Like Me (30 page)

His reaction to being challenged was to be nasty and mean. This often happened when he was intoxicated. His inhibitions would be down and his retaliatory impulses up. He had a sharp tongue, and it was never good to be on the receiving end of one of his rants, but he seldom attacked me.

During my breakdown in early 2006, when I needed my friends the most, Brandon and I came to a juncture in our long
relationship. I was on the phone with a mutual friend who asked me if I’d talked to Brandon in the past few days, and if so, did I know how he was feeling. The friend told me that Brandon had been having episodes of blacking out and that he had been told by his doctors that he had some kind of lesion or growth on his brain.

I quickly sent Brandon an e-mail asking him how he was doing. Later that evening, I was shopping in a boutique, near downtown Nashville, owned by Valerie, another of our mutual friends. I asked her if she’d heard about Brandon. She hadn’t.

I mentioned that I had reached out to Brandon and that I was going to call my friend Dr. Moses, a respected physician at Vanderbilt Hospital, to see if they could get Brandon in to see one of their specialists as soon as possible. Frankly, I had been so consumed by my sadness that I was happy to have the chance to do something helpful for someone I loved.

The next day I received an e-mail from Brandon addressed to Valerie and to me. Valerie had contacted him and asked him what was going on with his health. He said that if he wanted his private information out in public, he would send out a press release. I explained that I had only wanted to offer to try to get him into Vanderbilt Hospital. He wrote that he had already undergone intensive testing, that the Mayo Clinic was studying the results, and that he’d know what treatment plans were available to him when the results came back. His e-mails were rude, snide, and completely out of line.

I was in an emotional black hole and wasn’t spending any time with my friends anyway, so I retreated to my solitude. A few months after the e-mail exchange I heard that Brandon’s grandmother had passed away. I sent flowers to her funeral. He thanked me and told me how much that had meant to him. I told him that no matter what we might have gone through or what we might go through, I loved him. And that was true.

A week or so later, I was told by a mutual friend that when
Brandon was asked if he and I had “made up,” he said, “That bitch is trying to be my friend again.” I’m guessing that he wanted our friends to think that I’d come crawling back with my tail between my legs begging for his friendship. That is a game he plays, and I had always let him play it because I was scared of him.

Shame and fear caused me to tolerate that abusive behavior. If I’d been able to be open about my sexuality and if I’d had nothing to hide, I would not have allowed him to treat me like that. I’d also been told over the years that he
had
told people that I was gay and claimed that I had confided in him about it, which was not true. I was a good friend to him even though he wasn’t always good to me.

Now I value myself far too much to share my life with anyone other than ethical, honest, and kind people—who cherish me and let me cherish them.

I
n late 2006, after nine months of my producer and friend Rodney Crowell’s hearing my songs in their barest form as I was writing them, he called to invite me to dinner. We went to a restaurant in East Nashville. We’d barely been seated when he said, “Chely, I’m emotionally invested in these songs of yours. You need to make your record, and you need to let me help
you.” I was so broken at the time that I hadn’t even entertained the thought of beginning a record. I was without a record label then, and Rodney asked if I had the money to make an album. I said I did. He explained that we would put every dime that I wanted to spend into the record and that he wanted nothing for it.

My shepherd—Rodney Crowell—and me. 2007
. (Tiffany Scott)

I stared at my plate and then asked him why he, one of the most respected singer/songwriter/producers of modern music, would be willing to do that for me. He smiled, with an appropriate amount of sympathy, and said that it was rare to stumble upon an artist “really going through a creative change and not afraid to give in to it.”

Before Rodney and I parted ways that night, I told him that I wasn’t ready to begin recording—the songs were still coming to me. He assured me that we wouldn’t start recording my album until the time was right.

I thanked him for dinner—for everything—and said good night to my newfound shepherd.

T
he album Rodney and I started the following summer happened the way that I’d always imagined records were made—with true inspiration and what would come to be an honest heart.

W
hen I was in second grade, my elementary school started a project that would take almost an entire school year to complete. There had been discussion among some of the students about the number 1,000,000. None of us were really able to conceptualize how big that number was, and we struggled to imagine what a million of anything looked like. Our teachers decided that we should actually see 1,000,000 of something to understand the meaning. We, the students, were going to collect one million pull tabs—the disposable pieces of metal that used to be on the top of soda cans. The new stay-on-the-can pull tabs were already in use, but our small community was littered with the throwaway kind, a danger to the naked feet of children in rural Kansas. By collecting them, we’d be doing a good thing for the safety of the barefoot population of Wellsville (which was considerable), and we’d also get a math lesson.

Each day we delivered our bounty and counted the contributions. We competed to see whose class could gather the most, and a tally was kept every day. Once we filled our Folgers coffee cans, Ziploc sandwich bags, brown paper sacks, lunch boxes, and often our pockets with those little razor-sharp treasures, we’d make our way to the grade school gymnasium to deposit them in the designated corner. Before long, our pile reached gargantuan
proportions. We all marveled at the size of it. One million was
big
.

My entire life since then, when I’ve considered a million of anything, whether it be dollars, miles, or fans, I’ve always thought of that pile of aluminum pull tabs.

I’ve never been certain how many people are actual fans of mine, but I have it set in my head that I have one million fans. Not two million, not seventy-five thousand, but one million. I allow myself this estimation based on a couple of things that I know: I have sold a million records and I have played live concerts for at least a million people.

There was a time in my career, until recently, that I was fixated on maintaining the approval of all of these one million people. For instance, I don’t eat food from McDonald’s. A commercial music artist is taught not to make divisive public statements about any one group or establishment, especially a corporate entity that might be a potential sponsor. McDonald’s could likely be the favorite restaurant, or perhaps the employer, of some of my fans.

My policy was that if something I might do or say were to put off just one of my one million fans, I wouldn’t take that risk. I believed that I had it in my power to maintain the approval of all one million people, and anything short of pleasing every single one of them was unacceptable to me. I was afraid to let anyone down.

I knew that if my fans found out that I was gay, I’d certainly disappoint a good number of them.

As I thought about how I’d been trying to win the approval of one million fans for more than a decade, a new truth slowly and powerfully became obvious to me. I had deprived myself of a basic human need—love. That deprivation caused emotional, physical, and spiritual damage. Had I allowed it to go on, it would have killed me for sure.

I finally realized that the one million mark that I had set was
not a need at all but a want. During those very pivotal months of solitude and sadness, my system of measurement was slowly, systematically, reset. Material things, which I had worked so hard to acquire, were of little or no importance to me anymore. I’d never been hung up on money or things, but I’d always understood that I couldn’t live on dreams alone. I’d been frugal in my spending and aggressive in my saving. I didn’t have my eye set on money so that I could buy cars, jewelry, and lavish things—that’s never been my style. My objective was to save and invest every dime I made.

I started buying real estate and stocks in my early twenties. I watched my contemporaries in country music blowing through their newfound wealth, but I knew better. I anticipated that my moneymaking opportunities could, at any time, come to a screeching halt if it were ever revealed that I was gay. So I buckled down even more than a typical former low-income, blue-collar farm girl from Kansas might have.

When I found myself in the midst of my breakdown, I was surprised to realize that my financial security, which I once held in such high regard, meant absolutely nothing to me anymore. It didn’t matter to me in the least when I was balled up in my bed crying that I owned real estate, had fruitful investments, and enjoyed a diversified portfolio.

I began to realize that I would have been a happier person had I lived paycheck to paycheck in a tiny apartment with my dogs and my female partner, for all the world to see. For years, the thought of that had scared me, but as I began to fully take in my sad existence—and as I discovered how hard I’d worked to achieve a high mark that provided no consolation whatsoever—living an open life as a gay woman, no matter what the consequences, didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Had I been forthcoming about my sexuality in Music City in the summer of 1989, I would never have had the opportunity to make an album—not to mention seven of them. Many who are
not in my industry might suggest that I was just being paranoid and that it probably would’ve been okay for me to be an “out” gay country singer. To those who make that suggestion, I say, You are wrong. In a perfect world, that would have been an acceptable situation, but we do not live in a perfect world. I loved country music so much that I was not willing to compromise my chances at getting a fair shot at making records.

In my early years in Nashville, I was helped by many singers and songwriters who preached that success as an entertainer hinged on the ability to bend where you are able and willing to do so. They explained that to be a successful recording artist, you might sometimes have to do things that you’d rather not do—record a song that you don’t really love, appear in a video that you think is silly, or tour with an artist whose music you can’t stand. I guess I overestimated my ability to bend when it came to denying myself the freedoms of love and companionship the way that straight people were able to enjoy them. I did it for a long time, and I believed I could pull it off. But like a concrete bridge that collapses, I too crumbled. It’s not as if one day that bridge’s integrity was damaged and it just fell. It would have taken time for stress and bad design to catch up with it, but eventually it would finally collapse. That’s what happened to me. I was no longer able to sway and bend, and I finally broke.

Rock bottom. When a person gets to the lowest of lows, faces ultimate devastation, and he or she is forced to make changes in order to survive—this is called hitting rock bottom. I had hit mine and it was clear in every part of me.

I became aware of the distinction between my wants and my needs. I wanted one million people to love, accept, and approve of me. My need was another story.

Rodney Crowell called me early one day from the airport in Los Angeles and told me that as soon as he landed in Nashville that evening he needed to come talk to me. I said okay.

He told me that since he and I had begun working together,
whenever he’d bump into music industry people in Nashville somebody would ask, “Hey, aren’t you working with Chely Wright?” He’d tell them yes, and often they’d say things like “She’s great,” “I really like her; she’s talented and a hard worker,” or “She’s so nice and pretty.” Then Rodney told me that usually, after people complimented me, they’d ask him in a quieter voice, “Isn’t Chely gay, though?”

After Rodney arrived back in Nashville, we sat on the front porch of my house and he confessed his self-proclaimed crime of betraying me. Something moved inside my chest. He asked for me to hear him out—he needed to apologize for gossiping about my sexuality.

On Rodney’s flight out to Los Angeles a few days earlier, he sat next to a woman who is married to someone who used to work for me, and she asked him “the question.” He said that her position was one of admiration and respect for me and that she encouraged Rodney to encourage me to be
the one
to step forward and come out of the closet. She insisted that I would be able to be a great example for the gay community because I was a respected and well-loved part of Nashville’s music community. Rodney told me that because she was so sincere, he got caught up in the speculation and discussion of my personal life, even though he and I had never discussed it. He regretted his participation in it because it was not respectful of our friendship.