We were not prepared to have Damaged Don with us. Nora used to say that having Don with you was “like going to a brothel with a child.” I never knew what Nora meant, but we knew we were supposed to protect Damaged Don. What eluded us was what to protect him from, and exactly how. Don was well-meaning, good-hearted, and kind, but he had no talent as a singer-songwriter, and he was a sad sack onstage—Don was a doom-and-gloom guy. You could see it in the faces in the audience at the Gallows—those poor people who were hearing Damaged Don sing for the first time, the ones who hadn’t run to the washrooms. You could not prepare yourself for the overwhelming sadness, or the way Don droned. “In a comedy club, you need some sorrow relief,” Nora used to say—in Don’s defense—but she’d stopped saying it. “Maybe not that sorrowful,” Nora later said.

Don was always getting evicted from his apartment; it didn’t matter where he moved. The last time he was homeless, he’d crashed on Nora and Em’s couch. Nora nearly suffocated him with a sofa cushion—Don had been singing in his sleep. “The same old song,” was all Nora said, but it could have been fragments from a song Don was writing. The way Don sang, even in his sleep, his new songs sounded like the same old song. It was always Don’s neighbors who got him evicted; Don was up all night writing and singing when he wasn’t singing in his sleep. Now that Nora and Em were heavily armed, it was out of the question that Damaged Don could stay with them. In the dead of night, Don’s plaintive yowls might have been mistaken for the confessions of Em’s father to the unresponsive Cardinal O’Connor. In the dead of night, it wouldn’t have been safe for Em’s homo-hating dad or for Cardinal O’Connor—to be wandering around, lamenting, in Nora and Em’s apartment. Nora and Em despised conversion therapy; they would have blasted away at either one of the Catholics. Damaged Don was an all-night moaner. In the dead of night, it wouldn’t have been safe for Don to sing at Nora and Em’s.

That snowy night in New York, the snowshoer and I knew we were stuck with the Damaged Man—Don had nowhere to go after he’d performed. There were dressing rooms backstage at the Gallows, but it was a challenge to dress Don for the snowstorm. He’d brought his few clothes to the Gallows. The clothes, the songs he was writing, his guitar—that’s all he owned. “Doesn’t it snow in Montana—where are your winter clothes?” Mr. Barlow asked Don.