My Cross to Bear (2 page)

I
WAS BORN ON
D
ECEMBER
8, 1947,
AT
3:23
IN THE MORNING, AT
the old St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville. It was a beautiful building, all marble and brownstone. Now they’ve moved to the outskirts of town, but like everybody I’ve ever known in Nashville—“Where were you born?” “St. Thomas.”

My brother, Duane, was born on November 20, 1946, one year and eighteen days before me. Same hospital, same doctor.

In 1949, when I was two years old and my brother was three, my father, who was about thirty at the time, came home for Christmas. He had fought in the last part of World War II and had landed on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day. He’d been a gunnery sergeant and a lieutenant, and he’d just gotten promoted to captain. He was getting the pay, but he hadn’t gotten the bars yet.

The day after Christmas, he and a friend of his, who was a master sergeant, went out to a tavern that they always went to, just shooting pool and drinking beer. The year before, when he was overseas, my father had ordered a brand-new Ford, so he’d gotten one of the first ’49 Fords that came off the line. That night, he and his friend took his new car, and they were definitely celebrating being back home.

After they’d been there for a bit, this dude at the bar started asking them, “Tell me about the war.” He was buying them beers and all this stuff. It got late into the night and the guy asked them if he could get a ride home, and they said sure. They got up the highway, and my father asked the guy where he lived. He said, “You turn right up here on this dirt road.” Of course, back then the roads in that part of Tennessee barely had asphalt, especially out in the cornfields. They turned and started going on one of those roads through the corn, and when they got to a place where the corn stopped, the dude pulled out an army .45. He told my daddy to stop and get out, so they did. They’re talking and talking, and he thought they had a bunch of money because of the new car and their uniforms and everything.

My dad said, “You can have everything—take the car, take everything.”

His friend, the sergeant, said, “Listen, buddy, we don’t mean ya no harm.”

And the guy goes, “Oh, you know my name. Now I gotta kill ya.”

It turned out the guy’s name was Buddy Green—first name Buddy, or maybe that was his nickname. Either way, he misunderstood what my daddy’s friend had said, and they were in trouble. My father gave some kind of signal and he and his friend took off running, but the guy got my father three times in the back. He missed the sergeant, I think.

At that time in the state of Tennessee, they had a sentence called “99+1,” and you couldn’t serve the one until you served the ninety-nine. So it was a hundred-year sentence, and Buddy Green got that. He recently died in prison, but at one point I started getting these letters from him. I guess one day one of his partners in prison must have said, “Hey, look whose papa you killed, asshole.” And, oh, they were these mournful letters, like “I’m sorry to the 16th power,” over and over. But I never wrote back. Matter of fact, I think I might’ve done away with the letters.

My two uncles, Sam and Dave—sounds like a band to me—they always drummed it into my head not to ever hitchhike or pick up a hitchhiker. And I listened to them. The only time I ever did bum a ride was after my brother called me in March 1969 to come join him and these other four guys to play some music.

M
Y DAD WAS NAMED
W
ILLIS
T
URNER
A
LLMAN, AND THEY CALLED
him Bill, mostly. When he was younger they called him Billy. His family was from White Bluff, Tennessee—actually, they were from Vanleer, Tennessee, which is a small suburb of Dickson, which is a small suburb of White Bluff, which is a small suburb of Nashville.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house, and I still remember the address—703 Eighteenth Avenue South. My grandmother’s name was Myrtle Allman, and my grandfather was named Alfred. They were my dad’s folks, and they were married back in the days when the family kind of appointed who your spouse was going to be. You see those old oval pictures, where the ladies were all buttoned up, with their ankles covered up and everything—those were the times when they’d met each other. They stayed married long enough to have three boys in four years, and then they divorced—goodbye, end of story, I hate your fucking ass.

My mother is named Geraldine, but they called her Gerry. She was from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and her maiden name is Robbins Pitt. She had a sister, Janie, and two brothers. Her oldest brother was Robbie, whose real name was Swindale, which was a popular name in parts of North Carolina back then. He built the Atlantic City Pier basically by himself. He had another guy help him pour the cement, but he put all them pilings in. He was a tough old bird who died of cancer, and he died slow. His last few days, he was just pissed off, man. My mother was the youngest sister, but she wasn’t the baby. The youngest was my uncle Erskin, who died a long time ago of testicular cancer. He died a very young man, and he was kind of a groove.

As I remember it, my parents met in Raleigh, North Carolina, during World War II, when my father was home on leave from the army and my mother was working in Raleigh. Eventually they moved to Tennessee, and the first home my mom and dad had didn’t have plumbing, and all my mother wanted to do was get the hell out of Vanleer. My mother didn’t get along with the Allman family worth a damn—she didn’t back then, and now, hell, there’s not many left on either side. I love them all, but they don’t talk to each other. There’s no love lost there. After my father died, she was gone, out of there.

I don’t have the slightest memory of my father, nothing. As far as I was concerned, it was always the three of us—my mom, Duane, and me. I wondered about it in the first and second grade, but you’re so damn young you can’t understand it. When I was in the fifth grade, I went over to a friend’s house, and I thought, “Who is this big son of a bitch kicking my friend around? I sure am glad that I ain’t got one!” I thought it was quite a bonus not to have a father.

One day I was sitting with my mother, watching this speech by John F. Kennedy. He said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” My mother said, “God, your father used to say that years ago. That’s how he snaked all them young boys into joining up.”

After my dad died, we moved to Nashville, and my mother went to work for NAPA—National Auto Parts Association. One day, a delivery boy named Elvis Presley came by with some car parts. My mother came home and said, “This deliveryman came in, and he looked funny. He had one of them riverboat haircuts, and his name was Elvis.” Sure enough, he came on the TV, and Mom said, “That’s him—that’s Elvis!”

My mother must have really loved my father a lot, because she never remarried and she had no social life when I was growing up. She only had one boyfriend, a guy from Greece. He was a terrible driver—it took him like six tries to get his driver’s license. He was some kind of master chef, and he had to drive to Orlando to pick something up. On the way back, he had a head-on crash with a tractor-trailer, and I can remember how hard that hit her. She never went out on a date again.

Later on in life—when I was old enough not to get smacked for asking something like this—I asked her about it. She said, “I was so afraid that some belligerent guy would come around here and knock you boys around, and I’d have to kill him, and I didn’t want that to happen.” At first I didn’t believe her. I thought that maybe she just didn’t want the confusion, but I didn’t know that much about life and love, I guess.

Still, my mother knew how to wield a switch, but that was a real rare thing. One time, she caught me playing with matches. We had these big hedges that went around the house, and there was this space in between ’em. Me and one of my little school chums were in there and we were lighting model airplanes with a can of lighter fluid—I’m sure every kid did it.

Well, the house was built of wood, and the wrong spray and the right match … I don’t know if it would’ve gone up or not, but there’s always that chance. My mother came out of those hedges—she just appeared there—and she grabbed me up by the wrist and I was just kinda dangling. And pow! I knew not to squirm either, because it would last twice as long.

We lived at 214 Scotland Place. I’ve been by there since, and they’ve built onto the house, because when we were there we had a huge yard. My mother couldn’t stand the neighbors, because they built this huge treehouse that she said looked like the “damn shanty Irish.” I didn’t know what that was, but I thought it must be a bad thing to be from Ireland.

In our house, you’d go down the hall and my mother’s office was there, which would have been another bedroom. The bathroom was right there, and then there was the two bedrooms, Mom’s and ours. In between was a closet—
the
closet. See, my mother had to work every day, and the year that Duane started school, she hired this young black lady named Gladys to come in and watch me. Gladys would lock me in the closet, and she told me that she was a personal friend of the boogieman, and even though I couldn’t see him, he was in there with me. If I did anything that she didn’t like, or if I tried to get out of there, he would jump on me and eat me. I was four years old and, man, I was scared to death.

I can still remember the sound of the hair coming out of Gladys’s head when my mother pulled it out. She asked me to go get something out of the closet one night, and I tried to be as cool as I possibly could be. I was like, “I got to do something right now. I’ll get to it later.” She tried it two or three times, and she was watching me, and finally she said, “Come on in here and sit on my lap. Why don’t you tell me what’s in that closet?”

I told her the whole story, and I begged her not to tell Gladys. Boy, my mama’s face was getting red—she was like a locomotive. So I kind of put it out of my mind, but the next day Mama came home early from work, and oh man! The door busted open and she came in, and Gladys was laying there with a fifth in her hand, with one of my mother’s dresses on, watching TV. My mother grabbed her by the hair, saying, “Don’t you never come back here again,” and every time she said something, she pulled some hair out. I thought she was gonna kill her, man.

Back then money was tight, and we didn’t have much, but my mother did have a home entertainment center—the big floor model, with a big TV. You slid something back and it had the changer there, the speakers were all over the place, and you had your big storage space. It was mahogany, and it was set up right by the front door. She had
Johnny’s Greatest Hits
, by Johnny Mathis. I always thought that was a beautiful record, with all the strings and everything. On the other hand, she listened to this other guy, Vaughn Monroe. Vaughn would be on the radio when she took us to school in the morning—every morning, man.

The first person I knew who really loved music was David Allman, my uncle. When you’re real young, if something really moves you, you spend a lot of time on it. Uncle David had this old radio—it was a Philco, kind of roundish, and it had a big dial with all these bands of different colors on it. Every now and then, he would let me monkey with it, but if Grandma caught me, she’d tell me to leave it alone. “That’s David’s, and you know he brought it back from Okinawa.” She was a terror sometimes, but a sweet terror.

Late at night, he’d put that radio on and I’d listen for hours. I loved to sleep over with David, because I knew we’d listen to music. Uncle David just loved his music, and he could really sing. He’d walk around the house just singing. He could sing a low note and rattle everything in the room. He had a hell of a throat, and if he’d ever put it to use, he could have been something. Sadly, he passed away in 2010.

W
HEN
I
WAS IN THIRD GRADE, EIGHT YEARS OLD, MY MOTHER
packed Duane and me off to military school. Having my older brother with me was the only thing that saved me, because back then I knew—I didn’t think, I knew—deep in my heart that my mother hated me. I just couldn’t figure out
why
. I thought she just didn’t want us around, but I look back at it today, and I was so wrong. She was actually sacrificing everything she possibly could—she was working around the clock, getting by just by a hair, so as to not send us to an orphanage, which would have been a living hell.

The real reason we went was so my mother could go to school to become a CPA. They had all these strange laws back then, and I think you had to go to an on-campus college for that degree, had to stay there on campus, something like that. It seems ridiculous to me, but that’s what I was told. All I know is that she worked her ass off so that we could go to Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee.

Castle Heights was a real mix of kids. Some came from broken homes, some came from South American countries like Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, and some came from wealthy parents who just wanted to get rid of them and were all too happy to just let the kids grow up at school. We had a lot of people who were kind of unruly. I remember this one boy named Gonzalez. I’ll never forget how they kept hazing him and hazing him. I was in the junior school at this point, and he was up in the senior school. He went home for Christmas vacation, and he got a .22 rifle for a gift. When the boys started messing with him, he turned around and shot and killed some son of a bitch. He shot him right through the heart, man. When my grandmother heard that, she kept going on about it, saying, “I told you it was a hellhole,” and telling my mother how she messed up again, how we were going to turn out to be hoodlums.