Tom

I don't remember how it happened, but I got back into contact with Tom. I missed his advice and talking to him. When I was in my last year living in Boston, he and my mom came to visit. During their visit, not a word was said about their health, but something was different. One night we sat down for a drink in a bar and I had my first adult face-to-face look at them. Through Tom's tar stained glasses were a pair of eyes that couldn't focus, they were cross-eyed and twitchy, he was talking at me like things were fine, but I could see the honest lie in front of my face. My mom looked like a slab of grey steak with no color present on her face. The experience awakened a sense of duty that had me consider a return to Houston.

I moved back to Houston six months prior working for dad again because I felt something to be seriously wrong. He was the guy that stuck around my mom so that they each had a partner to die with. It felt like that day was approaching. My mom always spoke of Tom as messianic tones.

"You know, he was a millionaire at one time," Mom would say all the time.

She also would say, "This is the last Christmas I spend with him," but she never broke up with him.

Ever since my mom had started dating Tom, she said, "he's got some deals working, and if any one of them would close, we could be rich." I had heard this bullshit since I was 14, believed it until I was 15, then just let her speak because everybody has the right to quietly dream of an outcome that overcomes all of the massive fuckups one creates in their life. Now and then, everybody needs a distracting fantasy to get through the day.

Once, Tom told me of his days in California and how much money he made during the 70s' oil embargo. The movie Saturday Night Fever was big then, and he loved disco music. He loved 7&7's and cocaine. He had a mansion, two failed marriages, and non-stop partying. He also had two sons, each from two different marriages.

Tom had a few demons, but he never let me know about the extent of them. The best opportunity my mom provided me was choosing Tom to spend 15 years of her life with. He was a second dad that just made some mistakes. He wasn't a sexual predator or a bully who abused somebody else's kids. Tom lived with those mistakes quietly and went through the rest of his life quietly paying the price for his mistakes. We bonded over the two Houston Rockets Championship teams of the mid-1990s, in awe of Olajuwon's graceful post game. He taught me how to bowl, I bowled a few 250 games when I was 19. We were bowling together during game five of the NBA finals between the Rockets and the Knicks, watching the O.J. Simpson car chase.

Tom taught me how to negotiate calmly. He was there the first time I bought a car on payments. He taught me how to buy a car old-school, with a torn off sheet of paper -- pencil in the price to be taken to the booth who can see if the car could walk off the lot for the amount proposed. We sat there for six hours, looked through four different cars, test drove them by ourselves. The dealership was floor to ceiling 1970s faux walnut. The manager's station was up high so that you couldn't see their notes and prices.

"Hey, what do you think of this car?"

"It's too much car -- feels like I am spending $5,000 too much for the bodywork on the sides."

Son, I can get you into this for $12,500.

How about $5,500?

I want to get you into a car sir, but I have to eat too?

We ended up with the most reasonable deal on the lot, a 2007 Kia Spectra with 24,000 miles on it for $7,500. It was gold with a warm tan cloth interior, a little reminiscent of the Cutlas I grew up in. It was a simple car. It lacked luxury amenities. It had a CD player and luckily, an auxiliary cable, but little else. I was just beginning a portion of my life that I didn't want but wasn't experienced enough to understand why. Tom didn't live much longer and wasn't going to be there to help. I remember driving him to go golfing then waiting to pick him up. He was agitated, I was complaining about how a job wasn't turning out, to which he blurted out quietly, "fuck you, Scott, I'm dying." He never went to the doctor in the years that I knew him. He always complained about numbness in his feet while we bowled when I was in high school, but I didn't know what to say or do, other than to marvel at the fact the man could bowl a few 280 games without the ability to feel his feet. One night, he asked me:

"You are thinking of going back to work for your Dad? Why?"

" I dunno," I said. "Obligation, maybe?"

"Just think about it, you know what you are getting into."

"Oh yeah, I know."

The fact is that I did not know what the hell I was getting into. He then said something that I easily remember but have difficulty keeping with me. He said, "Scott, don't chase what you think you want. I don't see you rich, but I see you and your wife happy."

He collapsed out on the golf course one day and finally made it to the doctor. He had a blood glucose of 650. He was given a volume of various medications that he kept in a lunch box. He had to memorize the steps from the television to the couch, the couch to the kitchen, and the kitchen to the bathroom so that he didn't trip and fall because he was going blind. He kept golfing and bowling and would walk around the ring around the cul-de-sac of his rental house to keep alive. He was a person that I would bug constantly asking for advice on things. He helped me break a lease without owing anything, because a man died in the apartment above mine and wasn't found for a month.

I went on a trip to visit family with JL in Miami, the first-weekend trip I took in my work life. I was floating in the calmest, greenest water I have seen. I felt oddly relaxed, without any worry in the world, and the sensory deprivation gave me a horrible sense of anxiety. Getting out of the water, I checked my cell phone to find a slew of missed calls from my mom. I called her back. "I haven't heard from Tom since yesterday," she worried. I said, "Mom, it's fine, you don't know anything until you know, don't worry. Go over there." (I talked my mom through her cancer diagnosis saying the same shit.) I quietly waited until she called me back: "I don't know how to get in." I said, "Tom usually leaves the window in the living room/backyard open." She opened the window and got inside, walked into the bedroom and saw him dead lying on his bed with the television on. He'd had a kidney stone that had been giving him trouble all weekend. "The last thing he said to me was that he was going to lie down and try to relax," she said. The doctors gave him some morphine to help him relax with the pain. In the middle of the night, he had passed the stone and the wave of relief combined with the other medications he was taking stopped his heart. He was 63. A wave of grief washed over me, left me crying uncontrollably.

We flew back to Houston, now without the person I always asked for advice.

By the time Tom passed away, I think he knew that there was not going to be a business deal to help for mom's cancer or old age. Mom held out hope though. When Tom died, they had a broken down 1993 Jeep Cherokee that they had wrecked in Mississippi while visiting her mother before she passed away. She was also the owner of a 2007 Jeep Liberty on payments, because Tom somehow was starting to make a living through his "deals," something about a ground penetrating radar system. I remember when he bought the Jeep. He told me about the purchase when I was still living in Boston. I asked if they could afford a car note. He said, "Yeah!" Things were going great and he was a few months away from some deals closing. 18 months later, he had passed away and left mom with a car payment and a three bedroom apartment she couldn't afford. This is why I returned to work for Dad.

My previous work experience with Dad made me skeptical of trusting him. He used his children as free farm labor. Despite the heady Clinton years, I saw him getting stiffed on payments and periodically not able to pay employees. A common saying he repeated weekly was, "You'll get paid when I get paid." I laughed the first time I heard the line. I didn't laugh the countless other times he made the joke.

My brother, some of the other guys we worked with, and I would rearrange the words of songs on the classic rock station while we were loading the truck of cabinets to go out to jobs, songs like American Pie. Instead of This'll be the day that I died, we would sing we'll get paid the day that we die. It got a laugh. But the reality was that getting ahead was never going to happen.

Dad's business at the time was a shit show.

We were driving to the land of our main client. Dad seemed happier in those days. He seemed to not worry about money like he did before. He joked about having a sugar daddy. We were taking a drive out to his country estate.