Wherever I Wind Up (3 page)

There is still hope for me. Isn’t there?

CHAPTER ONE

PLASTIC SPOON

H
arry Lee Dickey and Leslie Bowers got married on May 29, 1974, wearing jeans in the Davidson County Courthouse in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the anniversary of the day when Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” I don’t think that had anything to do with their choice of day. I think they picked May 29 because there was a judge available and a clerk to fill out the certificate. My father was twenty-two years old, my mother nineteen. They had met eighteen months earlier through a mutual friend at a school in town called Aquinas Junior College. Things moved quickly.

My parents didn’t get married because they were hopelessly in love. They got married because my mother was pregnant with me.

So life begins as an accident. It begins with a lot of strife and the predictable money problems, and a dump of an apartment in a complex called Natchez Trace on Nolensville Road, a part of town teeming with pawnshops and used-car lots and fast-food joints, including one named Taco Tico. Nolensville Road is your go-to neighborhood if you want to sell a ring and eat cheap nachos. The rent in the apartment is $175 per month and my parents get what they pay for. The paint is peeling and the walls are dingy and the cockroaches have the run of the place. My mom does battle with them as best she can, standing on a chair and squishing them with a towel, but they keep coming in nocturnal platoons. You don’t win against cockroaches. You just move and hope the next place doesn’t have them.

Our apartment has another problem. A neighbor problem. He lives downstairs and his name is Pitt. The centerpiece of his apartment is a pyramid of Coors Light cans that almost goes to the ceiling. When he isn’t working on his aluminum skyscraper, Pitt, a skinny man with long, shaggy hair, keeps to himself and keeps away from bathing. My parents don’t have much to do with Pitt, other than keep their distance. When they scrape together enough money to move out, they pity the next person who has to deal with Pitt, until something terrible happens.

Did you hear the news about Pitt?

No, what happened?

He died of a drug overdose.

Oh, that’s too bad.

He didn’t look too good, so you had to figure he was on something.

My mother works as a receptionist at a supply business. My father works construction by day, operating heavy machinery, and at the Davidson County Juvenile Delinquent Center by night as a security guard. One of the perks of his night job is access to jeans, which are standard issue to the delinquents upon admission.

After the delinquents wear them, my father brings them home for him and my mom. You know they’re from the JD Center because the pockets are cut out of them.

My parents learn how to get by, but not always how to get along. They almost never kiss or hold hands or have an arm around each other. When I watch Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia kiss in
Star Wars
, it’s the first time I see people being affectionate. Maybe my parents are too busy or too tired from work, or maybe they just don’t belong together and they both know it. They grit it out for as long as they can. People in my family are good at gritting things out. But when you fight a bunch and you don’t kiss at all, all the grit in the world isn’t going to get you through.

The marriage doesn’t last five years.

My father is a big, strong man, a quality athlete at six feet one inch and 205 pounds, a guy with shoulders that go on forever. He’s a man who doesn’t complain about anything, the sort of guy who could have a gaping wound in his leg and might—
might
—ask for a Band-Aid. There are people who specialize in high drama, making mountains out of every available molehill; my father specializes in no drama. He’s had surgeries that he hasn’t even talked about until he was back home. My mother is the same way: no drama at all. Together they’d make for a terrible reality TV show.

I spend my early years in Betty Waters’s day care center in Nashville, playing with toys and getting my diaper changed in the basement of Betty’s house. Mom picks me up one day after her shift is over. She is driving a Chevy Vega that has a 50 percent chance of starting on any given day; she’s constantly opening the hood and jiggling the wires in the distributor cap to get it going. On the way home that day, the Vega breaks down about a half mile down the road from Betty’s, so my mom leaves it on the shoulder, puts me on her hip, and starts walking back to Betty’s to call for help.

She’s about halfway there when a big German shepherd comes out of nowhere, running right at her, barking and baring his teeth. She keeps walking and tries not to act scared, even though she is terrified. She shifts me to her left arm, away from the dog, which keeps growling at her. She takes a few more steps, hoping he’ll give it up, but he’s all over her and now he’s biting her leg. She yells and tries to shake free, but her mobility isn’t great with Baby Dickey in her arms. The dog gets another couple of bites in. She yells again and just keeps holding tight to me, telling herself over and over:
Don’t let him get my baby.

Finally, the dog retreats and my mom continues on her way to Betty’s.

If you are a mother, you protect your children no matter what, my mother says. Nothing gets in the way of that, no matter what the story is.

My father’s story, meanwhile, takes him all over Aquinas Junior College. He is an A student who gets his grades with minimal effort. He is an actor in the school’s theater group whose work drawsfavorable notices. Most of all, he is a star in baseball and basketball, an athlete who big-league scouts like as a pitcher. Everybody calls my father Horse. People say he could’ve had a pro baseball career, especially after his impressive tryouts for the Cubs, the Reds, and the Cardinals. The Reds are the most interested and offer him $2,000 and a bus ticket to Plant City, Florida, to join their Florida State League team. It is a dream opportunity for a promising young pitcher.

But it is also 1974, the year I am born, which screws up everything.

I want to finish my education, my father tells the Reds. I can’t see leaving school to go down to Plant City to see if I can be the one-in-a-thousand ballplayer who makes it to the big leagues.

I don’t know if the Reds tried to change his mind or if my father agonized over the decision. He has never talked to me about his baseball dreams or about how he felt when the door on them closed. He has never talked about how hard it was to be a young father, or about why he went from being a dad who would do everything with his son to a dad who more or less checked out.

My dad’s approach to problems and emotions is to not say a word about them, to lock them away. It’s a skill I perfected, too, getting me through a lot of rough times as a kid and causing me a lot of rough times later.

He could throw the highest high pops in the world, my dad. We’d have a catch and he’d fire them up in the sky and I’d chase after them, wobbling around and trying to get under them and trying my best to have them wind up in my glove. My favorite days in school were when an announcement would come over the loudspeaker at Glencliff Elementary School:

“Robert Dickey to the main office … Robert Dickey to the main office.”

My dad would write down some little lie in the book, like a doctor’s appointment, sign me out, and then off we’d go to Harpeth Hills Golf Course. Maybe my mom knew about my father aiding and abetting me in playing hooky. Probably not. My dad would let me drive the cart and drink pop and knock the ball around. I wanted to play thirty-six holes.

Everything my dad and I did revolved around sports. He’d take me to Nashville Sounds games and we’d get $2 tickets and I’d root for Don Mattingly, the first baseman, and chase foul balls into the parking lot. I loved the way the horsehide of the ball smelled, the way it felt in my hand.

Look what I got, Dad, I’d say, showing the ball to my father.

Way to go, Little Horsey, he’d say. “Little Horsey” is what he always called me.

I’d spend a big part of the game down the left-field line, where the other kids and I would play a game of “cup ball,” batting around a crumpled up soda cup. I dreamed about playing in Herschel Greer Stadium one day, with my dad—the best ballplayer who ever lived—watching me. More than anything, I wanted to throw like my dad. When I won the beanbag toss competition at field day, it was the best day of the school year.

My dad and I spent the most time of all, though, at the Green Hills Family YMCA, playing basketball. Although baseball was his best sport, my dad wasn’t a shooting guard to mess with. He could bury outside shots all night, and his range was legendary.

Twenty-five feet? Thirty feet? Horse would start looking at the basket just a few steps inside half-court. I loved watching him play, and watching him referee games when he started doing that to make a little extra money.

Money was always an issue. I won’t tell you that I grew up hungry, on the bad side of a trailer park, but every day was a battle to get by. My dad’s car would run out of gas every other week. I wore my uncle Ricky’s hand-me-downs and if I absolutely needed something new, I’d get it at Kmart. We didn’t go out to eat much, but if we did, it would be Western Sizzlin or some other place with a buffet where the food was cheap and you could load up your plate as often as you wanted. Western Sizzlin was where my parents got their first silverware. Not service for eight, just a few forks and knives and spoons they smuggled back to Natchez Trace.

After my parents split up, my younger sister, Jane, and I would sometimes visit our dad in his new place in a nearby section of Nashville. It wasn’t very nice or big, and didn’t even have a kitchen. Kind of like camping out, minus the campfire. He’d make us macaroni and cheese on his hot plate. There was only room for one bed, so that’s where the three of us slept.

Whatever we did and wherever we went, my father’s advice to me was the same:

Keep doing the work. You always have to keep doing the work.

He never elaborated, but he liked saying those words. He liked language in general, liked the sound and texture of written and spoken English. He taught me one of my first grown-up vocabulary words: “enigma.”

You know what that means? he asked.

No, I don’t.

It means mystery. As in: “He’s always been an enigma to me.”

My mom played sports, too, and played them well. She was a star shortstop in softball. I had more catches with her than I did with my dad. I thought it was cool that my mom could make a play deep in the hole and gun a runner out, and that she’d slap a ball the other way and run the bases and hook-slide into home. One of her teams was Joe’s Village Inn. She worked there as a cook, a waitress, and a bookkeeper, but got most of her attention for the way she could pick up grounders. I’d go to her games on the weekends, and sometimes we’d be at the field until the early evening. Then the whole team would head over to Joe’s, a little roadside place on the corner with air that reeked of smoke and beer, with a big table in the back where all the old-timers hung out. Joe’s wasn’t a mean place; on the contrary, it was a friendly, Cheers-like place. But people acted different in Joe’s. I noticed that from the first time I went there when I was five. They were louder, happier. Sometimes much, much louder and happier. Joe’s had a bowling game by the door and a whole video arcade in the back. The bartender’s name was A.V. We had a routine.

Hey, A.V., you got any quarters? I’d say.

Here you go, Robert, he’d say, and give me a stack of coins.

Off I’d go to video heaven, to race make-believe cars and shoot make-believe guns or blow up make-believe planets.

My mother spent a lot of time at Joe’s, and at Amber III, another Nashville tavern bar she played for. The team would gather at one bar or another after games. Nobody wanted to leave, least of all my mother, who her teammates described as the life of the party.

I got very good at Pac-Man.

Miller Lite was my mother’s beverage of choice. It surprised me how thirsty she would get from playing softball. A.V. kept filling up the pitchers of Miller Lite, and my mom and her teammates kept pouring them into glasses. I lost count how many times this went on. My mother acted silly after a while—a little loopy—and then we’d drive home in the Vega or the beat-up Impala with an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.

Joe’s Village Inn was fine at the beginning, but as much as I liked playing Pac-Man and getting the infusion of quarters from A.V., I knew it was a place Jane and I didn’t belong. Of course we didn’t belong there. Joe’s was a bar and we were little kids.

Even at Joe’s, though, my mom was always loving and nurturing. The safest place in the world was being in her lap or her arms, and they were always open. Always. She gave so much comfort, so much kindness. On the sofa at home, she would lie on her side and bend her legs at the knee behind her, and I would hop in the little cubbyhole between her heels and her rear end. It was the best spot on earth to watch television.

We’d spend hours cuddled up that way during the week, but slowly the Miller Lites began to intrude. The empties would pile up fast in the garbage. Sometimes my mom would fall asleep as soon as she got home. She was still loving, just not so available. She did her best to keep up with my teachers to see how I was doing in school, but she wasn’t much for helping with homework or getting to games or activities. She was a single mom who worked hard and was beginning to drink hard. With my dad already gone from the house by the time I was in kindergarten, I learned to be by myself, and to seek diversions. I was good at that. I loved Luke Skywalker, because he was brave and ventured out in the world even though he didn’t have a mother or father. I loved how Luke was his own person, and how boldly he lived. I even named my dog, a German shepherd/golden Lab mix, after him. The canine Luke and I spent a lot of time lying down in the front yard, with my head on his belly, in our own little world. If I wasn’t there, I was with Lowell Dillon, my best pal. He lived right across from us when we moved to our little house on Timmons Street. Lowell and I were constantly playing football or war, the Cold War still enough in play that the object was always to get the Commies.