Vendor Writing

How Far I’ve Come and How Far I Want to Go in Life

BY BY WILLIAM B.

I was born into drugs. My momma was on drugs and alcohol before I was born and she still had them in her system when I was born. During my mom and dad’s marriage, my mom was a bar maid in South Nashville and I remember that at a real young age.

I think I was born to be an entertainer. I was signing from the age of three years old and I’m still singing now. Since then, so much has happened in my life. I think the world would appreciate the good and true story. The thing is, I went away for 10 years because of a mental condition. I had to escape to get out. I sang at the old hobby shop with my band called William and the Hurricanes. I even had a baby blue Beatle’s suit my brother gave me. I had to grow into it because it was a little big, but I had it for several years.

I got in trouble with the law, so the band broke up. One of my band mates is a country singer now, John Wesley Ryles. He married Conway Twitty’s daughter. He sings a song called, “Kay” where he talks about, “starin' out at music city from my cab.”

I would love to get in touch with him and would love to hear from him if anyone reading this knows him. I have things to tell him that would - if he still has hairblow his hair off!

After I got out of the mental institution I started experimenting with drugs. And I drank alcohol. I never was considered an alcoholic, but I drank more when I did drugs. I got sick of hurting people I loved in my addiction so I made them lock me up to get sober.

I’ve been clean now 15 years and I feel like I’m on my way to better things. Partly because of The Contributor newspaper, who I think of as my family. I’ve been at the paper about five or six years and it gives me the opportunity to do what I want to do.

I like to sell where there’s a lot of foot traffic. Through The Contributor I can work at my own pace. I can get things I aways wanted to have because of the funds I save from my check and selling The Contributor. It also helps me buy my medicine, and get the extra food I need and get more instruments and spoons, which I always need because I play them so hard.

I think I’ve got better things coming. I have a surgery on my back soon and I hope it will help my pain. I feel like I was done wrong by the city when I was hit by that car. I filed a civil lawsuit, but I lost. The city should have done more for me than just give the driver tickets.

I have a dream. My dream is to do another music demo. I have two more dreams. I’m not going to quit until I make America’s Got Talent and I’m not going to quit until I make The Voice. We lost the original voice host Blake Shelton. He’s got a new show now called Barmageddon

I don’t want to ever sing in bars. I think that might be a trigger to my drugs or my drinking. I don’t ever want to be back on drugs again. I hurt too many people but the main person I hurt was me. I used to could hold song notes real long. With my COPD that kind of hurt it when I was doing drugs.

Now my dream is to be more into entertaining and hopefully meeting my friend John again and doing a demo again and showing him how far I’ve come. He wouldn’t be surprised that I kept it up, but I think he’d be pleased.