Last Call

In those days, Bobby still dreamed of hitting the big time--playing the best clubs, getting a recording contract, going on tour. He wanted the spotlight and all that went with it--the money, the women, the notoriety, the approval from strangers that he never got from the man who first taught him how to hold a guitar.

"I'd slide in one or two blues tunes a set," he recalls. "The bands would indulge me. But mostly, it was Top 40."

When he was nineteen, Bobby's band was looking for a female singer. In walked the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. He went home and told his mother that he planned to marry her. They were to live happily ever after...

The lines in Bobby's face seem to grow deeper as he recalls the first time he met Cathy. There have been plenty of women in his life, although he's always joked that without his guitar, none of them would have given him a second glance. But no one but Cathy would ever rival the music for his love.

"I once tried to write a song about Cathy," he says. "I couldn't do her justice. In my opinion, most women aren't worth the ink it takes to write a song. But Cathy, now there was a woman who could give you the blues."

Bobby suddenly announces that the pain in his hip is returning. "I need another shot of morphine," he says. He stands and staggers momentarily to the side, reaching out to catch a post. He straightens and, with his worn cowboy boots clumping slowly across the wooden floor, heads for the bar to bum another cigarette.

I can turn a gray sky blue.
I can make it rain when I want it to.
I can build a castle
from a single grain of sand.
I can make a ship sail on the dry land.

How happy am I
with all the powers I possess?
When you got the key to my happiness,
And I can't get next to you, babe.
I can't get next to you.

--from "I Can't Get Next to You,"
by Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong

Cathy, too, was nineteen years old and loved music when she met Bobby, but there the similarities ended. She was a classically trained music major, studying opera at Colorado State University. She came from a "normal" background. Her great-grandfather had been the mayor of Des Moines and had built the hospital where she was born into a middle-class family straight out of Father Knows Best.

When Cathy was ten years old, the family moved to Littleton. Her father worked, and her mother stayed home to take care of the kids.

Cathy was working part-time as a dental assistant during her summer break between freshman and sophomore years when she saw the "Help Wanted" advertisement. "Rock and roll band needs singer." It was 1970, and with visions of Grace Slick and Janis Joplin dancing in her head, she applied.

She auditioned wearing a neck brace--she'd been in a car wreck. But otherwise, she did her best to look the part of a rock-and-roll singer. Her straight dark hair hung to her hips, and a satin blouse showed off her cute figure.

The band consisted of a drummer, a female bass player and a guitar player named Bobby Hornbuckle. Cathy's voice wasn't made for rock and roll, but the band hired her on the spot. "Mostly because they could actually hear me over their lousy sound system," she recalls, laughing. "They needed someone who could project, and I could project."

Now Cathy opens a photo album. The first picture is a black-and-white print of a rock-and-roll band: a drummer, a female bass player and, middle-stage, a skinny boy with shoulder-length hair and a guitar.

She thought the guitar player was "pretty," with his beautiful blue eyes and perfect white teeth. He was thin, but not painfully so, and so shy and quiet--which drew her to him. With all her training, she immediately recognized that this was a truly talented musician. "Gifted," she says.

They fell in love. He was gentle and romantic, and there was nothing he wouldn't do for her. She heard about his childhood and wondered how he had turned out as nice as he had. She was impressed that he still looked after his younger brothers and sisters, taking them on outings to the museum and the park.

Soon it was Cathy he was taking on those outings. He'd tell her about his dreams of making it big in music; she'd talk about her ambition to sing at the Met. His siblings complained to their mother that Cathy had "stolen" Bobby from them, but they loved her, too, because she made him happy.

When Cathy married Bobby that year, her brief career as a rock singer was over. (Today, her sons jokingly imitate her attempts as Beverly Sills trying to do Mick Jagger.) She also put college on hold, going to work full-time at the dentist's office to support the two of them.

The rock-and-roll life wasn't easy on their marriage. Bobby sometimes drank too much and smoked too much pot, and she didn't like the way girls threw themselves at him. But it was hard to voice her concerns. After all, her generation expected a certain wildness in its musicians, and she hadn't been above experimenting with drugs, either. She thought she just had to trust Bobby to make the right choices, and eventually he'd grow out of it.

But there was evidence early on that Bobby was not capable of making those choices. Bobby had told her he'd tried and enjoyed heroin as a teenager and would try it again if available. When a friend showed up from Vietnam with a bag of heroin, he and his girlfriend and Bobby started smoking the drug. Cathy didn't know what to do, so she left the room.

"At least they weren't injecting it," Cathy remembers. "But I still went to bed mad that they would bring that stuff into my house."

The heroin gave out after a few days. Cathy was relieved that it was gone and even more relieved when Bobby made no immediate attempts to replace it. But drugs were slowly carving out a bigger place in Bobby's life. Once he was arrested for allowing a drug-dealer friend to use their home to meet with a customer who turned out to be a federal drug agent. "We were naive," Cathy says. "We thought, 'How could we get in trouble if we weren't the buyer or the seller?'"

Bobby, who took the rap in exchange for letting Cathy off the hook, got probation and a referral to counseling. But two years later there would be another arrest, this time for possession of heroin, and more probation.

Cathy turns another page in the album. A series of photographs of herself: young, pretty and obviously pregnant as she posed outside the small home she had purchased with Bobby.

"We planned our first child so carefully," she recalls. "We talked about it every day. Bobby was excited. He swore that he would never be like his father. He always spoke of his dad as the man who took away his childhood."

It was 1972, and they were among the first couples in Denver to deliver using Lamaze natural childbirth methods. As Cathy went into labor, the nurses wanted to know the name of the child, girl or boy. And so Cathy learned the gender of her firstborn when one of the nurses announced, "It's a Brian!"

"Bobby was so proud...he couldn't stop smiling," she says. Another page in the photo album has a photograph of Bobby at City Park holding newborn Brian above his head. "That's Bobby talking to his son," she adds. "He's always been good about talking to his sons." She points to another photo, this one of the young father napping on the couch with his son asleep on his chest. "That pretty much says everything about how close Bobby and his boys were."

Cathy looks up and blinks in a futile attempt to control her tears. Just then, the front door opens and Michael comes stomping in. He wants to talk to his mother about money, $80 to be exact, to buy new tires. If she can just see her way to loaning him the cash now, he'll pay her back as soon as he can sell his stereo speakers.

"We'll talk about it later," she says firmly, and Michael heads off to his bedroom. After he's gone, she confides, "He's a lot like his father--he wants instant gratification and doesn't think things through.

"Sometimes it scares me. Of course, he's only seventeen. His father...well, I used to joke that I was actually raising three children, and sometimes Bobby was the biggest kid of them all."