My Cross to Bear (5 page)

There’s no question that music brought me and Duane closer together. When we first started learning, it was competitive as hell, almost to the point of me saying, “Fuck you, go find another goddamn band.” I had been practicing all this time while he was out motorcycling, and then all of a sudden his bike breaks and he wants to horn in. Eventually we made peace, because that was the only way it was going to work, and he could see that—the only way that we were going to sit down and have me teach him the map of that damn guitar was if we could get along.

If he was to walk into the room right now, and you asked him, “Did this guy teach you how to play the guitar?” he would tell you, “Yeah, I guess he did.” But it wasn’t like, “For today’s lesson …” or anything like that. He just watched me, but he watched me like a hawk. If I did something just a little bit different, he’d be, “Why? What’s that?” He didn’t miss a thing.

Long after he could play circles around me, he’d still say, “You ought to hear my little brother play,” and “little brother” pretty much stuck right up to the end of his life. Either that or “baybrah,” as he said it, which is something he got from our old friend Floyd Miles, because that’s how Floyd would say “baby brother.”

I played that guitar constantly, every day and night. I’d stop for a while and do my homework, but by the end of the year my mother was getting frustrated. My brother was worse, because he would play all day long, while my mother was at work. Duane passed me up in a flash—he got real good. My brother was born with the passion to play, that serious passion that he had for the guitar. That passion was second only to a woman, and it was one of them definite loves, because your guitar ain’t gonna leave ya, just like your dog ain’t gonna leave ya. He had a real love affair with that guitar.

The first gig I ever played was when I was in the seventh grade. It was me, my little Fender guitar, and a Champ amp. This was at R. J. Longstreet Elementary, right down the street from my mother’s house in Daytona. These two guys were supposed to play with me: one of them played drums, and the other one played another guitar—we weren’t hip to a bass yet. We were going to play three or four songs in the lunchroom, and we borrowed a set of drums from my English teacher, Mr. Anderson. He was such a nice guy—very tall and skinny, very cool. We had a couple of Ventures songs that we were going to play, instrumentals only, no singing. Forget singing, man.

Right at the last minute, them two boys chickened out on my ass. They just didn’t show. There I was, with my little tiny amp and my little guitar. I’m up there by myself, the lights were on, and I turned red as a fucking barn, and I stayed that color throughout the whole performance. Mr. Anderson got up and played the drums, which was really nice of him, but it made me look like I was sucking up to a teacher. Right at the end, I played a Jimmy Reed song, and that went over pretty well.

I didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, but in the days that followed, a lot of people came up to me and asked, “When are you going to play again?” That was cool, because a lot of them had never even seen anybody play music like that, and they liked it. And when I came back the next time, I came back full force.

A
S WE GOT OLDER, THERE WERE TIMES THAT MY BROTHER LEFT ME
behind, and I didn’t understand it. I even went and asked my mother, “Duane doesn’t like me anymore?” That just crushed my mother, and she told me, “No, no. Your brother loves you. He’s just growing up, that’s all.” She really tried to explain that to me.

There was this pretty little girl named Sherry, who looked like Meg Ryan, and she was my brother’s first girlfriend. Boy, she was gorgeous. She had this leopard-skin hat, and I guess it was real. She’d wear that hat, and it was the sexiest thing in the whole world. That’s when I started to notice girls—this would have been right around the time we moved to Daytona. Duane started going to these parties, with boys and girls, and the boys would eventually go home and the girls would sleep over.

My brother loved women, and they loved him. He was real, real private about it, even with me—he’d just give me a wink or a nod and walk on. Of course, he’d have to have a blow-by-blow description from me about my women. “Tell me everything, Gregory,” he’d say. “Don’t you hold back shit.”

I had two real heavy crushes when I was in high school. The longest one was this lady named Dee Dee Cornelius. Her father was a math teacher of mine. I took her to the prom and what have you. She was a sweetheart.

Then there was the first heartbreak I can ever remember—I mean Shatteredsville. Vicky Fulton, Victoria Lynn Fulton. I had spent the whole summer before tenth grade with this babe, and I went further with her than I had gone with anybody before. I was infatuated with her—we had the school rings and all that. Then my mother came to me around mid-August and said, “Your grades are so bad, you’re going back to military school.” I was crushed.

Just as I was preparing to leave, I found out that the school was full. My brother could get in, but I couldn’t go until January. My brother’s grades didn’t get him in as a junior, though, but as a sophomore. Pissed him off, man. He was back in little brother’s grade, back with the hired help, so to speak. Believe me, it wasn’t because he didn’t know the shit. He could learn it just like that. It was just that now he had a guitar under his arm constantly. He was learning that guitar, but they didn’t notice things like that. No grades for that—not back then, anyway.

So Vicky and I stayed together that fall, and right around Christmas I got the news that I was going back to Castle Heights in January with my brother. My hair was just getting right. I had a kinda half-Elvis, half-Beatles haircut, I guess. It was nice and poofy, and the sun had bleached it out. I’d been on the beach every day, and my skin was so dark that I looked like a negative that hadn’t been developed. I had some freckles—it was the darkest tan I ever had.

So I went back to Castle Heights in tenth grade, and it was terrible. I got through the year, and I came back to Florida. I went to see Vicky, and her house had this long dock that went out over the water. She said, “Well, it’s nice that you’re back.” Then she grabbed my hand and put the ring in it.

I said, “What’s this?”

She said, “I’m so sorry.” I was gone for five months, and she had fallen in love with the captain of the football team.

Oh man—I found out what the blues was. Every morning, I’d stop by this one restaurant and have breakfast. They had “Dark End of the Street” on the jukebox, and I’d play it and sit there and cry. The waitress got to know me. I would sit in a booth, way in the back, and every morning I’d have me a cry.

Boy, it hurt so bad, because I knew I was gonna see her. She dressed prettier every day, and her little ass got tighter every day. I didn’t want nobody else—if Raquel Welch had fallen out of the sky, I would have tripped over her and not noticed it. It felt like I had a hole right in the middle of my soul. I didn’t even want to play guitar no more. I sold my guitar, I sold my amp. I just said, “Fuck it,” and I got back into the books. My brother thought I was crazy, and he just mocked me. He said, “Fuck you,” and went off to play with someone else.

I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like forever, but it was probably like three months, just long enough for an infatuation to get over with. In other words, until some other chick speaks to ya. I was no great shakes back then, I was pretty quiet, but when we started playing that music, here they come!

Years later, I went up to Vicky’s high-rise one night, and we were feeling pretty good. She was so glad to see me, and she wanted to show me what it was that I had missed. Let me tell ya—that was one special night. I might as well have been Gene Kelly coming out of that place, and it had been raining! We caught up, and then some.

Duane’s first true love was a girl named Patty Chanley. He had a daughter by her, who’s deaf, and who now lives in Daytona Beach. In my eyes, that relationship was very legit, because he really loved Patty. He went through many changes during high school, juggling this here and that there, and her old man absolutely hated him, to the point of saying, “I’ve got a shotgun loaded with rock salt, and I’ll shoot you in the ass if you come around here anymore.” I’ve got to hand it to my brother, because he just said, “Fuck you, old man. Me and this girl, we care about each other.”

I remember Duane doing strange things, man. One day in the summertime, he was in our room, and he was doing all this math work. He’s working all these numbers, so I asked him, “Duane, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Well,” he tells me, “I just measured my dick, and from the day we got out of school until today”—which was the last day of summer vacation—“I’ve given her nineteen miles, four hundred seventy-two feet, and three inches of dick!”

“Where in the hell did you come up with that figure?” I asked.

“Well,” he said. “I counted a few times, and I got me an average of how many strokes it took me before I finished. I took that and multiplied it all out, and came up with that figure.”

W
E HAD A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY NAMED
M
AX
G
ATEWOOD, WHO
also moved down to Daytona from Nashville. Max had no wife or children, and he was just a cool guy. He’d come and get us sometimes when we would go on leave at Castle Heights. He would take us to this place called the Copia Club in Nashville.

Max had a brand-new 1960 Thunderbird—God, that car was beautiful. He’d come get us at that wretched school because he knew how much we hated it. He bought us BB guns, but he wasn’t weird or anything. When he died, he was buried with a diamond ring that I bought him with some of the first money I ever made. The first thing I bought was a pair of snakeskin boots, and then I went and got him this ring. It looked like a saddle, and it had sixteen diamonds in it. Max Burton Gatewood Jr.—let him not be forgotten.

We’d take four or five of the guys from school and come back to Nashville, because he’d give us his car. We’d all sleep over at his house, and if we wanted to drink, we had to do it there. He was just a hell of a guy. Somebody once asked me, “So what does he get out of all this?”—trying to make something of it. I just said, “Man, get out of here, put that shit away.” It was so great to have that outlet, and it helped me to get through that school.

When we first started playing, Max brought this guy that he knew up to see us, and he played guitar. We’d play and sing, and I’m learning all these chords, and I’m certainly paying attention. And my brother, he just had it inside of him. The music just flowed from his brain to his fingers. He just knew.

We actually formed a band at Castle Heights called the Misfits. The great thing about it was that when we played after one of the football games, or the prom—we played all that shit—we got to wear our civilian clothes. I had this pair of jeans that was skintight, and I loved it.

That was a big deal, because we had to wear uniforms all the time, every day. White shirt and a tie, man. We had drills and inspections every day, and on Sundays we had a pass-and-review, which was when all the folks came out to watch—unless it rained, and we used to pray for rain. We’re talking wool uniforms, heavy-gauge wool. Believe me, you didn’t want to run out of drawers, because you didn’t want to wear no pair of wool pants without no drawers on. It takes a hell of a dude to do that. In the spring, you got to change the wool pants for white pants, but everything else would stay the same, no matter how hot it was.

They had a great shop class there, and I learned a lot about measuring stuff, building things, woodworking and all that. That was good, because you were moving around and working with your hands, and that took your mind off of stuff. I also joined the school band, playing cornet, and earned a sharpshooter’s medal, because I got forty-eight out of fifty bull’s-eyes. That was from the prone position, which really isn’t that hard. They took us down to the range, with live ammunition and everything. When you got up to the high school, they had Browning Automatic Rifles and a lot of that heavy shit. ROTC was one of your classes, and they had incendiary grenades, Bouncing Bettys, claymore mines—all that shit. They taught you how to defuse them, how to wrap a bandage and treat a wound.

In the fall, we had something called bivouacs that would last a week. Behind the school there were woods, and I mean the thick woods. We’d go when the leaves were turning nice colors and it was cooling off. We’d have the blue team and the red team, and it wasn’t really nothing but a paintball game. They called them “blood bullets” back then, but they were just paintballs. One time, my brother got lost, and he stayed out there overnight with a couple of other guys. They just found a cave and hid out for the night.

In the end, despite the few good things, I was totally lonesome and out of place—a ship drifting and drifting. I didn’t make a lot of friends because I didn’t want nothing to do with the place. I didn’t want to go there, I didn’t want to be there. Everything you did, they told you how to do it. They told you how to do everything but take a shit, man. They put saltpeter in the potatoes so nobody would get horny, and they put laxative in the coffee so everybody would crap at the same time. You’d walk into the bathroom, and up on this big concrete slab was a row of about ten toilets, and everybody would sit together. I mean, Jesus Christ, that was terrible.

Every day, I’d wake up and see the springs on the bunk above me, and I’d think, “Oh no, it’s not a bad dream.” But I never realized that it just came down to me saying, “By God, all you got to do is get the fuck up and walk out.”

After a little while, my brother did just that. He just took off, and when he got home, he called me, saying, “Come on, man, the band is together!”