Like Me (6 page)

Later, my folks inherited Grandma Dixon’s piano and it became my best friend. My folks asked me if I wanted to take formal piano lessons and I said yes. They didn’t have extra money for such an expense, but they scraped some together and saw to it that I had a chance to properly learn my instrument.

M
y first piano teacher told me that I had perfect hands for playing piano. I have long, skinny fingers that I’ve always been a little self-conscious about. Running them up and down the keyboard has always been as natural as breathing.

As a kid, I’d listen for new songs on 61 Country AM, remember the tunes, and run to the piano and play them. My dad’s coon-hunting buddies were always around the house, and I’d tug at their Carhart coveralls and make them sit by me while I played. Once I even convinced a Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman
who showed up at our door to attend a private concert (my mom bought the vacuum cleaner, too).

One day when I was five, Rev. Skiles, the Baptist preacher, came to call, and I asked him if he wanted to hear the latest song I’d mastered. He obliged. I sat down on the piano bench and patted the empty spot next to me. I played the song perfectly and when I finished, I turned to him and asked, “Whaddya think, Warren?” All he could say was “Wow.” At that moment my mom walked into the room and asked what I’d been serenading the minister with.

“‘Love in the Hot Afternoon’!” I declared with pride. I watched the color drain out of my mother’s face as she realized that her young daughter had just sung the 1975 Gene Watson hit about a tawdry, midday sexual encounter between two strangers to our preacher.

As I got older, the performances got better and my audiences got bigger. By the time I was eleven, I began to get calls to come play with bands or to play solo. I also found my way to Opry shows—regional country music concerts modeled after the Grand Ole Opry and often broadcast live on the radio. These shows drew large audiences of country fans who would drive for miles to hear their favorite music. Typically, I’d perform three or four songs with a house band of seasoned musicians. Kansas City had a popular show called the Farris Opry, owned and operated by a musician named Byron Jones. I had a burning passion to land a guest spot on his show.

If you successfully auditioned for a slot on one Opry show,
others were likely to book you as well. In that way you could build a regional following, and I knew that if I ever wanted to make it in Nashville, I’d have to be able to make it big in Kansas City first. It seemed to me that the Farris Opry, just an hour up the pike in Kansas City, held the keys to my success. By my early teens, I had enough of a name playing around Kansas and Missouri for Byron to allow me to come up for a special closed audition.

My parents never pushed me into entertainment, but when I asked them to drive me wherever I needed to go, they did. So they happily took me up to Kansas City. The plan was for me to do my audition, join my folks for dinner at a restaurant, then come back to the theater to enjoy the Opry that night. I hoped that if things went well, I’d be back in a month or two as a featured guest, so catching the show that night would be homework for the future.

I performed a few songs, backed up by the house band, which was led by Byron’s son Kevin. He was the best guitar player that I’d ever heard live in my life. After I sang, Byron asked me a lot of questions as he stood in the center aisle of the auditorium. When we wrapped up, he chatted with my parents by the concession stand and asked if we were going to grab a quick bite to eat. We said yes and asked him for a restaurant recommendation. He gave one, but added, “Be sure to get back here by the start of the show, ’cause you’re going on in the second slot.” I about jumped out of my skin. I was going to be singing live on Kansas City radio while performing on the stage of the Farris Opry that very night, in front of a sold-out crowd! My parents were happy for me and we went off to that restaurant. I don’t think I ate a bite.

I
t was around this time that I received one of many signs from God. When I was about twelve years old, I started to explore the notion that I had a birth defect—a big one.

I began to consider the possibility that I was actually supposed to have been born a boy. I was good at sports, I liked to play outdoors, and I thought that girls were pretty. So, naturally, I’d been praying really hard to God, asking Him to give me a sign to let me know how to go about addressing what I now believed to be a birth defect.

I went with my family to the only sit-down restaurant in Wellsville for dinner one evening. This was a rare occurrence for us—to actually get to go out to eat. I was excited and I knew just what I wanted to order: the Salisbury Steak Dinner. We were seated and our waitress came to our table with a tray of ice water. We knew her. Everyone knew everyone in that town, but we knew her as a friend of the family.

She had played on the high school girls’ softball team that my mom and dad had coached a year or so before. She started making small talk with my folks, talking about school and her new softball team. I was seated nearer to her than my folks were; they were next to the wall in the booth and I was the closest to where she stood. Her leg kept bumping my leg as she chatted and laughed next to me.

She held the empty ice-water tray over my head as if it was a little shelter she’d built for me. Because I was seated and she was standing, I was on eye level with her breasts. I looked at them, in her tight T-shirt, and then I forced myself to look away. It wasn’t right, I thought to myself. There must be something wrong with me. I was born in the wrong body. I was defective. I told myself not to look again, but I couldn’t resist. I checked to see if my brother was staring at her chest, too. He wasn’t. He was busy trying to blow the paper wrapper off of the drinking straw into the light fixture dangling above our heads.

I suppose our waitress informed my family about the dinner specials that night, but I can’t be sure. After being fixated on those breasts for a good two minutes—a long time for a twelve-year-old girl in Wellsville, Kansas, to be staring at a seventeen-year-old girl’s boobs—I got a sign. I finally actually noticed the words ironed onto her T-shirt. Written in red capital letters was the message
GOD DON’T MAKE MISTAKES
.

I felt, on that night, that I was okay. I had hope and some comfort, for a while at least, that I was just as I was supposed to be.

The beautiful young waitress turned to me and asked me for my order, and I shouted, a little too enthusiastically, “Salisbury Steak Dinner, please!”

She smiled. “Okay, sweetie,” replied God’s buxom, cheerful messenger. Then she tapped me on the head with her pencil and bounced off toward the kitchen.

B
y my teens, I was looking hard to find anyone who was like me. I knew a few girls who were considered stereotypically tough and tomboyish, but they had boyfriends. I didn’t fit the stereotype of a gay woman, but I knew my sexual identity was outside the norm. I hadn’t heard many discussions about homosexuality, but what I heard in church was enough for me to realize that the church did not approve.

There was one person in Wellsville who I thought was gay—a single man in his thirties named Sam. I never saw him with a boyfriend, but some people called him our town pervert. I assumed the only way he could have earned such contempt would have been to be a homosexual, though I never asked about it. I just knew I didn’t want to join him.

Faced with the possibility of life as an outcast, I tried hard to develop feelings for boys, with no luck. That is, until Loren Gretencord moved to town. I wonder if I was drawn to Loren because of his unisex name or the fact that he was so pretty. Not merely handsome, but beautiful—with smooth skin, full lips, long eyelashes, and wavy blond hair. In fact, I thought he was prettier than any girl in Wellsville Junior High. He was two years ahead of me, but we were cast together in the school play. I wrote Loren a love letter, and I asked my sister to give it to him, enclosing a school picture and asking him to go out with me.
Days went by without a response. Loren didn’t look at me in the hallway and didn’t act any differently toward me at rehearsal. It was mortifying. I just knew that the other kids in school had read my letter and were going to make fun of me. I recently asked my sister, “What ever happened to that letter I asked you to give to Loren Gretencord? Did you even give it to him?” She snickered and said, “Of course not, silly.”

With my love life stalled, I focused on music, basketball, schoolwork, and chores. Had I been into boys, I would’ve made a lot more time for them. But when I was about to turn fifteen, I met Mike Folks. It was toward the end of summer, and I was driving down Main Street to pick something up for my mother (at that time, kids in Kansas could get their driver’s license at the age of fourteen, but they were only allowed to get behind the wheel without an adult if they were running “farm errands”). I was in my mom and dad’s old beat-up truck when I noticed that there was a big tractor in front of me at the flashing red light.

When the young man driving the tractor turned at the signal, the wind picked up and blew the ball cap off his head and it landed in the street. He’d made an attempt to grab it as it went airborne, but he was in mid-turn on a big piece of farm equipment. Even though there were a few cars behind me, I switched off my ignition, got out of the truck, and picked up the cap. But the young man on the tractor didn’t see me retrieve it, and he kept on driving.

I followed in the truck. He finally stopped, and I pulled up behind him. I ran up to him just as he was climbing off the tractor. I said, “Hey, you dropped your hat.” He flashed a big smile, and I explained how I’d retrieved it. I was well aware that Mike had been a star player on our high school football team. Now he was studying at nearby Ottawa University and was playing football there.

“I’ve seen you play basketball a couple of times,” he said to me. “You’re pretty good.” I was flattered and then told him I
needed to get home. When I got back to the truck, I noticed he hadn’t moved from the spot beside his tractor. He didn’t smile or wave. He just stood there, with the rescued cap in his hand, looking back at me.

A few days later, I saw Mike again. I had been working on Sundays at East Kansas Chemical, a convenience store that also sold wholesale farm supplies and served as a gas station. I could work only on Sundays because I was underage and the store didn’t sell beer on Sunday. The owners, Bonnie and Carl Coffman, would open the store early on Sunday morning and I would take over at 11:00 a.m. I stocked shelves, mopped, inventoried, and logged the sales of fuel by the hundreds of gallons. I loved Carl and Bonnie, who let me prove myself at a grown-up job.

Mike walked into the store and waited until I was through serving customers. “I found you,” he said, once the store had grown quiet and it was just the two of us standing there. I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say—surely he hadn’t come in there just to see me? Indeed, he had. It was the beginning of a cherished relationship that lasted through much of my teens.

I began dating Mike. I wanted to measure up to other girls my age, and they were starting to have physical relationships with boys. My friends would complain about how hard it was to resist going all the way with a boy, how things would just be getting going and they’d get caught up in how good it felt. It was as if they were speaking another language.

Mike and I had a pretty traditional courtship. When he wasn’t in class or at football practice in Ottawa, he’d come to Wellsville to see me. His parents were great to be around, and we’d eat family dinners with them whenever we could. I liked how important family was to him, and I especially loved how he doted on his nephew Phillip. After family dinners, Mike would drive me over to his college and we’d spend time at the house he shared with his friends. He showed great respect for me, but like any
guy his age he wanted to move things along sexually, and I dreaded that. I actually liked kissing, but making out with Mike managed to both bore and frighten me. Attempts to do more than kissing always ended awkwardly. I’m sure Mike thought that I was being a good girl and showing restraint, and he never ever made me feel bad for not giving in, even though he was by no means a virgin. Still, he once hurt me terribly by cheating on me with a girl named Michelle, who was known around town. I’ve always thought he did it out of frustration, and in a way Michelle took the pressure off of me.

Mike and I dated on and off while I was in high school. At some point during my junior year, I began dating Andrew Collins. Andrew was the starting quarterback of his football team in Gardner, just a couple of exits up I-35. I’m not sure what Andrew saw in me, since he could have had any girl in that rural part of Kansas. I even wondered if he dated me because he’d taken a bet from his buddies to see if he could go all the way with me. If so, he lost.

Like Mike, Andrew wound up cheating on me, in this case with one of my oldest childhood friends, Erin McAlpin. I suspected something was going on between them, but both denied it. Then one day I was at Andrew’s house, waiting for him in his room while he took a quick shower. I wasn’t snooping, but I saw a handful of letters folded into neat squares on his dresser. On the outside of each square, “Andrew” was written in feminine handwriting. I opened one, glanced at the bottom to see who had signed it, saw her name, and then read the letter. I read every one, managing to carry on a conversation with Andrew as he dressed in the bathroom. After, I walked out of his house, got in my car, and drove home before he’d even come out and faced me. Andrew called, but I never spoke to him again.

Sometime the next week, at school, Erin asked me if we could go outside and talk about it. She admitted what had happened, but insisted on showing me letters Andrew had written to her,
too. She wanted me to know that they were both guilty. She asked for my forgiveness and I gave it without hesitation. I was upset, but not for the reason one might imagine. I wasn’t hurt that my boyfriend and one of my best friends had betrayed me. I was upset because I didn’t really care what he did or who he did it with. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel anything like heartbreak over losing a boy. I was upset that I wasn’t upset enough.