The friends that came along
Are characters in songs
The tune’s not always strong
But the truth’s not right or wrong
Nowhere, nowhere
Gave me a home for free
Somewhere, somewhere
Is always calling me
—“Somewhere” (Thornton/Andrew)
I NEVER SET OUT TO BE LIKE SOMEBODY. THAT’S NOT TO SAY THAT INFLUENCES don’t creep in over the years. You watch things, you love people, you have heroes, and you get influenced eventually. I was obsessed with short stories and Southern novelists like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, that kind of stuff. But from the time I was born until now, my writing process has always been about my observations and experiences.
As a little kid, as young as three maybe, I was already interested in characters, and Alpine was rich with characters. They were just everywhere. Like the ones that would come into our house to get their taxes done by my grandmother, most of them loggers who hauled billets or worked at the sawmill in Glenwood for a living.
And we loved stories. We’d sit on the porch and listen to our grandmother and grandfather or some old man from down the road visiting. Visiting was a big thing. See, the South is just different from other places. The air is heavier, for one, but you can feel the ghosts there. There’s something about the fact that a war was fought on our own soil, in Vicksburg and places like that. With African-Americans, there’s this long history about the spirituals. What they used to call Negro spirituals all came out of the Africans coming here as slaves and working in the fields. Those songs and later the blues came out of those fields. Similarly, I think for the sharecroppers and the white folk around there, country music actually came from the old men who’d sit on Coke crates out in front of the store or on the screened-in porches or in the yard under the hickory nut tree, spinning yarns and just talking about people who lived there. See, these stories didn’t have to be made up. The characters were already there, so the stories just came out of the characters we knew. I really believe that that rich sort of hillbilly culture is where country music came from and why some guys like me ended up writing and telling stories or becoming actors or musicians. Country music, real country music, is just different from other types of music. The songs are usually driven by stories. I mean, if you hear Merle Haggard do “If We Make It Through December,” it might be just three minutes long but you get it.
But from the time I was three years old, I was aware of people and interested in characters and the weird shit that went on around me. And I came from this little bitty place being influenced by a mini–literary society within my family. My mother, Virginia Roberta Faulkner, was an English major, and my dad, Billy Ray, was a history teacher and a coach. My grandmother was a schoolteacher and a writer. My uncle Don was a musician and singer. Years later I was the drummer for his band. This was old-fashioned country shit. We played VFW clubs, stuff like that. That’s why I get pissed off when people say, “Oh, he’s an actor trying to be a musician.” It’s like, I’ve been playing at VFW halls since I was a fucking teenager.
But anyway, we lived in a little town called Alpine; there were about one hundred ten people living in this valley. There wasn’t much to it. There was one store that was called Carmie Buck’s Grocery that had a post office and a gas pump, and that’s all there was. We lived with my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and we were raised the Indian way. There were Cherokees and Choctaws on my mom’s side of the family, and there was some Italian in the mix, too. We were Choctaw on her dad’s side, and when my grandmother would get mad at my grandfather, she would call him “an old gut-eating Choctaw.” We even had some burial mounds on our land, and if we played on them we got our asses beat for it.
Our family had a well, a little old garden, and a bunch of dogs and cats, but we didn’t really raise cattle and all that. They didn’t have any running water or electricity until I was probably nine maybe, and when it gets dark out there, if you don’t have any electricity, it gets pitch-dark. So up into the midsixties, they literally read by coal oil lamp and went to sleep at seven, like Abraham Lincoln.
My grandfather was a medic in World War I. I used to put his gas mask and helmet on and run around, and he would whip my ass for it. When he retired he became a forestry man, working for the Forestry Service, and part of his job was to climb the tower a couple of times a day, take his binoculars, and look around to see if there were any fires.
You could see all the way into Oklahoma from the top of his mountain. He would give me his binoculars and say, “See those mountains over there? Way back there? Those are in Oklahoma.” That was crazy shit to me when I was a kid, climbing that tower and looking at a mountain in Oklahoma.
My dad’s family was raised around a place called Glenwood, Arkansas, which was about twenty or thirty miles away from Alpine. Glenwood’s a town of probably one or two thousand people, so to us, being from a town with a population of one hundred ten, that was a city. Where I was raised, if you went from Alpine to Glenwood, it may only have been thirty miles but you might as well have been going to Vienna. It was a huge trip to go pretty much anywhere. I didn’t know anything about travel growing up. Shit, I never flew on an airplane until my twenties, so to me, if you went to Little Rock, you went to the moon.
My grandfather was like Daniel Boone. He hunted and we ate squirrel like people eat chicken. Like today, one guy might ask, “What are you going to eat today?” The other guy might say, “I don’t know, grill some chicken.” That’s the way we were with squirrels. By the time I was six or seven years old, I was shooting the eyes out of squirrels, skinning them and cleaning them so we could have them for supper. Here in my house in the middle of L.A., we’ve got some of the biggest, fattest fucking squirrels I’ve ever seen in my life. I go out on my balcony to have a smoke and I see like twelve squirrels running around the yard that are plump little shits. And I have to admit that even though I am practically a vegan these days, I still imagine myself up there on my balcony with a .22 rifle, picking off those fat little shits and bringing them in, skinning them, and frying them. Squirrels just have a special taste to them. It’s like the old saying goes: you can take the boy out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the boy.
My family was sort of the literate people around there. My grandmother, Maude Faulkner, was a teacher in a one-room school. She wrote magazine articles, poems, and even a novel that was never published. Some of it was lost, or I would get it published now.
Because there was a lot of illiteracy around there, she also did everybody’s taxes. But people wouldn’t really pay her money most of the time, because they didn’t have any, so they would pay her in trade, with a quilt or a pot of beans, maybe a bushel of corn. A friend of mine once said, “I remember when I was growing up, everything was fried in Crisco.” I replied, “Shit, we had Snowdrift,” which was the off-brand. So, I guess we were pretty poor, but we were poor people in a place that was really fucking poor. I never thought we were poor. We weren’t starving. We ate all the time. I mean, I didn’t really eat store-bought meat until I was in the first grade. If you live in the country, there’s always something to eat. And it wasn’t just squirrels either. My grandfather killed other shit, too—possums, turtles, raccoons, everything.