by Tim Sandlin
Mickey stuck two fingers in his mouth, pulled out his gum, and rubbed it into the bottom of his chair. He opened the fifth and drank. I counted. His Adam’s apple rose and fell three times. He grunted once and handed me the bottle.
“Thank you,” I said. I tried to rub his cooties off the bottle mouth without him seeing.
“You a cocktease?” he asked.
“Of course not.” I didn’t even know what the word meant. I took a sip and handled it real well—no gasp, no shudder, no gag. I felt real grown-up. “This is certainly smooth whiskey.”
“Certainly?”
“Certainly is.”
Mickey reached for the bottle and took another swig. “You hungry?”
“Sure.” This wasn’t exactly what I expected and I wasn’t hungry, but I figured I’d better be agreeable or he wouldn’t talk to me.
“I need a hamburger.” He stood up about a foot taller than me. “What’s your name again?”
“Lana Sue. What’s yours?”
“Mickey Thunder.”
“Really?”
“Naw, that’s my stage name. Real name is Michael Rossitelli.” We walked across the street to a hotel coffee shop and ate hamburgers and french fries and talked. He told me about growing up poor, playing music, and being on the road all the time. I told him about Pep Club. I asked a lot of questions about his steel guitar. Mickey drew me a diagram of all the strings and their notes and what each of the eight foot pedals and four knee pedals did.
“Why do some make tones go up and some make tones go down and some do both?” I asked.
“Because that’s how you play it.”
“But it’s so complicated, moving your fingers, feet and knees all at the same time.”
“That’s why most steel players don’t sing. I can’t sing for shit.”
“Is that why you chose steel?”
“Naw, you get to play sitting down. I hate standing up.”
“I want to hear you play some more.”
“Let’s have a drink first.”
A couple of hours later—after the Twitty Birds and Roxanne, Neb, and whoever I was with were all gone, after everyone was gone—Mickey and I stumbled blind drunk onto the stage so he could play a song on his pedal steel. I was very drunk. I’d never been very drunk before. A teenager’s first drunk is a bizarre, spinning experience that no amount of Coca-Cola and aspirin can prepare you for. God, was I drunk.
Mickey was only his usual every-night-stinking drunk. Halfway across the stage, he lurched into me and we fell over a drum and rolled under his instrument.
Virginity was a big deal back then. Maybe it should still be a big deal. I mean, there are three things that you only do once. You’re born, you lose your virginity, and you die. Life’s like that. Everything else can be repeated. Of those, losing virginity is the only one you have any control over. It’s also the only one that’s supposed to be fun and the only one you can reflect back on later.
I kind of wasted my once-in-a-lifetime loss because I was too drunk and don’t remember much. We rolled around onstage, all tangled together with cords and wires and each other. His fingers went everywhere at once. His breath wasn’t pleasant, but his fingers sure were.
Mickey said some dirty words.
I grunted around some.
The next thing it was light and some guys were laughing and I was lying on a dusty stage without clothes on.
• • •
Imagine kerplunking your typical American adolescent down in western Pakistan. He’s lost, right? Everything he sees and touches is new and bizarre and he has no way of knowing what is normal for western Pakistan and what is considered strange even there. If his guide says everyone eats monkeys’ feet or shaves their chests or prays five times a day or gives away all their money on the new moon, this theoretical typical kid has no way of knowing if he’s being fed truth or dog manure.
Now—there is a large difference between the life of a doctor’s daughter and the life of a groupie, snuff queen, or whatever you want to call a girl on the road with a second-rate country band. The two styles have no common points. Every detail—the food, the hours, the lack of privacy, especially the people—was unlike anything from my past, and Mickey was my only connection to reality. So when Mickey said all musicians drink Wild Turkey all day and all night, who was I to question? He told me working-class women give their men blow jobs before breakfast. I’d never met a working-class woman, how should I know better? You’ve got to trust your guide in these situations and I drew Mickey Thunder as my guide.
Not that I didn’t eat up every minute of it. For ten glorious weeks we wheeled around Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, singing, playing, driving, and screwing our way across America’s Heartland. We were Thunder Road, hottest Western band in a five-state area—at least the ads said so and, like Mickey, I had no reason to think they lied.
I truly loved the traveling band life, all those EAT HERE cafes with “guaranteed” steaks and “famous” apple pie, the grime of gas station bathrooms, practically existing on Peanut Planks and Orange Crushes. We slept in the cheapest motels on earth, disgusting little boxes with stained sheets and rusted iron bathtubs where you showered with A-200 instead of soap. If only Roxanne could have seen me sleeping six in a bed with five horny, drunk musicians. Wet dreams fell like rain.
The time was evenly split between the van, the motels, and the bars. I liked the bars best because that’s where I met the people. Country bars back then all had black floors carpeted with cigarette butts and spilled beer. The air was unbreathable by today’s standards. None of the tables had four equal legs, none of the bartenders had clean teeth, and all the waitresses were overweight with ratted-up hair and tight jeans. At least that’s how I remember it, twenty-two years down the line.
The bars blur together, but the customers don’t. I liked the country bar customers. They acted like they felt. If a cowboy felt drunk, he acted drunk. If he felt lonesome or mean, he acted lonesome or mean. Amazing. Dancing, fighting, crying, I saw more raw emotion in a country bar in one night than I’ve seen in all my country clubs put together.
Poor people treat you like anybody else, like you’re as good or bad, weak or stupid, as them. They take sixteen-year-old girls seriously.
The second night out we played in a county-line bar outside of Beaumont filled mostly with black farmers and Gulf workers. They were nice to me. I couldn’t believe it. They acted like I was as regular as they were. One of the wives asked me what I thought of the new disposable diapers. I told her they sounded great.
The women spend a lot of their time pregnant. Every blacktop-highway cafe had at least one stuck-out waitress who called me honey and asked how many young’uns I had. They seemed disappointed when I said none. In Texarkana, I met a girl named Jamey that I liked because she had the exact same birthday as me. Jamey had two boys, both down with a rural pox of some kind, a car with a busted oil pan, and a husband who had run off to Shreveport with her younger sister and refused to pay child support. A couple of days before I came along she’d had to shoot the family dog because she couldn’t afford to take him to the vet, and, just to make it all country song material, she’d skipped her last two periods.
I listened to this story with all the respect of Mary Magdalene listening to Jesus. I admired that girl so much, but Jamey acted like she was nothing out of the ordinary. She was cheerful. The heaviest decision of my life was whether or not to tease my hair like Kitty Wells’s. Only two weeks ago I’d cried my eyes out because Daddy didn’t buy me a Chevy for Christmas, and here was a girl my age raising two boys without money or hope.
“You must be worried sick,” I said.
“Why?”
• • •
Choosie played fiddle. He was older, twenty-six, and only slept with fat girls. He lived on cashews and Dr Pepper. Would drink half a 10-2-4 bottle of
Dr Pepper and fill it back up with whiskey or tequila. Or wine or beer. Mickey always said Choosie wasn’t. Then he’d funnel in a pack of cashews and a couple of pills and drink the whole mix in one pull. I like to threw up watching the first time.
Lined up between Mick and Choosie stood Paul Bob, Butch Bob, and Bob Bob, bass, drums, and lead guitar. The Bobs were thin, long-fingered embarrassed boys with dirty jeans and a never-ending supply of toothpicks.
We got along well, but I made the boys nervous. They were at that woman-craving age and cramped quarters caused them to see a good deal of my body. All the boys, except maybe Choosie, wasted a lot of time fantasizing about what it would feel like to hump me.
“Come on, Lannie,” Bob Bob whined. “One quick romp or I’ll bust.” I didn’t mention he’d busted all over my arm in his sleep last night.
“You mind?” I asked Mickey.
“Wouldn’t want the boy to explode. Have to find a new guitar player.”
Much to everyone’s disappointment, including Mickey, even mine, I suppose, I never did. Middle-class morality flowed too deep for me to rationalize the term “Gang Bang Queen,” no matter what the circumstances. We all draw the line somewhere.
After a while they let me sing a few songs onstage, mostly slow, mostly sad, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn material. The rush beat sex all to pieces. I stood, fingertips touching the mike stand, face upturned a tad, moaning “I’ve Got the Memories But She’s Got You,” pretending to be the spurned woman. Not pretending, I felt the heartbreak, I was that woman, sitting alone with her pictures and memories, feeling the ache as her soul broke up and floated away. Though I’d never been unhappy in my life, I could click right into pain as if it was the natural state of being me.
At the end of a song, I wrenched myself back into the present and looked down through the tears and smoke at those men and they stared up at me with their mouths open, Pearl beers poised above the table—and I found the power. Those men wanted me. Me, sixteen-year-old Lana Sue Goodwin, student council representative at Bellaire High. I had the power.
It didn’t matter if they were married or alone, too old to get it up or too young to get in, I could take any one of them I wanted.
Mickey knew it too. “You sure turn on horny drunks,” he said.
“It’s my charisma.”
“It’s your twat.”
We traveled mainly on two-lane state highways. Mickey and I drove the van full of equipment while the others followed in Choosie’s ’54 Studebaker station wagon, which was nice because driving was the closest Mick and I ever came to privacy.
The van was an old Dodge deathmobile with no lights, springs, or brakes to brag about—not a car really, but a condemned roller coaster with a built-in bar. I sat on a milk crate between the front seats, Mickey on one side and an amp on the other. That way we could grab each other without a bunch of scooting and shifting.
Mickey constantly fooled with the radio, searching out Arkansas hillbilly stations, and when he found one, he’d turn the volume up so loud the speakers crackled and I couldn’t understand any of the words.
He banged his fist on the dash and jumped around in his seat, swerving all over both lanes, hollering stuff like, “Aw right,” “Sing it, baby,” and “God, Lannie Sue, I love miserable people.”
“Why’s that, Mickey?”
His head dipped with the song. “They’re the only ones real, the only ones worth fooling with. You show me a happy person, I’ll show you a fake and a liar. Listen to this.”
That day he cranked up Patti Page on “Tennessee Waltz.” The sound came through as if they’d recorded her from the far side of a crowded roller rink, but, on the last note, I looked over at the tears on Mickey’s face.
“You sure are emotional.”
“You gotta be emotional or you might as well be dead, Lana Sue. Emotions are like muscles or brains. If you don’t use ’em, you lose ’em. Man that don’t cry regular won’t be able when he needs to later.”
I snuggled up on one arm. “How’d you get so smart?”
Mickey rolled down the window so nothing stood between his smile and the wheat fields. “Pussy and booze,” he said. “Pussy and booze.”
• • •
Lost virginity and extended school skipping were only secondary goals of what is known in the Goodwin family as “Lannie’s fling.” My plan, right from the beginning, was to learn about the “real” world. Given that Daddy’s system of money, Cadillacs, charge cards, and shoes made from dead animals was fake, was Mickey’s alternative “real”?
I had to know. Are sex, drugs, and alcohol any more sincere than pep clubs, braces, and plastic furniture? Or maybe the third group, our customers—the farmers, waitresses, and mechanics—had found a legitimate way of getting by. Is a crop duster closer to honesty than a public relations expert specializing in Republican candidates from Southern California?
I still haven’t decided. The battle between wealthy hypocrisy and poverty-stricken down-homeness has raged around and in me for thirty-eight years now, and I still don’t know if a wood stove shows more integrity than a microwave oven.
Mickey taught me how to drink. We drank a lot. He taught me how to slide around fakes, rapists, and nose breakers, how to spot if someone wants something from you or wants to give something to you. Mickey showed me how to cut loose, ignore everything negative, and have one hell of a good time. Most people can’t do that.
We lived an excessive life, working, drinking, crying, fighting, and screwing much too much. I enjoyed it then. Stability tends to wear away the extremes of life. Everyone needs to see the highest highs and lowest lows at least once. It’s worth cleaning up the mess.
Mickey’s most important lessons dealt with sex. He lived for sex, was obsessed with sex, and gave almost all his energy to sex, and Mickey expected no less from his partner. I couldn’t lean over an amp without him trying to stick something in somewhere. Mickey taught me the joy of oral. The joy of anal. The joy of nonstop. A month after losing my virginity, I knew every position I’ve seen, heard about, or tried in the twenty-two years since.
I learned that shame or shyness only obstructs the fun. Without embarrassment, we made love in a bed full of people pretending they were asleep. Or on his lap in a moving van. We used to catch quickies in the men’s bathroom stall during the break between sets.
Mickey claimed “real” isn’t polyester versus rags. When analysis comes down to it, the difference between loving and wishing you loved, living and putting up a pretty good front, is the Regular Orgasm. If you can find an RO in a flaming sun, you’re living an honest, sincere, productive life. If not, you’re fooling somebody and it might be you.
That last is a line of bull I didn’t buy even at sixteen, much less thirty-eight.
• • •
Sending Daddy a postcard was a serious error, of course, on the order of looking at your watch while making love, but you’ve got to remember these were pre-Runaway Hotline days. What was a girl on the road to do? Worry the poor manic crotch doctor to death? Even flighty heartbreakers follow certain lines of loyalty.
Daddy and the Christian Detective Agency didn’t catch us until mid-March, and, even then, we might have resisted the rescue had Patsy Cline’s sudden death not broken Mickey’s will to be obnoxious. Halfway between Memphis and Nashville, Mickey’s riotous-living act cracked and crumbled and the alcohol turned depressant as opposed to fire.
“I may grow up,” he said.
“Aw, shit.”
The country music system stagnated. By the time Daddy and his religious dick arrived, I didn’t really care who carried me off.
• • •
Patsy Cline’s death was so important to us, such a turning point, that I find it hard to believe all America didn’t screech to a halt and hang its head in mourning, but I’ve come to realize lately that most people didn’t ev
en know who Patsy was. Country-western music wasn’t considered legitimate back then.
I asked Loren where he was the day Patsy Cline died, and he said, “Oh, is she dead?” What an ignoramus.
She didn’t make the “Deaths” column in Time magazine. Some 1920s playboy made the list, but the greatest female country singer of all time was left off. Shows America’s priorities.
For me, it was one of those scenes where you always remember where you were and exactly what you were doing—like prominent assassinations or marriage proposals you accept or the beginnings of wars back when wars had definable beginnings.
The long booth in the Confederate Truck Stop on the Arkansas side of West Memphis at 8:30 on a rainy Wednesday morning. We’d been up all night celebrating Butch Bob’s birthday. Somewhere in there, all of us except Mickey had eaten black capsules so we could talk faster, only they made my grits look and smell like something put out by a sick cat. My jaws were grinding my back molars into dust.
Bob Bob and I argued about the blond girl who played Elly May on The Beverly Hillbillies. Bob Bob said a shark in South America bit off her legs and I said it wasn’t true.
“A cocktail waitress told me last night,” Bob Bob whined.
“You believe everything a cocktail waitress tells you?”
“Yes.”
Choosie’s hands were under the table, pouring Jack Black into a Dr Pepper bottle. Next to the wall, Mickey turned the jukebox selector wheel, even though the WHO Early Bird Show blared from a radio next to the cereal pyramid behind the counter. Flatt and Scruggs were playing “T for Texas.” I listened to the banjo break, thinking it would sound better with a steel behind it.
“How do you figure this works with the buttons at every booth and the jukebox way down there?” Butch Bob asked.
“Electricity,” Choosie said.
Paul Bob snorted. “You’re not as smart as people give you credit for.”
Butch Bob was real dazed. He’d just turned twenty-one, which meant last night was his first legal drunk and he’d taken advantage of the fact.