Imagination climbing up the walls
Remembering a little of my fall
Reality feels liquid in my hands
Thoughts take off in flight but never land
Memories for me just come and go
It seems that I recall a brilliant show
Striking swirling colors that I used to know
Now are just a dull nerve-wracking glow
—“Psychedelic” (Thornton/Andrew)
I WENT TO HENDERSON STATE COLLEGE. IT WASN’T AN EXPENSIVE COLLEGE, but it was a good college. It was the same place my mom and dad went to. My mom ended up being an English major there when it was called Henderson State Teachers College. In 1967 it became Henderson State College, then in 1975 they changed the name to Henderson State University. A lot of people from my town went there. My niece, my brother Jimmy’s daughter, went there, and she told me they have a plaque at the college that has my name on it, about fulfilling your dreams and how you can be whatever you want to be. That’s kind of ironic considering I never graduated because I was too drunk most of the time. But it’s a cool, creative school. If you went to Henderson, it meant that you were the real deal. Not in academic terms, necessarily, but it meant that you were a hippie or you were a football player or you had some edge to you.
I mostly hung out with the music majors. I didn’t really want to hang out with the jocks, even though I had played baseball in high school. I was never the jock type, like the kind of guy you see in a sports bar. I was the long-haired hippie guy who happened to play ball pretty well. Those music guys were the perfect people for me to hang out with because we all had the same ideas. Some of them were a little squirrelly, but a lot of them had bands that I played with off and on. Some of the first sound jobs I worked when I was a roadie were at the gymnasium at the college. And they didn’t have shit bands play there, either. They had bands like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I remember Blood, Sweat, and Tears playing there, too.
In the nineties and up until a few years ago, I always had an easier time hanging out with musicians, until I got my first major record deal. Since then, I’ve found it easier to hang out with actors. Much easier. It’s them being pricks because they don’t want me to make records. Mick Jagger is one of the more iconic guys that I used to hang out with a bit—he’s a fucking Rolling Stone and he doesn’t care about actors being musicians. If I sold ten million records, he’d be all for it. There are a few good ones who are all for me. Levon Helm is all for me. Warren Haynes is all for me. Rickey Medlocke, the guys from Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons, and Dusty and Frank, they’re all old friends and real terrific to me. But I’ll never get a Grammy, I’ll promise you that. I’ll guarantee you that. Not that I want one. I’d probably melt it down and fix my fucking carburetor with it.
Anyway, Henderson State was a great college, but if we’re being real honest, I pissed my opportunity away. Besides playing music from time to time, I didn’t do much of anything there but fuck, drink, and shoot pool over at the Minute Man. I think I only had two classes that I actually earned grades in—Psychology and Western Civilization. The rest of them were incompletes. That was in a year and a half—three semesters if you’re keeping score.
When I was at Henderson, I messed around with this chick and got into some trouble with her boyfriend, who was on the football team. He used to chase me around the campus all the time, so I spent most of my college days outrunning that son-of-a-bitch. I’d see him on campus and I’d haul ass. He finally caught me in the room where the mailboxes were. I thought, This is it, he’s going to beat my head into one of these mailboxes.
“Hey, man,” he said, “you can stop running from me. I broke up with that girl. Sorry I’ve been chasing you all this time, but I was real pissed off at you then. Now I see how she is.”
One day a friend of mine said, “Let’s go to the Minute Man and shoot pool and eat those forty-five-cent sandwiches from the menu because we can’t do anything else.” I had no money. The first semester I was there, I was living with my aunt and uncle who used to live in that town. I slept in this extra room of theirs. So my buddy and I went to the Minute Man, and he said, “You’re just a dumb ass like me. Let’s pledge a fraternity.”
“A fraternity?” I said. “Are you high? Look at us. Aren’t those like Joe College guys?” He goes, “Fuck no, there’s all kinds of people. There’s this one fraternity here, they got a house on this street over here. They’re the ones always having parties and fun. Let’s go to one of their parties!”
So we went to a party, and the guys in the fraternity turned out to be pretty cool. It was rush week, and they talked me into being a pledge. I said to my friend, “What does that mean? What do I have to do?” And he said, “You stay drunk all the time and you get a lot of chicks.” I said, “Well, shit, sign me up.”
We actually considered two or three of the fraternities. One of them was a bunch of jocks, which, as I said, wasn’t our scene. Another one was a bunch of Dilberts. That wasn’t our scene either. But that first fraternity was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Just right. So I pledged to this fraternity, and felt really accepted for a change. They all liked me, and there wasn’t one person in that fraternity who was “typecast.” It really was like the movie Animal House because you had the Belushi guys, the James Widdoes guys, all kinds. Some fraternities would make you light a match, put it in your teeth, and say the Greek alphabet however many times the fraternity brother told you to say it before the match burned your lips. Our guys, they would always take things a step further than anybody else. These were the baddest sons-of-bitches on campus. I don’t mean they were the meanest, I mean they were the coolest fucking fraternity. It was kind of an honor to be around those guys. Our fraternity brother would step up to the pledge, strike the match, put it between his own teeth, and tell you how many times to say the alphabet. If he burned his lip, he would beat the dog shit out of you. My big brother in the fraternity was a cool dude that I worshipped, who put me through the mill. He would take me by the ankles, turn me upside down, and hit my head on the porch. But I loved him and wanted to be just like him. Because of him, I got to where I could say the Greek alphabet three times before he burned his lip. I can still recite the Greek alphabet to this day.
Every year the fraternity held a dance called the Swamp Stomp. They’d gather up cane poles and put up this big fence around the backyard of the fraternity house. They’d hire a band—I actually played a time or two—wet the yard down to get it all muddy, and do a dance called the Gator where you’d get down in the mud, drunk, and flop around like you’re an alligator up on the bank. They’d raise their mugs and sing drunk songs like fraternity guys would do. “Last night I stayed at home and masturbated. It felt so nice, I did it twice. It felt so neat, I used my feet.” Shit like that. The song leader was a guy who had a big walrus mustache. He was kind of like Chuck Negron from Three Dog Night.
Anyway, there was this girl that went to school there. She was way too good for me, but I wanted her more than anything in the world. I didn’t think she would ever talk to a dirtbag like me, but a friend of mine knew her and got her to say yes when I asked her to the Wine Festival, which happened every winter. This was literally like if I had asked Raquel Welch out at the time and she said yes. It was a big deal.
I didn’t have a car, so we rode out there to the woods with a fraternity brother buddy and his girlfriend. He was a cat older than me who looked like James Dean and had a 1964 Plymouth Valiant that had a push-button transmission.
We didn’t say a lot to each other on the way out there. It was like a blind date, even though I had met her a time or two. I was real nerved up. Here I was with my dream girl, who was wearing one of those sweaters that made her breasts look real good, and the only thing going through my mind was that I was going to sleep with her that night and that I was going to get good and shit-faced because I was nervous being around her. I told myself it was going to be okay if I was drunk.
For the Wine Festival they would take a bunch of number-ten washtubs out there in the middle of the woods where there were a few remaining metal pieces from an old abandoned fire tower with the concrete foundation still intact. Then they would get a bunch of blocks of ice from the icehouse, put them in the tubs, and pour them full of pure grain alcohol and punch. Everybody was supposed to bring their own glass or mug. Of course people would be drunk in about ten minutes, but that helped you out there in the Arkansas woods in winter because it was freezing cold. It was a stupid time to have a party in the woods, but that’s what we did.
I had my Tupperware glass and started dipping it in the “wine,” and the shit tasted like nothing. Within minutes I was so drunk I didn’t even know who I was. The last thing I remember, I was lying in the backseat of my buddy’s car in this chick’s lap, and it was real cold. I saw the dome light on the ceiling of his car come on when he got in, but I was so drunk I felt like I was hallucinating. Everything was just spinning so fast.
When I came to, I was bleeding and lying facedown in the grass. Something real wet and sticky was all over me, and I had a big lump in my chest. I figured I’d either been shot or I had a huge tumor and it was bleeding. There was wet shit everywhere. I couldn’t raise my head up, because I had a blazing headache, and my head was so heavy I couldn’t get it up off the grass. I heard a football game going, so I thought, I’m lying facedown in the grass at a football game. I heard people yelling and cheering behind me, screaming at the ball game, and so I’m thinking I must be on the sidelines. Really I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I finally managed to raise my head, and when I looked up there was a TV set about five or six feet in front of me and a ball game was on. I was lying facedown on the shag carpet in the fraternity house.
I turned around, and the whole fraternity was watching the football game, and here I was, passed out in the middle of the fucking thing with matted-up, dried-up puke in my hair. When I tried to get up, everyone started yelling, “Get the fuck out of the way of the game!”
I looked down and saw I had a cheeseburger in my shirt that had separated. Buns on one side, mustard and ketchup on the other side, mayonnaise all over me. Later my buddies reconstructed the night for me. They said I had gotten so drunk I was trying to climb some tree out in the woods and then started trying to hump this girl. I had my britches down, running all around, and when they finally got me in the car to take me back to town, I puked all over her and all over the car. My buddy said I kept screaming at him that I was going to kill him if he didn’t get me a cheeseburger. They said that I tried to climb over the seat to come after him. So he went and got me a cheeseburger, told me to go fuck myself, and threw it down my shirt. The girl just wanted to get the fuck away from me as soon as she could, so they took her back to her house, then took me back to the fraternity house and threw me on the floor with this cheeseburger in my shirt. I woke up the next day.
Years later I was trying to find a buddy of mine who was a fraternity brother there and probably my best friend in the whole outfit, so I just called. I’d been out of college for twenty-five years, but when I called and this guy answered the phone for the fraternity house there, I told him my name and he went, “Oh! Dude! The Cheeseburger Man!”
I dropped out of college and never did end up being a full fraternity member, but I had a great time with those guys.