Hillbilly Heart

by Billy Ray Cyrus

  “Thanks, man,” I said to Robbie, though I was too self-conscious to sing for the rest of the car ride.

  Back home, Susie was upset with me for having gone to Myrtle Beach. I could tell something had gone down while I was away, and I was right. I picked her up the next day and drove someplace where we could talk. I’d barely finished parking when she dove in.

  “Bo, my mom and dad won’t let me see you anymore if you don’t straighten up,” she said. “Mr. Baker spoke with my parents about you. They’re all worried about me being with you. My dad says you’ve got a chance to be a professional baseball player, maybe the next Johnny Bench. But they say you’re blowing it and better get yourself together before it’s too late.”

  I might’ve argued with her if deep down I hadn’t known she was 100 percent right. I had just spent a few days doing nothing more than drinking beer and smoking pot. I couldn’t muster a response right away. The truth is your strongest ally, but it can also scare the crap out of you, which was the way I felt at that moment.

  “And what do you think?” I asked.

  “I agree,” she said. “And it’s not just because I’m agreeing with my parents. I really think you’re blowing it.”

  “What do you think I need to do?” I asked.

  “Let me help you,” she said. “I want to help you. Billy Ray Cyrus, my mission in life might be to save you.”

  Recognizing the possibility that she was right, I went with Susie on Sunday to the Russell Christian Church, her family’s place of worship. The sermon that day was about getting a new chance in life, washing away your sins and starting fresh. Perfect. It couldn’t have been more appropriate. Maybe Susie’s mission was to save me. I leaned forward, taking in every word, and imagining what it would be like to be brand-new. The next thing I knew, I was in line to get baptized.

  Susie sensed my nervousness.

  She squeezed my hand and said, “You can do this.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  And I was. I genuinely believed I needed to be saved—not only my soul but also my life. I felt changed afterward. It was more inward than out, and I have to thank Susie for giving me that gift. She saw good things about me when others only saw trouble. She also saw what I lacked—faith in God and, more so, faith in myself.

  That summer, my life was Susie, the church, and American Legion baseball for the Ashland Post 76 team. I tried not to think about the fall, when I would go away to Morehead State University. Even though I was excited about the next phase in my life, particularly the opportunity to be the starting catcher on the school’s baseball team, it meant seeing Susie less. We talked about that, though.

  By contrast, my friend Robbie continued on the downward path that I had been on until Susie wrangled me in a better direction. After graduating in May as the most popular guy in our class, maybe the most beloved student in the whole school, he received a scholarship to a technical school in Columbus, Ohio. Big things were expected from Robbie Tooley. But that summer, he began hanging out with a different crowd. They did a lot of drugs, including acid and something else called Crystal T, which I heard was an elephant tranquilizer.

  One night that summer, Robbie took some acid and ended up at Russell High, where he busted all the school’s windows with a hatchet. He went row by row, taking out every window on the ground floor. In the midst of that destructive frenzy, he cut his forearm on the glass. Whoever he was with dropped him at the hospital drenched in blood. He thought he was going to bleed to death.

  By then, the police had been called to the school. They saw the blood and checked in with the hospital, where they found Robbie. People couldn’t believe the news. Even I wondered why Robbie Tooley would do that. I also knew that if not for Susie and the church, I probably would have been with him that night.

  Actually, it was more than Susie and the church. My turnaround began with Dick Baker telling Susie’s parents that she shouldn’t be dating me, and then Susie’s parents talking to her, and so on, until finally I woke up. I listened to my inner voice, telling me to take a walk down that church aisle and save myself. I’m not proselytizing here. Ultimately, the decision to help myself was mine, and mine alone.

  My buddy Robbie made the wrong decision. After busting those windows, his stock dropped among those in town who had always admired him. By the time the newspaper wrote up the story, his girlfriend had broken up with him and he’d lost all his friends. I’d never seen people turn so quickly on a human being. In the fall, he went to Columbus, where he mixed with the wrong people and his drug problem got worse.

  I went off to Morehead and didn’t hear about Robbie for a couple of months. Then one weekend I was home and heard a knock on my window late at night. It was Robbie, looking all wild-eyed and disheveled. “Hey, man, I’m sorry to come by this late,” he said. “But I heard you started boxing, and I need you to teach me how to defend myself.”

  In fact, I had taken up boxing to stay in shape, but that was beside the point. I was shocked that Robbie Tooley needed my help defending himself.

  I got up, made us some hot tea and asked what was going on. He explained that he was mixed up with some bad people in Columbus who were after him. He didn’t offer many more details. We put on the gloves and sparred till the sun came up.

  I looked to Susie for both counsel and comfort, which always made going back to Morehead hard. The space between us was more than I could handle. It drove me crazy. I spent most of my time thinking about Susie or waiting till I could call her from the pay phone in the dorm. Then one day while jogging through the woods near campus, I came upon a puppy shivering under some leaves. It looked half-starved and scared.

  I guessed the poor thing had been tossed overboard from a car traveling down Interstate 64. I took him to my dorm room and, over the next few weeks, a couple of other guys helped me nurse him back to health. As he gained strength and trust, his spirit emerged, and he was a terrific companion.

  My plan was to take him back to Flatwoods and give him to Ruthie, who’d never met a stray she didn’t adore. But the day before I went back home, I returned to my dorm after class and found a crowd of students waiting for me in the lobby.

  “They killed your dog,” someone said.

  “What? What are you talking about?” I said.

  Someone had reported me for having a pet in my room, which was against school policy. Instead of coming to me for an explanation, the campus police had broken into my room, taken the puppy, and put it down. I immediately went to their headquarters, where I was directed to the head cop, who was expecting me.

  “Rules are rules,” he said. “We can’t let you be an exception. If we did, what good is it having the rules in the first place?”

  “So I’m an example?” I said, holding back my anger.

  “That’s one way to see it,” he said. “Another way is that you broke the rules.”

  “So you killed the puppy?”

  “Thank you, son,” he said. “You’re excused.”

  That night I made the rounds at all the fraternity parties on campus, and when I was good and soused, I got into my blue Camaro and headed for the dean’s house. I drove right onto her perfectly manicured front lawn, gunned the gas pedal, and proceeded to execute a series of spectacular loop-de-loos. Let’s just say that when I was finished, the dean’s yard was no longer the garden spot of Morehead State University.

  The following Monday morning, I was summoned to the dean’s office. She was sitting behind a gleaming wood desk. Behind her was a wall of diplomas and awards. She motioned for me to sit and waited a moment or two before cutting to the chase.

  “Mr. Cyrus, did you tear up my yard on Friday night?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did,” I said, calmly. “Did you kill my dog?”

  “We had to,” she said. “You broke our policy against keeping pets in the dorm.”

  “Killing that dog was against my policy, ma’am,” I said.

  She shook her head as if I di
dn’t understand. But it was clear she didn’t understand.

  “Mr. Cyrus,” she said, “on account of your actions you may no longer continue as a student here at Morehead State.”

  I stood up.

  “That’s fine with me,” I said.

  As I reached the door, I turned to her for one last jab. “I guess you’re the reason they call this place ‘moor head.’ You earned that name, didn’t you?” I had never said anything that harsh before. But she deserved it. Then I walked out, not knowing what was next but damn sure that I would find a better place.

  CHAPTER 7

  “My Buddy”

  WITH MY NINETEENTH BIRTHDAY just around the corner, I was back in my old bedroom on Long Street and taking courses at Ashland Community College, a branch of the University of Kentucky. Susie was ten minutes down the road at Russell.

  It was all good, I suppose. But things felt different. Not in a bad way. They were just different.

  Just before spring, I got a job managing the campground at Greenbo Lake, one of the most picturesque spots in the area. To get there, you had to go up one Appalachian mountain, then down to the lake, around a half horseshoe-like shore, up another mountain, and then you dropped down to a little piece of land where there was a boat dock and the entrance to the campground.

  Since not many people went camping before summer, I usually had the remote location to myself. I was stationed inside a ten-by-ten shack, a tiny wood building with a couple of small glass windows that let me deal with approaching cars. I also stored the clubs and balls for the miniature golf course, where I played whenever I had the chance.

  Mostly it was too cold out there for anyone trying to keep warm. The wind would come howling off that lake. I kept a tiny electric heater going. Despite the chill, it was a cozy setup. It felt like my camp, and I liked being out there by myself.

  I did have a phone in the station in case I needed to get in touch with someone or vice versa. It was old and black, government-issued from the ’60s. An operator connected all calls in and out. Susie would call me every day around lunchtime from the pay phone at school. We would catch up and make plans to see each other later on.

  One night I was running late, and I stopped at the state park’s main lodge to turn in the money and receipts I’d collected from the miniature golf course. They had a small souvenir section inside, and on my way out, I picked up a stuffed bunny to give to Susie. Since the office was closed, I couldn’t pay for it. I made a mental note to pay the next time I saw someone behind the counter.

  I hurried to my car, which happened to be my dad’s four-door Cadillac; I’d borrowed it that day. It was about 10 p.m., and Susie’s parents wouldn’t let me see her after eleven. I knew if I drove fast, I could make it to her house in about twenty minutes. So I went flying down the two-lane highway leading out of the area, and lo and behold, a drunk driver came down the road on the wrong side, headed straight for me. I swerved to the side and went spinning down a modest slope. My head went through the window and I got beat up pretty bad. I still have a scar on the middle of my hand where a vein was cut.

  I staggered out of the wreckage, looked around and saw a trailer nearby. I knocked on the door and next thing I knew, I was in the back of an ambulance, heading to the hospital. As I lay on the gurney, with EMT workers cleaning my wounds and wrapping me in bandages, I heard a voice: “Cyrus, both of us know you stole the rabbit. But because you said you were going to pay for it later, it was a kind of gray area.”

  The circumstances were different the next time I was racing along those roads. It was April 1980, and the first blush of spring was evident across the landscape. I was late for work at the lake, hence the reason I was driving fast. I had turned from Route 207, a connector road that led from Flatwoods to Argillite, onto Route 1 and I was trying to make up time when I saw a nice car stopped on the side of the road. Standing next to it was an older man. He had white hair and was in a suit.

  Despite my hurry, I stopped and rolled down my window. You never know on those country roads.

  “Sir, are you OK?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m all right,” he said.

  He looked at me kind of funny.

  “Say, ain’t you that Cyrus boy?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “It’s unusual for a person your age to help a man in need, don’t you think?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, I find that’s a unique quality in a human being,” he continued.

  “I just wanted to make sure you were OK,” I said.

  “Actually, I stopped to admire the cattle over there,” he said, pointing off to a hilly pasture where a herd of cows were grazing on fresh spring grass. “I’d like to ask you something, son.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You gave me something when you stopped here,” he said. “You gave me your time. The fact that you cared whether I was OK speaks volumes about your character. That’s a rare quality, son.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s just how I was raised.”

  “Well, I’ve been around a little longer than you, and I think it is. And I want to give you something in return. How would you like to know the secret that could lead you to see, have, or do anything you want in this world?”

  Inside, I was thinking Hell yes! What’s the catch? Outwardly, I was more polite and restrained.

  “I would love that, sir,” I said. “It sounds incredibly exciting. What do I do?”

  “Good, very good,” he said, offering a hint of smile, before introducing himself as Dr. H. V. Bailey, a local chiropractor. “My office is right down on Argillite Road. As a matter of fact, I started renting the place in 1950 from your grandfather. You can’t miss it. You come by next Wednesday at five p.m.”

  “I’ll be there, sir,” I said.

  For some reason, I never doubted Dr. Bailey’s credibility or intent. If the same thing happened to me today, I probably would have written him off. But something he said turned my brain on. For the first time in my life, I was hungry to learn. Basically, I was in from the start. And when I showed up at his office the following week, Dr. Bailey’s last patient was on his way out. Dr. Bailey greeted me warmly, led me into his office, and presented me with a book, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. Hill was a newspaper reporter and motivational speaker from southwest Virginia who published his bestselling book in 1937. It went on to become one of the bestselling books of all time.

  I stared at the cover almost as if it were a foreign object. Dr. Bailey was the first person who ever gave me a book. While I flipped through the pages, he explained the process of positive thinking and visualization that formed the basis of the book. He reiterated the message: I could achieve whatever I wanted with the techniques in the book. As we talked, I let him know I was ready. I kept waiting for Dr. Bailey to share some Yoda-type line that would instantly unlock the secret, but it turned out the wisdom was in learning the lessons and committing to them.

  We started studying Think and Grow Rich together, as we would weekly for the next few months, reading each chapter together and discussing the passages we’d read. I copied key lines in a notebook and memorized important passages. Like “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” Or “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Or “As a man thinks in his heart and in his soul, so is he.” It all came down to this: thoughts are things. I had never been much of a reader, but this book obviously struck a nerve, as did Dr. Bailey. I had a pretty realistic view on my own life—the anger and shame I’d buried, having come from a family split by divorce—and I wanted, more than anything, to figure out a way to do better. According to Dr. Bailey, this book, Think and Grow Rich, was the way.

  As I was studying, Robbie returned to Flatwoods, but he was extremely ill. He’d gotten into harder drugs and somehow contracted severe hepatitis. I was shocked when I saw him in the hospital. He was emaciated. He’d lost a ton of weight. His body mass was gone, and so was his passion
for life. His latest girlfriend had left, he’d lost his scholarship, and he’d been expelled from school. Everything had crashed down around him, he said.

  On my next visit, I brought him a Playboy magazine. I should have brought a Bible, or even Think and Grow Rich. But I didn’t. I still regret that choice. I just thought the Playboy would lift his spirits. He loved girls. Oh man, did he love pretty women.

  “Man, you’re the only person who’s visited me,” he said. “The only one. When I get out of here, I’m going to go to church and get me a good girlfriend like you’ve got.”

  “You can do that,” I said. “That’d be a good idea.”

  “When I get out of here, me and you will start working out again,” he said. “We’ll go back and hit the weights hard, like we used to.”

  “Definitely,” I agreed.

  I told him that I’d gotten into canoeing and had competed in a couple of contests. His face brightened. He wanted to go with me.

  After he got out of the hospital, we canoed down the Little Sandy River and had a great time, even after it began to rain. It was a warm shower, the kind that feels good. We came upon a little bank where we found an old wooden swing attached to a tree. As we swung over the water and dropped in, a violent electrical storm filled the sky with thunder and lightning, and we laughed at it. We knew that we were flirting with danger, but we had been through worse. Plus, the risk made it fun.

  We talked about God and what life was like without being all messed up. I said that I was really happy, and Robbie seemed genuinely happy to hear it.

  We got back in the canoe and finished our trip. A ways down the river, Robbie spotted a glass pint of Jim Beam that someone had tossed into the shitty-ass mud of the bank. Who knows how long it had been there. The bottle was covered with moss. But there were a couple of swigs left in the bottle. Robbie held it up.