The Reader's Digest used to have a regular feature, "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met." I've met many unforgettable characters, but if I were to choose the most unforgettable one, it would have to be Tom Conroy. He was not famous but he was a very important person in my life for 50 years and I'm putting up this post as a memorial to him.
MEMORIES OF TOM CONROY
In September 1970 I moved to the Lower East Side of New York City to attend the Cooper Union School of the Arts. I collected comic books and hoped to become a comic book artist. A few months after I settled in, I came across a store on Fourth Avenue and 11th Street called The Memory Shop and went in to see if they had any comic books. The store was crammed with stuff, mostly movie posters and file cabinets of stills, but there were also boxes of back issues of comics, completely unsorted. I said to the owner, “If I put all these in order, would you pay me in comics?”
“Sure,” he said. This was my introduction to Mark Ricci. I didn’t know yet that this was the way he generally handled business. Mark looked to be in his 40s and always wore rumpled, greasy, black suit pants and a sweaty sleeveless undershirt, a “wife beater.” He had a Hitler mustache. Mark was not a scrupulous person. When the fire inspector dropped by to look at his firetrap of a business, Mark would ask, “50?” and in response to a slight nod would slip him the bills. He might say to one of the employees, “Geronimo, we need an electric typewriter.” A day or two later Geronimo would show up carrying one, unboxed, of course. As far as the memorabilia, was Mark buying goods stolen by employees of studio offices or other sources? Sometimes.
At the same time, Mark didn’t seem to care about money. His staff consisted of various street people whom he paid out of his pocket and let stay in apartments he rented. Most went by nicknames. Mark was referred to as “The Godfather.” Other members of the cast included Geronimo, Popeye Larry, The Bride of Frankenstein, a couple referred to as the King and Queen of England (because they don’t do any work either), and last, but very important in my life, the Gray Lizard, Tom Conroy. Tom was a tall, skinny speed freak whose movements were quick and jerky, like those of a lizard, and who had an ashy dusting over his pallid skin and clothes, hence the descriptor “gray.” Once my comics started getting published, I became “Famous Paul.”
After I had organized the comics in the store, Mark asked me to collect some boxes of books stored at Tom’s apartment. Tom wrote out his address on an index card. I still have it.
I went over there that evening. Tom didn’t have a telephone, so I had to call out his name until he heard me. He then dropped a set of keys tied to a bandana out of his window.
A photo of Tom's building, 340 East 6th Street, I took on a recent visit to New York. It looks much the same as it did in the 1970s.
I opened his apartment door to face a dark hallway, narrow because one side of it was lined with milk crates holding magazines and other items. They were stacked to the ceiling and propped up by shovels, brooms, and plungers. Some light filtered in from a window in the small room at the far end.
That small room was cluttered with the sort of things with which hoarders fill their places, but also a lot of filing cabinets. There was a path through it to the room in which Tom stayed. It too was cluttered, with a mattress on the floor and posters and papers pinned to the wall. There were stacks of file folders full of movie stills as well as boxes full of well-organized comic books. In the middle of the room was a tripod holding up a hose from which rose an open flame about a foot high that burned constantly. This was his source of light and heat and the explanation for his slightly sooty appearance. “Just like a campfire,” Tom said. “Electricity’s been off for two years.”
The windows in this room were covered in cardboard so that people across the street wouldn’t call the fire department. There were no chairs. Tom sat on his mattress. The effect was like entering a shaman’s cave. I was fascinated and spent several hours sitting and talking with Tom. We hit it off immediately, like the kindred spirits we were. When I left that night, he gave me 20 early Fantastic Four comics to add to my collection.
We had some things in common. The previous summer I had hitchhiked to California and back and had accumulated some adventures. Tom, who was almost ten years older than me, told me he had hitchhiked across the country 21 times before he was 21. He was very knowledgeable about comics and had aspired to draw them professionally. He could draw fairly well but didn’t have the discipline to actually finish anything. Instead, he partnered with Mark Ricci and created a photo service, renting out movie stills to magazines.
Tom took speed in the form of Dexedrine, which at the time was prescribed for weight loss. Obese people might go to multiple doctors and collect prescriptions, then sell the pills. Some of them would swipe a few pages off the doctor’s prescription pad and sell those. Tom later stopped using amphetamines when the prescription drugs were no longer available. He wouldn’t buy street drugs. Also, he never sold drugs.
Message Tom posted on his wall.
As is characteristic of most speed freaks, Tom subscribed to a lot of crank theories. Numerology, magnetism, and the I Ching were frequent topics. He had read Gurdjiev and Edgar Cayce and would talk at length about their ideas. He was obsessed with flying saucers and would talk about them endlessly. He’d talk about the flat-earth theory and five minutes later segue to the hollow earth theory with no concern that they contradicted each other. He even had some theories I hadn’t heard of before, such as that the moon was a lens that observed and recorded everything that occurred on the earth. Also, that the other planets were Earth in different time continuums, i.e., past and future Earths. Another one, which I liked, was that archeologists of the future, finding an old-style Coca Cola bottle, would interpret it as evidence that we worshipped a sun goddess. The curvaceously feminine bottle was the pedestal. The cap, red with scalloped edges, symbolized the sun itself. The serpentine lettering of the logo might cause puzzlement, raising theories of some association with a snake god.
Tom had another habit common among paranoids and schizophrenics—looking for hidden meanings in words. Two I recall were “Pyramid: to look within, to peer amid” and “World: to have spun, whirled.” I used some of these in my Dope Rider comic. He’d say other things I quoted, like, “The best thing about being high is the view.” He’d sometimes tell me about his dreams and visions, some of which I used in stories. My story “Survivors” came from Tom. Another dream of his I recall was perhaps a past life recollection. He was putting terracotta tiles on the roof of a tall tower in an Italian city. The scaffolding on which he was standing broke and he fell. As he was falling, he passed a window in which there was a woman, who said, "Don't worry." Just as he was about to hit the ground, he woke up in bed with his arms and legs up in the falling posture. He settled back and thought, "The difference between life and death is the difference between falling from a height and waking up in bed."
Tom’s life was one of amphetamine highs and crashes. Up all night, he’d roam the streets of the city, rummaging through garbage cans and dumpster-diving in search of oddities and treasures that he’d bring back to his place. These included hood ornaments, trophies, model planes, mannequin parts, magnets, a gramophone, and a sword. It wasn’t that he really cared about this stuff—if he had something in which I showed an interest, he’d immediately give it to me. I still have some of these things, such as a human skull that was made into a candle holder and a rusty old metal sign with a helpful message:
Among the things he collected were keys. In his wanderings, whenever he saw a door key on the sidewalk, he’d pick it up and string it on a wire that held a stack of keys at least a foot long. He was convinced that if one of his friends were locked out of their building or apartment, surely one of these keys would fit the lock.
When I first knew Tom, he was still smoking cigarettes. He frequently coughed up phlegm, which he would casually spit on the floor. Cockroaches would run over to drink the spittle. Tom told me that he was studying the roaches, as he was convinced his amphetamine-laced bodily fluids would gradually raise their consciousness. My impulse was to squash a cockroach when I saw one, but Tom told me not to. “Kill a cockroach and 17 come to his funeral,” he said.
Tom also scolded me when I excused myself after burping. He said, “At my place, you don’t say ‘excuse me’ unless you shit or piss on the floor.”
When he felt it was time to end his marathon talk sessions, Tom would say, “I’m gonna have to chase you out of here now.” I didn’t take offense; I knew he appreciated my visits.
Tom would often be unavailable for days. I’d stand in front of his building, calling out his name, and get no answer. After four or five days like that, I’d think, “Maybe this is it. Maybe he’s dead.” Never would I have imagined Tom would live to be 80.
Sometimes when I was sitting with Tom other friends of his would drop by. One of them was Popeye Larry, who was always scrounging for food. One night he found an open half-empty, half-melted quart of ice cream and, sitting in the dim light, finished it off. He said, “That was great, Tom--maple walnut, my favorite!” After he left, Tom told me that it was coffee ice cream. The "walnuts" were cockroaches.
Three blocks south of the block on which Tom and I lived was the clubhouse of the New York City chapter of the Hells Angels. They had long hair and beards, were dirty, wore boots and jeans, and were alleged to use drugs (Allegedly! I have no knowledge of that). They were sort of like redneck hippies--violent, but if you didn’t bother them they left you alone. When I had guests, like my sister and her friends, we’d always stroll along 3rd Street to look at their choppers lined up in front of their building.
Late at night you'd see a pack of them roaring down Second Avenue after they’d picked up their stripper girlfriends from Times Square. I'd sometimes see them on the street, always in pairs. One time I was sitting in laundromat and saw a large drunk outside the window. Two Angels were walking toward him. When they got close, he staggered toward them brandishing a carving knife. One of them disarmed him and knocked him down without even slowing down. They just kept walking.
Tom had friendly relations with the Angels, who nicknamed him "Comic Book." He was once offered speed by a drug dealer who claimed he'd gotten it from the Angels. Tom knew they would not appreciate their name being bandied about for commercial purposes and reported it to the chapter president, Sandy Alexander, who thanked him for the information.
Tom had a friend, Gary “Animal,” who belonged to a street gang called the Pagans. Gary wanted to be a Hells Angel and asked Sandy Alexander if he could join. Sandy asked, “Do you have a motorcycle?”
Answered Gary, “No.”
Said Sandy, “Well, that’s a problem, because we’re a motorcycle club.”
Gary sometimes carried a 9mm automatic pistol tucked in his belt. It wasn’t tucked in the usual way, with the muzzle pointing down and butt above his waistband, but the opposite—the butt was below his belt and the muzzle pointed up. The reason he carried it in this novel fashion was that the only ammunition he had for it was .32 caliber. Being of smaller diameter, if he pointed the gun downward the cartridges would slide out of the barrel.
Tom was with a couple of the Pagans when they were trying to come up with an initiation test for prospects. Tom said, “I got a great idea! How about you all get under a blanket and let farts!”
Tom was an enterprising person. He had a dread of taking any assistance from the government—he thought people who did so would eventually be put into work camps—and he always provided for himself. Upon first settling in New York, he delivered telegrams and sold Planter’s Peanuts in Times Square in addition to dealing comic books. He always had some side hustles. For example, when he was up in the middle of the night and it started snowing, he would run down to the street and grab a stack of newspapers that had been put out with the trash. He’d go up and down the street covering the front and back windows of cars with sheets of newspaper. Then, early in the morning, when people went out to get in their cars and saw them covered with snow, Tom would say, “I’ll clean your windows off for a dollar.” When he got the dollar he would whip the newspapers off, leaving the glass untouched by snow.
Grabbing a moment's rest while traveling.
Tom sold comics out of his apartment by appointment only. He told a story of how he dealt with customers who argued about prices:
One time a guy called who wanted early issues of MAD magazine. I had a run of them from issue 3 on, all in great shape. When the guy came by, he flashed a wad of money and said, "Hey man, I'm for real and I got the money to spend."
I explained to him my way of doing business. "If you buy more than a couple comics I'll give you a deal. This will be a take-it-or-leave price. No haggling. Anything you try to whittle me down on will be added on to the total. Understand?"
He says, "Yeah.''
I repeated it again to him real slow just to make it perfectly clear. He says, "Yeah, I got it," and we shake on it. He picks out about 8 or 9 comics and I tell him the best price I can do is 40 bucks. He says, "Forty bucks? No way man. I'll give you 30."
I put the comics back on the shelf and walk him towards the door. He says, "Okay man, I'll give you 40 bucks."
I pick up the comics again and tell him they are his for the new price of 50 bucks.
He says, "FIFTY BUCKS?!'' I say yes and reminded him of our agreement. By lowering my price to 30 he brought it up to 50. I said, “Do you want them for the new price of $50? Take it or leave it. Do you want them or not?”
"No man... I'll give you $40." The comics go back on the shelf, and I walk him again towards the door and he says, "All right...I'll give you $50."
I pick up the comics again and announce to the guy the comics are his for the new price of $60. He says, “SIXTY BUCKS?!”
I said, "Yes, the last time we talked the price was 50 and you offered me 40, so that brought the price up to 60. We agreed on this thing about lowering the price of the comics. I just got these yesterday and if I make two phone calls they will be gone by tonight. Do you want them or not for $60? Going once... going twice... hey man, it's now or never."
He paid me $60 and left. This was near the end of my comic dealing days and it was guys like him that gave me the reason to quit.
I got to witness Tom doing this routine when we worked a table together at a comic convention.
When Tom would talk to me about his theories, he’d repeat things I’d heard many times before. I’d have to wait for him to move off them and start talking about more interesting topics, such as his childhood experiences; various characters he had known, including Janis Joplin and Robert Crumb; his adventures during the years he hitchhiked back and forth from San Francisco to New York; and the many street fights he had gotten into, all recounted with great gusto. Even after the many years of our friendship in which we had had countless conversations, he would occasionally tell me a story I had never heard before.
Tom’s father was a police officer who enlisted in the army at the outbreak of WW II. He was a training officer and drowned while attempting to rescue a recruit from a barbed-wire entanglement in a pond. Unlike most counter-culture types, Tom always had respect for police officers and veterans.
He and his brother lived with their alcoholic mother in trailer parks between the times she would hook up with a new boyfriend and put them in foster care. Tom found foster care problematic, partly because he didn’t know each new family’s protocols regarding bodily parts and functions and it was easy to get in trouble. Examples:
“In this house we don’t say ‘take a crap,’ we say, ‘go poopoo’!”
“In this house, we don’t say ‘peepee,’ we say ‘urinate’!”
“Why are you coming into the house to pee? Just go behind a tree!”
“What are you doing, peeing in the yard? Use the bathroom!”
It could be worse. One set of foster parents were avowed Christians and forbade Tom and his brother listening to the radio on Sunday. After they were caught doing so, the father had them stand in front of him and he punched each of them in the face. It was this that gave Tom his crooked nose. This was a story Tom told me only once, and after decades of my knowing him. He wasn’t a fan of “Christianity.”
Time for a break.
Tom’s mother yelled at her boys a lot. Once he reached age 16 and discovered he no longer legally had to attend school, Tom hit the road. He told me he went back to visit his mother a few years later, but as she immediately began yelling at him, that was it.
Tom had an endless supply of hitchhiking stories.
Tom and his friend Milt hitchhiking in the 1980s.
Like me, one of the things he liked about being on the road was the people you’d meet, all sorts of people with all sorts of experiences. They’d pick you up because they wanted someone to talk to. Because they would never see you again, they’d often tell you things they couldn’t talk about to people they knew. When Tom had done his hitchhiking, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the men picking him up had hitched around during the Depression or were combat veterans from World War II and Korea. One vet told him he had hitched around after the war because he "couldn't go home." Another veteran had a job traveling around inspecting and repairing billboards for a billboard company. He said, "After the war I found it hard to settle down. I bummed around for years. Now I'm getting paid to bum around."
When hitchhiking, one of the challenges is finding an out-of-the-way place to sleep when you’re in a settled area. One time Tom found a churchyard with a hedge around it, and inside there was a wide cement bench. He crawled under it and got into his sleeping bag. He forgot it was Saturday night, and when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he saw was the back of a woman's legs in stockings and high heels about three feet away. The churchyard was full of people socializing after the service. Tom crawled out, dragging his sleeping bag behind him, and shamefacedly walked past about 25 people as they stared at him in silence.
Many of Tom’s hitchhiking tales involved his interactions with various drunks, morons, and perverts, but the ones that struck me the most were those that suggested he enjoyed divine protection. Some of these stories are remarkable, but I believe them as I never knew Tom to lie. In one case, Tom entered a town after dark and found an empty brick building. He got in through a window, went down to its basement, and rolled out his sleeping bag on the floor. He was awakened early the next morning by a man calling, “Is anyone in here? Anyone in the building? Anyone here?” Tom packed up his things, went upstairs, and met a man who stood in the doorway. He was the operator of a crane mounted with a wrecking ball, which stood just outside. The man was visibly shaken to see Tom. He said, “This is the first time I’ve ever checked to see if anyone was in a building I was sent to demolish. I never did it before.”
Tom got a ride one night with a truck driver. After a couple of hours, the driver took an off ramp despite there being a sign reading, “Ramp Closed—Construction Ahead.” Tom looked at the driver--he was sound asleep. Tom pushed and shook him. He wouldn’t wake up. Desperate, Tom put his hand over the driver’s mouth and pinched his nose shut. The driver awoke with a start and slammed on the brakes. The truck screeched to a halt just in front of a wooden barricade. Behind it, illuminated in his headlights, were parked bulldozers, graders, and other heavy construction equipment. The driver stared at them in shock. After a moment, still staring ahead, he said to Tom, somberly, “My wife, Ann, thanks you. My daughter Susan thanks you. My son, Jim, thanks you. My other daughter, Joanne, thanks you.”
One night when Tom was hitchhiking to California in late winter he got stuck outside Wheeling, West Virginia, waiting hours for a ride. Across Highway 40, there was a billboard for the Bank of Wheeling which had a display showing the time and temperature. At 9 o’clock the temperature was 38 degrees. Tom was still waiting at midnight when the temperature had dropped to 20. He pulled a discarded box from the roadside and flattened it out to stand on and keep the cold from coming up through the soles of his shoes. He jumped from one foot to the other, trying to warm up. At 1 AM the temperature had dropped to 12 degrees.
A semi-truck pulled over. The driver said, "Hi, I'm your angel that's here to stop you from freezing to death. I can't give you a long ride, but I'll take you 40 miles down the road to the next truck stop. I'll get you a motel room for the night, and the company will be paying for it."
When they got there the driver went in and rented a room. He brought Tom the key and told him “Don't go in the front lobby, use the back door over by the side.”
Tom stood by the side door watching him as he pulled away. There were dozens of other trucks in the parking lot. Because of the weather, all those trucks were covered with sleet and slop from the highway. His truck was spotless. The trailer was painted bright blue and in the middle was a loaf of bread. Behind the bread was a white cloud, with. a sunbeam shining on it. Beneath the loaf of bread were the words Heavenly Baking Company. Tom said, “I stood there staring at that truck until all I could see were his taillights fading into the night.”
Here is a story Tom wrote out:
I'm heading east on Route 66 and this guy picks me up somewhere outside of LA and gives me a ride to Barstow. He was driving this big fancy new car. Maybe a Lincoln or Cadillac.
He was about ten years older than me and talked about how he had hitched around the country when he was my age. When he ran out of money he would get some two-bit job for a couple of weeks. Then take off again when he had a few bucks saved up. He said he traveled with the wind for four or five years and had a great time. Then he got married and had kids. Now he had a good job and was making lots of money. We swapped road stories. Before he dropped me off, he took me a few extra miles out of town and left me at a good place for hitching.
When I got out of the car, he took a $20 bill out of his wallet and offered it to me. When I reached for it, he grabbed my hand and started crying. He said, ‘Hey, kid, don't let them do to you what they did to me. Keep traveling. Don't sell out. Stay free as long as you can. The only time I was really happy was when I was on the road. The one thing you can't buy is freedom.’
Then he drove off into the night. A weird feeling came over me, like I had just received some kind of sacred knowledge from a holy man. I ate good all the way to New York.
Tom’s years of panhandling, buying drugs, and prowling the nighttime streets of New York had gotten him into a lot of dangerous situations. There were guys that wanted to fight him just because he had long hair. He told me about one time a guy got in his face and called him a dirty hippie. Tom didn’t react but cupped his hand behind his ear and asked him to repeat it, louder, explaining that he was hard of hearing. The guy yelled it louder. Again, Tom asked him to please say it a little louder because he still couldn’t quite get it. The guy shouted it again. After two further repetitions, Tom knew the guy had expended his energy. He then suddenly leaned into his face and roared, “A dirty hippie, am I?!”
Another time a young drunk began giving Tom shoves to his shoulders as a provocation to fight. Tom knew all the tricks; usually, in a situation like this, he would grab one of his assailant's fingers after which he would have him at his mercy. In this instance, Tom took a different approach. He tripped him, and as he lay on his back on the sidewalk, he grabbed the end of one pant leg and began running circles around the guy, spinning him until he was too nauseous to get up.
Tom was hanging out with a group of hippies at a public event, where he was taking photographs. He had brought along a small telescoping metal tripod. There were three feral teens there, 13 or 14 years old, who were bothering one of the hippie girls, pinching her rear end and lifting her skirt. She was ineffectually slapping them away, but they kept it up. No one was doing anything about it, so Tom went over and told the kids to knock it off. They just laughed and swore at him, so Tom held up his tripod and said, “Leave her alone or I’ll beat the crap out of you.” They took off. When he returned to the group of hippies, they turned their backs on him. One said, “We don’t want to hang out with you, man. You’re into violence.”
Tom generally disdained hippies. He identified more as a beatnik. As he said, “Beatniks would fight.”
One night, Tom was sitting on a park bench in Washington Square, his arms draped over the back. A mugger approached, displayed a knife, and said, “Hey, man, I’m gonna go through your pockets.” Tom let him do so. He came up with nothing but some change and a few scraps of paper. The only valuable thing Tom had with him was his camera, which dangled from its wrist lanyard behind the bench.
One time Mark was closing up the Memory Shop while Tom and I were still there and warned us about some thieves he was concerned might come by. “Don’t worry,” said Tom, “I’ll just tell them I know karate and my friend Paul here goes to kung fu movies.”
Some of Tom’s confrontations were not so comic. He was tipped off that two guys that were coming to his Sixth Street place were planning to rob him. He took a fireplace poker and set it up with its tip in his gas flame. When they came into the room on some friendly pretext, he noticed that as they made small talk, they kept glancing at the red-hot tip of that poker, its handle in easy reach of Tom. After a few minutes they left.
One night Tom was gathering up some treasures he had pulled out of a dumpster when two muggers approached him. Tom picked up a long-necked beer bottle, and--explaining to me how to do this--slipped a finger through its mouth and lightly tapped its base against the side of the dumpster a few times till it broke off, leaving a jagged edge. Watching this, the muggers went off in search of easier pickings.
In another instance, Tom was warned of a guy coming to his apartment to rob him. The guy carried a hunting knife, so Tom tucked copies of Life magazine under his belt to protect his belly. He confronted the robber on the stairway landing, and after a struggle had him bent over the railing with a three-story fall behind him. He dropped his knife and begged Tom not to let him go. Tom pulled him back and he ran off. A few days later, he heard the same guy tried to rob someone else who fought back and killed him. When the police looked at the decedent’s rap sheet, they declined to charge his killer. “I should have let him drop,” said Tom.
In later years Tom said he suffered PTSD from the number of fights he had been in and took an active interest in the Vietnam Vets movement. Despite the differences in their experiences, he related to them.
Tom and Carole in her memorabilia store.
I knew Tom for several months before I met his girlfriend, Carole York. Tom had set up Carole in business with Mark Ricci. She sold movie memorabilia out of a shop in Key West and split the proceeds with him. Every once in a while, she would come up and stay with Tom, but she couldn’t live with him because of the squalor. Carole was Jewish, pretty, a dancer, and dressed neatly, a strange contrast to Tom. Carole was a friend of Flo Steinberg, with whom she would stay while visiting. Flo worked as the receptionist and “gal Friday” at Marvel and was the first person I met who was in the business. Once, when Tom started droning on and on about flying saucers, Flo turned to Carole and asked, “How can you listen to that stuff all the time?”
Carole responded, “Who listens?”
Tom and Carole had the same sense of humor—anything to bug the squares. Carole once spent a day driving across the western deserts while half-naked. “I was topless from the waist down,” she told me. Startled a few truck drivers, no doubt.
In 1973 I dropped out of art school after I began working in the comics field. I told Tom my parents were worried that I wouldn’t get a job. He said, “Tell them you can’t get a job, you’re too busy working. Besides,” he added, “What are they so worried about? You’re not even using hard drugs yet.”
During the time Tom was in New York he lived in several different places. One was a basement under a storefront on the Bowery where Mark was storing some of his stock. He had a mattress on the floor. He was bothered by mice crawling over him at night, so he surrounded his mattress with small cups of his urine to mark his territory. Whether the mice respected the boundary I don’t recall. Tom later lived in a large loft on Broome Street.
In 1975 my girlfriend Sandy and I moved out of New York and into a mother-in-law apartment on a 53-acre wooded estate in Bethany, Connecticut, where I did maintenance work in addition to drawing my comics. Tom and Carole would visit us for a week or more in the summer. There was a little cabin in the woods where they would stay, spending a lot of time naked. There was a secluded lake on the property where we’d all skinny dip.
Tom and Carole at my in-laws' above-ground pool.
One time when Tom and Carole came for a visit, Carole brought her mother along without having notified us in advance. Their idea was that the mom would stay with Sandy's parents, which did not go over well. They had to bring her back to New York.
In the 1980s, Tom moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now in his 40s, Tom and an old friend decided to relive the adventures of their youth and hitchhiked across the country. They even hopped a few freight trains.
Tom also became active in the Vietnam veterans’ movement, while never posing as a vet himself. He walked and bivouacked beside them on their marches and photographed their parades and events. When TV evangelist Pat Robertson, who falsely claimed to have served in the Korean War, addressed a Vietnam vets rally in Washington, DC, Tom worked his way to the front of the crowd and mooned him. Tom founded the Nam Vets Publishing Company, with the idea of publishing a series of photo albums of the parades and providing employment to local veterans. In 1987, he published Vietnam Veterans Parade Chicago, 1986, which was mentioned in People magazine. Tom closed the company when he discovered that one of the veterans he had hired was embezzling from it.
I visited Tom in Santa Fe in 1993. Within a few years he decided to move from the city. He and Carole, who were now married, drove widely through the western states looking for an isolated small town to which they could move. Tom anticipated a collapse of civilization and didn't want to be in a heavily populated area. He settled on Harrison, Nebraska, population 250 and falling. It was in the high plains at the western edge of the state, surrounded by sprawling cattle ranches. Carole, who wanted her own place that she could keep neat, bought a trailer in Chadron, 50 miles away.
Tom and I continued to speak regularly on the phone, and I visited him in 2007. He lived in a building he had purchased for $14,000 on the town’s Main Street, next door to an Old West-style saloon where on Saturday nights cowboys gathered to drink and get into fist fights.
Tom's building at 198 Main Street, Harrison, Nebraska.
His backyard was overgrown and occupied by several junked cars which he had transformed into shelters for the community of feral cats he fed.
The backyard, with derelict cars converted to housing for a colony of feral cats. Also, lots of scrap lumber and old skids for wood-stove fuel come Armageddon.
A vehicle Tom drove around in until it stopped working. He said it always got a laugh.
Tom stored cases of canned food in anticipation of civilizational collapse.
He no longer ran a photo service but sold memorabilia on-line and through Heritage Auctions. His sudden appearance in the town, then keeping largely to himself, sending out packages through FedEx, and depositing large checks at the bank, aroused curiosity. One local asked him where he got all the stuff he sold.
"From my father," said Tom.
“Your father?” said the man.
“Yes, my father, god, the god-father,” said Tom, pointing to the sky.
Incredulous, the man asked, “The Godfather?! Are you in the witness protection program?!”
That rumor persisted. Tom had a few good friends, though, which was all he needed.
Carole developed breast cancer and, like Tom, she didn’t believe in modern medicine. Tom used to say that no one dies from cancer, it's the treatment that kills them. I know several people who were treated for breast cancer and recovered, but Carole took only herbal remedies and died in 2011.
Tom spent very little on himself, outside of books. In one of our conversations, he told me that while researching flying saucers on the internet, he learned of a man in New Mexico who had self-published a treatise on flying saucer propulsion systems--top secret stuff. He sold the staple-bound Xeroxed copies for $150. Tom drove to New Mexico to meet the author and purchase one.
Tom’s business brought in more than enough money to cover his modest needs, and he shared it with his friends. I once got a check for $10,000 from him. He explained he had had a dream that I needed it. He caused a minor scandal when he paid a neighborhood boy $100 for shoveling the snow off his sidewalk and cat paths. He contributed generously to the community, helping people with medical bills, buying Christmas toys for local children, and purchasing all the fireworks for an annual Fourth of July celebration, something the town had never had before. Tom told me he was watching the show when an old rancher turned to him, looked him in the eye, and said, “You’re the one who made this happen.”
Tom always anticipated rejection by the community and tried to get in front of it by rejecting it first, but in a moment like this, when he was given respect, it meant a lot to him.
I visited Tom again in 2018. He was now 76, had trouble walking, and had put on a lot of weight. “I’ll bet you never thought I’d end up as an old fat guy with a yard full of cats,” he told me.
Tom had an increasing number of health problems. He had slipped on ice and fallen hard, hitting his head and passing out. Afterward he had long-term vertigo and balance problems. He lived far from any medical center and in any event distrusted doctors. When ill, he relied on the advice of an alternative health consultant named Olga who lived in South Dakota. Olga had supervised Carole's treatment. Tom told me she didn’t have to examine him, she just had to put the coordinates of his current location in her computer and it would tell her what was wrong with him. She would generally prescribe herbal remedies or colloidal silver. When Tom was suffering severe abdominal pains, she advised him to see a doctor as her computer program had diagnosed him with an inflamed appendix, which might burst at any moment. As it happened, it was a marble-sized kidney stone that was causing the pain, but at least Olga got him to see a doctor.
In his last few years Tom had developed cataracts and macular degeneration. The impending loss of his sight frightened him enough to get treatment. I could see that old age was not going to be easy for him. He called me almost every day and would talk for an hour or more. I was the only person that knew him from the old days, who shared his experiences in the 1970s and ‘80s and who knew the cast of characters, now all gone.
He'd still give me advice. For example, if I started a statement with, "It makes me sick when..." or "I drives me crazy that..." he'd respond, "Don't use that expression! You're programming your body to get sick!" or, "You're programming your mind to go crazy!" And when he started a statement with the same expressions, I'd return the favor.
I took a picture of the local cafe in 2007. It was still in business when I visited in 2018.
When I visited in 2022, the cafe had closed and been turned into a leather-repair shop. It's hard to maintain a business in such a sparsely populated area--a dying town, to be honest.
Tom turned 80 on September 17, 2022. His friends planned a party for him and asked if I could attend as a surprise guest. I flew to Denver, rented a car, and drove to Harrison. I parked on the street catty-corner to Tom’s building and called him up. As usual, he started talking about his theories and recollections, and I let him go on for about 20 minutes and then asked him if he wanted to get some pizza in Lusk. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You told me there’s a good pizza place in Lusk,” I told him. “I thought maybe we could go.”
He asked, “Is this a joke?”
“No, look out your door.”
He came out and saw me. He was first dumbfounded, then tremendously happy. He got ready and we drove the 30 miles to Lusk, Wyoming, for dinner. Tom was so excited to have me there.
The next day, we celebrated his birthday brunch in the dining room of the Harrison House hotel, where a small group of friends and well-wishers had gathered. The birthday cake was decorated with a road and a hitchhiking thumb, with the message, “80 – It’s not the miles, it’s the adventures.”
Tom said, “Me and my friends all wanted to live fast and die young. I was the only one who failed.”
On the morning of November 9, 2022, I got a call from him. He was about to head off to see the eye doctor in Scottsbluff, 66 miles away, with a friend driving him. He was worried about his failing vision and the prospect of not being able to read his books. I reassured him as best I could. That night I got another call from his number and assumed it was Tom about to tell me how things went. It was not Tom, but a friend who was at his place. He said, "Tom is dead."
On the way back from Scottsbluff, the car had spun on black ice and tumbled. Tom was thrown from the vehicle and died at the scene. I was jolted by this devastating news, in utter shock. A nearby rocking chair rocked a few times. I thought our cat had jumped from it, but the cat was asleep elsewhere. A last message.
That was a really interesting read, I'd get a whole book of stories like that—I wouldn't even need funny little pictures to go with it.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I don't think they make 'em like Tom anymore, but I'll keep trying to put that same kind of good energy out into the world.
Wotta life.
ReplyDeleteDunno that I agree with PoG there that they don't make them like Tom anymore. It's the ability to live that kind of life that's no longer possible.