A Guitar and a Pen Read online

  A car horn interrupted and we were all suddenly as skittish as a herd of deer, every ear alert, but Lorraine showed no reaction and continued her monologue: “So you see it’s really quite impossible to raise a baby under such circumstances.” And then, like she’d stepped straight out of a movie, she blew us a kiss. She blew us a kiss, turned, and walked out.

  I remember running to the window, not the door, and watching the scene unfolding through the screen. It was like I wanted some filter or protection from reality, and the window, being a smaller portal, served that purpose.

  There she was, climbing into an unbelievably shiny, silver Cadillac. And there was Daddy, grabbing the car door and refusing to let go, yelling, “Lorraine, now you get your skinny ass back in the house and get that baby. I don’t care what kind of spineless son of a bitch you’re planning to ride off into the sunset with, but you’re not gonna skip out on your responsibility. You brought that child into the world and you’re damn well taking it with you. . . .” He was saying all of this as he was running down the drive trying to keep up with the moving vehicle. The car was kicking up chalky dust as it accelerated and began to drag him. My father finally let go a hundred yards from the house, yelling, “Goddamn it, Lorraine. You are not doing this to us.”

  But she was. And we all knew it. She and What’s-his-name were already a mile down the road and they weren’t looking back. Daddy spit. Momma, who had been standing in the drive with Ruthie, Rose, and Helen, turned and walked slowly back into the house, her shoulders slumped, her eyes almost closed. I followed her back to the kitchen and watched her run her hands across her face, trying to pull the moment together. She was breathing through her mouth and instinctively reached down to pick up the silent baby, whose enormous eyes were wide open. She began pacing the room, holding the child.

  “Momma,” I asked.“Are we gonna have to keep the baby?”

  “Junior, I don’t know,” she said.

  “Momma, where’s the baby gonna sleep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Momma, what’s the baby’s name?”

  She gave a look that was at first exasperated and then just plain exhausted.“Lorraine didn’t say, did she now.”

  A minute must have slipped by with her just kind of vacantly gazing at the child and I asked again, “Is the baby going to have to stay with us?”

  She sighed and said, “I’d say it’s looking that way.”

  As I listened to my mother’s resigned response, I was suddenly gripped with a realization: My curiosity wasn’t motivated by whether or not I’d be sharing my room or helping to change smelly diapers—those notions didn’t bother me much—no, it was out of pure self-preservation. The sex of the baby had yet to be revealed, and I just knew that if that uninvited guest lying in my mother’s arms was a male, my days as Frankie Jr. were over. If that child was a boy, I’d be back to being just a plain old girl in no time flat. So I didn’t ask any more questions. I figured it would all come out in the wash soon enough. Literally.

  My father tucked me in early that night. There was no kiss on the forehead or tousling of my hair. He didn’t ask “Who loves little Frankie?” He just shut the door and said, “Get to sleep.” Through the wall I could hear Momma and Daddy talking and hashing it out, only halfheartedly fighting—it wasn’t like words or a thrown plate would change anything. Then I heard the back door close and the truck start up and knew that Daddy was headed into town to claim a barstool. I think I heard Momma crying, but it might have just been the baby.

  WHEN WE all struggled out of our beds in the morning, more than just my father felt hungover; we were all a little sideways from a long, sleepless night. Lucille was rocking the baby in a cradle pulled down from the attic and Rosie was frying eggs when I heard Helen ask, “What kind of name is Dianah? Do we have to call her Dianah?”

  “That’s the name we found on her birth certificate in the basket,” Momma said. What she didn’t say was that the space for “father’s name” was left blank and the last name of the child was listed as Owen.“Besides, when Lorraine comes back, how would we explain that we changed her baby’s name?”

  I wasn’t even seven yet, but I knew enough to know that Momma’s statement was pure fiction; Lorraine wasn’t ever coming back, no way, no how. And people changed babies’ names all the time—I was a perfect example of that. Normally, I would have pointed these discrepancies out, but at that moment the most unstoppable, self-indulgent smile had overtaken my face. Call her Dinah, Winnie, Lou Lou, Esmorelda; dress her up like the doll she was; put a big pink bow on top of her hairless head; paint her fingers and toes China-girl red—it was all fine by me. The only thing that mattered was that my job was secure. I was still my father’s son. There was no new boy coming to live in this family.

  I put on my work boots and walked out to the barn to find Senior, which is what I had taken to calling Daddy lately. He was standing in the back of the building by the tool bench and seemed to be unable to decide on the first order of business for the day. I knew he had some cobwebs in his head—that’s what he called his hangovers—I also knew he was just plain ticked off at this latest turn of events, so I got to work putting oats in the three horse stalls. For a while, we both shared the early morning cool beneath the old barn roof, saying nothing and doing chores. We were both, in our own way, chewing over fate and faith and luck and life. Daddy broke the silence, calling out, “Junior?”

  “Yes, Senior,” I said, stepping out of the middle stall.

  He smiled a little in spite of himself, walked over to me, put a callused hand on my shoulder, and said, “Promise me something, Frankie. Don’t you ever do us like Lorraine or any of the other girls. They’re all heartbreakers, every last one of them, and they’re gonna walk a hard road. You’re not like them. I don’t mean you’re not a girl—I know you’re a girl and one day you’ll be a woman—but just you stay you. Keep makin’ your old man smile . . . and for God sakes keep your pants on.”

  “Yes sir,” I said solemnly. And then, just because I looked for any excuse to please him, even though I didn’t know what in the world it meant, I said, “I’ll keep my pants on.”

  Tia Sillers

  There is absolutely nothing average about Tia Sillers. First of all, she wrote her first hit song right out of college (“Lipstick Promises,” with George Ducas). She has the unusual distinction of having “Blue On Black,” which she cowrote with her best friend Mark Selby and blues artist Kenny Wayne Shepherd, holding the record as the longest number-one in rock chart history: a whopping seventeen weeks.

  A Fine Arts major (UNC–Chapel Hill), this Nashville native has also done pretty well on the country charts. She cowrote Pam Tillis’s number-one “Land of the Living” and the Dixie Chicks’ megahit “There’s Your Trouble.” She entered uncharted territory again with the attention-getting ode to living life to its fullest “I Hope You Dance,” cowritten with Mark D. Sanders and recorded by Lee Ann Womack. This number-one country hit and Top 20 pop hit has earned a Grammy Award for Best Country Song, the CMA and ACM Awards for Song of the Year, and launched several books. It is used at graduations, christenings, and marriages, and was also used in a video to honor the slain students at Columbine, an honor that Sillers says tops them all.

  She doesn’t write the way others do, either. She plays guitar and piano well enough to pick out melodies, she says, but writes primarily “in her head.”

  “I think in a cadence,” she says.“Things seem to meter out. When I write a song, it automatically takes a melody in my head.”

  And if all that weren’t enough, she calls herself “indomitably happy.” Which just might be the secret to it all.

  Whitey Johnson

  Gary Nicholson

  Whitey Johnson was the first guitar player I ever saw that amazed me, and I always go back to that parking lot in Garland, Texas, when someone asks what made me want to play. It was Labor Day 1963 with the new asphalt oozing a black goo that would rob your flip-flops if y
ou didn’t keep moving. My baseball buddies and me were hotfootin’ all around the shopping-center carnival, rocking the Tilt-A-Whirl and the bumper cars and ruling the Fun House. Leon Phelps was my ride to the fair. His dad played mandolin in a bluegrass band called the Breakdown Boys—they were all mechanics—that was performing there that day. They played before the Valiants, who mostly covered Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, and Fats Domino. The Valiants had the perfect look for a combo of their day: powder blue shirts, white dickies, tight black slacks, pointed-toe white loafers, and razor-cut pompadours standing tall. Their outfits were complemented by a matching white Fender Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Precision Bass and beige Fender amps. They were smoking and laughing at each other’s dirty jokes the whole time the Breakdown Boys played their set of crippled-up Flatt and Scruggs and Bill Monroe stuff. Leon and I tried to look cool and act like rockers, like we didn’t like his dad’s band, even lighting up behind the flatbed truck that was the stage while his dad was busy workin’ the mandolin and couldn’t see us.

  About halfway through a tortured “Rocky Top” the Valiants’ drummer’s girlfriend—picture a very tired Tuesday Weld—came running to the back of the stage and let out with the news that Jimmy Rains, their lead guitar player, had missed his plane back from his grandfather’s funeral in Lubbock and would not make the show. The news hit them hard. Leon and I watched their lead singer, Randy, instantly drop his cool, collected James Dean swagger and start pacing around his candy-apple-red ’57 Chevy, looking up at the cloudless sky crying, “What are we gonna do, what are we gonna do, we can’t play without Jim, he’s the only one who knows the songs, we’re screwed,” on and on.

  They really were screwed. Randy did not play an instrument; he only sang and looked dreamy-eyed cool. The bass player, Billy Ray, could only play the patterns that Jimmy had tirelessly trained him to play on twelve songs, and Ron, the organ player, could barely block out three-note chords with his right hand. They had never considered playing any music without Jimmy.

  Then Randy lit up with an idea: “Hey, what about that albino dude that Jimmy always talks about being the best picker in town, plays at the Holy Roller church?”

  “How do you think we’re gonna find him in fifteen minutes?” the drummer asked, shifting his girlfriend on his lap.

  “I know his mama is the cook at the Nite Owl—my cousin busses tables over there,” said Billy Ray.“Well, get her on the phone quick or we’re gonna have to pack up and get outta here ’cause if all these people see us standing around they’re gonna want us to play whether we’ve got a lead guitar player or not, and we’re gonna suck,” Randy said as he flicked his cigarette away.

  So I guess Billy Ray called Whitey’s mom and somehow they found him and told him to come on down to the fair, because about twenty minutes later Whitey and his brother came pulling up in an old Ford pickup, a Fender Super Reverb covered with a quilt strapped in the back. It was then that I first realized that Whitey was actually black, ’cause his brother was black. I had never heard the word albino and had no idea what that meant, but taking a good look at Whitey you could see that though he was white, he wasn’t like all us other white boys. Whitey’s hair had a yellowish tint that almost looked dyed, and was real frizzy in small tight curls. His lips were big like his brother’s, but his eyes were very light blue with pink eyelids that seemed irritated. He wore his black slacks too short with white socks, black penny loafers with lightning strikes on the sides, and a white short-sleeved shirt with a skinny black tie—a uniform for a side musician. While his brother unloaded his amp and lifted it onto the stage, Whitey put his ear down close to his red Harmony Rocket to check his tuning, asking Ron to give him an E note from the organ. He then quickly adjusted the knobs on his amp, cranking up a healthy dose of treble and reverb. He struck a few notes to test his volume, then turned and looked around for the first time to face the Valiants.

  “What you guys usually kick off with?” he asked.

  “Let’s just do ‘Johnny B. Goode’ to get things going,” said Randy, nervously looking Whitey up and down.“In A.”

  Whitey leaned into the drummer and threw down strong on the intro exactly like the record. The Valiants jumped in with him and they were rockin’, but the guys kept looking at Whitey with half-smiles trying to adjust to his driving rhythm, something they had obviously not experienced the same way before. After the first chorus of “Go, go Johnny, go,” they got a little more comfortable and fell into a groove. When the solo came up, Whitey tore into it hard, doing all the Chuck Berry licks everybody was ready for, then stretching out a little, but not so much that it would throw any of them off. He just looked out into the crowd smiling, never looking down at his hands on the neck; it was all so effortless. They played the stock ending and before the cymbal crash died, Randy jumped in, singing “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On” in the same key. After that, Randy introduced Whitey to the crowd, explaining that he had come to sit in for their regular guitar player, who had missed his flight.

  “Let’s have a big hand for him, y’all: Whitey Johnson,” Randy said, and there came some scattered applause.

  “Not quite white enough,” we heard someone holler from the middle of the crowd. I was up close to the side of the flatbed-truck stage and couldn’t really see where the voice was coming from, but a bunch of people turned around and looked in that direction. I realized it was some guys with letter jackets and burr heads who were drunk and lookin’ to make some trouble.

  Randy had enough sense to jump right into “Gonna tell Aunt Mary ’bout Uncle John, said he had some misery but he’s having lots of fun” à la Little Richard. The troublemakers were laughing and moving around with their girls sorta but not really dancin’ and everything seemed cool for the moment.

  Whitey was looking at the guy he was pretty sure must have hollered the “not white enough” stuff, and the way the guy looked back at Whitey made it very obvious that he was the one and there could be more of his racist bullshit to come any minute. Whitey smiled a cold smile till the tune ended, then he turned to the drummer.

  “Just give me a strong backbeat,” I heard him say. Then he turned to the bass player and organ player and said, “You guys just lay out for a while—I gotta do this.” He reached down and turned the volume all the way up on his amp and went into the riff of “I’m a Man” by Muddy Waters. It got everybody’s attention quick. People who were playing all the sucker games down the side strip of the fair started making their way to the stage, along with the kids getting off the Ferris wheel and bumper cars that were nearby. Whitey had stepped up to the microphone and was singing, “I’m a man, I spell M-A-N,” and glaring hard into the face of the loudmouthed letterman. The groove was so heavy and undeniable, with one huge distorted electric guitar and backbeat drums. Thinking back now, I’m sure none of the folks at the little shopping-center fair in Garland, Texas, 1963, had ever heard anything even resembling what Whitey was laying down. It was acid rock before acid, Hendrix before Hendrix; his semi-hollow body Rocket was howling feedback and Whitey played with it, holding the guitar close to the amp to get the wildest possible electric moans. The sounds he was making were as if he were up in the kid’s face yelling at him. He then looked hard at the smart-ass and turned his smile into a stark stare that said You should be ashamed of yourself, son. The kid looked very uncomfortable, red in the face and embarrassed.

  Whitey’s presence expanded before us; he seemed to get physically larger some way when he played a long, mean, dissonant solo. He sang the last verse and ended by taking his guitar from around his neck and holding it next to the speakers to get the loudest feedback yet, then leaned his guitar against the amp and turned the reverb all the way up. He just stood there and glared awhile at the red-faced redneck kid before he reached behind the amp and turned it off to let the sound slowly fade, finally giving some relief to the amazed crowd. Everyone erupted into applause with shouts and whistling while the Valiants just grinned and stared at Whitey for
a while before Randy jumped to the mic and announced in his best show-biz voice that they would take a fifteen-minute intermission. It was obvious that Randy couldn’t handle following Whitey’s outrageous performance with more lame cover tunes.

  After they put their instruments down and climbed off the truck-bed stage, the guys came over to Whitey and started praising his playing and thanking him for saving the day. I was standing off to the side watching Whitey show Randy his guitar and tell him what kind of strings he used when a loud voice came from behind me.

  “If that little white nigger wants to start some shit, he’s come to the right place.” Everyone turned to look in my direction at the same time, and I looked behind me to see a big ol’ Hoss Cartwright–looking dude taking slow and deliberate steps toward Whitey.

  “I saw you lookin’ at my little brother like you want some trouble while you were makin’ all that racket up there, and I’m tellin’ you to git your shit and git while the gittin’s good before I bust you upside the head with your piece-of-shit guitar.” The words roared out of his fat face.

  “Wayne, you got no business coming back here trying to start shit,” said Randy, moving in front of Whitey.“This guy’s doing us a big favor sittin’ in for Jimmy. We couldn’t have played without him. Besides that, he ain’t done nothin’ to you or your little brother.”

  “Well I just don’t like the smart-ass look on his face, anyway. What are you, boy—black or white? If you’re white you need to quit ridin’ around with niggers, and if you’re black, you need to stay with your own kind.” Wayne’s big voice was not so loud now that he knew no one was gonna side with him, but he had to keep talkin’ his shit anyway.