Gretchen Wilson

One night Eric took off with his stock car buddies to drink and act up and he left Aunt Vickie home with me. Vickie was mad as hell. As the two of us sat around the kitchen table, cussing out Eric, I decided to light up a cigarette, a habit I had recently picked up from my Cuban pals in Miami. Vickie, at that point a nonsmoker, was shocked.

"A cigarette? You're only twelve!" I told her I'd teach her how to smoke a cigarette if she would let me have a beer. She was just in the right mood to say yes. We then proceeded to go out to Eric's shed, steal his cooler of Busch, drink every last one of them, and stack the empties in a pyramid on the table for him to see. Although I didn't feel too good the next morning from all the beer and cigarettes, the whole experience was a whole lot of fun and something Vickie and I laugh about to this day.

How did my mom handle such a long-term abusive relationship? Unable, like many abused women, to walk away, she tried every way she could to block it out and numb herself from the fear and violence. She started working all night in a bar in Miami while her husband was between jobs. Before long she was hooked on cocaine and drinking heavily, addictions that weakened and tormented her for years. This only aggravated an already desperate situation and made her both more dependent on him and less able to take care of Josh and me. She was unhappy, depressed, and, in her own words, a broken person. And she pretty much remained this way until my stepfather was completely out of her life and she could finally see what a mess she had become.

The effect of all of this on me was pretty apparent: I had to develop a pretty thick skin-Vern likes to say that I became "bulletproof." What he means by this is that, at least in my dealings with the outside world, I grew a protective shield to ward off an attack, either emotional or physical. Like many women who grew up in circumstances like mine, I developed a wariness about who to trust and who not to trust. I didn't let someone get to know me or tell them anything personal until I was assured that they weren't going to take that information and turn it against me. I was the opposite of a sheltered, pampered child. I was never someone's little princess or "Daddy's little girl." Early on in life, I had what you might call a real hard edge.

Uncle Vern likes to tell stories about how he saw this in me when I was still a tomboy growing up in Pokey. Because we were only a few years apart in age-he was an afterthought, my grandma used to say-Vern was often my principal playmate-and tormentor. I used to shadow him constantly and he was always looking for ways to tease or test me. One of his favorite memories along this line happened when I was five or six. My grandpa grew hot peppers in the garden he had at the time. They were so hot that all you had to do was smell them and your eyes would start watering. So Vern saw me playing in the garden one day and figured it was time to introduce me to the world of tongue-burning peppers. He broke a pod in half and told me to stick it in my mouth. Which of course I did, because even at five, I was game for damn near anything.

His mom-my grandma-was washing dishes in the trailer and heard my bloodcurdling screams (I already had a strong voice). She came running out of the house with a wooden ladle and whacked Vern on the head for what seemed like forever. Vern claims that was the only time she ever laid a hand on him. All I know is that I never bite into a pepper today without thinking about how Vern introduced me to my first one.

Part of whatever bulletproofing I developed had to do with being raised in the country where kids had a lot of time to just screw around and had few places to do so. Vern's idea of a good time back then was to knock me down, get on top of me, pin me to the ground, work up a giant slimy hocker in his mouth, then get real close to my face, and proceed to shoot it right at me, then pull back at the very last second. Or he'd give me Indian burns until the skin would start to peel off my arm. Or, after he learned to ride a motorbike, he'd find his sweet little game-for-anything niece, stick me in a Radio Flyer wagon attached with a telephone cord to his 175 hp Kawasaki, and take off down a back country road going sixty miles an hour. Vern was a thrill-seeker and tried his best to turn me into one. I'd say he succeeded.

Also, Vern was a star athlete as a teenager. He played football and baseball in school at Greenville and was known by everyone who followed local sports. When he graduated from high school, he was offered a full scholarship from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville to play baseball. His dad said, "Sorry, we ain't got enough money for gas," and that was that. For lack of gas money, Vern was denied a free college education. He got a job in the masonry business and started hauling bricks for a living.

A budding jock myself, I was always bugging him to play catch with me and as he got stronger and stronger, the pitches came faster and faster. By his mid-teens he was whizzing sixtyand seventy-mile fastballs at my head and though it scared the hell out of me, Vern claims I never walked away. I'd put the glove right in front of my face and take whatever he was throwing.

I don't think I would've had any of these experiences with testing my limits if I'd grown up in the suburbs. You can get toughened by economic stress or people around you who abuse or mistreat you, but you also toughen up by taking risks. There is some connection, at least in my head, between taking that hot pepper from Vern and refusing to give up in the face of a lot of rejection when I got to Nashville. In both cases, you learn to take it and keep going.

Given the craziness surrounding me, I had to grow up fast. I had to walk into a new school in a new town every few months and devise a way to fit in and make the most of it. I had to fend off Cuban boys one day and whoop it up with good ol' boys the next. It takes an entirely different set of social skills to order lunch in those two worlds, let alone make friends and avoid enemies.

My first real boyfriend was an Italian man from Miami named Christopher Salvatore Leone. He ran a pool hall with his father on Byrd Road in South Miami. He was a cross between Rocky Balboa and Tony Danza-exotic, fun-loving, and tough. The relationship didn't last that long, but long enough to upset my grandpa. He especially hated Italians for some strange reason, maybe because they were Catholics or seemed to be having too good a time in life. My grandma, on the other hand, loved them all, even the New York mobster types. I, a crazy-ass hillbilly girl of thirteen or fourteen, had to figure it out all by myself. Without the guidance from an often spaced-out mother and a completely uncaring stepfather, I had to figure out how to handle many of the common problems of growing up. I also had to watch out for Josh, my little brother. And, given her state of helplessness and addiction, I often had to be the mother to my own mother.

The final episode in the sixteen-year-long saga of my mama and my hellish stepfather came after I had left home at fifteen and moved back to Illinois from Miami to live on my own. My mother and her husband had moved back soon after that, and my mom, in another fit of common sense, had separated from him again, hopefully for the last time. At the time she and Josh were living in Pocahontas with her parents, my grandma and grandpa, and Mom was tending bar at a tavern nearby. Her now estranged husband was living in a trailer in Collinsville, a few miles down the road.

As my mom tells the story, one afternoon he showed up at the bar where she was working and demanded that she accompany him back to his place in Collinsville. When she refused, he just pulled her into the car and took off. He drove to his trailer, threw her inside, and locked the doors. He had essentially kidnapped her and had no intention of letting her go until he vented his rage.

When I pulled up to the trailer, she came running out, panicked and completely naked for all the neighbors to see. She jumped in my car and we sped away from her irate husband. We immediately drove to the nearest hospital to have her examined. While we were sitting in the emergency room, her husband burst into the hospital and was ready to finish the job he had started in the trailer. Thank God hospital security and the police took over at this point, jumped him, and hauled him off to jail.

My mom went back to her parents' home to stay and my grandpa now had his shotgun cocked and ready in case the jerk decided to drop by and "patch things up" for the four hundredth time. Finally the court handed down a substantial sentence for terrorizing my mom-thirty-two days in the Madison County jail. It wasn't nearly enough time to justify what he had done over so many years, but it was apparently sufficient for him to finally give up and leave us all alone. He never really bothered my mom again after that.

To this day, my brother, Josh, still finds a place in his heart for this man. Maybe Josh is the one person in the family he managed not to hurt.

I feel differently, of course. I feel like a large chunk of my childhood was damaged by that marriage. My mom shares some of the responsibility, of course. I think she did the best she could under some horrible circumstances. But, hey, I'm a redneck woman, remember, and I grew up a redneck girl. I'm "Pocahontas Proud," and as I say in that song, "You know, where I come from, we don't give up easily." I had plenty of strong people to help me keep going and not give up during my strange childhood, and the strongest of them all was my grandma.

Reprinted with permission from Gretchen Wilson and Hatchett Book Group USA.
Copyright© 2006 by Gretchen Wilson

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