All That Is Bitter and Sweet (38 page)

Colleen’s friendship made a profoundly lonely and ignominy-filled year endurable. But it was not enough to keep me safe. Although he never used in front of me, it was obvious that my dad’s disease worsened with each passing month. He has since been candid with me about the extent of his addiction while he was home and how obsessed he was with me going to sleep so he could get down to business. While away, he would call me in the middle of the night and rage incoherently; when he was in town, he was by turns paranoid and angry. His thinking grew increasingly distorted, and he began telling me it was in my power to remedy some of our family’s interpersonal ills. He would demand I do something about Mom, complaining about the way she treated him, how she prevented him from seeing Sister, and the Judds, on the road. He was in this mode when he decided that I needed to know the “big family secret.” In the living room of the apartment, he told me that he was not my sister’s biological father. I’d had no idea until that moment.

I took this information stoically. Although it was shocking, it also made sense. I already felt our family was a screwed-up, crazy, irredeemable mess, a family full of hatred, fighting, accusations, manipulation, abandonment, and emotional and physical violence. Disapproval, contempt, manipulation, and demonizing others—this was the major currency of each relationship. This information fit perfectly into the helpless, hopeless container of my broken heart. It made such screwed-up sense that Dad knew this thing that Mom hated him for knowing, this thing that she manically feared he would use against her. I realized it was as if he had a loaded, cocked gun and he just … walked around with it all the time, and she was desperately, creatively scrounging for ways to restrain, control, or trump him. And both of them used us kids in their power struggle. The lie took on ever-greater meaning, proportion, and without being spoken about out loud, it actually dominated our lives mercilessly.

It didn’t occur to me to tell my sister. I had no voice and no power in this family, so why would it? Instead, along with the many other secrets I was well practiced in keeping, this became one more that weighed me down with a crushing sadness that was nearly killing me.

And if that weren’t making me crazy enough, the midnight phone calls grew worse and more frequent. I was so unskilled—I was a child, and it never occurred to me not to answer the phone. I would be lying in bed, alone in my dad’s apartment, the phone would ring, and I would pick it up and brace myself. He would start cursing about Nana and work his way through the family from there. Once, when I was so utterly shattered that I hung up on him, he called back and threatened to kill me.

After many of these nights in a row, for some reason I received a phone call from Ken Stilts, Mom and Sister’s manager. It is possible I called him; I don’t recall. He could hear in my voice that something was wrong. I broke down, and a staccato description of how I had been living poured out.

My mother, sister, and Nana happened to be together that day in Washington, D.C. Ken told them what I’d shared, and within minutes it was decided that I should go live with Nana. She had gotten remarried to a man named Wib Rideout, and she and my mom had finally repaired their relationship. Nana would be happy to take me. But of all my grandparents, I had spent the least amount of time with her over the years. It had simply never occurred to me that she would want or accept me.

I leaped out of bed, packed up the Honda Accord that by that time my sister had given me for my sixteenth birthday (which arrived too late to be of much help during the actual school year), and drove back and forth to eastern Kentucky twice, moving myself to my ancestral and spiritual home. Avalon, at last!

Dad, to say the least, did not take it well. When I told him over the phone, he started screaming at me for being ungrateful, for leaving him after all he had done for me. He tracked me down at Nana’s and flew into another rage. I don’t remember the details of what happened next, but this is what Dad tells me transpired: It was about ten o’clock at night when I met him in front of the hotel where he was staying on Winchester Avenue, right down the street from Papaw Judd’s filling station. He demanded to know why “I was doing this” to him.

“I did the best I could for you,” he bellowed. “But if it’s not enough, if you don’t accept it, fuck you! I’m out of here.”

I don’t remember if I said anything back to him, if I ran away or stood there and took it. I was obviously not going back with him. He had, to use his own words, publicly “divorced” me. He was saying he was out of my life for good.

Finally moving in with Nana was my redemption. She proceeded to give me what I had had for only brief stints in my entire life: three hot meals a day cooked by a grown-up rather than by me; someone to wash my gym clothes on Fridays; a safe, consistent, and abuse-free home. She listened to me. She supported me. She bought me pearls when I made straight A’s. When I asked her why, shocked at the gift, she said she felt that others did not give me the recognition I deserved. I didn’t really know what she meant.

In addition to having Nana, my beloved Mamaw and Papaw were of course nearby, prior to and after they came home from their usual winter in Florida. I could go there for breakfast. I could stop by every day after school. This, for me, was nothing short of heaven. It was what I had been trying to organize, manipulate, connive, and make happen my entire life; I had begged, in many ways, many times, to be allowed to live in eastern Kentucky. I finally was, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it saved my life.

I had one year of being a normal teenager. I confess that I had a
Miami Vice
poster taped to my bedroom wall. I fell in love with the movie
Out of Africa
, listened to Billie Holiday records and U2’s first album, and dated a smart, kind, delightful boy. And once again I loved going to class. I went from nearly failing geometry at Sayre to finishing eighth in my class at Paul G. Blazer High School—the same school my mother had attended twenty-two years ago.

I had known I wanted a higher education since I first learned to spell the word “college.” But when the time had come to apply to schools during my senior year in high school, I was flummoxed by the process. I remember sitting at my Nana Judd’s kitchen table in Ashland, struggling over the forms. My godmother, Piper, had stepped into the breach, providing an effective adult presence in my life in the area of higher education. When no one else was paying attention, it was she who adamantly insisted that not going to college was not an option. She supervised everything, right down to making sure I had asked people for letters of recommendation. Nana was supportive, too, as I struggled to find a suitable topic for my essays. But even with Piper’s firm guidance, I bungled much of the process, in part because of the heavy burden of shame that undermined my every step. There was a severe internal critic that told me I was not good enough to go to the schools that teachers had suggested and which Piper expected of me. I sabotaged myself to the extent that I didn’t mail in most of my applications on time. I had my heart set on the University of Virginia, which was the only application I actually mailed, but I didn’t make the cut. So I hastily applied to the University of Kentucky and was accepted into the class of 1990. As it turned out, it was the best choice of all.

This period of reaclamation was deep. But it was not perfect. It was embedded in the broader family context of ongoing, untreated addiction and dysfunction. I rarely saw my mother and sister, who had progressed in their increasingly unhealthy relationship, which was exacerbated by their professional success and their cojoined lifestyle on the road. My grandparents still were unfriendly with each other. But they all declared a truce and attended my party at Nana’s house to celebrate my high school graduation. The only one missing was Dad.

My father and I remained estranged for years. In college, I would occasionally run into him at my favorite Mexican restaurant, High on Rose, and because he was my dad, I would reflexively go to him, expecting to speak to him. He would be terribly chilly to me, and I couldn’t understand why. When a sorority sister with whom I did most of my running around commented that she did not like the way my dad treated me, I realized that hey, maybe it wasn’t so good. I had accepted unacceptable behavior for so long, from so many, I didn’t know that I had the right not to tolerate it. He shared that we ran into each other once on an airplane and another time at the Breeders’ Cup, and that both times we passed each other without a word. Sister made an effort in fits and starts to keep up with Dad—occasionally inviting him to concerts (which caused massive drama between Mom and her) and taking him along to meet the Rolling Stones, a band he’d always loved. When he was around, I had no idea what to say, think, feel, or do.

After making an indelible debut when I was in high school, the Judds rocketed to superstardom during my college years in a story that is by now a familiar staple of country music lore. Suffice it to say that I was content to stay out of their spotlight, celebrating and enjoying their successes mostly from a distance. Sometimes I would join them on the road for a date or two, and everyone made me feel welcomed. In spite of the considerable hardship offstage and what their music cost me emotionally, I was always tremendously proud of the Judds. The band welcomed me warmly, and I enjoyed hanging out at the crew meal after watching soundcheck, which I made a point of attending. I loved listening to my sister, relaxed and carefree in this setting, experiment vocally and musically, reprising the Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt sounds I had grown up listening to her sing in her bedroom. In these informal performances, I glimpsed the vocal virtuosity and commanding stage presence that would eventually characterize her solo career, and lead reviewers to declare her “Elvis-like” and the “greatest voice since Patsy Cline.”

Come evening I loved attending shows, slipping out into a sold-out arena just as the lights went down, feeling the crowd’s excitement, and watching, with deep pleasure, the joy my mother and sister brought to tens of thousands people each concert. I had my own favorite songs and waited to hear how my sister would hit certain notes, appreciating creative treatments she would give signature Judd licks, especially savoring the bluesy numbers that really showed off her remarkable voice. I beamed when folks recognized their favorite songs, watching women cut loose to “Girls’ Night Out,” loving it when couples wrapped their arms around each other’s waists on “Love Is Alive,” and laughing at the bit in “Mama He’s Crazy” when some poor fool of a man near the front would be put on the spot to sing into my mother’s microphone. After shows, I would sleep with my sister on her pull-out sofa bed, and some of my fondest memories are of those calm nights after electrifying shows, reading Ellen Gilchrist and Flannery O’Connor to her, with her little dog, Loretta Lynn, curled up with us, Mom up front in the jump seat looking at “life’s highway,” as she called it, eating her nightly bowl of popcorn with Banjo by her side as the miles rolled by.

Mom slowed down a bit after she discovered in 1990, while I was a senior in college, that she had contracted hepatitis C, a chronic, potentially fatal liver disease. The Judds embarked on an emotional farewell tour, after which Wynonna had to launch a solo career. My sister was bereft, while also stunningly successful. I continued to participate from the distant sidelines, as usual. I found that tour to be an especially histrionic one, and in general I didn’t enjoy the drama. I had already had too much of it.

Mom’s semiretirement from recording and touring gave her some time on her hands, and she used it to write her memoirs. In 1993, the whole life story that she had invented for herself and told to others for years was suddenly put out there in black and white.
Love Can Build a Bridge
was Naomi Judd’s self-portrait as a quirky but lovable single mom who became a star after overcoming great hardships while raising her two daughters by herself, after being abandoned by her no-good husband. The problem was some of it was simply false, and often what was not patently false was at least hotly disputed by family members, who remembered things very differently.