I heard he died the other day. And to be honest, I hadn’t seen him for decades, but at one time we were inseparable.
Yeah from the rumors I’ve heard, it was COVID-19, but I’m not sure. He had been homeless off and on for years I guess, and I had only found out this past summer that he had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. Which I thought was so odd, since looking back, it was I who was most likely to become a schizo. I may have even relished the idea at times.
He was like my mother’s third son for a while, and I was like is mom’s fourth. He was over all the time, and during the summers we tried to eat way too many of my dad’s charcoal grilled burgers so we could make bigger cannonballs in our redwood pool. We’d climb all the way past the bench to the upper railing where we weren’t allowed, and leap. I always made the bigger splash because I was larger and a bit more rotund.
I was older than Tommy by more than a year and a half, but I always looked up to him. He was one of the best players on our little league team, my first year, and I was in the dugout most of the time. I was awkward, just like the rest of my grandfather’s grandchildren. He had played semi-pro, the equivalent of minor league, and though I was driven by a wild enthusiasm to master the game, I was just never any good. Tommy, however, he was a natural. No matter what it was — baseball, basketball, soccer, he nailed it. And my grandfather was happy to coach both of us, and we were always made to feel equal, even though Tommy was playing on a wholly different level than I was.
Even when we were in 5th and 6th grade, and Tommy started to hang with the much cooler guys, the most popular of his grade, and they all had girlfriends, Tommy insisted that I follow him around on my bicycle, that I was one of them, even though I obviously wasn’t. He tried to get me to ask one of the girls out, and I was paralyzed by my adoration for her, so I couldn’t. But he never gave up on me.
Over the years we got in all kinds of trouble together, almost got ourselves killed a few times. We had the same favorite songs. When I got a copy of The Beatles’ album Let It Be, and we looked inside, he was Paul at the piano, and I was John with his arm around Yoko.
Over the years when we had bonfires in the woods, smoked pot, drank beer, and the group got larger, we may have begun drifting apart, but it was hardly noticeable. By the time I was in college — my short reform from self-annihilation at Suffolk County Community College — we hardly saw each other at all. He would end up at CW Post, going for a degree in accounting, while stocking shelves at a local grocery.
It seemed strange that even after graduation, he stayed at the same job at the King Kullen, a couple of blocks from where we grew up. But his father was a mailman, with a second job at a Grand Union, after all. I just figured it must have run in the family.
But he cancelled his wedding a couple of days before the date and turned himself into rehab, supposedly for cocaine. He was way paranoid, from what I had heard. He found chicken bones by the wheel of his car and thought someone was trying to curse him or something. We knew then that things were not right.
I think I was living in the city by then, or trying to off and on, as it was hard to find something I could afford with my tremendously lame salary as a clerk at an investment firm. Yes there were always people making big money on Wall Street, but there were also people working in those firms who just had no special salable talents or just fewer opportunities. There were a lot of immigrants, people of color and a glut of temporarily or permanently unsuccessful artists. I had a degree in communication, with a focus in rhetorical theory, which was as bad as an English degree. I think I wanted to be a writer, or a musician, and kept wavering. I was making making twenty-five cents more per hour than the folks without a college education because I had spent more time in a library, and the management thought that meant I could alphabetize better. Tommy could have walked in there with his accounting degree and made more than double what I was making, but instead he went back and continued to place the fruit and vegetables in the cooler.
Schizophrenia is a funny thing, and I kind of got obsessed thinking about it, partially because I write poetry, and at least on the surface, a lot of modern and postmodern poetry almost sounds like schizophrenic babble. I even wrote a paper about it, about the structure of the thinking and the language around it, read it at a fancy university in California, not knowing anything about what was happening in Tommy’s head. I hadn’t heard anything about him for so long, though now and then he would come to mind, the boy I knew, not the man I never got to know.
I really think some of the conditions we tend to write off as diseases, disorders, may actually have some overall purpose that helps us, creates a mirror for our own processing, or adds some sort of necessary strangeness to the mix of our over-normalized, conventional way of going about our day and solving problems. A process like schizophrenia is perhaps a way that the community, at least our past and smaller indigenous communities, help to reshuffle the deck. Our current indigenous communities still have their medicine folk, their shaman, and goodness knows what they’re up to, but it seems like madness, I mean, when held up against our conventional everyday world.
Perhaps beneath the self-composing conscious selves we all know ourselves to be, we’re all schizophrenic. Way smarter people than me have thought so. In fact, I reckon we’re probably a lot more schizophrenic, even on our most normalized level, than we like to think. People like Tommy are like canaries in a coal mine telling us just that.
And something like COVID-19, even that is perhaps a part of or results from this schizophrenic mechanism that invades and colonizes, tries to make Capital out of every last thing on earth. And like schizophrenia, it is a mirror of ourselves, our thinking and actions, our greed to invade and make everything our home and territory.
Something in me keeps speculating that if we listened to more Tommys, accommodated what and how they are more than we do, without locking them up like criminals, and took them seriously, or at least useful, this pandemic would look a lot different at this moment. But maybe that’s just crazy talk.