Chapter Eight

I know, I know, you don't have to tell me. I'm a sucker. I'm a loser.'m a fool. I always get into these things and I just can't help it. Sometimes I blame my dad, who's never been known to say 'no' in his life, not sa far as I can remember. As a kid I was so tempted to take advantage of him. Dad, can I have some candy? Dad, can I have that toy? Dad, can we go fishing? It was always 'yes' or 'sure, why not', or 'okay'. The only time he ever told me 'no' was when he asked me to please stop trying to play security guard in the store, before the whistle, of course. Other times I blame my mom, who is always doing things for other people. If she isn't dragging home strays she's out grocery shopping for shut-ins, or driving old ladies to their medical appointments, or calling random strangers on behalf of wonderful charities. My whole life has been full of nothing but mister and missus nice guys left and right.

So I ended up with the worst of both worlds. I don't do any good for anyone, and I don't help people who need it. Instead I always end up helping people who don't. I'm like the guy who's driving healthy people around because they're lazy. I'm like the guy giving a ten percent discount to a rich kid (not really, dad, it's just an example). I'm the pedestrian who gets out of the way of the car in the crosswalk when it's a pedestrian crosswalk for heaven's sake! I'm the guy who lets the other guy go first even though I'm the one in a hurry. You should see me sometimes. It's pathetic. I usually apologize to people when THEY screw ME over. I would probably adopt a dog if it bit me.

Of course I ended up spending my evenings in my room with Bobby O'Bannon working out his songs. It's not that they were bad, they weren't. Some of them were even pretty good if not exactly my style. He had a tendency to slack on the bass lines, find a simple groove and stick with it no matter how boring it got. He wasn't big on bridges, preferring a typical patter of verse verse chorus, verse verse chorus, verse verse fade away. Also he wasn't kidding when he said he could live in C. Most of his songs got around to that eventually if they didn't actually start out there. C, A and D. C, E and G. C and F, C Em Gm. That was pretty much his repertoire. On the guitar he could basically strum those chords and that's about it, no fingering, no soloing, but that's okay. If we were going to have a band we'd need more people anyway, a lead guitarist and a drummer at the least.

He was all about the singing, and the act that went along with it. That rooster strut he did around my room was merely a shadow flickering on a wall compared to the strutting he liked to do when vocalizing. He was your typical rock and roll lead singer imitation all the time, and like a kid with it, a kid who's broadcasting his fantasy world when he thinks that nobody's paying attention. I even expected to hear him cheering for himself after every song. The twitching and fidgeting he normally did was accentuated to infinity when he was singing, and I could hardly tell if the one was the product or the inspiration of the other. Did he perform that way because he lived that way, or did he live that way because he performed that way? It is possible that he was performing all of the time in his mind, and the bodily jerkings were just the outward manifestation of this raucous inner world.

I never asked him. I'm not sure I ever asked him anything beyond "what does this notation mean?" in his little notebook. I took to transcribing the songs into actual sheet music and tablature, making him write the lyrics in standard English lettering and translating the secret codes into accepted musical instructions. Within a couple of days our system was down to a simple matter of finger pointing, shrugging and nodding. My mom was pretty ecstatic that "you and him are getting along so well", and I have to admit there were parts of it I truly enjoyed - playing, mostly, and adding some livelier variations to perk up his songwriting. We sounded okay, at least to me. My dad even liked what he heard and proclaimed it "promising". We were down there every night for a few weeks and by the end of that initial period we had whittled the set down to ten or twelve songs we decided to concentrate on. We spent so much time in that basement that Bobby joked we were like anti-nomads. That's how he came up with the name of Bobby and the Bedouins, although when you think of it, I was the only Bedouin, and Bedouins ARE nomads so it was exactly the opposite of what he meant to say.

The best thing about those sessions was it limited his bullshit to a manageable quantity. Whenever he started to wander into metaphysics, ancient history, inaccurate science, or who he'd fuck, I would just start playing something and he would shut the hell up and get back to doing his performing thing. After the first two days I'd already heard everything he was capable of playing on the guitar, which wasn't much, but I could pretty much use that knowledge to get him to accompany my own stuff as long as I kept it within his range. I could tell he wasn't always happy to be going along with my "songs" (which are more like endless improvisational jamming around a simple theme I happened to come up with at the moment and would never remember or repeat ever again), but as long as I let him vocalize to the music he was satisfied. He liked to think he could make up lyrics to go along with anything, and this is what he would try to do, but the truth is he never came up with decent material that way. The only times he wrote good lyrics or songs was when he was alone, and especially when he was outside, walking around, going nowhere. For some reason, this was the magic formula he required.

He had no job, so during the day he had plenty of time to walk around, going nowhere. My mom was trying to get him a job, but she had to admit it was hard. Bobby was full of enthusiasm, and claimed to be able to do anything. He said he'd worked in construction, driven a cab, done office work, but whenever she found him a possible position he flaked and backed out. The few times she forced him into an interview for a kind of a job that he'd said he had done, she heard later that the interviewers were convinced he was lying, that he'd done no such thing. He also had no references. He lied about where he had come from, where he had lived. He lied about everything, so much in fact that his lies were confused, all mixed up, and he wouldn't even try to keep them all straight. Every day brought a new fictional Bobby. We wondered aloud how he'd made it this far.

Mom snooped in his room and found nothing. Aside from his notebooks of songs he had only clothes and not many of those. He had no identification, for example, not even a library card. As far as we knew his name wasn't Bobby O'Bannon. There was no way to tell. He would say that it wasn't important who he was, what he'd done, where he'd been. He was living transcendentally, he claimed, alive in the moment. He had showed up one day in the unemployment office, was shepherded into my mom's. He said he'd been fired from Randy O Tire Co. It wasn't true, as a phone call soon proved. Even while my mom was talking to the actual Randy O, Bobby just sat there, fidgeting and smiling, maintaining his lie. Sticking to it, he'd say. My mom even told me, this was much later, that Bobby was the hopelessest case she'd attempted, her words, and for mom, that was saying a lot.