His name was Jerry, but everyone called him Jukie. A nickname he earned by tagging along with his older brothers to local bars and juke joints in the dusty Appalachian coal camps that his nomadic family bounced between.
While his brothers were bellied up to the bar, young Jerry would swivel his hips and sing along to the juke box. Bemused patrons people would throw coins at him. Eventually people started calling him Jukie. As all good nicknames do, it stuck.
He was my great-uncle. My grandmother’s baby brother, closer to my mom’s age than my grandmother’s. The twelfth of thirteen children born to Clyde and Ida Conley. He was a Vietnam Vet. A certified butcher and a father to five daughters.
Jukie loved his mama, his first wife, his girls, Old Milwaukee and George Jones.
He was a charismatic ladies’ man who dressed neatly and smelled of Old Spice. He could bark just like a dog.
When he took to drinking, which was often, he was fun until he wasn’t. He made the best hush puppies I have ever tasted. Jukie met his second wife in jail. She shot him twice – once in each leg.
Uncle Jukie’s proclivity for drinking and then driving meant that he rarely put together the combination of having both a valid driver’s license and a car. However, the summer that I was 15 years old, he had pulled this off. Summoning every ounce of his charisma he talked my grandmother into letting me road trip with him to Richmond to visit his daughters.
We took off on the five hour drive on a stifling hot summer day. The car’s air conditioner was busted but despite my legs sticking to the white hot leather seats, I grinned into the wind and belted out off key versions of Fortunate Son and Midnight Rider. As usual, Jukie had a beat up cooler filled with Old Milwaukee nestled in the backseat.
Before we left gran said, “Juke, I swear on everything holy that if you drink and drive with Sosha in the car, I will kill you where you stand.”
He promised he wouldn’t and he kept that promise – right until we were out of his sister’s sight.
After a couple hours of steady drinking he was drunk off his tree. Thankfully, when he started to get baby head he piloted his little yellow Mustang to the side of the road and nonchalantly said, ”You drive for a bit. I’m just gonna catch a little shut eye.”
I stuttered that I didn’t even have my learner’s yet; momentarily forgetting that he wasn’t exactly a stickler for the rules of the road. He said, “Ahh hell, Sosh. You’re smart as a whip. There’s nothin’ to it. Just keep it between the lines.”
So, I did what I was told. I would like to say that it was a thrilling rush, but I am just not that type of person. I was a nervous wreck, but I did it. I kept it between the lines.
When we got to Richmond, he taught me how to eat crabs and take shots of tequila. It was one of the best weekends of my life.
I did not tell a soul about driving to Richmond until the night before his funeral more than a decade later. He may not have kept his promise to gran but I can guarantee that she would have kept hers to him.
Jukie was only 58 years old when he died. He seemed to have known that he wasn’t meant to be here for very long. Therefore, he took everything as it came, never worrying too much about anything, and crammed a whole lot of living into his years.
The night before his funeral was sad as the night before funerals usually are. However, it was also filled with the type of stories that made you laugh until you cried, George Jones sing alongs and many toasts in his honor. That night the only barking that we heard was from the actual dogs and we knew it would never be the same without the man who was equal parts endearing and irritating.
I always felt a special connection with Jukie. He nor I ever seemed to have a permanent home. We were always bouncing around from couch to couch. He was also the first person I told when I found out that I had gotten the scholarship that would allow me to go to West Virginia University (WVU). Jerry and another of my uncles had taken me the four hours from my hometown to the campus of WVU for my final scholarship interview.
He scooped me up in a bear hug and barked and barked.
“I’ve always told you you were smart as hell, kiddo!”
My Uncle Jukie was a misfit of the highest order. However, he showed me how to live unapologetically, to bark enthusiastically for your loved ones, to get the lime in your mouth immediately after you swallow the tequila, to dance in the kitchen and that sometimes all that we have to do is keep it between the lines.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
