Luck or Something Like It by Kenny Rogers Read Free Book Online Page B

someone had reported the license number of our flashy red convertible as the getaway vehicle. That was the bad news. The good news was that we were cleared right away. The best news was that when I got back to San Jacinto High, you would have thought I was a convicted felon and hardened criminal in the eyes of the other students. Though all we really did was lounge by a creek all day, we had been arrested, and we deserved respect.
    When I then showed up for my first day at Jefferson Davis, my tough-guy reputation, despite my soft-guy nature, had preceded me. That was good, because the Jeff Davis crowd was all new to me, and it was better to be seen as a tough guy than just another nervous teen. But the moment of truth came when the resident bully, Wallace Connor, chose me as his next victim. For whatever reason, he thought that I needed to be taught a lesson. I was sitting on a stool at Dube’s drugstore one afternoon with none of my backup crew when Wallace accosted me. He punched me in the back of the head with his fist, snarling, “Hey, tough guy, I want you outside. I’m gonna whip your ass.”
    “Well,” I said, “now is as good a time as any,” shaking like a leaf but seeing no way out of it. “Let’s get it on.”
    That appeared to shock Wallace, and he hesitated a moment before he said anything else. Finally he shrugged and said, “I guess we don’t need to do this. I just wanted to see what you were made of.”
    Standing up to Wallace Connor was a big accomplishment at Jeff Davis, and no one bothered me again, with or without my tough-guy reputation. I don’t know if Wallace was really the badass he made himself to be when I first met him, but a few months after he got out of high school, someone shot him through the screen window of his home, thinking he was a drug dealer. He died instantly.
     
    I ended up buying my first guitar with money I earned while working as a busboy at the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. Throughout high school, I continued to take as many part-time jobs as possible, including working as an usher at the Metropolitan Theater and rebuilding Coca-Cola boxes. Finally, after I’d been at the Rice Hotel for a bit, I’d saved enough to actually buy an instrument.
    At the local H&H music store, a salesman named Red Novak had set up a kind of “pickers’ corner” in the store where you could go in and play one of their instruments. He’d let you pick out a guitar and try it out as long as you were responsible. Red’s rule was “You Break It, You Own It!”—but he at least gave you the chance to play really good instruments without having to buy them. There were other pickers who hung around the store. We all learned chords and technique from each other. There was a great camaraderie at those guitar pulls.
    The guitar I loved was a Les Paul L5, the same guitar Eddy Arnold had let me play years earlier. It cost $500. I ended up putting it on layaway and paying for it, bit by bit, with money I earned working my part-time jobs. But I practiced on it, learning the chords, in Red’s pickers’ corner.
    I guess you could say that from a professional standpoint, it all started for me when I went to a talent contest at Jeff Davis and saw a really bad band get up onstage and play. Once I saw how little it took to be in a “talent contest,” I figured I could do better. I had learned a lot from all those sessions at the music store, and I believed I could put together a band that could be professional.
    One of the greatest things for me at Jeff Davis was singing in the glee club, where Mrs. Leifesti encouraged my singing and gave me a lot of solo parts in school performances. By this time, some friends and I had formed a vocal group called the Scholars, an interesting name for four C students. Nevertheless, we were serious. As a cover band, we sang whatever was popular on the radio, like songs of the Penguins (“Earth Angel”) or the multihit group the Drifters, or anything else that