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

as shocking as that might sound, that’s just how my dad was. He’d just slide me a sip of his beer when my mom wasn’t watching and I’d drink it. I can’t imagine that I liked it but at least I was giving my body plenty of year’s head start to develop a taste for it. For the record, I couldn’t imagine feeding my five-year-old a fucking beer nowadays, but back in the day that’s just how things were.
CHERYL PONDER

Mother had no idea how to become a widow or a single parent at the age of forty-seven, so along the way she’d made a lot of psychological mistakes, which she couldn’t redo. She knew it but she couldn’t go back and redo. I would call every other day to see how Daddy was, and if mother saw one little glimmer of what she thought was “Oh, he’s going to get better” then we all thought he was going to get well, and Rex got caught in the middle of all that. Back in the ’70s, I’m not sure if many people knew much about psychology, or at least how to tell a young child that his dad is dying.
     
    Predictably—due to my dad’s poor health—most of the parenting and disciplining was left to my mother, although she had a few health issues of her own. She’d had polio as a child and while there were no lingering effects that could be clearly identified, when Dad got really sick she didn’t cope well at all and it triggered a central nervous reaction that impaired the use of her limbs. What that meant was that in order to take care of Dad while her mobility decreased, I got farmed out to stay with other people more and more, sometimes to people that I hardly knew.
    Apart from grandparents’ houses on both sides of the family, one of my other favorite places to go was my uncle’s beach house place at Surfside, south of Galveston, because when I was there, I was basically there on my own, free to roam the sand dunes that stretched out for four hundred yards and free to get in the ocean and try to learn to surf, mostly unsuccessfully, I might add.
    Strangely, even at this young age, I seemed to like fending for myself, scrapping to survive, and this was a trait I’d carry throughout my life. Whether it was because I had no choice or because I was a naturally independent type, who knows? Not only was it a way of protecting myself, but it was also indicative of a kind of single-minded drive that I would always possess. Yes, I was a small, skinny kid, but I always punched above my weight in every sense.
CHERYL PONDER

Rex was always full of it. He had a great little personality but he did pretty much exactly whatever he wanted, wherever he was. He thought he was independent from a very young age.
     
    My dad passed away in January of 1972, almost exactly a year after his own father had passed, and I get the impression from what I’ve been told that it was a long and painful death. He was only forty-seven-years old. Young by anybody’s standards.
    I was oblivious.
    This is where it gets sticky for me. I’m not the kind to open up too much emotionally, and my dad’s passing is something I have never discussed with anyone, not even my mother or sister. I must have completely shut it out immediately because at that age I had no hope of coming to terms with what death actually meant, although I’m surprised about how much I actually remember about the events themselves.
    On the day he died I was playing outside in the yard at the doctor’s house, the biggest mansion in town, as if it was any other day, and my mother came out to tell me that Daddy had passed. Although I was still very young, I can still vividly remember that the first thing my mother said was, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
    Of course I didn’t have an answer. I was a kid. I just kept playing…

CHAPTER 3
     
    ON DOWN THE LINE
     
    W ith no father, and a mother who was struggling to cope both physically and emotionally, the road ahead could have been a grim proposition. I missed having my dad around of course, but