Excerpts from Consent Without Language: A Memoir
Growing up in Nashville, proximity to music registered as ordinary. Studios were just buildings. Tour buses parked in inconvenient places. Late nights blended into background noise. Fame never registered as a spectacle because it was always attached to people I knew first as parents.
Shooter and I played paintball together. We were kids with mud on our shoes and welts on our arms, running through woods and backyards, shouting rules we made up as we went. His parents remained simply his parents. No starstruck childhood. Just accustomed.
That distinction would matter later.
We did not arrive in Nashville as natives. We arrived as refugees from a legacy that had already been spent.
My family left Sikeston, Missouri, the way families leave places when there is nothing left to stay for. We did not talk about why we were leaving. The language that reached my level ran managerial: opportunity, transition, fresh start, necessity. Words that sounded like reasons but functioned as walls. The urgency pressed real—boxes appeared, rooms emptied, the familiar architecture of daily life disassembled over weeks—but it moved faster than meaning.
No one asked whether I wanted to leave. The question would have implied that my preference carried weight, and nothing in my experience had established that precedent.
My father was a man of considerable talent and considerable mythology. He had built things that were real—the businesses, the networks, the reputation. He had also constructed a story around those things that was larger than they were, and he managed the gap with charisma and forward motion. What gave, in his case, was everything. Not at once. Not dramatically. The businesses that had once anchored the family were no longer viable. What had been built across generations was not dismantled by outsiders. It was spent. Legacy did not fracture. It dissolved.
Nashville received the story as information rather than claim, and information is much easier to sustain. This is what my family understood about geography—not consciously, but as orientation. Movement was more effective than reckoning. Beginning again was the primary available response to failure.
When we arrived in Nashville, my mother had to work. It was that simple and that seismic. She had not held a job in nearly thirty years. For most of her adult life she was Terry Conn's wife—the woman who hosted the parties, who kept the house immaculate, who arranged flowers and seating charts and made sure everyone in Sikeston knew we were a family that had arrived. Her labor was social. Her product was appearance. And she was exceptional at it.
Now the appearance was gone, and what remained was a woman entering a city that did not know the woman she had been. Nashville did not care about Sikeston. Nashville did not care about the Conn name or the legacy it was supposed to carry. Nashville had its own names, its own legacies, its own mythologies that had already been written and did not require ours.
What Nashville did have was proximity. Not the tourist kind. The kind where fame was geography—where you knew people before they became people other people recognized. Where the ordinary texture of childhood included things that only registered as extraordinary later, when enough distance had accumulated to recognize what had been close.
The Education
The CAA offices were on Music Row—the kind of building that did not need to announce what it was because everyone in Nashville already knew. Proximity without entrance marked the growing up. My father's work had given closeness: the ticker tape machine, the names he spoke with in lowered tones, the understanding that certain doors existed and that standing near them was a form of education. Access as currency was learned long before any of it was mine.
By nineteen, I was walking through those doors.
A jacket was worn. Rehearsal had happened—not the pitch exactly, but the version of myself to bring into the room. The version formed through years of stepping forward when no one else did, of occupying the chair at the front of the meeting before anyone asked, of understanding that credibility does not wait to be assigned.
John Hughey met me in the lobby. He was professional in the way that serious industry people are professional—not cold, not performatively warm, but efficient. He knew the difference between someone who had wasted his time and someone who would not. Understanding came within the first few seconds of the handshake: the meeting had already begun in the lobby.
I told him what I needed. Jars of Clay, one evening, Auburn University, spring semester. The budget was named. The timeline was named. Apology did not come with specificity. Specificity had been learned to signal preparation, and preparation signals respect for the other person's time.
He pulled out a contract.
I signed where indicated.
On the drive back to Auburn, the conversation ran again—not looking for mistakes, but cataloguing what had worked. What I did not examine was what had made the meeting possible. Not the preparation, and not the connections. What had made it possible was the specific facility I had developed for occupying authority before it was offered. For behaving as though I already belonged in the room.
That learning came from my father's office. From the meeting where ceiling tiles were counted and breath was held. From years of performing competence inside environments that required silence and rewarded availability.
Training was not yet recognized. Talent was what it seemed. That misreading would take years to correct.
Chris Rice performed at the event. Afterward, he pulled me aside and told me I had a real talent. He suggested the industry. He helped secure an internship at Word Records. I transferred to Belmont. Nashville was no longer backdrop. It was mechanism—the city that trained me to be useful before I understood what usefulness would cost.
The Mirror
Years later, when Shooter and I reconnected through a mutual friend while I was at Belmont, my body recognized the rhythm immediately—the posture, the ease, the absence of calculation. Familiar. There was no sense of re-entry or escalation. We picked up where childhood had left off—easy, unremarkable, unguarded.
The cover for his first album came through my lens, and so did their first major live performance in Los Angeles, at the Viper Room.
We were minors. All of us. And we knew it would not matter during load-in—you carry gear through a back entrance, nobody's checking IDs, nobody cares. That is how it works at every club in every city. You are labor until you are on stage, and then you are entertainment, and neither version of you gets carded.
Except that night, someone did.
The Viper Room sat on Sunset like it had always been there and always would be—the kind of place that had its own gravity, its own list of ghosts. River Phoenix had died on the sidewalk out front six years earlier. The room carried that. It carried everything. People walked in already performing reverence.
We did not. We walked in carrying amplifiers.
And then we were not walking in at all, because a man at the door carded us and did the math and said no. Not tonight. Not at this age. Like the building itself had rules that superseded the booking.
Shooter stepped away and made a phone call. One call. Short. The kind of call you make when you know exactly who to dial and exactly what they will do.
Minutes later—not many—Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter appeared around back. He did not move fast. By then his body would not let him move fast, and you got the sense it would not have mattered anyway, that he had never rushed toward a confrontation in his life. He came to the door the way weather comes over a hill—steady, unhurried, certain.
He did not raise his voice. Did not posture. Did not name-drop himself, which would have been absurd—the man's face was the name and the drop. He just spoke to the door guy in that low West Texas register, that dry gravel drawl, and explained how things were going to go. Not argued. Explained. The way you would explain to someone that water runs downhill. Not because you are angry at them for not knowing. Because it is just a fact and now they know it.
The door opened. They had a list. The band went through name by name. I was not on it.
I was not in the band. I was there to shoot. And shooting was not on the list, and no amount of Waylon Jennings standing in the doorway was going to change the arithmetic of a name that was not written down.
Then Jessi's voice—that soft, certain instrument of hers—came in from just behind me. She had been listening. Not watching the confrontation, not waiting for her moment. Just present, the way she was always present, in that black leather newsboy cap pulled low, the one she had worn through every decade of outlaw country like a quiet signature. She looked at the door and said, simply: He's my family. You don't have to worry. He'll be sitting next to me.
And that was it. Not a negotiation. A statement of fact delivered in a voice so gentle it did not occur to anyone to challenge it. Jessi Colter telling you something was true had the same effect as gravity—you did not argue with it, you just adjusted.
I was in. But I was in on her terms. No backstage. No roaming the wings with a camera. I sat in the VIP booth beside Jessi and Waylon—on a leash so short I could feel it—and shot the show from there. The angles were what the booth gave me. The light was what the booth gave me.
The room was just a room. Darker than you would expect, smaller than the mythology suggested. It smelled like every club smells—old beer, electricity, the ghost of ten thousand cigarettes. The stage did not know its own history. The monitors did not care.
That night should have registered as a milestone. The Viper Room. The history. The weight of the place. But by then—even as young as we were—the habit was already set: you do not assign meaning to rooms simply because other people do. You assign meaning to the work. The angles. The light. The way bodies move when the music hits.
And the music hit.
The Descent
Sunset Boulevard after midnight still carried heat from the day—stored in the concrete, radiating up through your shoes. The club emptied in pieces. Gear got loaded. Someone suggested women. The way someone always suggested women—casually, already half-decided, the kind of plan that does not ask for consensus because momentum is its own permission.
I went along.
Always, that was the pattern.
Silence held my sexuality then. Deliberate. Carefully edited. The knowledge of how to keep that part folded away without strain had been learned through years of practice. Going along had become instinctive, the logic being continuity—the night had already started moving, the momentum already established, interrupting it would have required a willingness to become visible in exactly the way I had spent my entire life learning to avoid—conspicuous, different, the one who stops the room by refusing to play along.
My experience diverged from theirs.
The woman who came back to my hotel room did not provide what the others were looking for. There was no performance of heterosexuality that needed sustaining, no pretense that required completion. What we shared instead: secrecy. An eight-ball of cocaine. A quiet understanding that neither of us needed to explain ourselves to the other. We were both participating in a parallel track—adjacent to the plan, but not truly inside it.
That night, for the first time, I injected.
No decision preceded it. It felt procedural. A continuation. Another step that followed logically from the one before it. There was no drama. No internal debate. No sense that I was crossing a threshold that could not be crossed back.
It does not arrive as disaster. It arrives as familiarity.
The next morning brought no sense of change. The moment did not feel large enough to demand interpretation. Filing it away happened the way many things got filed then—incompletely, to be sorted later, once time had done its work. And later did not arrive on schedule.
Waylon's Warning
The first time recognition became unavoidable, it had nothing to do with me wanting to stop. The recognition arrived from outside. Exposure—external, undeniable, and embodied in someone whose body had already paid the cost.
Waylon Jennings.
Summer pressed down on Nashville, the kind that presses against your skin even when you are standing still. Heavy. Wet. The air never really moves. Movement from Shooter's pool-house studio toward the main house came naturally, passing through Waylon's sitting room to get to the kitchen.
He was watching television. Bundled as if it were winter in Minneapolis.
That registered first.
A stocking cap pulled low over his head. A heavy wool sweater despite the heat. A heated blanket draped across his legs. Isotoner gloves on his hands. The thermostat changed nothing. His body no longer regulated itself the way it once had.
The room smelled clean but not fresh—a smell layered over older smells: tobacco smoke absorbed into upholstery decades ago, an aging house, the chemical sweetness of whatever kept the heated blanket from burning. The kind of smell that lingers in places where bodies are being managed rather than lived in.
He did not turn when I entered.
"Son," he said, without looking away from the screen. My feet stopped before my mind registered why. "Don't think I don't see what's going on with you."
Slowly. Carefully. Every movement measured, deliberate, as if speed itself carried risk.
"Those marks," he said. "They're familiar."
He did not point. He did not ask. He did not need clarification. He was referencing the missed shots on my arm—the ones you get before you know what you are doing, before the muscle memory sets in, before the body learns how to cooperate efficiently with harm.
He did not raise his voice. He did not moralize. He did not dramatize what he was seeing. His voice carried the weight of someone who has already paid the price and has no interest in watching someone else pretend they will not.
"I'm not judging you," he said. "But I am warning you."
The word warning landed heavier than concern ever could, because concern invites response and warning transfers responsibility.
By 2000, diabetes had wrecked his circulation—his body was shutting itself down in sections, the way a building loses power floor by floor. He was home. Not resting, not recovering. Just home, because that was what was left. And he did not talk about it the way people expect you to talk about it.
Son, there are roads you don't realize you're on until they stop letting you turn around.
The danger was never the excess. It was the familiarity. Once your body learns a pattern, it does not unlearn it simply because you decide you have had enough.
He did not ask me what I planned to do. He did not wait for reassurance. He delivered the information and let it stand.
I nodded. I listened. I absorbed the way most things were absorbed then—quietly, incompletely. Only much later did it register for what it was. Not inspiration. A mirror. Waylon was not telling me what to do. He was showing me where I was headed if nothing changed.
Using did not stop that day—mirrors do not demand immediate action, only reckoning.
But pretending that escalation was theoretical could no longer hold. The endpoint had been seen—sitting quietly in a chair, wrapped in layers, regulating a body that had learned too much too well.
Waylon did not haunt me. He stayed with me. As evidence does.
The Building and The Inheritance
Fidelity Behavioral Health became the thing that every skill I had ever developed—reading rooms, understanding where power lived in an organization, knowing what people needed before they named it—had been preparing without my knowing. A closed continuum for justice-involved, unhoused men with primary mental health diagnoses in Colorado. Housing managed in-house. Primary healthcare embedded. Competency restoration as a licensed state provider. Case management internal. Transportation internal. Every service someone required existed under one roof.
The first thing said to every client I picked up from jail was the same. What would you like to stop and get? Pizza, burger, fried chicken?
One client—six foot three, three hundred pounds—requested a Sonic burger. When the food arrived, he held the burger to his face before eating and inhaled. "I forgot what food really smells like," he said.
This is being written in Birmingham.
My mother is in the next room. She has Alzheimer's—a word that functions differently in medical records than it does in a room where the person named by it is present.
She was the first system. Not maliciously. Not even consciously. She was a woman shaped by the same architectures—power inherited rather than chosen, belonging conditional on performance, silence treated as a form of grace. What had been passed to her was passed on.
She taught me composure. She taught me how to make a room feel effortless while the real work happened underneath. She taught me that silence could function as care.
Forty years were spent learning to find my words. She is beginning to lose hers.
Nashville made me. In every sense of that word.
It was the city that received a failed legacy and asked no questions. The city where proximity to greatness functioned as education before it functioned as danger. The city where a boy learned to occupy authority by watching his father stand near doors, where a teenager walked into CAA and walked out with a contract, where a young man shot Shooter Jennings's first album cover and got waved into the Viper Room by Jessi Colter's voice.
It was also the city where silence was the price of belonging. Where a queer kid held his sexuality folded away through Brentwood Academy, Music Row and Belmont and every late-night session where someone suggested women. Where usefulness was trained into the body so thoroughly that the training was mistaken for talent, and the talent was mistaken for identity, and the identity was mistaken for consent.
The systems in this story are not villains. The family was not a villain. The church was not a villain. The industry was not a villain. They were systems. Systems do not intend. They optimize. They select for what they can use and discard what introduces friction, and they do this with complete indifference to the experience of the people moving through them.
Naming this is not accusation. It is description.
The silence I grew up in was not mine. It was inherited. Transferred without consent. Held in place by environments that had learned, long before I arrived in them, how useful a silent person can be.
That silence is gone now.
What changed is the function. Silence, when it comes now, is a choice I have made—about what to hold, about what does not require language to be understood, about what belongs inside and what belongs in the room. Not a reflex protecting something I can no longer name.
The silence was released. The steadiness—the real kind, not the performed kind, not the kind purchased at the cost of truth—I am keeping. On different terms. As my own.