Tales from the Trails of a Rock ’n’ Roll Bus Driver

by Jerry Fitzpatrick

  Sometime during one of the years I was traveling for work, Jeremy’s mother had shown up at my mother’s house with Jeremy in tow. She knocked on the door and made her usual announcement with bravado.

  “Thought you might like to meet your grandson,” she said to my mother.

  I can’t imagine what my mother said, but I know she struck up a relationship with them to the point that she started including his birthdays and Christmases and extra time in her schedule. This was all hidden from me. I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t think my wife knew about it until Jeremy was reintroduced back into my life. His mom met a good man, married, and they grew a family. She became a Christian and changed her partying ways. We ended up living close to each other in the southwest part of town. I actually passed their house several times. I didn’t know they were there until someone told me. I then started going a different route.

  One afternoon I was somewhere in America on tour when I made one of my daily calls home.

  “You’re not going to believe who walked into my office today,” Michelle said.

  By this time it seemed like my wife had become the mother hen to many of the people in the apartment complex. Everyone there had problems in their lives, and when you manage an apartment complex, you seem to get included in it all. So I didn’t have a clue who she was talking about.

  She explained that Jeremy’s older brother, the kid who had been on the floor years ago while his mom and my other friends were smoking pot and having sex, came into the apartment office. His father had killed himself with a shotgun when he was still a baby. I had known his father, had socialized with him only a couple of times, but I ran with a different crowd.

  It wasn’t hard for Jeremy’s older brother to figure out who and where I was. We lived close to each other, and when I was home, I parked a bus on the street in front of the apartments. He just walked into my wife’s office one day.

  “Hi, I’m your husband’s son’s big brother.”

  Michelle knew who he was from the stories I had told her. She looked at him.

  “So what do you want with me?”

  He told her some tale about Jeremy being upset, and he said he wanted to know his father. Jeremy’s mother later told me that Jeremy’s brother was mad at her, and it was his way of rebelling against getting at her.

  After a lot of discussion with Michelle, we decided to atone my behavior toward Jeremy and try to make a difference in his life. I figured it was something in my past that I had to face and straighten out. So we made plans on how to incorporate him into our world. When I came home from a tour, I reached out to him, and we tried to get to know each other. Eventually, Michelle and I included him in our Christmas and welcomed him during family meals together and a couple of short family trips. The way I had felt trapped in my childhood, Jeremy also was trapped in the confusion of life. He was a teenager by this time, and he was getting in a lot of trouble. He didn’t live with us, and he didn’t share have my last name, but we tried to treat him as part of the family.

  It didn’t work. I tried to work on his attitude and his life choices, but after a while, we concluded he wasn’t going to go along with our family plan or values. I sat him down and told him the facts.

  “If you don’t want to do it our way, then we can’t participate in your life,” I told him. “I think it’s best if you don’t come around here for a while.”

  Michelle and I were trying to build our own family, and he was making detours in our plans. I had gained custody of my daughter from my first marriage, and she had felt she had gained a brother, so it was an issue for her when we sent him away.

  A few years later after Jeremy was in his early 20s, I called home, and Michelle told me Jeremy was suing me for 18 years of child support. He had hired my first ex-wife’s attorney at her encouragement, the one who lost her case in the custody fight over my daughter. Jeremy thought I was going to give him $25,000 or more when he won his case, a sum that seemed liked all the answers to his lack of money skills.

  My lawyer countered right away and challenged his claim of me being his father. After decades, we would finally find out if I was actually Jeremy’s father. We went to take a paternity test. I was on tour at the time and headed to a hospital in Chicago, where they drew my blood.

  It took a couple of months for the results to come back, but when it did, Jeremy’s lawyer called me.

  “OK, you’re not the father,” he said. “You’re off the hook, we’re dropping the suit. Jeremy hasn’t been told yet, so don’t contact him until we do.”

  At the moment, I wasn’t planning on it. I was angry about the whole situation. Then I became very sad. I felt bad for Jeremy, a confused young man who would be even more confused now. I talked to Michelle about it, but her coldness shocked me.

  “Do you feel bad enough to send a get well soon card and $500?” Michelle was angrier about this situation than I was. She really thought we were taken advantage of.

  Jeremy contacted me again after some time had passed. He explained how he had his life in order. He was learning a good trade in heating and air and had a girlfriend he loved. I wished him luck, but I had no desire to get close to him. I just wanted to let bygones be bygones. I figured time would eventually sort out the emotions.

  One night I ran into him at a bar, and we chatted for a minute. I wished him luck and went to another bar. It was hard to face him again unsure of his intentions. We shared many of the same problems that life had dealt us, but I couldn’t bring myself to look into his eyes with what I had felt was the disrespect he had shown.

  On May 27, 2007, a Sunday evening, I was at my home with my children enjoying a few days together before I was about to head out on a five-month summer tour. The phone rang with the news that Jeremy had put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger, killing himself instantly. Jeremy had been living in the northern part of the county with his girlfriend.

  The news took the wind out of me. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Equally disturbing was the additional news that his mother had also killed herself. His mom had been living alone in a house in the southwest part of the county more than 20 miles away from Jeremy’s home. She had shot herself in the heart with a pistol.

  I never sought after the entire details of the incident nor have I ever wanted to. Rumors circulated that he had killed his mother and then went to his home and killed himself. Others said they had done it together while talking on the phone. No one knows except those two and God. The situation and the entire way our lives intertwined has weighed heavy on my heart. I will always regret not being able to make a real difference in his life.

  I felt like him once, or at least how I imagine he felt, when I was younger and so sick of what life was giving me. I later realized it was what I was giving life that was hurting me so badly.

  I was once where Jeremy was, and I came close to the edge. Standing up on the guard rail on the I-430 bridge where it crosses the Arkansas River, I had the choice to quit this bullshit life that I had been dealt. Standing in the cool evening summer breeze with my arms stretched out and my eyes closed, the feelings, emotions, adrenaline rushed through me, knowing that leaning forward a couple of inches was certain death.

  Or there was the other way. Stepping down to face more of an unhappy certainty, a desire to start over and the impossible challenge of making it happen. Fuck it. Lean forward and make it all go away. Give up on trying to figure it out. That’s the way I felt.

  I can’t even explain where I was inside my mind. The rushing thoughts were so loud that as the occasional car passed, I didn’t even hear it. I certainly didn’t hear the policeman the first time he yelled at me to get down. The second time he yelled, he snapped me out of my trance. My attention turned to him pointing his pistol at me. By that point in my life, I had already had pistols pointed at me by several other cops, so it didn’t scare me at all. Suddenly the decision I was contemplating wasn’t mine; someone else was making it for me.

  As so
on as I stepped down, the officer handcuffed me right away and placed me in the back of his car. I sobbed uncontrollably on the ride to the jail and for several hours while sitting in a cell. All I could think of was the value of being alive, which shut out any other emotions I had about jumping.

  Talking to my beautiful daughter many years later and telling her of my decision and how close I came, she made comments relating to her existence. Her sobering words brought home how different the world would be without me in it. I’m grateful the policeman broke that trance. I’m glad to be alive to see what the world is like with my daughter and my other children in it.

  Many get dealt a strange hand when we’re born. Fate is kind to some, harsh to others. Sometimes all you can do is make the best of the hand you’re dealt. Since the time I almost gave up on playing the hand I was dealt, I’ve learned that if you really want to change your situation, you can. It’s up to you.

  Chapter 32 A Broken Family Tree

  I’ve known parents who stay together for the children and others who sacrifice the tight-knit family life for their own happiness. I’m not advocating one way or another. I do believe that during these complex situations consideration of the immediate and long-term effects divorce can have on a child often is left out in the cold. Divorce affects different people in different ways, and it is impossible to apply one cure to the problem. You definitely don’t get the same results.

  In my case, I don’t think my mother and father ever gave a second thought to what would happen to my brother, sister and me while they were tangled in the war between themselves. The anger they shared for each other was palpable. They were so caught up in the heat of their debates, they forgot often about our needs.

  The world around me seems consumed with the epidemic of divorce. As an adult having gone through my own divorce, I have come to understand a lot of things about myself. I also now understand more about my parents and how their approach to life had been handed to them from their parents and the parents before them. This cycle had been placed at the doorstep of every generation, and they handed it to me. Their emotions and actions were the results of what grandparents and great-grandparents had taught them.

  My father, Harold Fitzpatrick, didn’t have a relationship with his father or his grandfather. Rumor had it that on the day my grandmother gave birth to her 11th child, my grandfather was at another woman’s house, “shacking it up.” Dad once explained to me that my grandfather had dozens of children with various women throughout Kentucky where they had settled. I don’t remember ever meeting my grandfather, and I have wondered many times just who he was and what it was that I got from his gene pool. Do I have any of his traits or habits? Would I journey down his road?

  My grandmother, Lida, eventually moved to Dayton. Some of my uncles had made their way to the northern Cincinnati area and settled around Dayton and Germantown, Ohio, looking for a better life. Many of them jumped into business with the National Cash Register Company. NCR had an enormous factory and grounds in Dayton and was a major employer in town. The company even owned a large park for its employees. I remember going to a few family reunions there. My uncles would all brag about what a great company it was to work for, but in the mid-1960s, most of them began to lose their jobs when the company began to go electronic. The old dependable cash registers were not being made anymore, and these men in my life and family were all out of work. Several of them fell on hard times and became bitter. Perhaps their stories deterred me from ever seeking to join a company or a union where my job was not safe. It’s better to care for oneself, I came to believe.

  Lida was a small woman who always wore dresses and skirts. She had long hair that she never cut. She worshipped at a Pentecostal church and was very strict with her opinions. In her religion, women didn’t wear pants or cut their hair. Nor did men grow their hair long. My grandmother and other people of her faith followed these rules based on biblical scripture found in Deuteronomy and Corinthians. Guess I have some explaining to do to the Corinthians. Once I visited Grandmother with my future first wife. The fashion of the day had me growing my hair long, and my girl had trimmed hair wearing hip hugger blue jeans. Grandmother allowed us into the front room of her house but wouldn’t let us go much farther and wouldn’t let us spend the night. It was the last time I saw her before she passed away.

  When my father was old enough, he joined the Air Force to escape the hardships of the Kentucky backwoods. After he went through boot camp, he was sent to the Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville, Arkansas, just north of Little Rock. Like most servicemen, they hit the local towns surrounding the bases chasing girls and drinking at the bars when the workday was done. On an outing to downtown Little Rock, my father was at a hamburger drive-in when he met my mother, Marion Louise Davis. Even today, having known the two, I can’t imagine what the attraction was for each other. They must have met while arguing or something.

  When my mother was a young girl, her father was killed. William Boydston “Boss” Davis, from whom I got my middle name, was described to me as an incredibly good-looking man who would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. He loved his beer, and he loved his women. One of my mom’s brothers once said, “Dad had 40 and 11 girlfriends, even after he married Mom.” That’s Southern slang for a married man stepping out on his wife.

  Boss worked the railroad and was killed in a train accident while in the switching yards in St. Louis, Missouri, when my mother was only three or four years old. My grandmother, Rosie Bell, was devastated by the event, and she was forced to raise my mother and two older boys alone. Rosie Bell had been a stay-at-home mom and had few job skills. The insurance wasn’t much, so it wasn’t too long before she was cleaning houses to make ends meet.

  She met and married John Sawyer, an older gentleman, and our family became connected with the Sawyer clan. John had children from his first marriage. His wife had died. Upon remarrying my grandmother, he helped raise my mom. But despite his influence, my mom was a Davis through and through. Many of the Davis clan had migrated from the Paducah, Kentucky area where they had been firefighters. They were there during the creation of the fire department in the late 1800s. When the Davis family made it to Arkansas, many of them naturally navigated toward the firehouses for work. My mother was so proud to be part of the Davis clan and spoke of them all as heroes.

  As children, my brother, sister and I were kept aware of Mom’s linage as a Davis since they were regularly featured in the newspapers. Jack Davis became the Little Rock fire chief, and many of the family were high ranking in the department. Photographs of the Davis men fighting fires were featured in the newspaper at least several times a month. They were shown wearing their protective gear with the Davis name on their backs like football jerseys. Mom retrieved the Arkansas Gazette newspaper every morning and always looked for a Davis. She would always remind us of our connection, and although I admire them, for me it is from a distance.

  Rosie Bell’s way of keeping kids in line was with physical force. For whatever reason, as the kids got older, the spankings became brutal beat downs. The boys got older and bigger, so things weren’t as bad for them, but my mother endured years of this kind of abuse. An aunt once told me she had discovered my grandmother beating my mother with a chair for a childhood infraction. She came to my mother’s rescue and threatened Rosie Bell with the police. It slowed her down some, but it continued behind closed doors.

  My mother was a bit of a racist. She cursed like a sailor and smoked like a chimney. She would take no grief from any man. She could handle her liquor pretty well when she drank. She didn’t like beer much, but there always seemed to be a bottle of Old Charter Whiskey around our house. She drank when she hit the bars for a night of dancing, but she didn’t drink every day. She did smoke all the time, however. There must be a picture of her somewhere breastfeeding me with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. It may be why I have found it so hard to fight the habit of nicotine. She attended Little Rock Central High School and grad
uated in 1956, just before the infamous situation of the National Guard escorting nine black students to school. I remember her talking about it. She had gone with others down to the school when all that was happening and screamed obscenities at the students and the Guardmen.

  When I was a child, my mother and many around me laid blame for every problem in our community and the world to the black man. “They’re taking all the jobs, going to our schools, eating in our restaurants,” I would hear from her and some of her friends. It was confusing in elementary school to be in the same class as black children since I’d been told how bad they were as people. All of us kids played the same during recess. Some of the black kids I had befriended explained that their parents were equally racist toward the white man. They were just as confused.

  When she graduated from high school, Mom started working at Colonial Bread and Bakery making cupcakes. She also hung out at a hamburger stand on Main Street, where she met my dad.

  Harold and Louise met, got married and had me in the span of a year or so. They separated by the time I was four years old. Dad was an enlisted Air Force man, and Mom wouldn’t leave the state to live with him at a different Air Force base in another state or country when he was transferred. Mom wouldn’t move away from her mother as her brothers had. They fought about it as my dad tried to force the situation. Mom wouldn’t budge, and soon the fights were over infidelity and money and anything else they could think of. I can’t ever remember my parents not fighting. Even after the divorce, they never talked civilly to one another. A brother a year and a half younger and a sister just being born made up the short-lived Fitzpatrick marriage. Mom was pregnant with my sister when they divorced. Before and after the divorce, Dad was stationed at various bases around the world. He would drive to Arkansas from wherever he was stationed in the country and pick up my brother and me and take us back to the base. My first trips out of Arkansas were to places like Nebraska, Michigan, Florida and Texas. Much of it was traveled on two-lane highways in the back seat of a station wagon.