Daddy was a gynecologist. Grandma committed suicide.
I come from a long line of moody people on my father’s side and social climbers on Mom’s. Dad’s family was wealthy and wanted to be normal, were desperate to be normal. Mom’s family was normal and wanted to be wealthy. The two lines culminated in me, Lana Sue Goodwin Potts Roe Paul, the moodiest social climber.
My sister Dessie once said, “Daddy fell in love with Mom because her mom served dinner at exactly the same time every night and all the furniture in the living room was wrapped in plastic. He figured anyone that normal couldn’t put out crazy kids.”
He figured wrong, of course. Dessie turned gay at eleven. I caught her going down on the baby-sitter the night Mom and Dad drove downtown to see The King and I. I thought she was playing hide-and-seek from me and had found a really dumb place to hide. Dessie lives in New York City now with a famous lesbian magazine editor. My sister never was cute like me. Maybe she got the wrong hormones.
Dessie won’t go to Houston to visit Mom and Dad anymore, says they’re provincial and have bad taste.
“I do not care to associate myself with anyone who serves Riunite on ice with a salmon loaf,” Dessie says, “even if they are my parents.”
From the earliest I remember, especially after Daddy started having sad spells, much was made of “Grandma’s blood.” When Dessie sat in the middle of Wildwood Way and refused to budge, Mom said, “Grandma’s blood.” When I threw the veal piccata into the living room knickknack shelf, it was “Grandma’s blood.” I never found out what Grandma’s sin was, other than killing herself while her sons were off on Iwo Jima wasting Japs, but she sure got blamed for a lot of grief fifteen years later.
Once every seven or eight months I’d come home from school and Mom would meet me at the door, whispering, “Grandma’s blood is in your father again. Why don’t you go to Roxanne’s for the night?”
“Why do I have to leave?”
“For one night. You can come back tomorrow.”
“Daddy won’t be any better tomorrow.”
“Yes, he will. He just needs some rest. You’ll be fine at Roxanne’s.”
“Sure, Mom. We got any candy bars? I’m hungry.”
I packed off to my cousin Roxanne’s with my toothbrush, a rolled-up nightie, and an overnight case full of junk food, which I finished off by bedtime. The next day I would walk home to find Daddy sitting in his overstuffed Naugahyde recliner, staring at his hand on his knee. He usually sat about a week, sometimes a week and a half or two, not talking, not even blinking as far as Dessie and I could tell. Each night around bedtime he’d exhale a sigh that tore my spine from bottom to top.
I reached a time where I could handle the catatonic daddy routine by pretending he wasn’t really there, that man in the chair was a visiting plant, but I never got used to the sighs. I still remember how terrible the nightly wait was and how much I hated myself when it came.
Then one morning I’d wake up and Daddy would be in the kitchen, teasing, rumpling hair, flipping pancakes, full of energy and projects. His favorite project was the garden. Daddy spent hundreds of hours piddling over strains of saffron, trying to find one that flourished in Houston’s climate. I don’t think gynecology was all that important to him. He only put in enough time at it to finance his real interests, like saffron.
Poor Mama married the wrong money. She didn’t want a family of temperamental neurotics. She wanted a television commercial life. A household where the biggest problems were choosing a feminine spray and stains in the toilet bowl. She wanted two large American-made automobiles and a separate family room away from the dining and living room combination—a bathroom of her very own.
Lord only knows what Daddy wanted—to get through it all, I suppose, to grow old with a presentable wife, plenty of insurance, virgin daughters, and enough money to bury himself with dignity.
That was the problem right there—virgin daughters. His spells coincided with my first period, my first date, my first C in school. Any excuse from me and Daddy’s eyes filmed over and he shuffled around the house like an old man for a day, then he moaned out loud and sat down and I got sent to Roxanne’s for another night.
Mom knew who to blame, all right. Daddy had a spell just before I ran away with Mickey. It started on Christmas Eve, midway through Perry Como.
Perry sat on a three-legged stool, singing about the bells of Saint Somebody while Mom hummed along. She had set up a card table for stringing cranberries and popcorn. Mom just couldn’t accept the fact that we were not a regular, wholesome American family like the ones on Donna Reed and “My Three Sons.” Daddy leaned back in his recliner, smoking a cigar. Dessie was upstairs with her best friend, Brenda.
I sat on the couch, eating a TV dinner and wondering how Mom would feel if I told her Dessie wasn’t upstairs gossiping about boys. Wouldn’t it be neat at sixteen to surprise your complacent Better Homes and Gardens mother with, “My sister’s up in her room licking Brenda’s clit, Ma.” I’d love it. She could never act so damn self-righteous around me again.
But, I didn’t. It would be too much like stepping on a puppy’s head. Instead, I silently chewed Salisbury steak and watched Perry Como and my mother fake the Christmas spirit.
Daddy leaned over and took off his left slipper and threw it at the television. Mom and I stopped in midhum and chew, staring at the slipper on the floor.
Daddy groaned, “Jesus Christ.”
He didn’t say another word clear through The Tonight Show—just sat there with one slipper on his foot and one slipper on the rug.
Before bed, Mom caught me in the hall and pulled me into her and Daddy’s bathroom with the fuzzy toilet seat cover. The towels were red and green, used only during the holiday season.
“Grandma’s blood is acting up in your father again,” she whispered loudly. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything, Mama,” I said, though I knew better. I didn’t know what awful injustice I’d committed, but I knew Daddy’s depression was my fault. It was never Dessie who caused him to stop talking. Always me, I was older.
“You’re so pretty and sweet,” Mom said, touching my hair. “You have all the advantages, Lannie. Don’t break your father’s heart.”
A week later, I ran off to get laid and become a country star, but if someone says you’re breaking their heart before you’ve done anything, you might as well do something. You get blamed either way.
A couple of years after the twins were born, I took a course in psychology at Rice. The course gave me just enough undergraduate ammunition to try defending myself.
“Daddy’s manic,” I shouted at Mom. “It’s bad chemicals he inherited from Grandma or too much salt or something. I don’t cause these episodes. They just happen.”
Mom looked at herself in the lavatory mirror, holding her narrow chin up and to the right. Every serious talk I ever had with her took place in the bathroom. It’s like the woman can’t express herself more than three feet from a douche bag.
“If only you hadn’t run off with that musician.”
“The spells were as bad before I left as they are now.”
“That’s not true, Lannie. Your father has never been happy since that first night you didn’t come home.”
“My father’s never been happy since the day I was born. I can’t vouch for earlier.”
Mom’s lip quivered and she blinked quickly. “Don’t say that. We were happy when we were young. I remember.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
She opened the cabinet and reached in for another blue Valium. “You must be careful, Lannie. Your father loves you more than anything on earth. I hate to think what he might do to himself if you ever pulled another stunt like that.”
Translation: Disappoint Daddy and he’ll kill himself and it will be your fault.
• • •
Daddy was a gynecologist in Houston, which means we never had to do without. He chose Houston because of the humidity. A gynecologist’s dreamland, he called it. We lived in Bellaire, which is a reasonably upper-middle part of the city—mostly white people, mostly with money. I was typical to the point of nausea. Skirts to the knees, socks to the knees, hair usually straight, though flipped up during a Doris Day stage and page-boyed when Patty Duke pageboyed hers.
I had a boyfriend, Ron, who played basketball and ate pizza. He drove a huge ’55 Oldsmobile with bad springs that rode like a ship in heavy weather. We went out four times before he kissed me, seven times before he felt my left breast, thirteen before he felt my right.
Most of our “dates” were spent sprawled on the floor in the family room, reading DC comics and drinking 7-Ups. Sometimes we played Ping-Pong in the garage with another couple. Passion didn’t come up too often.
I don’t remember school. I don’t think it was important. I never stopped to think about myself or whether everyone was like me, or I was like anyone. I do remember the summers. We circled from the A&W to the Sonic endlessly, singing along with the Rhondelles, beating out Ventures drum solos on the dashboard.
Ron and I French-kissed a couple of times at the drive-in (Son of Flubber), I giggled about how weird it felt later with the girls at a slumber party where we each smoked a Lark cigarette and I threw up in the kitchen sink because someone else was throwing up in the bathroom.
Most of the summer of ’62 was spent in a one-piece bathing suit at the country club, though I don’t remember swimming that much, mostly just lying around the pool, watching the boys show off. I had a good tan by August. I remember that tan. Happiness was not an issue. Who thinks, Am I happy? when they’re fifteen? Loren probably did, but he’s peculiar.
School started. I was a junior. Football season, Thanksgiving, basketball season, Christmas. The high point came on my birthday in October when I got a driver’s license. Because I was going with the captain of the basketball team, I had a fairly good shot at Queen in February. I didn’t worry about it much. I was more worried about keeping my weight down and my teeth straight—braces terrified me. I also stood in front of the mirror most nights, searching for boobs that never came. Other girls had boobs. I knew all the kids thought I was a squirrel for not having any.
I asked Daddy for a car for Christmas, but he gave me a watch instead. What did I need a watch for? What I needed was wheels of my own. With wheels I could be popular without knockers.
• • •
All this life based on growing up in the American dream ended on New Year’s Eve. It was my cousin Roxanne’s fault. Roxy is my favorite hell-raising relative. She’s a year and then some younger than me, but her daddy wasn’t a manic gynecologist, so Roxanne started her smoking, drinking, life-in-the-fast-lane period way before Dessie or me. Not only did Roxanne get lucky at fourteen, but she claims she had regular orgasms. I doubt it.
The reason I doubt it is because Roxanne’s supposed Big Os came off rodeo cowboys. Even older women complain about short rides and losses of concentration on the rodeo circuit. Bull riders and calf ropers are just too horny. I can’t conceive of a kid cowboy lasting more than eight seconds, but I guess that shows a prejudicial viewpoint picked up later after several years of working honky-tonks.
Looking back, I find Roxanne’s pastime really amazing. I mean, knowing her rich and easy background, hanging out with cowboys was a lot more rebellious than the early sex, but then, Roxanne didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her cowboy fetish. She said a limp turned her on.
Rox’s cowboy that winter was an older, browner guy named Neb—which I think was short for Nebraska. Neb had a face like a muddy teardrop and knees farther apart than his shoulders. He chewed and spit. I thought he was repulsive, though I never have figured out Roxanne’s tastes in butt.
Along about Thanksgiving, Neb gave Roxanne two tickets to a New Year’s Eve concert by something called Conway Twitty and the Twitty Birds, his obvious plan being that I should drive Roxanne to the concert so he could get her drunk and hump her. I didn’t cooperate.
“No.”
Roxy pleaded. “Every Christmas Ron gets drug off to his grandma’s in Wichita Falls and every New Year’s Eve you sit home watching TV. It’s time you had some fun, Lannie.”
“I can’t stand hillbilly music. Twitty sounds like twang and twang stinks.”
“I bet you never even heard any real country music.”
“I heard it and I hate it. No.”
“Maybe Neb can bring a friend for you.”
“I’m not going to pop my cherry with a smelly cowboy in a pickup truck. Besides I’m going steady. Why should I screw a stranger if I won’t screw Ron?”
“Because Ron doesn’t know how.”
“That’s possible.”
“You don’t have to screw Neb’s friend. Just pretend you might and he’ll buy you some drinks.”
“Forget it.”
Roxanne bothered me the whole week after Christmas. Part of her problem was that I was sixteen and could drive and she was fifteen and couldn’t. If Neb picked her up at home, they were afraid her parents would call the police.
I finally gave in. You can ask Loren. Or Ron, Ace, or Mickey. Persistence is my weakness. I’ll give in to anyone who’s willing to beg awhile.
We told Mom and Dad we were going to a slumber party at Brenda’s with Dessie. Dessie and Brenda were glad to cover for us. It made them look less suspicious also. I wore my pink sweater and jeans. Roxanne wore a skirt and cowboy boots. She looked like Dale Evans pretending to be a teenage hooker.
We ate Mama Burgers at the A&W before driving downtown, but the night almost collapsed right there because Roxanne tried to steal her root beer mug and we got caught and the man threatened to call the cops. He only let us go because she cried.
We each drank a beer while I drove Daddy’s car downtown. Roxanne had taken us two apiece from her parents’ refrigerator. I said they’d find out, but she said they wouldn’t. Her parents were throwing a New Year’s Eve party and they’d never miss four Lone Stars.
“Here,” she said, handing me a straw from the A&W. “You get drunk quicker if you suck it up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why, but everyone says it works.”
The concert was in the old Baxter Hall on Second Street. We got there early and sat in the car, drinking beer out of straws and looking at all the people on the sidewalk.
“Where’s Neb?” I asked.
Roxanne smoked a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Her long fingernails were painted bright brown to go with her eyes and brown hair. Even back at fifteen, Roxanne fit like a comfortable cat into the sophisticated world of beer, cigarettes, and easy sex. “He said he’d meet us at the door. I talked to him this afternoon and he’s bringing a friend for you like I figured.”
“I never knew a real cowboy before.”
“They’re the same as those jocks you go out with, only their peckers are pointed like their boots.”
This got us both to laughing with mouthfuls of beer, which got beer all over the front seat of Daddy’s car.
“Can I try a cigarette?” I asked, opening my other Lone Star.
“Sure”—Roxanne handed me the pack—“but only if you inhale. I’m sick and tired of butt beggars who hold the smoke in their mouths and try to look cool.”
I lit up, but I didn’t inhale. “I saw Ron’s pecker once.”
Roxanne seemed to think this was about the funniest thing she’d ever heard. I suppose she’d seen dozens by then. “What did it look like?” she giggled.
“I don’t know, like they’re supposed to, I guess. It was dark. He pulled it out in the parking lot after the Brownsville game. Ron wanted me to touch it, but I didn’t.”
“Was it hard and stiff?”
“I don’t think so. It looked kind of gross.”
This sent us into more giggles and more beerspit in Daddy’s car. I tried to wipe some off the seat with a Kleenex.
“Jesus, Daddy’ll kill me.”
“Too late now. Look at that.” Roxanne pointed at a big woman with a bigger cowboy going into the hall. The woman wore a huge, blond sparkly wig and a belt buckle with blue rocks on it. As she passed, the back of the belt read IMOGENE.
“How do you figure she got those pants on?” I asked.
“A long time ago, then she grew into ’em. Check out this guy.” The original rhinestone urban asshole strutted past. “Maybe he’s a pimp for horses,” Roxanne said.
Three couples spilled, laughing, out of a pickup truck beside us. The women were all thin and chewed gum. Two had chrome silver hair and the other had dyed hers an unbelievable zit red. Obviously, all three had spent a lot of time and money making themselves look like they looked.
“Where did all these hicks and freaks come from?” I asked.
“Houston.”
“I need some air.”
Sixteen years old, half-drunk on two beers, walking in to hear something called the Twitty Birds, I started to think. It wasn’t easy. I’m sure I was the first girl in my class at Bellaire to think a thought someone hadn’t told her first.
These people around me, some even touching me, all had real faces, open to good and bad and love and pain. These people seemed to believe in their own legitimacy, but they weren’t like me or my parents or any of my parents’ friends. I’d never in my life met an unmarried adult. Or a black person. We had a maid named Bobbie who I took for granted was poor, but I’d never actually talked to her.
These people on both sides of me didn’t give a damn about getting into a good college.
That thought staggered me. Here were grown women who weren’t bums or degenerates, but most of them obviously hadn’t been Sub Debs and had never even thought about what they were missing. I bet not one of those three women with the aluminum hairdos knew the difference between a Lucky Circle Girl and a Jolly Jill. I bet they didn’t care. And their dates probably didn’t consider themselves washed-up, skid-row hoboes even though they didn’t hold membership in a restricted country club.
These people didn’t dress like me, talk like me, wear their hair like me, or want the things I’d been told I wanted, yet none of them looked miserable because of it.
Suddenly, in a white flash of teen enlightenment, I realized that people completely unlike me outnumber people like me. KaBoom. Second insight. They were not worth less than people like me.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk on Second Street. “Roxanne,” I said, “the people not like us outnumber the people like us.”
“Of course. There’s Neb. Wow, his friend is cute, we may have to trade.”
“And the people not like us are just as good as we are.”
“Whoever said they weren’t? Hey, Neb, over here.”
• • •
Neb’s friend was kind of a nice guy, in an angular sort of way. His face wasn’t scarred and all his teeth seemed to line up right. I didn’t catch whether his name was Mel or Del. The face matched either one.
“So you’re Hot Rox’s cousin,” he said with a grin that might have been a leer.
“I’m not a bit like her.”
“Oh.” Mel or Del looked disappointed.
Roxanne laughed hysterically at something Neb said and he put his arm around her shoulders as we walked through the double doors.
The Baxter is a wonderful place for a concert. I’d love to sing there sometime. Hardwood floors, high, dark ceiling, small tables scattered around like a real ballroom. We sat toward the front on the right. No one checked our IDs or anything. It was great—my first experience at being treated like a grown-up.
A waitress in a low-cut blouse and square-dancing skirt gave us each a funny hat and a toy that clicked when you spun it or unrolled when you blew in it. The guys grabbed up the toys you blew in and started zipping us in the ears and tits.
Roxanne jumped right into the spirit, but I hung back some, it all seemed a bit stupid to me.
Without even asking, Neb ordered four tequila sunrises. I caught him winking at Mel or Del.
“Why did you wink?” I asked.
“Got sawdust in my eye.”
I didn’t see any sawdust, but what the hell, why push it? If Roxanne wanted to be hustled, that was her business. What pisses me off is a man thinking he can seduce someone who doesn’t want to be seduced. All the charm and tequila in Houston wouldn’t trick me into doing something I didn’t think up first.
Roxanne laughed every time Neb opened his mouth whether he meant to be funny or not. And whenever she laughed, she touched him—on the arm, the hair, the side of the face, somewhere. It grated my stomach. The laugh she used around boys was nothing like her girl laugh. It was all shriek and no sincerity. There are certain women that I like fine until you get them around men and then I can’t stand to be anywhere near the bitches. Roxanne is one.
As soon as the lights dimmed, my date—sure wish I knew his name—grabbed my hand and held it between both of his. He didn’t intertwine fingers, but held on like a double handshake.
The first band was called Thunder Road, and Mickey was in it. He sat behind a flat thing that looked like an electric bicycle rack, grinning, chewing gum, scanning the audience with this self-satisfied look. The band broke into a fast instrumental, sort of a Texas polka. I liked it.
“What’s that thing the guy is sitting behind?” I asked.
Mel or Del stopped gazing at me long enough to check the stage. “The drummer?”
“No, the other guy.”
“That’s a pedal steel. You never saw a pedal steel before?”
“Uh-uh. What’s it do?”
“Like a guitar strung across an ironing board. You play it with your hands, knees, and feet.”
“All at the same time?”
I sometimes wonder why I chose Mickey. He seemed so worldly, leaning over his steel, nodding his head more to the chewing gum than the music. Maybe not worldly, but Houstonly. I’d just discovered a huge mass of people with a value system different from mine, and Mickey looked like he understood them.
Even sitting down, I could tell he was real tall. His face was all ridges, his cheekbones, chin, and nose stuck out as if he’d recently starved to death—a chewing, smiling skull.
The waitress brought our sunrises just as the song ended, so I was the only one at the table to applaud. The others were digging for money or oohing over the orange and red colors or some foolishness.
“Clap,” I said.
Mel or Del just looked at me with his billfold in one hand and two dollars in the other.
The fiddle player stepped up to a microphone and said they were happy to be in Houston and he hoped everyone has a wonderful New Year’s and gets drunk and laid. The rest of the table came round long enough to applaud and cheer that one.
Then the fiddler said, “Since this is the tenth anniversary of the death of country music’s greatest legend, Hank Williams, we’d like to play a few of his songs for you.”
Mickey leaned forward, and closing his eyes, moved into the introduction of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” I didn’t breathe. His fingers made the most beautiful, saddest sounds I’d ever heard, like he touched my insides, casually picking up all the vital organs and squeezing.
The steel wept, not the quiet tears or uncontrolled sobbing like a woman’s crying, but the deep, helpless grief of a man at the end of himself. I couldn’t believe the sounds, the pain, the hopelessness of each slowly bending note, and all the while, Mickey smiling, looking down at his hands as if he wasn’t even connected to the wails coming from the speakers.
I’d be embarrassed if it happened now, but I was moved, forced to feel strong emotion. Imagine that, Lana Sue feeling strongly. Maybe it was more the steel than the man. Maybe I’d have fallen in love with the first pedal steel player I heard, no matter who it was, but Mickey got the nod that night.
Oh, shit. Let’s get as corny as we can here. I was sixteen and semidrunk and the occasion called for corn. The set ended with my sunrise untouched and my heart stomped on. Let’s see Loren get mushier than that.
As Mickey stood up, he smiled and nodded and looked at me. I know he did.
Wrestling my hand free of Mel or Del’s double grip, I said, “I’ve got to go to the ladies’ room.”
Roxanne glanced over. “You want me to go with you, honey?”
“No, I can make it alone.”
She frowned. “You okay, Lannie?”
“Sure, the beer just went right through. I’ll be back in a second.”
• • •
It took some time, but I found Mickey backstage. He sat alone in a dressing room, his long legs propped on a guitar case, a fifth of Wild Turkey tucked between them.
“Hi,” I said.
He looked me up and down, slowly, calmly. Later I realized that was the same look he gave porterhouse steaks or cases of beer, but at the time, the look made me tremble and go tin-mouthed.
He didn’t say anything, so I jumped right in, talking as fast as possible. “You don’t know me, but my name is Lana Sue Goodwin and I’m a virgin but that doesn’t really matter because I admire your music and, just watching, I think you could teach me about the world, you know, the people in the world that you sing about. You see, I’ve led an awfully sheltered life, and I don’t know anything about anything, like why people do what they do and how you play that beautiful machine of yours, and you seem to know. Maybe you don’t, maybe I’m just being a squirrel, but I don’t think so and Christ, you have to grow up sometime.”
Mickey stuck two fingers in his mouth, pulled out his gum, and rubbed it into the bottom of his chair. He opened the fifth and drank. I counted. His Adam’s apple rose and fell three times. He grunted once and handed me the bottle.
“Thank you,” I said. I tried to rub his cooties off the bottle mouth without him seeing.
“You a cocktease?” he asked.
“Of course not.” I didn’t even know what the word meant. I took a sip and handled it real well—no gasp, no shudder, no gag. I felt real grown-up. “This is certainly smooth whiskey.”
“Certainly?”
“Certainly is.”
Mickey reached for the bottle and took another swig. “You hungry?”
“Sure.” This wasn’t exactly what I expected and I wasn’t hungry, but I figured I’d better be agreeable or he wouldn’t talk to me.
“I need a hamburger.” He stood up about a foot taller than me. “What’s your name again?”
“Lana Sue. What’s yours?”
“Mickey Thunder.”
“Really?”
“Naw, that’s my stage name. Real name is Michael Rossitelli.” We walked across the street to a hotel coffee shop and ate hamburgers and french fries and talked. He told me about growing up poor, playing music, and being on the road all the time. I told him about Pep Club. I asked a lot of questions about his steel guitar. Mickey drew me a diagram of all the strings and their notes and what each of the eight foot pedals and four knee pedals did.
“Why do some make tones go up and some make tones go down and some do both?” I asked.
“Because that’s how you play it.”
“But it’s so complicated, moving your fingers, feet and knees all at the same time.”
“That’s why most steel players don’t sing. I can’t sing for shit.”
“Is that why you chose steel?”
“Naw, you get to play sitting down. I hate standing up.”
“I want to hear you play some more.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
A couple of hours later—after the Twitty Birds and Roxanne, Neb, and whoever I was with were all gone, after everyone was gone—Mickey and I stumbled blind drunk onto the stage so he could play a song on his pedal steel. I was very drunk. I’d never been very drunk before. A teenager’s first drunk is a bizarre, spinning experience that no amount of Coca-Cola and aspirin can prepare you for. God, was I drunk.
Mickey was only his usual every-night-stinking drunk. Halfway across the stage, he lurched into me and we fell over a drum and rolled under his instrument.
Virginity was a big deal back then. Maybe it should still be a big deal. I mean, there are three things that you only do once. You’re born, you lose your virginity, and you die. Life’s like that. Everything else can be repeated. Of those, losing virginity is the only one you have any control over. It’s also the only one that’s supposed to be fun and the only one you can reflect back on later.
I kind of wasted my once-in-a-lifetime loss because I was too drunk and don’t remember much. We rolled around onstage, all tangled together with cords and wires and each other. His fingers went everywhere at once. His breath wasn’t pleasant, but his fingers sure were.
Mickey said some dirty words.
I grunted around some.
The next thing it was light and some guys were laughing and I was lying on a dusty stage without clothes on.
• • •
Imagine kerplunking your typical American adolescent down in western Pakistan. He’s lost, right? Everything he sees and touches is new and bizarre and he has no way of knowing what is normal for western Pakistan and what is considered strange even there. If his guide says everyone eats monkeys’ feet or shaves their chests or prays five times a day or gives away all their money on the new moon, this theoretical typical kid has no way of knowing if he’s being fed truth or dog manure.
Now—there is a large difference between the life of a doctor’s daughter and the life of a groupie, snuff queen, or whatever you want to call a girl on the road with a second-rate country band. The two styles have no common points. Every detail—the food, the hours, the lack of privacy, especially the people—was unlike anything from my past, and Mickey was my only connection to reality. So when Mickey said all musicians drink Wild Turkey all day and all night, who was I to question? He told me working-class women give their men blow jobs before breakfast. I’d never met a working-class woman, how should I know better? You’ve got to trust your guide in these situations and I drew Mickey Thunder as my guide.
Not that I didn’t eat up every minute of it. For ten glorious weeks we wheeled around Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, singing, playing, driving, and screwing our way across America’s Heartland. We were Thunder Road, hottest Western band in a five-state area—at least the ads said so and, like Mickey, I had no reason to think they lied.
I truly loved the traveling band life, all those EAT HERE cafes with “guaranteed” steaks and “famous” apple pie, the grime of gas station bathrooms, practically existing on Peanut Planks and Orange Crushes. We slept in the cheapest motels on earth, disgusting little boxes with stained sheets and rusted iron bathtubs where you showered with A-200 instead of soap. If only Roxanne could have seen me sleeping six in a bed with five horny, drunk musicians. Wet dreams fell like rain.
The time was evenly split between the van, the motels, and the bars. I liked the bars best because that’s where I met the people. Country bars back then all had black floors carpeted with cigarette butts and spilled beer. The air was unbreathable by today’s standards. None of the tables had four equal legs, none of the bartenders had clean teeth, and all the waitresses were overweight with ratted-up hair and tight jeans. At least that’s how I remember it, twenty-two years down the line.
The bars blur together, but the customers don’t. I liked the country bar customers. They acted like they felt. If a cowboy felt drunk, he acted drunk. If he felt lonesome or mean, he acted lonesome or mean. Amazing. Dancing, fighting, crying, I saw more raw emotion in a country bar in one night than I’ve seen in all my country clubs put together.
Poor people treat you like anybody else, like you’re as good or bad, weak or stupid, as them. They take sixteen-year-old girls seriously.
The second night out we played in a county-line bar outside of Beaumont filled mostly with black farmers and Gulf workers. They were nice to me. I couldn’t believe it. They acted like I was as regular as they were. One of the wives asked me what I thought of the new disposable diapers. I told her they sounded great.
The women spend a lot of their time pregnant. Every blacktop-highway cafe had at least one stuck-out waitress who called me honey and asked how many young’uns I had. They seemed disappointed when I said none. In Texarkana, I met a girl named Jamey that I liked because she had the exact same birthday as me. Jamey had two boys, both down with a rural pox of some kind, a car with a busted oil pan, and a husband who had run off to Shreveport with her younger sister and refused to pay child support. A couple of days before I came along she’d had to shoot the family dog because she couldn’t afford to take him to the vet, and, just to make it all country song material, she’d skipped her last two periods.
I listened to this story with all the respect of Mary Magdalene listening to Jesus. I admired that girl so much, but Jamey acted like she was nothing out of the ordinary. She was cheerful. The heaviest decision of my life was whether or not to tease my hair like Kitty Wells’s. Only two weeks ago I’d cried my eyes out because Daddy didn’t buy me a Chevy for Christmas, and here was a girl my age raising two boys without money or hope.
“You must be worried sick,” I said.
“Why?”
• • •
Choosie played fiddle. He was older, twenty-six, and only slept with fat girls. He lived on cashews and Dr Pepper. Would drink half a 10-2-4 bottle of Dr Pepper and fill it back up with whiskey or tequila. Or wine or beer. Mickey always said Choosie wasn’t. Then he’d funnel in a pack of cashews and a couple of pills and drink the whole mix in one pull. I like to threw up watching the first time.
Lined up between Mick and Choosie stood Paul Bob, Butch Bob, and Bob Bob, bass, drums, and lead guitar. The Bobs were thin, long-fingered embarrassed boys with dirty jeans and a never-ending supply of toothpicks.
We got along well, but I made the boys nervous. They were at that woman-craving age and cramped quarters caused them to see a good deal of my body. All the boys, except maybe Choosie, wasted a lot of time fantasizing about what it would feel like to hump me.
“Come on, Lannie,” Bob Bob whined. “One quick romp or I’ll bust.” I didn’t mention he’d busted all over my arm in his sleep last night.
“You mind?” I asked Mickey.
“Wouldn’t want the boy to explode. Have to find a new guitar player.”
Much to everyone’s disappointment, including Mickey, even mine, I suppose, I never did. Middle-class morality flowed too deep for me to rationalize the term “Gang Bang Queen,” no matter what the circumstances. We all draw the line somewhere.
After a while they let me sing a few songs onstage, mostly slow, mostly sad, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn material. The rush beat sex all to pieces. I stood, fingertips touching the mike stand, face upturned a tad, moaning “I’ve Got the Memories But She’s Got You,” pretending to be the spurned woman. Not pretending, I felt the heartbreak, I was that woman, sitting alone with her pictures and memories, feeling the ache as her soul broke up and floated away. Though I’d never been unhappy in my life, I could click right into pain as if it was the natural state of being me.
At the end of a song, I wrenched myself back into the present and looked down through the tears and smoke at those men and they stared up at me with their mouths open, Pearl beers poised above the table—and I found the power. Those men wanted me. Me, sixteen-year-old Lana Sue Goodwin, student council representative at Bellaire High. I had the power.
It didn’t matter if they were married or alone, too old to get it up or too young to get in, I could take any one of them I wanted.
Mickey knew it too. “You sure turn on horny drunks,” he said.
“It’s my charisma.”
“It’s your twat.”
We traveled mainly on two-lane state highways. Mickey and I drove the van full of equipment while the others followed in Choosie’s ’54 Studebaker station wagon, which was nice because driving was the closest Mick and I ever came to privacy.
The van was an old Dodge deathmobile with no lights, springs, or brakes to brag about—not a car really, but a condemned roller coaster with a built-in bar. I sat on a milk crate between the front seats, Mickey on one side and an amp on the other. That way we could grab each other without a bunch of scooting and shifting.
Mickey constantly fooled with the radio, searching out Arkansas hillbilly stations, and when he found one, he’d turn the volume up so loud the speakers crackled and I couldn’t understand any of the words.
He banged his fist on the dash and jumped around in his seat, swerving all over both lanes, hollering stuff like, “Aw right,” “Sing it, baby,” and “God, Lannie Sue, I love miserable people.”
“Why’s that, Mickey?”
His head dipped with the song. “They’re the only ones real, the only ones worth fooling with. You show me a happy person, I’ll show you a fake and a liar. Listen to this.”
That day he cranked up Patti Page on “Tennessee Waltz.” The sound came through as if they’d recorded her from the far side of a crowded roller rink, but, on the last note, I looked over at the tears on Mickey’s face.
“You sure are emotional.”
“You gotta be emotional or you might as well be dead, Lana Sue. Emotions are like muscles or brains. If you don’t use ’em, you lose ’em. Man that don’t cry regular won’t be able when he needs to later.”
I snuggled up on one arm. “How’d you get so smart?”
Mickey rolled down the window so nothing stood between his smile and the wheat fields. “Pussy and booze,” he said. “Pussy and booze.”
• • •
Lost virginity and extended school skipping were only secondary goals of what is known in the Goodwin family as “Lannie’s fling.” My plan, right from the beginning, was to learn about the “real” world. Given that Daddy’s system of money, Cadillacs, charge cards, and shoes made from dead animals was fake, was Mickey’s alternative “real”?
I had to know. Are sex, drugs, and alcohol any more sincere than pep clubs, braces, and plastic furniture? Or maybe the third group, our customers—the farmers, waitresses, and mechanics—had found a legitimate way of getting by. Is a crop duster closer to honesty than a public relations expert specializing in Republican candidates from Southern California?
I still haven’t decided. The battle between wealthy hypocrisy and poverty-stricken down-homeness has raged around and in me for thirty-eight years now, and I still don’t know if a wood stove shows more integrity than a microwave oven.
Mickey taught me how to drink. We drank a lot. He taught me how to slide around fakes, rapists, and nose breakers, how to spot if someone wants something from you or wants to give something to you. Mickey showed me how to cut loose, ignore everything negative, and have one hell of a good time. Most people can’t do that.
We lived an excessive life, working, drinking, crying, fighting, and screwing much too much. I enjoyed it then. Stability tends to wear away the extremes of life. Everyone needs to see the highest highs and lowest lows at least once. It’s worth cleaning up the mess.
Mickey’s most important lessons dealt with sex. He lived for sex, was obsessed with sex, and gave almost all his energy to sex, and Mickey expected no less from his partner. I couldn’t lean over an amp without him trying to stick something in somewhere. Mickey taught me the joy of oral. The joy of anal. The joy of nonstop. A month after losing my virginity, I knew every position I’ve seen, heard about, or tried in the twenty-two years since.
I learned that shame or shyness only obstructs the fun. Without embarrassment, we made love in a bed full of people pretending they were asleep. Or on his lap in a moving van. We used to catch quickies in the men’s bathroom stall during the break between sets.
Mickey claimed “real” isn’t polyester versus rags. When analysis comes down to it, the difference between loving and wishing you loved, living and putting up a pretty good front, is the Regular Orgasm. If you can find an RO in a flaming sun, you’re living an honest, sincere, productive life. If not, you’re fooling somebody and it might be you.
That last is a line of bull I didn’t buy even at sixteen, much less thirty-eight.
• • •
Sending Daddy a postcard was a serious error, of course, on the order of looking at your watch while making love, but you’ve got to remember these were pre-Runaway Hotline days. What was a girl on the road to do? Worry the poor manic crotch doctor to death? Even flighty heartbreakers follow certain lines of loyalty.
Daddy and the Christian Detective Agency didn’t catch us until mid-March, and, even then, we might have resisted the rescue had Patsy Cline’s sudden death not broken Mickey’s will to be obnoxious. Halfway between Memphis and Nashville, Mickey’s riotous-living act cracked and crumbled and the alcohol turned depressant as opposed to fire.
“I may grow up,” he said.
“Aw, shit.”
The country music system stagnated. By the time Daddy and his religious dick arrived, I didn’t really care who carried me off.
• • •
Patsy Cline’s death was so important to us, such a turning point, that I find it hard to believe all America didn’t screech to a halt and hang its head in mourning, but I’ve come to realize lately that most people didn’t even know who Patsy was. Country-western music wasn’t considered legitimate back then.
I asked Loren where he was the day Patsy Cline died, and he said, “Oh, is she dead?” What an ignoramus.
She didn’t make the “Deaths” column in Time magazine. Some 1920s playboy made the list, but the greatest female country singer of all time was left off. Shows America’s priorities.
For me, it was one of those scenes where you always remember where you were and exactly what you were doing—like prominent assassinations or marriage proposals you accept or the beginnings of wars back when wars had definable beginnings.
The long booth in the Confederate Truck Stop on the Arkansas side of West Memphis at 8:30 on a rainy Wednesday morning. We’d been up all night celebrating Butch Bob’s birthday. Somewhere in there, all of us except Mickey had eaten black capsules so we could talk faster, only they made my grits look and smell like something put out by a sick cat. My jaws were grinding my back molars into dust.
Bob Bob and I argued about the blond girl who played Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies. Bob Bob said a shark in South America bit off her legs and I said it wasn’t true.
“A cocktail waitress told me last night,” Bob Bob whined.
“You believe everything a cocktail waitress tells you?”
“Yes.”
Choosie’s hands were under the table, pouring Jack Black into a Dr Pepper bottle. Next to the wall, Mickey turned the jukebox selector wheel, even though the WHO Early Bird Show blared from a radio next to the cereal pyramid behind the counter. Flatt and Scruggs were playing “T for Texas.” I listened to the banjo break, thinking it would sound better with a steel behind it.
“How do you figure this works with the buttons at every booth and the jukebox way down there?” Butch Bob asked.
“Electricity,” Choosie said.
Paul Bob snorted. “You’re not as smart as people give you credit for.”
Butch Bob was real dazed. He’d just turned twenty-one, which meant last night was his first legal drunk and he’d taken advantage of the fact.
The song ended and the announcement came on. “Benton County Sheriffs Department announced that the crash site of a single-engine Cessna Cherokee was found early today near Camden, Tennessee. The Federal Aviation Administration has been called in to investigate the accident which killed country singers Patsy Cline, Lloyd ‘Cowboy’ Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and their pilot, Randy Hughes.”
Just like that. There was no one to deny it to. The disc jockey came on all choked up and said something nice about Patsy, then he played “Leavin’ on Your Mind.”
I looked at Mickey. We all looked at Mickey, waiting for a sign, waiting for him to show us how to feel.
If you’ve got leavin’ on your mind,
Tell me now, get it over,
Hurt me now, get it over,
If you’ve got leavin’ on your mind.
I listened to the voice I’d discovered just two months ago. I sang her songs, I wanted to be Patsy Cline. She was country music’s center, our role model, and now her voice was silent. Not silent—dead.
Mickey didn’t move, just stared at a point somewhere on the wheel while Patsy filled the booth, creating a sort of stop-action spell that held us stuck in the moment, no one wanting to go on to the next moment where she didn’t exist.
If there’s a new love in your heart,
Tell me now, get it over,
Hurt me now, get it over,
If there’s a new love in your heart.
I was more worried about how it affected Mickey than how it affected me. Death made the getting drunk and fucking game seem pretty worthless and Mickey wasn’t the type to handle realizing the things he thought mattered were worthless. He blinked once, listening to her sing. I reached over and touched his hand, but I don’t think he felt me.
Six of us, not thinking but feeling, hardly even breathing, sat through the end of the song and into a few seconds of dead air.
“That was the late great Patsy Cline, and here’s a word from the men who keep those trucks on the road,” and the radio went into a Texaco jingle.
“You through here, honey?”
I nodded.
The waitress leaned across Bob Bob and took my untouched plate of grits and eggs. “Shame about Patsy, ain’t it?”
“Shame,” Mickey said.
“You want more coffee?” and the spell was broken.