Hillbilly Heart

by Billy Ray Cyrus

  “Want a hit?” he asked.

  “No,” I laughed.

  He cranked the lid off and slugged it down. I didn’t know whether that was cool or desperate. But that was Robbie.

  A couple of days later, I was in the middle of my shift at Greenbo Lake when the phone rang. It was Susie.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “At the campground,” I said. “You just called me here.”

  I could hear people in the background screaming or crying. I couldn’t tell which it was, but I could tell wherever she was it was pretty chaotic.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Are you sitting down?” she said.

  “I can be. Do I need to?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice sounding wobbly. “You need to sit down.”

  I pulled a little stool up close to the phone.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “They just found Robbie Tooley dead in his basement,” she said. “They say he killed himself.”

  “What? I don’t think I heard you right. What’d you say?”

  “Robbie,” she said. “He committed suicide. They found him in the basement.”

  If Susie kept talking, I didn’t hear her. I dropped the receiver, picked up a golf club and started swinging it against the shack. Glass shattered. I swung it again and more glass shattered. I did it again and the cash register exploded. Then I busted the phone. More glass broke, half a wall came down, and I was steadily beating that shack to the ground when I saw a car coming off the far hill. Soon a state park ranger pulled up in front of the destroyed shack. I was standing in the middle of the rubble, holding a golf club.

  “Cyrus?” he asked. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t OK.

  “You have an emergency in Flatwoods,” he said. “I need to take you home.”

  He loaded me into the back of his car and drove me straight to 2317 Long Street. My mom embraced me at the door, her eyes red from crying. Neighbors had gathered inside and on our front porch. I worked my way through the crowd, past the living room, and down the narrow hallway till I got to my room. I went in, locked the door, and fell face-first onto my bed.

  I could have been like that for ten minutes, thirty minutes, or thirty seconds—I have no idea—when suddenly words came to me. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I didn’t know what the words were, just that they were there and I had to get them out of me. I raised myself up, grabbed an old notebook and pen from the night table, and my hand started to move across the page.

  I wasn’t a writer. I had written a few school assignments but that was it, and I’d written them only because I had to. This was different. As far as I could tell, I was writing a poem. I’d titled it “My Buddy,” but it wasn’t like I’d made it up. Those words seemed to appear of their own accord, like I was possessed. They came so fast I could barely keep up. They just came. And that’s all I know.

  Robbie’s funeral was three days later, April 28, 1980. The church was packed. It was standing room only. The entire town was there. Everyone from our football team was there. We all wore our jerseys. There were even some players from nearby high schools we’d played against. They wore their jerseys, too. People came from miles around to pay their respects to a great family who had lost a great son far too soon. His dad had read my poem about Robbie and asked if I would recite it at the service. So, despite being terribly nervous, and with Robbie’s casket lying in front of me, I started to read:

  Through all the years of growing up,

  My best buddy’s name was Rob,

  We’d laugh, and we’d play and sometimes find trouble,

  By throwing the corn from a cob,

  We’d ride our bicycles and eat big icicles,

  And set back without any thoughts,

  And think of the things we’d had done that day,

  And hope we’d never get caught.

  One winter we decided to leave all our troubles,

  And decided to go on a hike,

  We left for the trail, the endless snow fell,

  For three days we were both in a fright.

  But we hung in there, my buddy and I,

  Through temperatures of twenty below,

  We worked together to stay alive,

  To reach our strongly set goal.

  We wanted to prove to the folks at home

  That we both had the guts to survive,

  So we toughed it out in the wilderness,

  God, my buddy, and I.

  My buddy once had a paper route,

  And I helped whenever I could,

  And people who didn’t pay my buddy

  Would often end up cleaning their wood.

  There’s so many times that I can remember,

  From skinny-dipping to camping in a barn,

  But one thing for sure, through all the years,

  We never did no one no harm.

  Long nights we’d spend, a pumping our weights,

  And pushing each other real hard,

  ’Cause we both had a spot on the football team,

  That our hearts had a longing from far.

  We worked and we worked, and we reached our goals,

  And we both got our names in the paper,

  Me for the balls which I had caught,

  And him for his world-known Tooley Trot.

  Be we were not on a self-love trip,

  We wanted to win a state championship.

  So we fought and we scrapped as we followed the ball,

  And in the end, we had conquered them all.

  “But where does the time go?” we asked each other,

  For now it was time to depart,

  He went his way, and I went mine,

  But we both made a deal from our hearts.

  With a handshake we vowed, as we stared at each other,

  To never forget all we’d been through,

  And we vowed to stay the best of buddies,

  No matter what else we would do.

  At that point, I choked up and stopped. I stood uncomfortably in front of everyone, tears filling my eyes. I couldn’t believe we were saying good-bye to Robbie Tooley, that he was gone. I wanted to leave, and I was about to fold up the paper and walk off when Robbie’s father stood up.

  “Keep readin’, Bo,” he shouted. “Keep readin’!”

  I looked at him, nodded, unfolded the paper, and wiped my eyes.

  So Robbie, my buddy, I hope you can hear me,

  Wherever it is you may be,

  I’ll never forget you, ole buddy, ole pal,

  And I know you’ll never forget me.

  I’ll see you in heaven, I know that I will!

  And you’ll say, “Hey, God, here comes my friend Bill!”

  But before I can come, there’s work to be done,

  And I know that you would be proud,

  Just to help a kid, who seems to be lost,

  Lost somewhere out in a crowd.

  You’ll always be with me, Robbie, my friend,

  In my thoughts and all that I do,

  And one thing I must say, before I do go,

  Ole Buddy… I’ll always… Love You.

  So many times I’ve tried to make sense of Robbie’s death. I’ve turned it around every which way and I can only say this: I’ve often prayed that God would somehow use my life to add a moral to the story as to why Robbie’s life ended the way it did.

  I look back at the words that came that day, and at this part in particular: “But before I can come, there’s work to be done / And I know that you would be proud / Just to help a kid who seems to be lost / Lost somewhere out in a crowd.” Robbie was lost. Like a lot of kids these days. But we should never allow kids to feel so alone, especially so alone that suicide becomes the answer.*

  * For those needing help or wanting more information, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255, www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
.

  PART II

  Persistence

  CHAPTER 8

  “Buy a Guitar and Start a Band”

  EVERYONE THOUGHT I WAS crazy. It was summer, and my baseball career was red-hot. I was playing for Ashland’s team in the Stan Musial League. Teammates Cabot Keesey, Mark Moore, and Tim Holbrook had all been superstars for other schools, and I respected those guys. They dug the way I played, too.

  I was all out, all the time. I would do anything to stop the ball. After practice, I had the coaches throw me extra wild pitches so I could practice knocking them down with my hands and body. At the plate, I had always hit around .300, which was decent, but thanks to my Think and Grow Rich studies with Dr. Bailey, I visualized myself hitting better and more powerfully, and it worked. I went on a home run tear.

  My timing was perfect. Ashland hosted a Fourth of July tournament that was big among Stan Musial League teams, and our first game of the tournament was against Flatwoods-Russell. All my former teammates, the guys I’d played with from Little League through high school, were on that team, wanting to destroy me. In addition, scouts from the Dodgers and the Reds were in the stands, looking at me. Dr. Bailey was also at the game.

  It was a big game to say the least—and I’m proud to say, I rose to the challenge. Flatwoods-Russell’s leadoff man got on base. He was the fastest guy I’d ever known. I knew he was going to try to steal, and he did. After the first pitch, I popped up and threw him out at second. The next guy up chipped a pitch foul to my right. I dove and caught it—the best catch of my life. Then, in my first at-bat, I jacked the ball over the left field fence. It was probably the longest ball I’d hit in my entire baseball career.

  My play stayed at that same level throughout the summer, and I heard the scouts were impressed and continuing to watch me, as they did serious prospects. I should have been thrilled.

  But something odd happened in the weeks before that game and persisted through the summer. I heard a voice telling me to buy a guitar and start a band. I know it sounds crazy.

  I know sane people don’t hear voices—at least they aren’t supposed to. But I did. It came to me the same way the words did to the poem I wrote about Robbie Tooley. I didn’t hear it all the time. It was simply there, lodged in my brain, like a presence, and if I was driving or waiting for Susie or ready to go to sleep, I heard the words. Buy a guitar and start a band.

  “You gotta get that out of your head,” my teammate Cabot Keesey said. “You’ve got a chance to go to the big leagues. Focus on baseball. We’re the best team in the tristate area.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “Cyrus,” another teammate chimed. “You don’t even play guitar, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, shaking my head and laughing uneasily.

  I had certainly tried. My dad always had a guitar, and starting when I was a little kid, I would pick it up occasionally and try to play. It was futile. I was never able to put together the chords and a strum. I never found the rhythm, the feel.

  I tried to ignore the voice. In the fall of 1980, I continued taking classes at Ashland Community College and got a job at Ashland Oil’s cigarette warehouse, driving a forklift. I also delivered crates to the company’s SuperAmerica gas stations. The following spring, Susie graduated high school, with plans to attend Kentucky’s Georgetown College in the fall. Then, after a summer of standout baseball, Georgetown offered me an athletic scholarship. Although it was only a partial ride, requiring me to take out a student loan for the rest of the tuition, I was overjoyed. I’d be playing ball, Susie would be at the same school, and we’d be together. It would be like high school—only better.

  What I didn’t factor in was the voice telling me to buy a guitar and start a band. Susie was amused the first couple times I mentioned it. Then it became an irritant. Now, my girlfriend sent a very clear message. She was tired of hearing me talk about whether to buy a guitar and start a band, period.

  “Bo, you need to quit smoking pot,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  A few weeks later, I told her that I was thinking about not playing baseball. Then I admitted I wanted to quit school.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Play music in bars,” I said.

  “Bo, let’s be serious for a minute,” she said. “You don’t play an instrument. You’re not a musician. You’re a catcher. In college.”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “I think this is what God wants me to do. I think it’s my purpose. I’m being called.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  I dropped out of Georgetown just five weeks into the semester, and Susie and I didn’t speak for a few days afterward. Going into damage-control mode, I waited till she went home for the weekend and then arranged to take her to Kings Island, an amusement park just outside Cincinnati. Going there was always a special event for us.

  I picked Susie up at her house early in the morning and we drove to Kings Island in my red Chevy S-10. It was a little less than a three-hour trip. We got there early, hoping to be among the first through the gates, so we could go on all the rides before the lines got too long. We pulled into a parking space and leaped out of the car like superheroes. However, as I slammed the door shut, I realized that I had screwed up.

  “Oh, shit!” I said.

  “What?” Susie said, stopping in her tracks and turning around to see why I wasn’t with her.

  “I locked my keys in my truck.”

  Susie watched as I spent the next two hours trying to get the door open while people walked past us on their way to a good time. Eventually, someone helped me get the door open, and Susie and I managed to get on a couple of rides. But we never recovered from the strain and tension of my mistake.

  We drove home in silence. I knew Susie and I were at the end of the line. She knew it, too. When I pulled up in front of her house, I told myself to take a long, intense look at her beautiful face and remember it forever in case I never saw her again. As it turned out, I didn’t. We looked at each other. I said, “So this is it,” and she nodded. She got out of the truck and that was it.

  One morning I was at the cigarette warehouse, listening to the radio as I drove my forklift. It was September 1982, and the radio was tuned to WKEE, the pop station out of Huntington, West Virginia. Around eleven o’clock, I took a break, parked my lift, kicked back, and let the tunes wash over me. We liked to crank up the radio and let the music fill the vast space, especially when a song came on from a rocker like George Thorogood, whose song “Bad to the Bone” had come out earlier that year and was like a three-minute vacation from the boredom.

  Between songs, I heard a promotion for a Neil Diamond concert. The station was giving away two tickets to the eighth person who called the station. They were going to continue giving away two tickets every hour till 9 p.m. that night. I had never once before thought about dialing in and trying to win—until now.

  The reason? I heard that voice.

  “OK, you’ve been wanting to know whether you’re crazy or whether what I’m telling you to do is real,” it said. “Call the station. You’re going to win the tickets to see Neil Diamond.”

  “I’ve never won anything,” I said to myself in response. “I don’t know much about Neil Diamond, either. I don’t even know why I’m talking to you.”

  At times like this, I really did think I was crazy.

  “When you’re at the concert,” the voice continued, “you’re going to see and hear why you’re supposed to buy a guitar and start a band.”

  “OK,” I said.

  That was it: game on!

  I ducked into the warehouse office, picked up the phone and dialed the radio station. I didn’t get through. The line was busy.

  “See,” I said.

  “Just play the game,” the voice said. “If you don’t win those tickets, game over. It’s done. You’re crazy, like you think, and you’re going to need to get help. But if…”


  I wasn’t going to win. I was definitely going to need professional help. Nevertheless, I started to play the game. By 5 p.m., I was deep into it—more because I wanted clarification than the tickets. Later that night, at 8:55 p.m. to be more specific, I was in the weight room at the YMCA in Russell. I still had the radio on, and I knew WKEE had one last pair of tickets to give away.

  I dialed the number, which I knew by heart, and this time, instead of a busy signal, someone at the station picked up.

  “Hello, it’s WKEE. You’re caller number eight, and you are going to see Neil Diamond in concert!”

  “Really?” I said. “OK.”

  “Caller eight, you don’t sound very happy,” he said.

  “No, I’m just in shock,” I said. “I’ve never won anything before.”

  “Not anymore. Hey, hang on and we’ll get your information so you can get the tickets.”

  The concert was September 10. Unable to find someone to take, I drove to Charleston, West Virginia, by myself. It was a haul from Flatwoods, about seventy miles. My seat was way up in the rafters—beyond the nosebleed section. Neil’s songs were classic, and he was a phenomenal showman. He could rock, slow it down, tell stories, and then pull out yet another humongous hit from his quiver, like “I Am… I Said” or “Sweet Caroline,” and the entire place sang along with him.

  At one point, he brought an orchestra and choir of gospel singers onstage and began singing “Holly Holy.” His band and the orchestra played with one another, with a lush dynamic that I’d never heard on a stage before, and the singers carried on as if they were in church. Then suddenly, as if on cue, all of their voices dropped down to where the mood turned soft and spiritual and amazingly intimate considering there were probably twenty thousand people in the audience.

  The multicolored lights dimmed, the stage darkened, and then Neil stepped forward into a solitary spotlight. In his low, slow, soulful voice, he spoke to the crowd, almost as if he were preaching. And who knows, maybe he was.

  “I don’t care if you’re white or black,” he said. “Rich or poor, man or woman…” He let those words simmer for a moment. “If you just believe in the power of love, you can reach your dreams and be all that you can be. If you just believe… and have faith.”