by Bobby Bones
The result was that during college, I never had five minutes to myself. Every minute of every day was full of something—including spending afternoons trying to lose my accent. Right across the street from Henderson’s campus was another college, Ouachita Baptist University, which offered a speech pathology major. And I definitely considered the accent I got from growing up in Mountain Pine a pathology. I mean it was reeeeeal thick. If I was going to have a successful career in radio and break out of my little neck of the woods, I had to scrub from my tongue the Dirty South (note: it’s not dirty South; it’s Dirty South! I still represent). That’s what I attempted to do, several hours each week, at Ouachita Baptist, where I got free speech therapy from students training for a degree in this area. My i’s were “ahs” and g’s at the end of a word just didn’t exist. “Fishing” was “fishin’.” I spent years working on my damn i’s and g’s.
I wish I could say that my hectic schedule was the real reason that I wasn’t exactly the most popular guy at Henderson. The truth is there was a much bigger impediment to me being the life of the frat parties (that I never attended): I had never touched a drop of alcohol and never intended to.
I don’t remember ever making a conscious decision not to use drugs or alcohol. There was never that after-school-special moment where kids at a party were pressuring me to pound a beer, but I said to myself, I’m not drinking. No, my commitment to abstinence was always a part of my makeup. I have always known I would avoid drinking my whole life.
Clearly, my abstinence was a reaction to my mom. From early on, I saw the effect of alcohol not only on her but also on a lot of other adults around me. From that I took away a few lessons. When my mom came home drunk, I was scared—not for myself, never for myself, but for her. I never wanted to put others in that situation. If you have a certain genetic or psychological makeup like my mother, you can’t control your alcohol intake. Any amount, no matter how little, is poison. And I suspected that if I tested it, I would find out that my mom and I were more alike than we were different.
Even in high school, when a lot of kids get into alcohol as a way to navigate the troubled waters of adolescent social life, I was never tempted. It should come as no surprise that as the kid with the nickname who had ketchup dumped on his head in the cafeteria, I did not get invited to a lot of parties. So that limited the amount of peer pressure I was exposed to. But even if I had gone to parties, I wouldn’t have ever taken a beer. Peer pressure doesn’t affect me. For me, pressure comes from within. Some guy shouting at me, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” is not pressure. That’s just some idiot shouting. Pressure comes to me when I’m about to walk onto a stage where a crowd has paid good money to be entertained.
However, my choice not to drink made me an anomaly at Henderson. At college in the rural South, there isn’t so much to do. So, there’s generally a lot of time to drink and party. But for me it was never an option. To this day, I’ve never touched alcohol, an illegal drug, cigarettes. Nothing. I’ve never even tried coffee. I’m not morally against alcohol. No judgments at all. Matter of fact, if my friends aren’t drinking, they’re not fun. But I saw what my mom went through and can feel that demon inside of me.
Don’t get me wrong. Despite my unwavering conviction, being a teetotaler wasn’t easy. There was a part of me that was jealous when I watched people around me get drunk. I was envious at the way they could let loose and have fun. I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink in any sort of moderation—that if I started it’s all I would want to do, all the time. I didn’t want alcohol to become a bigger influence on my life than it already was, and I knew that if I made drinking an issue (meaning not wanting to be around others while they drank), it would divide me from others.
It was (and is) my biggest fear that people would change their behavior on my account. I never wanted anyone to feel uncomfortable drinking around me, so one of my strategies was to fake-drink. I would order Coke or club soda with a lime in a small glass. There are many ways to make it look like you’re drinking. I also made myself useful by being the designated driver.
I was also quite happy to hang out in bars on the weekend until the wee hours of the morning, as my friends got progressively more drunk and incoherent, for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to meet girls.
Spending countless hours at nightclubs (we’d show up to the Electric Cowboy in Little Rock at 11 P.M. and I’d dance until the sun came up), I did meet a lot of girls—it was just that none of them wanted to meet me. I was familiar with that situation from my high school days, as evidenced by my first kiss.
It was during the summer after my sophomore year of high school and I was working as a roofer in Kansas City, Missouri. My mom’s brother, Don Hurt, got me the job. Uncle Bub (what we called him) had been in a lot of trouble in his life. He’d been in jail; he’d been all over. (An alcoholic, he was eventually found dead in his trailer. He was only in his forties.) I really liked Uncle Bub, but even more important, I had to make money for school clothes. So I went up to Kansas City for the summer to help him roof houses. My job required the least amount of skill. I did tear-offs (stick the shovel under the nails; use your foot to pry up the roof; tear off a piece; throw it down on the ground) and cleanups (cleaning up everything I’d thrown on the ground).
Uncle Bub had a friend on the crew with two daughters, one of whom was my age. One night, the sisters and a couple of other kids invited me to hang out with them. There were six of us, and someone suggested we play Spin the Bottle. I was nervous because I had never kissed a girl. Let me remind you, I was a sophomore in high school. There were kids in my class who already had babies, and I still hadn’t made it to first base.
No one in the group gathered around the bottle knew I hadn’t kissed a girl, but that didn’t make me feel any better. The bottle spun around and landed on the sister my age, a blond sixteen-year-old who was already very developed. Then it spun again . . . and landed on me.
She was not a happy camper.
How do I know this? Because she was very vocal about her displeasure. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” she said. “I hate this game.” As I write this, I just felt that disgusted feeling again. The same one I had when I wrote the T-Bone story just a few pages back. I am such a loser.
But she did it. I had to give her credit, she held true to the rules of the game. That was my first kiss—with someone who wanted to have nothing to do with me. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it wasn’t until I got to college that I finally got a girlfriend.
It took me the longest time to get the nerve up to ask out (fake name alert) Farah (with an h, always with an h, and if you didn’t put an h, you’d have to hear about why the h was so important to her. And that’s true. Just her name wasn’t Farah. But it did end with an h). I could tell she was awesome as soon as I met her. The cousin of my roommate’s girlfriend, she was smart, pretty, and together. I didn’t think I had a chance with her.
I was scared of girls, especially pretty ones like Farah, because they never liked me. It’s just like if a dog gets hit a bunch, he’ll flinch whenever someone raises his hand. I had been rejected so much I was scared of putting myself out there. But somehow I got the nerve to ask Farah out. I remember the smooth pickup line I used the first time I asked if she wanted to hang out: “Hey, ummm, can we eat sometime?” Feel free to use that whenever you need, and don’t say I never gave you anything.
Farah was awesome. She was smart. She challenged me on my beliefs. She had parents who were still together and loved each other. I enjoyed everything about her. Well, almost everything. She and I dated for a long time before we had sex—like, a long time. Unlike the stereotypical scenario where the girl is the one who refuses to put out, in this case I was the one who wouldn’t do it. I was scared to death.
I was always scared of sex. Different than my fear of rejection from women, this stemmed from my mom getting pregnant with me when she was fifteen. I never wanted to have a kid and certainly didn’t have the mon
ey to support one. Because of that early and indelible imprint on my personality, I have never been the type to go out and try to get lucky. I’ve only ever had sex with real girlfriends. And myself. Lots of that. I can’t get me pregnant!
BEFORE I DID THE DEED WITH FARAH, I WANTED TO DO MY homework. Because I was already in my twenties and still completely inexperienced, I didn’t want to be, as my grandma would say, “like a cub bear playing with his peter.” In my quest to learn what made women feel good, I turned to the best source of sex education: the Internet. Now, I’m not talking about porn. I’m not a porn guy. Never have been. Not for any moralistic reason, I’m just not into it. No, I did some bona fide research on how to have sex and more specifically what women like while having sex.
On the big night, I implemented some of my learning and was, as they say, going down on Farah when all of a sudden, I tasted blood. That brought things to an abrupt halt, as you might imagine.
“Bobby, your nose is bleeding!” she said.
For my entire life, I always got nosebleeds when I was in warm situations. I remember waking up as a kid with blood all over my pillow if it was too humid. But to have a nosebleed during my first sexual act when already I had no idea what I was doing? I was so embarrassed. I had thought it was her. But it wasn’t; it was me.
I have had no shortage of mortifying experiences in my life, but this was hands-down the worst, even worse than the wrestling boner. I was every word for embarrassed that you can think of. I mean, even writing about it now makes me feel sorry for me. I was so embarrassed that I could have easily left and never talked to Farah again. Luckily for me, Farah was way more mature and refused to let that be our last moment together. Still, I couldn’t fool around with her for a long time for fear that I’d mess it up again. Eventually, somehow she convinced me to relax, and at the age of twenty-two (you read that right!) I finally lost my virginity. I could make some joke about it “being the best six seconds of her life,” but that would be too easy. And probably not much of a joke at all.
Farah and I didn’t last. (But why? you’re thinking. You were such a stud!) The truth is that I didn’t want to commit, which, as you will read, is the story of my life. She went on to become the successful professional and incredible mom I knew she would. And me? Well . . . I’m still single.
I wish I could say that I got better with more experience when it came to women, but my next girlfriend inspired another lackluster performance on my part. Samantha (fake name alert #2), a teacher who was a few years older than me, lived in the same apartment complex that I did my senior year of college. A tall brunette with an athletic build, she came from an affluent family and had graduated from one of the rich-kid high schools near mine. She was really pretty and had money—all of it was way too good for me. Samantha was completely out of my league, but I wore her down over months and months and months and months.
Farah did improve my confidence, in that I learned that if I could just get a girl to pay attention to me, I could get her to like me. The trick is getting them to pay attention, because when I walk into a bar, girls aren’t bowled over by my good looks. The only thing that I have is a combination of wit and self-deprecating charm.
So after months of badgering her with my amazing wit, Samantha finally agreed to go out with me and eventually became Bobby Estell’s second official girlfriend. But after dating for a while, she wound up moving back to her hometown, which was an hour and fifteen minutes away. Now, when you’re a twenty-two-year-old college student, an hour and fifteen minutes might as well be South Korea.
There didn’t seem any other answer than to break up, which we did. But after a few weeks of being apart, I decided I had made a mistake. I wanted Samantha back and knew exactly how to do it: the grand romantic gesture. I didn’t have money for jewelry (heck, I barely had money for gas), so I did the next best thing and wrote her a song. Although I can’t remember the words now, I spent a good few hours on the song, which I called “Let’s Get Back Together.” Subtle.
I put my guitar in the car and took off for her house on a Thursday, thinking that if she took me back we’d go out on Friday night. When I got into her driveway, I was excited to perform my love song. I knocked on her door, my guitar in one hand and a rose in the other. Perfect.
Samantha, who had no idea it was me outside, opened the door. And when she did I was the one taken off guard, because there was a dude on her couch—a big dude.
Before he could see me standing there with a rose and guitar and decide to come out and beat me up—which he or anyone else could have easily done (you don’t have to be big, or a dude; I’m pretty easy to beat up)—Samantha shut the door behind her and walked out onto the porch.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
What was I doing? I know what any self-respecting guy would have done—packed up his stuff and gone home. But not me. Instead, I insisted on going through with my plan, even if it had become a suicide mission.
“I wrote you this song,” I said, handing her the rose. “I’d like to sing it for you.”
I strummed the guitar and performed “Let’s Get Back Together,” maybe because I like the pain. Or maybe because I wrote this song, had driven an hour and fifteen minutes, and that was the plan. I can’t remember a single line of that terrible tune; I’ve blocked it out. But when I was done, Samantha said, “Uh, thanks. You need to go now.”
Then she gave me the rose back and closed the door.
Walking back to my car, I saw her new boyfriend’s monster truck parked on the left side of her house. How had I missed that before? I guess I was blinded by the fact that I was about to play this love song, which was going to sweep Samantha off her feet, and then we were going to be back together and go on a romantic date the next night! That’s all I was thinking about.
I learned an important lesson that night. If you ever knock on an ex’s door and there’s another guy sitting on the couch inside, just pack it up and go home.
COUNTRY MOUSE
IN THE BIG CITY
Driving across the Broadway Bridge, which led into downtown Little Rock, I was overwhelmed by the sight of skyscrapers—well, tall buildings, anyway—that rose up behind the arches of the bridge. The state capitol was here! I’m from Mountain Pine, where 700 people live. The nearest city, Hot Springs, was a town of 30,000. Little Rock had a population of nearly 190,000. The city across the Arkansas River felt like the biggest one in the world.
I couldn’t believe I was going to live in this place with guys in suits and briefcases rushing around, fancy shopping malls, and restaurants with all kinds of food like Greek and even Japanese. One of the first things I did when I moved there was go to one of those restaurants where they cook the food on the grill in front of you. And when that dude flipped the shrimp tail in his pocket, I wanted to give him a standing ovation! They even had TV news stations in Little Rock. I drove by the studios of KATV, where chief meteorologist Ned Perme reported on the weather. When I was a kid my grandma never missed his weather report. I was starstruck just thinking about it; I was working in the same city as Ned Perme!
Working in Little Rock had been a dream of mine ever since I was a kid, and my stepdad took me down to the city for a Travelers baseball game, which we did maybe once a year. Thing was, I was never too clear on how I was going to actually get to Little Rock. That was many railroad tracks away from Mountain Pine. But shortly before graduating from Henderson in 2002, I forced my way into the offices of Q-100, Little Rock’s Top 40 station, and just like I had done with KLAZ, begged for a job. Now, I wish I could say that it was my sharp wit or the impressive reputation I had gained doing nights for the last four years in Hot Springs that convinced the program director at Q-100 to give me a job. But I think what clinched it was the fact that I took less money than I was currently making at KLAZ—and I was making none to begin with. It didn’t matter to me. When I signed my contract for seventeen thousand dollars a year to do nights for Q-100, I was the happiest guy in t
he world.
I didn’t even mind that it meant my commute to and from college, which I still had to finish up, was longer—although I was ready to be done with the grind that was my college experience. I felt that school was holding me back from my life and my career. But I understood it was important for me to finish my education. If I failed in radio, I would always have that degree.
Even more motivating than securing an insurance policy for myself by graduating from college was setting an example for my sister and other people from my hometown that anyone could do it. I still have the same drive to show people that anything can be achieved, no matter how big it is, if you set your mind to it. I’ve really forced my way into accomplishing things—not out of talent but out of hard work and just refusing to stop. What I believe and say so often (ad nauseam, if you listen to my show, maybe even in this book; I’ll check) is that being on time and not giving up are the two most important elements of success. At least they were to me. They were two things that I could control, and I worked them as hard as I could.
Even during the most difficult days of college—when I was juggling exams and extra shifts at the radio station—I never felt like I was going to crack. It wasn’t an option. The lack of any kind of safety net only served to push me to greater extremes. I took way too many classes every semester not because of my passion for learning but because I felt like I needed to in order to stay ahead of things. What if I got sick or I got in a car wreck and couldn’t go to school for a semester? I couldn’t afford to lose any time. So I hoarded credits just in case something bad happened to me. It was a real disaster mentality, to be sure, but one that helped me to graduate early. The weird thing about me is that I still use this mentality in different elements of my life. I’m the kind of person who wants to overpay my bills by a few dollars every month. And for the same reasons. What if I get fired and don’t have a job? I need a cushion to be able to survive “just in case.”