Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some return, unknown and hungry. Only the dog remembers.
—NICK FLYNN, ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY
Their stories interweave: Tom Petty, Bernie and Tom Leadon, Rodney and Ricky Rucker, Jim Lenahan, Don Felder, Marty and Jeff Jourard, David Mason. These are just a few names. There were others. They liked B movies, read Mad, stole copies of Playboy from their fathers, snuck booze, put dents in cars. As teenagers, many of them hung out at the same Gainesville music store, Lipham Music. They saw one another’s early performances, loved the same records, played in each other’s bands. Among them, talent and ambition weren’t equally dispersed, though a love for the music was. Sometimes they got into it with each other, over girls or over bands, and stopped talking. But they were kids bound to one another through a shared experience that preceded the music’s arrival: they all came out of the same quiet that haunted a lot of American homes in the fifties. Rock and roll was the thing God delivered to break up the silence.
Tom Petty recalls being five years old when he began to get a better sense of his father’s working world. “He was a salesman,” says Petty. “He just didn’t always have something to sell. And when he did have something to sell, it didn’t always go so well.” Earl, no longer a truck driver, had first entered business as the owner of a grocery store in the black section of Gainesville, where his son would sometimes play out back with the neighborhood children. On the heels of that, Earl started his own wholesale operation, Petty’s Dry Goods. His eldest son’s lasting memory is of his father lifting him into a green panel van with the business’s name written on the side. They went store to store, selling the little things that sat on racks by the checkout, the stuff that tended to get dusty. Cheap sunglasses, tie clips, items that might sell when a customer wasn’t on his guard.
“It was the strangest collection of things,” Petty says. “I remember there being a lot of toys, really crappy plastic toys. There was this mannequin that had six sets of breasts on it. I used to go, ‘What the … does he sell bras?’ He took me with him that one day. And I realized that he would just pull up to these little grocery stores and try to go sell something. But it didn’t look to me like he was selling much, just went in and talked like crazy. I watched him do this for a whole day. By the time we got home, I knew I was never, ever going in that truck again.” Not long after, Earl went back to selling insurance door to door, mostly in the black part of town.
Even by that time, Earl had shown his son the side of him that would color the boy’s entire life. “I’m not the best authority on the relationships fathers have with their sons,” explains Petty. Listening to him, one gets the sense that the past has remained uncomfortably close. More than once when the topic of his father arises, Petty gets up, opens the door to his recording studio lounge, and throws what’s left in his coffee cup onto the bushes outside his door. He’ll talk about his father, doesn’t refuse the topic. He just pours more coffee before he starts talking. “I didn’t understand there could be a relationship,” he explains. “I thought a father just put shit on the table, made a living, and we owed him the respect because he put a roof over our head, because for some reason our mother married him or because we just owe him respect. I didn’t realize that there were kids who had really genuine relationships with their fathers. I remember when I was young that I didn’t want to spend time around any parents. If I was visiting a friend and his parents showed up, I was gone.”
When Petty was a boy, the popular media were rich in sentimental snapshots of happy times in the American household. Walt Disney, who would become something of a latter-day version of Henry Flagler, planning his Floridian dream within a decade of Tom Petty’s birth, certainly had ideas of what a family should look like. Disney’s visions proliferated in the entertainments his studios sent forth. Norman Rockwell promoted his own tidy pictures of the American family life through his Saturday Evening Post covers. Television did its part, with Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet all beginning long runs in the midfifties. Amid all that, what father was going to start talking about his Cherokee roots, his life during wartime? The Depression, poverty, the various tastes that clung to the back of his mouth? No one wanted to bring that into the living room. So most kept it to themselves. Certainly Earl did. Until he couldn’t. And then it came out as something else.
Images contrary to the tidy scrapbook of American family life did begin circulating, coming from a few different, incongruous sources. It was the Kinsey Reports, The Catcher in the Rye, Playboy, Death of a Salesman. It was sociological work like The Lonely Crowd. It was Marlon Brando’s face. All of it challenged the sanitized images of a harmonious American life: it was information, sometimes shocking, that suggested there was something else going on, another America, kept out of view like panties at the back of a desk drawer. With the exception of Playboy and, possibly, Brando, however, this stuff wasn’t coming Earl Petty’s way. But he was a part of the world it belonged to, a conflicted place of failed repressions.
If Time called them the “silent generation,” this obviously didn’t mean that everyone kept their voices down. They just didn’t talk about what they didn’t want to talk about. Earl had a temper and a fondness for the bottle. He was no Ozzie Nelson. But still, he preferred to think that he and Ozzie were part of the same general history. Earl’s firstborn, however, didn’t exactly fit any idealized picture either. Tom may have been a boy, but he was a boy who wasn’t interested in sports, wasn’t interested in school, wasn’t even interested in fishing and hunting. The only thing about the kid that matched the image Earl had in mind was the blond hair. A towheaded boy was playing in Earl’s yard.
* * *
Earl and Kitty’s second child, Bruce, was born in 1958. The Petty boys shared the bedroom across the hall from their parents. When Bruce was old enough, Earl installed a bunk bed. More dark-skinned than his brother, Bruce was too young to be a rival of any kind. “We never really competed for things,” Bruce explains. “It was a real big brother thing. He was always looking out for me, trying to help me in any way he could.” The struggle between Earl and Tom unfolded before Bruce Petty’s eyes. The younger brother may not have been a peer, but he was a witness. “It’s good, still feels good,” Tom says, “just to know there’s somebody out there who knows what happened, what it was like.”
But what the younger brother didn’t see was the beginning of the trouble, the point at which Earl Petty starting letting himself do it. “I remember it first happening when I was probably four,” Tom Petty recalls. “Four, maybe five, because it was a ’55 Cadillac. I had this crappy slingshot my father had given me, a plastic thing, the first one I ever had. I was in the yard shooting this slingshot. And cars are driving by. I’m just like, ‘I wonder if I can get a car.’ And whack! This big Cadillac. It was going by pretty slowly, and I just nailed the fin on that thing. The car came to an immediate stop. The driver got out, and he was so fucking mad. I couldn’t quite compute why this had made him so mad. He went up to the door and knocked. There was some discussion with my mother, and she looked really distressed, took the slingshot away, and said, ‘This is bad. Your dad’s not going to like this.’
“I felt kind of weird, not knowing what was coming next. But when my father got home later, he came in, took a belt, and beat the living shit out of me. He beat me so bad that I was covered in raised welts, from my head to my toes. I mean, you can’t imagine someone hitting a child like that. Five years old. I remember it so well. My mother and my grandmother laid me in my bed, stripped me, and they took cotton and alcohol, cleaning these big welts all over my body. My mother’s rap was, ‘You gotta be a better boy. You just can’t do that. You can’t make him that mad.’ But I was fucking five. She learned, for her part, that you’d better not mention it to Earl. That was one of the first ones. But there were many, many more.” By contrast, Kitty was the gentle one. The angel.
“My father had this kid,” Bruce Petty explains, “that was going a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of everybody else and their kids. And Earl was trying to stop that with everything he could.” Whether it was because Tom was a living cautionary tale with whom he shared a bunk bed or not, Bruce got into sports. And, with his brother and the rest of America, television.
* * *
The television was always on. For Bruce, it was entertainment. But for his brother, Tom, it had already become something more. “Very early on I realized,” Petty says, “that I had to teach myself everything just to exist at the level I wanted to live my life. I felt there was more to be known, more to be understood than I was going to get from the household I was in. I kind of knew that much from very early on. Exactly why, I’m not sure, but I got that maybe what my parents pictured for me wasn’t at all what I was going to go with. I knew I didn’t want to grow up and be an insurance salesman. That looked really dull to me. And I think it was television that saved my life, that raised and educated me.
“It was an escape, of course, but it was more. And I watched a lot. What I noticed on television was that families were nothing like ours. Everything I saw looked like a much better way of doing things. Ozzie and Harriet was a good one, where everybody seemed to be cruising along just fine, Dad had a relationship with the kids, and the family would all come together to work on Ricky’s problem. It wasn’t like that in my house. Mom and Dad both worked, were dog tired at the end of the day, and my brother and I were pretty much on our own as far as passing the time.”
Petty and his father used the image of the perfect American family against each other. Neither measured up. Earl drank too much too often. He beat his son. He fought with his wife. And, for his part, Tom was a disappointment in most every category. Well before rock and roll arrived on the scene to make matters simultaneously better and worse, a cord of anger and resentment connected father and son. The difference between them may have been that Tom sometimes blamed himself for the failures of his family—a common enough response among the young people who kept their parents up at night. Historian David Halberstam has suggested that there was a perverse effect to shows like Father Knows Best: young people had to watch those perfect families, only to show up at the dining room table and be greeted by lunatics. “Kids growing up in homes filled with anger and tension often felt the failure was theirs,” he writes. Of course, what kid had the presence of mind, or the information, to see it for what it was? Who knew that Ozzie Nelson was in truth a workaholic with little off camera time for his children, another absent father among the many? That wasn’t how it looked on television.
“What I did come to notice,” recalls Petty, “was that everything really great seemed to be coming from California. The television announcers would say, ‘From television city, in Hollywood, it’s the Red Skelton Show!’ And I thought, ‘Television city? Man, that’s where I need to be.’ This is when I was really still a little kid. Television turned me on to a whole different idea of living, and I was a sponge. But pretty soon you start wondering if there isn’t something between what you see on television and the shit you’re dealing with at home.”
In school it was no different: the world of Dick and Jane, through which Petty and almost every other American kid would learn to read, was a forced feeding. So antiseptic as to be a fantasy literature, the Dick and Jane volumes had no trace of outsiders, of grief, of fear, of trouble—it was a world without an Other. “I remember them well,” Petty says. “That was how we all learned to read: ‘See Dick run. See Jane run. See Dick jump. See Jane jump.’” It would take a movement, and many years, to remove those books from American schools. The year 1957 saw a little advance with the publication of The Cat in the Hat. Of the many fragmented clues that give some sense of the conflicted nature of American life at midcentury, The Cat in the Hat, in its own strange way, is as revealing as anything. There’s as much truth in the book as you’ll find among any images drawn from the era, certainly more than one finds in the idealized pictures of American life generated by Rockwell or Disney. The Cat in the Hat exposes the in-betweenness of it all, the midcentury breakdown in meaning, out of which Tom Petty’s generation emerged, a little starved for something to call their own. It’s the rock and roll of children’s literature.
As Louis Menand explains, the story of The Cat in the Hat belongs to the mater abscondita tradition. Like so many fairy tales, so much Western fiction, really, The Cat in the Hat begins with loss, particularly the loss of the mother. And it’s that maternal absence into which the cat arrives. All hell breaks loose, the domestic scene thrown out of control for most of the book. The fish, a kind of stand-in for parental rule, if all but powerless in his bowl, insists to the children that they do the right thing. But the fact is, it’s not clear if anyone, whether the kids or the cat, actually knows what the right thing is. No one knew just when mother would be back or in what way that even mattered. The only given, the only thing that everyone knew for sure, is that the father is, quite simply, gone. Not worth a mention.
At a moment when it was needed, and to whomever was paying attention, Dr. Seuss gave away some of middle America’s secrets. It wasn’t as if kids like Tom Petty had any interest in telling their peers what was going on at home. They all kept it from one another. Of course, when a family is in trouble, its members are often hard pressed to believe that other homes might be as fucked up as their own. So why let on, and suffer for that, too? Then, as now, life inside the front door was like its own dark planet. So the feeling was, keep it there. No young person in Gainesville was thinking their own world of shit might be like the next family’s.
* * *
Don Felder was older than Tom Petty but grew up in the same part of town. At Christmas, Don and his brother would load their .22 rifle with rat shot purchased with money they got from returning Coke bottles, and they’d shoot clumps of mistletoe out of the oak trees. They’d tie up in ribbon what they shot down, selling it on the streets of Gainesville for fifty cents a bunch. “That’s the South when you’re poor,” Felder says.
His brother went on to law school and passed the bar. His parents were proud of that. Don, however, played guitar. “I think we were the last family in our town to get a black-and-white television,” Felder explains. “It was the size of a washing machine, with a screen in it that was about twelve by twelve inches. When I got my first guitar, I would plug it into a jack in the back of that TV. I’d be watching Mighty Mouse and the other cartoons on Saturday, playing the guitar, trying to learn.” His father, interested in electronics, may have helped him set up his “amp,” but his father didn’t see it going anywhere. Why would he? If it came out wrong when the father confronted his son, it was only because Mr. Felder wanted something better for his youngest. “At the time,” Felder explains, “I didn’t understand what was going on. We parted under very bitter terms.” Later, when he was on the road with the Eagles, his father did come to see the band. But there’s a point at which the damage is done, and hit singles and backstage hugs can’t really undo that.
* * *
Down in the Tampa area, Charlie Souza was seven when his father split. He saw the man a few years later, driving by with his girlfriend. Souza’s father stopped the car when he recognized his son and gave the nine-year-old Charlie some loose change to share with his sister. He was gone after that, not reappearing until more than fifteen years later, when he stayed at his son’s house for one night before disappearing without a trace the next morning. Never seen again.
Around the time Souza’s father first left the family, the boy’s mother went into a deep depression, got sick, and remained bedridden much of the time. One day when Souza was almost thirteen, cleaning his room and playing records, a neighborhood boy came by to see if Charlie could come out and play baseball. “No,” Souza told him. “Gotta clean my room.” The neighbor persisted, asking if he could, on Charlie’s behalf, go and check with Charlie’s mother. “Sure,” Charlie told him. The boy went to Mrs. Souza’s bedroom. The music was loud in Charlie’s room, loud enough that he didn’t hear anything. But when he did go to his mother’s room, Charlie found her stabbed to death. The bloody sneaker tracks of his young friend made it easy for the police to find the boy. With the exception of that one night years later, when his father slept on his couch, Charlie Souza was really an orphan. In the midsixties, a few years after his mother’s murder, Souza’s group, the Tropics, would be the hottest rock-and-roll band in Florida.
* * *
There was a violence that could, suddenly and unexpectedly, rip the fabric of suburban life. It was as though some rougher, rural past was moving just below, closer than anyone wanted to believe. Petty was witness to it and would eventually do all he could to leave it behind.
“It wasn’t very often at all,” Petty says, “but sometimes there would be a friends-over-for-dinner kind of night at our house. My mom would invite this other family, the Jenkinses, if I remember their name right. Bob and Liz. They’d come over with their kids. Everyone would wear nice clothes. You know, the crushed velvet skirts and all that. Bob Jenkins was a slicked-back-hair kind of guy but nice enough.” At one of those gatherings, on a night when the cold was coming into North Florida, Petty, around nine at the time, went to turn up the heat in the hallway. Bob Jenkins stopped him, told him not to do it, with enough insistence that the young Petty responded in kind. Only after the Jenkinses were gone did Kitty Petty explain to her son that Bob Jenkins didn’t like what he called “artificial heat.” Petty’s mother explained that it upset him. “I was thinking, ‘Artificial heat? Heat’s not artificial. There’s heat, and there’s no heat.’ I thought it was strange,” says Petty. “I thought Bob was just a little weird. My mother told me that they wore a lot of jackets over at the Jenkinses’.”
The families had a few more dinners together before the afternoon when Petty heard the adults talking in hushed tones, and he could pick up the Jenkinses’ name being mentioned. When his parents left and he was alone with his grandmother, Petty asked her what this was about. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And she tells me they’ve taken Bob Jenkins away. He held a shotgun on his family for twenty-four hours, put them all on the sofa and held the gun on them. The police had come and arrested him. I was like, ‘Wow.’ But, you know, every now and then you saw a crack in the veneer.”