(I've been writing book reviews...and scheduling them for the day the book is scheduled to reach a bookstore near you...and remembering, belatedly, to pop an older book review out of the can...)
Title: Walk to Beautiful
Author:
Jimmy Wayne (Barber)
Date:
2014
Publisher:
W / Thoams Nelson
ISBN:
978-0-8499-2210-7
Length:
280 pages
Illustrations:
color photo insert
Quote:
“We moved a lot when I was a little boy...every time Mama ran out
of rent money.”
Jimmy
Wayne Barber’s father disappeared when he was born. His mother was
one of those lovable but badly drug-damaged hippie chicks; she let
her homes fill up with freeloading “friends” who usually ate up
most of the food Mama used her monthly handouts to buy, and let her
children try to make it through the rest of the month on a box of
cereal and a box of powdered milk apiece. Mama Barber tried to give
her children a home, as she drifted from party to party, slum to
slum, man to man, and in and out of the institutions social workers
undoubtedly thought might have helped her, but it was just too
difficult. Once she started to take little Jimmy with her; but then, when
he and her boyfriend of the season didn’t get along, she set him
out at a bus station.
So
he learned about the foster care system and, as a rebellious
teenager, about the juvenile correctional system. Being unable to
afford a lot of drugs might have been good for Jimmy Wayne, on the
whole, because he was sober enough of the time to remember his
adolescence as being worse than average. He describes his early
adventures rolling and selling marijuana cigarettes with just a few
real marijuana seeds rolled up in tomato leaves. The primary effects
of marijuana are psychological so his mother’s hippie friends paid
for the “high” they got from much less marijuana than they were
paying for, and little Jimmy felt good about being a fake drug dealer
because he sent some of the money to Mama in the mental hospital. You
might suspect that this early success as a fake drug dealer inspired
Jimmy to try to make even more money as a real one, but he doesn’t
describe doing that, if he ever did.
Foster
parents, and state institutions for children in between foster
parents, did not provide the sort of supportive adult young Jimmy
knew he wanted. As a teenager looking for odd jobs he found a pair of
supportive adults, Bea and Russell Costner. Disqualified by age and
self-employment from being official foster parents, they’d been
unofficial foster parents to many children. Jimmy was the last. He
came to identify the word “beautiful” with the name “Bea,”
idealizing this foster mother who was probably older than his real
grandmothers.
He
sang in a rock band. Then he studied law enforcement and worked as a
prison guard. Then he had some success as a country musician,
but--...
Y’know,
although I think it makes this “celebrity memoir” an awkward
read, I can relate to Jimmy Wayne’s level of musical talent and
success. Musicians who are described as “great” are usually
obsessed with music by or before age four. Then there are those of us
who can carry a tune, can learn to play instruments and harmonize and
even perform classical pieces competently, but for whom music is just
one of several things we enjoy...who are usually advised not to try
making music our primary source of income. We may be competent
musicians but we’re not obsessive enough to make music a career; we
want normal lives too. We’re good enough to be in backup bands, may
even sell a few recordings; as long as we perform cheap or free, at
churches, hospitals, prisons, or at local events, we have enough fans
to justify recordings. If the lyrics are timely or clever, or the
video is brilliant, we might even monetize a YouTube post now and
then. We’re not magical musicians, though, and most of us
are likely to be better rated at the other jobs we also do
competently and enjoy doing.
It’s
not painful to be the kind of musician Jimmy Wayne describes himself
as being in this memoir. He was in this band, they recorded an album
and sold five-dollar cassette versions to all their friends, they
broke up. He performed in contests and usually didn’t win. He
auditioned for this and that industry mogul, most of them said “Don’t
call me, I’ll call you,” but some of them tried marketing his
records. It’s not bad to be that kind of musician. It’s
not even uncool to write about it, later—if the memoir is about how
you then moved on to your real career, or how music remained part of
your life along with your real career. I think it’s extremely cool
to be a good music-store manager, or writer, or bus driver or
whatever else, who has sold a few records and still sings on
weekends. Most of my school friends are in that category; many of my
favorite writers are, and The Rock Bottom Remainders are an excellent
idea and a decent, if self-parodic, band. But it is pitiful to
be that kind of musician, not know it, and package your memoir as a
celebrity musician’s memoir, at an age when you’re too young to
write a memoir as such, in any case. In this book Jimmy Wayne never
seems actually to come to terms with the fact that he’s neither
Elvis Presley nor Shel Silverstein.
This
makes the packaging of Walk to Beautiful as a musician’s
memoir a source of pain. That’s a pity because Jimmy Wayne does
have something worthwhile to say, and in this book he says it well;
it’s just a disappointment for those who like to read the memoirs
of celebrities who moved quickly through that garage-band stage into
long, glamorous careers. As the musician’s memoir the professional
writer Ken Abraham tried to make Walk to Beautiful, it’s
pathetic. As a fundraiser for a cause—the cause of helping foster
children become independent adults—it’s excellent.
One
of the things that put people off Jimmy Wayne’s songs is their
emotionality. Emotionality worked against him as a prison guard too;
nobody is paying those men to befriend convicts, as Jimmy
Wayne wanted to do. When you realize that this book is really
about how awkward and difficult it is for 19-year-olds without
money or connections to start functioning as adults, that
emotionality is appropriate. He makes a strong case that 19-year-old
boys, not all of whom have even reached their full height, have a
hard time acting like men when they don’t have a living, supportive
father to guide them, by presenting his life as the way such boys’
lives can go if they’re very lucky. He gives mostly statistics, and
not enough to make a chart, about the ones who are not lucky.
The
dramatic climax of his story so far is thus his pledge to walk
“halfway across America,” from Nashville to Phoenix, as a
fundraising demonstration. He walked 1700 miles in seven months—all
well publicized, with some sort of “support vehicle” and often an
entourage of fans bollowing. During the last month his heel bone
cracked so he walked on an increasingly swollen and painful foot. He
limped into Phoenix in a padded support boot, with two sticks, doped
to the gills on heavy-duty painkillers. He sang for his fans that
night. Then he was flown back to Nashville and rolled off the plane
in a wheelchair. Then he lobbied in the Tennessee legislature and got
the legislation he wanted in his own state, at least.
Was
it good legislation? Do nineteen-year-olds want to be wards of
the state, of their schools, or of their parents? Given the
inadequacy of state foster care to connect Jimmy Wayne to the
Costners before he was seventeen, how helpful to the young Jimmy
Wayne would it have been if the state had retained custody of him for
another eight years? Is it healthier, generally, to classify
nineteen-year-olds as normally independent adults, some of
whom may revert to dependency due to temporary disabling
conditions? We need to talk about these things. Fiscal
conservatives’ opposition to the idea that foster children should
be dependent till they’re 25 is not merely a matter of not wanting
to disburse the money. Fiscal conservatives, who tend to be sturdy,
resilient, cheerful souls and expect everyone to loathe anything that
sounds like “Oh you poor little helpless useless thing, of course
you can’t be expected to take care of yourself!”,
often feel genuine concern about social workers who try to “rescue”
children from things like growing up in conservative families—and
sometimes succeed, often by aggravating devoted, hardworking parents’
financial problems. This is a serious concern for some people who
have been foster parents or foster children. I share the concern. I
think that, as always, flexibility, with all final decisions left to
the individual of principal concern (in this case the foster child
over age ten), is the central rule to which any satisfactory solution
must adhere.
It
won’t hurt the fiscal conservatives, though, to read Walk to
Beautiful. Jimmy Wayne missed so much school, due to family and
welfare-system drama, that at eighteen he’d only just moved in with
the Costners—one of whom died later that year—in order to be able
to attend eleventh grade classes. He was almost twenty when he
finished high school, not quite twenty-two when he earned a two-year
degree in “criminal justice,” basically a trade school course for
prison guards. He’d been working—doing yard work and other
legitimate odd jobs, as well as selling fake marijuana cigarettes—for
years before he struck it lucky, getting the Costners as yard work
clients. He had not been able to earn enough, from honest work, to
have much chance at a decent adult life if he hadn’t stumbled into
the Costner home just before the Costners died.
Such
stories aren’t typical, but what is typical for foster children as
a group? If we know one foster child, we know one foster child. Jimmy
Wayne offers fiscal conservatives much to think about.
