I'm Telling Everyone Bob Wright's An Asshole

It was about 3 in the morning this night, a Sunday. I had been up for three days straight on heroin and speed, suffering only minor hallucinations. I saw a tiny pixie chewing on a dead crow, which would have been disturbing, but I had started to roll with the visions. It was actually just my diminuitive friend Tim Birdsell eating a box of KFC he was nursing for the same three days.

Bob was a mess. He never dealt well with being extremely wasted, we all knew it and had started to hope the S.O.B. would just overdose and stop bringing us down. Bob climbed up on top of the water tower at one point and demanded from God that he be able to fly. We were afraid he was going to jump, thinking he could fly, but apparently his refusal to do so was simply because in his paranoia he figured that's what God wanted to just destroy him. Of course, if God had wanted to destroy him, I mean, c'mon, He's God, He can do whatever he wants. He doesn't have to angle his way to your destruction or nothing.

We all did lots of drugs, but Bob was self-destructive about it. Too much was never enough, and never enough was always far from finished, and far from finished was just—it was all a shitload of drugs, that's all I know. He filled a Lincoln town car with cocaine one evening and snorted it all over the course of the weekend. His whole head was as hollow as a chocolate bunny's by Monday morning. One time I saw Bob feed six pounds of hashish to a burro and smoke its ass. He was way over the top, we all knew it. He was going to crash and burn, and it would be at the same time.

Sex with Bob was always terribly embarrassing for him. His penis had shrunk to an inch and a half, fully erect, and often when we were supposed to be having sex he had been fucking the cat for five minutes before I told him his error. And when we did manage to have sex it was over so fast I think we actually went back in time. It was like we stopped ourselves from having sex before we had it he was so quick to ejaculate.

Bob's eyes were bloodshot on this Sunday night, practically bulging out of his head and into my chicken noodle soup. I was trying to sober up quick because Monday morning I needed to be at Cher's by 10 a.m.—I was a close confidential friend of hers for several years as well, which I'll dish out all the dirt on in a future book. I thought if I left Bob might die, but despite my pleas to please not die while I was gone, there was nothing I could do. I wrote a post-it for Bob, asking him to get help while there was still time, but I don't think he ever got it. Or if he did, he didn't take me seriously.

I found Bob in the studio three days later, passed out on the Marshall Tucker Band. At this point his habit was at its worst, he had taken to mainlining John Denver records and I was sure he would be dead by the weekend. But somehow Bob always managed to snap out of it long enough to record another hit album. It was this record-injecting session that turned out "Mixed Fruitcup Blues," one of his most touching ballads ever, and he had actually come up with the lyrics while the microphone was fully inserted up his ass. When they say Bob Wright's a genius, that's what they mean.

Bob and I had about six months left in our relationship, yet as bad as our relationship would get at times, I've never hated him for what he's done to me. He's simply Bob, that's who he is. He is no more responsible for being a drug-addled, childish musical genius than I'm responsible for being a two-faced confidant.

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