Last Call

Like any true-blue bluesman, Bobby sees his life as a gauntlet of hard knocks and great good fortune. "I've had serious doses of both," he says. Love was tough on him. "It hurt me more than helped me, though a lot of that was my own fault. If love was a plant, I forgot to water it."

He blames no one but himself for the down periods of his life. Not the drug dealers. Not the fans who wanted to share a line of coke. Certainly not Cathy, whom his mother still describes as "the great love of his life."

"I could have walked away from the drugs. I didn't," Bobby says, sitting at his mother's table. "I was my own undoing." The boys don't need lectures to understand what drugs did to him. "They can see the damage done from 25 years of my lifestyle."

But the cancer is the hardest knock of all. Always in the past, when the heroin or cocaine had dragged him down near rock bottom, he had been able to fight his way back up through the healing power of his music.

Now, he knows, he will never feel good again. He massages the colostomy bag attached to his body. "This is horrible," he says. "I would not wish it on my worst enemy."

He closes his eyes and allows a wave of pain to pass. "On the other hand," he says, "I was kissed by God with my blues ability. I love my mom and my family, especially my children, and they love me. But this ability to play the guitar, it's my gift from God, the only real thing I have left.

"I was lucky enough to recognize it at a young age so that I could refine it. I could be at my lowest, and still even famous people would recognize what I had and give me respect accordingly."

Bobby is tired. "It's weird dying," he says. "I know I'm dying, but I'm not supposed to admit it. Everybody wants to give you 'hope for the future,' says 'there's a new miracle cure.' My brother Rick came to visit the other day. He lives in Seattle, and I hadn't seen him in years. When I saw him sitting on the chair at mom's, I said, 'Jesus Christ, now I know I'm gonna die.'

"He said, 'Ah, I've seen you look worse when you were doin' that heroin.'"
And so Bobby makes plans to go to Mexico, taking his boys along. He says his music doesn't inspire him anymore, that he needs a change of scenery to find that old energy again. He has a few more radiation treatments to reduce the tumors and thus the pain, and then he's off...even though he can't walk across the street without stopping. "But I can still stand long enough to play a set," he says.

Somewhere south of the border is a beach on which a bluesman can lay his battered body and soak up the hot sun and cold cervezas while gathering his energy for one more gig. A bar where the air will smell of salt, margaritas and maybe just a hint of marijuana. Where the sun-tanned senores and senoritas dress in white, like angels, and wait for him to take them to a better place with his songs about lost love and hard times.

Some of Bobby's friends believe he wants to go to Mexico to die as he sometimes lived. A guitar close by and enough heroin in his veins for a last sweet ride into eternity.

Bobby shakes his head. "Uh-unh. I'm going to work," he says, then smiles. He suddenly looks much younger.

"I'll be playing the blues in paradise.