Like Me (12 page)

I climbed aboard my international flight the next day and confided my parents’ potential break-up to my drummer, Preston, who’d been as close to me as any family member. He was concerned, and did his best to provide comfort during that trip. Preston had been around my folks a good amount of time, and he shared my sentiment about the situation, that it wasn’t so much sad as it was weird. Whatever warts and dysfunction my parents’ marriage may have had, they just seemed to have a style
and a visible
that makes sense
to their relationship. People, including me (especially after I became a young adult), enjoyed being around them. Most of the time, they were funny and clever.

As I watched my bandmates slip into sleep at thirty-eight-thousand feet, I began to dissect what had happened in the recent twenty-four hours of my life. I wondered if Aunt Char had called to tip me off, or if she had called to deliver a message sent by one or both of my parents. If it had been the latter, I thought, that would be bizarre, because my mother and I had always been so close, even into my adulthood. Why wouldn’t she tell me herself?

I was my mother’s youngest child, her baby, and yes, I think she favored me. Perhaps I benefited, in age-old fashion, by being the lucky last in the birth order. When chores were finished, spankings had been administered to each of us, and homework was complete—from even the young age of five, I could usually be found spending time with my mom. We’d listen to records, read liner notes in albums. I’d help her re-thread the bobbin on her old Singer sewing machine, we’d play Gin Rummy, and we’d talk about things—big and small.

I wouldn’t say we were friends or buddies, but I liked my mom. She was the mother, and I was the child—that was evident.

When I was very young, perhaps even until junior high school, I adored my mom and thought that she was the wisest woman on earth. I have no idea if this is an unusual notion for a kid or not. She was my mother: she fed me, she taught me to read and write, and she showed me how to put an unwilling worm on my hook and pull a catfish out of a low-water creek. How could I
not
think she was all-knowing?

But something ran parallel to that adoration for my mother, and that was fear.

Of course, I had fear of both of my parents—in different measure, for different reasons. My dad gave spankings, as we
called them, which sometimes left our legs covered in welts. The asterisk to that particular fear of my father is that my mother was always (as I recall) the one to instruct my dad to dole out the spankings. From my adult perspective, I can see that my dad was still unable to parent his children, and if it were left up to him, I think he’d have taken the easier route and never punished us. The other fear I had of my dad was the fear I assumed on my mom’s behalf. When my dad would be angry with my mother (in my younger years, alcohol made him go nuclear), I became frightened of him—for her. I knew during their screaming matches, which sometimes turned physical, that my dad was not going to hit or harm
me
, yet I took on tremendous amounts of fear. I don’t recall my mom hitting me outside the customary 1970s swatting of the child’s backside with a wooden spoon, flyswatter, or hand; it was usually three or four staccato quarter-note swats accompanied by a spoken-word lyric: “I. Said. Stop. That.” Which I did. And it barely hurt. The fear I had for my mother was much more frightening, and each time that fear would come to pass, it never left a mark on my body.

Even as a tiny girl, the biggest fear I had of my mother was that of not having her approval and affection. When my mother assigned household tasks for me to do, I executed them as perfectly as I could. A well-cleaned bathtub or a symmetrically folded bedsheet would, on occasion, earn me high marks.

“Did I get that really clean, Mom?” “That’s pretty good how all those cans of soup are lined up the way you like ’em, huh?”

“Yes, Squirrelly, you did a good job.” She might say, punctuating her praise with the slightly crooked smile she got from my grandfather and passed down to me.

There were times when I just plainly and simply needed affection. I have so many memories of failed attempts to get hugs, but one memory has always represented the entire library of denial.

I must’ve been about five years old. Chris and Jeny were at school, and it’s likely that I was upset because I wanted to be
there too. I sat in the big bay window of the dining room playing with the homemade Raggedy Ann doll my mom had recently made for me. She did thoughtful things like that for all three of us, but those acts were sporadic and never made much sense to me. I remember thinking that even though the shades of red on my doll didn’t quite look like those on the real Raggedy Ann doll, otherwise my doll did look a lot like the real thing. My mother was talking on the kitchen telephone. I waited until I heard the clunk of the receiver as it rattled back into place, and I dragged my stocking feet over hardwood then linoleum to get to her. She was standing in the middle of the room and just as I hooked my arm around the top of her good knee and pressed my right temple to her outer thigh, she reached down and pried me off of her.

“No,” she said. “I hurt.”

I wouldn’t realize until I was much older that my mother suffered every day from chronic pain, as a result of her polio and from the dozen or so surgeries performed on her legs.

I adored her so much when I was young, and my love for her has grown up in the ways that
I
have grown up. I have convinced myself that I haven’t completely lost her—that we’re still hanging on by a thread. If I tell her I’m gay, I worry that a definitive laser beam of disgust and rejection will zap that thread in two, with such velocity that there won’t even be smoke or fire, no evidence of a burn—just a cold, freezing cut that will send me spiraling down, looking up at her like I did when I was five years old.

N
ot long into Julia and Phillip’s marriage, shortly after I’d been signed to MCA Records, Julia and I rekindled our relationship. She wasn’t sorry that she had married him, and in fact I wasn’t sorry either. The three of us spent a lot of time together, and over the years I came to consider Phillip as close as a family member. I wouldn’t say that they had an open marriage, because my understanding of that type of relationship is that the married couple continues to be intimate. Along those lines, we weren’t what they call “swingers” either. My relationship was with Julia and Julia only. They seemed to be happy living in the same house, being the best of friends, and spending time together when they chose. She and I did everything together. We took vacations, often to remote cabins located in state parks. We loved to hike and explore together, but we also appreciated the privacy that we could find in a little log cabin in the woods. Phillip always encouraged our time together, and when we’d take off on a trip or if I were around, he’d say, “Yay, C’s here. I can go play now!”

Mostly, he was joking when he’d say that, but there was a part of him that wasn’t. He often said that Julia was simply happier when I was there. He claimed that the weekends when I was on the road were tough on him because she missed me so much.

I bought a house about five miles from their house, so it was
easy for us to be together. On nights when I was home in Nashville, we’d sleep either at her house or at mine. We had a routine that worked for us, and the effort it took to make it happen was worth it to both of us. I was actually glad on so many occasions that Julia was married, because it provided us with a certain cover under which we could hide. Her marriage to Phillip was never part of a scheme to camouflage the existence of our relationship, but it certainly added an element of disguise for which I was thankful.

I
’m called a hard worker. I think I’m known as a nice person, too—a lady, with good manners. This is important to me, to be ladylike. I’ve been amazed at some of the behaviors of women in the entertainment industry, on all levels.

There are women in every position of the entertainment business, and I am aware that this didn’t come about easily. I know that there were females who carved a path for the rest of us to get to do what we do, and it is a little easier on each passing generation of women. These women who were pioneers were forced to prove themselves in a man’s world.

I’m not suggesting that sexism and inequality don’t still exist in the country music industry; they are very much alive, but some progress has been made. I suppose that early on, when women were first starting to have solo careers and were actually working behind the scenes in the entertainment world, they had to play tough. I’ve heard legendary stories over the years about women and how they were faced with a decision of how to approach their careers. One path was to use their sexuality to advance their position. Even when they were simply going along with it, they were perpetuating an archaic role for women. I do understand that in many cases, had these women bucked the system, they would have been fired or somehow squeezed out.

Another way was to toughen up, be one of the boys, and play
a macho game, and that is still happening today. I knew all of this early on in my career and was confused as to how I would fit in. I wouldn’t take that path as a straight woman and I didn’t do it as a gay woman. It wasn’t an issue of sexuality for me. It was not in my personality to play tough, act macho, and be one of the boys in that regard.

Loretta Lynn is the greatest influence on my music, and I still get nervous when I’m in her presence. She called me personally to invite me to a party celebrating her Grammy nomination for the Jack White-produced album
Van Lear Rose
in 2004
.

When I was growing up, Buck Owens was one of my musical heroes. Once I got to know him on a personal level, he became an even greater hero. We were very good friends. I learned so much from him, not only about music but about the business. 1996
.

I don’t lead with sex, hetero or homo. I don’t swear in public,
seldom in front of men. I don’t tell off-color jokes in mixed company, and if an off-color joke is being told in my presence, I try to slip away. I just remove myself from the situation. I have found in my career that one sets boundaries early on to one’s peers and associates. I guess I let people know in the first couple of years of my career who I was and how I wanted to be treated. I wanted to be treated with respect, and I wanted to be treated like a lady. I have seen many females in my business try to take a shortcut to fit in or to become successful, either by becoming a sex object or by taking on the role of “one of the boys” only to later feel frustration that they weren’t being shown respect as women. I’m not a tough girl. I have manners, I am ladylike, and I am gay.

I’m known as a good American. I hear it so often, but I wonder what it means.

I
began spending time with people in the military and veterans very early in my life. My grandfather Harold Henry had been a sergeant in the Second World War. After I declared to him at a young age that I had dreams of performing country music, he encouraged me to go play for guys at the VA hospital. From about age nine, I would travel once a month with Wellsville’s local American Legion members up to the VA in the city. I had no fear or hesitation in getting to know these old men and hearing their stories of service and war, which at times would be very tragic. There were stories that were carefree as well, detailing accounts of travel to exotic destinations and of people who sounded nothing like the people I knew. All of that led me to develop a deep appreciation and understanding of what they’d done for our country, not to mention giving me a glimmer of comprehension of how big the world really was.

Furthering my associations with the military, once I began to play the trumpet in the junior high school band, I gladly took on
the duty of being the official bugler for the American Legion. During Memorial Day programs in my school or in my town, I would be the one to play taps. I also took my trumpet to military funerals and burial services. I would stand in the distance and play as the family members of the deceased veteran were given an American flag perfectly folded into a triangle. The ceremony is sacred and emotional, and in a perfect world every veteran would have a live bugler at his or her burial service. Taps is a powerful melody, and there is nothing like that sorrowful tune as it cries out of a live brass instrument. I was the bugler from seventh grade until the day I packed my car and headed to Nashville. My grandfather had asked me during my time as the bugler if he could count on me to play taps for him when that day should come. He died a little more than a year after I moved to Tennessee. Grandpa and Grandma had just spent a week with me in Nashville and had seen me perform live, for the first time in my life, on the Grand Ole Opry stage. I traveled back to Kansas with my trumpet. It was the last time I ever played taps.