Bare Bones

by Bobby Bones

  Betty’s nursing me back to health while I recovered from a couple of teeth getting pulled was nothing, though, compared to how she supported me when my mom died. As soon as she heard the news, Betty left work and was by my side, which she refused to leave. Even when I begged her not to come to the funeral, she just shook her head. “There’s no way,” she said. “I’m going to be there even if I drive in a car behind you.”

  Betty was right not to listen to me—about anything—since I had been in shock ever since I got the news about my mom’s passing the morning of October 21, 2011. It was 8:45 A.M., right in the middle of the Friday Morning Dance Party.

  I knew immediately something was wrong when I saw that my sister was calling me while I was on air. No one who knows me calls during the show, because they know I’d never answer the phone. But as soon as I saw my sister’s number pop up on my phone, I hit a song and answered it. This was so out of character for me that, deep down, I must have already understood my mother was gone.

  When I picked up the phone, sure enough, my sister Amanda was crying. “Mom’s dead,” she said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “They found her in the kitchen.”

  That didn’t answer my question, but I knew what had happened to our mom. Just a few days earlier Amanda and I had talked about trying again to get her into rehab.

  “I’ll call you after the show,” I said.

  Lunchbox and Amy were looking at me, so I quickly explained that my mom had died. Then the song ended and, boom, we were back on the air. Amy started crying so hard that I had to turn her mic off. It was strange for me to see her so upset, because her reaction should have been mine. She was feeling the pain that I should have been feeling. I should have been crying like that. But I wasn’t.

  Instead, I focused on the remaining hour and fifteen minutes of the show. I couldn’t just leave. What was I going to do in that hour that I couldn’t do later? Nothing. I have no idea what I talked about that day, but I just kept talking and finished the show without any of my listeners knowing anything was wrong.

  Like many children of alcoholics, I’m incredible at compartmentalizing my emotions. Yeah, my mom had just died, but I had a radio show to do, so as everyone else around me cried, I pushed the news to the side. It didn’t exist for me.

  As soon as the show was over, though, I jumped into high gear and dealt with all the business around my mother’s death. I got the basic information, flew home, made the funeral arrangements, paid for them—all without any feeling of loss whatsoever.

  It wasn’t until three days after she died, while I was speaking at the funeral, that I finally felt the full weight of grief. The hardest thing I’ve ever done was give my mom’s eulogy. I was crying so hard in front of everyone—including Betty, my sister and her two kids, my mom’s sisters and their families (my uncle Bub had already died from his demons)—that I didn’t think I was actually going to get through it. If it weren’t for someone’s phone going off with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” as its ringtone, I definitely wouldn’t have made it. But when I heard Jim Croce singing, “Bad, bad Leroy Brown, the baddest man in the whole damned town,” I couldn’t help but feel it was a sign from my mom.

  A large part of my grief came from the fact that her dying meant the end of my dream that I could become successful enough to make things right with my mother. My story is the story of pretty much anyone close to somebody with an addiction. I would have loved to solve my mother’s problems for her no matter how much time, money, or heartbreak it caused me. It just wasn’t possible.

  Once I began to make money in radio I was happy to spend it on her, naively believing that if I could make her life easier maybe she wouldn’t have to resort to drowning herself in alcohol or drugs. Still, I was wary for obvious reasons whenever she asked me for money. When she told me she couldn’t make the rent payments on the piece of land where her trailer sat, I decided to buy it for her. I saved up seven thousand dollars and purchased the two acres of land right outside of Mountain Pine, so that she wouldn’t have that excuse anymore.

  But like anyone who tries to help an addict in this way, I learned that there were always more excuses. It wasn’t the land anymore. It was the trailer payment. When it wasn’t the trailer, it was the electric bill. She might have owed money, but the real culprit behind her problems was the evil influence of drugs and alcohol in her life.

  A couple of years before she died, I went back to her trailer outside of Mountain Pine to visit her (she never came to visit me in Austin) and found her passed out on the couch with an empty bottle of mouthwash right next to her. She was drunk on mouthwash because she couldn’t afford booze. That was a terrible moment for me. I was faced with the reality of how low my mom had fallen, and saw with stark clarity that her life was consumed by drinking. She had to be intoxicated to survive.

  The way she lived took a toll on her appearance as the years went by. Her face was worn down and her teeth were those of someone who’s been a lifelong addict or never brushed her teeth. Or both. She put her body through hell, so that although she was still small and thin, she now had a bloated gut. When my mother died, she was forty-seven years old, but she had the body of someone much, much, much older because of all the abuse it had endured.

  My mother’s problems grew progressively worse in the year leading up to her death. My friend Scotty—our next-door neighbor from when we lived in my stepdad Keith’s house and the only friend from home who I am still connected to—drove with me up to her trailer during one of my visits to Mountain Pine. There we found her passed out on the ice, her truck door wide open. There’s no question she would have died if we hadn’t driven there that day. We picked her up and carried her inside to call the ambulance, and I could tell Scotty was embarrassed for me.

  Scotty didn’t know the half of it. Dragging my mother, who has passed out in the ice and snow, back into her trailer was a picnic compared to the lowest moment imaginable. Right before she died, my mom called me for the reason she always called me: to ask for money. She was in a bad place, and I didn’t want to give it to her. Money was my only bargaining chip. I knew she wasn’t going to be homeless because I had bought her land and her trailer, so I didn’t have to worry that she’d be out on the streets. Well, she gave me something else to worry about.

  “If you don’t give it to me,” she said, “I’m going to put out a tape of me having sex on the Internet.”

  I forget how much money she wanted—maybe five hundred dollars. The amount is irrelevant. I didn’t hear anything more after my mother extorted money from me by threatening to put out a porno. I just gave her the money.

  I was angry with her for so many things. I was angry about all the times I tried to get her help and she refused it. There were so many times we sat and talked about how she needed help. Or rather, I talked.

  “Let me do this for you.”

  “Don’t you want to get better?”

  Her response to whatever argument I made was to say whatever it took to end the conversation. And that’s what happened many, many, many times. Even if somehow she did agree to go to rehab, it was never for long.

  I was mad, I was sad, I was confused, I felt sorry for her, and I loved her—all at once, and I had no idea what to do.

  I was also angry with her for my genetic tendency toward addiction, which, even if I didn’t have my mother’s glaring example to remind me anymore, was always there lurking in the shadows of my own behavior. Alcohol wasn’t my source of obsession, but almost everything else was or could be. Hobbies that for most people were harmless easily became a fixation for me. That’s what happened when I began playing poker a couple of years after I moved to Austin.

  My grandma taught me how to gamble when I was five years old; I learned the value of every card and the rules around odds. Recognizing that I was pretty good with numbers, Grandma taught me everything I knew. Once I had some money to spare, though, the rush of winning and losing took cards to a whole new
level.

  A couple of times a month, Lunchbox and I would go to Las Vegas, where I’d play in massive poker tournaments that lasted upwards of thirteen hours. That was just the start. I played online all the time as well as in a ton of underground games. The problem wasn’t money. I actually made a decent amount playing poker. (Once I even won a Las Vegas tournament with a pot of over fifteen thousand dollars.)

  The problem was that for several years all that I did besides work was play poker, read about poker, or practice poker math scenarios. That was my life. I didn’t realize how deep I was until one day I looked at my bookshelf, and every book on it was about poker, or odds, or Doyle Brunson, or other famous players. I thought to myself, Okay. I’ve reached a point in my life where this is all that I’m doing. This is more than a hobby; I am addicted to playing poker. And like that, I quit. Just stopped and didn’t play anymore.

  The same thing happened with golf. (I could shoot in the low eighties at my best, starting with an average score of over 110 only a couple of years earlier.) I got decent at the impossible sport not because I’m a natural athlete but because I would go and practice for four hours a day, five, six days a week. Just like with poker, that’s all I did. And again, just like with poker, I had to quit because I became too obsessed. I haven’t touched a club aside from a charity tournament a couple of times a year (where I tell myself I’m not really “playing”). I could tell the same story over and over again. It didn’t matter if it was poker, golf, work, exercise, diet: I only seem to be able to do things in extremes. Just like my mom.

  I came to understand a lot of this in therapy, where I also learned about enabling the addict. In the case of my mom, I would have done anything if it meant she would get sober. At first it was buying her a couple of acres. Then it was buying her a place to live. I naively thought money would make her life easier so she could focus on other things—like her compulsion to get drunk. But that’s not what happened.

  It didn’t matter what I did: my mother was not going to stop drinking just because I wanted her to. Everyone around the addict can want whatever they want, but until the addicted person actually wants to get sober, nothing is going to change. My mom was never committed to changing. I don’t think she even contemplated it.

  When I was crying at my mom’s funeral, I don’t know what I was really mourning—her death, or my dream of saving her.

  Ironically, though, it wasn’t until after my mom died that I had my most personal moment with her. When my sister was clearing out the trailer, she found a note my mom had written to me but had never sent. In it, she talked about when I guest-hosted Live with Regis and Kelly. Now, at the actual time that I hosted the morning show with Kelly Ripa, in early 2011, my mom didn’t have any kind of reaction. None. For all I knew, it wasn’t a big deal to her. (To me it was a huge deal.) It was like the rest of my career: my mom never really seemed to care that much.

  But apparently she watched me when I was on TV with Kelly Ripa, where I played a funny song I wrote called “I Want My Mom to See Me on TV.”

  It was the first time she really kind of understood what I did—and she was touched by it. “I loved when you played that song on TV,” she wrote, “because I felt like you were talking to me.”

  BONES GOES COUNTRY

  I was scared to death as I drove up to Truluck’s restaurant. It was 2011. No, I wasn’t taking Kate Beckinsale out for dinner. (Although, Kate, I’m still available . . .) I was at the fancy seafood and steak house in North Austin to meet Rod Phillips, an executive at Clear Channel, the humongous radio company that now owned my radio show.

  I was intimidated because Rod was the first executive I’d ever met. A national guy who had overseen the programming for regional markets that stretched from Miami to Chicago to Waco to what seemed like Egypt, the SVP of programming was known for his ability to make stations and the on-air “talent” better.

  Getting a visit from corporate was kind of like being called to the principal’s office, even though there was really nothing for me to be nervous about. Over the last eight years, I had built The Bobby Bones Show into a decent radio program with a few affiliates scattered around the country. My tiny syndication company began back in 2005 when I begged the manager of KZCH in Wichita, Kansas, to put our show on his station. I literally begged. And pleaded. And maybe cried. And offered to do it for free! (I actually went into the hole with the Wichita deal, but it was worth it in the end.) Wichita didn’t have a morning show, and the station manager knew my old champion and local station manager Jay Shannon, so I (and Jay) asked him if he’d take a chance on me and a new technology called Comrex, which allowed us to transmit the show through the Internet. These days Comrex works seamlessly, but back then it was awful. It died three or four times a show, so that we had to reset it constantly. But we made it work, and eventually we won in Wichita.

  (As soon as we became the number one morning show in Wichita, I said on air, “I will always be loyal to you guys.” And I have been. I go back to Wichita every year. Now we’re on The Bull, the country station there, and we’ve been number one there forever. When my band the Raging Idiots announced a show date at Wichita’s Orpheum Theater in the fall of 2015, we had to add another because the first sold out in less than forty minutes—faster than any other in the Orpheum’s ninety-two-year history. Yeah, literally outsold the Avett Brothers, Ray Charles, and Glen Campbell’s farewell tour. That was pretty cool. Sorry if that sounds braggy.)

  I’m indebted to Wichita because it was there that we proved we could win in a place besides Austin, and after Wichita we were able to get bigger syndication deals in both Amarillo and Lubbock, Texas. And that’s when Rod Phillips arrived on the scene. Rod didn’t turn out to be the “corporate guy” I thought he was at all. He was just an ordinary dude in jeans, a polo shirt, and three-day stubble.

  “You know, we’re messing up by not using you,” he said over his steak and what I was having because of whatever weird diet I was on at the time. It could have been fish with no butter; or an extra large slab of beef with extra butter to put on weight; or a veggie plate, as I also had my vegetarian chapter.

  “I want to put you on a couple of my stations,” Rod said, “because I think you’re good enough to do that.”

  I couldn’t believe someone outside my building was telling me I was good. For years I had been hearing Jay Shannon telling me I was good. But he was my station manager. Your own program director or station manager is always supposed to tell you you’re good—otherwise why would he have hired you in the first place? Rod, on the other hand, was the first guy on a broader level to like what I was doing and then fly all the way to Austin to tell me.

  Even better than the compliments, he started putting my show on affiliates inside the company. He put The Bobby Bones Show on in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Then it was Albany, Georgia. Soon, all in all we were on in more than thirty cities because Rod championed the show on a national level.

  In the summer of 2012, Rod and I started talking about the idea of me putting my show on some country stations. Having grown up in Arkansas, I had country music in my blood. In fact, I got in trouble many times for putting country acts on my Top 40 show. I never worried too much about labels. It was just about finding the best music or best talent out there. Eli Young Band, Pat Green, Dierks Bentley, and Willie Nelson all came on when I was on pop radio. And man, did I get crushed by my Top 40 music directors for putting on “country and western acts.”

  (Side note: it’s so weird how things change but stay the same. Now I am constantly scolded for putting acts on our show that aren’t “country” enough. So, like in real life, I never really fit in perfectly on the radio, either. I may be the only guy to play 2Pac into Luke Bryan into Lou Bega on a country station. I also bring in acts to perform on the country stations that aren’t country at all. I’ve had Ed Sheeran in performing live. Even Shaggy came in to do a couple of songs. Yeah, “It Wasn’t Me” Shaggy. The station managers were like “WTF?”) />
  Because Rod and I had been talking about my moving into a country format, I didn’t think it was all that odd when he invited me to the Country Music Awards in November. “I know you’re wanting to spread the word about your show,” Rod said. “So why don’t you come to Nashville? Everyone’s going to be in town at the same time. Station managers, company managers. Ordinarily it’d be tough to get all these people in the same room.”

  He didn’t have to ask twice. I booked my Southwest flight and off I went to do my Top 40 show from the heart of country music, and hopefully get station managers to see it was a good fit for their stations. Almost as soon as I landed in Nashville, Rod and his team (from the company then known as Clear Channel but later rebranded iHeartMedia) were wining and dining me. Well, just dining me. They took me to so many awesome dinners and cool places it was freaky. Maybe they just like me, I thought to myself. But that wasn’t what it turned out to be at all.

  On my second day in Nashville, Rod casually suggested we check out a shoot where all these top bands were doing national promos for our company. “Of course!” was my speedy reply. Tim McGraw was there; Lady Antebellum was there; Carrie Underwood was there. And everyone was super nice, and so clearly A-game. “Well, this is pretty cool,” I thought to myself. “I’m in Nashville to meet all of the bosses. And I get to see a few country stars, too!”

  Right after I got done talking SEC football with Tim McGraw (and texting all of my friends, “I’ve been talking with Tim McGraw for the last twenty minutes about college football!”), Rod took me aside and gave me one of those serious the-police-are-outside-to-take-you-to-jail looks. “Listen,” he said. “You’re about to be hammered. They’re going to tell you something that will really shake you up. I shouldn’t even be telling you this, but I just wanted to give you a warning, so brace yourself.”