I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…
There’s another movie that gives you a way into Tom’s life. I’m sure Maria and Charlie O’Brien remember how they headed out with Tom and the rest of their crew—was Wish there? was Kevin told?—to see Mean Streets in Midtown in the mid-70s. They all loved that flic—at least in part because of how Scorsese melded 60s music, our people’s music, into the dailiness of life. Nobody had ever done that—‘cept Joey with “Truly Yours” a couple years before?
While Tom was taken by DeNiro’s Johnny Boy—“Back to Bataan!”—and Keitel’s Charlie—he came at Mean Streets from a different angle than Maria or O.B. or Wish. They grew up in the city—but Tommy was in the process of making himself an echt New Yorker and—a decade or so down the line—adopted son of Harlem. That all seems fated now—but Tom’s self-creation was also an act of will and imagination.
One reason why he fought so hard against Columbia was that he knew the gentility were out to tame his wild, open city–blanding it into an urbanesque equivalent of a provincial college town. That’s where he/we came from. It wasn’t where he meant to end up.
I’m reminded of a distinction of Fitzgerald’s. He says somewhere a sentimentalist is stuck on innocence, but a romantic is enthralled with instants when it’s lost. Tom was that kind of romantic. Tougher than the rest, he could handle stone truths beneath his sweetest memories. I’m reminded of his poem about glory days when he played hero b-ball as a ringer for a semi-pro team in D.R.—“Mis hermanos loved getting open shots off my hot-dog passes…surprise bounces shoved between my legs gave time for swishes…leading ones from behind my back set up breaking targets…” But his ender kept it real about his running mates “who sometimes had no soles on their sneakers (sheepishly revealed—canvas of Cons on top but with bare feet for bottoms—only after the torneo.”)
Yet Tom’s capacity to image the real never killed his romantic imperatives.
There was surely a Romeo and Juliet aspect to Tom and Maria’s courtship. No balcony scene, but they scoped each other out from fire escapes on Tiemann Place. No Bernstein in their West Side Story but mucho Beatles. Maria’s love for them, which Tom shared, gave them plenty of hooks to hang their love on.
I used to think I’d been sound-tracking the world together with Tom since “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but I recently realized we go back further when Tom wrote a lovely lyrical piece sparked by a cover of a C&W tune he first found infectious when he heard it as a six year old on “a cowboy compilation record with a wild west lasso cover.” I sung along to that record too–-before the British Invasion. But I’m recalling another tune from an even earlier time that I bet we both locked on. One of my earliest memories is my mom putting me to bed by singing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” as we ferried from Portugal to the UK. I’m sure she faded Tom out with it too.
Which, in turn, reminds me of how Tommy had my late dad’s homemade CD playing down low in my mom’s last hospital room—the sound was faint but I believe she could hear it—so daddy seemed to be leading her on as she made her final passage…
Back to that ferry ride from Portugal. The family spent a blissful year with the sun there in Estoril in the late 50s. (Fascist Salazar notwithstanding.) And I think that’s when Tom became one of the traveling kind. A glance at the montage of photos of Tom underscores how much he loved to go on the road. Tom drove through France with OB and Maria and, then with the kids—through France and Spain. They did Italy and Turkey on another trip. They hung out on Greek islands with Zaharis. They rolled through the American West a couple times—up to the Canadian Rockies, down through the desert. Maria and Tom did Hawaii. And of course they went to D.R. over and over…
Tom may have had rambling fever but he was always juiced to come home. (By the end of his life he was running himself ragged taking care of three of them.) That’s another reason why he fought so hard to keep roofs over folks’ heads. He could imagine from within what it felt like to have no way in, and only movers’ blankets to keep you warm on the street. He knew how much homes mattered. The last time I talked to him, the day before he died, we wondered together at how Naipaul got all of that in the eternal A House for Mr. Biswas. Another novelist from a colder country is on point too: “It may be that the thrill of a lighted window in winter lasts longer with us than any of the great emotions of love or ambition, and perhaps it’s the only one we shall keep in the end…”
But now it’s on to Tom’s own words. As I was reading through his writings, I realized he’d written his own obituary in the midst of a story called “The Passengers.” (The title probably nodded to that old Antonioni movie where Jack Nicholson’s character sheds the skin he’s in, and takes up a new life/identity.) Tom’s story flashes between two outliers—a youngblood on the margins of a Florida key (like the island Tom came to adore when he was taking care of our snowbird Mom) and another older Tom-boy surveying life from the Dominican vantage point of El Morro—the promontory where Mama Prestinary (who lives on at 101) has her house. Both these soul men share a way of seeing with others who…
sit among the ruins and see through it and know it…They know what’s out there, even as they fight to keep building their doors and windows to get beyond the thickets of whitebread tomfoolery. That decent thing that the churches occasionally bring to mind for a couple of hours by accident mostly, is a communal knowledge. An understanding that for many, this world is not theirs to escape from, and sympathy for those who each day watch the asphalt grow, spin the twist-off caps, the jive and fives, the what-they-know.
The section of “The Passengers” I’m going to read now starts in D.R. and then dreamworks it way back to the homie in Florida…
Above the galleria was an open roof with some hard lawn chairs and a breezy, mountain-side view of the town and the ocean beyond. He plugged a boom box into a long extension cord he’d bought a couple of years back from the local hardware and numbers joint on his last visit for the express purpose of making his private beach party flow at the push of his button.
He felt like hearing a swinger right away and didn’t want to jump around through tracks to find the right one so he put on Orchestra Baobab which guaranteed life at the first song and then everlasting. There are records like that. But are there more or less of them as one moves along in years? There are different reasons the answers to that can move around too. Aint life grand? The Orchestra’s latin beat ditties exploded from the minds and ears of Senegalese percussionists, and overflowed with African voices rich as five-flowered honey from the Loire Valley. These cuts always made instant dance steps happen when the servants smiled by. His DJ self loved that Baobab. He was alone up there and tapped his feet with his heartbeat.
From the pile of backed up newspaper clippings he carried on trips to “get to,” the first he happened on was an excerpt from an interview cited in an obituary of Yves Bonnefoy, a frog writer who visited his grandparents in a village in the Lot River valley and ended up listening there “to the voices that come from the unconscious—which know more than we do about the life and death.”
The next side from the orchestra moved from West Africa espanol to the Wolof of the West African nit-ni. He laughed to himself at this cultural juncture and pondered his being up on the roof, on the receiving end of dark ghost visitors colonially seeded by the French, floating in from the nearby hills of the Haitian border-town of Ouanaminthe, crossing el Rio Massacre—named for the horror of Trujillo’s machetes turning black slaves into a bloody river—to the marketplace in Dajabon where la chusma meet pep-la (if both communities of peasants from either side of the border had enough representatives to afford a space in the back of a pick-up or tap-tap truck to get there). But these ghosts he imagined would then have had to find a means to mosey across thirty minutes of desert to find his les yeux.
The obituary suggested many thought Bonnefoy’s writing style was “abstract and often obscure.” But the poet didn’t give a shit. He said “it’s not a question of reveling in a hermetic language exclusive to a few insiders, but of breaking down stereotypes which no longer give an authentic representation of reality, only a superficial one, and therefore do not allow real exchanges.” (Had le frere ever swung the mangoes round and round to Bird’s Ornithology?)
As the breeze stopped and the sun hit hard again, he pondered the reference to Bonnefoy’s approach which used language that “opens and locks the doors of perception.” He liked that there were so many quotation marks in the obituary since these were kind of the guy’s last words. “We are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is…We need poetry not to regain this intimacy which is impossible, but to remember that we miss it and to prove to ourselves the values of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words.” The passage didn’t soak in, but he felt it had something to do with him, even with this very day. It would be nice to talk to a professor about this, but it was, as usual, forty years too late. His unfinished reverie was interrupted by a late afternoon dispute between a ranting rooster and a burro.
He fiddled among his disorganized music collection in a cloth bag with weak handles and found Orchestra Harlow’s C’est La Vie, Mon Cher with El Judio Maravillosa’s swaying piano lines, barely there, surreying the country lilt while the flute and guitar seasoned it hard out in front until the salsa stunk like Jelly Roll’s sated companion when “not so smutty”—he had her in the Whinin’ Boy—“that’s my fucking name”—grass. As Mr. Morton told the Library of Congress, he had to fast break around “the femininity stamp” when playing the most genteel of instruments of the Hot Five Twenties, even as he employed an andante voice of unequaled subtlety while alternating his joyous and heart-wrenching trills to his dancing keys, and pussies to loving and lusting lyrics with singular honesty. “I sing this so many times it gives me heart failure.” Ah, the Winin’ Boy Blues. In the Larry Harlow song he plunked in next, Junior “estoy fracito” Gonzalez carried the lyrics “Yo no tengo dinnero, pero felicidad” all velvety designed. True it was a humble sentiment in phrases that are as comonplzce as the pop in this hillside, but Gonzalez sang it with depth, and un chiste, at the same time, C’est la vie, mon cher. That was the song’s title, but all the rest of the lyrics, except “the way life goes” chorus line en francais, were in Spanish.
He fell asleep and dreamed a song, in the song.
xxx
Back at Ali’s the other nodded on his crate. The sun had gotten to him. He dreamed too. Saw a black parking lot in a light brown cactus field covered with bright graffiti colors in well considered splotches not cursive lines, and with an unfamiliar tool in his hand. There he sat. An apportionment away from the battle of the perpie boys on a hundred thousand street corners blown in on warm breezes from the Contra dope cracking, courtesy of Godfather Reagan, winding through Marvin G’s ghettos, a swirling to the encrypted-text eye-phoned clever brother sellers no longer compelled to melt pills on corners, and now less easily observed from a perch on a crate. No murders at good addresses. No news in the hood. It was time head back.
The passengers. Both their parents were gone. The roof was gone. There they were, plantigrading down dewy thoroughfares. Still in sorrow, and decades apart, yet everything interested them even more— the solace of the act of looking. They were lonely, but they’d be, and been, lonely any damn way. So they watched and waited, knowing there was something out there that mattered, lingering for love.