Bad Company - Bad Company

Unpacking Family Mythology

My favorite album title comes courtesy of the Georgia rockers Collective Soul, their debut: Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid. It’s a phrase so perfect, so overripe with the mysteries of human relationships, that it lingers long after you’ve turned off the stereo. It captures the sheer weight of all we bury in silence — the words that curdle on our tongues, the truths we are too afraid to shape into sentences. Relationships, after all, are woven from gossamer threads, fragile even on the best days, and when blood gets into the web — well, there’s no salve for those wounds, no easy medicine. They fester, they demand attention, but not everyone has the patience, or the courage, to stitch them closed.

Around this time every year, I think about Old Man Longfellow, who, incidentally, shares a birthday with my mother. He once wrote:

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.

And overflow they do — drinks, emotions, memories — sometimes all in a single evening, sometimes in a precise order that fools you into believing you’re in control. Families are their own rivers, their currents thick with stories, myths, and outright lies, all swirling together into a mythology that feels as real as water. Every family has its rogue’s gallery of tall tales, and ours is no exception. My brother Josh and I, savage archaeologists of the family past, have spent decades unearthing the bones beneath the fairy tales, often to the visible discomfort of those who once wielded these stories with all the reckless verisimilitude James Ellroy suggested we have.

Take our Uncle D. He once stole a car — not to joyride, but to visit his brother Ronnie, who was serving time in a Pennsylvania state prison. D’s logic? Who would ever suspect a stolen car parked outside a penitentiary? It’s a move so audacious, so beautifully absurd, that it could only happen in our family.

My mother’s side has spent the better part of 50 years painting themselves as rebels — scrappy populists who thumb their noses at authority and damn the man. They tell these stories with a twinkle in their eye, savoring the banditry, the cleverness, the sheer gall of it all. But when pressed, when their mythology is tested under the light of truth, they balk. Suddenly, the outlaw swagger is replaced by something more cautious, more sanctimonious. There’s a moment on the 1983 stand-up “Himself” by Bill Cosby (I know, I know, but roll with me here), in which he discusses how his parents, having fully embraced being grandparents, are not the people who raised him. “You’re looking at an old person who’s trying to get into heaven now.”

Last Christmas, I told the story of how I came to be named after my great-grandfather’s dog, a German shepherd trained to bark at Black people. BZ — my namesake’s owner — was a racist and a drunk, and the whole thing was, as far as family lore goes, an unvarnished horror show. My mother, sitting there in a room that hadn’t contained so many members of our fractured clan in decades, simply shook her head, her hands spreading wide in a gesture of disavowal. “I have no idea what he’s talking about,” she said, as if the truth were a stray dog she’d never seen before in her life.

Thanksgiving this year wasn’t much different. Josh and I, freshly fortified by bourbon and Cards Against Humanity, decided to tell the unvarnished version of the shoplifting incident that got our mom arrested and her sister Kelly detained back in the ’80s. Our young cousin, barely 18, was gobsmacked — not at the act itself but at the idea that such a thing had been hidden from her. The cracks in the family mythology had grown into chasms, and she was peering into the void.

“That’s not your story to tell,” my mom snapped, her voice a blade, cutting through our laughter. And there it was: the line in the sand. We had trespassed into sacred territory, the place where the outlaw narrative turns inward, becomes a shield rather than a sword. “Keep it up,” she added, “and I’ll tell Bella (my daughter) about all your shit.”

Josh and I laughed — because what else could we do? Our mother, who once reveled in the role of the righteous bandit, was now guarding the gates of heaven with a pitchfork of moral indignation. Accountability is a true motherfucker. And yet, under different circumstances, she would have been the first to tell that story, painting herself as a scrappy Robin Hood, sticking it to K-Mart in the name of some proletarian cause.

Company always on the run
Destiny is a rising sun
I was born six-gun in my hand
Behind a gun
I'll make my final stand, hey
That's why they call me

-Bad Company, Bad Company

America loves its outlaws, and my family is no different. But there’s a catch: the real outlaws, the ones we celebrate in song and story, were willing to go down with their ships, to bleed for the myth they’d built. My family? They’re just trying to patch up the holes in their story before someone punches their ticket to the pearly gates.

Just old people trying to get into heaven.