My name is Joe. I disappeared for a long time between Bekah and I breaking up in 1998 and the writing of Teardrop Road. When I came back, I had no idea what all of this technology was about. I didn’t know what a cell phone was. Computers had been taught to me by Mr. Schwingle in fourth grade, but the thing that sits on this desk that I am watching words appear on as I think and Adam types is nothing like what I knew. I have a voice-activated machine on my desk here that I can tell to play music, ask for a joke and weather. Anything you can imagine. They say I can pay extra money and the machine will respond with Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. And I love that Muthafucker. One day maybe.
In the movie School of Rock staring Jack Black his entire mission is to play one great rock show. He says it over and over again. “One great rock show can change the world.” I’m here to tell you about me and Uncle Ball’s one great rock show. I’m going to try to capture what it was like to go to Waynesville for a month during the summer with Tigress and Lioness.
This song was written by our own Zack Mooneyham
Line from the movie before they play their great rock show. Well this summer, the summer that I was ten and we got the call from Uncle Wrath, was written by my Uncle Ball.
See Uncle Ball and Easy didn’t work out. He drove to Waynesville to live with his parents in that double-wide and he decided to finish out his senior year at a new school. I think that private school was ripping his soul out of his chest. He had to walk past Glass in the hallway. I can’t imagine how many times he begged her back, and she may have taken him back. She loved him the way that Bekah loves me. That Four Winds loves F. The way that Sunshine loves her man. The kind of love that redefines love. Glass probably took him back. But that is just a guess, and it wouldn’t have lasted.
The love Ball and Glass had is always burned away by the Devil. The shadow of the number would have risen up after a while, and that Ball of Glass would have shattered along with all of his promises. But that might not have happened. All I know for sure is that I went to school one day, and when I got back, Uncle Ball was gone.
He had not said goodbye. He had not told me of his plans. He had just rolled away, and with him had gone the one who loved me most. With him had gone a future without Rose and Mumble.
I was living in that Mocking Family Home when we got a call. It was Uncle Wrath, and he was missing his daughter Tigress. Ball was missing me, and they had crafted a plan.
For one month when I was ten, Uncle Wrath would drive up to Milwaukee and pick up Tigress, Lioness, and me. Somehow he was able to sell that he would leave Less behind. That she would not come down with us. See by this time, Rose had turned every family member against Less because of the war that started when Char and Rose divorced. That horror show was still slashing around the house, even after we found out what Char had done to Less. So no one in Waynesville, Mo., wanted her there.
Don’t remember the drive there. Don’t remember much of it at all except that we didn’t have a suitcase big enough for a month-long trip. How do you even begin to pack for that long? So we rolled everything up to make it all fit as best we could. We stacked and we stuffed. We sat on the hard shell suitcase way before suitcases had wheels, and we managed to get it closed. We all jumped in Uncle Wrath’s car and this is all that I can remember of the drive. I remember Uncle Wrath’s old song.
He had been singing this song for as long as Rose and Mumble had been married.
“You can say anything you want to about Mumble being weak or him letting your mom rule everything, but you have to respect him. He is raising another man’s son. I would never do that. I would never even think about doing that. That is ridiculous. Raising a boy that was not mine. Fuck that. No, any man that can do that has got my respect. So think anything you want to about Mumble, but if I were you, I would thank him every day that he is man enough to raise me, even though I belong to another man.”
Same song. It was not a great show.
I remember hearing it over and over again while I was growing up. From when I was five and Mumble married Rose until the day I walked out of their house, Wrath sang that song over and over again. And he did it on that trip. Said it a few times. I think that Mumble losing his job and us living in poverty, Mumble being unable to keep Less safe, and the soft way I was growing up was weighing on him.
When we got to Grandma and Grandpa’s house I was greeted by a different man.
Waynesville had slowed Stone down for sure. All of his hair was white. Still thick but white. His belly had taken over where once had been hard stomach and he had drifted into a quiet kind of hum of a life.
He slept. A lot. Long nights and a lot of naps. He wasn’t interested in telling stories anymore. He read all the time. He watched a lot of TV. He watched soaps. Soap Operas were big with Stone. And my fear of him, and my relationship with him, began to erode. He never laughed. He rarely smiled and the only thing you could count on from him was that every now and then, when you were laying on the floor watching TV, he would lean forward in his chair, run his fingertip up the sole of your foot, and tickle you. You would giggle and spin to look at him, and he would grin at you.
Other than that, not much was coming out of the oldest living Son of the Devil. He still got together with his crew. The Sons still met every so often. But they would not play poker anymore. Pinochle was their game and they would play for hours. All of them were calm when they crowded around him and I think he began to resent living.
Rules. Well there were a few rules. One, no one under any circumstance was allowed to touch The Tray. The Tray was about ten inches by eleven and it held countless bottles of medicine. These pills were the only thing keeping Grandpa alive. He had to have them exactly how they were, because if one was switched with the other, he would take the wrong pill at the wrong time and die. We were told he would die instantly.
I take a few pills. At night I have about eight pills that I take. But Grandpa took pills by the handful. He never did it in front of anybody, but he would shove a fist full of pills in his mouth and he could swallow twenty, twenty-five at a time. Or at least that was the legend.
There were certain foods we could not touch. They belonged to Stone and he had to have them any time he wanted them. They were his greatest joy. It was mostly cookies and cakes of certain sorts, but they would not be shared and they would win you an ass whooping if you were found with one in your mouth.
It was on this trip that I learned the magic of the mixture of bologna, American cheese, mayo, iceberg lettuce, and white bread. It was on this trip that I saw a different side of Grandma. She had found God in a Baptist church, and there were no more Screwdrivers. There was no more cussing coming out of her mouth, and she had blonde hair now instead of her black mane. I guess gray was not going to win her over, and she was never seen with her jet black hair ever again.
They both still smoked.
I don’t remember the basics. I remember that Grandma took away my knives when she found them, and she told me I could have them back when I left. Guardian begged, but there was no changing her mind. I remember Tigress and I had no one watching the overall behavior, so we didn’t bathe for two weeks. When Uncle Wrath found out, he screamed and hollered, decried we would shower every other day like Lioness was doing, and we muttered out agreement.
But I will never forget Uncle Ball’s great show.
He was working at the same Pizza Hut I would work at seven years later. He brought us pizza all the time, asking me what my favorite was and taking me out to eat every now and then without Tigress or Lioness. He introduced me to the crew he worked with. Introduced me to his friend, the one guy he held competition with to fuck every girl at the restaurant. He introduced me to Business. She would become my first boss and teach me about working a job like no one else ever would. I met Cici, the beautiful tall goddess he was trying real hard to lay (he wanted her digit in his number bad). She said she had heard of me and that I was more handsome than she imagined I would be. And on one of these trips to Pizza Hut, sitting in the back room, I asked him the question that had been haunting me for years.
“Uncle Ball?”
“Yeah,” around a mouth full of sausage pizza.
I could not look at him when I said it but I asked. “Would you raise another man’s son?”
“What?” He asked it softly, gently, and with love because he could tell I was upset.
“Would you still raise another man’s son?”
“Look at me,” he said.
It took a while for me to lift my gaze to him.
“I am always going to be your godfather. No matter what. You will definitely be my son if your parents die. Now that that bastard Char is out of the picture, I would get you, too. It is a thing I think about a lot. A lot of things would change in your life if I was your father, but yeah, I would still raise you.” He put his pizza down and flushed out his mouth with his coke so I could hear him clearly.
“Look me in the eye and listen good. I am the kind of man that would raise another man’s son.”
“You’re respectable?”
He looked back at his pizza and nodded. “Yeah, I’m respectable. Now if you don’t eat that entire half of the pizza I’m throwing it away. Sausage and Mushrooms. Who eats that anyway?”
“Less eats it. She loves it.”
“Well get it down your belly or it’s gonna fly in the trash like a frisbee. A whole half of a pizza ruined with that.” He gently kicked me in the leg and I laughed.
“Did you know that this pizza has seafood on it?” He took a big bite and chewed.
I looked but saw no fish. “Nut uh.”
He opened his mouth to show me a gross mash of crust, sauce, cheese and chewed sausage. “See, food!”
We both laughed and the summer went on.
He took me miniature golfing. Had never been before. He brought Tigress and Lioness, too, but he spent most of his time whispering to me.
“Laugh so they think we are talking about them,” he said looking at the girls.
I looked at them and giggled.
They stared confused.
“Yeah, I think it’s working,” I whispered to him.
He nodded. “Now shake your head and laugh hard.” I laughed and he did, too. He pointed and I laughed harder.
“Gonna kick you guys in the dick if you don’t stop laughing at us!” Tigress said.
“They are not really laughing at us,” Lioness said. “They are faking.” She tapped her ball and sunk it. “They are not clever enough to be that funny.”
All of us laughed and we went on to the next hole.
“Uncle Ball, do we have to keep score?”
“Mocking is all about competition, Jesse, you know that,” he said. “Especially the men. You gotta learn that good.” He looked at his ball and squared his feet. “Now watch this shot.”
He sank it.
The next hole had a windmill with spinning blades that knocked everybody’s ball away.
I timed it perfect and sank the ball in one shot.
It was a great show.
Jesse Teller 
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