Hillbilly Heart

by Billy Ray Cyrus

  That night, the police came to the house. My brother knew about it and said the state police were taking fingerprints. Joe and I snuck through a couple of backyards and saw the cops. By this time, I felt bad about having torn up that guy’s property. It was a horrible thing. Maybe we had taken it too far. But I didn’t want to go to jail and neither did Joe. So we decided to leave town… on our bicycles.

  We headed out toward Greenbo Lake. We spent a good part of the night on our bikes, but at some point we turned back and went to Joe’s house. After making sure the coast was clear, I went back to 2317 Long Street. Nothing happened, no one asked any questions, and I never brought it up.

  For me, it was the rare escape.

  I wasn’t a bad kid, but I sure wasn’t an innocent one. Getting in trouble was my way of dealing with the conflicts of being from a broken home. My parents’ lives were so different, and it created a mess of confusion for me. I dreaded conversations with new people, knowing that they’d eventually ask me about my family and if I had any brothers or sisters.

  Always trying to be honest, I’d say, “Yeah, I have one brother by my mom and my dad, one brother by my mom and my stepdad, one sister by my dad and my stepmom, two stepsisters from my stepmom, and one stepsister from my stepdad.”

  Every month, my mom and Cletis struggled to pay their bills. My dad and Joan did better. It was hard for me to reconcile having hardship and joy in the same family. I guess that’s where the phrase broken home comes from.

  A year or so later, my dad made his first run at public office. He lost, but I never heard him say so. Instead, he made it seem like he’d learned what it was going to take to win the next time. “Everything was in God’s timing,” he said. Then he added, “There are only two things in the middle of the road—yellow lines and dead possums.”

  That’s one of the truest sayings, ever. I still say it to this day.

  In 1975, my dad ran again, for the Kentucky House of Representatives, from the ninety-eighth district, and this time he won. We worked hard on his campaign. Kebo and I put up posters all over town, so I attributed the win, at least in part, to my staple gun. I don’t remember my dad celebrating his election. Not even a victory dinner. He went straight to work the next day.

  Soon afterward, he quit the steel mill and went full-time with the AFL-CIO. As he canvassed the state, his passion for helping people took on an even more pronounced purpose.

  Not long before, my papaw Cyrus got an infection in his lungs and passed away. He was eighty-five. His was the first funeral I attended where he wasn’t preaching. It was strange to not have either of my grandfathers in my life anymore. After my parents divorced, I’d leaned on my grandfathers, and while it was sometimes a curse to be known far and wide as the preacher’s grandson, there were definitely benefits, too.

  Take for example the day Mrs. Fight, the meanest teacher at McDowell Elementary, caught me and my brother bombing her house with apples. She was an older, heavy woman, with gray hair. My dad remembered her as mean from when she had been his teacher. Kebo and I were getting even, I guess. As soon we heard her yell at us, we ran away.

  We didn’t expect her to chase us. She was a scrappy old lady. We ran to my papaw Cyrus’s house and went inside just before Mrs. Fight arrived. She knocked on the door a few minutes later and let my grandfather know what had happened. “Preacher Cyrus, them boys right there just pelted my house with apples. I want you to bring them out on this porch and whip them!”

  My papaw stood between us. I was imagining the paddle with holes in it she kept in her classroom. She had beaten me, as well as my brother, my dad, and hundreds of others through the years. But she wasn’t going to get us this time.

  “Mrs. Fight, you know boys will be boys,” he said, stretching out his frame to its fullest six feet three inches before closing the door on her.

  What could she do? He was the preacher.

  Payback came a few years later when I was playing with matches and accidentally set my papaw’s bathroom on fire. To this day, I can still see the hurt in his eyes as he stood in the doorway, surveying the damage, after I had put out the flames.

  “What did I do to make you hate me?” he said.

  Without waiting for a response, he walked away. It was the most severe punishment I have ever been dealt. If I could take back one moment of my life and trade it in, that would be it.

  After my papaw was gone and no longer preaching, I quit going to church and took my juvenile delinquency to a whole new level. I was fourteen, and many kids that age were starting to experiment with alcohol and marijuana. Only I didn’t experiment: I just went straight for it.

  There was a guy who lived with his folks a couple of houses down from mine. He was five or six years older than me and, as far as I was concerned, the coolest dude on the planet. To me, he was like the Fonz on Happy Days. I saw him one day with a sack of grass and yellow rolling papers. I didn’t even know what it was, but I watched, completely enthralled, while he rolled what I thought was a cigarette. I forgot to mention he had a yellow Corvette to match his papers. He also had a motorcycle and pretty girlfriends… lots of them.

  I wanted to be just like this guy. Every now and then he gave me a smoke. Or sold me one. He also introduced me to beer—little green bottles of Big-Mouth Mickeys. Sometimes we chased them with a shot of whiskey… or moonshine.

  My mom usually kept a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label or Wild Turkey in the kitchen cabinet, and Cletis had a fridge in his work garage filled with a beer called Bavarian. It was the cheapest beer he could buy. But it was cold—and free!—so I helped myself.

  I’d always had a daring streak, but the whiskey was like putting a match next to a can of gasoline. Toss in a soundtrack of ass-kicking southern rock with a double shot of outlaw, turned up loud, and it was a recipe for a big batch of trouble. I thought it was fun to pelt people’s homes or trailers with rotten apples or eggs at midnight. The evening wasn’t a success until I got the police to chase me. The blue lights were icing on the cake to a job well done. Mission accomplished.

  Without my papaw or church in my life, I didn’t have any fear of consequences. One of my favorite activities was streaking. As soon as I heard about this fad of people running out in public without any clothes, I jumped on the bandwagon. I ran all over Flatwoods. I even went to Hills department store and bought Ray Stevens’s record “The Streak,” which became my national anthem.

  My friend Robbie was usually running alongside me; other times it was Joe Preston or another buddy named Jeff Vest. I ran through the middle of town; people laughed and screamed. It was fun to see how far I could get running naked before the cops gave chase. That was the goal. To get chased.

  We did get caught one time, me and Joe. We told the cops our clothes were in the woods. They knew who we were; we had a reputation. Laughing, they let us get our jeans and T-shirts before driving us back to my papaw’s house, where my grandmother still lived.

  “Cyrus, don’t let us catch you hanging out in town again,” one of the cops said.

  “Literally,” the other one cracked.

  Despite the warning, my wild side and petty vandalism continued. I threw eggs, tomatoes, and persimmons (when in season) at homes and trailers. The sound of persimmons bursting as they smashed against the outside of a trailer sounded similar to a gunshot. If we threw them fast enough, we could approximate the sound of a machine gun—or so we imagined.

  Then I started to shoplift. We had three department stores nearby, Hills, Hecks, and K-Mart. My frequent partner in this crime was a friend from the football team. He was the kicker and I was the holder. We were already a duo of sorts. When the weather turned cold, we wore large down coats that we called puff jackets.

  “You got your puff jacket?” was code for “Let’s go steal stuff.” We slipped whatever we could inside those jackets and walked out of the store as if we weren’t able to find what we’d wanted. This was my acting debut; I just didn’t know it. We were loaded do
wn with 45s, LPs, and damn near anything else we wanted. We got so skilled that we took orders from our buddies and sold the stuff back to them at a discounted rate. We considered ourselves redneck Robin Hoods.

  Robbie only came with us one time, but it turned out the one thing he wasn’t good at was shoplifting. We went to K-Mart, and he also wore his puff jacket and he put a bunch of stuff in it. I was on lookout at the front door when I heard our gambit announced over the loudspeaker: “Shoplifter. Aisle 12.” Then an update. “He’s at aisle 10 now. It’s a man in a blue jacket.” Then: “He’s headed toward the side door and throwing stuff from the jacket.”

  That’s when we took off. Robbie managed to escape through the parking lot, and we picked him up down the road where there were no lights. He was wet and sweaty from running his ass off and he looked scared to death. As he caught his breath, Robbie swore he’d never shoplift again.

  One weekend I was having dinner with my dad at his house. It was just the two of us. Kebo had graduated high school and was off doing his own thing now, and I can’t remember where Angie, Joan, and Mammie were that night. My dad and I were talking, when I heard Clyde and Jimmy yelling outside. They were too far away for me to understand what they were saying. I went to the window and saw them running across our horse pasture as hard and as fast as they could.

  “Look there,” I said. “Clyde and Jimmy are having a race.”

  My dad turned around and looked.

  “No, it seems like something might be wrong, Bo,” my dad said.

  I stepped outside to holler at them, and that’s when I understood their scream: “Our house is on fire! Our house is on fire!”

  “Dad, their house is on fire!” I yelled. “Call the fire department!”

  I shot into the backyard and joined them in the field. We turned around and ran back up the creek to their house. We raced through a hollow, through the creek bed, and along a path that wound back to where two Appalachian foothills came together. When we finally got there, we saw that their wooden house was ablaze. The sun was setting; we were literally in a valley of shadows. Their house, which dated back to the 1880s, was a fiery hell. I had never seen anything like it.

  As we got closer, I heard something that sounded like a young girl’s voice. The voice was faint, and creepy, like something out of a scary movie, but I could clearly hear the words: “Help me. Help me, Mommy.” I looked around for Clyde and Jimmy and found them over to the side, counting all their brothers and sisters.

  “Everyone there?” I yelled.

  “Yep,” Clyde said, adding to his parents, “Daddy? Mama? You OK?”

  Then where the hell was that little girl’s voice coming from? When we were younger, Kebo and I would camp out in our barn with Clyde and Jimmy, and they frequently told us about a ghost that lived in their house.

  “Last night the ghost came downstairs and took all the clothes that Mama had for Sissy and Bubba out to the well,” Calvin once said.

  “And hung ’em on the clothesline,” Jimmy had added.

  “Y’all are just trying to scare us,” I’d said.

  Another time, Clyde and Jimmy said their father saw a Ford Model T from the late ’20s driving up the creek one night. I investigated and I found a carving of a Model T etched deep in the bark of a huge old beech tree by the creek. When I showed my dad, he shrugged it off.

  “Oh, you know Clyde,” he said. “One night he might see a pink elephant and carve that into a tree. Given how he’s been known to have a little drinkie-winkie, he’s liable to see anything.”

  Maybe so, but that still didn’t explain the voice I’d heard in the fire. Nor would I get an explanation that night. The fire trucks were unable to get up the hollow and Clyde and Jimmy’s house burned till there was nothing left. I waited for my dad to say something about this tragedy, something that would make sense out of it. I wanted him to at least tell me that Clyde and Jimmy and their family would be OK.

  Instead, we sat up late that night, just me and my dad, not saying much of anything. Johnny Carson came on TV, and we watched him together as we always did on the rare occasions when we were in the same house, in the same room, at the same time. But this time we never laughed, not once.

  When the show ended, my dad turned off the TV and we sat in the dark, enveloped by stillness of the night, the absolute quiet. Finally, my dad got up to go to bed, without mentioning anything about what had happened earlier. I was surprised. It was the only time my dad didn’t seem to know what to say, though now, as a father myself, I realize he’d said it all.

  Sometimes silence speaks louder than words.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Higher Authority

  KIMMY BLEDSOE WAS MY very first girlfriend. We started dating when I was three years old. I’m serious. Her family lived in the house next door to mine and that wasn’t close enough for us. We weren’t happy unless we were sitting on the sofa next to each other. We shared a little stuffed monkey that we referred to as our baby and took it into the woods, where we pretended we had a house of our own.

  One day, a couple years into our friendship, I came out of the woods and my dad said, “Where have you been, son?”

  “I was down in the woods, kissing Kimmy,” I said.

  “Where did you kiss her at?” he asked.

  “Down the woad,” I said, my speech impeded then by a few missing teeth.

  “No, where did you kiss her at? On the lips?”

  “No. Down in the woad, tupid.”

  My dad loved that story and told it for years, always laughing as he recalled asking me where I had kissed her and then embellishing with an exaggerated accent, “Down in the woad, tupid.” But that romance ended when Kimmy and her family moved the summer before first grade. After that, I was unattached until I was eight or nine and noticed Regina Carroll had grown some boobies.

  Starting in third grade, we were on-again-off-again boyfriend and girlfriend. Sometimes we were just friends. We played football or basketball together. By junior high, she had turned into an exceptional athlete (and would go on to star on every team in high school and stand out at the University of Kentucky). On Friday nights, we roller-skated at the local rink and held hands. Afterward, I walked her home, and somewhere between the rink and her house we’d end up in the woods, fooling around.

  She taught me a lot. I’m not sure I taught her anything except that she could jump higher than me and shoot better.

  My mantra was “play it by ear,” and that’s how it was with me and sex. It kind of happened, and I learned.

  By fifteen, though, Regina and I stopped kissing each other (with a few exceptions, just because it was fun). I had a few different girlfriends in high school, but not anybody steady until the end of the summer between my sophomore and junior year. That’s when Susie Secrest not only entered my life but also took it over.

  She was younger than me, coming up from the eighth grade to be a high school freshman, and she put out the word that she had a crush on me and wanted to date me. Up till then, I had never been in love. I didn’t have time for that foolishness. Oh, I might meet someone at the pizza shop or roller rink every now and then and have a game of hide-the-weenie. But that was it. Then it was back to work.

  At first I felt that Susie was too young and flat-out wrong for me. She was from a religious family in a prosperous neighborhood called Kenwood, and I was from the other woods, Flatwoods. There was a difference. I knew her parents wouldn’t dig me. But that didn’t matter to Susie. She was smart and persistent.

  It was August, and I was in the middle of two-a-day football practices before the school year started. I played defensive and offensive end. Robbie Tooley was the center. We worked out in the morning and then again late in the afternoon. It was hot and humid, temperatures routinely soaring into the nineties and hundreds. As far as I was concerned, the tougher the conditions, the better I liked it—except wearing a helmet and chin strap in that heat made my face break out something terrible.

  One
day after practice, I looked up and saw Susie staring at me. She was blonde, with brown eyes, and she’d made the cheerleading team as a freshman. She stepped forward without my noticing and was straddling the front tire of my bike, a leg on both sides.

  At first, all I saw was a pair of hot-pink gym shorts right in front of me, at eye level. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at the most beautiful, sexiest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  “Please, Bo, won’t you take me to my street,” she said, motioning to my dirt bike. “I won’t cause you any trouble. No one will ever know.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if your mom and dad drive by? Or someone they know?”

  “No one will find out. Just ride me to my street.”

  I had no willpower at this point. I surrendered. The word no disappeared from my vocabulary.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, and it was game over.

  We stopped along the way in the woods and kissed, and between then and dropping her off, I fell in love.

  Even though I had strong feelings for Susie, I still played hard to get through most of my junior year. Susie was a good girl; I was from the wrong side of the tracks, and I wanted to spare her and her wonderful family the heartache and disappointment of a doomed relationship. I didn’t see how we could possibly work as a couple.

  I had other reasons, too, and I couldn’t articulate them other than to know that Susie was such a good girl and I had some issues. Here’s the proof: A few days before Christmas, I stole a 3-D picture of Jesus from Hills department store and gave it to my grandmother Mamaw Cyrus for Jesus’s birthday. She loved it! Thank God she didn’t ask where I bought it so I didn’t have to lie to her.

  I still don’t know how I could’ve stolen it in the first place and then given it to her. Anything would’ve been better than a 3-D Jesus. What had happened to my conscience? Had my spirit left me?

  My heart was in the right place. I wanted to give my mamaw that magnificent three-pronged spectacle of Jesus on the cross, the Lord’s supper, and then I think if you moved in one more direction he was kneeling at the rock. You can understand why she loved it—and why I felt terrible.