Reba: My Story (19 page)

Then, in 1983, we hired a real doozie. He only lasted seventeen days. There was a problem with the bus, or a complete breakdown, each day he worked for me.

For example, we were in Davenport, Iowa, and after our show, he drove through a side-street underpass and almost got the bus stuck in the tunnel. I could hear the luggage rack, on top of the bus, being scraped off as he tried to force the bus through.

“Stop! Stop!” everyone on board started yelling.

I was in my stateroom, counting concession money
with Preecher, when Wayne Lewis came running into the room. That bus was Wayne’s pride and joy, and he always kept it washed and shining. He loved to baby it. He would have done nothing to harm it.

When he came into my room, he was carrying the bus’s luggage rack and the antenna that had been torn from the top.

“This guy is killing me!” Wayne sarcastically said. “We’re jammed in the tunnel.”

The new driver made things worse by trying to claim the bus had cleared the same underpass on the way to the show. “Someone has laid asphalt on this road while we were at the concert,” he said. “And now the road is higher. That’s why the top of the bus is caught against the bottom of the underpass.”

We got out of that scrape by letting the air out of the tires and backing out, before heading on to Nampa, Idaho.

“This is about all I can handle,” I told the driver.

“Well, I’m quitting,” he said.

“That’s a smart idea,” I said.

By the time we got to Omaha, the battery was dead—the driver had forgotten to put water in it—and we had to use the alternator. That burned up too. At that point the driver saved his own life by catching a plane home, while I flew to Nampa, Idaho, where I had a press conference. Narvel, Preecher, and Wayne took turns driving the bus the rest of the way to Nampa.

Charlie flew into Nampa, and the search was on for a new bus driver. Thanks to Russell Hulme, my soundman, we found Larry Jones. Larry had driven trucks for his dad’s business in Duncan, Oklahoma, and had mentioned to Russell that he would like to be my bus driver if the job ever came open.

Larry and Charlie hit it off immediately, mainly because Larry offered to work free for thirty days if we would pay his expenses. He was just that eager. He was so eager,
in fact, that he showed up a day early. Charlie didn’t see how we could lose on a deal like that.

But when Wayne began to show Larry the ropes, he quickly learned that Larry had never driven a bus in his life. He didn’t know how to start it or how to put it into reverse. He didn’t even know where the ignition keys were supposed to go. He had just figured that a bus couldn’t be too much different from a truck.

Nobody told me at the time, and I’m not sure they ever told Charlie.

The next night Larry drove us to the rodeo we were playing, and all eyes were on the new guy. Folks who travel for a living have a way of watching the one who drives them.

“It was dead silence,” Larry remembers. “I was thinking, ‘This must be my big test.’ I got down to this one place and had to make a U-turn to get back into the rodeo grounds. I thought, ‘God, this is it, I’m exposed.’ ”

Larry turned as far as he could, backed against traffic, and completed his turn. The turn probably took an entire minute. Still, nobody said anything as he struggled with the bus, looking into the mirrors to cover his sides.

He finished the turn, and the bus broke into applause.

I wanted to get to know Larry, so I sat in the jump seat the first time he drove us during daylight. We came up on a construction site.

“Man,” Larry said, “I hope this ain’t a roadblock. I don’t have a driver’s license.”

Preecher asked Larry to see his license later that day. Larry had only been kidding.

T
HERE IS NO RHYME OR REASON FOR SOME OF THE THINGS THAT
happen on the road. Sometimes, you have to think God is behind them. Sometimes, you know He is.

One time, Sheri McCoy, my hairdresser, and I flew from Detroit to Kansas City, Missouri, where Larry met us
with the bus. When we reached our hotel, which happened to be one of a chain of hotels in that area, we discovered we had no reservations. That’s when we learned that Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, have hotels with the same name.

We were in the wrong Kansas City.

I remember that the weather was extremely cold, icy and snowy. We drove around awhile trying to find our hotel, and finally I told Larry to stop and call for directions. He pushed the 0 button on the telephone. It froze inside and wouldn’t come out. We stayed lost.

Larry ended up driving around Kansas City, Kansas, for four hours—longer than it had taken me to fly from Detroit. We were lost long enough for me to watch on the bus TV a videotaped movie, another one-hour program, and the ten-o’clock news. But surely it was God’s plan for me to see that news broadcast, with a feature on all of the homeless people who were freezing out in the elements. It really tore me up. Here I was in a nice customized bus with a heater running full blast, and these people were searching for shelter to save their lives. In a way I felt guilty, but changed my mind and decided to do something about it instead.

So the next day, Charlie’s niece Renee Nelson, Sheri, and I went to Wal-Mart after my rodeo show. We picked out socks and compact cases with toothpaste, shampoo, and other stuff that a travel bag would hold. I also got lots of pillows and blankets.

When the girls and I were taking that stuff through the checkout line, the cashier recognized me. He asked me why I was buying so much, and I told him about seeing the homeless on the news the evening before.

Wal-Mart is a family-oriented kind of place, so the cashier offered me a 10 percent discount on everything I bought. Of course, I didn’t
ask
for a discount. But the next day a newspaper story claimed that I had bickered over the price with the people at Wal-Mart. I thought that was kind
of tacky of the newspaper. I hope they were simply misinformed, and naturally, I was hurt that someone would tell such a lie.

But that hurt was overshadowed by my gratitude that God had let me be in a position to help. The Wal-Mart folks volunteered to send the items over to the people at the Rescue Mission for me, since I had another show that night and since we were in Renee’s small Mustang car.

The next day, Larry came to me to apologize about getting lost.

“Never mind,” I told him. “If you hadn’t been lost, I wouldn’t have heard about the people having such a rough time in the weather. We might have been frustrated about being lost, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as being in the cold. At least we were in a warm bus.”

I’
M STILL HAUNTED BY A TIME THAT I WISH I COULD HAVE
helped—but could I have helped, if I had only known? On March 30, 1980, two days after my twenty-fifth birthday, I came in off a weekend tour to receive some terrible news.

I called Mama as I usually did after getting home and said, “What’s been going on?”

Mama quietly told me, “Diannia Kay killed herself.”

Diannia Kay, my cousin, had walked freely in and out of my home and life for as far back as I could remember. Miles separate families today, as they have separated me from my brother, sisters, and parents. But when I was growing up, most of my family lived within driving, or horse-riding, distance of each other. Cousins, aunts, and uncles were expected to unexpectedly drop by. And they did.

I was shocked at Mama’s news and flooded with scores of memories of Diannia. There were more than just ties of blood between us. We were constantly together as childhood playmates at home, from the first grade up through the Kiowa High School Cowboy Band.

She had married Bill Lewis and they had a beautiful daughter, Virgeana Dale. Apparently, Diannia and Bill began having problems after a while. Diannia was crying a lot, very depressed, and in her own way, in the form of a letter, tried to let us know. But as everyone tries to tend to their own business, people around her just thought that, like any couple, she and Bill would work things out. Then, late one night after the house was quiet, Diannia took the rifle outside. She walked silently across the grass to a dry creek bed. She put the rifle barrel to her head, the butt on the ground, and reached down to pull the trigger.

She was found after a long search the next day.

In 1991, I recorded
For My Broken Heart
, my biggest-selling album at that time. The record contains a song, “If I Had Only Known,” which I dedicated to the eight people we had lost in a 1991 plane crash. It also fits Diannia Kay’s situation.

Suicide always leaves the loved ones left behind feeling helpless and guilty. I felt both.

Here I had been busy trying to build a career when Diannia had been busy trying to build peace of mind.

I
HAD BEGUN TO REALIZE THAT IT WAS TIME TO GET SERIOUS
about my career. I could see that the kind of haphazard planning and general roughhousing of my early years on the road weren’t going to help me advance as an artist. I needed to take more control of my performing life, and I started by getting more choosy about the places where I sang.

A touring entertainer never knows what a place is like if he’s never played it before. I learned that as far back as the Singing McEntires. Some places have swanky names. You drive all day and night to get there, then find out they’re not so swanky. That was especially true in my early days when I was playing the honky-tonks.

It is not that I have anything against honky-tonks. It’s good for performers to stay close to the grass roots, to see
how the people respond, the songs that get them dancing, and—hard to take, but important to know—what bores them enough so they talk through it. But I always had a terrible time singing through all the cigarette smoke, which I had grown allergic to. For five years, with my burning throat and running eyes I’d felt like I’d been singing in rooms full of ammonia.

I remember the inside of the last honky-tonk I ever played. It was in 1982. Susie, the band, and I worked a club in Texas, and after the show my sinuses were inflamed and infected. They were killing me. I went to the motel and called Charlie that night.

“I’m not playing another club,” I said. “Don’t book me into another nightclub.”

“You’ve just ruined your career,” Charlie said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “If I continue to sing in that smoke, I won’t have a career because I won’t have a voice!”

Charlie insisted several more times that my career was over, because nightclubs were the places where I had played most. But I had made my decision, and I stood by it.

Much later on, I told this story to my movie stand-in on
The Gambler
. She had been saying that she would much rather learn the ropes of the film business by being a stand-in than by taking what she knew were bad acting jobs. Well, hindsight is always 20/20. I played all the bad clubs, and if I’d gone in and tried to find a job as a backup singer for a first-class act, I might have learned the ropes better and sooner. I might have been more experienced by the time I hit. But looking back, I wouldn’t trade in one bit of it. The time it took let me meet lots of great people, and learning the hard way never lets you forget.