What I love about this site is that articles you write about people or topics far away in time or space can elicit replies, totally unexpected, from others where you've touched a sensitive chord of affinity.

This just happened to me, where a few years ago I published a vignette of a person I knew forty years ago, a musician and street person living in such an impoverished state that I assumed he was long dead. A woman who read the post told me she was in contact with him, which astounded me, as I thought he was knocking on death's door way back in 1984.

Human resilience always amazes me, or perhaps I should say human endurance. He was a street musician living on cigarettes, coffee and maybe a few donuts a day, with no home and sleeping in the back of a camper pickup, using my bungalow bathroom for his necessities.

She somehow read the link which I attach here:

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/john-fyzer-xqelvpj

              Thanks for your detailed reply. Did you read my autobiography that covers the years 1977 to 1985 when he was in Berkeley and a friend of mine? I think we first met him maybe in January of 1978, me and my friend Rick White, called by everyone 'Bones' when we were living over the bar called the 'Starry Plough' and having musical parties almost every night fuelled by an unlimited supply of free methedrine, so pure it was almost harmless and which we doled out freely to anyone who joined in our jams, usually from 9 PM to 3 in the morning. I remember that when we first met him he loved our parties and became an almost nightly participant and a shining star in the group of six to eight musicians that sat with their guitars around our coffee table while I, not a musician, constantly chopped up and laid out another dozen lines on a large mirror to pass around, fully enjoying and delighting in the wonderful music. I know I heard more beautiful renditions of songs in our living room than the best performed on the stage one floor below us. The bartenders at the Starry Plough knew this too and after the bar closed they would come upstairs with cases of beer further fuelling the party. John amazed us with his huge repertoire. I remember one night someone mentioned what I thought was an extremely obscure song which John immediately played perfectly. While he was playing it I remember trying to think of another hardly known song to ask him to play that next, and he did, much to my amazement, as all the the other musicians sitting on our long couch and the chairs around our coffee table in a large living room would defer to him and let him play whatever he wished and listen and learn. If you mention the word 'Bones' to him and the words 'Starry Plough' I'm sure this will elicit an emotional response however deep his dementia because he was deeply happy in those long nights he spent with us, you could tell it by his music, one of the few things in life that never lies. I was never what you would call a close friend to John. I was empathetic more than sympathetic because I saw his talent, and the waste of it and I believe he saw something in me that intrigued him. I had to leave that Starry Plough excess in April of 1978 to return to Canada to restore my health, after 100 almost sleepless nights. I didn't see him again until the summer of 1982 when Bones and I instituted a weekly, Monday night poker game at my place in a bungalow behind the old Victorian house Bones lived in just two blocks from the Starry Plough. He loved that game and was a weekly participant with six others of us. I remember all of us would sometimes loan him a few bucks so he could play. Most often he would have the coins because he would sit on the street in front of 'Tower Records' on Durant avenue, one block off campus and play and sing all day, just for the change to participate. The pots started off at a quarter so with five dollars you could be a player. All of us were relatively poor back then but John and Larry Davis were in the classification of 'destitute'. That's when Bones told him he could sleep in the back of his old Ford camper truck parked in front of my bungalow and I never locked my door (I owned nothing worth stealing and my whole book collection was in Latin or Greek or French) and gave him free use of my bathroom for the next half-year. I suppose that was the closest period of our affiliation. We respected each other. He was a true bohemian and I was in love with the first true Bohemians of Paris in the Nineteenth century, Gerald de Nerval and Henri Murger, art for art's sake and neglect everything else. Let's stay in touch. This is inspiring. My burning question to you is: Did you read my autobiography or just the segment entitled John Fizer?

My story:

https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/beginnings-xjrqddn