Southern Rocker Chick

  Southern Rocker Chick

  By

  Ginger Voight

  ©2014, Ginger Voight

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  Part One: Lucas

  Chapter One

  It was smoky in the alley behind Bubba Bear’s Bar. The bricked building had blackened windows protected by metal bars. A lone neon sign buzzed overhead, casting a red light over the darkened alley that was barely wide enough for our car. Mama kept it running, which caused clouds of exhaust to envelop us in the tiny space. We were forced to hang out of the opened windows just so we could breathe, but it didn’t help. Mama looked at her watch again, cursing under her breath, thinking I wouldn’t hear.

  “I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch.”

  As if on cue, the double metal doors facing the alley slammed open. Daddy stumbled through, carrying his guitar, Nadine, by the neck, which was unusual for him. Normally he kept Nadine safe and protected in an expensive case he’d risked Mama’s wrath to buy.

  The doors burst open again and someone tossed said guitar case out after him. It had been beat all to pieces. I glanced at Mama, who surveyed the scene with narrowed eyes.

  We had both seen this before.

  Daddy still wore a smile when he got into the car. He reeked of booze.

  Again… nothing we hadn’t seen before.

  Mama put the car into drive and eased down the narrow alley. “So what happened this time, Lucas?”

  “Me and management had a slight disagreement,” Daddy murmured as he rested his head on the headrest. Mama said nothing, but seethed all the way back home.

  We pulled into the drive. “Lacy,” she said through clenched teeth, “why don’t you head to the house? I’d like to have a word alone with your dad.”

  Daddy sent me a commiserating glance before he nodded. “Here,” he said, handing me his prized guitar. “Take Nadine.”

  I was quick to do so. Like Daddy, I suspected that Mama was about to turn Nadine into kindling over his head.

  Either they thought I couldn’t hear them fight or they simply didn’t care, but I knew every single hateful word they had ever uttered to each other. I could practically recite them in my sleep. Mama railed at Daddy how much better off she’d have been if she’d never met him. He’d snap back how much easier it would be to make it in music without a family. She would usually scream, “There’s the door! No one is holding a gun to your head to stay.”

  Then the words got a little softer as Daddy crooned that he didn’t want to go anywhere. He’d sing her name and, after a while, she’d chuckle and give in. The sounds would change and I’d turn up the music in my own earphones just so I wouldn’t have to hear what came next.

  We lived in a mobile home built in the 1970s. The walls weren’t thick, but the tension that often filled the place was. I’d been hiding behind earphones ever since my Daddy gave me my first pair when I was six, which came with an antiquated cassette player he’d outgrown when he moved on to CDs. I begged him for both the player and his massive cassette library. It had over a hundred cassettes, everything he had collected, and studied, since he was a kid, and to me it was more valuable than gold.

  He figured he would rather give to me than throw it away, and it would keep me safely away from his prized CDs. So this bounty became my Christmas gift in 1996. I had been studying the sounds of the 60s, 70s and 80s ever since.

  I took the key from the chain around my neck to let myself into the cramped trailer. By 2002, most people called my type of dwelling a manufactured home. But I had been in a manufactured home, so I knew there was a big difference between what I lived in and what some of the luckier kids in the park lived in. Those had fireplaces and spa tubs and decks, not to mention twice the space. They felt like mansions in comparison, sitting side by side with singlewides and funky aluminum travel trailers that made up Friendly Hills Estates, inadvertently creating a class system between the lower classes forced to live there.

  We, sadly, were near the bottom of that particular totem pole, and had been my entire life.

  My “house” was a classic 12-foot singlewide. Wind howled through the aluminum siding in the winter, and rain beat down on the flat roof in the summer. We had a back door and a front door, but only the front door had any steps to get inside. They were wooden, weather-beaten and wobbly, without so much as a railing to keep us stable as we climbed the three steep steps.

  The kitchen and living room were on one side of the trailer, the bedrooms on the other. I had been into walk-in closets bigger than my room, which was separated by a narrow, shared bath with my parents’. The carpet was brown shag throughout, which was a tad darker than the paneling on the walls. The countertops in the kitchen were olive, as were the appliances. It was 1970 right down to every last felt paintings that still hung on the walls. The furniture consisted of a couch with sagging springs and a recliner that Daddy had positioned right in front of the console TV that had given out ten years ago. A newer, smaller one sat right on top.

  The place hadn’t changed much in twelve years.

  My grandmother had willed it to my mother when she passed, just months before I was born. It was the only thing of value she had to give, and she knew my poor Mama didn’t have a pot to piss in. She had just married Daddy, which had broken Mama and Grandma apart in the months preceding her death. They were still estranged when Mama got the call she had been dreading, so no one was more surprised than my mother when she ended up with my Grandma’s house.

  She had done everything she could to keep it almost in exactly the same condition since. She hadn’t changed one picture on the walls or one curtain in the windows. There were new things scattered around the place, but they were always in addition to everything else, rather than replacing what was old or broken.

  And they felt just as out of place as the fancy doublewide parked right next door.

  I knew it was important to Mama to preserve how it had been just because she regretted how things had ended. She couldn’t even walk into my room, with its cheerful pink carpet and walls, without bursting into tears.

  I knew she remembered her time as a child there, before things got hard… before things got complicated… before things happened that she couldn’t take back. My Mama often waxed poetic on her impoverished upbringing, telling me the thing she had always loved best was sharing it with her mother.

  “It wasn’t much,” she’d tell me as she braided my long brown hair. “But it was still home.”

  So that was how I looked at that trailer now, despite all the hard times we’d had there.

  I carried Nadine to the back bedroom. Though Daddy wanted to mount his instruments on the wall in the living room, Mama had strictly forbidden it. His music was one of the things Grandma had liked least about him.

  At least that was Mama’s story, backed up with a box filled with letters Grandma had written to Mama the year they were estranged. They had never been sent from what I could tell. I’m pretty sure Mama had never read them prior to her death, but I knew for a fact sh
e read them weekly ever since.

  She’d shared them with me on my tenth birthday, to connect me with the grandmother I never knew. I think it was her way of getting back at Daddy, since he’d spent that birthday, like so many before it, away playing at a bar rather than spending the day with us.

  Grandma’s words rang even truer the more disappointed either of us became.

  “You can’t trust a musician, Jules,” Grandma had written. “They’ll break your heart. And then where will you be?”

  Despite the dire predictions, Daddy had never bailed, though I’m sure at times he wanted to. My Mama had been pissed practically since the day I was born. I didn’t remember her ever being happy. She didn’t sing. She didn’t smile. She just barreled through each and every day with grim purpose. She was always darting between the two or three jobs she had to hold down so she could pay the rent for the trailer park, keep the car in running condition and keep me in new clothes for school. When she was home, she was stressed out, cussing Daddy up and down a blue streak in fights that, just like our depressing trailer, never really changed. She was always pissed that he had been fired, again, and would force her to get another shift or another job or another man, again.

  She tried to connect with me, but I knew I reminded her a lot of Grandma. I looked just like her, as evidenced by all the photos packed into album after album. The sticky white pages no longer held the plastic film in place, but the old photos with cardboard backs would stick like they were bonded with cement.

  I never knew when the photos were taken or with whom, so that meant I only got half of the story, the part I could see.

  My curiosity peaked when I found all the photos where my musician-hating grandma danced in darkened bars, hanging off the arms of just about every guy in the band. She sang and she danced, which sounded a lot more fun to me than working in some restaurant or truck stop.

  Mama didn’t have much to say about party girl Grandma and shut any question down about it when I asked. “She was young and stupid, like everyone eventually is,” she would say before she’d slam the album shut on Grandma, who sported little miniskirts back in the day, her hair teased almost to the ceiling.

  Late at night, after Mama had gone to bed (or gone to work) I would sneak an album back to my bedroom and fantasize about the secret life Grandma must have led. Laverne Spencer was clearly a part of Austin nightlife from the iconic 1960s, singing backup on stage or dancing for the band. There were pictures of her with up-and-coming musicians who eventually hit it big. There were pictures of her on that stage by herself, lost in the glorious music to which she bore witness.

  Since I loved music from the day I was born, I was so jealous of her I couldn’t see straight. Sometimes I’d grab a hairbrush and sing all the hits from the late 60s in my bedroom, crooning to my mirror to emulate her photos. I couldn’t think of anything more exciting to be up on that stage. I would pretend I was meeting the biggest acts in the world. “Oh thank you, Mick. Of course I’d love to sing backup for you on your new album.”

  It felt silly but it also felt right. I felt plugged-in to my destiny, even though it was such a fantastic destiny to consider. So it became my secret world I had to hide from everyone. Even my friends wouldn’t understand. I’d sing to myself and no one else. I just knew everyone would think it was some huge joke that some trailer trash kid wanted to be a superstar.

  “You? Want to be a singer? You can’t even read in front of the class!”

  “What are you supposed to wear for your videos? A couple of bandages for those mosquito bites on your chest?”

  “Yeah. Go be a rock star. Maybe you can last longer than a week at a club, unlike your dad.”

  Mama thought my passion came from Daddy, which only made her resent him more. “Don’t fill her head with foolish dreams, Lucas,” she would say.

  “The only foolish dream is the one you let slip away,” he’d respond before he gave me a reassuring wink.

  He was the only one who understood.

  But, to save us both some hassle, we never indulged our love for music in front of her.

  Honestly, some of my favorite memories of my dad came about when he was unemployed. He’d pick me up from school and take me to the park. We’d swing right next to each other, singing some of his favorite tunes.

  Those memories of my Dad always made me smile.

  So while I was pretty sure Daddy got canned that night, I looked forward to the time we’d spend together in the coming days. I’d memorize a new song from one of his prized tapes and surprise him after Mama left for work the next day.

  I had just slipped under my blanket when the door banged open to the mobile home.

  It was about to get ugly.

  “Get off my fucking back, Jules! I’ve got it covered.”

  “Oh, right,” she sneered. “Which of our possessions do you want to pawn now? You might as well take this ring,” she said right before I heard something metallic hit the floor. “Although I don’t think you’ll get anything out of it. It’s been worthless to me for the last thirteen years.”

  “Jules,” he said in that softer voice to placate his angry wife.

  “Don’t Jules me,” she snapped. “You know we have to pay the registration on the car, get the brakes fixed, get a new fridge, and Lacy is going to start middle school in a month. How the hell are we supposed to buy her school clothes?”

  “I told you I have it covered,” he repeated. “I was talking to this guy at the club…,” he started, but she was quick to cut him off.

  “Talking or drinking?” she asked. “And was it really a guy? Or another girl?”

  It got quiet for a minute. “You want to live in the past, that’s fine. But I told you then and I’ll tell you now. Mistakes or not, if you’re in it for me, I’m in it for you. I love you, babe.”

  Mama had no response to that. I heard her stomp down the hallway and slam into her bedroom.

  When I woke up the next morning, Mama had left early for work and Daddy was curled up on the sofa, asleep. Quietly I made him some scrambled eggs and toast, which I served to him as he brushed the sleep out of his eyes. “Hey, Lil Bit,” he said with a smile. “Come give your old dad a hug.”

  I let him draw me into his lap. The way he rested his head against me, I knew that he had a massive hangover headache. It, too, was not new. “Eat something, Daddy,” I said. “You’ll feel better.”

  He kissed my forehead before he reached for the plate. “You take good care of me, Lil Bit. You’re going to make a fine wife someday. Just not too soon,” he added with a wink. “Wait till you’re 30. Just to be sure.”

  I said nothing as I studied him. It was clear he regretted he hadn’t followed that advice. I retrieved the aspirin from the kitchen cabinet, bringing him a glass of water to wash it down. He lay back down again after he finished his breakfast and slept almost until noon.

  If Mama was there, she would have had a conniption.

  To offset any blowups, I decided to clean the house, just to help Mama out. I worked quietly as Daddy dozed, cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom thoroughly before I turned my attention to detail work, which included taking all of Grandma’s old knickknacks from the curio cabinet where they were housed and cleaning them one by one.

  It always made Mama happy to see them sparkle and shine.

  I reorganized the videos and the CDs on the entertainment center, which always made me feel better. The more perfect and organized things got, the more manageable life felt. I decided to get on my hands and knees and clean out the lower cabinets in the kitchen. I saw something gold and gleaming just under the stove.

  It was my Mama’s wedding ring.

  With a sigh, I took it into Mama and Daddy’s room, placing it in the music box with the dancing ballerina inside.

  That, too, had come from Grandma, as did what few pieces of jewelry remained.

  “It’ll be okay,” Daddy said from the doorway.

  I looked up at him. “I know,” I
said, though I really didn’t.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let me shower and change and then you can help me with the set list for my new gig.”

  “You have a new gig?”

  He nodded. “I tried to tell your mama last night but she was too angry. It’s huge, honey. This could be it. Why don’t you fix us a snack or something?”

  “Okay,” I said immediately as I jumped to my feet.

  I had just finished the grilled cheese when Daddy joined me back in the living room, Nadine in hand. He sat in the recliner as I served him. “How do you feel about getting into the fair free this year?”

  I was beside myself. Most years we couldn’t afford to go, even with the free ticket I got from school. Mama and Daddy couldn’t afford to spend what little precious money we had on rigged games, expensive fried food or rides, so it seemed rather pointless to pay for their tickets to just walk around watching everyone else have all the fun. “I’d love it, Daddy. But how?”

  He started strumming on his guitar. “Your old dad will be singing at the fair,” he sang. “And my whole family gets to be there,” he added with a wink. “So come along, we’ll sing a song, and we’ll both be big stars at the fair.”

  I clapped my hands and laughed. He was silly but I sure loved how he dreamed big. It always made me feel better when I did the same. “You’d really let me sing with you, Daddy?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ve wanted to get you on stage since you were five years old, but your mother would have had my head on a stake if I ever took you into some seedy bar.” He reached for his sheet music. “So, which song should we sing?”

  I stared at him, stupefied. “You’re serious?”

  He nodded. “A friend of mine needs a guitarist for her band. These are some of the songs she gave me to learn.”

  She, I thought to myself. “Was it really a guy?” Mama had so astutely challenged the night before. “Or another girl?”

  Daddy went on, jazzed about his oh-so-brilliant plan. “I figure you can learn the backup of one of them and then we put you on stage. You’re gonna put butts in the seat, baby girl,” he said with another wink, before he started tuning his guitar.