Last Call

The family ate by candlelight. In a vain attempt to keep her children warm, Jean moved all the beds, including her own, into the living room and arranged them in front of the fireplace. In the morning she'd heat a pan of water over the coals so that the kids could wash themselves before school.

One morning Bobby was sitting by the fireplace, washing, when he asked her, "Can't you see what's happening here?"

Jean nodded and hung her head. The baby was severely malnourished, and the rest of the kids weren't much better off. She could see their breath in the cold air. Something bad was going to happen if she didn't act. "I promise," she told Bobby. "When spring comes, we're leavin'."

Bobby looked long and hard at her. "You sure? Because this is impossible."
"I'm sure, Bobby," she replied. "I promise."
Come spring, Jean kept her promise. When her husband and his drunk friends left the house one day, she gathered her kids and "borrowed" a pickup truck that had been left behind by one of the revelers, taking only her brood and their clothing.

But Robert was the only problem she left behind. The next few years were tough, and the family went on welfare. Still, there was no way Jean was going back to her husband.

When Robert tracked her down, he found a woman ready to fight for herself and her children. Surprised, he could only make a lame argument: "You can't raise these kids alone."

"We've been through this before," she replied. "I can't save you, but I'm gonna save them."

It was brave talk for a woman whose family's fight for survival was as fragile as a baby's breath. That point was made soon after they moved to Denver, when Jean broke her foot and ended up in the hospital.

She left some money and Bobby in charge of keeping his brothers and sisters safe and fed. He was doing just that when his aunt came by one day, took the money with the promise of shopping for food, and never returned.

Afraid that social workers would hear about their plight and break up the family, Bobby walked down to Broadway and started shining shoes to earn money. After a long day, he'd buy tortillas and milk to take home to his siblings. But a neighbor eventually called the social workers, and the younger children were sent to live with friends. Bobby stayed behind to help his mother, who came home with a cast up to her hip.

Bobby always had a heart, Jean says, recalling one day when she took her kids to a barber college for cheap haircuts. A number of bums and derelicts were hanging around the school, and as her other children stared, Jean cautioned them, "Don't ever say anything bad about those people...each and every one of them belonged to somebody once in their life. They were somebody's child, and somebody loved them.

"Bobby was one kid you never had to remind of that," she says. "He understood that naturally."

Sitting in her kitchen thirty years later, Jean pauses and listens for the guitar in the back bedroom. As long as it keeps playing, she knows Bobby's okay.

Jean got her family back and, over time, life improved. The kids went to school regularly, and the pain of the days with their father faded. But it was too late for Bobby. By the seventh grade, Jean could no longer get him to go to school. If she tried, he simply walked away when her back was turned.

When he was fourteen, Bobby took off with some friends for Nevada. Jean hadn't heard from him in weeks when she finally received a letter. "He missed the closeness of the family and was sorry he had worried me," she recalls. "I have many letters over the years from him like that. He loved his family, and no matter what else was going wrong in his life, he wanted me to know that."

But by now, the only thing that interested him was music--and everything that went with it. Bobby earned his chops playing with older boys in neighborhood garage bands--The Ventures, Beach Boys, Elvis. They put up with him because he could sing and because he could hang with any of them when it came to banging a guitar. But with the music came experimentation with drugs--marijuana, LSD, mescaline. Jean knew that Bobby was using drugs, and not just marijuana. He seemed to be walking into the same trap that had captured his father.

When Bobby was fifteen, Jean and Rick offered to pay his way at community college. "You have a great mind, Bobby," she told him. "Don't waste it."

Bobby reluctantly agreed to go. He had a hard time saying no to his mother, and Rick was one of the few positive male role models he'd ever had in his life. He hoped to find courses in musical composition, but the school didn't offer any. Instead, he signed up for the standard fare: political science, English lit, history.

For eight weeks, it looked like Bobby had found something other than music to occupy his mind. His papers all came back with A's. But one day he walked into the house and slammed his books on the table. "You and Rick are just wasting your money and my time," he told his mother. "I'm a musician, and that's all I want to be."

In the years since, Jean has often wondered if there was anything else she could have done to save her son. Should she have discouraged the music more forcefully? "But I don't think I could have stopped him," she says. "Not without doing to him what happened to my husband."

Jean no longer bears a grudge toward Robert, who until recently lived in a veterans' hospital near Rifle. When he suffered a stroke in 1989 at the age of 71, he lost the use of his right arm and right leg. "He couldn't play the guitar anymore," she says. "I think he probably paid in full for everything the moment the stroke knocked him to the floor."

Surprisingly, of all their children, it was Floyd, his father's scapegoat, who went to live near his dad and recently took him into his home. "He told me that he had to forgive him so that he could go on with his life," Jean says.

"It was Floyd who told him what had happened to Bobby. Floyd said, 'Dad, Bobby has cancer, and it's bad.'

"The old man was eating at the time, but he pushed himself away from the table. Then he started crying...Bobby was always his favorite."

If the river was whiskey,
I'd be a divin' duck.
If the river was whiskey,
I'd be a divin' duck.
Goin' to swim to the bottom,
drink myself back up.

--from "Louisiana Blues," by Muddy Waters

By the time he was sixteen, Bobby was playing lead guitar for bands that had graduated from the garage to 3.2 beer joints. He already had a reputation as a gifted guitar player, but something was missing.

Then, appropriately enough, he was introduced to the blues, the "real" blues, the same afternoon he first tried heroin. Sixteen, "maybe seventeen," he was jamming with a friend when the other boy brought out some "stuff" he'd picked up in California. Heroin.

Bobby's friend was the son of a famous Hollywood plastic surgeon and had been in trouble with the law out there for drug possession. Daddy had come to the rescue and worked out a deal: probation, provided his son relocate to another state and attend college. The boy was rich, spoiled, well-traveled and had an extensive collection of the blues.

As Bobby felt the sweet dreaminess of the opiate course through his veins and invade his mind, his friend played albums. The Reverend Gary Davis. Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon.

What was this? Bobby was hip to the Stones, Eric Clapton, even John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, but this was better. The music was eloquently simple. The words spoke of hard times and good times, of love and heartbreak, of hitting rock bottom and picking yourself up and moving on. It was a music of raw, honest emotions, emotions he knew from experience.

For the rest of his life, heroin and cocaine and alcohol would come and go. There would be stark days of desperate cravings when he would give up all he had--his guitars, his health, the one woman who might have saved him--for his highs. Then he might clean up and stay sober for months. But sober or stoned, the blues would keep calling to him like a lover in the night. They were the ultimate high, better than heroin, better even than sex.

Bobby studied his new love, learning its intimate subtleties. But he knew he wasn't going to play the blues in Denver and manage to eat or pay the rent.