Between 1960 and 1977 my mother was in the dating pool and, as the only child, I usually had no complaints. She managed to keep her son at the top level of importance and then everything fell in line after that. There was only one glaring misstep and, to this day, I can’t figure out where her judgment failed her.
Tom was a large, pot bellied fella with a crew cut and a career in drywall who came into my life like a low-rent Santa Claus, always showing up with a variety of used gifts for me. He would give me things like transistor radios, rifles, bikes, archery gear and on and on. These were things that we could never afford to buy and though they were used I was appreciative nonetheless. I even had a homemade go-cart to kill myself on in the back yard and that kicked me into another status level among my pals on the block.
Tom became a large part of my mother’s life and consequently a part of mine and a number of his lifestyle choices became integrated into ours including his penchant for poodles, old Cadillacs and skiing trips. Much of this we adopted and, for a long stretch of time, Tom’s life was more or less steering ours, especially in the recreational department.
He liked to hunt and so off we went on a hunting trip in the sticks around Gaylord, MI which is where as much as I liked to hunt down and eradicate tin cans I was hopelessly unable to shoot a deer. I picked off those pesky cans though with a Winchester 32 Special and they never bothered us again.
He liked to ski and we’d hit Boyne Mountain or other nearby Northern Michigan slopes in the winter and with his omnipresent wine flask strapped around his shoulder we’d trek off down the slope and since this didn’t involve shooting things and since I was somewhat of a daredevil, totally into maniacal runs down the steepest most dangerous slopes in the area, I was happy to be on board. Actually, ‘slope’ would be a misnomer since what we usually recognize as a slope would, in my case, be more of a ledge that one might fall off of.
But there was always something just beneath the surface of Tom that made me wary of him. He was not a person I ever felt comfortable with and, in fact, usually kept my distance from and although I wasn’t sure what the source of this apprehension was, emotionally it wasn’t worth the risk of wanting to get close.
Kids have unusually capable radar when it comes to sizing up the character of a person. There may be hits and misses here and there due to their upbringing but children, in general, are not as misled by the superficial and let their spongy-selves pick up on the potentially devious.
One event in particular turned me off once and for all and what I got was a glimpse into somebody I didn’t feel safe being around. When I got into my teens the hormones started wreaking havoc with my complexion which happens to plenty of kids and so I had to deal with the onslaught of acne and blackheads. I was doing what I could to handle the problem (heavy on the Stridex pads) but it was a losing battle that I’d just have to deal with until it abated in due course.
Apparently, my mother and Tom had discussed this problem and concluded that I wasn’t doing enough and so approached me together suggesting that I let them get rid of some of the blackheads on my face. But the verbal negotiation broke down quickly as I said ‘no’ to their plan and then it became an ambush. Tom was big and much stronger than I and he forced me to the living room floor and pinned my arms with his knees and then began to go to work on my face. I yelled and struggled but it was a relentless embarrassment that seemed to go on forever and I didn’t have the strength to fight my way out of it.
To be clear here, this was not a friendly suggestion from a parent, it was a humiliating assault by someone who was not my father and whom I generally considered untrustworthy so to have all of his weight driving me into the carpet against my will was a confirmation that what we had here was a card-carrying, certifiable asshole that I should take every measure to avoid in the future. To make matters worse my mother, unfortunately, bought into this plan of action and so I was totally vulnerable.
After he had carried out whatever they thought needed doing they passed it off humorously but I was seething over what they were unable to see was abuse. I wanted to kill that bastard and the only thing I could think to do with my anger at the time was to go down in the basement, slap a piece of paper into the typewriter and, like Jack Nicholson’s obsession in The Shining, write over and over “I hate Tom, I hate Tom, I hate Tom…” until I ran out of paper.
Tom had proven that my earlier gut feeling was accurate and it was further substantiated by the time my mother finally came to her senses and gave this jerk the boot. He left alright but he left with a number of gifts he had given me and a number of things that never belonged to him in the first place and it was then that I figured out the pattern: make an inroad to relationships by giving away the property you’ve taken from others and if that doesn’t work out simply take those things back and lavish them on the next patsy. It was downright sociopathic.
The Tom episode didn’t end all that badly though.
On his way out the door he expressed interest in my first car, a black 1958 Chevy Impala with red and white interior which I’d gotten from my grandfather for $50. It was time to move on from my beloved Chevy and so I sold it to numbnuts for a small profit. He probably would have stolen it but it was too large not to be noticed right away.
Anyhow, I’d had the rear wheels off in the garage for some reason and my mother told me to put them back on and Tom would pick up the car later that day. I slapped the lug nuts on and went off to hang with my friends. Later on that evening my mother told me that Tom called and furiously relayed the following:
He was driving the Chevy home when he noticed a wheel had come flying past him on the passenger’s side and rolled into a ditch up ahead but he had no idea where it had come from. When he stopped to check on the wheel it turned out that it belonged on his newly purchased Chevy and he’d been dancing down the highway on 3 wheels. Pissed as hell, and with the lug nuts long gone, he had to call a tow truck to get the car the rest of the way home.
Gee, I thought I’d tightened those.
