Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles Read Online Free PDF Page B

stiffly playing guitar was less than enthusiastic, but after a while, a small silence fell, and I noticed that some of the kids were actually listening. Allowing myself a little smile, I relaxed into it and began to play with more confidence. I even strayed slightly from the song, injecting a touch of personal improvisation. There was hardly a standing ovation as I went into the last chorus, but I wasn’t being booed and they weren’t throwing paper cups at me, which I knew was a good sign.
     
    As I heard the final chord echo away, I focused on a couple of pretty young girls in the second row who were, for some unknown reason, beaming back at me with a look of adulation. I knew that this was what I had to do. Stumbling off the stage in a daze, as if I had just woken from a long sleep, it wasn’t as if I had a choice. From that day on, my life would never be the same.
     
     
     
     
    Puberty was, for me, an agony of teenage confusion. Hairs sprouted, bones grew, skin erupted, my voice broke, and all manner of alarming thoughts stole into my head. Ripples of heat would pass through my body at the very thought of a girl. A close encounter with the likes of Sharon Pringle probably would have killed me.
     
    Along with the physical changes came unforeseen psychological ones—like not appreciating how impoverished my family was until my first day at F. W. Buchholz High School. Almost overnight, I discovered completely new areas of embarrassment. Just by looking around at other people’s clothes, bikes, and even cars, and comparing them with my own painfully visible lack of assets, I came to understand what I was: dirt poor. And with that realization came a searing, scorching shame.
     
    Friends like Kenny Gibbs, whose father owned the furniture store in town, lived in new cinder-block houses with air-conditioning, something I could only dream about. I found myself spending more and more time over at his place, enjoying the permanently cool air along with unimagined luxuries like a color television and a refrigerator full of candy bars and Coca-Colas we could help ourselves to. I’d readily accept an offer from his mother to sleep over, just for the novelty of not lying in a pool of sweat.
     
    I rarely, if ever, invited Kenny back to my house in return. Or anyone else, for that matter. I usually made the excuse that Mom was home or my brother was studying. Everything about my parents suddenly seemed excruciating to my teenage mind. Their English seemed very broken; they weren’t articulate like other people’s parents, and I felt that the minute anyone met them, they’d know I came from limited means.
     
    Every now and again, my family background would rear up and threaten to expose me, if someone asked me a personal question like, “Isn’t your dad a mechanic at Koppers?” or “Didn’t I see your mom in the thrift shop?” But I usually managed to quash it before it was too late. Music, ever my escape route, continued to be my salvation.
     
    I couldn’t afford my own records to keep up with the latest sounds, so I listened to the radio endlessly. I had an old wooden one in my room, which quickly usurped any attention I might otherwise have given to homework. In Gainesville, most of the white-owned stations stopped broadcasting at sundown. If the weather was good and there wasn’t a big storm between Florida and Tennessee, I could wiggle the antenna around until I picked up WLAC in Nashville, at 1510 on the AM dial, the only station playing black music. Through its crackly broadcasts hosted by Gene Nobles, I was introduced to legends like B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Muddy Waters. Tired of Pat Boone’s mind-numbing version of “Tutti Frutti” all day on the regular channels, I’d listen at night, open-mouthed, to Little Richard strutting his stuff.
     
    With my hair greased to one side and my jeans pegged in on my mother’s pedal Singer sewing machine, I started getting into the North Florida