Tommy

When was the last time you knew a 64 year old man who wanted to be called Tommy? Like he was 16 or something. He acted 16. No, he wasn’t mentally impaired. He just grew up in a very harsh environment, with very harsh parents. But it didn’t seem that way on the outside.

They were rich. Veryveryvery rich. When I first became aware of them (being so much younger than everyone else in the extended family), I didn’t know that Tommy’s family had three homes in three different parts of the country. I didn’t know that his father was a huge wheeler-dealer in their city. I did know, with the instincts of a pre-teenager, that Tommy’s mother was one of the biggest, meanest people I’d ever come across. I worked hard to stay out of her way. Being little, I had some success in that area. Otherwise, they were summer people here on the mountaintop, just like the rest of us.

Like thousands before them, they came each spring to escape heat of one kind or another. In their case it was both the increasing heat of their home in Florida and the expected summer blistering of their home in the city. It had been, on one of those springtime drives north to the mountain that Tommy’s tiny, chronically ill brother died quietly as the family motored along - Tommy right by his side but too young to have any idea what had happened. When the tragedy was discovered, Tommy’s mother looked her five-year-old in the eye and said: "You killed your brother. I’ll never forgive you for this." And she never did.

It set him apart. Tommy’s mom could beat up on him verbally in both public and private (and did) but heaven protect you if anyone else did. When he played tennis in the annual neighborhood tournament, it was always the other guy’s fault if Tom lost playing doubles. Being in the same age group with my brothers as teenagers, they often played hookey from summer chores around the neighborhood. Tom’s mother would chase my brothers out of her house swinging a broom and across the road to the family home, screaming drunken vitriol at the top of her lungs, often coming smack up against my mother at the front door (thankfully the only person on the planet who intimidated her). Later, we would all hear how the "hookey" had been planned and instigated by Tommy.

As we all grew, Tommy’s other characteristics came out. Although I was too young to have seen or experienced it, my older female cousins still maintain that Tom regularly prowled the roofs and roads of our little community looking for young, nubile and preferably naked bodies to gaze upon illicitly. Neither they nor my sister-in-law would allow their own female children near him unaccompanied in later years. In those growing up summers, though, what was seen as boyish libido could be forgotten, compartmentalized in the scattering of the summer people at the end of each season.

Where did he go to college? I don’t think he did. There’s a famous story about his one and only marriage, which apparently lasted one and only one night. What did it matter? Tommy did what he wanted. He had plenty of money and no obligations. His parents made no demands I ever heard about. He was, in the parlance of the Bond-007 generation, a playboy. And he was good at it.

Eventually, he drifted back to the mountain where a few die-hards had stuck it out. Stayed here on the mountain or returned very quickly to it after college... or marriage. Others of us renewed our acquaintance with the place more slowly. Tommy was here waiting for most of us when we came back, whether for good or for vacation. The perfect host, the charming raconteur, the (thankfully) teetotaler. Keeping the traditions alive, in a strange sort of way after having had one hell of a life in any number of places all over the country.

By the time I moved to the mountain full-time, the acid that was Tommy’s mother had killed her, but not before she had made all of her children miserable, particularly Tommy. But with her death, Tommy found a level of comfort in his hard-worked sobriety and in caring for his father; a kinder, gentler personality. They did the annual pilgrimages from city to sunshine to mountain. By this time Tom was no teenager. He was needed by his father and had a purpose in caring for him and helping him stay independent. For the first and probably only time in his life he was happy, or at least content in some Tommy kind of way. The demon ghost of his mother wasn’t screaming so loud.

His father died about 5 years ago, here on the mountain, the place he really loved best. At first, it looked like Tom would do fine. He pitched in helping to make the decisions about the various houses and his father’s business dealings. Moving stuff around. He made what we all thought was a healthy choice to begin renovations and winterization of the family summer home here so he could live on the mountain full-time. Like his father, he loved it here too, though he’d never "done" a winter.

The winter proved his undoing. Too cold, too deep the snow, too windy and way too lonely for someone who needed light and talk and action to keep him on the right path. Tommy emerged from his first winter on the mountain with crushing home conversion bills, the conviction that there were "ghosts" in the family’s summer home and a pair of hips needing replacement. He had surgery the following fall and became addicted to prescription painkillers. Soon after, he renewed his acquaintance with alcohol in all its forms. He’s been drinking and drugging ever since.

Do you believe in karma? I don’t know if I do, although I do believe that the kinds of energy we put out in our dealings with others comes back to us in a myriad of forms. If we expect the negative, then that’s what we get, or at least that’s what we perceive we get. How about reincarnation? I actually hope for reincarnation myself, particularly if it lets me be with Preachy life after life after life. What fun! Maybe I’d eventually get into ice-fishing... then again... maybe not.

Whatever the case, I hope for an afterlife of some kind, particularly for people like Tommy. I believe him to have been in almost constant, unremitting spiritual pain for all of his 64 years, of which the last few have only been the worst. I have tried speculating about the cause and it’s easy to point at the money, his mother, his father and a whole host of other circumstances and say, "That’s it!." But I think that’s just window dressing. The trees, not the forest.

If it’s karma, then he has spent his time on this plane expiating the sins of a past life in the pain and anguish of his present life in order to learn the lessons he will need for a future life. In some ways, I hope this might be true because at least his pain is now over and I hope the next life will be better for and to him. I think, though, that I have still too much a of a christian view to fully be able to absorb the karma thing. So, like a very few other haunted and trapped souls I have known, I believe Tom woke up happy this morning when he woke up dead. For the first time in his life he understood... everything. I think that would be a great relief.

Thomas "Tommy" Thomasson

1940-2004

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