having straight, nonrotten teeth (and yeah, some of them are fake) feels like I’m on the come-up. The second achievement that stands out for me was buying my mom a couple of acres on the hill for her trailer. It meant something to be able to provide for her. In the end, it didn’t save her. But at lea
st I can say she had a place to call home.

  My third accomplishment, the annual scholarship that goes to a Mountain Pine high school graduate attending college, lends a helping hand to a motivated kid who probably doesn’t have a lot. After I went to college, the lumber mill shut down, and that is when the town really suffered. Mountain Pine was already a place where folks struggled, but it became more so then.

  Mountain Pine can feel like a forgotten place (it didn’t have cell phone reception until 2015), and kids growing up there can feel forgotten in it. That’s certainly how I felt. So the scholarship is doing for someone else what I wish could have been done for me.

  The Don’t Be Skipping Class Scholarship isn’t just about grades. Any senior who is going to college creates a portfolio, which includes their grade-point average, extracurricular activities, a letter of recommendation, and a five-hundred-word essay. As I read through the first year’s applications, I was looking for a good kid, who wanted to do right.

  I found that with Peanuckle Jones. (Okay, that’s not his real name, but since we aren’t using a lot of real names in this book, I thought that was a funny one.) A lot of people wrote about how hard they worked in school. Peanuckle’s essay was completely different. He wrote about how he played baseball and said that although his team hadn’t won a game in four years, it didn’t matter to him. He was still going to continue to play and work hard to get better even if he lost every game for the rest of his life.

  I identified with him immediately. He didn’t win the scholarship because he had good grades or did well on his SATs (although he did). Reading his essay I thought, Man, that is me. (That was only reinforced for me when I met Peanuckle the night of the graduation. Giving him my cell number and e-mail address, I told him to reach out if he ever needed anything. Just like I said to Deion Sanders when he gave me his number, Peanuckle made it clear he would never dare bother me by calling or e-mailing.)

  In a way, the scholarship is a selfish act. I can admit it. The award is money that the winner can use in any way he or she wants. Books, tuition, anything. Want to go out and eat a few hundred times? Whatever’s going to make your life slightly easier as you try to navigate through college, I GOT YOU! It feels selfish, because that is what I would have wanted when I was entering my freshman year of college. It’s almost as if I’m entering a time machine, finding the younger me, and saying, “Hey, Little Bobby, I’m going to help you out.”

  It always comes back to me. That’s a major reason I like to help people: I want to help the Me’s out there. With everyone on the show and great dudes like Jason Aldean (remember—the country music star who I thought hated me when I first came to Nashville? I told you, he’s my buddy now), Keith Urban, and Dierks Bentley, we have raised millions for different children’s hospitals all over the country. That cause in particular always brings me back to when I was in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. We couldn’t afford medical care, but someone paid my bills. And now I can help places like the hospital that took care of me.

  I’ve often thought I should give for the sake of giving and not because it makes me feel better about an issue I’ve experienced. Like, I should donate to a bird refuge or something. But I guess I’m way too selfish for that. I’d much rather give Christmas presents to children whose parents can’t afford them, because I can imagine how psyched a kid will be opening them up, just like I was when I was little and getting cool stuff.

  I don’t know that I was put here for any reason. I don’t think so. But I do know that I want to leave this place better than how I found it. And the way I help best is when I have a personal connection. That’s why I regularly speak to groups of people who are dealing with alcoholism or addiction. Although I’ve never had a drink or touched an illegal drug, I don’t give any kind of moralistic speech. It’s not about that. What I’ve found is that whenever I meet people who’ve been affected by substance abuse—either their own or that of someone they love—there’s an inherent bond. It’s almost as if you come from the same place. It’s just that this place is where your pain comes from. I want others to know that if they have trouble letting go of the past or continue to struggle with that demon over and over, they aren’t alone.

  Despite all the success I’ve achieved in my career, I am just like anyone else who has a hard time coming to terms with life’s disappointments. Although it’s been several years since my mother passed away, I can’t sell the land I bought for her. I get a bill for taxes on it every year. Meanwhile there could be someone living on it. I don’t know, because I refuse to return to even look at the place.

  That is definitely a metaphor for the way I’ve learned to cope with painful realities and emotions. I just try to shut them out. When I returned to Mountain Pine to give out the scholarship, I went to see a few people that I keep in touch with, like my friend Scotty. Then I went over to see my former stepdad, Keith, at his new house, and we decided to grab some food. In the car, he said, “I know we haven’t talked about your mom since she died.”

  Oh no.

  I would have done anything to get out of that conversation—including jump out of a car traveling sixty miles per hour. It wasn’t the subject that made me nervous but the intimacy of the conversation. It could have been about anything. When someone wants to have a face-to-face exchange about feelings, I get freaked out.

  “I’m really sorry, how it happened,” he said.

  In total he probably talked about three minutes, during which Keith said he was the one who had found her in the kitchen of her trailer. Or maybe he said someone called him to say she was dead. The fact that I don’t remember is more telling than the details of who discovered my mother’s body.

  Again, it wasn’t that we were talking about my mother’s death. I get this way in a lot of one-on-one conversations. My mind races, and I lose the ability to know when to respond. I get anxious that I’m going to ruin the conversation. Fixated on figuring out the right moment to talk, I’m not able to listen to what the other person is saying. This is the exact opposite of how I am on the job.

  It all stems from my fundamental lack of trust in others. It’s crazy that I feel that way, since I’ve been the recipient of so much generosity. I’m ashamed at my good fortune when I think of all the people who have looked out for me: my grandma, my stepdad, my childhood best friend Evan, Courtney, Jay Shannon, Bob Pittman and Rod Phillips from iHeartradio, and on and on. I know, a lot of people have had it a lot worse.

  But I also can’t beat myself up for feeling the way I feel. When my biological father disappeared from my life at five years old, I became hardwired to expect everyone to abandon me. And for that I can never forgive him.

  Nothing will change that, not even seeing him face-to-face, which I did several years ago while back in Hot Springs for Christmas. It seems absurd to say now, but I had no idea he was going to be there when I accepted an invitation for Christmas dinner at my paternal grandmother’s house. It wasn’t my grandmother who extended the invitation (having seen her only a handful of times in my life, I had no relationship with her). My cousins, aunt, and uncle, whom I am close to, said I should come. So I did.

  As soon as I walked in, a man, a little shorter than me and a lot rougher, standing in the entryway, said to me, “Hey, did you come here to kick my ass?”

  “What?” I said.

  I had no idea who he was and thought maybe he was making some kind of joke. Then it hit me who was talking and I felt sick to my stomach.

  I had no idea when I had seen him last. It could have been that convenience store next to Evan’s house. That was twenty years ago.

  I should have just left. But that’s not how I do things. Instead, I laughed uncomfortably and lamely said no.

  Then we sat down and proceeded to have about the most awkward hour-long holiday dinner since Christmas was invented. My dad (it pains me just to type the word “dad” in reference to the man) and I didn’t say one word to each other. Uncomfortable doesn’t even come close to d
escribing this meal.

  After my father left, it was easier for me to pretend that he didn’t exist than to deal with my rage over his leaving. That’s why I don’t like when he pops up on Facebook or at Christmas dinners. I recognize that I still have a lot of anger and sadness, but I’m most comfortable expressing my emotions through my work, whether it’s talking on my radio show or writing a song for the Raging Idiots.

  I actually did write a song about this very issue for my band, which is best known for such profound tunes as “Everybody on Facebook Hates Me” and “Ballad of Big Head Bobby.” Serious songs are not usually in my wheelhouse. In fact, I named our album The Critics Give It 5 Stars because I knew no critic would ever give it five stars but I still wanted people to have to say that every time they mentioned the record.

  For the album, I didn’t plan on writing anything more serious than my romantic ballad to the greatest love of my life, Netflix. (“I take you to the park / Sit with you on a bench / To have you there with me I don’t have to be rich / Only nine dollars and ninety-nine cents / Because I have you, Netflix.”) But I worked with a couple of songwriters, older guys who have been at it for twenty-five years. We weren’t on the same page comedy-wise, so I told them about one idea for a song, not particularly funny, about how I always wanted to go fishing with my dad—a dad, any dad. We started talking out the story, playing some chords on the guitar, and before we left the room, we had written “Fishin’ with My Dad.”

  It was sundown on Lake Ouachita and I was ten years old

  Watching a daddy teach his boy how to cast a fishing pole

  I remember wishing that I had what he had

  Just one chance to go fishing with my dad . . .

  Mom married a good man in the summer of ’93

  At first I wasn’t too sure about what he thought of me