Here was a young man without a place to live. Circumstances prevented Tom from going home, though his feelings weren’t totally logically. Even after looking at his situation from every angle, he couldn’t make total sense of it, for he knew that he’d made a mess of his life. But first things first: he’d have to eat and find a place to live. It was basic, but there was one problem: he’d run out of money.
Though Tom wasn’t lazy, he now didn’t want to settle for any ol’ job. It was something that he’d promised himself when he left Vaughn, and he certainly thought that he could find a better job than working in a gas station. In the back of his mind he also held out hope that maybe there was some way that he could get along without working at all. He had hopes of concentrating more on his writing and thought that there had to be a way. So he set out to find it.
Believe it or not, Oak Cliff had its own counterculture, and there were places where a guy with long hair could go and wouldn’t stand out. Several places come to mind. Of course Tom looked for a bookstore that carried hip literature. There were a few of those in Oak Cliff. Unfortunately he couldn’t buy anything.
The owner of the Book Nook knew of a crash pad where Tom could stay and could stay by contributing what he could. With a free place to stay he could breathe easily for a change, even though he had to sleep on the floor. The pad was crowded with a thrilling composite of the counterculture, people from varied backgrounds, who amazingly were compatible. There was, strangely, an order to how the place was run and somehow they always managed it without much effort. Tom hadn’t seen anything like it. This incense-laden house filled with the music of The Animals, Orlo Guthrie and Phil Ochs seemed to be the tonic that he needed, and probably he would never have left there except if it hadn’t been for the drug speed.
Elsewhere it was the summer of Love, and Tom certainly wasn’t in the mood for his mom’s apple pie. Remember that already he’d use pot. Now all of a sudden speed was available to him. He stopped. Luckily he stopped, but not before an old unquiet feeling overcame him. For one thing he didn’t like needles. Merely looking at them made him shudder. When he first came to the pad to live, there hadn’t been any serious drug use, or any that concerned him. That all changed rather rapidly after a 24 year-old drug dealer arrived on the scene, and everyone already was pretty stoned on grass, and before Tom knew it he damn near croaked. The dealer assured them that it was all quite safe, but Tom would be forever thankful that he had an adverse reaction.
He didn’t like the rush or the flash, the feeling of being out of control. It didn’t matter that the others around him loved it. He might’ve like it except for the needles and if he hadn’t been coerced (something he always maintained, which wasn’t necessarily true). So then, as he sweated profusely and his heart beat rapidly, he experienced an organism, which he would’ve enjoyed had he anticipated it, but instead it frightened him, and he wanted it to stop. And as he started to gag he said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
By then he’d given a piece of his heart to Janis Joplin and had heard someone say that watching the Port Arthur babe on stage was like living a dream that all boys dreamed. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Man ol’ man. Yes, Tom still enjoyed wet dreams. Or he could still hope, find joy, get high, and keep looking. For what? He still didn’t know.
Letters show that he left Oak Cliff right after that. They however don’t give details on how he got to Oklahoma City, where he was greeted warmly by his aunts and his uncles. It’s safe to assume however that by then he needed a shower and had grown tired of eating out of dumpsters but there was no reason to think that he wanted to talk about it. By then he knew that he had to call his parents and had concocted a story about how he been too busy to write and how he just happened to end up in the City, and including how much he missed them. His relatives certainly made him feel at home.
Tom’s cousins all turned out to be highly successful individuals; and their parents all bragged about them. Then when they asked Tom what he’d been up to, all he came up with was “not much.” They found that strange because he was known as a good talker. He was known as a bragger and they never heard such exaggeration, but by then he didn’t feel like talking. He’d just exaggerate anyway, and you can’t believe what he says. Tom’s parents had been worried about him and begged him to come home.
Randy Ford
