So often in Life we find ourselves looking back with 20/20 hindsight and thinking "if only..."
In July of 1989, the Reet stopped at my house in Texas on his way from the frozen North to the wobbly West. One of the prices that he pays for a full ahead style of enthusiasm in his mailings and postcards, is that it's generally difficult for those of us on the receiving end to distinguish properly between minor and major with regard to perspective and proportion on the events of his life...
As a consequence, when I welcomed him like the long lost brother he was, I had no idea how close to the edge he had been, nor how fragile he still was. .I hadn't read between the squiggly lines of his more recent mailings... hadn't retained the nuggets of hard core data scattered among the ravings about devo and rev bob... didn't put two and two together to paint the picture of the hell that he had suffered. He tried, gamely, to explain to me what burnout was, and how it had collapsed on top of him like a massive building. The stress of teaching small children in dire circumstances was incomprehensible to me then - and remains so today. These are shoes that I don't even want to try on, never mind walk a mile in.
I babbled gaily away about the
joys of Texas..... one of which was a recently discovered outdoor
amateur theatre built in a natural amphitheater of giant oak trees
out in the country. I had seen a few plays there, including a tribute
to R. Crumb and I had often thought that too little was made of this
marvellous setting. The arrival of our own little Mr Natural on the
scene flashed to me that he would make a wonderful host for a
Saturday morning children's show on live television from the "Oaks".
My innate tendency to overmarket ran away with me and before I knew
what the hell I was doing, I kept interrupting my friend's quiet
attempt to calmly regroup his life with rantings about guests and
housebands and costumes and sponsors and syndication rights and
taping facilities.... 
The
Reet would simply shudder at the idea of it.. and I was hurt and felt
rejected. How selfishly blind of me not to see and hear the tired,
the need for calm and absolute LACK of responsibility in his current
frame of mind. But we had been apart for too long. My life in Texas
wasn't even on the same planet as the quiet idyllic of Santa Barbara.
In retrospect, it's easy to see why I couldn't provide for him the
very thing that I wanted him to need.... a life in Texas, with me in
it on a daily basis. It's more difficult, albeit more pleasant to now
see that I did manage to give him something else... something that HE
actually needed at the time.... something that he would, in time
repay a thousandfold when it was most needed in my own life. I gave
him unequivocal love... unquestioned allegiance, right or wrong,
agree or disagree. I boosted his confidence and reminded him that he
had enormous value to all of us - that just by being who he was he
showed us what humanity could truly be like.... if we only had the
courage but to try to achieve and maintain it.
I don't know what I could have done differently if I had been more aware... more sensitive, perhaps.
I don't think that he ever would have, or should have stayed in Texas, which devours sensitivity like limes with tequila - sucking out the juice and tossing the rest away. I know that he met and befriended my new child, and that made the entire episode bearable for him. I know that my frustration had a major role in his discomfort at my home. I recall that he got lucky in the Lone Star State, an event that must have brightened up his sense of self worth, somewhat. And we took him to Billy Bob's, (see picture) a monument to tourist ostentaciousness in the bowels of the Fort Worth Stockyards. I know, now, how lost he must have been, preoccupied with the sense of disaster and recovery in his own life as we all prattled on about gibberish.
like I said at the beginning, "if only...."
He packed his trusty bug and set off across the desert, pausing along the way to rest in the desert and dip into Las Vegas. We got postcards from stops along the road until he settled in California.
It was some years before we met again... by then his hell had been vanquished, for the most part.
Unfortunately for me, mine was in full rage.