Part Eight

His prolific years were captured by his first two albums and most say he never caught it again.

The next few years he lived comfortably for the first time in his entire life, and in his comfort did nothing too much save for score heroin and sit outside on a lawn chair, watching nature, staying high, with cuts on the veins of his arms and wrists, and neck and thighs and ankles.

Penny-Dice came to him one morning when he was singing on the floor drunk and strung-out wearing only his underwear. NASCAR was on the television.

“You ever gonna get straight Tommy?”

He rubbed his eyes and tried to stand and fell down on his back.

“In this life,” he said. “No, I kindly doubt it.”

“I thought you was going to be a star. You ain’t nothin’ but dust’n’trash are you.”

He made fast engine sounds with his tongue and saliva stained his cheek.

“I’m taking the kids to my mama’s place in Greenville.”

***

After his family left him, a suicide attempt had him hospitalized at the Leotie Psychiatric Hospital.

He signed autographs for the staff, whoever wanted one and most did not care either way. They hung it up on the wall with the childish drawings the patients would color.

He taught a music class and he recorded Psychotic Blues in their music room with other patients that he showed how to play instruments contributing to each track, playing a theremin or harpsichord, or the bongos or a lute, pushing brooms against the floorboards and clacking washboards, playing the jaw harp and playing tubular bells or the xylophone, each of them taking a turn at the horns with the final production being dubbed so it sounds like a band of a hundred bronze trumpets. With verses he wrote of those he met there, “Done killed my brother in the morning in the fog/It was the voices in my head that said to/Say they was the Word of God/There ain’t nobody learned me God is a devil too.”

The record was the last to get any positive reviews and was considered almost unanimously, until his final album, to be his last decent effort as a singer-songwriter.

Penny-Dice would visit him, with other patients in the visitor’s room, and he asked to see his son and step-kids and she tried not to cry and he tried not to cry when she said the truth, that they preferred, at least for the time being, to not know him as their father.

“How’s your mama?”

“She’s good.”

“How’s your car?”

“It’s fine.”

“You need a new one?”

She was shaking her head and her eyes were consumed in darkness behind gray cloud sunglasses and she turned away when she spoke.

“Tommy.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

When he got out he still had the shakes and still down in his heart didn’t want to live in this world and he joined the Zou Buddhist Temple just outside Bethlehem, Georgia, praying with his feet crossed and his head shaved, learning a philosophy that says when one desires then one lives in pain and one accepts pain then one has no desires and then lives in contempt and satisfaction, trying to embrace this way of being, smiling every moment of each hour, whether it was true or not a true smile, and finally left after three months saying, “There just ain’t no blood here.”