January 19, 2006

• Internet Island Topic Post 5.00

  Who is/was your Best Friend?

  

  Tom (left) and Mike (1980, outside of Hanford, CA)

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I was five years old?” No matter how many times Tom uttered that sentence, it could always be relied upon to elicit gales of laughter from me. We had known each other for so long that this short statement summed up the fact that each of us had regaled the other with almost every waking moment of our lives. We used to take trips together, on vacation, on weekend jaunts, and part of the conversation would always revert to personal reminiscences, and Tom would usually get around, sooner or later, to asking, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was five years old?”

  I met my best friend Tom in high school. Although I was pretty popular, and was one of the group of guys and gals labelled “sochs” in the hierarchy of the school, Tom was just a normal guy, not involved with groups or clubs, not on a sports team, and not in school government. He was a part of one of our loose knit “gangs” of guys, which we called the “lunch gang” because we met each other in our Freshman year and hung out together at first lunch.
  Tom weighed almost 300 pounds, even in high school. He was tall, however, towering over six feet, so his height and girth gave him more of an imposing and regal stature than that of a mere “fat man”. He had a normal IQ, and wasn’t in any of the accellerated classes in which I attended, so I didn’t really know him that well. We didn’t have classes together, and we didn’t socialize too much, but we would see each other at lunch, during “lunch gang” shenanigans.

  After graduation from high school, I reunited with a few of the old “lunch gang”, and we would hang out together on Friday nights and sometimes on weekends. I attended USC on a scholarship, and also worked full time as Garden Department Manager for Ole’s Home Centers, a retail chain. I lived almost 50 miles from the USC campus, and I worked in Rosemead, where I had attended high school, so I didn’t have a lot of time on my schedule during the week. Friday nights, after work, or if I had a night off, I usually drove over to my friend Jon’s house, and then we got together with our group, and would cruise Whittier Blvd. or Valley Blvd, eat a late snack at Bob’s Big Boy, or split a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry wine gathered in the car parked outside my friend Steve’s house. Tom had come back in my life during this time, and when I discovered marijuana, Tom was the only other guy in our group who indulged in the “wicked weed” so we both tended to gravitate towards each other.

  By the time my parents died, when I was 21, Tom and I had become best buddies. We would go see movies together, and we both shared the same love of music, so could be found on Hollywood, Sunset, or Santa Monica Boulevards going to clubs for music acts in the late 70s and early 80s. Tom might not have  been an intellectual in school, but he did have a massive knowledge of American music history, specifically jazz and blues. He “taught” me most of what I now know about the greats. I never really liked bebop, but was able to appreciate it much better after listening to bebop artists with Tom. 

  His family “adopted” me during holidays. I always went over to Tom’s house for Christmas. He still lived with his parents. They moved out of the family home to Whittier in the early 70s, about the time my dad died. I would drive to Tom’s, visit with him and his parents, and his sister and brother, who became a second family to me as mine was falling apart. Then Tom and I would go out to eat, or to a movie or concert, and then return to his house. 

  When I moved to the South Bay, farther away from Rosemead and Whittier than even Glendora, where we had moved just prior to my Dad’s death, I still kept up my friendship with Tom. Our meetings grew more sparse as the years passed, and as I got to know and party more with the people in the South Bay. But we still would get together. We made comedy tapes in my apartment in Torrance, with Tom serving as “disc jockey” for a series of tapes we made to play while driving to Texas for the Buddy Holly days festival in 1980. As usual, during the long drive, at more than one point Tom would ask the ever present question, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was five years old?”

  Our “road trips”, which included jaunts to Vegas and San Francisco, were legendary. Tom was a ” big ‘un” and took up a lot of space in my 1970 Volkswagen. One night we decided to sleep in the car when we couldn’t get a motel on one of our trips, and the sight of Tom trying to extricate himself from the smallish compact the next morning was quite hilarious. Not to Tom, of course, who had hurt some muscles while cramped in the small car.
  During our friendship, we pretty much covered everything two people could possibly think about which to converse, but we never grew tired of each other’s company. When I found myself in jail after a bit too much to drink and got pulled over by some of L.A.’s finest, it was Tom whom I called, and he was right there to bail me out right before I got booked into County Jail the next morning. One particularly hairy evening, Tom, a work friend of his, and I went to the Ice House in Pasadena, where music and comedy acts performed. We all got drunk, and on the drive back to my place, I ran a few too many stop signs at about 80 mph. Both Tom and his work friend goading me on. When I was arrested after having almost plowed into the back of a police cruiser, I got to spend the night in jail, but Tom and his work friend were allowed to drive my  car back home. The next day, after I got out, I had to call my own house, and got Tom on the line. He and the other guy had gone back to my place, proceeded to drink my liquor and smoke my pot, and it wasn’t until I called that they realized they had to come get me and take me back home.

  When I became involved with Melanie, a girl who lived in the apartment building in which I lived in Torrance, I spend more time with her and other friends in the South Bay than with Tom. I would invite Tom over, and then when Melanie would drop by, we would start necking, and the next thing you know, I was dismissing Tom from the evening’s festivities, and telling him to go home, so Melanie and I  could be alone.

  For long stretches, Tom and I would not see each other, and then we would get together for an evening, seeing  a concert or movie. 

  At concerts, Tom and I were like “Mutt and Jeff”. He was tall, rotund, and wore western wear complete with a 10 gallon hat, which didn’t look the big on him. I’m only 5’6″, and wore the “button suit”, which included a cowboy hat festooned with buttons featuring musical acts, and also buttons on my red satin jacket. We were quite a pair, and were instantly recognizable among the group of partygoers on the Sunset Blvd. “scene” in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember one evening quite clearly where we met up with a guy who was writing about the history of Los Angeles radio, and we spent a long time reminiscing about our memories of early L.A. deejays.

  In 1987 I lived in Hermosa Beach with another friend, and was only seeing Tom about once every three months or so. We were still great friends, and we could pick up a conversation we left off three months earlier, but we weren’t the fast friends we had been for most of our lives. I worked in retail management, managing part of a Target store in Manhattan Beach. Tom worked for a toy company in downtown L.A. One day on the job, which entailed riding a forklift type machine called a “picker” which would elevate somebody to the top rungs of the warehouse steel on which toy pallets were stacked, Tom was up in the racks, and he slipped and fell 20 feet. He crashed into a stack of pallets on the ground, which somewhat softened his fall. He broke his back, however, and had to be hospitalized. I received a call from his father, and though I didn’t see him in the hospital, I did talk to him at length on the phone. Tom was in good spirits, even though it appeared he might not walk again. We spent about an hour the afternoon of the operation talking on the phone. I felt  bad that I didn’t go visit him, but after the operation on his spine, his father called to say that everything seemed to have gone okay.

  About an hour or so later, I received another call.  Blood had gotten into Tom’s lungs somehow during or after the operation, and he had died. He was only 34 years old.

  

  I rode my motorcycle in front of the funeral procession, I was one of the pallbearers carting his immense body, and I broke down completely at the casket before they lowered it in the ground. Occasionally I will drive up to Rose Hills Memorial Park, where Tom is buried close to his parents, who passed away in following years, and I’ll stop by his grave, and tell him I do remember that time he told me about when he was five years old.

  My present friend and roommate Joel met Tom a few times, and he will never forget him. You really couldn’t forget somebody like Tom. For one thing, his physical size made him stand out. His laugh could stop a train in it’s tracks. He was the sweetest and most friendly person I’ve ever met, and he might not have been an intellectual, but he possessed  common sense and a vast knowledge of music and  cultural history, so he always had opinions and stories to tell.

  There is a photo I have in my possession of Buddy Holly, the musician, who died in a plane crash at 23 and was a hero to both Tom and me. Buddy is gazing at the horizon. Tom used to joke that he was “looking out at a future he would never experience”. I frequently think that the same thing could be said about Tom. He lived such a short life, but it was so full and vibrant. He was truly my “best friend” of all time, and I’ll never forget him. Sometimes both Joel and I will raise a glass to him after hearing some great jazz lick on television, or when wer’re listening to Muddy Waters or some other blues record. Memory is a funny thing, and sometimes, it’s as if Tom is still alive, still laughing that uproarious laugh of his, and asking the question, “Did I ever tell you about the time I was five years old…..?”

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