The first good word that struck me this morning was tomfoolery. Nothing too juicy in its origin or history, but it got me wondering about all the Toms I've known. Goofy, eccentric, iconoclastic--these are words that come to mind with regard to my collection of Toms, but not really fool, foolish, or foolery. The Toms I know are too smart--book and street--to be fools. The more the mind wanders, though, the more it is drawn to one Tom in particular, perhaps the first Tom I knew, a good boyhood friend of mine. This Tom was definitely no fool; what he really was, when I think of it, is magical. Tomwizardry might be a term to coin in his honor.
My all-time favorite story about this particular Tom is one I told for years when I taught. I'd use the blackboard to draw stick figures of the action, make all kinds of asides, reference whatever was popular in the students' world at the time to make the story come alive even more. I even--I confess--might have embellished a detail here and there for comedic effect. But not today. In the interest of determining officially whether this Tom engaged in tomfoolery or tomwizardry or merely tommischief, I will tell the tale straight and let you be the judge.
1977. Freshman year in high school. We went to a school on the other side of town, so we had to take a series of bus and rapid transit rides to get to and fro. By the age of fourteen, Tom was well-established as a kind of ring-leader in all things whimsical. Tom Sawyer might have concocted a scheme to get others to whitewash the fence, but this Tom could have concocted a game of simply watching the whitewash dry. Everything could be worked into a game by him. At the time a one-way trip including all buses and rapids cost thirty-five cents. A pretty measly sum, even then. But much too much for us to spend if we could get away with spending less. And Tom, naturally, was the king of discovering ways to spend less, if not nothing at all. He was the one who'd put Necco candy wafers in the till and get away with it. He was the one who perfected the multi-part, climb the roof over the rapid stop to get past the toll booth, run and get a free transfer at the downtown stop, and pull the old three-man, one-transfer-out-the-back-bus-window scheme. An adolescent genius, no doubt.
Tom was also the one who discovered the flaw in the Pepsi machine. Before our last leg home every night, we used to have to wait in a grimy mini bus station for fifteen minutes or so. The "station" was nothing more than a kind of trapezoidal room with plastic seats along the walls, whose windows were a truly nasty plastic (nasty with the gunk from everybody's heads leaning against them as they waited Purgatory-like for their bus to come in). The only breaks in the line of chairs along the walls were for the two doors and the battered old Pepsi machine, which kind of served as the focal point of the room. Cans were only thirty-five cents at the time (yes, son, there was a time when nearly everything was a mere thirty-five cents; it's a wonder they didn't make a thirty-five-cent coin). Of course, there wasn't much of a choice back then--six buttons to push, three Pepsi, two diet, and one Mountain Dew (which was new then and hadn't quite reached its cult status). Although a couple of us made use of the machine every day, it was Tom who discovered that one of the plastic buttons for Pepsi would get stuck if you just pushed it in and up a little. Well, what delight this gave us for weeks. We'd sprint down from the rapid stop above to be the one who would stick the button, then we'd all sit back and watch the hijinks that ensued when some unsuspecting bus rider put thirty-five cents in the machine and before he or she could decide which button to push, a can of Pepsi would clamor through the machine and out of the slot at the bottom. Ball-busting fun, on an acutely fourteen-year-old boy level.
Hard as it is to believe, though, we eventually got bored with the stuck-Pepsi-machine-button ruse (or probably, Tom tired of it so we all tired of it too). As if sensing the boredom that would come with our gradually-encroaching adulthoods, we forgot about sticking the machine and simply sat on the seats, obliviously stared out the window, and waited for our bus to show like all the other bus station denizens. Within a few months of daily public transportation tripping through the big city, we had jadedly thought we'd seen it all. Nothing much ruffled our ennui except, barely at first, the big, hulking, hairy, thirty-something ogre who came into the station one day and put some money in the Pepsi machine. A twinge of nostalgia passed through me as I momentarily wished we had stuck the machine that day, just to see how this guy would have responded to the loud, instant can shooting out to him. What he did react to, though, was the machine not giving him any kind of can whatsoever. He pushed the plastic button a few times, jiggled the coin return lever (what's the percentage of coin return levers on any kind of vending machine working properly--25%, at best?), and even tried the time-honored bend-over-and-shove-your-arm-as-far-up-into-the-dispenser-to-pry-out-your-precious-can-of-carbonation move--all to no avail.
Did the guy go looking for somebody in a blue uniform to inform about the banditry of Pepsi-co. or did he shrug his shoulders and walk away, figuring, oh well, life just exacted another thirty-five cent toll from me, like most people in the same situation would have done? Hell no. Anticipating Olivia Newton John's 1981 smash hit, this guy got physical with/on/to the machine. First he pushed it, with both arms/hands, like a linebacker slapping the pads of a teammate prior to a big game. No Pepsi. Then he tried shaking it like some savage after coconuts. No Pepsi. Then, using his ample girth, he lurched at the machine from a standing position. Bam. No Pepsi. Now outside of the audience listening to Glenn Beck read his Christmas story, you've never encountered a more indifferent, uncaring, unwitnessing, oblivion-wracked crowd than the masses gathered in this particular bus station, but by the time the guy lurched into the machine people were starting to take notice, in that there's-a-lunatic-in-my-presence-and-I-know-I-shouldn't-look-but-goddamn-this-is-too-fascinating-not-to-watch kind of way. Maybe it was the lunatic's awareness of the crowd, or maybe he just really wanted that Pepsi, but he then proceeded to back away from the machine, all the way back to the opposite end of the room, maybe twenty feet, to the seats directly facing the machine, which, of course, happened to be occupied that day by Tom and yours truly. Standing right in front of us, facing the machine, the guy kind of sized-up his task for a few seconds, as I'm sure everybody there (I couldn't see much, the big galoot was right in front of me), like me, was thinking, no way, this guy is not going to run clear across the room and tackle the Pepsi mach-- he did. Like a mountain man running toward his newly shipped mail-order bride, the guy took off straight for the machine. He was large, the direct route no more than twenty feet, but he maxed out his speed about seventeen feet into his dash, and then crash! It wasn't a tackle, just a collision, the apotheoisis of the by now age-old man vs. machine conflict in all its glory. The air exploded, the guy grunted, the crowd gasped, the machine quaked. But, no Pepsi. I should say just about all of the crowd gasped, because one voice in the crowd didn't gasped, it guffawed. Tom. Still dazed from his collision, the man wheeled and seethed in the direction of the guffaw, which being my direction, since I was sitting right next to Tom. Fearing time, all time, my time, was desperately short, I silently recited the digested, no-frills, get-to-the-point form of the Hail Mary: "Now and at the hour of our death, amen!" I am sure in those brief, suspended seconds, more than a few of the bus station crowd were looking at Tom and me and thinking, "them boys about to die."
Maybe all the fight in the guy had been expended on his mad dash/collision; maybe he suddenly (albeit belatedly) realized how foolish he looked; maybe he was out on parole for something and had a split second moment of grace and wisdom that told him to stop right there, that Pepsi and those boys aren't worth a return trip to the big house; maybe there are Guardian Angels; or maybe the overwhelming metaphysical inertia of the place finally enveloped him--whatever, the guy, after a couple near bladder-loosening (me) seconds of staring us down, gave up, found a seat near the machine and sat his ample, defeated ass down.
Within a minute, complete apathy was restored to the station.
Good story, no? Hardly. We're just getting to the good part. A minute or two after all this, Tom quietly asked me if I had a dime on me. Sure, I said, and started to dig in my pocket. "The guy only put a quarter in the machine," Tom whispered, and smirked. Oh no, Tom, don't, please...handing him the dime against all good judgment (what could I do, this was Tomwizardry in all its spell-casting power--such trifles as good judgment, the survival instinct, concern for my fellow man, all were no match; this was the guy, after all, who I had witnessed, a year or two before, throw an unwrapped mini Snickers bar from the very top row at Public Hall toward the floor where the high school basketball city championship game had just concluded; I had watched, with keener eyesight than I've ever had before and definitely since, that little candy bar fly down through the air, hit the hardwood floor and, instead of smashing to bits, roll end over end across the mayhem-filled court and right between the legs of the referee who was walking off the court with the game ball).
Tom took my dime as I took one last inventory of what had been my life. Without announcing the fact, Tom made clear to whatever part of the crowd cared, but especially the defeated big guy who sat glumly near the machine, still trying to catch his breath, that he (Tom) only had a dime and was proceeding to the Pepsi machine to insert it. Tom did just that, pausing to theatrically make his choice of soda, but also for the fact to sink in that he had just put merely a dime into the machine that had so recently waged and won an epic battle with the gorilla who sat nearby licking his wounds. I know I heard that dime descend through all its machinations and land loudly on top of the other coins, most especially the recent quarter (only) that the ogre had deposited. By leaning back a little, I could take in Tom and the guy (the only one watching the scene more intently than I) at once. I figured in the short time it would take the guy to devour Tom, I could be running out the side door and hopping on the first bus I saw, happily willing to pay the full thirty-five cent fare, happily willing to go to wherever the bus might take me because I knew salvation would be waiting for me at the end of the line. Eventually Tom pressed one of the Pepsi buttons, the machine burped and clanged as usual, and a fresh cold can of Pepsi emerged at the bottom of the machine. I couldn't look but I couldn't not look. Tom stood there with his pride and joy, a ten-cent (technically
my ten cents, but I had immediately surrendered [not in any legal sense, but in my heart, to God] all claims to said dime and anything that could be gotten with it) can of Pepsi. He pulled the by now obsolete pop top, threw it in the little receptacle in the machine, took a deep gulp of the cola, and emitted a satisfying "aaaahhhh"--all right in front of the ogre. I tried hard to memorize every detail of the scene, for the police and for Tom's parents at the wake. With the ogre just sitting there in an incredulous stupor, Tom walked back over to me with the smirkingest Pepsi-gulping grin, held the can out, and said, "D'ya want some?" Blindly bound as I was at the time in the ninth year of my twelve-year Catholic school servitude, I still would have rather drunk gluttonously and unquestioningly from the chalice at a Black Mass than to have even touched that Pepsi can. Tom had no such qualms: he imbibed happily. And by the time he had finished the can and our bus had pulled up, the ogre, wholly defeated, had slunk out of the bus station. Thirty-plus years later, he's probably still walking, looking for some retribution, enlightenment, clarification, peace, who knows?
So, Tomfoolery, Tommischief, Tomwizardry, or just Tom being Tom? All I know is I survived to tell the embellished tale, and now, for once, the unadorned facts of the case.
David Bowie-Boys Keep Swinging
