Official Truth, 101 Proof: The Inside Story of Pantera Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’d have no choice but to laugh or at the very least smile. My sister tells me that whenever she used to visit for the weekend, when she pulled up in the driveway I’d always be standing there dressed up as something different: a cowboy, Superman, Batman, or frankly anything besides myself. I must have been born with a built-in need to perform.
    One of our dogs was called Reddy Kilowatt—not exactly a normal dog name, I know, but he was named after the mascot used for electricity generation in the United States, and there’s a picture of me with him somewhere where I’m dressed up as the Lone Ranger. And I did these things because I always wanted to be noticed. Fortunately, my dad’s parents encouraged me to express myself. They lived just a half hour away in Ranger, Texas, and my grandparents, while very, very strict people, were also extremely influential on my early life and encouraged me to try anything I wanted to do. After all, I was the last of twenty-six grandchildren on both sides of the family, so it seemed that because they knew they’d probably never get another chance to be grandparents, I got special treatment.
    Dad was diagnosed with cancer of the sinus cavity in 1971 and we had a maid to help my mom after Dad got sick, and she was called—brace yourself—“Nigger” Georgia. That’s the name I always heard being called in the house. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? No wonder I’ve had problems with that word ever since. I grew to resent it because I didn’t feel that it was proper. I didn’t realize this as a kid though—it wasn’t until much later in life that I came to know what that word truly meant, but that’s just what my mother said—she made it sound like a term of endearment: “Nigger Georgia this, Nigger Georgia that.” Nowadays I will never use the words “nigger” or “faggot,” nor will I allow them to be used in my house. In my eyes, they are the foulest words imaginable.
    I’m not trying to say that my mother was a racist—she definitely wasn’t, but there were just very few black families out in the peanut farming areas at that time, and to talk like that was just how the South was back in the sixties and early seventies. Even at school you could see it: some of the water fountains were clearly marked, “Colored Only,” which seems unbelievable in modern times, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still there in some of the really back-ass places.
    Because my dad was ill, it was easier for my mother to help him if I wasn’t around all the time, so I was always being shuffled off to spend time with other people, especially my maternal grandmother, who lived in downtown Ft. Worth. Well, she was quite a woman, let me tell you. Back in the day, she and her brother Jack lived in Thurber, Texas—right on the county line—one of the only places you could get liquor back in the ’30s and ’40s post-prohibition days. That was where all the juke joints were back in the day, in hard-living towns like Strawn, Mingus, and Thurber. My grandmother used to play the piano down at the front in the silent movies that were shown in these tough little towns in the Texas countryside.
    She used to tell me stories about when, back in those days after prohibition, she and her brother Jack—who played standup bass—had a band. When they were up on stage performing, everybody in the audience got so drunk that, when they didn’t like a song, they’d just throw a fucking beer bottle at the musicians in protest. So the only way to stop being hit on the head by a bunch of beer bottles was to hang chicken wire around the stage area, like some kind of crude barricade. I’m sure some missiles still got through though. These places were rough, and you can probably still find dives like this in some outlying parts of the state.
    She lived in this huge Victorian home with another elderly lady. I can still remember the place like I was there last week. Isn’t it weird how places