Dirty Rocker Boys Read Online Free

years old the first time I decided to step in. Bobby was getting Judy really bad, kicking her on the floor. So I grabbed a bottle of ketchup, lay down, and squirted the red stuff all over my belly, so as to create a diversion.
    “Look over here, Daddy, I’m hurt. You must get help.”
    Bobby cocked his head to one side. “You better get out of here, Bobbie,” he growled. “Yes, get out!” my mom screamed. I wasn’t sure who was more mad at me, my dad or my mom. She really hated my seeing her like that.
    Judy tried to leave Bobby numerous times. She would pack a few suitcases and we would go stay at a hotel, but my dad would show up looking all lonesome and sorry for himself and convince us to come home. He just had this way with words, the ability to make you fall in love with him all over again, no matter what he had just done. Things would get good for a while, and our little house on Pioneer Drive would be filled with music. My daddy played the guitar, mandolin, and harmonica; once upon a time, he even had dreams of being a country singer. A lot of blues and country singers came from his hometown of Spartanburg—Pink Anderson (inspiration for the Pink in Pink Floyd), David Ball, and Walter Hyatt, for instance. When I was little, I would sit up with him late and listen to him strum on his guitar. Those were my favorite times with him. Sometimes my dad would perform in a little bar close to where we lived. When he wasn’t performing at the bar, he’d be drinking it dry.
    Bobby didn’t drink much at home, but he loved to go out and party, and when he came stumbling onto the front porch, that’s when the fun and games began. I could hear them in their bedroom, my mom yelling at him to stop. After a while Mom would have me sleep in bed with her, hoping perhaps that Icould act as a safety barrier. But it didn’t work. Bobby Brown couldn’t help himself—a trait that ran in his family.
    “Bobbie, honey, wake up.”
    It was the night of my seventh birthday and I had fallen asleep hours ago, high on cake and soda pop. I opened my eyes and blinked, trying to make sense of what was happening. My mom was leaning over me, stroking my hair.
    “Grandpa John just went to heaven; now we gotta take him to the funeral home. You have to get up, sweetie.”
    Grandpa John was my dad’s dad. I was his favorite, the only kid he really liked out of all his children and his children’s children. In fact, I may have been the only human being he liked, period. Grandpa John grumbled, growled, and complained, and had beaten up his poor wife, my grandma Ida, like it was his daily duty. A sweet, mild-mannered woman, she had died before I was born, after suffering a brain hemorrhage. My dad was a teenager at the time of her death.
    “The heat was on high in the house when I came home,” my dad told me, when I was in my twenties. “That’s when I knew something was wrong.” On a hot Southern day he found my grandma lying on the couch with the heating turned on high. He thought she was sleeping, but she was dead.
    My dad remained loyal to my grandpa, though, and when Grandpa John got sick in 1975, he moved in with us. I was six years old and tried my hardest to be a good nurse for him. I would steal pink geraniums and pansies from the neighbor’s garden, tie them in a posy, and lay them on his bedside table.“That’s my Pickle,” said my grandpa, patting my head, ignoring the neighbor in his yard, hollering about his missing flowers. Grandpa John loved to call me Pickle.
    We drove eleven hours to Grandpa’s funeral in Spartanburg. That was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. I cried too. Grandpa John was the only grandpa I ever knew, and I loved him. The last piece of advice Grandpa gave my mom before he died was, “Give him a son.” He figured that if my mom bore Bobby a boy, that might help lift his mood. And so when I was eight, my mom gave birth to my brother, John Adam Brown, the sweetest little baby on Earth. As