The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  As a little kid, as young as three maybe, I was already interested in characters, and Alpine was rich with characters. They were just everywhere. Like the ones that would come into our house to get their taxes done by my grandmother, most of them loggers who hauled billets or worked at the sawmill in Glenwood for a living.

  And we loved stories. We’d sit on the porch and listen to our grandmother and grandfather or some old man from down the road visiting. Visiting was a big thing. See, the South is just different from other places. The air is heavier, for one, but you can feel the ghosts there. There’s something about the fact that a war was fought on our own soil, in Vicksburg and places like that. With African-Americans, there’s this long history about the spirituals. What they used to call Negro spirituals all came out of the Africans coming here as slaves and working in the fields. Those songs and later the blues came out of those fields. Similarly, I think for the sharecroppers and the white folk around there, country music actually came from the old men who’d sit on Coke crates out in front of the store or on the screened-in porches or in the yard under the hickory nut tree, spinning yarns and just talking about people who lived there. See, these stories didn’t have to be made up. The characters were already there, so the stories just came out of the characters we knew. I really believe that that rich sort of hillbilly culture is where country music came from and why some guys like me ended up writing and telling stories or becoming actors or musicians. Country music, real country music, is just different from other types of music. The songs are usually driven by stories. I mean, if you hear Merle Haggard do “If We Make It Through December,” it might be just three minutes long but you get it.

  But from the time I was three years old, I was aware of people and interested in characters and the weird shit that went on around me. And I came from this little bitty place being influenced by a mini–literary society within my family. My mother, Virginia Roberta Faulkner, was an English major, and my dad, Billy Ray, was a history teacher and a coach. My grandmother was a schoolteacher and a writer. My uncle Don was a musician and singer. Years later I was the drummer for his band. This was old-fashioned country shit. We played VFW clubs, stuff like that. That’s why I get pissed off when people say, “Oh, he’s an actor trying to be a musician.” It’s like, I’ve been playing at VFW halls since I was a fucking teenager.

  But anyway, we lived in a little town called Alpine; there were about one hundred ten people living in this valley. There wasn’t much to it. There was one store that was called Carmie Buck’s Grocery that had a post office and a gas pump, and that’s all there was. We lived with my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and we were raised the Indian way. There were Cherokees and Choctaws on my mom’s side of the family, and there was some Italian in the mix, too. We were Choctaw on her dad’s side, and when my grandmother would get mad at my grandfather, she would call him “an old gut-eating Choctaw.” We even had some burial mounds on our land, and if we played on them we got our asses beat for it.

  Our family had a well, a little old garden, and a bunch of dogs and cats, but we didn’t really raise cattle and all that. They didn’t have any running water or electricity until I was probably nine maybe, and when it gets dark out there, if you don’t have any electricity, it gets pitch-dark. So up into the midsixties, they literally read by coal oil lamp and went to sleep at seven, like Abraham Lincoln.

  My grandfather was a medic in World War I. I used to put his gas mask and helmet on and run around, and he would whip my ass for it. When he retired he became a forestry man, working for the Forestry Service, and part of his job was to climb the tower a couple of times a day, take his binoculars, and look around to see if there were any fires.

  You could see all the way into Oklahoma from the top of his mountain. He would give me his binoculars and say, “See those mountains over there? Way back there? Those are in Oklahoma.” That was crazy shit to me when I was a kid, climbing that tower and looking at a mountain in Oklahoma.

  My dad’s family was raised around a place called Glenwood, Arkansas, which was about twenty or thirty miles away from Alpine. Glenwood’s a town of probably one or two thousand people, so to us, being from a town with a population of one hundred ten, that was a city. Where I was raised, if you went from Alpine to Glenwood, it may only have been thirty miles but you might as well have been going to Vienna. It was a huge trip to go pretty much anywhere. I didn’t know anything about travel growing up. Shit, I never flew on an airplane until my twenties, so to me, if you went to Little Rock, you went to the moon.

  My grandfather was like Daniel Boone. He hunted and we ate squirrel like people eat chicken. Like today, one guy might ask, “What are you going to eat today?” The other guy might say, “I don’t know, grill some chicken.” That’s the way we were with squirrels. By the time I was six or seven years old, I was shooting the eyes out of squirrels, skinning them and cleaning them so we could have them for supper. Here in my house in the middle of L.A., we’ve got some of the biggest, fattest fucking squirrels I’ve ever seen in my life. I go out on my balcony to have a smoke and I see like twelve squirrels running around the yard that are plump little shits. And I have to admit that even though I am practically a vegan these days, I still imagine myself up there on my balcony with a .22 rifle, picking off those fat little shits and bringing them in, skinning them, and frying them. Squirrels just have a special taste to them. It’s like the old saying goes: you can take the boy out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the boy.

  My family was sort of the literate people around there. My grandmother, Maude Faulkner, was a teacher in a one-room school. She wrote magazine articles, poems, and even a novel that was never published. Some of it was lost, or I would get it published now.

  Because there was a lot of illiteracy around there, she also did everybody’s taxes. But people wouldn’t really pay her money most of the time, because they didn’t have any, so they would pay her in trade, with a quilt or a pot of beans, maybe a bushel of corn. A friend of mine once said, “I remember when I was growing up, everything was fried in Crisco.” I replied, “Shit, we had Snowdrift,” which was the off-brand. So, I guess we were pretty poor, but we were poor people in a place that was really fucking poor. I never thought we were poor. We weren’t starving. We ate all the time. I mean, I didn’t really eat store-bought meat until I was in the first grade. If you live in the country, there’s always something to eat. And it wasn’t just squirrels either. My grandfather killed other shit, too—possums, turtles, raccoons, everything.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It’s Real Hard to Get Away with Shit

  Look at all the thoughts we hide

  If anybody likes you it’s gotta mean you lied

  Our tongues are tied

  —“American Jail” (Thornton/Andrew)

  WE MOVED INTO A TOWN CALLED HATFIELD WHEN I WAS IN THE first grade. I’ll never forget that place. It had about twenty thousand people in it. One of the churches, Presbyterian I think, had lost their preacher, and so they let my dad—who was a basketball coach and a history teacher—and our family live in the parsonage. That parsonage was probably the best house we ever lived in.

  A lot of shit happened there in Hatfield, a lot of crazy shit—at least to me it was crazy shit. It’s like every time I hear somebody reminiscing, “My grandmother, I’ll never forget, made the best biscuits,” I’m like, “Who fucking cares? So did mine. Everybody’s did.” But when you’re a kid, everything looks bigger than it really is.

  My grandfather, I don’t remember why, came and stayed with us for several weeks one time. He was this old crusty guy, as I said, like Daniel Boone. He didn’t say much, but when he said something, it usually meant a lot.

  When I was a kid, I always wanted everybody to like me so much that I would just do any fucking thing I was told. Like if somebody were to say, “Hey, let’s go steal that truck and drive to Little Rock,” I would say, “Oh, okay, but do you like me?” and if he said, “Y
eah, I like you, sure, let’s go,” I’d be in the fucking truck with him. That’s a hypothetical situation, but when I was in the first grade, I had a buddy in the second grade who would talk me into shit all the time.

  One time he said, “Tell your grandpa to give us fifty cents for some cigarettes,” because he wanted to smoke. This would be my first cigarette, but I guess he had smoked before because he already had this shit figured out. The way it was back then, you could buy a pack of candy cigarettes that looked just like the real thing. They looked like a pack of Pall Malls or Chesterfields or whatever it was, but they’d use a slightly different spelling, like “Chesterfeel.” And they had two different kinds. One was this long chalky candy, and that you would just eat. The other actually had paper around it with a filter and the candy was in the middle. If you blew, the powdery shit that was on the candy became a little puff of smoke. That’s the kind my buddy said we should get.

  So we went to my grandfather and said, “Hey, can I have fifty cents?” My grandfather asked us what we needed fifty cents for, and here’s how stupid I was: I didn’t think to just say we wanted to go buy some candy. I said we wanted to go buy some candy cigarettes.

  Now, my grandfather was a smart old son-of-a-bitch. Not only had he been through World War I, but he was a good hunter, and good hunters are real smart usually. He gave us the fifty cents and said, “Don’t go getting into any damn trouble,” but what he meant was, “I’m going to let them learn a lesson.” I guess he was figuring we would go get cigarettes and just get sick and puke.

  Back then, in a little town, especially in the South, you didn’t have to be eighteen or twenty-one to buy cigarettes. You could send an infant in there if you wanted to get a pack of cigarettes—because your parents always sent you somewhere to get shit. I used to go get Kotex for my mother when I was thirteen, you know?

  So we went down to the store, and I said, “My dad wants a pack of cigarettes.” The guy said, “What kind do you want?” I said, “Winstons.”

  A shed full of wood and straw and paper goods is probably not the best place to smoke your first cigarette. Long story short, we burned down the shed and the volunteer fire department showed up. My buddy and I went out on the porch and watched it burn with the whole family. My grandfather whispered to me, “Did you go buy your candy cigarettes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you burn that shed down?”

  I didn’t respond.

  He just kept looking at me. After a while, I realized what he was saying to me without actually saying it was, “I’m not going to tell anybody, but it’s real hard to get away with shit. So don’t fuck around.”

  Now, when I look at my own daughter Bella, who’s seven, I can’t imagine her doing anything except looking at her dinosaur books and playing around the house. But I burned down a shed in the first grade.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My Mom and the Gift

  Hey there Mama, am I ever gonna feel good again?

  Can you hear me every night when I call your name?

  I hope you can.

  —“Am I Ever Going Home Again”

  (Thornton/Andrew)

  MY WRITING PARTNER TOM EPPERSON AND I WROTE A MOVIE CALLED The Gift, which was made with Cate Blanchett. It’s based on my mom, who is a psychic. Of course, the studio wanted to turn it into more of a thriller kind of film, and the finished movie didn’t end up exactly the way it was written.

  My mom didn’t talk about being a psychic when I was growing up. Me and my brothers didn’t even know what a psychic was. But she took appointments, and we had a coffee table with magazines on it just like at a doctor’s office. In the back, in my mom and dad’s bedroom, there was a room we called the Blue Room because it had blue curtains and a blue wall. I’d get in from school and there would be three or four women sitting in our living room. My mother had a few male clients, but she saw mostly women because men back there, they’re a little more closed off to things like that.

  There was a guy that came to our house one night, a businessman who was a big redneck in town. I was maybe twelve or thirteen. We were all asleep. My dad wasn’t there—he was working the graveyard shift at a cable plant—so I went to the door when I heard the knocking. I opened the door, and this guy was standing in a white buttoned-down shirt and holding this troll doll—the ones little girls used to play with. He asked, “Is your mother home?” I said, “Yeah,” and went back and got my mother.

  “Mom, there’s some guy at the door wants to talk to you,” I said, and when she saw who it was, my mother told me and my brother to go back over around the corner in the hallway, where we listened to the whole thing.

  He started yelling, “If you don’t stop seeing my wife and my daughter, then I’m going to start using your own medicine on you. You see this?” he said, holding up that troll doll. “This is a voodoo doll, and I’m going to use it on you if you don’t quit talking to my wife and daughter.”

  He’s been dead forever—ended up having a heart attack while he was sleeping with some chick is what I heard—but my mom’s still traumatized, it shook her up so bad. To this day, she says she has images of him and thinks it’s him every time a doorbell rings.

  We got a lot of threats and hate mail. My brothers and I were also teased at school about my mom being a psychic. One time I was walking home from school with a bunch of other kids—we didn’t hang out with them, they were walking down the same street we were—and they pointed at our house and said, “There’s that house where that old witch lives.” That was the first but not the only time we heard someone call our mother a witch. I put my memory of that experience in The Gift.

  My mom doesn’t read for people anymore—just a select few who have been her friends for years—but she was kind of a renowned psychic. Still is. The police used to ask her to help them. So would politicians and all kinds of wealthy people. They’d fly in from New York or Memphis. But my mom was not only a psychic—people liked her because she’d also talk and listen to them.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Don’t Ever Call Him Daddy

  We all go through the portal

  Yeah, no one’s immortal

  But the time and the place puzzle me

  I’m a prisoner of the details

  My theory always fails

  To free me from death’s mystery

  —“They All Fall Apart” (Thornton/Andrew/Davis)

  MY PARENTS, BROTHERS, AND I WOULD MOVE TO DIFFERENT TOWNS, but my dad was kind of hotheaded, so he’d lose jobs and we always ended up coming back out to my grandmother’s place in Alpine. He had a bad temper and would tell somebody to kiss his ass just like that. He worked as a car salesman sometimes, but he was mainly a teacher and a basketball coach. Small-town basketball team, that was everything where I was from. Imagine a more intense version of Hoosiers, that was kind of like my dad’s bag.

  My mom said my dad was crazy about me until I started talking. After that, he didn’t seem to like me that much. He liked my brother Jimmy. He didn’t have much time to decide if he liked my brother John or not. John was about five or six when my dad died, so he was more like a son to me and Jimmy. I was twelve when John was born, Jimmy was ten. We kind of raised him after our dad died. My mom was having readings there at the house and we were watching John.

  John was very quiet as a kid. He grew up and joined the Army, where he became a medic, and when he got out, he went to the University of Louisville. He went through part of medical school, but then he had a family and started having to make a living. He couldn’t really afford medical school anymore, so since then he’s been an RN. He’s been teaching nursing, which I think is a great thing for him. He’s one of the few people in the medical profession that I can actually stand, other than Richard Dwyer, a doctor who saved my life, but I’ll get into that later. John’s a very smart guy who knows about every fucking disease on the planet, so what I try to do is never talk about that shit with him because if I have one conversation with him abo
ut medicine and the new germs and shit they’re finding, in my mind, I’ll have everything in the world. I’m a little like Woody Allen’s characters, like a neurotic Jewish guy from New York. I’m a hypochondriac and everything else.

  Anyway, my dad used to whip the shit out of me with a belt, and he hit me a couple of times, too, with his fist. But when I was sixteen, I hit him back. Then it pretty much stopped.

  When I was fourteen, my dad got a job at a cable plant, so we were able to move into a three-bedroom brick house. That was the American dream where I came from. But when I was seventeen, right after I graduated from high school, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, that type that you get from asbestos—and he died eight months later. He was forty-six, I think.

  My dad never stayed in a hospital. After he got sick, Jimmy and I shared a bedroom, my mom and my little brother shared another bedroom, and we had my dad in this other room. He was only in the hospital when he went to get cobalt treatments and shit like that, so over a period of eight months I got to see firsthand what it looks like to have your parent die right in front of you. Where they deteriorate into nothing and don’t look like themselves, you know what I mean?

  Until he got sick, my dad was pretty healthy. He was only five-eight, five-nine, but he was a tough little son-of-a-bitch. He was a boxer in the Navy. I never looked like him or anything. He had real light-colored hair and blue eyes. Somebody told me one time that all the Old West outlaws, 80 percent of them or something, had blue eyes. Very few gunslingers and outlaws had dark eyes unless they were Mexicans or Indians.