My Cross to Bear Read Online Free Page B

Daytona Beach. I guess she’d been there when she was a teenager, and she always wanted to go back and live there. It’s funny: to this day, my mother doesn’t ever complain of pain, except for her sinuses; she’s always had sinus problems. Later on in life, I said to her, “Mama, you moved from Nashville to Daytona Beach, Florida—hell, you should have gone to Arizona! You moved to the damn humidity capital of the world.”
    At first, I hated the fucking place aside from the beach and the warm weather. One thing that saved me from running away and going God knows where is that I rode my bike down to the beach where they were having the last NASCAR beach race. It was scary, because after you came out of the south turn, you had two straightaways, one paved and one beach. Toward the end of it, you had nothing but soft sand, and the whole thing was like a demolition derby. They would stop the race every now and then and get these half-ass little steamrollers out there and pat the sand down a little bit, but those guys were doing 80 to 100 miles an hour, in those big old swaying Pontiacs. It was something to behold, and I wouldn’t trade it for nothing.
    Because they shaved my head at Castle Heights, I wouldn’t cut my hair anymore. I didn’t grow out my hair because everybody else did. I grew it out because I remember them taking it down to my scalp, and with the light color of my hair, it looked like I was bald-headed. I don’t have the best-shaped head in the world—I mean, bald is beautiful, but not if your head looks like an old basketball with no air in it.
    When I went back to Nashville the summer after we moved to Florida, my grandma had been moved into a housing community, which was a big change. She’d always seemed pretty independent. My grandmother read her Bible every day, she smoked three packs of Tareytons a day, and she was one of the finest cooks I have ever witnessed, to this day. She had her ups and downs, man. She loved her gossip, and she talked to herself when she was mopping the floor. She’d start every sentence with “Well, gentlemen …” That was an old country way of talking. “Well, gentlemen …” is definitely the country side of the Allman family.
    Seeing her in that housing was tough, you know? Didn’t seem right. I think my uncle Sam was footing the whole bill, and my uncle Dave was on the police force, but I don’t know who was paying for what.
    My grandmother and my father’s brothers were all we had left back in Nashville. A few years before, my grandfather had passed away, but because he and my grandmother were divorced it hadn’t impacted her much. Though my grandmother didn’t much like Alf, his sons loved him and us grandsons were crazy about him. He brought us firecrackers and barbecue—he bought me a Wham-O slingshot with a sight on it, and a whole bag of ball bearings. I thought, “This old man is the hippest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen!” What kid didn’t want a slingshot like that one? You could take down a pretty good-sized alley cat with one of them!
    My grandfather made whiskey all his life and sold it to the state police. I think he worked in a sawmill, because I remember him always having coveralls on and dust all over him. He taught me lots of good things—just hitting me with random bits of wisdom. He told me one time, “Gregory, there’s two things that gets you in trouble and one of ’em’s your mouth.” I was way too young to understand, but later on it hit me.
    I was playing with one of those fly-backs one day—the paddle with the ball on a string. He was watching me, and he came up and took the ball in his hand and let the paddle drop.
    “Gregory,” he said, “I’m gonna tell you something about love.”
    I’m thinking, “Oh no, here he goes”—’cause I was like five or six.
    “If I squeeze and squeeze and squeeze tighter and tighter on this ball,” he said, “it might pop out of my hand. But if I just keep a nice, easy grip