No. 9
Blue eyed Tommy and the Chain gang...
Every family needs a villain. Preferably within the extended, as opposed to immediate family unit, though it can vary, and the moniker can transmute at times. But that was my uncle Tommy. Villainized and badmouthed eternally. And with good reason at times. Irony being, he was the sweetest most approachable of the three brothers which included my dad as the eldest, three Scotch-Irish boys with thick beards and weird cold blue eyes. Tommy was the youngest, born in east L.A. after the family left Missouri for lack of prospects. He entered a criminal phase at a young age that never let up.
When I was six years old, I encountered him in his middle age in stained white t-shirt and blue jeans, yellowed teeth and a grip of swirly blue tats and that funny 20-yard stare with accompanying grin of the shit-eating variety. My grandad’s house, a rickety white leaner in one of the old neighborhoods of El Sereno up in the east L.A. hills off Lombardy held a grip of trap-door spiders all through the lawn and after looking on hands and knees in the wiry grass for a time I glanced up. Tommy stood over me smoking a cigarette. ‘I’m your uncle, remember me?’ I shook my head and held my breath. He grinned and my dad laughed as he came up the drive from the street. ‘That’s your uncle Tom. Give him a handshake.’ Tommy had long slicked back ex-con hair that he smoothed with a hand before shaking mine. He lived with a woman named Irene in the back daylight porch of my grandad’s place. They kept it smoke filled and dimly lit; their scant belongings strewn about like vagabonds.
Irene had a daughter who’s name I forget, freckled, buck-toothed and ornery, but same age as me and we’d play in the back shed where my grandad kept his weird collections, hundreds of Avon bottles, rare coins, stamps and rocks, fossils and animal skins and wine bottles and furniture he’d made or found. Irene’s freckled daughter might have been the first girl I ever kissed though my memory is hazy.
I’ve told this story on stage and in song, but it bears repeating in this format for there can be no mistaking that Tommy was always the villain, though there turned out to be a far more heinous individual within the family who remained unseen and malevolent but that’s another story. In the mid 60’s Tom had been picked up on a misdemeanor charge that turned worse on account of an earlier possession charge and so he’d done some time and then got put on a work gang which he later referred to as the ‘chain-gang’ though I don’t think there were actual chains involved by then. The way my father told the story, his brother had done several days on this work crew bagging garbage or digging ditches and as the days grew hotter, Tommy grew more disgusted with the situation and simply wandered away. The details of his escape were always nebulous no matter who was telling the story but what everyone always agreed upon was the next part. So, keep in mind he wore his ‘prison blues’ since he was work detail and somehow, he made his way into a neighborhood off Palo Verde and hotwired a station wagon and drove it north on Lakewood drive, evidently opened up pretty good because a cop pulled him over for speeding…
Though the villain has endless detractors at any given time, he will always have one person in his corner. For Tommy that was his mother, my grandmother, an invalid paralyzed from the neck down since middle age, she lived in a bed in a room with one window looking out onto the alley. Family mythology has it that she got involved with occult, Ouija type energies at a young age and paid some kind of karmic price. Not sure I buy this; she always had a poet’s heart and nothing but loving kindness for all us kids but the astral powers are not to be fucked with in general so I can’t rule it out completely. She treated Tommy special, gave him the benefit of the doubt, he was her favorite and her baby eternally. But I will say that at the end of his days my grandad, a lifetime teetotaler, took to the bottle with Tommy who lived in the house and the two of them would get wild and unhinged and a week after my grandma died, grandad fell down drunk in the hall and passed over as well. Everyone blamed Tommy.
It’s odd that the cop didn’t notice the ‘prison blues’ that Tommy wore. Maybe he was a newbie, or far-sighted or, and this is purely speculative, Tommy was purported to have a kind of Jedi-mind-trick psychic-control type leverage when he wanted to and, on this occasion, he was able to sweet talk the cop not only into letting him go, but without the speeding ticket. A real head-scratcher.
I try to imagine east L.A. in the early 60’s, bright sun, the Mama’s and Papa’s playing gently in the background, this squeaky-clean young buzz-cut officer running up on this greasy bearded convict who flashes a golden smile and those spooky blue eyes of his, ‘Howdy officer, apologies for any inconvenience, hope I wasn’t going too fast. Sometimes I just kind of get distracted, the wind and road you know what I mean? That’s a hell of a patrol car you got, you ever open that thing up, see how fast it’ll go? Oh yeah? One twenty? Boy, you’re braver than I, that’s for sure. I’m usually thirty-five tops, old lady type speeds you know…’
He rolled up into the drive at my grandad’s and my dad was there working on an engine. My father told me he asked Tom where he got the car and of course he said he borrowed it, but weren’t you still on detail till September? No, I got clear of all that brother, chain-gang ain’t no place to be. You worry too much. I’m go inside, say hi to mom.