This will be my 25th Christmas without my father. On a Saturday night in ’71, Walter Senior (Jabo to his friends) took the evil, snake-faced Montine, his bride of six weeks, out dancing at the Augusta, Ga., Amvet’s club. One minute Jabo was boogalooing, the next minute he was trying to talk his way past St. Peter.
Believe me when I tell you, Jabo had some explaining to do. I’ll bet there was some tough questioning about the time my mother sent him to the bank, with a double-fistful of nickel rolls, to start a savings account for me. But Jabo decided the money would be better invested in low-stakes pinball games, so he could start me down the road to financial security with some real money. Of course, he came home broke.
If things were looking grim toward the end of his interview with St. Pete, Jabo surely would’ve asked for extra credit for his December behavior. “When the boy was 10,” I can hear him saying, “I bought him a hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks wholesale and built him a firecracker stand up next to the road. Told him he could pay me back and still make a hundred dollars for himself before Christmas. I didn’t gripe when he broke even and then shot up all the profits. I let him make up his own mind.”
Yep. Yep, he did. Jabo led by two examples—very good and very bad. For instance, when my sister turned 16, Jabo bought her a wrecked Karman Ghia and spent months rebuilding it. Then, one Friday night, he took the reborn car out for a test drive, hooked up with some drinking buddies, and drove the car into the path of a pickup truck. Net results: Jabo’s friend Frank dead, killed by the ironic intrusion of his glass eye into his brain matter; Jabo in the hospital, near death, for weeks.
But back to Christmas. I remember vividly the year Jabo squirmed and struggled and ducked the hard Santa questions, doing his best to have just one more year with him believing that I believed. Christmas eve night, from my bedroom, I heard him talking with my mother in the kitchen. “Guess it’s time for the old gentleman to come,” he said, and I heard the screen door slam. In a few minutes, there came the sound of a small motor, followed by the sound of Jabo hooping and hollering and skidding in the sand as he test-rode—and rode and rode and rode—my new Christmas mini-bike, up and down the driveway. Hours later, Jabo and the scooter came to rest, and I went to sleep. Christmas morning, I couldn’t get the thing to start. The gas tank was stone empty.
Lucky for me, Jabo knew how to siphon.
I never got to keep a present, even the mini-bike, for more than a year. Every Christmas, Jabo would take the previous year’s loot, fix it up, and donate it to Toys for Tots or another local charity. Jabo did his best work in December.
Christmas of ’66, Jabo set the course of my life. He took me to Schneider’s Music Center in Augusta, Ga., with the intention of buying me a lame Harmony electric guitar and the cheapest amp possible. I walked out of there with a cherry-red Gibson ES-330TDC and an Ampeg Rocket II. By spring, I was in a working band, and Jabo had bought drums, guitars, amps, and PA for everybody. (Well, actually, he signed a note for the stuff. When he died in 1971, I had to pay the bill.)
The guitar rig let me get my wheels off the runway. Playing rock ’n’ roll all over the South let me get some altitude and see a little further than Burnettown, S.C. I’ve got Gibson’s electric guitars to thank for all three of my serious girlfriends—the three-nippled love slave, the one who broke my heart and ran off with a nine-fingered man, and the best one of all, who married me and birthed my daughter. I’ve got rock ’n’ roll friends to thank for bringing me to Nashville, where I discovered that I’d rather have my spleen out than play country music. This revelation made me a New York magazine editor, then a home inspector, a seriously doting father, and now your humble Helter Shelter Boy. All things considered, it’s been a pretty good run so far.
Thanks, Jabo. Merry Christmas.
Walter Jowers can be reached at Walter.Jowers@nashville.com.
