Folk ballad hero has lived a country song and is ready to write a new verse

Ballad hero has lived a country song

BARTOW, Fla. — Christopher Daniel Gay’s life has been one long, sad country song, the latest verse written when he bolted from a sheriff’s deputy at a Waffle House on his way to jail.

Gay’s ballad has taken him from a rough childhood in the hills to a joyride around a NASCAR track. He has escaped from custody so many times folks call him “Little Houdini.” Trying to reach his dying mama, he took a Wal-Mart truck and then a Nashville singer’s tour bus.

All the stealing and running make for a bittersweet refrain, and now, behind bars again, he says he’s working on a new final stanza.

The 35-year-old begins his story matter-of-factly: “We was raised real hard.” His brown eyes stare into the wall during an interview in Florida’s Polk County Jail, his pale cheeks hollow as he nods his head.

His mama left when he was 10. His daddy stayed gone a lot, too. In the family’s mobile home, Gay remembers times with no lights and scarce food, when the children wore the same clothes for weeks at a time and duct tape held their shoes together.

“We was real poor,” Gay says. “Even the teachers made fun of us.”

He quit school at 11. Soon after that, a relative took up the instruction, teaching him how to steal. Gay says he was paid in beer and marijuana, which seemed to make his troubles go away for a while.

He learned how to drive so he could steal cars. Before long, he got caught and did stints in juvenile detention facilities, then prison.

But he kept breaking out. Once, he ran away during exercise. Another time, he cut his arm to get sent to a lower-security mental health facility, then walked out an hour after being admitted.

Trouble is, Gay couldn’t seem to stay out.

By January 2007, no longer a kid, he was in a Texas jail, serving time for criminal mischief, when one day he got a phone call. It was about his mother.

Anna Shull had come back into his life a few years earlier. She just showed up one day, after being gone for more than 10 years. No explanation — her son Gay figured she was too embarrassed to say why she left. But she apologized. All that mattered was that she was back.

But now in Texas he learned that her cancer was progressing rapidly. She might not make it another week.

Although she was in Tennessee, he felt he had to go and see her — and he made a plan, knowing he was about to be transported to Alabama to face charges. A few days before the trip, he says, he took the spring from an ink pen and fashioned a handcuff key that could be hidden between his cheek and gum, like a dip of snuff.

Gay doesn’t look like much to be afraid of, but behind the twinkling eyes, boyish grin and easy tongue is a mind that is always working, always plotting. He counts on people to underestimate him.

That’s when he gets away.

During the ride to Alabama in the transport van with prisoners being taken to various locations, he built up the deputies’ trust. He played sick and got them to pull off the highway at a rest area in Hardeeville, S.C., where the deputies allowed him to go into the restroom.

Removing the restraints, he ran across a highway, climbed a fence and raced into a woods, police dogs in pursuit. He followed ditches and backroads, stole a pickup truck, then swapped that for a stolen tractor-trailer cab in Georgia, according to authorities.

After he crossed into Tennessee, Gay hooked the cab onto a Wal-Mart trailer filled with $300,000 in merchandise, police said. That was to keep from drawing attention to himself, he explained: “Usually, trucks don’t go over state lines without a trailer like that.”

His mother’s house was just outside of Nashville, but as he got closer he realized he was being tailed. When the police turned on their blue lights and sirens, Gay says he cranked up the radio so he couldn’t hear.

He turned onto his mom’s narrow road and finally skidded to a halt within 50 yards of her mobile home.

As Gay got out of the truck, the scene was chaos. Police were running up the driveway, screaming. His mother was inside the trailer, clinging to life. He didn’t want to scare her.

“I could hear the dogs barking and I thought to myself, ‘If I run into my mom’s house, she’s on machines and everything …,” Gay said, his voice trailing off. “I ran past her. I thought maybe I can come back and see her.”

He took off into the hills to hide. Experience told him the police wouldn’t run far — and he figured right.

From this point, Gay’s country song life story gets even wilder. The basic refrain is backed up by law enforcement records, but is the rest the gospel truth? Yes, Gay says in the jail cell interview, but he’s been known to bend the truth before.

He says he made it to a motel near an interstate, then came upon a lot with tour buses of country music performers. The buses were behind a gate that required a code, so he started punching numbers. Sometimes, that works.

Just then, he says, a man passing by told him the code. He pressed it and went in.

As it started to rain, once again a man approached, he says, this time asking — he could hardly believe it — if he needed the keys.

Yes.

To which bus?

The blue and silver one used by Crystal Gayle, he said. She was his mother’s favorite singer.

With keys now, Gay unlocked and started the bus. He flipped on the TV and checked the news for word of his whereabouts. There was nothing about him.

Easing through the gate, he found the interstate and headed south toward Florida.

Driving along, the fugitive had an idea. The Daytona 500 was coming up, he remembered. There would be lots of buses there, and he could blend into the crowd.

But as he reached the speedway entrance lane, he panicked. State troopers were everywhere.

Then he noticed one trooper handing a driver ahead of him a card and waving him through. Gay risked it, pulling forward. The trooper asked him who he was with.

Tony Stewart — Joe Gibbs Racing, Gay blurted, naming his favorite driver.

The trooper stamped a piece of paper and told Gay to hang it in his window. Another officer escorted the bus into the raceway’s VIP parking area.

“Have I messed up?” Gay thought. Was this a trap?

On the contrary, he says, his VIP badge got him a front row seat to the Rolex 24. Afterward, he even hopped into a golf cart and went onto the track for a couple of laps.

“The banks are steep there, real steep,” Gay recalled. “I couldn’t believe where I was.”

But back on Crystal Gayle’s bus, TV news reports now had him headed for Daytona.

Police notified the singer about the theft, and she later spoke with Gay’s sister, Leann Newman, who explained her family grew up poor in the Tennessee hills, like Gayle. When the children were hungry, it was her brother who would go out to find food, Newman said.

Gayle was moved. “I think there’s a story behind him that started him out on a career and the path he’s taken in life and I wish that he could change that,” Gayle told The Associated Press in 2007. “And I wish him the best.”

For Gay, the ride was about over.

Looking for a place to dump the bus, he says he got confused by the one-way streets in town — and stopped to ask directions from a young woman he thought was a prostitute. She was actually a cop.

Busted: Gay was charged with grand theft auto and jailed in Daytona Beach.

The reunion with his mother that got all of this started wasn’t to be.

Anna Shull died Feb. 7, 2007, two weeks after her son’s last-ditch effort to see her. Gay wasn’t allowed to attend her funeral. Talking about it later, he focused on her coming back into his life. “It just seemed like she cared,” Gay said.

News stories reporting the sad saga caught the eye of bluegrass picker Tim O’Brien, who chronicled the hapless fugitive in “The Ballad of Christopher Daniel Gay.” He set it to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s 1939 song, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” about the Oklahoma outlaw who became a folk hero to some. One verse goes like this:

“Stole a pickup in Carolina, then a Wal-Mart truck with 18 wheels.

“He drove toward his dyin’ mama in the Cheatham County hills.

“And it’s down those lanes and back roads the police made their chase.

“And he almost made her trailer, he almost saw her face.”

For Gay — who doesn’t think much of the song — the saga continued.

Transported from Florida to Alabama by wary deputies, he says he was determined to turn over a new leaf. He thought about his three children, and wanted to be a better father for them. And for a year, Gay didn’t try to escape. He got better at reading and writing and eventually got his high school equivalency certificate.

But charges against him in other states that had to be settled before he could be free, and Tennessee authorities came for him on March 3 of this year.

So close to freedom, but now headed back to prison, Gay made another bad decision.

In the back seat, he says he broke off his zipper and made a key to unlock his shackles. When they stopped at a Waffle House in Kennesaw, Ga., and the deputy went to the restroom, Gay bolted. He hitched a ride in a van to Tennessee.

After volunteering at a Nashville homeless shelter — he says his hero, Jesse James, also helped the poor — Gay traveled by bus to Atlanta, then Orlando, Fla., where a prison friend had a roofing business. After giving him work for several days, the man turned him in. Cops surrounded Gay in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

In the Polk County Jail, “Little Houdini” was treated as an extreme escape risk.

“We know that sometimes the quiet ones are the ones that are scheming to do something worse than the ones that boast about what they’re going to do,” says Capt. Mike Allen, who runs the jail.

There, Gay had no visitors, except a public defender and a reporter. He had a lot of time to reflect on his life. When he legally gets out of prison, he says he’d like to get his truck driver’s license and be with his three children.

If he could kick his drug and alcohol habit for good, maybe his life could be different, too. Gay’s friend, Jerry Nail, who counseled him in prison in Tennessee, says Gay is trying and adds that he believes in God and wouldn’t hurt anyone.

“He’s just a good individual that makes bad choices,” Nail said. “That’s not anything to shun him for.”

Running, Gay says now, has been no more than a quick fix for his problems, each time making them worse.

Gay lost weight in prison and it would be even easier now for him to slip out of his cuffs, which he demonstrated openly to a reporter with a handful of deputies watching intently nearby.

“In a way, (escaping) would be a punch in the gut on them,” Gay said, smiling. “It would be like showing them that anything can be done.”

But Gay knows that the trickiest escape he’ll ever perform is to get out of the prison he has built for himself.

And only he can decide how the ballad should end.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is based on interviews with Christopher Gay at the Polk County Jail, on law enforcement interviews and arrest records, and on media reports. Transferred to a Florida prison, Gay is currently serving an 18-month sentence.