Probably the most exciting and adventurous thing I’ve done in life was to become a songwriter. I was back from Graphic Design School and unsuccessfully looking for work. I never felt very excited about being a page layout artist, which is what graphic design mostly entailed. I was following through on an idea someone else had for me to be a graphic artist. I also had no better ideas and felt I needed to do something…..anything before I was too much of a loser to ever move out of my Mom’s garage. While I was in school, I bought a twelve string guitar and taught myself to play. I’ve been interested in playing music since before I was born. I was making beats in the womb. Somehow, I never considered it as a career option and it was never presented as such.

1991, I went to see a music show in a little club called “Luna” in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Marshall Crenshaw was one of three, slightly obscure, songwriters doing the show. He was the only one I’d ever heard of. I had two of his cassettes that had no hit songs. I don’t know why I even knew who he was. Eventually he had a Hugely popular song called “Someday, Someway” and also appeared as Buddy Holly in “La Bamba”, the movie. During the “In their own words tour”, I was incredibly, amazingly, overly inspired. I was so excited that I felt that I must share my epiphany with Marshall Crenshaw! I was so shaken up by the idea of just making a living writing songs, that I was vibrating and profusely sweating as I informed the inspirational and highly accessible music artist all about it. Like I was the first person to ever figure that out. Except, of course for Marshall Crenshaw, who obviously previously figured that out. He actually was concerned about my nervousness and said in his cool voice,” Hey man, you all right? You gonna be okay?” It was then that I realized I was over zealous and was really freaking out Marshall Crenshaw. I strictfully informed him that I would move to Austin, Texas and become a songwriter like him. He calmly reassured me that Austin was a good town for music. So I moved to Austin very, very soon.

I started out dominating open mics all over town. I became a regular at the Saxon Pub on Thursday evenings . Owen Murrell was the host and introduced me in a serious and booming voice with pauses between my first…middle…..and last names. He introduced everyone that way. After the mostly mediocre open mic performers, Rusty Wier would headline the late show. He was a blast. He was a great performer and drank a lot of tequila shots. The bartenders loved the money he brought in with the crowd. I was broke, so I never left the bar after the open mic, so my girlfriend and I never paid a cover charge. For some reason, Rusty took a liking to me. Probably because I wore a signature hat like he did, and I reminded him of a younger, less talented himself. He often would insert my name into the song he was singing as I made my way through the crowded room. It was a great feeling. Rusty had written a song that was included on the “Urban Cowboy” soundtrack. “Don’t it make you wanna dance” sung by Bonnie Raitt. He was friends with another local songwriter, Jerry Jeff Walker who wrote the hit song, “Mr. Bojangles”, made famous by Sammy Davis Jr. Mr. Jerry Jeff Walker happened to be hanging out one afternoon following the open mic. I was also very much there. Owen Murrell was talking to Jerry Jeff when I interrupted and thanked Jerry Jeff for sending me advice on music. I actually had sent him a tape before I moved to Austin and I thought he sent it back with the kind advice to read a book called,”This business of music”. He enthusiastically told me that it was just the standard thing his wife, Susan, does with unsolicited tapes and he had nothing to do with it. I politely asked him to thank his wife for me then. He just grumbled at me. I was obviously bothering him but I loved his music so I really didn’t notice his despite for me. I honestly knew two of his albums by heart. Owen asked him if he wanted to play a few songs and he thought out loud and muttered, “I’m not sure what to play”. I immediately interjected with many, many random Jerry Jeff Walker song titles -like I was asked to help him out. About ten minutes later, I noticed Jerry Jeff standing alone, listening to Slaid Cleaves playing on the stage. He was the talented open mic headliner. I thought to myself, this would be a great chance to have a real moment with Jerry Jeff. I stood next to him and confidently told him to remember my name, Sidney…. Vance…..Stephens, because I was going to make it someday and he should remember my name, Sidney. …Vance….Stephens. I could feel the shiver of bone chilling blood, running down his spine. He didn’t even look at me. He couldn’t.

I’m highly ashamed of that moment, but he kind of had it coming. He could’ve been a little nicer to me. I only admit to this horrible behavior because I wonder if it became relevant many years later.

I moved to Nashville for many years but eventually returned to Austin. I saw Rusty Wier again, but so much time, and tequila, had passed that he did not remember me. I was a little hurt but I understood. If you don’t stay active in the music world, you’re forgotten easily.

A few more years passed by and I sadly heard that Rusty was not doing so well. He had pancreatic cancer. He made an appearance at a local bar where he was showered with an abundance of love. He was crippled and very weak as everyone surrounded him as he made his way through the crowd. I spoke to him and told him how good it made me feel when he sang my name all those years ago at the Saxon Pub. He didn’t remember me at all, but was smiling. That’s the last time the public saw Rusty.

He passed away a few weeks later with his good friend Jerry Jeff Walker by his bedside.

And if this story is relative, I’d like to think that maybe, just maybe, the moment before Rusty Wier took his last breath, he suddenly looked up and remembered me, and said my name aloud, and Jerry Jeff Walker turned his head in confusion and heard a distant booming voice…..

SIDNEY……….

VANCE……….

STEPHENS!!

And Jerry Jeff would have remembered my name.

I once impaled my own eardrum with a Q-tip. I was multitasking by letting the cotton swab soak up the excess moisture in my ear after a refreshing shower and brushing my hair simultaneously. My arm raised up and my bicep jammed the resting implement right through my ear canal. It was very loud and jolting due to the incredibly close proximity. Then it continuously made the disturbing sound of a ripping plastic swimming pool inside my cranium. Luckily, it was during the late afternoon and I could get to a doctors office instead of an emergency room. Unluckily, my only mode of transportation was a motorcycle. I learned that day how much physical balance is reliant on the equilibrium created by the complex workings of the inner human ear. Physical balance is also a key component in the operation of a motorcycle. I very unsafely rode twenty-five miles to see the doctor. There was much weaving and wobbling on my journey. The treatment for a broken eardrum is to break it even more. It’s called scarification and it’s just as sadistic as the name implies. It’s not incredibly painful, but it leaves the subject in a state of dismal confusion. Even better for a challenging after dusk motorcycle ride back home.  At one point, I had both feet skiing on the pavement for balance at fifty-five miles per hour.  Sadly, that was not the only time I had done that, but that’s another story involving a facial chemical burn, a heat enhancing safety helmet facing the sun, and a much higher speed of travel.

The moral of this tale is that there is a legitimate reason the Q-Tip people tell us NOT to use their product in the only way we can conceive of how to use it.

I just google searched a person who made me sad and angry in 1985. Jerry Tillespie. It’s about time. 31 years. And yeah, he seems to be doing fine.

He was one of those kids that exuded confidence. His hair naturally fell perfect on his slightly larger than average cranium. He was built like an athlete and was , of course, taller than the average eleventh grader. He played football and went to church. He was the teacher’s favorite and not just because his Father helped to financially support the Agriculture department. He was handsome and had his future waiting on him.

I was a sophomore in High School. I was in class, sitting at the end of a long, slightly oval, simulated wood laminated table. The Ag teacher, Mr. Werner, was sitting directly across at the other end, quizzing the entire classroom of students sitting at the over-sized table about the information we were all supposed to have read the day before. I actually read it all but retained none of it. That seemed to be quite common with my learning skills. It was an abundance of information about cotton farming. I remember thinking it was incredibly boring and not what I had been studying the previous semester at my last school. For some reason, I was glorifying the study of artificially inseminating cows. I’m not a weirdo, that’s what we were doing in my previous Ag class. It was easy to belittle cotton farming in comparison. Ranchers are way more cool than farmers. Everyone knows that.

I had recently moved from a small town, that had no cotton farms, in a different state, that had a lot of ranches. I had good friends and was at a school I actually enjoyed attending with good teachers. I tried to stay at that school, in that town, on my own. My single Mother household broke apart halfway through my Sophomore year. She moved to a different town one weekend after promising me she would not uproot me again until I graduated High School. She broke her promise and I was angry. So I stayed. At fifteen, I was bouncing around surrogate homes with my friends. I made it four months, living with three different friends and their families. I ran away from the first family when I discovered that my Mom was secretly coming to get me after my friend’s parents had grown weary of the situation. I hid my back-pack, full of my belongings under a tree the night before, so my friend’s parents wouldn’t see I was leaving. I was highly dedicated to not living with my Mom in her new town.

So I had a few troubles in my life and was just trying to survive. Eventually, I wound up living with my severely alcoholic Dad, in my Aunt’s house, in a different new town, in a new state, with no cows in sight.

It was Jerry Tillespie who welcomed me by making me sad. If I could go back in time, I would have, perhaps, made him more aware and sensitive to my situation.

I would do the same for Mr. Werner. I’m not sure why he treated me the way he did. My instinct tells me that he was just an insensitive asshole. Once every two weeks, the class would load up into an old, ratty, school bus and visit the Ag Farm, five-point two miles away. The more physical students would gather up and highly enthusiastically push-start the bus. It had a perpetually dead battery. I suppose that created an instant nostalgia for the upper middle class white kids. The same more popular kids would practice welding in the shop while the less popular kids would put on supplied rubber boots and clean the livestock pens. There were only two pair of slip over, protective rubber boots. Apparently, Mr. Werner did not expect a third loser kid at the farm and was not so prepared as to get a third pair of protective boots. He had me clean the pig pens while wearing my own cowboy boots or get a zero grade for the class. Pig feces has a very particular and potent aroma.  We returned to the school after I massively failed the attempt to hose off my nasty boots. The science class, that was extremely vocally unaware of the source of the powerful stench, was highly relieved when I finally walked out of class, never to return. The overbearing stink rose from the floor under my desk, slowly upward and spread across the classroom like a deathly flatulent ghost. I tried to ignore it as long as possible, knowing that if I left, everyone would know it was me. And there is no explanation for that much putrid stink. I couldn’t say to strangers, “Oh, that smell? It’s pig crap! I’m covered in it!” I just couldn’t go back to school after that. I would start out headed to school, but turn around and walk back home in the mornings. It wasn’t long before I dropped out of school.

In the short time I was at that school, I truly came to understand why kids snap and commit horrific violence. I was bullied by jocks. I was ignored and put down by teachers and made an example of. I was getting very poor grades and didn’t understand why. Not much had changed based on the grade percentage numbers on my papers. I eventually discovered that no one bothered to inform me that the State’s grading system was entirely different than my previous school. No one took any time with me at all, and no one cared that I quit.

A few days before the pig poo incident, I was called on by Mr. Werner in class. I was probably daydreaming, slumped behind a thick textbook, or possibly drawing my “Super Goober” cartoons in my notebook that was hidden inside the textbook. I wasn’t really listening to what he was talking about and was shocked that he expected me to know anything at all. I’d transferred halfway through the school year and been there less than a week. I was dorky, shy, and awkward. I was lost in this new world of strangers and lacking knowledge. I was socially inept. I dressed like I was poverty stricken and with an astonishing lack of style. I had no friends and no confidence. I had a unsophisticated walk like Charlie Chaplin impersonating a penguin. The last thing I needed was to be publicly called upon, exposing all of my frailties at once, in a room full of unkind strangers. But, after a few minutes went by, the teacher called on me again. He was testing me, which would be OK, but he also knew what the outcome would be, which made him a bully. This time, I knew exactly what he was talking about but didn’t tell him the answer out of defiance. I felt like I should have received a little credit for acknowledging the question at the very least, but no. I felt like I should get a little praise for having minimal eye contact and trying to engage at all. but no. The room was increasingly cold and judgmental. I started to feel the pressure and began to withdraw into my metaphorical insecurity shell. The third time I was blatantly called upon to answer a question I obviously knew nothing about, I simply replied, “I don’t know” the moment he finished asking. The person sitting next to the teacher was unprovoked when he stated, “Whut DO you know?- is whut I’D like to know!” The whole class chuckled at Jerry Tillespie’s snappy dim wit, including the teacher. Then it became quiet as everyone stared at me and I slipped deep into my shell of shame and discontent, never to expose myself again. I somehow missed the hilarity of his comment.

I would berate them all if I could go back. I would rise up against the confident and secure. I would hand Mr. Werner his ass in a swine crap covered boot. I would state the obvious. That a kid like me needs patience, compassion, empathy, and understanding. A guiding hand. A simple conversation to assess my unique and troubled situation, then a plan to help me respond with confidence. But there’s no going back. I can only write and complain about it thirty-one years later. I credit myself highly for not blowing up the entire school. Instead, I dropped out and remained uneducated and lost for most of my life.

I also understand that this is only my personal recollection of these events, and they are biased. I think it’s allowed to have a skewed memory based on the fact that I felt like I was treated horribly. I feel like I was failed by the people society entrusted to educate and empower me. I feel angry and resentful for their uncaring attitude. And I cannot forgive the embarrassment and anguish it caused me. It didn’t have to be that way.

I could have failed just fine without their help.