Last Call

Jean says she didn't know her husband was taking Bobby to local pubs, where he'd stand him up on top of the bars to sing. The patrons would buy Robert drinks and toss quarters at the kid, who also got to eat all the "bar food"--pretzels, potato chips and soda pop--his belly could hold. She began to get suspicious when father and son would return home, the former staggering drunk and the latter sick to his stomach, but she didn't want to interfere with the father-son bonding.

"It was my mother-in-law who finally told me what they were doing, and I put a stop to it. Bobby wasn't too happy when I did."

Jean looks out the kitchen window. Dead leaves whip by in the wind. A bitter winter waits just ahead. In a bedroom, a guitar weeps the blues. She sighs. "Even then, he knew what he wanted to do."

It seems so hard to bear,
when I wake and you're not there.
All my life I've always been so blue.
Born to lose, and now I'm losin' you.

--from "Born to Lose," by Ray Charles

Bobby's earliest memories are of a guitar--"a Sears with Mickey Mouse on the front"--and singing at the bars. Father and son were often accompanied by Bobby's aunt, who also reaped the rewards for her nephew's talents.

"My dad'd stand me up on the bar," Bobby remembers, "and I'd sing, 'How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?' and 'California Here I Come,' whatever was popular at the time. Patti Page. Hank Snow. Chet Atkins. I have a pretty good ear and could remember most of the lines if I heard them once on the jukebox."

There aren't many good memories of his father. "I sang for the joy of it, not him," Bobby recalls. "My favorite memories of music in those days was sitting on the kitchen counter, singing along with the radio and my mother as she made dinner."

One of Bobby's hands curls around a bottle of beer, the other holds a cigarette. He takes a drag and sends a perfect smoke ring into the air, where it hovers like a ghost. He answers a questioning look at the cigarette with a shrug. "I tried to give them up after the last time I was in the hospital," he says. "It was too hard, and I figured, 'What the hell for?' They're not what's gonna kill me."

He takes another drag and looks over at the bar as if he can see that little boy in cowboy hat and boots, singing at the top of his lungs against a backdrop of liquor bottles. His father had taken him to workingmen's bars not unlike Ziggie's, with its battered furniture and peeling paint. The men there were big, tough and loud, but they'd quiet down to hear the boy sing.

Robert was as loud and tough as any of them. "He liked to hit," Bobby says. "I saw his nose get broken more times than I could count, duking it out with some other drunk. He actually enjoyed bar fights. And he beat me plenty."

Bobby was five before his grandmother figured out what her son and daughter were doing with her grandson. The excursions ended--but not before Bobby had gained a taste for the spotlight.

"It was a gas. I loved it," he says, stabbing out his cigarette and immediately reaching for another. "I was the center of attention. I got all the candy I could eat and a pocketful of quarters. I guess that was the first profit I ever got as a musician."

He smiles. "I'd come home jazzed up on eight pounds of candy and throw up all over the place. My dad would be shitfaced. When my mom put a stop to taking me to bars, I missed it."

Another smoke ring floats off. Bob's voice, gravelly as a river bottom after decades of cigarettes, booze and belting out the blues, grows huskier still. "Everybody there treated me good...even my dad."

Tell mama and all the folks back home,
sometimes a man just feels
he's got to make it alone.
Tell mama why I be leavin' so soon,
because this life I lead has got me sick
through and through.

--from "Tell Mama," by Kim Simmonds/ Paul Raymond

The phone rings. Jean Hornbuckle listens for a minute, then thanks the caller and hangs up. "Michael!" she yells toward the back bedroom. "Tell your dad they're gonna play something for him on KIMN for his birthday. Turn on the radio!"

She returns to the kitchen table with tears in her eyes. "Oh, it's just one of those people from Ziggie's," Jean explains. "She means well, but they won't leave him alone. He gets depressed when he goes to those places anymore, sees the same people, none of them going anywhere."

Jean got her fill of barflies years ago, when she'd go pick up a husband too drunk to make it home on his own. "Over the years I'd see people I knew back when they were younger," she says. "It was sad to watch them degenerate. Their looks would go and their minds, then there'd be nothin' left, just a wasted life."

Bobby was his father's favorite, Jean says, "probably because of his talent. I think the old man saw that good part of himself in his son...though sometimes it just made him angrier." Floyd, the child born after Bobby, got the worst of his father's abuse, "probably because he looked like the old man, big and husky. I used to feed Floyd his lunch and dinner early so he wouldn't have to sit at the table and have his dad go off on him.

"I should have left him sooner," she says, "but I was sure I could change him." She laughs bitterly. "Of course, I was only wasting my time...and his."

When Rick got old enough, Jean urged him to leave home, promising to do the same with the other children when she got the chance. With his older brother gone, many of the responsibilities as the man of the house fell on Bobby's thin shoulders. He remained a sweet, sensitive boy, volunteering to help his mother with the babies and cleaning while she tried to find odd jobs to help them get by.

He was a good student, ahead of his classmates. When he was in the fourth grade, Jean found a complete law-library set at a garage sale that she purchased for herself on a whim. A few days later, Bobby surprised her by saying he found case law interesting reading.

Although a straight-A student, Bobby wasn't just a bookworm. He would eventually captain his elementary school basketball and gymnastics teams, and he later taught himself to play a mean game of tennis.

But his first love remained music. His brother Rick bought him a trumpet, which he played for the school band. He also learned to play the piano and French horn, although his favorite was the guitar. It seemed to his mother that Bobby only had to look at an instrument to know how to make it respond.

"Music was his quiet time," she says. "Pretty much the only time he had to himself, where he could withdraw from everything else that was going on. He'd spend hour after hour practicing without being told."

Eventually, having to be the man of the house wore Bobby down. He approached his mother one day and said, "I know this has to be hard on you, but I'm just a little kid."

Jean looked at her son. He was only ten years old but looked older and tired. He had so little time to just be a boy. She nodded and said, "You run along and play with your friends." As she watched his too-thin body skipping down the block, she made up her mind to leave her husband as soon as winter had passed.

It was easy to think about, hard to accomplish. Robert had moved his family to a rural part of Adams County. The family car had been repossessed, and Jean and her children were essentially stuck. Even if they did manage to escape, Jean was afraid of her husband, afraid he might track the family down--and God only knew what he'd do then.

That February was particularly cold and cruel. Robert hadn't maintained the boiler, and they had no heat--not that he minded, since he was gone most of the time. The electric bills hadn't been paid, either, so there were no lights or running water.

Jean hauled in water from a pond--chopping through the ice every morning--to use for drinking and washing clothes, including diapers for two. "Thank God we had an outside toilet," she says.