So I was outside just now and my downstairs neighbor is watching MASH reruns. It made me want to post this, a thing I call “Good Ol’ Boy Zilla and Son Of Good Ol’ Boy Zilla.” It all makes sense after the jump. But hearing MASH on a big day when lots of big things happen, well, a more superstitious man…
MASH action figures, for all your moral horrors of war make believe.
The centerpiece of my hometown is the town square, which is actually a circle. In the center of the circle is a two-story brick building with a bell tower stretching out of the peaked roof. This is the courthouse. On one side of the walkway leading up to the courthouse entrance is one of those black moveable type boards behind a pane of glass. This informs you that you are in Fredericktown, that so and so is the mayor, some other so and so is the sheriff, and yet a third so and so is the presiding judge. Any critical assessment as to the three so and so’s level of competence is left off the board to make room for public announcements, by which I mean when the carnival will be arriving in town. Which is the same date every year.
On the other side of the walkway is a community bulletin board on which the only important information is that “Lori is a slut” which the town has known since 1987 thanks to whoever wrote it on the board in very permanent Magic Marker.
Behind the bulletin board, just out from the corner of the building, set in front of a backdrop of sumac trees and red cedars, is the statue of my father. Nine feet tall and cast in bronze, Billy Joe Lawrence stands looking straight down Main Street from straight down the sites of a long barreled revolver. He is wearing a cowboy hat, pushed back to reveal a mischievous grin and gleefully squinting eyes. The hand not holding the gun is clutching a beer bottle. My father is portrayed wearing a V-neck T-shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, one of which is resting on a crate labeled TNT. At his side, frozen in a never ending howl of excitement, is a blue tick hound.
The Groundskeeper at the courthouse went to school with my father and he keeps the statue absolutely spotless with special attention paid to the placard set in the granite base. The placard reads: “Billy Joe Lawrence, the Greatest Good Ol’ Boy This Town Has Ever Known. Who tragically passed before his son could ever know how amazing he was. No urinating.”
Every year, in the spring, a virgin goat is ritually sacrificed.
Only a paternity test will be able to tell you which one is really my father.
I am totally pulling your leg. There is, of course, no statue and no placard. However, Lori is a slut.
What is true is that my father, Billy Joe Lawrence, not William Joseph – the birth certificate said Billy Joe, died when I was three months old. A long haul trucker, he went out for a run east one early morning and halfway across the state of Illinois hit a guardrail doing seventy-five miles an hour. The eighteen-wheeler flipped completely over and my father was killed instantly. The highway patrol’s official theory was that a car swerved into my father’s lane and he had attempted to dodge the oncoming vehicle. If so, the person who caused the crash hadn’t stuck around. My grandfather on my Mother’s side always put forth the theory that Billy Joe had been trying to “ride the rail,” which is when you try to take a vehicle up on half its wheels using the guard rail as a launch. He would say this with a little half smile of admiration at the thought that his son-in-law could be a man of such daring as to attempt this in a tractor trailer. My grandfather also liked to say that he liked Billy Joe more than his own sons. While his sons were standing there.
Three years after my father dies, my Mom will marry my Step-Father.
And the Addams Family and the Clampetts will finally be united in a sort of Brady Bunch, as broadcast straight from the icy vortex of Chthullu.
Now, the death of Billy Joe Lawrence will be a day of mourning for the whole town. My Father was a good old boy of the first order, and for those of you who don’t know what that means, it means he is more legend than man. In a small town, where entertainment is scarce and the days are slow, a good old boy is a hero and their stories grow over time. Nobody drove faster, drank harder, laughed louder.
There was the time he chased old man Carlson down the street with a broom handle just to watch him run. And then, the time he fell off the bar down at the Main Street Tavern, broke his arm, and refused to go to the hospital until he finished his beer and the story he was telling.
Did you know about the gunfight in Chicago?
How about when he was a fighter pilot in Korea?
Or the time him and his brothers got in a food fight at the Longhorn during the Sunday church rush and hit the Minister from First Methodist with cranberries?
He’d streak the Baptist Church on a dare, ride his motorcycle right up the courthouse steps, and set Jeb Devereaux’s dogs loose in the diner just to watch Shirley Hanson jump. And every incident would end with a round of drinks bought for everyone, including the Sheriff, that no one ever seemed to actually pay for.
And I can’t go anywhere in Southern Missouri without someone finding out that I am Billy Joe Lawrence’s boy. There is always someone with a story to tell and I have been sought out on camping trips and at work by middle aged people who have some connection to my home town and some story to tell from more than twenty years ago about something they were there to witness and boy that was a good time.
Then they stare at me and grin. And I can never escape the feeling that they are waiting for me to let out a whoop, set something on fire, and steal a car just for their entertainment.
On the occasion of the camping trip, things got even more uncomfortable. Partly, because I was stoned. Several friends and I had gone down to a place called Johnson Shut-Ins in the Ozarks. This is a place where the rich swampy climate of the region had interacted with the granite geology of the place to create a stretch along the Black River where rocky outcroppings had turned the otherwise docile waterway into a series of neck snapping eddies and whirlpools. It was designed by a cruel God to weed out the weak among the hill billies and fool hardy teenagers that used the place for recreation. Every peak we jumped off of had a sign hammered into it that said “No Jumping.” From there it was a thirty foot drop into swirling, foaming water that allowed no visual clue as to what sort of bone breaking outcropping lay just below the surface. It was Russian Roulette with gravity.
This has nothing to do with the story. Its just Tony Orlando.
This day we had split up. Girls, being too bright to risk their fragile mortality on ten seconds of adrenaline, opted to go to one of the beaches to sun themselves. The boys, believing ourselves to be both immortal and impervious, had gone off to climb the highest cliff face we could find and fling ourselves off into uncertainty. We arranged to meet up at a certain spot along the wooden walkway that the park service had built to reduce their exposure to law suits by self injured rednecks. Then we all got very high and went along our separate ways.
It all went along fine until we realized that Matt had no intention of stopping bleeding. So we gathered our clothes and wandered off to the rendezvous spot to meet the girls. We got there first and waited. Before long the girls appeared down the walkway, but they were being followed by a gaggle of paler, fatter people. As they got closer, we realized that the people following them were all in their fifties. The girl I was dating at the time, Christy, turned and said something to the middle aged hangers on, pointed at me, and their eyes lit up. My blood went cold.
A guy with salt and pepper hair and glasses walked up with his hand out. “So, this is Billy Joe’s boy!”
Ah. A member of the cult.
And with the words “Your Daddy! He was crazy!” I was regaled. The guy said his name but I was too off balance to catch it. My friends had never been around for this, though I had tried to impart the phenomenon to them. Often, when people who never knew my father find out that he died when I was so young, they will say, “Oh, so you never knew him then.” As if to suggest that I have no feelings on the matter at all. I have taken to fixing people who say that with a steady gaze and saying, slowly, in the flattest tone possible, “Right. I never knew my father.” Some of them actually get it.
There on the trail, confronted with someone who knew the man and knew what it meant that I didn’t, I felt conspicuous and paranoid. But then, I was high. I wasn’t really in the frame of mind to confront the gaping hole at the center of my life, nor some stranger’s well meaning but inherently futile attempts to fill that hole with half remembered and probably wildly exaggerated anecdotes. Nor was I quick witted enough to divert what was coming.
His story was actually set right here on the Black River. You do have to love a touch of local flavor. Apparently, he and my father and several others had been on a canoe trip. Down on the straight section of the river. About midday, ol’ Salt n Pepper realized that he had lost his watch in the water, which was particularly muddy in that stretch.
“My Daddy done went n gimme that watch an I’s just about aside maself.”
Well, yeah, I’d suppose so.
This was where my father came in. Billy Joe said he could find that watch and, because there is one in every crowd, some joker said that my father would never find that watch. This was the point where my father said that if that was the way the guy felt then it must be time to lay some money down. How about five dollars? They shook on it and my father dove in after the watch.
I picture this in my head. When I picture my father’s body it is always criss-crossed in exotic scars. There is a story that, while on furlough in Korea, he and some of the other pilots took a boat out to go swimming in the ocean. At some point, my father looked into the water and saw that one of the other guys was having trouble. Thinking it was a cramp, Billy Joe jumped in to help the guy. That was how he found out that the guy was actually tangled up in a Portuguese Man-o-War. From what I was told he had tentacle scars striping some portion of his body for the rest of his life. But he did save his buddy.
I didn’t catch how old Salt n Pepper said they were at the time of the watch story, so I didn’t know if the picture in my head was correct.
My father dove down, was gone for a long time, then popped up empty handed. But instead of giving up, ol’ Billy Joe doubled the bet. From that moment on, every time he came up for air he would raise. This went on for hours and as it did, more folks gathered around and they wanted some of the action. By the time the sun started to go down there were a dozen people who had fifty bucks at the minimum on this thing, some had as much as a hundred, and he didn’t know how much the first guy had on it. It was then, that my father popped out of the water, one hand raised high above his head.
“An I’ll be darned if’n he didn’t have my Daddy’s watch!”
According to this guy, money rained down on my father like air was made of green paper. And to top it off, almost no one went away mad, they had so much fun watching the suspense build that it was worth every penny. The first guy, the joker who lost the most, he went away mad, but, there’s one in every crowd.
Photo by Maureen Bond. Hope she doesn't mind.
After everyone left, Salt n Pepper looked at Billy Joe and declared that it sure was a good thing Billy Joe had found that watch or he would’ve owed a lot of people a lot of money. Salt n Pepper was pretty sure that was money my Father didn’t have. Billy Joe looked him straight in the eye and said, “Boy, I found that watch three hours ago.”
That night my father bought several rounds at the Main Street Tavern.
There on the trail, the middle aged Salt n Pepper laughed and laughed. So did my friends. I tried to, but my chest was really tight.
I have an aunt, my father’s little sister, one whole side of her living room was black and yellow VHS cases. When they released MASH on video they came in black and yellow cases. She had always liked MASH because Hawkeye reminded her of my Dad.
Most any other kid who had grown up with a dead parent that was held up for such adulation, would probably have a severe inadequacy complex. Fortunately for me, I had also grown up with a step-father who was full of violent rage, a chronic weight problem, a school full of peers who hated me and liked to demonstrate as much. In the years since my father’s death half of the family, and the town he had grown up in, had spiraled into an abyss of addiction, guns, and poverty. The other half was praying for the end times. I hadn’t had time for abstract, intangible Hamlet complexes. I had been in actual danger. I hadn’t been the life of a party that never ended. I had been a soldier in a pitched battle. Tends to make you a little more serious minded.
Then there was my Mother. It was impossible for me to think about Billy Joe without thinking also of Carol Lee. I think of the life she had, and thought she was going to have, and the one she ended up with. The man she ended up with.
In 1973, my step-father woke in the middle of the night to his second wife thrashing, uncontrollably, next to him in bed. She was having a brain aneurism. My step-father called for an ambulance. But he still had the problem of the six kids in the house. Three from his first marriage and three from hers. My Step-Father’s first marriage ended when his first wife died of uterine cancer.
Not being a man to make close friends, and with most of his family in Gary, Indiana, my step-father ran out the front door of his house looking for help. He found it.
One Caravan in the trailer park across the street from his house had it’s lights on. This was my parent’s trailer.
My Step-Father is not a great communicator and, when he’s upset, the curses and mispronunciations only seem to multiply. It’s a wonder that my Father was ever able to put it together that my Step-Father’s wife was dying, but he did. So, my Father drives my future Step-Father to be with his dying wife while my Mother goes over to watch her future step-children, with my toddler sister in tow and me in her belly. It’s a really small town.
Three months later I will be born. Three month’s after that Carol Lee will be a widow and a single mother.
My Mom will never say why she married my Step-Father. I suspect they bonded over mutual grief. I don’t think she realized that his rage and hate for life went beyond a temporary mourning cycle. She will answer why she never left him; she couldn’t abandon the six kids who came with the marriage. I guess she may have actually saved one of them.
When you ask her about Billy Joe, a remarkable transformation comes over her. She actually sheds years. Her eyes become crisp and bright, her face clears and widens. Stories come pouring out. I have always liked her stories. The one about her Aunt and Uncle coming over to find her soaking wet and chasing a laughing Billy Joe around the outside of their trailer with a broom. The one about how they pulled a quick one on the guy who tried to steal watermelons off of Daddy’s truck. Or how, while on a double date, he made everyone stay in the theater for a second showing because they had missed the Bug Bunny cartoon the first time around. I like to hear her stories because it is one of the few times she is so purely happy.
But, it also means that when I think of Billy Joe, I think of the kind of happiness that Carol Lee can only remember and never have again.
After he died, after the rolling disaster of my family began to pick up momentum, after managing that disaster fell on her shoulders, my Mom turned to Christ for solace and the church provided. My Mom, my sister, and I began to attend church three times a week. I guess the love and light of Jesus was supposed to replace the love and light that went out of our lives when I was three months old.
I, the son of the greatest good ol boy Southern Missouri ever knew, was raised with the threat of hell fire and eternal damnation and my Step-Father’s limitless wrath. I was not a carefree daredevil. I was a fat kid who was a little too sensitive and a lot too awkward. And even if I eventually found my way out of that, being confronted with people like Salt n’ Pepper, people who knew and loved my father, feeling the weight of their expectations, always made me feel like I was still that kid.
So, I waited for the grin, which I was sure was about to be pointed at me, because it was always what came next. That grin that says, “What does Billy Joe Jr. got?” That expectation these old rednecks always seem to have that I am about to magically transport them back to the magical land of lost youth where Billy Joe Sr. lives forever, frozen in amber like that fictional statue.
But Billy Joe died. And I’m just his boy.
Then the whole thing took a wide round house that I never saw coming. Instead of the grin, Salt n’ Pepper got a very serious look. The he put his hand on my shoulder and gently shook his head. It was an expression of deeply felt loss, of profound failure, cosmic injustice. He looked me in the eye and he said, “If I have anything to regret, it is that I never had the chance to share with your Daddy the wonderful love I have found through Jesus Christ.”
Holy Shit! There I was waiting to hypothetically disappoint the dead parent I never knew and suddenly we had skipped that and gone right to how I in fact have disappointed my mother, the living parent who prays for my soul every single day.
I should have seen this coming. I looked at him and I suddenly saw the car dealer haircut, the baby blue polo shirt, the wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered that, earlier, he had used “Darn” where “Damn” would have fit just fine. Everything about the guy screamed evangelical soldier for Christ. If I hadn’t been stoned.
He actually wasn’t waiting for me to reveal my inner good ol’ boy. He wanted to know if I had the light of salvation living in my heart. If I failed to offer the right shibboleth, he would have wanted to have a prayer session right there on the trail to get me back to the righteous path that I deviated from so long ago. If he couldn’t win Billy Joe’s soul for Christ, maybe he could send his son home with good news for the widowed mother who worries everyday that she and her son will not be together in the kingdom of heaven. Who was I kidding, There was nothing I could say. A guy like that could spot a backsliding Christian who had fallen off the path at a hundred paces. He knew when he ran into Christy on the beach that Billy Joe Lawrence’s boy was lost in sin and it was up win him to bring him back to salvation.
But I couldn’t find my way back to Jesus any more than I can find my way back to Billy Joe. And what’s more, I had no desire to.
I stepped back and took the guy’s hand. “It was nice to meet you.” I said, “We really should be going now.”
