Chapter Nine

I was starting to feel a little trapped. I couldn't come home without Bobby waiting for me on the front steps, eager to get back to work in the basement. I had to fend him off just get something to eat and it was getting to be a bit of a chore. I was thinking maybe this is just more of the motivation I need to find myself another place to live and get on with my life. It wasn't just Bobby and his omnipresent agitation. It was also my mom, who was beginning to take a sort of pride of ownership of what she called "this budding partnership". She was thinking maybe this was the collaboration she'd been wishing for me for so long. I had to tell her the truth. It was probably going nowhere.

"What we need", I told her in sign language, "is something big, and between me and him, we've got nothing big. We're nobodies nowhere."

She suggested we go out and perform but I had a really bad feeling about that. I didn't have a lot of faith in Bobby. The few times even just my mom or dad came down to watch us play, he tended to freeze up, stop twitching, and when he lost that bodily disorder he lost his rhythm and he lost his focus and it all went out the window. He was toast. I figured there was no way he was going to be able to keep it together in public, so that's what I told her.

"What we need", I told her again, "is a missing ingredient".

Maybe that was the big mistake, because once she heard that, she made up her mind that she was going to find that missing link, the final piece of the puzzle. I didn't really mean it, of course. I didn't think there was anything that was going to make it work. Bobby was weird. He was truly fucked up. I just didn't know how to get rid of him. Like I said, he was there, every day, every night, doing nothing but waiting for me to appear. If I was home, I was his, like a prisoner in my own deep dark dungeon. I was sick of his songs pretty soon. I was tired of his face, of his manner, of his talk. Most people think I'm so patient. It's only because I can't scream.

Now this is where Laura Napoli comes in. I don't have all the facts but I'll tell what I know. Once again, I blame mom for this part. She's the one who put the pieces together. Laura works over at St. Catherine's. She's the activities coordinator for the basket cases they like to call clients. These are the bag ladies, the homeless, the nutjobs, the halfwits and losers who are out on the streets. I suppose that I should be kinder. Excuse me if I'm in a bad mood but just thinking about it, it gets me. The fact that these people, who are really in terrible shape, are left out to die and decay on their own, who'd have nothing and no one if it weren't for people like Laura, makes me wonder what kind of a world do we live in? Most of them need to be in hospitals, institutions, places of refuge, but most of them have nowhere to go.

The church does something at least. It gives them some food and a place to hang out during the day. Nowhere to sleep, of course, no not that! That would be asking too much I suppose. Nowhere that they can call home. Nowhere they can get mail, get a phone call, take a shower and shave. Well, the church can't do everything, they say. Yes it can. The church is tremendously rich. They've got treasure and property all over the world. They do just enough to look good. Don't get mad at me, Laura, it's just what I think, and you know that I love you and I love what you do. You're trying your best. I believe that.

I think that Laura is a lot like me in some ways, the bad ways. The way that other people can get her to do anything for them, the way she never says 'no' like my dad and the way she's always helping, like my mom. I can't help it if she brings out a certain tenderness in me, though it's something I'm not used to. Who is going to take care of Laura? She never looks after herself. You would think that someone as young, as pretty, as nice, would find it too dirty, too stinky, too creepy to work in that place. You would have to be some kind of saint, and maybe she is, or maybe she just wants to be. Sometimes you want to shake her, point out the simple fact that saints don't get far in this world. They don't get rewards or nice houses or noticed or even appreciated most of the time. Doing good for it's own sake is perfectly fine, I suppose, but like my mother would say, someday she might wake up and smell the coffee, and then where will she be?

Laura gives them all something to do. She reads to them. She plays with them. She teaches them and talks to them. Part of her job is to give them a sense of a purpose in life, at least for the moments she's with them. She tries to build on whatever they are, whatever they have they can offer. So it was, with Mario Flambeau. You probably remember him, if you're a rock fan at all. You'll remember his band, The Flaming Pigs and their hits, like "Can't Get Away", "Nobody But You" and "Heat of the Day". At the heart of that sound was Flambeau, his guitar, the way that it felt it was coming from heaven, coming down from perfection eternal.

The Pigs had a couple of years where they were the top, they were the best, they defined rock and roll. It was magic. Of course, that was then, this is now. What happened was the usual story. Johnny Bricks died of heroin, trash in some alley. Kerry Smash fell about ten stories to his death. Billy Ray still survived, the bassist of course. He's out on some riverboat gambling ship now. And Mario Flambeau just burned out. Drugs, booze, whatever, you name it. His brain was all gone and it never came back. He had vanished completely several years back, then somebody found him out on the pier, staggering around, destitute, ruined. I don't even know how they found out who he was, but they did, and he was, dirty, smelly, in rags, you can imagine. They put him into some halfway house here, and that's how he ended up down at St. Catherine's, another pet project for Laura. She found a guitar and some pedals, an amp. She found him a chair, sat him down, put the thing in is hands, and what do you know? He could play. He could still play the way that he used to back in the old days, only now with no awareness, no presence at all. It was weird, like a ghost making glorious sounds.

Naturally it was my mother's idea that here was the missing ingredient. She's the one who arranged for Bobby and me to go over and visit the place, see him play. Of course Bobby knew who he was. He had practically built his persona on the Johnny Bricks model. Of the very few other people's songs he could play, almost all of them were Pigs'. His excitement was practically out of control from the moment mom mentioned Mario's name. It didn't bother him a bit, I'm not sure he ever even noticed, that Mario was basically a shell. He was Mario Flambeau. He was God.