So there was this tall, thin-lipped troubadour, part mountain man, part swamp rat, with an aristocratic confidence and the appellation Gamble Rogers, as if his parents knew from the beginning he wasn’t going to be an architect like his daddy, but was going to need a name that sounded good on a stage, because with that twinkle in his eye and those long fingers and that reedy voice he just had to turn out to be a storyteller and a musician.
But who could have predicted how much he would love life and seize it to him, careful of the details, painstakingly mastering every nuance of his stringed instrument, just like he honed and sharpened and practiced his wit and his observations of the people around him, stirring them all together and giving them new life as archetypal characters scattered all over Georgia and Florida from the loading dock of Arrendale’s Purina Store to the parking lot of the Terminal Tavern.
He thought his thoughts during long, lonely drives to play at this festival or that bar or television program, sometimes in the big time, often in the smaller, more intimate places where you could sit right up close and watch his fingers, and see him pick out a piece and then sling that guitar around behind him on its strap, hitch up his chinos and light into one of his tales in the very same way that Homer did around the campfires, telling the old stories they all knew and hungered to hear again so far from home on some windswept plain, hearing the bard’s voice reminding them of home, reminding them that they were human, and that humans always have to fight and contend and grab life where they can get ahold of it, because at any moment it may be gone. And the Greeks cautioned about calling any man happy until you see the end of his life, because things can turn on you mighty quick, and the most popular athlete can get old and sick and forgotten.
But our Homer cheered us around the campfire just this summer and left us all happy, even though we right then were looking at the end of his life and didn’t know it any more than we know when our own end is coming.
It could be a car wreck or a cancer or a coronary or all the fears we dread and dodge, but he went out boldly and gave his life, trying to save a drowning man, just gave it the same way he lived his life by giving it: giving his music, his song, his laughter, his friendly concern.
And when he stepped down off the stage he wasn’t whisked away by handlers or hurried to a dressing room. Shoot, no, Gamble just hung around and asked about your daughter and your Mama and was a real, warm human being. Except that he was a hero, too, because he had a debilitating arthritic condition, and had to fight every day and every night to keep it from turning him into a petrified man, and he fought it and won by the hardest his right to keep on moving and breathing, and then he flung it away because he couldn’t do anything else but fight for life. Even though he could hardly turn his head, he plunged in to try and save another, just like his song about the two little boys, “Do you think I could leave you dying…?”
And now he’s dead and mourned by all these friends all over the country who have known him as he passed through our lives and left us smiling and crying and laughing and shouting for more and looking forward to the next time we could hear him and talk to him and tell him about our daughters.
Now, unlike the Dutchman, he will never grow old but will live in our hearts with Still Bill, Miss Eulalah Singleterry, the Skylake Campfire Girls, Trudy Buckram, the Sheik of Araby and the Honeydipper and the Bible salesman and the Hell’s Belles Motorcycle gang and the airboat gamblers and all the country philosophers and raunchy retinues of rednecks and the Vista volunteer talking metric to decent folk. All these and the Sheriff of Dekalb County, with his bandoleer stuffed alternately with Hava Tampa Jewels and Slim Jims, and all those million details of life observed and gently captured so that while we are chuckling at Narcissa Nonesuch we are laughing at ourselves, too, and our own foibles.
Now we are hoping we can keep on laughing; this articulate athlete has died young, his life whole and complete. We can never forget him because we have met his characters, and they are us.
Gamble was such a piece of work that as surely as he breathed life into his own inimitable characters so did God or the gods fashion him out of that rare clay that we shall not find again in our wanderings on this Earth.
“Let us go to the banks of the ocean. Let us sit there beside the Zuider Zee. Long ago, I used to be a young man…” Dear Gamble remembers that for me.
Reprinted from the Oct. 17, 1991 Athens Observer, with encouragement from Brenda Poss, Rick Peckham and other friends.
Like what you just read? Support Flagpole by making a donation today. Every dollar you give helps fund our ongoing mission to provide Athens with quality, independent journalism.
