Waylon Read online

  And yet, people loved living there. It’s a rough place to be, if you want to know the truth, but if you can survive Littlefield, then you can pretty well handle the rest of the world. I have to go back every once in a while, just to see where I’ve been and who I am. I don’t know why that is. Daddy never wanted to leave there, and Momma’s never wanted to leave. People who live there bitch about it all the time, but they don’t want to go anywhere else. Home is home no matter where it is.

  Littlefield gets in your soul, in your blood, in the same way sand gets in your craw. I think that’s part of my sound. All the damn sand I swallowed is in my singing.

  Did you ever parch peanuts? I would sit around an old potbellied stove with my dad, putting peanuts in a pan and roasting them a little bit. We’d eat those peanuts listening to the Grand Ole Opry, and when Bill Monroe would sing, Daddy would look at me and grin.

  He loved Bill Monroe. He was my dad’s favorite singer; I think he liked that high voice. We would park the pickup outside the house and stick some booster cables through the window and attach one end to the truck’s battery and the other to the radio. We were able to pull in the Louisiana Hayride, and on Saturday nights the Opry came through loud and clear over WSM.

  Daddy never played out much after I was born, but since nobody had televisions or record players, the only entertainment was going over to people’s houses and singing to each other. He’d sing “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and “Old Zebra Dunn,” and a cowboy song about some old boy who had a girl he was going to wed. He took her out on a cattle drive with him and the Indians attacked and an arrow come and “dashed out her brains.” Those were the actual lyrics.

  He used a thumb-and-finger plucking style, and I later found out that Jimmie Rodgers and Mother Maybelle Carter did that a lot. My dad taught Momma a few songs, and when I learned to play, me and her would sing together, “Maple on the Hill” and “The Girl in the Blue Velvet Band.” She put all her soul into her singing; she could be so moved by it. Whenever she heard Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway,” she had to go outside and cry.

  I was fascinated with the guitar from when I had to stand on tiptoes to reach the strings. It was Momma who showed me how to shape my first chords. She was real patient, sitting on the couch and humming “Thirty Pieces of Silver,” placing my fingers so I could change keys. She liked C and D. I was guitar crazy by then. They had a drive-in theater about a mile behind the house, and one week they had an Ernest Tubb movie. For the next month, I’d sit out with a broomstick behind the cafe my Grandpa Shipley had for a time, listening to the jukebox, trying to get my little squeaky voice down there low enough to sing like Ernest Tubb: “Yes I know I’ve been untrue / And I’ve hurt you through and through / Take me back and try me one more time—”

  The first guitar I ever touched was my uncle Pat’s. It was more like a bow and arrow than a guitar, and I tried my damnedest to play that. Next door to us were some boys that moved in from Arkansas: snuff-dipping, guitar-playing, way-back-in-the-hills Arkansawyers. They had a Gibson, and their real names were Rastus and Sambo. There wasn’t anything black about them, and they let me bang on their guitar every once in a while. My uncle Jabbo also had one, a Kalamazoo with a hole in it. It had a good tone. That’s where I learned to play “Kentucky.”

  Then Momma pulled cotton and bought me one for five dollars. I guess it was an old Stella. I don’t know if it even had a name on it. She bought it from this guy named Weldon Tate. Then we ordered a guitar, a Harmony Patrician, and it came in time for Christmas. Tommy got a mandolin. I had that guitar for years. I even sanded it off one time and put a varnish on it, and ruined it of course. I painted it, and polished it, and put my name on there like Ernest Tubb had on his.

  I tried to take a couple of lessons, but the guy I was taking them from spent more time trying to show me how to hold the neck than playing. I just got frustrated with it and wouldn’t go back. But I wanted to play so badly I went ahead and learned myself. Daddy had a little song called “Spanish Fandango American Style,” and that was the first thing I ever learned to pick. It was so pretty, but it wasn’t really a tune. It was more of an exercise. Momma taught me another song I used to practice: “I had a cow / She had a hollow horn / Fed that cow / On green popcorn—”

  By this time Daddy had set himself up a produce store at the corner of Xit and Third streets. It doubled as a creamery, and he bought and sold dairy products, eggs, and chickens. It was the job of us kids to test the cream for butterfat and candle the eggs. Daddy took cotton sacks and hung them in the back where we’d keep the chickens, and we’d go in there with a light and hold up the eggs. Sometimes you would see a bloody speck, and that was a number two; and number threes were cracked. Number ones didn’t have anything wrong with them. All the bakeries in town bought the number twos or number threes, and I always thought of that every time I would eat a doughnut.

  Daddy seemed prosperous in that time of our life. Not rich or anything, but he had a little money ahead in the bank. Farmers would pull up and I would go and get the cream out of the car, or grab buckets for the eggs, and while we tested them, the farmers would sit on the porch, or just inside the front door, chewing tobacco and whittling on a piece of wood; we called it the spit-and-whittle bench. Or the Dead Pecker bench.

  I drove them old farmers nuts, trying to learn to play the guitar in the back room. I’d sit on an old feed sack, pounding away, and every once in a while one of them would come in the back, snuff rolling down his face, saying “If you’re playing that ol’ guitar in parts, well, leave my part out. ’Cause you ain’t worth a shit. I know that ol’ Bob Wills, and he ain’t nothing but an old alky-holic. Anybody who plays that ol’ guitar they won’t never amount to a hill of beans, and you’ll just be an old alky-holic.”

  Alcohol never seemed to be my problem. Daddy didn’t drink; he had an ulcerated stomach and the most he would ever do was act like he was swigging out of the bottle. He just never liked the taste of it, and I never have either. It’s probably saved my life on more than one occasion. Over on the Shipley side, it was another story. My momma’s uncle O. C. West was drunk all the time. I don’t ever remember seeing him sober. Once I saw him mixing up grapefruit juice and brake fluid, that’s how bad he was. Finally they sent him off to a sanitarium. He came back when they said there was nothing they could do to help him. He wasn’t an alcoholic; he was a drunkard, and there is a difference. He got drunk because he liked to, and that’s all there was to it.

  We kept the produce store till the early fifties, when the bottom fell out of the farmers’ market and Daddy went broke. It almost put me off chickens; they really are nasty birds. They’ll peck each other’s eyes out, given the chance. I hated those damn things, but I hated more to watch Daddy out of work again, smoking Bull Durham and eating beans seven days a week.

  When we moved to Austin Street, Momma covered mine and Tommy’s room with cowboy wallpaper. We’d sit back with our BB guns and shoot at the cowboys, one by one.

  You’d figure growing up in West Texas we’d practically be cowboys ourselves, but most of our six-gun lore came from the movies. I considered us farmers. Texas wasn’t the West, and somehow, I didn’t even consider New Mexico to be the West. Arizona was the West to me. You just never thought of Littlefield as cowboy country. Flat plains: there was nothing exotic about that.

  We’d go down to the Palace Theatre on Saturday afternoons. I was eleven years old, and I had a quarter. One thing I always bought was a box of peanuts, a round box about four inches tall, and along with the peanuts it would also contain a nickel, or a penny, or sometimes even a dime or a quarter. It cost five cents, and I’d go to the movies and that would cost another ten. Later I’d buy a dime toy at Perry’s or Ben Franklin’s, a puzzle or a G.I. Joe, and that was my Saturday quarter.

  When Rex Allen came along, I thought he was such a great singer. I was never real crazy about Roy Rogers’s singing at all, but I loved his movies. Gene Autry and Roy were almost like
enemies, fighting over who was going to be King of the Cowboys. Tim Holt was the one that always looked weird to me. And the Durango Kid usually had a guest spot featuring Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. It always impressed me that Tommy Duncan never took the cigarette out of his mouth while he was singing.

  In particular, Lash Larue was my favorite. He dressed all in black and carried a bullwhip. Like most of the heroes of the day, he had a horse, Black Diamond, and a sidekick, Fuzzy. His movies, like Son of Billy the Kid or Mark of the Lash, played downtown quite often, and we’d all go and pretend we were him fanning his revolver and cracking his whip. I even made a whip out of a conveyer belt, and put a shoestring on the end of it. Then you could pop it. I tried to wrap it around Tommy’s or Wendell’s legs, but they wouldn’t let me trip them with it.

  Lash came to our town on a guest appearance in the late forties, and I was right in the front row. He was going to do his act onstage, and they were also going to show some of his movies. The Palace had a small stage, maybe twenty feet wide at most, and he was in the middle of his whip act, guns and all. He missed and whipped the screen, and ripped it.

  When the lights came back on and the cartoons started, I went out to the lobby to get a drink of water. There stood Lash Larue. He was having it out with Bill Chesire, who owned the theater, and Truitt Benson, the manager. Lash still had his gun on, was carrying his whip, and had his hat cocked over.

  “You’re going to pay for the screen,” they were telling him.

  “I told you the stage was too short,” he said. “I told you it was dangerous, even for my assistant. You should’ve had insurance.”

  They said, “You’re going to pay for it.”

  Lash looked them straight in the eye. “I got a gun and a whip that says I won’t.”

  I looked around and thought, I’m the only one that ever heard that. I bet God wasn’t even listening. From then on, if I was playing cowboys out on the prairie, no matter who I was supposed to be, somewhere in my dialogue I had “I got a gun and a whip that says I won’t.”

  The cowboy movies were in black and white, and so was their notion of good and evil. All my life I was told you were going to Heaven or you were going to hell. There was no middle ground, no in-between. The Church of Christ taught that “straight and narrow is the way and few will be that’ll find it.” I was getting lost more’n most.

  Football, fighting, fucking—the three f’s of West Texas, and probably a whole lot more places besides. I was on the football team at junior high, a pretty good kicker and playing in the backfield some. I could go up to the Catholic dances on Bula Highway if I needed to prove how tough I was. And I was also starting to discover girls.

  Or maybe they were starting to discover me. These two little girls who lived down the street, the Griffin sisters, said they’d give me some pie if I took my clothes off. They told me to lay down on top of them. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. From there, it was all downhill. I used to neck all the time with another girl from the neighborhood. We had this junk car and I had her in the back seat, and she had her panties off and everything, but her little brother wouldn’t leave us alone.

  Mostly we sat around in a clubhouse we had across the alley from my house, a shack in back of this old woman’s house, telling dirty jokes and lying about women—the ones we had and the ones we were going to get. We’d make up ghost stories. Most of all, we’d smoke.

  It sometimes seemed like we’d smoke anything. Old cigarette butts that we’d pick off the streets and blend together in roll-ups. Grape vines. Cedar bark. You inhale that and it’s something you never get over. It’ll take the hide off your tongue. We would’ve smoked a pickle if it wasn’t so soggy and hard to light.

  Where there’s smoke, there usually follows fire. One morning, about seven-thirty, I was sitting around behind a granary with Tommy, smoking away. There was a board up against the wall that had some cotton caught on it. We’d touch it with the tip end of the cigarette and it would smolder. We did that for a while, amusing ourselves, and we thought it had gone out. I left and went up to Grandpa’s house in Morton with Daddy. That night we came back and found the granary had burned down. Runny-nosed Johnny White told on us, and the police and fire department came knocking at the door. “Your boys burned the granary down,” they said.

  “What time did that happen?” asked Daddy.

  “Well, it happened at eight o’clock this morning.”

  Daddy looked relieved. “Eight o’clock this morning those boys were in Morton at their grandpa’s with us.” Of course, nobody stopped to realize that cotton will smolder for an hour before it catches on fire.

  We weren’t so lucky with the Hilltop Dairy. It was up on the only high spot in town, more of an incline than a hill, really, on the fringe of the prairie. We set that on fire one time, watching as the brown grass around it charred and curled in wisps of smoke, feeling the heat on our faces.

  It seemed like one thing led to another. We broke the lights in the school ballpark with slingshots; we cracked windows inside the school. We scraped teachers’ cars with nails; mean kid stuff. Once we broke into this truck that the Curtis Candy Company was using as a storehouse and stole a bunch of candy. We took it back to the clubhouse and ate it. You’ve never lived till you’ve tried to chew a month-old marshmallow.

  They finally caught up with us, and there was a real possibility they were fixing to send us to reform school. A guy named Skipper Smith was all set to pack us away. I think he was more concerned with us cussing than he was with any of the mischief we’d gotten into. But Houston Hoover, a scoutmaster, spoke up and he said that he’d like to have us down at the youth center one day a week. He knew we had just gotten off on the wrong foot, and that reform school would likely only make us worse.

  It was Daddy who really let me off the hook. I might’ve escaped going to reform school, but I was still depressed. I thought I was the rottenest thing on earth, that I’d ruined their lives and they were never going to care anything more about me.

  One day Daddy and I were in the produce store. He had his back to me, working testing cream. I was really down, thinking suicide and everything. I didn’t want to live.

  “Son,” he finally said, not turning around. “I know you feel so bad ’bout what you did. All those things were wrong, but you can only feel bad for so long. You’ve got to forget it, and put it behind you. I want you to know one thing. You were wrong, but I’ve done worse.”

  That’s all he said. What a way to let me up. Momma might never cut you any slack, but Daddy was all heart and forgiveness.

  School and I were destined not to get along. I never could seem to get much work done during the year, and I think I probably had some learning and comprehending difficulties. I was a terrible student, even though at the end of the year I would work real hard and get the teacher on my side so they would pass me.

  They still enjoyed giving me a hard time. I had a tough ol’ redhead for a teacher in sixth grade at the primary school. One day I was wearing one of those crinkly shirts that you could see through; they came out about the time they first started dealing with synthetic materials. We didn’t have money to eat in school, so we went home for lunch.

  I came back late, starting to my seat. “Wait a minute, Waylon,” I heard the teacher say. I turned around, and I realized she could see a pack of cigarettes in my pocket.

  “What are you doing late?” she asked in a tone of voice that said she already had an inkling.

  “I had to go to the store for my uncle,” I said.

  “And whose cigarettes are those in your pocket?”

  “Them’s my uncle’s cigarettes.”

  She took the pack out. Four or five were missing. “If you just went to the store and got these for your uncle, how come they’re opened?”

  “I had to give some to these guys at the store.”

  “Tell your uncle I’ve got his cigarettes and come see me. In the meantime,” she said, opening her d
esk drawer to get out a straight-edge paddle, “I’m going to give you about five licks for not getting them back to your uncle.”

  Hell, five licks wasn’t bad. The schools had corporal punishment, and they’d hit you on the butt, right in front of the class, girls, boys, and all. Every teacher had a paddle. Most of them had two or three. Some would have little short skinny paddles, some would have big long ones; some used rulers. Mrs. Crosby, she’d open a drawer and show you all the paddles and say “pick out the one you want.” You got to choose the one that beat your butt.

  I lasted up to the tenth grade. One day I took a corner shortcut across the grass, when I wasn’t supposed to. We had to keep to the sidewalks. The principal came at me with a paddle, and I took it away from him and told him I was going to whip his ass with it. It was a standoff for a couple of hours. Finally the football coach stepped in and talked me out of it.

  I came down with yellow jaundice after that and was sick for a couple of weeks. When I was well enough to go back to school, the high school superintendent called me into his office. He was a big fat guy, with an overbearing attitude to match. “Are you going to play football?” he asked.

  I shook my head no. He said, “Then why would you want to come back to school?”

  There wasn’t much thinking over to be done. I imagine he was tired of messing with me. “That’s a pretty good question. Maybe you’re right.” And I quit.

  I was sixteen years old.

  My dad had one thing to say about my leaving Littlefield High. “If you’re smart enough to quit school, you’re smart enough to go to work.”