My Cross to Bear (4 page)

At first, I hated the fucking place aside from the beach and the warm weather. One thing that saved me from running away and going God knows where is that I rode my bike down to the beach where they were having the last NASCAR beach race. It was scary, because after you came out of the south turn, you had two straightaways, one paved and one beach. Toward the end of it, you had nothing but soft sand, and the whole thing was like a demolition derby. They would stop the race every now and then and get these half-ass little steamrollers out there and pat the sand down a little bit, but those guys were doing 80 to 100 miles an hour, in those big old swaying Pontiacs. It was something to behold, and I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.

Because they shaved my head at Castle Heights, I wouldn’t cut my hair anymore. I didn’t grow out my hair because everybody else did. I grew it out because I remember them taking it down to my scalp, and with the light color of my hair, it looked like I was bald-headed. I don’t have the best-shaped head in the world—I mean, bald is beautiful, but not if your head looks like an old basketball with no air in it.

When I went back to Nashville the summer after we moved to Florida, my grandma had been moved into a housing community, which was a big change. She’d always seemed pretty independent. My grandmother read her Bible every day, she smoked three packs of Tareytons a day, and she was one of the finest cooks I have ever witnessed, to this day. She had her ups and downs, man. She loved her gossip, and she talked to herself when she was mopping the floor. She’d start every sentence with “Well, gentlemen …” That was an old country way of talking. “Well, gentlemen …” is definitely the country side of the Allman family.

Seeing her in that housing was tough, you know? Didn’t seem right. I think my uncle Sam was footing the whole bill, and my uncle Dave was on the police force, but I don’t know who was paying for what.

My grandmother and my father’s brothers were all we had left back in Nashville. A few years before, my grandfather had passed away, but because he and my grandmother were divorced it hadn’t impacted her much. Though my grandmother didn’t much like Alf, his sons loved him and us grandsons were crazy about him. He brought us firecrackers and barbecue—he bought me a Wham-O slingshot with a sight on it, and a whole bag of ball bearings. I thought, “This old man is the hippest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen!” What kid didn’t want a slingshot like that one? You could take down a pretty good-sized alley cat with one of them!

My grandfather made whiskey all his life and sold it to the state police. I think he worked in a sawmill, because I remember him always having coveralls on and dust all over him. He taught me lots of good things—just hitting me with random bits of wisdom. He told me one time, “Gregory, there’s two things that gets you in trouble and one of ’em’s your mouth.” I was way too young to understand, but later on it hit me.

I was playing with one of those fly-backs one day—the paddle with the ball on a string. He was watching me, and he came up and took the ball in his hand and let the paddle drop.

“Gregory,” he said, “I’m gonna tell you something about love.”

I’m thinking, “Oh no, here he goes”—’cause I was like five or six.

“If I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze tighter and tighter on this ball,” he said, “it might pop out of my hand. But if I just keep a nice, easy grip on it, it’ll stay with me forever.” I really loved that old man.

The truth is, my uncles and mother tried to keep him away from me as much as possible. Sam and David would take us to see him, in moderation. Nothing really bad ever happened, even though I got a fishhook in my hand one time. My uncles were very good about letting my mother know where we were, and calling ahead and asking to see us. That’s why I looked forward to summertime, because I finally had a couple of dads. Though one of them was in this thing called the army, and it dragged him off sometimes, I could always count on the other one being there.

Every time Alf’s name came up though, my grandmother would go, “Shi …” She wouldn’t say “Shit,” but we knew what she meant. He was a drunk, a saloon rat—he was a lot of things, man, and she hated him.

I think back now to all the questions I wanted to ask her. “Why don’t you love him, Grandma? Look at me and tell me why you don’t love this man, who I love so much? Have you given him a chance? What happened between you all? Why can’t you just part as friends?” I don’t understand that about divorce. I’ve had a few, and it’s not like I want to have a big reunion, but I don’t hardly ever hear from any of them. There’s no “Hi, how you doing?” We did once say that we loved each other, and I did pay them all a fair amount of money.

About fifteen years ago, I was in a session, cutting my record
Searching for Simplicity
. I remember somebody talking about this whorehouse, and somebody said, “Gregory, have you ever paid for it?”

I said, “Pay for pussy? There’s too much of it.” Then I thought, “What am I talking about?” I told them, “Correction—I have paid, and paid, and paid, and I’m still paying for something I ain’t getting!”

T
HERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS THAT JUST TOTATTY ALTER YOUR
life. It’s like you hear a voice yelling, “Come about, because we are changing course.”

One night, my mother dropped me and my brother off at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium, and we spent a buck and a quarter to sit in the cheap seats. The show was called a “revue” because there were a whole bunch of different acts, and they were given maybe five songs each.

Jackie Wilson was the headliner. He closed with “Lonely Teardrops,” of course, but he put his coat on the stage floor before he got down on his knees, so he wouldn’t get his pants dirty, and that was disappointing. They had the orchestra down in the pit, and I can still see the natural starburst that came off this horn player’s instrument when he stood up to take a solo. I guess that was my first taste of live music, much like it must be for our fans who hear us live for the first time. Cheap seats or no cheap seats, it was amazing.

Next to Jackie was Otis Redding, and Otis just took it, man. It was a huge stage, at least twenty-five yards wide, and Otis just ran back and forth across it. He got the whole place singing, and moving faster and faster. Otis was a big old son of a gun, and when he came back out to take a bow, I could see that he had big old stumps for feet. He was a big man, and I mean
big
—Otis was Mean Joe Greene big, that’s how large he was. He could really sing, and that band could take it down low.

The girls up in the front row were melting in their seats, and we were watching the whole thing unfold. My brother was just mesmerized—he was frozen, and he looked stuffed, like a taxidermist had gotten through with him. Nothing on his body moved during the whole concert. I had to poke him a couple of times to make sure he was still there with us. He had a time, man, I’m telling you.

That music hit Duane, and it stuck like a spaghetti noodle against the wall. That music was in his heart, and it was in mine too. Then we got to playing it, and we realized how important it really was.

That Otis show was the start, but I didn’t have to wait long for more. By August 1960, toward the end of our visit with our grandmother, I was kinda wanting to go home. It was hot as a bitch, and there was no air-conditioning back then, and no sea breeze in Nashville. One day, I looked over across the way, and I saw this mentally challenged guy named Jimmy Banes, who lived over there with his mama and another man, who I don’t think was his father. I hope he’s doing all right, if he’s still alive. He was outside, and he had an old beat-up Packard, and it looked like it was flat black, or else it had never been touched by wax—one or the other. The car ran, and he drove it around, poor guy. He was painting it with a paintbrush, like a house paintbrush.

I had been taught not to ridicule people who were different, so I just went over there and said, “Hey, partner, how you doing?” More than I was looking at him or his situation, I was looking at him painting this car—tires, grille, over the lights, everything. He was painting it black, and it already was black, and he was painting it so it would shine.

In the projects, they always have the front porch—the stoop, they call it. Sometimes there would be walkways going off of both sides, depending on the size of the place. There’s usually a swing that hangs there, and they had one of those. There was a bunch of stuff—a ball glove, odds and ends—out on the porch, but one thing in particular caught my eye.

“What do you got up there?” I asked.

“What?” Jimmy asked back.

“That thing, leaning against the house,” I said.

“Oh, that’s a guitar.”

“Okay” was all I said back, and he went on about his business. I waited until he got through painting, and said, “You know how to play this thing?”

“I sure do,” he replied. Jimmy picked it up and started playing “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” and, I mean, he was playing it with a vigor. I thought he was gonna bang the damn strings off of that son of a bitch.

This guitar was a Beltone, and those things are almost impossible to play. This guy might have been autistic, you know? He had filed down the bridge on this old funky-ass twenty-two-dollar guitar, and the thing had enough action to where it wouldn’t be too hard for a kid to pick it up and, if done correctly, it could be played. Now, a barre chord was kind of a bitch.

He got through the song, and it was a hell of a lot better than I could do it, so I asked him to play something else, and he showed me a chord. He told me, “Look, you gotta keep these fingers inside”—he was teaching me an E chord. “You gotta keep these three fingers inside these outside strings, because if they touch your finger—oh boy.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, it will just be bad,” he said all cryptically, as if the boogieman would come get you.

I’ll tell you, my life changed that day. It did. Jimmy and I sat up on that porch until he had to put the top back on his damn paint so it wouldn’t dry out. We talked and talked about that guitar, and I went over the next day, and the next day, and I was so thankful for him. Later on, I was at a party, and I picked up a guitar, played maybe three chords, and my brother just about shit himself.

When I came back to Daytona after seeing Jimmy Banes in Nashville, there was still a little bit left of summer, about five weeks or so. We went back to school after Labor Day, much later than they do now. So I went down to the newspaper looking for a job, because I wanted to get a guitar real bad, and I found one at Sears for twenty-one dollars. I knew a guy who had a paper route, and I used to help him with it, and there was nothing to it. All you had to do was remember the damn houses—this was back when people used to put their address on the mailbox.

I had some rough times: a few dog bites and acute ingrown toenails, which two of my children suffer from today. The nail would just dive right down into my toe, the whole thing, both sides. I went to the podiatrist time and time again, and he would take the scalpel and start at the top and go in about a half-inch and cut all the way down. One time I went down and missed the pedal, and I pulled my pant legs up and pus was just sprayed all over the place. That was brutal, man.

But I never thought, “This ain’t worth it.” I knew I was gonna get that guitar.

Finally, I had saved the twenty-one dollars, and I went down to Sears on my bicycle. I walked up to the counter and told the guy I wanted that Silvertone, and I handed him the money. He told me, “Son, with tax, that’ll be $21.95,” and he wasn’t about to let that ninety-five cents slide. Man, I was just crushed, totally crushed.

I got home and told my mother what had happened, and she could see the hurt and disappointment in my eyes. Well, you know mothers—I didn’t even have to ask her. She gave me a dollar, and the next day I rode back down there and got me that guitar.

I didn’t want anybody knowing about it, because I didn’t want to hear them saying, “Oh, you think you’re a star?” People always have something to say. Of course, I didn’t have enough money to buy a case, not that that finger-bleeder was worth a case anyway.

About the time I bought my guitar, a motorcycle of Duane’s had just fallen apart. It was an old used bike, and Duane had got it off some guy for like seventy bucks, which was still a lot of money for a teenage kid. Of course, Duane started playing my guitar, and I told him to go out and play with his motorcycle parts. He snatched it from me a couple of times, and my mother caught us fighting over it—and thank God, because my fingers were about to go.