I first met Tom on a MUNI bus. I recognized him from meetings as he approached me; I really hoped he would walk on by. I had that intuitive trepidation in the pit of my stomach. Instead, he sat down next to me & started talking about his kids, which immediately captured my heart. Clearly, he adored them.
At that time he had 6 years sober, which seemed like forever to me. I thought then that anyone with more than 6 months was an expert. Little did I understand the disease of alcoholism. I had less than a year myself.
Right from the start he was eccentric. On our first date, he showed up on a decrepit motorcycle with a couple of thrift shop helmets. I think he was trying to impress me since my last boyfriend was a biker, but the last guy owned a sturdy, safe BMW, whereas this thing felt like it might rust away beneath us at any moment.
We had a fun day hiking on Mount Tamalpais in the Marin Headlands. Then he wanted to show me Kirby Cove, a beautiful camping area beneath the Golden Gate Bridge (my sister later got married there.) There was a locked gate at the road to the cove, which required a day pass & combination to enter. But Tom wheeled the bike around it, & off we went. Arriving at the bottom of the steep hill, we were quickly greeted by a park ranger, who asked for our permit. When he found we didn't have one, he asked to see Tom's license. As it turned out, my future husband didn't have one of those either...it had been revoked for various offenses. The ranger informed us that he could confiscate that rickety motorcycle & we'd be walking home across the cold & blustery Golden Gate. Instead, Tom skillfully schmoozed the man, & we continued happily albeit illegally back to San Francisco for a burrito. I told myself I'd never go out with him again.
But Tom had a knack for wheedling his way into your heart. He told me everything I wanted to hear. I was longing for children but couldn't have any. Tom said we'd go for fertility treatments. He was certain he could "save" me. He introduced me to his own adorable son & daughter, darling little California hippie kids. They could steal any one's heart. He was anxious for another chance to have a family; he was saddened that he'd made such a mess of his first marriage due to alcoholism. The man was undoubtedly persuasive. Soon I gave in, enchanted by the magic of his dreams, and mine.
Tom loved Alcoholics Anonymous. He adored other alcoholics, & many of them adored him. He loved to pop out with sarcastic remarks during his shares at meetings, just to hear the laughter. It was so important to Tom that everyone like him. He craved love. Like many of us with the disease, he didn't feel deserving of love. It robs you of self-esteem, if you ever had any in the first place. We went to every A.A. dance, for him always a big occasion. He'd slither around the dance floor in goofy weathered Italian loafers, ratty polyester slacks discarded by some one's Grandpa, a Guatemalan vest & baseball cap...an iffy combination, but somehow for him it worked. He was a cartoon character...I loved that. He was one-of-a-kind.
He loved doing service in A.A....going to recovery homes, the jail, sponsoring other men. He wasn't as anxious to work his own recovery program. In this he reminded me of my Dad, another alcoholic whom sobriety eluded, & who died too young as a consequence. In many ways he reminded me of Dad: he was brilliant, hilarious, surrounded by people. He cared little for money or material possessions. He loved to travel. He was democratic: never mind where you came from, your profession, your credentials--everyone was equal in his eyes; he was non-judgmental, perhaps because he felt judged.
By trade he was a drywall taper. He made good money. But coming from a background of educated artists, with a professor of architecture for a father, he felt like a failure. A brilliant mathematician, perhaps he felt pressured by expectations. However, Tom didn't have the corporate/business personality, nor did he share those values. I saw him in a suit only one time, for a job interview. He was so uncomfortable, I pitied him. It was a relief to see him back in his holey T-shirt & painter's pants, covered in a ghostly coat of white dust, flaking plaster as he moved, coins jingling & flying out of his pockets haphazardly. He was wildly creative, but without focus. He lacked focus, but certainly not obsession. That he had in spades.
A shrink would've had him on meds for bipolar, if he'd ever given them a chance. He was the most manic person I've ever met; he could not sit still. His mind was spinning at the speed of light; you could practically feel sparks & shocks of electricity just sitting next to him. Always, always over-the-top, his critics maintained he was attention-seeking. I personally think he couldn't help himself. On my third sobriety birthday, I walked into our apartment to a room filled with roses...300 to be exact. There was not a vase in the house. Empty 5-gallon plaster buckets contained long stemmed blooms of all colors. It was glorious.
I simply could not keep up with Tom. I was his polar opposite, exhausted all of the time, depressed frequently. Perhaps he needed that opposite pull; on rare occasions, he would hole up & watch movies, for days at a time, round the clock. He would cry at romantic & sad ones, the only time he was able to access those emotional depths. And sunsets. How many times did we drive to Ocean Beach to watch the reds & oranges envelop the horizon? The ocean, the beach, the sunset were inextricably linked with his Higher Power.
Mostly though, he was on the move. Cars, cars, cars, the man was obsessed with cars. He attributed this to his Michigan upbringing, America's auto capital. Amusingly though, it wasn't American cars he loved so well, but the French Peugeot. He collected them like a kid collects comic books. He got me a lovely old green one for my birthday, with tan leather interior & sun roof. I loved it for a minute...until I walked out one day to find a tow truck hauling it away. This moment turned out to be the tip of the iceberg in the Tom Auto Melodrama. The man possessed multitudes of vehicles, parked all over the city of San Francisco. The City finally computerized it's parking ticket system, & within the course of a few months, hundreds & hundreds of old parking tickets began to arrive in the mail. It quickly turned into a media sideshow; San Francisco's Parking Ticket King, with a bounty of nearly $20,000 worth of old tickets. The telephone began to ring off the hook. Morning radio talk show hosts called, asking if he planned to enlist me to do the lifetime of community service needed to pay off his debt. Local columnists banged at the door for interviews. Angry citizens threatened to "teach him a lesson," while at meetings angry sober alcoholics demanded to know what type of "program of rigorous honesty" involved scoffing at the laws of the land. Yet despite the fact that loose change perpetually spilled from his pockets, would he take a moment to find a quarter for the parking meter? Of course not.
Riding in the car with Tom was also a hair-raiser. He drove with his feet on the dashboard, one knee on the steering wheel. Never bothering to use a turn signal, he swerved about as if he were floating through the clouds, while surrounding traffic blared horns & shouted expletives. He never seemed to notice. He'd jump in one of his fleet of battle-scarred Peugeots on the spur of the moment & drive halfway across the country steering with his knee, chain smoking & expounding on some philosophical tangent.
Cars & Baseball...what he longed for most was to be that all-American boy next store, to be normal I suppose, like all us alcoholics. He adored baseball & loved to play on a softball team. The chain smoking interfered with his sporting ambitions, so he took up chewing tobacco. Later, after I suspected a relapse, he'd whip out the can of tobacco, stick it under my nose & say, "Isn't it weird? This stuff smells like Jack Daniels." No it doesn't, I'd say to myself, at the same time thinking, well, Maybe. The power of Denial.
While working on a Master's in computer science, Tom became fixated on the idea that beating the Vegas craps tables was a real possibility. He was designing a no-fail craps system for his thesis project, entirely convinced that he'd broken a mysterious code. Road trips to Vegas, Reno, & South Lake Tahoe became a regular event. He'd set me up in a hot tub suite at the hotel & head for the casino to get his Game on. Days & nights would pass as he'd burst wildly in & out of the room, tossing thousands of dollars onto the bed in a hyperventilated frenzy. Or he'd sheepishly slink in with head hanging. "You lost?" I'd ask. "I broke even," was his response, avoiding eye contact. I personally witnessed thousands of dollars being chucked onto craps tables; it was hard to watch. Weekend trips turned into near-daily trips to Reno or Tahoe, a good three and a half hours' drive from the City each way.
Other, darker changes were happening too. One day he charged through the front door, with a possessed gleam in his eyes. "The cops held me in the Presidio for three hours!" he exclaimed. Apparently there'd been a bank robbery on Lombard Street earlier that day, & they held him as a suspect, "...even though," Tom exclaimed, "...they were supposed to be looking for a black man!" Why is he not making sense? I wondered. At the time, I was dealing with my mother's early-onset Alzheimer's, & visiting her involved an assisted living residence filled with people who made no sense. Growing up in an alcoholic home, nothing ever made sense anyway, & running the streets as a drug addict there was not a lot of logic either. Needless to say, odd behavior was not odd for the likes of me...though with a little recovery under my belt, I was beginning to question. A few days later while dusting the house, I pulled books off the shelves to dust behind them, & out fell piles & piles of cash. There were thousands of dollars; I didn't dare to count. It took my breath away. When I asked about the money, Tom got angry & accused me of stealing from him. It was frightening. Was this casino winnings? He couldn't have robbed a bank...could he? Then one night at 3 a.m., a dark figure burst through the door of our apartment. Tom jumped up & talked hurriedly to the man, who left. I never got a straight answer as to what had occurred, something to do with a friend he worked with who was on a meth run.
Then one evening we parked at a meter in a busy San Francisco neighborhood on our way to dinner. As usual, Tom ignored the meter in his single-minded rush for food. Traumatized by the recent parking ticket scandal, I began to dig through the backseat of his station wagon for a quarter. His car,like his person, was perpetually a drywall-covered mess, all the tools of the trade thrown recklessly into the back along with trash, old cigarette boxes & sandwich wrappers. As I dug for change, I happened upon a discovery that nearly caused me to faint. Beneath a thin veneer of work tools was the biggest collection of porn I have ever seen. Books, magazines, videotapes by the hundreds. At home I was soon to discover massive loads of Internet porn, almost beyond belief. Addiction & mania were ravaging him.
It was as if I'd been in the eye of the hurricane in the beginning, peacefully secure with a thin pawn shop wedding band encircling my finger, trips to Mexico & Maui, helicopter rides, parasailing & moped adventures in the balmy tropics. Now suddenly I was sucked into the raging storm wondering when it had actually hit. The dark side of addiction was emerging like an alien from inside it's human victim. I tried to talk to his friends, but most couldn't believe it. Tom was coming up on his 10th sobriety anniversary. There was nothing in the world that would stop him from running to a meeting to get his A.A. chip on his birthday; he'd talk about it for weeks in advance. But now, when I asked how he wanted to celebrate, he dodged the question with mumbled response. My heart sank, though he vehemently denied a slip. Instead he told me to leave.
At the time I was in a tremendous amount of emotional pain. The fertility treatments were not working. My Mom was dying from Alzheimer's. I woke up one morning to see 9/11 happening in my beloved New York City, an unbelievable shock. I kept hoping Tom would return to the funny, quirky sober character I'd married. What hurt most was his acting as though our relationship had been but a fast & furious carnival ride, & now, Well, move on! The carnival left town.
It took me a long time to recover & gain my bearings, but eventually I did. I stayed sober, I don't know how or why. I think it may have to do with the willingness to exhume the family demons. Alcoholism & addiction is a family disease, passed from generation to generation, mercilessly affecting not just the addict but everyone involved. I had only glimpses of Tom's pain; I don't think he could bear to face the larger part of it. Those are the things that lay dormant, waiting to strike like a viper at any moment.
The last time I saw Tom was at a meeting. He was trying once again to maintain sobriety. I was with a new sober husband, who has an anger problem. Tom approached us, & fear enveloped me. "I see you're still alive," I growled, & walked away. It's not that I didn't forgive him; I did. He'd said when he told me to leave, "I'm doing this for your own good," & in truth, he was. It's not that I didn't love him, you don't just stop loving someone even when they've hurt you, especially when you share their same disease. But I was afraid that my new husband would be jealous & angry. In fact I found out later that these two had met & talked frequently at meetings. As it turned out, these were to be my last words to Tom. I'm sorry for that now.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard the news. Tom was gone...hit by a bus while riding a moped in Puerto Vallarte. Apparently he was on a surfing trip. I was shocked, but glad he was having fun when he died instead of sitting on a bar stool or in midst of a drug run. I recalled his surfing when we were in Maui, when the locals ran him off the beach because he was endangering everyone (his surfing skills were minimal, but that didn't stop him) & riding crazily around Mazatlan on a moped. God was giving him a last hurrah in Mexico. At the same time, I also got the devastating news about his son, David, a casualty of the next generation of addiction. I don't think I'll ever get over that. I'll always see "Nature Boy," the idealistic teen aged save-the-redwoods activist, the dreamy, sweet youngster sitting on the floor of my sister's kitchen decorating Christmas cookies, surrounded by captivated little children. His was a life cut short by a cruel disease. I loved him too.
Though he may not have stayed sober, I know Tom gave many alcoholics hope for recovery. He helped us all learn to have fun in sobriety, not an easy task. Most of all I hope his children know how much he loved them, even though he had a disease. To Tom's sweet daughter Carla, I love you & hope you're having a life filled with love. And Tom & David, though our time was short together, I'll miss you both. In the redwoods or on a sunset beach, I'll be thinking of you.
Examine these photos.
