Chapter 43 – The Distance

Long distance home-buying is not always the best course of action, but for us it was unavoidable. It was the real estate agent, the one with the racist cop for a husband, who put us in touch with, Tim Bailey, an independent mortgage broker. He told us he would get the best loan package available. The average mortgage rate at the time for a thirty year loan was about six to seven percent, and after putting down the customary twenty percent down payment, it would leave a balance of around a hundred-thousand dollars.

The closing was to be held at the law offices of Tom Jones (not the Welsh song-belter) in Franklin, ten miles north of Thompson Station. Donna was suffering from an ear infection and the swelling was so bad she could hardly hear out of it. We should have cancelled the closing, but it was one of those things that were written in stone. I was going to take her to the doctor later in the morning—if we could find a doctor in this one horse town—probably would be a veterinarian. While at the closing with the real estate agent, the lawyer and his junior partner, a sick wife and me, Jonathan was running around the long rectangular table, playing hide and seek or capture the attorney. While I tried to concentrate on the three inch stack of papers that needed to be read and signed, Donna tried to distract Jonathan with a grape soda or stale candy from the crystal dish in the reception area. He was on a mission to be as awkward as any two-year old would be in a situation as boring and tedious as that—it wasn’t exactly Magic Mountain of Disney World.

I finally grabbed him and sat him down on my knee while he struggled to escape my grasp, Donna and I tried to concentrate on signing the deal that would affect the next thirty years of our lives. When it came to the page where the loan details were revealed we saw that instead of the six or seven percent interest, it was ten percent, and it wasn’t a fixed rate, but an adjustable. This was bad. I called Tim Bailey’s office and his home number but he couldn’t be reached.

 We could have postponed the closing, but all of our stuff was in boxes in the living room of our new house and we didn’t have anywhere else to stay since Chas’ cabin was being used for a session. Besides, I had a sick wife and a rambunctious child to attend to and no parents, aunts, uncles or cousins in the area to turn to for help. In fact, Chas was the only friend we had in Tennessee.  I was beginning to wish I had never left Los Angeles in the first place, but as most people who know me say, “That Haymer guy can be a bit impulsive.”

When people ask me why I moved to Tennessee I usually say, “I made a wrong turn at Barstow and kept going, and then I ran out of gas and had no choice but to stay.” Another one I like: When you are at a store and the cashier says, “That’s gonna be five dollars,” I stand around and wait. They ask, “Is there anything wrong?” I say, “No I was just waiting. You said that it was going to be five dollars, I thought if I waited, the price might come down.”

Another one: When you ask for directions here they tell you to turn right or left at landmarks that don’t exist anymore or they’ll say, “You make a left turn at the red light.” Then I say, “Sorry I’m late but I was going to make a left at the red light, like you said, but the signal changed to green so I kept going straight.” I can be such a wise-ass too.

I told Donna we should go ahead and sign the loan and as soon as we could we would refinance. What else could we do? We never did reach Tim Bailey, and when I stopped by his office the next week there was another sign over the door. He had vanished.

We were settling in to the farm house and Donna was doing better now drinking lots of fluids and taking antibiotics. Thompson Station at the time was a one horse town without any restaurants or supermarkets. The closest Kroger was ten miles away and the only place to get a bite to eat locally was at the diner in the Goose Creek Inn five miles away. One night we thought we would give it a shot. It was your typical greasy spoon with yellowed linoleum on the floor, squeaky ceiling fans and a menu that featured pulled pork, hamburgers and two kinds of fish. Our gum chewing waitress came by with a pencil stuck behind her ear.

“Have y’all decided what all y’all are gonna have?” she said in an almost unintelligible Southern drawl. Donna decided she would try the fish and wanted to know a little more about her choice between the two that were offered.

“I noticed you have two different kinds of fish on the menu. Can you tell me the difference?” Donna asked.

The waitress thought about it for a moment and scratched her head with the pointed end of the pencil. After what seemed like an eternity she answered, “The taste,” which sounded more like “the taay-yest”. Welcome to bum-fuck Egypt, I thought.

Chas was producing a few tracks for my neighbor, Billy Ray Cyrus at the time when Miley was still running around in diapers. It was at Chas’s twenty-four track studio at the cabin where we first stayed when we moved to Tennessee. I was hired to play pedal steel guitar and sing background vocals on a track called, The Distance, an original Chas Sandford composition. Just two weeks earlier, at Christmas, I had come down with a nasty flu and was so sick I lost three days in a feverish malaise. I had no idea that we had a visitor who came to the door dressed as Santa Claus bearing gifts. I guess this particular Santa didn’t know that we had a boy, because when he opened the present it was a doll. Still it was a nice gesture. Who was this man dressed as Santa? It was our neighbor—Billy Ray Cyrus. I don’t care what people think about the guy, especially after coming out with the painfully banal song, Achy-Breaky Heart, and he won’t get any awards for father-of-the-year now, but after what he did that Christmas I could never think of him in a bad light—in fact, he is one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people in the music business. Well, the album didn’t get finished for some reason or other at the time, but Billy Ray held onto the song and it was just released as the title track to his 2014 record. He had gone the distance. By the way, my pedal steel is all over that record, and it is pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. Way to go Billy and Chas!