Let go of the wheel, the drivin’s done
Don’t turn around
You showed up in the lost and found
Welcome to our town
Just close your eyes, you’re finally breakin’ down
—“Breakin’ Down” (Thornton/Andrew)
BEFORE I CAME TO CALIFORNIA, TOM EPPERSON AND I WENT TO NEW York to seek our fame and fortune. It was 1977, and we stayed ten hours. We had a tape recorder with us because we wanted to record our reaction to seeing New York City. Tom says that he still has the cassette tape and that we sound so fucking country you can’t believe it.
I spent ten, fifteen years in California reading for parts they wouldn’t give me unless it was about a redneck. But there have been a million New Yorkers playing in movies about Mississippi, and they have that Foghorn Leghorn accent that doesn’t exist anywhere. I grew up in the South, and I never heard anybody talk like that. There are some people in Georgia and Alabama that give it a little lilt, but not that much. Anyway, it’s not like I sound like Charles Boyer now, but at least if I have to do a movie where I’m not from the South, I can do it. Back then, we were just hillbillies. I haven’t heard the tape since 1977, but Tom says you can’t imagine how country we sound. He says he and I were hyperventilating as we arrived in New York before we went into a tunnel. We were coming into town from Pennsylvania, or New Jersey probably. We came out of this tunnel, and I remember we parked not too far out on Sixth Avenue. When we saw the Statue of Liberty, we started yelling, “Jesus Christ, look at that, that’s the Statue of Liberty, and it’s green! It’s fucking green!” Tom says you can hear me breathing too hard, hyperventilating on tape. I haven’t heard this tape in thirty fucking years, you know, but on that tape is exactly what the fuck I said the first time I ever left home. I would be embarrassed to hear it now.
Part IV
I was a big fan of The Waltons and identified with John Boy, the aspiring young Southern writer. When John Boy left Walton’s Mountain and moved to New York City to seek his fame and fortune, I decided it was a sign that I should do the same. I talked Billy into coming with me. The fact that we had very little money and not a single contact in New York didn’t seem to faze us. We warned our weeping mothers and girlfriends that it would probably be years before we returned, then bought a road map and left Malvern in my packed-to-the-gills black Buick.
It was June 1977. The Summer of Sam. We drove through the very intimidating Holland Tunnel and parked the car on the Avenue of the Americas. We began to walk. New York terrified us. The buildings seemed miles high. Wave on wave of yellow taxis rushed hither and thither down the streets. The throngs of pedestrians seemed alien, rude, and in a great hurry. The only friendly person we encountered was a chubby black woman who said to me: “Hey, baby, wanna date?” Flattered, I replied: “No, ma’am, but thanks for asking.”
We walked and walked, and day turned into night, and a violent thunderstorm struck the city, and we were soaked to the skin, and we saw apocalyptic-looking clouds whipping past the top of the Empire State Building. We decided to return to the car, but weren’t sure where we had left it. We became lost. The rain continued. We were afraid the Son of Sam was going to get us. Finally, with the help of a kindly cabdriver, we found our car. We’d arrived in New York at noon. We left at ten o’clock that night. Shaken and humiliated, we took our time driving back to Arkansas. We hung out in a cheap motel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, for a few days. Twelve days after we’d left, we were back in Malvern. Billy went to the Dairy Queen. He ran into his girlfriend. She was surprised. She said: “But I thought you were goin’ to New York City.”
Youth is nothing, though, if not resilient, and after a few weeks of recuperation, we hit the road again. We boarded a Greyhound bus to Lakeside, a suburb of San Diego, to visit Billy’s aunt and uncle, Sally and Bill.