The Setup
I should have smelled a rat when Nancy asked me to fly to Lexington to “get dinner, see the [inaudible] and have some chuckles.” She had just begun dating some NCAA bigwig who was also the former athletic director at the University of Kentucky.
All my friends are aware of the degree to which I detest sports. My good friend “Fancy” Nancy has known me for more than ten years, and we worked in a bookstore together; therefore, she knows this better than anyone.
In hindsight, of course, I file this whole experience under, DUH.
I thought Nancy’s invitation was a veiled attempt to send her boyfriend off with the guys for an evening so we could find a good restaurant in which to hide out and chit-chat for a few hours.
I discovered after it was too late to back out that I’d actually been asked along as a fourth leg to balance Nancy, C.M. (her gentlemen friend), and a Wildcat Basketball Superfan whom Nancy had referred to only as “Miss Ashley.” It was bad enough that I was being subjected to a college sporting event; the greater indignity, though, was being used as a romantic guinea pig by someone I thought was my pal.
“Don’t you blame me, Miss Sassy Pants!” Nancy said to me after I did what anyone else would do: nine months later, I attributed the failure of my relationship with the beautiful and brainy Ashley Judd solely to Nancy’s goodhearted attempt to play matchmaker.
“Go ahead and stick a fork in my neck about it, but listen! I just figured you girls would hit it off. And I thought you did!”
To be fair, we did hit it off, though not until we left the sports arena. I spent most of the game fighting my desire to call a cab to drop me off at the nearest Barnes and Noble. Well. There was that, and also covering my ears every time Miss Ashley screamed like Elsa Lanchester in The Bride Of Frankenstein. She did this whenever the Wildcats scored a court goal (or whatever it’s called when the ball they keep bouncing and throwing between each other’s legs goes through the orange circle with twine hanging off of it.)
After the game, Miss Ashley and I stayed up until five in the morning talking about books and films and honeysuckle and ramp dinners and cricks and hollers and outhouses. We delved into the history of coalfield bloodshed in our respective home-states. We even tried to deconstruct the inexplicable allure of the carbonated beverage called Ale-8-One (“A Late One”: get it?), which is bottled in Winchester, Kentucky. (Basically watered-down ginger ale with about three times the sugar of regular soft drinks, a single twelve-ounce bottle of that stuff will keep you awake for forty-eight hours—one day of which you’ll spend doing little more than going to the bathroom to urinate.)
This conversation continued for months, pausing only for us to fall asleep in each other’s arms and awaken to start the conversation again the next day.
The Judds
It wasn’t until I moved to Tennessee to set up housekeeping with Miss Ashley and was suddenly part of her family that things went sour—and not just because I’m a “wine-guzzling, statue-worshipping, Pope-crazy” Catholic. (I overheard Uncle Albert describing me as such before I entered a room full of elder Judds one evening.)
The Judds. They’re heartwarming. Talented. Loving. Hardworking. God-fearing. Quite simply, the Judds are fine people with uncomplicated and unassailable values.
They’re also up one another’s asses 24/7.
They came and went from our home like it was some kind of hotel. This is a harmless pattern to be part of, assuming one doesn’t have a strict writing schedule to which one has to adhere. But the whole time Miss Ashley and I lived together, I wrote a total of about 3,500 words. And not long after we began living together, I never saw her again in the daylight, as she seemed sucked into some benevolent-but-unstoppable vortex of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and all their spouses and children from sunrise to sunset.
Still. Who was I to complain? I was only a Judd-by-proxy at best. (I was probably deemed a non-Judd when I graciously declined a bowl of Aunt Sandy’s bacon and cheese grits. But come on! She kept insisting, like all southern women do in such an annoying way when you tell them you don’t like and never have liked grits, “Oh, honey, but you’ve never had my grits. . .”)
It was always clear where my boundaries existed in the household, even when Naomi would confound me by rearranging all the cabinets in the kitchen on a whim. Or when she made it her mission to clean out the refrigerator without asking what was okay to throw away.
I’m thinking in particular of an aged wheel of Roquefort (don’t look at me; Miss Ashley was the epicure in our relationship): “I threw out that hunka stinky cheese y’all had in there. I just don’t understand why you girls let things get so moldy before you decide to pitch ’em!” Naomi said to me, nose scrunched up.
The thing is, I got blamed for that. And when I tried to explain the truth to Miss Ashley, suddenly I was merely a “finger-pointing attention-monger” who “refuse[d] to take responsibility for her actions.”
Miss Ashley was, I’m willing to bet, more upset about the fact that I didn’t like Roquefort cheese. Throughout our relationship, I was also verbally strung up with piano wire because I didn’t care for going to the opera, eating foie gras, drinking Scotch, and for failing to recognize the importance of NASCAR to the advancement of civilization.
Not surprisingly, nothing courted more disfavor with Miss Ashley than my flat, unyielding refusal to give a shit about the success or failures of UK’s basketball, hockey, and football teams.
The good news: Miss Ashley’s mama and my mama got along so great that every time I thought of ending it with Miss Ashley, I couldn’t bear the thought of also ending the friendship between Phydellas and Naomi.
I hung in there for our mothers much longer than I should have. Thankfully, they’ve stayed in touch.
Besides. Naomi was never the irritant that Wynonna became. For some reason, Wy thought our house was the best place to headquarter the many parties she hosted for her music industry friends.
At first, Wy’s parties were fun and exciting. I never in my life imagined I’d be coached by Ricky Skaggs while I poured beer into a funnel attached to a hose being held in the mouths of people like Dolly Parton and Chris Isaak. And I’m positive not many people can say they’ve seen Willie Nelson doing the moonwalk alongside B-52s front man Fred Schneider.
Invariably, these evenings ended up with Wy and Lyle Lovett—both of them knee-walking drunk and weeping—staggering around the bed of Lyle’s pickup singing a loud, badly harmonized duet of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” straight into the night sky:
Take yore prooooh-teeeen peeeels ’n pooootcher hail-muuuut ooooonnnn!
(Of course, when sober, both Wy and Lyle called Bowie “a sorry-ass cat,” stealing Miles Davis’ now-infamous moniker for Steve Miller. Oh, well. No question about it: In aqua vitae veritas*.)
Miss Ashley’s insistence that her big sister could do no wrong led to many other annoying social scenes, one of which had us paying a sneaky-snake member of the paparazzi $25,000 for photos he took of Shania Twain, Garth Brooks and Mary Chapin Carpenter in a very compromising position in the graveyard on top of the eastern ridge of our property tract.
Also, it was nothing for Wy to show up at some ungodly hour of the night and climb right into the bed with us—often with all her children, who were usually dragging with them Barbie dolls, Tonka trucks and our hissing, growling cats.
On one hand, this was all okey dokey, artichokey. It made Miss Ashley happy to have her kin near her, and I truly liked her people better than most of my own. Sadly, I come from one of those Appalachian families that only gets together at funeral parlors to speak ill of the dead and to rip scabs off emotional sores of the living.
In some ways, the Judds were the relatives I’d only dreamed of having.
But did they always have to crowd and kick and elbow me under the covers until I finally would go and sack out in the Land Rover? I held on desperately to my three inches of mattress, but the depth, breadth and width of the love I felt for Miss Ashley never made our bed a damned bit bigger.
(*: “In whiskey there is truth.”)
The End
Everything came to a head the morning I awakened at four o’clock with the ass of a cat in my face while the animal “kneaded dough” on the tender flesh of my stomach. God knows, it was not a singular occurrence. But this time I just happened to be lying on the floor after having been pushed off the bed during the night by a body which hadn’t been there before I’d gone to sleep.
When I came completely to my senses, I realized Wynonna the Great’s left arm and left leg were hanging off my side of the bed. She was snoring so loudly that the lampshades on the night stands were jiggling like Charo in a Vegas nightclub.
That morning at breakfast—with not less than fifteen relatives who’d camped throughout the house, on the porch and in the barn, as well as some who had just magically appeared, like toadstools—I declared in a normal tone of voice that I was leaving and that I probably would never come back and that I was sorry but I couldn’t be a writer and love Miss Ashley and at the same time put up with all the Judds, regardless of how much I admired them for being infinitely better than “my kind of people.”
Nobody heard me, not even Miss Ashley, who was bent over and busy with pulling yet another pan of her famous, ultra-light “High as Heaven’s Radio Tower” biscuits from the oven when I made my announcement.
Four years later, I’m still not certain she’s aware of my absence. The last time I tried to phone her, one of Wy’s kids answered, giggling for a few seconds and then dropping the receiver on the floor and running away until the sound of little feet faded.
Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision. I mean, I’ve dated tons of beautiful, famous women. But none of them tossed out words like peripatetic and incendiary in their interviews with the press. I could never deny that I deeply grieve the absence of Miss Ashley’s vocabulary from my life.
Usually my doubts take me over when I hear “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” by Gary Glitter. It had played constantly during that first Wildcats basketball game we attended with Fancy Nancy and C.M., so that made it “our song.”
If something like this festers in my memory and threatens to make me sad, I just call Fancy Nancy and berate her for ruining my life. Because she’s a true-blue friend, she always finds a way to make me feel better about it all.
“Now listen! I didn’t hear you boo-hooing and squawking when Miss Ashley dressed you up and dragged you off to the Oscars, did I?” Nancy said once or twice when I tried to pin the blame on her. However, she always says, “Wipe your nose, darlin’, and let’s move on. Life is just too short not to look for all the chuckles we can get out of it!”