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Big Joe the Pimp

I met my husband, Ryan, the first week of my sophomore year in college.

Six weeks before meeting him I had sworn off men once and for all. My heart had just been unexpectedly broken and I wasn’t ready for love—only music. But there he was, in the middle of a college mixer, introducing himself with those ginormous baby-blue eyes. He is always mortified when I tell the world that we were at a college mixer for a traveling show choir, but we were. A small Baptist show choir that performed 1990s Christian music songs with coordinated handclaps. Of course there were coordinated handclaps.

Although I had met Ryan several times, I couldn’t remember his name. Now, those baby-blue eyes, I remembered. But I wasn’t interested in his name; I was interested in singing.

He asked me out to dinner and I turned him down three times. I couldn’t go to dinner because I was headed home—to do my laundry. Coffee? Nope, I had to study. Dinner on a different night? I didn’t eat dinner. I mean, I ate dinner, but I was “sick” so I couldn’t.

He showed up with a can of chicken soup and a roll of crackers and offered to make dinner for me, the “sick girl.”

My roommates giggled in the hallway of our apartment. You can’t turn a poor boy down when he shows up with chicken soup and baby-blue eyes. That was October of 2000. Fourteen months later, the day after Christmas, he proposed to me on a boat as we passed under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Seven months later, two weeks before I started my senior year of college, we got married.

By the time we said “I do,” Ryan and I had decided that we could make music and conquer the world. My dad told friends and family gathered at our wedding that they could buy our band’s debut album in the church’s lobby. Before final exams my junior year in college, we drove from Texas to Nashville and used our student loan money (unbeknownst to our parents) to make our first full-length album. It was terrible music. We borrowed my mom’s green minivan to make the twelve-hour drive. We had so many people and so much gear in the van that the trunk door wouldn’t shut. We bungee-corded it shut. It was all kinds of humble beginnings.

Before I started my senior year of college my life had begun to head down a distinct path. It was a path I could have never dreamed up on my own, but I had always known it. Together, Ryan and I created a dream. As wildly young, naive, broke, and totally-in-love newlyweds we planned out one heck of a far-fetched future together.

When the college career counselors are talking to you about your career goals, you never think you will forgo a grown-up paycheck in order to spend half your week living in a van with four boys and the other half living in the ghetto with four boys. But this is what happens when you fall in love with a boy and start a band. After graduating from college, my husband, bandmates, and I all moved in together. We lived in the hood, the real live hood.

We were not only broke musicians, we were young and naive musicians as well. But we were fearless—living in an eight-hundred-square-foot duplex, forgoing real jobs, working the 5:00 a.m. Starbucks shifts in order to pay the bills and chase our dreams. We were in a constant state of bliss and annoyance with one another during that time. Cramped van rides for small, nonpaying shows by day—eight-hundred-square-foot duplex in the ghetto by night.

From what I could tell, the duplex was a complete fire hazard. The fire department confirmed this after we found one of the electrical outlets smoking. The wiring was a ticking time bomb. But it was a toss-up as to what might get us first: electrical fire or the pimp across the street. We decided early on that there was a good chance we might get shot by the pimp, Big Joe. But he came over and decided to become neighborly with us. He said if we wouldn’t call the cops on him and would stay out of his business, he would make sure our stuff was never messed with. And Big Joe the pimp was true to his word. We never called the police, and our cars, with tires and hubcaps fully intact, were always there in the morning.

We had no money, no health insurance, no 401(k) plan. (Okay, we still don’t have one of those. What the heck is that anyway?) And no newlywed family pet. Which apparently is a thing. You get married. You keep a potted plant alive. And then you try your skills out on a dog. But we didn’t have a dog. We had bandmates. And as long as our bedroom was located across the hall from the bandmates’ bedrooms, I assured my husband we would never have marital relations again. Never. I couldn’t bear the thought that three other men within eight hundred feet of me might have any clue that you know what was happening. So no money, health insurance, 401(k), or family pet—and definitely no sex.

Adulthood started on a gamble. We would conquer our dreams and write our own happily-ever-after, one van ride, bad show, late credit card payment, free low-income-clinic visit, and sexless day after another.

Three years after graduating from college, Ryan and I moved into an apartment of our own. Our bandmates moved into the same apartment complex, one building away. We were growing up. Asserting our independence. We signed a record deal with our dream record label and celebrated by buying ourselves one of those giant cookie cakes from the mall. We had them draw a guitar in purple, puffy frosting. We popped open a bottle of champagne, signed the papers in the small living room of our apartment, and celebrated. We made it. Soon we would be on big tours. Our songs would end up on the radio. We would be living in our own tour bus. Recording albums in the heart of Music City. Doing what we loved and what we felt called to.

Addison Road. We were the new band in town. And we were living the dream.