A Guitar and a Pen Read online

  “Was Donald Sutherland the host?” Curly was actually sneering.

  “I think Saturday Night Live is cool,” mumbled Arachnid Two. They were starting to form a solid black lump in my near vision.

  “Hey, here you are!” said the dockworker, who had woken at some point and opened a laptop.“Look what I found.‘Robbie Fulks was briefly an interesting figure in the mid-1990s Chicago-area “insurgent country” scene,’ ” he read.“That’s pretty cool. You’re right here on this Web site.”

  “It’s cool if you like being referred to in the past tense, or as a representative of a movement,” I said.“If you think it’s a great honor to appear on the Internet.”

  “I don’t know,” Curly reflected.“I might just appreciate being referred to at all. Especially if I played music that wasn’t popular.”

  “It’s got a song on here!” said the dockworker. And in a moment there was my voice, caterwauling in the little classroom on the prairie. I mean, it was my voice as it was nine years earlier, singing lyrics written five years earlier still, over an orchestration driven by sounds in vogue at least ten years before that. The song dramatized small-town despair, and was written in a Super 8 room during a lonely couple of days between bars. Normal music.

  “That’s you singing?” said the brunette.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  The arachnids, my last best hope, could hold out no longer. They covered their mouths out of politeness and turned from me. Around the laptop, a small group stared raptly at the little machine, as if it were playing a video file rather than an MP3. Perceiving my singing through their ears, I heard an aboriginal yammering. The computer’s built-in speaker rendered the recording shrilly remote, as through an Edison cylinder.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I picked up my posterboard and slipped into the hall. Through the pane in the door opposite me, I spotted a familiar face. Name tag: HAIRDRESSER. She was in the middle of a circle of relaxed, smiling students; she was giving one of them a cut. And there was Stritch, too—in my mind’s eye, anyway, and I don’t doubt its acuity—doing a 401(k) song-and-dance, and going over like Jolson.

  Lowering my face like a penitent, I ducked out a side door, half-circled the building, and trotted down the soft incline to the parking lot. Leaving a populous city for the small staid towns and the country beyond, one feels the enactment of a pleasant shift, the glamour of ideas and organized industry giving way to the bedrock of custom and honest toil. To return is to recall that, for most of us, sparkling ideas and illusions are not as much like idle playthings as they are bread and water. In either direction, the trip offers the blessed false promise of escape.

  I would call my wife on my cell phone, telling her they had released me early. That would take care of her. Then, with the wheels spinning beneath me and the countryside filling in with subdivisions and strip malls, I would work on a song in my head. With luck it would prove intelligible to others; and that would take care of me. As for the kids of 1355, they will have to find their own escape route. Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such.

  Robbie Fulks

  Robbie Fulks was born in York, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Virginia and North Carolina. Since 1983 he has lived in and around Chicago. In the 1980s he played guitar for the bluegrass band Special Consensus and taught music at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In 1993 he started working in Nashville as a country songwriter, and shortly after that began recording country CDs under his name, of which eight have been released to date. He also produces records (Dallas Wayne, the Johnny Paycheck tribute Touch My Heart) and sings on commercials (McDonald’s, Budweiser, Applebee’s, and more).

  He has scored one failed sitcom for Fox and a couple terrible films, and worked a little in regional theater. His live-music-and-interview program, Robbie’s Secret Country, airs thrice monthly on XM satellite radio. His writing has appeared on-line and in print publications such as GQ, Blender, Journal of Country Music, and the Chicago Reader, and has been anthologized in Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series. You can visit his Web site at RobbieFulks.com.

  How I Stayed a Boy

  Tia Sillers

  There is something strangely glorious about being an accident—particularly if you’re a child with an imagination. Your view of the world is fundamentally altered, forever tilted once you’ve uncovered how desire and nature came together one early winter’s night and ignited a combustion of sorts. I still can’t help but be filled with a kind of guilty pleasure, knowing that all it took was a few moments of recklessness to trigger an unintended chain reaction that wound up becoming, well . . . me.

  So it goes that in August of 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression and on the cusp of World War II, I came into this world: unplanned, breech, two weeks late, and screaming. Born in my parents’ bed on a four-hundred acre barley-tobacco farm just north of Ghent Springs, Kentucky, I was the sixth of six daughters born to a very exhausted forty-one-year-old mother and a very disappointed forty-five-year-old father. And, as the years wrote out our lives, the family lore claimed that when I was finally born and my sex became known, my father, after alternately crying and drinking for most of a week, announced that he was changing my name from Claudia Ann to Francine Samantha and that I would henceforth be known as Franky. My father’s name, by the way, was Franklin Samuel Owen and, for a while, in addition to Franky, people called me Junior.

  It was also whispered that Daddy never slept with my mother again—a highly effective form of self-imposed birth control. I can’t help but wonder if believing that my mother was never again held by a passionate, albeit often drunk, man for the rest of her life had some profound effect on my development. Surely there are certain family secrets that are best kept in the dark. In Daddy’s defense, for most men, six children, let alone six daughters, is more than enough, and he was a sweet drunk.

  But even for all of that, there is still something strangely glorious about being an accident. When you’re a living, breathing mistake, this world can offer a brilliant sense of freedom. Somehow if you weren’t supposed to exist in the first place, you could feel that everything you did in life was pretty much gravy. In my young mind’s eye, I could get away with more, because I wasn’t quite as there, or really as real, as the rest of the intended or on-purpose beating hearts out there. All of those intentional souls had to watch their step, had to make their days and nights matter, because they mattered. God was keeping an eye on them. But not me. I was such an afterthought I didn’t even come into this world headfirst like everybody else, and they’d renamed me three times before I was even a month old. It was like my footsteps were less visible in the backyard chicken-scratch dirt, and it wouldn’t take much wind or water to wash them away. It was almost like I was half ghost, half child, and that kind of existence helped lead to a life not threatened by solitude.

  Still, I was always so thrilled when Daddy would scoop me up and carry me under his arm like a sack of feed, with my legs in the air sticking out behind him. Thrilled when he would take me into town for a new pair of overalls and let me get my hair cut in the chair right next to him at the barbershop, all the men chuckling whenever we walked down the street on the way to the feed store or the soda shop hand in hand.“Here comes Frank Sr. and Junior.” And then there were those wonderful nights when my father would tuck me into bed with just a nip of Evan Williams on his breath and ask, “Who loves little Frankie?” And I’d say, all heavy-eyed and smitten, “Big Frank does.”

  But I wasn’t a boy. And that, I guess, was the dark heart of the matter. If I had been, everything really would have been different. With one different chromosome, I would have gone from being an accident to being the long-awaited answer to countless prayers, the son after five daughters, the rain after a ten-year drought. I tried not to look like a girl, not to act like a girl, never let Momma grow my hair long or make me wear a Sunday dress. I kept my skinny knees and elbows scraped from climbing trees and straddling fences. I knew, from an improbably young age, that my family
needed a son and I was the closest they were gonna come to it.

  My oldest sister Lorraine was almost thirteen when I was born, soon to be long gone with the first boy that talked smooth and held an equivocal sense of promise. The twins, Ruthie and Rose, were ten, Lucille was nine, and Helen had just turned seven, so by the time I was old enough to be aware of my surroundings, my sisters were busy going through what seemed to be a constant coming of age. And every one of them was exactly what I wasn’t: one hundred percent woman-child. What started out all pink and giggly had, by the age of fifteen or so, given way to hourglass figures and husky laughs from stealing boyfriends’ Pall Malls. It’s crazy, looking back now, how they all wanted to be Hollywood bombshells instead of girls from Ghent Springs and I wanted to be a son instead of a daughter.

  If I were to give you mental snapshots of each of my sisters they would look like this:

  Picture Lorraine, with her long jet-black hair, studying herself smoking a cigarette in the side mirror of Daddy’s pickup while trying out lines like “Well, aren’t you a picture” and “My lamb, my lamb” all slow and low. She was the breathless one, always biting her lip and batting her eyes.

  If there ever was a “sweater girl” to give Lana Turner a run for her money it would have been Ruthie. I can still see her wearing an impossibly tight Sears and Roebuck ecru number with an egg blue scarf around her neck. Still see her swinging on the front porch humming “You must have been a beautiful baby . . .”

  Then there was Rose, in her platform shoes and navy blue sailor shorts, a white shirt tied at the sternum, climbing up the ladder in Curtis Reed’s daddy’s hayloft to do heaven knows what (me hiding behind the tractor, watching them sneak in).

  And speaking of what, what about Lucille leaning on the door of Walter Bradshaw’s Plymouth, actually effortlessly saying, “Hey Walter, if you need me just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you?” And Walter swallowing hard, looking at her all torn because he knows how to whistle. Hell, he won the 4-H Club bird-calling contest. He knows how to whistle and he knows it’s just a movie line but he wants to hear Lucille Anne Owen say it because if she’s playing Bacall that means he’s Bogey and . . . and . . .“Why you just put your lips together and blow.”

  Finally, there was Helen—she’s the one I followed around the most. I can still see her posing for Hank Cummings’s brand-new Kodak camera: her fingers laced behind her head, elbows in the air, eyebrows penciled just so, and a look for the lens that was X-rated. Somehow, she was standing there in that yellow eyelet dress revealing nothing and promising everything.

  The truth is, for a kid like me they were fantastic. While the rest of the world watched their starlets in black and white over at the town cinema, I got to witness five femmes fatales all life-sized and in Technicolor. Yes, the Owen sisters were too much and yes, they were destined for trouble, but for me, growing up as a child who wasn’t supposed to be there and as a girl who wished she was a boy, all those sisters were a fabulous distraction. They smelled like chocolate malted milkshakes, gardenias, and a pure musky sexiness. They had lovesick pups driving slow past our house at all hours of the night. They had mothers all over town saying “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  I must have been almost four when Lorraine quit school and ran off with a could-have-been-minor-league-shortstop-if-it-hadn’t-been-for-Pearl-Harbor kinda guy named Howard Housten. Momma told me that they went to California when he joined the navy. In the years Lorraine was gone we got exactly two postcards from her. One showed a black Packard sedan on a muscular winding road cut into the cliffs of Malibu, with a foaming surf, white gold sand, and an impossibly blue sky as a backdrop.

  The other card had an all-on-fire neon sign that said The Boulder Club—BETS FROM A DIME UP! Craps—Twenty One—Roulette. It was surrounded by a night sky that glowed a crazy electric blue in the distance, like maybe the desert sun had just set. We had no idea where the Boulder Club was and only found out much later that it was in Las Vegas. On the back of both cards she wrote the same thing: Dear all—Wish you were here. Yours very truly, Mrs. Howard Housten. Below those words was a huge poppy red lipstick kiss. Lorraine had flown to the moon.

  The spring before I entered first grade marked the first time ever that the family wasn’t broke. The war was over, the farm had had a few banner years, and suddenly GOD BLESS TOBACCO posters were up in the grocery and the courthouse. Momma and Daddy had finally saved up enough money to be the first people in McClane County to have screens put on their windows. Now, my mother was salt of the earth and she was never one to flaunt, but I do think she held her chin a fraction higher and her back a little less bowed. I do think she even moved us up a few rows in church.

  Screens! You can’t imagine the magnitude of that simple invention. The luxury of being able to have all the windows open in those mosquito-riddled dog days of August! Somehow, that and a dozen dollars in the coffee can helped forgive everything my father wasn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t be. My mother loved Frank Sr. more than ever as she stood in the front yard and watched him install that fine mesh wire on all the windows and doors. She must have thought, Bring on the flies, bring on the crickets, bring on the locusts, Lord. We’ve got screens.

  You have to understand that up until now, Momma had always been the unfailing realist of the family. She was the bill payer and the penny saver. She was the one who walked the three miles into town at midnight to pull Daddy off the barstool and somehow managed to get him into the bed of our old truck and drive him home. She was the one who believed that life in Ghent Springs was what it was: sometimes interesting, sometimes maddening, sometimes comical, and most often a grind.

  Mix up that realism with a dose of fierce Catholic upbringing, and you’ll get a hint of the strange amalgamation that Momma was. Her human nature would never quite let her buy into the very Catholic notion that a million rosaries meant answered prayers. She couldn’t quite swallow the idea that a lifelong hell-raiser could bargain his way into heaven with a final act of contrition: why worry about being good from the get-go if you’re forgiven in the end? All of that body and blood of Christ and incense and ashes and holy water just didn’t add up in her brain. She knew in her gut that bad things happened to good people and it was nothing personal. She knew that if she were ever to ask “Why me, Lord?” the most likely answer (if there would even be one at all) would be “Why not?”

  Yet she couldn’t let it go. Despite all of the things she knew in her head and heart, religion had a way of trumping reality at the end of the day. Kept her glancing in a godly direction and mumbling a prayer with each new rumor that floated around about her daughters or husband. And when you consider everything that was going on in foggy-windowed Plymouths and darkly lit haylofts, when you consider that more nights than not, Frank Sr. was pissing on his boots in the alley behind the Anvil Bar—well, you couldn’t really blame her.

  But the screens weren’t only a momentous occasion in that they represented a rising in local social standing; they also arrived in time to punctuate a line of demarcation. I’d be starting school that fall and my mother would finally, after eighteen years, have a few hours here and there without children or chores. I think she envisioned afternoons with less fortunate “screenless” women, drinking iced tea and mastering the art of needlepoint. For the promising months of May and June 1946, I think she allowed herself to be lulled into an extended moment of suspended reality, sheer fantasy: freedom was waiting just around the bend. She suddenly wore a secret smile and seemed a little more girlish. In a sense, she was brimming with anticipation of living the “good life.” I could tell that Momma had begun to believe she was due a little fun.

  MRS. HOWARD HOUSTEN, née Lorraine Beatrice Owen, showed up at suppertime on the twenty-third of June, with a basket containing a two-month-old infant she failed to introduce or ever acknowledge. She sat the basket on the kitchen table, reached into her white leather clutch for a cigarette, muttered, “I know, I know . . . ,” and stepped out on the
back porch to light up. No one said a word. We all must have watched her standing there in the twilight for several minutes before Momma was distracted by the sound of the baby waking up. She cleared her throat and then carefully said, as if reading a script for the first time, “Honey, we’re so glad you’re back. You can’t imagine how much we’ve missed you.” Momma stole a glance at the agitated infant and, in a voice wanting desperately to sound nonchalant, said, as if an afterthought, “And who have we here?” Momma did not reach out to comfort the child.

  Lorraine took the time to slowly exhale a lungful of smoke before saying, “It’s not Howard’s. I hadn’t seen him in over a year when I got word he was MIA. It could be Bruce’s, but that’s done, and Thomas says I can’t pursue my career and he won’t marry me with a baby on my hip.”

  Lorraine was now blond, almost twenty—and deadly. When she’d left at sixteen she was sexy but harmless, kind of like ordering a Shirley Temple in a martini glass. But this latest edition of Lorraine was potent stuff, leaner and somehow leggier in a tight dove gray suit and unbelievably high white stilettos. Her hair was teased, sprayed, “done”—and it wasn’t going anywhere. Her heavily penciled eyes were those of a poker player, revealing nothing. She had traded her wild coltishness for a horse-broke steely self-restraint, but it wasn’t like she’d been broken or tamed by someone else. No, Lorraine had done it to herself. Somewhere along the way she had realized that she could get farther down the road by trading unpredictable heat for a highbrow kind of cool—this new Lorraine could look at you without a trace of hunger or wonder or playfulness and hold it there. You might have to look away, but she wouldn’t. Everything about her seemed effortless: everything was on and in place, and somehow, though you were sure it was, it didn’t seem fake.

  And it was with all of this self-control that Lorraine—who had yet to sit down with us at the kitchen table, who had not taken her jacket off despite the heat, who had, by now, casually picked up her clutch—walked to the opposite side of the kitchen, stood near the doorway to the living room in the front of the house, and said, “I have the late show at the Apache starting in September and Thomas swears we’ll be at the Golden Nugget by spring. The hours are going to be pure insanity. . . .”