MY MOTHER’S BROTHER BO WAS IN THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE IN World War II. We had all this military history around the house. That was real big back then because before rock and roll, soldiers—the boys returning home—were actually like rock-and-roll stars. Of course, when Vietnam came along they were treated like dirtbags on the corner begging money from people, which is unfortunate.
The first time I ever had a drink of beer was with Uncle Don and Uncle Roy when I was about five. Those were the days when you had to have a church key to open the cans, so Uncle Roy took out his church key, and they opened up their beers and poured them into their jelly jars. It was like whatever jelly you had, when it was gone, you just washed out the jars and those became your drinking glasses. Uncle Don had his Jax beer, and my uncle Roy was drinking his Schlitz. It was the best-looking shit I ever saw in my life. It looked like apple juice.
I asked my uncle Roy what beer tasted like, and sure enough he said, “Tastes like apple juice, you want a drink?” If I told anyone now that I gave my five-year-old a drink of beer, I’d be in jail. Anyway, Uncle Roy said, “You want a drink?” and I said, “Yeah.” Of course, I nearly puked because I expected apple juice and I got that bitter beer taste.
But Uncle Don was my hero. He was like a god to me. In reality, he was an alcoholic who got into knife fights, but to me, he was just this cool guy. Later on, when I was in my twenties, I got compared to him a lot, which was good to me and maybe bad to some other people. Uncle Don was a country musician. Sang like Jim Reeves and played the guitar left-handed, upside down, like Jimi Hendrix. He looked kind of like Errol Flynn, dark, with a little mustache. He was in the Army in the Korean War.
Uncle Don taught me about music and he taught me about life. He was the most charming son-of-a-bitch in the world. He was married like six times or something, and he always married chicks who could play bass.
Uncle Don and his friends stayed drunk a good deal of the time. They’d drink the vanilla flavoring, the cough syrup, whatever was in my grandmother’s cabinet. One of his friends drove around in a brand-new truck with no passenger door on it. The passenger door was missing because, after they lost their jobs, they took the door off and sold it to a parts place in Hot Springs to get money to buy liquor.
Uncle Don had a friend from down the road who drank some canned heat or kerosene—I can’t remember which—and he died from it. I’ll never forget when that happened. They came running out of the house—my grandmother, all of them—and went running down the road because somebody found the guy swollen up and dead out in a field.
I remember another time being on the porch—we had a screened-in porch, as most people did back then, with a swing on it—as a little bitty kid, two or three years old, and watching my uncle Don in a knife fight with a guy in the front yard, which was mostly dirt, because it was just a road that came up to the front door. My grandmother was in the middle of them, screaming, “Please, Don, don’t do this!” and Don screamed back, “Mama, get out of this, you don’t need to be out here!”
At some point during all the commotion, he accidentally cut her hand real bad. She came back into the house crying and saying, “Yeah, he’s cut me.” Everybody gathered around her, putting bandages on her hand while Don was still out there in the knife fight. But then I remember him coming in, and just the look on his face from having cut his mother … I’ll never forget that look that he had.
Don was a carpenter by trade, but when he would lose his carpenter job, he would come back and stay with my grandmother, too. So, just so we’re clear, there were times when in one house we had my dad, me, my brother Jimmy, who was two years younger than me—my youngest brother, John, was born years later; my grandfather, who was up on the tower looking for fires and killing shit; my grandmother, who was doing people’s taxes; my uncle Don and one of his wives; a few cousins; and my mother, who would see images in the well. That was what my house was like as a kid.