Diamond in the Rough by Shawn Colvin Read Free Book Online Page A

from one of his albums, and this particular answer was James singing “just a bad dream …” from “Blues Is Just a Bad Dream” on his first record. This was vinyl, remember, so it required a fair bit of work to drop the needle in the exact right place. Another one of our questions was, “James”—we loved this, just saying his name—“James, what are the lyrics to your new song?” We delighted in our clever answer, from the very end of “Blossom”: “La laaa la la la la laaa la la la la la la, la la la LA LA LA.”
    On New Year’s Eve, the older Bakers always went out, leaving us to fend for ourselves in that fabulous house. My folks were teetotalers, while the Bakers showcased a complete liquor cabinet and had their five-o’clock highballs every evening. Mandy’s aforementioned Scott came over one New Year’s Eve, having been drinking before he got there and with plans to go on drinking after he left. Before he left, though, he needed to puke in the downstairs bathroom, and I guess he wasn’t particularly neat about it. This was news to us when Dennis, Mandy’s father, got home in his cups and used the bathroom. His wife, Donna, was in tow, her wig turned halfway around her head, giving her a sort of Liberace–meets–Louise Jefferson effect. After seeing the mess downstairs, Dennis interrogated Mandy, who could think on her feet and blamed the dog. Dennis paused as we all held our breaths and finally said, “Mandy? Mandy? Did you give that dog scotch? You know he was raised on gin.” God bless Dennis. He got sober the same year I did—1983.
    With my guitar on one side of me and Rollie and my good friends on the other, I coasted through high school. These were some of the most wonderful, grounded times of my whole life. I made decent enough grades to get by, although I recall precious little of what I learned in school, save for how to write a check and how to type. From Larry English I learned the words “twat” and “snatch.” From Todd Stephens I found out what a great friend a guy can be. Oh, and I remember learning about tectonic plates and that flushing the toilet wastes water. Overall, life was simple and full. After I graduated from CCHS, though, things weren’t so clear anymore.

5
    Small Repairs

    Eighteen years old, 1974
    (Photograph courtesy of Jim Bruno)
    I wasn’t born, I got spat out on a wall,
    And nobody knew my name.
    The sun hatched me out, cradle and all,
    On the corner of First and Insane.
    I couldn’t wait to get out of The House. I took summer school for two summers straight in order to graduate from CCHS a year earlier than my friends, to graduate in Rollie’s class. We had a fantasy of living on a remote shore in Australia after he got a degree in marine biology, and attending SIU together was a good start. In 1973, at the age of seventeen, I packed myself up and flew the coop with Rollie to the Thompson Point dorms, which were all of maybe three miles from Norwood Drive.
    It was kind of a case of the emperor’s new clothes. I was hell-bent for leather on becoming independent, but I really didn’t have a clue about what to do next. The only reason I attended college at all was spite—I’d been told so many times by my high-school teachers how hard college would be that I had to prove a point, I suppose. I took refuge in required freshman courses like earth science and algebra, and as far as I could tell, they weren’t any different from high-school classes except that they were way bigger and the teachers gave less of a damn.
    One of my electives was modern dance. Don’t ask me why, because I’m one of the least graceful people on the planet, and our first assignment was to make up a solo piece about something we did in our everyday lives. I painfully recall trying to “be” a shower; let’s just leave it at that. Truly, I was a buffoon with regard to the whole undertaking of SIU, now that I had a choice in the matter. I had absolutely zero interest in