Swine Not: A Novel Pig Tale - By Jimmy Buffett & Helen Bransford Page 0,5

to make the ball go where I wanted it to go. It all helped me deal with the feelings I had about my dad.

Another good thing I learned is that soccer is not a one-man sport. It is a team sport, and you have to depend on, and get help from, strangers. After you help them or they help you, they become your friends. Along the way, you also figure out the angles to the goal, which aren’t that far from the angles of life — even in a town named Vertigo.

The New York Red Bulls are my favorite team, and I hope to play for them when I’m old enough. I was born in New York, although I don’t remember much about living there. I was only three when I left. So how did a future striker for the New York Red Bulls end up in Tennessee? To quote the title of a country song by Tammy Wynette, it was “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” Back in the ancient days of the 1970s, when the song was popular, a family with just a mother and kids was called a “broken home.” Today it is referred to as a “single-parent family.” Either way you slice it, it is still only half a loaf.

My dad, Oliver McBride, was an English teacher from Boston. He moved to New York, where he met my mom, Ellie Dean. She was a former beauty queen from Clarksdale, Mississippi, who was in culinary school. Though my dad was a fine teacher, he had this pipe dream to be in the movie business. One summer, he got a job as a script consultant on a gangster movie that was filming in Greenwich Village. That was it for the academic world. He quit teaching and started hanging out with other would-be actors and directors, drinking lots of coffee and talking about what they would all do when they got famous.

He and my mom dated for about a year while he wrote his first movie script. They were part of a wild crowd back then. After a party, they ran off to Haiti and got married, and it was only upon their return to New York that my dad learned that not only did my mother come with a steamer trunk full of handed-down Southern family recipes and a closetful of debutante gowns, but she also carried the barnyard gene. This manifested itself in her immediate acquisition of a mean dog, a dozen chickens, a cat, and a baby potbellied pig, whom she scooped up one Thanksgiving back in Mississippi. She somehow managed to stuff all of them into a rental apartment in Greenwich Village. My dad thought he was marrying a Southern belle–turned–city girl, but what he really wound up with was a circus act.

After we were born, we were celebrated at many a party. The champagne flowed, and once our parents actually left us in the restaurant under a table. We were quiet babies; the adults made most of the noise. Space was the first problem, and then the issue was money. The mean dog went to the police-dog program, the chickens went to live on a farm on Long Island, and my dad made his first — and last — sale of a movie script.

The movie business doesn’t appear to have a lot of financial security. That didn’t seem to matter to Dad. He went from being a writer to a producer, but not much was produced. Meanwhile, Rumpy and the cat stayed, and they seemed to get more of my mother’s attention than my dad did. That is when he took off for Hollywood, promising to become rich and famous. Then he planned to return to New York and lather us with luxury.

That didn’t happen. Even at three years old, my sister and I could pick up on it with that “twin thing.” My earliest recollection that our lives were changing was when my sister and I had to start sharing our desserts with our pig. I love my pig, but food is a big deal to a three-year-old, especially dessert.

Somehow my mom managed for a year, baking pies and pastries at a fancy diner, but living in New York ain’t cheap when you’re a petting zoo. One day, a registered letter arrived at her door telling her that her old aunt Margaret had just died and willed her a farmhouse in Tennessee. A week later, she found a job at the famous Opryland Hotel, and we went south,