LATER THAT NIGHT I WALKED BACK TO JR’S HOUSE, WHERE he and his wife, Jean, allowed me to stay the night. And the next night. And the next. I stayed with them for nearly a month, sleeping on their couch.
I was unsure what I was going to do with my life or where I could go. I was fourteen. I was now officially a runaway. I hadn’t been to school in weeks. I became depressed, so depressed that at one point, I didn’t even talk to JR or Jean for a solid week.
JR got up each morning and went to work. Jean went out somewhere, so I mindlessly sat in their house the entire day, doing nothing, not even watching television. As far as I was concerned, my life was over. I felt useless and figured I’d never amount to anything. I hated living, and more and more, I just wanted to die.
One day I asked JR if he’d take me to Patricia’s trailer, off Airport Road in Gastonia. “I’ll be glad to take you,” JR said. He took me to Patricia and Steven’s place and dropped me off, but when I called him to come pick me up, he didn’t answer.
I visited with Patricia all day. When Steven returned home from work, I left Patricia’s and started walking down the road, hitchhiking to anywhere. An old man picked me up and took me to the corner of Airport Road and New Hope Road. I glanced at the road sign with a sarcastic laugh. If there was ever anyone who needed new hope, it was me.
I continued walking in the cold, not sure where I could go. By nightfall I had made my way to Uncle Austin’s house in Crowders Mountain. Five years older than my mom, Uncle Austin was a crusty codger cut out of the same mold as Grandpa. But he was Mama’s brother, and besides my mom and sister, he was my closest kin. He lived on the mountainside with his wife, Diane; his daughter, April; and his son, Chad. I knocked on his door and told Austin I needed a place to stay. He refused to let me stay with them, but he told me that I could stay in Grandpa’s old, abandoned trailer, still on the hillside.
Grandpa’s trashed trailer didn’t have heat, water, or electricity. It had been a wreck when Grandpa had lived in it, and now that he was in an old folks’ home and it hadn’t been used or kept up in the years since he left, the trailer had deteriorated even more. Austin told me to dig through the pile of junk in his backyard. “There’s a cot in there somewhere,” he groused, “and you can use that to sleep on.” I rummaged through the junk until I found the cot. Austin laid a piece of spun glass wall insulation on the cot and covered it with plastic. He wrapped the cot with string to hold the plastic and the insulation together, forming a makeshift bed.
“The weather’s gonna turn nasty cold,” Austin warned, “so don’t sleep in your clothes, or you’ll be cold throughout the day.” He even gave me an old Sears and Roebuck coat. The coat was big enough for two people my size, but it helped keep me warm. (More than twenty years later, I wore that oversized coat in a music video for a song I wrote called “Paper Angels.”)
Although it wasn’t exactly southern hospitality, I appreciated Austin’s kindness in allowing me to stay there. I stayed in that freezing cold, rundown trailer for two weeks.
To help stave off the bitter cold, I bought a blue sleeping bag for $18.38 on October 17, 1987. (I still have the receipt and the sleeping bag.) It wasn’t much of a sleeping bag, but it kept me from freezing in that trailer. It was so cold that I could see my breath at night by a trace of light streaming in the window from the pole in the churchyard down the hill and across the road. I often would lie there at night, shivering and thinking about my life. Sometimes I wondered where Mama was . . . and I’d get angry, very angry.
IN THE MORNING, JUST AFTER DAWN, I AWAKENED TO THE sound of Austin banging on the side of the trailer with his hand. That was my alarm clock. I got up, put on my thermal underwear, and went outside to feed the goat and chickens. That was part of the deal in exchange for my use of Uncle Austin’s luxurious accommodations.
After I fed the animals, Austin sometimes invited me inside to eat breakfast, complete with eggs and tomatoes. Following breakfast, he always had a chore for me to do. I didn’t mind. I was accustomed to work, and I was glad for the food.
Austin owned a lot of land, so we’d drive a few miles over the border to South Carolina and work all day, cutting trees and chopping firewood. My job was to clear out the brush from around the bottom of each tree with a heavy ax so Austin could get to the bottom with a chain saw.
One day I grabbed a thick vine and started to chop it in half, but as I swung the ax downward, I missed, and the blade went through my knuckle on my left hand, nearly chopping off my index finger. Pain seared through me and blood spurted in every direction. Austin wrapped an old rag around my finger and pressed the knuckle back together. “Keep this rag on there till the bleeding stops,” he instructed.
An injured finger didn’t get me out of work. Although chopping vines was impossible, I spent the next week working in Austin’s backyard. One day Austin gave me a small steel brush and told me to sand all the rust off the bed of his pickup truck.
At first I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t.
I spent the entire day scraping rust off the truck bed. It was a difficult job, done nowadays mostly by electric-powered sanders. The following morning Austin woke me up, yelling obscenities, beating the side of the trailer, cursing me and asking me why I hadn’t sanded down his truck as he had ordered.
This guy must be nuts! I thought. Austin had watched me sand his truck bed the day before, but this was exactly how he treated his son, Chad, as well. He’d find a reason to get mad, and then he’d start an argument.
Since we hadn’t painted or sealed the freshly scraped truck bed, the moisture had settled in it overnight, causing the bed to oxidize again. Austin probably knew that, but he just wanted to fight.
I was not about to put up with him cursing me, and I sure wasn’t going to fight him. He was three times my size, and the Sears and Roebuck coat he gave me reminded me just how long his reach was. I had to fold the cuffs back twice.
Instead of arguing with Austin, I quietly gathered up my things, put them in my backpack, and walked out of his yard, down to the dam in the creek, where I used to fish as a little boy. I wasn’t sure where I was going or how I might get there. I couldn’t do anything else—so I walked. I was wearing jeans and Austin’s coat. It was so cold the only thing I could think about was getting warm.
I found a small cave, hollowed out in the rock, so I huddled in close to the stone for shelter. I remembered a pack of matches in my backpack and took them out; there were only three matches in the pack. I gathered some leaves and attempted to light them to make a fire.
The first and second match went out as soon as I struck them. With only one match remaining, I knew I needed to do something differently. In my bag I had a small bottle of Stetson cologne that had once belonged to Tim Allen’s dad. I removed the cap and carefully drizzled cologne all over the leaves. Trying to keep from shivering, I struck the last match. Poof! The spark caught the alcohol in the cologne, and I had a fire at last. The leaves began burning, and I added more twigs and brush to my campfire. As I basked in the fire’s warmth, I realized the date. It was October 23, 1987—the morning of my fifteenth birthday.
PHILLIP, ONE OF MY BEST CHILDHOOD FRIENDS, STILL lived on the mountain with his mom and dad, Duty and Lawrence Spicer. Occasionally, on nights when I couldn’t sleep, I sneaked up the hill through the woods to see Phillip and get some food. That morning I realized I couldn’t stay in the cave by the creek forever, so I crept up through the woods so nobody would notice me and knocked on Phillip’s trailer door. His dad let me in, and I told him what happened. Lawrence probably knew that I was on the run, but he was kind to me. “Are you hungry, Jimmy?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered honestly, still rubbing my hands to get warm.
Lawrence grilled some cheeseburgers for his family, and a big one for me, and we all sat in the living room to eat together. I was famished, so I chomped right into the cheeseburger. It was delicious! I gobbled down two big bites, and was about to take my third when I heard a knock on their front door and the squawk of a radio, like the ones used in a police car.
Lawrence answered the door, and there stood Larry Hamerick, a Gaston County police officer. “Sorry to bother you folks,” the officer said, “but I have a pick up order for a runaway that you might know, Jimmy Barber. His uncle says you might know where he is.” Lawrence stepped out on the porch, and I could hear him talking to the policeman. I thought of running, but I was so exhausted and emotionally drained, I simply froze in my chair.
After a while Lawrence and the officer came inside, and Officer Hamerick explained that he had come to pick me up and take me to the county detention center. Phillip sat pouting, and Phillip’s mom started boo-hooing, so Lawrence wrapped her in his arms, trying to calm her. “Can he finish eating?” Lawrence asked.
The officer noticed the burgers and glanced at me sitting on the living room couch. “Sure, go ahead, Jimmy,” Officer Hamerick said kindly. “Finish eating your sandwich before we go.” I looked at my cheeseburger, but my stomach was whirling so badly, I couldn’t even eat any more. I put down the sandwich.
“Okay, then, are you ready to go?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But let me go out back and get my backpack.” I fully intended to run for the hills, but the officer was no fool. The policeman followed me around to the back of the trailer, where my backpack was leaning against the porch, and then he escorted me to the squad car. He put my backpack in the trunk then told me to put my hands behind my back. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to put handcuffs on you.” He snapped the cold steel handcuffs onto my wrists, and as he did, I heard Phillip’s mom burst into tears.
Officer Hamerick helped me inside the backseat of the squad car, pushing my head down to avoid hitting the car’s roof. I looked out the window at Phillip, Lawrence, and Duty. They were standing on their front porch, and Duty was bawling.
As Officer Hamerick drove down the hill, I saw Uncle Austin and his son, Chad, in the yard. Uncle Austin looked at me and laughed.
On the way I stared out the window, and Officer Hamerick talked. But he spoke about only one subject: Jesus. “You know that Jesus loves you, Jimmy,” he said. The officer didn’t try to ram his faith down my throat, but he knew he had a captive audience, so he shared freely about God’s unconditional love for me. “No matter what we’ve done, He loves us,” Officer Hamerick said. “There’s nothing you have done or ever could do that would keep God from loving you, Jimmy.”
I wasn’t convinced. “If He loved me, I wouldn’t be sitting in your squad car right now,” I replied caustically.
Officer Hamerick drove to the Gaston County Detention Center in Dallas, North Carolina. He helped me out of the car and into the facility. He unfastened the handcuffs, checked me in, and said good-bye.
In complete contrast to Officer Hamerick’s kind professionalism—Officer Hamerick later went on to become a psychotherapist, a clergyman, and a military chaplain—the officer on duty at the detention center was an older man, overweight, and unnecessarily mean. “Get in here, boy,” the officer growled at me. I stepped into the processing area he had indicated.
“How many tattoos and scars do you have, kid?” he asked, as he moved around me, writing notes on a clipboard. He noted the gash on my finger where I’d hit myself with the ax. The cut had gotten infected, and my finger looked awful. The officer scribbled more notes. “Strip,” he said.
I looked at him in confusion.
“Take your clothes off, all of them,” the officer roared.
I hesitated, “Huh?”
“Take your clothes off,” he yelled, “or I’ll take them off for you.”
“I don’t think you will,” I said under my breath.
The officer stood up, looming largely over me, and looked as though he was about to move across the room toward me.
Oh, crap! I said to myself and pulled off my shirt. The officer glared at me as I removed the rest of my clothes. I stood there in front of him, naked and humiliated.
He curled his lip and rubbed his nose, sniffing. “Boy, how long has it been since you’ve taken a bath?”
“Two weeks,” I answered sincerely, thinking he really wanted to know.
“Bend over, spread your cheeks, and squat,” he ordered. This crass, demeaning technique was intended to reveal or loosen any contraband I may have tried to conceal before entering the facility. To me, it simply decimated what little dignity I had remaining.
The officer slowly walked around my naked body. Satisfied that I had nothing to hide, he ordered me to go over and stand in the shower but not to turn it on. I obeyed and tried not to cower as he walked toward me holding a bottle of disinfectant. Without warning, he sprayed it all over my body then poured some other substance, I assumed to be lice-killing shampoo, on my long hair. Once I was lathered up, he turned on a water hose and doused me again from across the room.
I felt like one of those men I had seen in civil rights films being hosed down with fire hoses by police officers. Any resident racism I may have had remaining from my KKK-surrounded childhood went down the drain along with the suds from the disinfectant.
The officer then ordered me to take a shower under the shower heads, and he watched me the entire time. Despite the horrendous humiliation, the hot water felt wonderful on my body.
“That’s enough,” the officer called.
I dried off with a towel he handed me and put on some clean, prison-issued clothes, including a pair of pants, a T-shirt, and a pair of pink socks. Inmates were not allowed to wear shoes inside the facility, so I was issued rubber sandals, similar to shower shoes, instead.
I was then led to the dayroom, where all the other boys were detained till bedtime. These were the bad boys, not the Faith Farm boys. In that room were kids who had killed their parents; others were in for committing rape, and still others had pending drug charges.
I, on the other hand, was a runaway—a small, skinny kid runaway—and I was scared to death.
In the dayroom I sat at a table and ate the peanut butter crackers the detention staff had given me, topped off by a glass of milk. About ten other boys were in there, watching television. I spoke to no one and tried to avoid making eye contact with anyone. I was nervous, but it was warm in the room, and I was thrilled to have the crackers and milk and a television.
At bedtime I was led down the hall to my cell, the last door on the right, and was glad to discover that each boy was housed in a separate cell. The cell was sparse, with nothing but a bed bolted to the floor, a pillow, a wool blanket, and a small pocket Bible lying on the bed. The windows were barred and screened. Oddly enough, once the solid steel door slammed behind me, I felt much safer than I had in the dayroom among the general population.
Periodically throughout the night the officer on duty raised the flap covering the window on the cell door. He looked in, checking to make sure I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, made a few rude, salacious comments, and then let the window flap loudly slap shut, smacking against the door as he walked on to the next cell.
I shut my eyes and tried to sleep. Happy birthday, Jimmy! I said to myself. It was definitely a birthday I would never forget.