Tom

I first met Tom in college. But I’ll get back to that in a second.

It was the first day of when I was to attend San Francisco State University. My previous foray into education was a decade prior, and now I was about to do it all over again. Only, this time I decided I was going to do the whole college experience, including living in the dorms, something you didn’t really get when your first run through college was at one of the military service academies.

Anyway, this time they were going to set me up with a roommate, and as it goes, the roommate was going to come as a complete surprise. And boy, did it ever. My roommate showed up and that’s immediately when sparks started to fly. Well, let me explain.

The roommate who showed up was someone with green hair. That should have been my first warning. The second warning was that she was a she. And boy, did that make her angry.

Even though the roommate “choice” was a crapshoot, and none of the roommates actually chose each other, she lit off like a firecracker. Well, more like a firecracker that explodes over and over again.

She immediately blamed me and started yelling at me nonstop, like I had secretly arranged this with my patriarchal cousins who were obviously snickering nextdoor, just out of earshot of her.

This went on for about half an hour before I left the room to retrieve the dorm manager downstairs, and as the two of us came back to the room, she was still yelling. At whom until he returned, neither of us knew, but she continued to be red mad.

So, the dorm manager took her out of the room, at which she started screaming that the guy (me) should have to leave, not her, even though all of my stuff was unpacked and her stuff was still in suitcases ready to be moved to wherever they needed to go.

So, for the first night, I had no roommate. The second night, my new roommate arrived, and that’s when I met Tom.

For my second roommate, they decided to link him with me because the two of us were veterans. He was a former Marine and I was former Army. There was an age difference; he had fought in Vietnam, and my time was Grenada, Panama and the first Gulf War.

Because the timeframe of our first nights on campus coincided with huge bouts of noise on campus, on one evening after lights out the campus band and glee team was practicing at what had to be after midnight in some impromptu blast of music. I just assumed this was a normal thing and struggled to get back to sleep, but then like a bolt of lightning, Tom came rushing out of his room and straight out the door of our dorm. The next thing I heard, he was yelling at the leader of the band, and someone yelled back at him from out there, and then there was dead silence.

Then Tom came back to the room and said, “They’ll shut up now.” And then he went to bed. I never heard another sound from the band again. As no police units showed up knocking on our door, I assumed he settled that problem without any violence.

Over the years, Tom and I bonded as most roommates do when they get along and have a common frame of reference. A few years into our friendship journey, one of my debate partners and I decided we were interested in starting a radio program with the school Broadcasting Department, even though we weren’t part of the Broadcasting Department.

But we couldn’t even get the Broadcast Department to give us an opportunity to try out. But when Tom overheard us talking about the failure of our plan, he said that he knows the director of the Broadcasting Department, and he’d talk to him. We kind of took it half-heartedly but then a few days later, he handed me a piece of paper with the director’s name, a date and a time, saying that he would see us then.

So, my friend and I put together or best elevator pitch and presented it. Next thing we knew, we were told we had some studio time to create our vision and then we could present that as proof that we could do the job.

When we got to the studio, we encountered the first bit of politics in the Broadcasting Department. Everyone in that department was competing for airtime, and as outsiders, we were infringing on their territory. But the director had told them to give us access and one of them took that obligation to actually show us the ropes. So, we finished the demo tape and then had to present our elevator pitch to the students who ran the radio station. They heard us out and then said no.

We were devestated, and Tom listened to our entire group commiserate over how we gave it our best shot, and unknown to us, Tom took the demo tape to the director so he could hear what we had done. The next day, we were given air time and the students running the station hated us forever after that day.

But we had our air time.

Years later, Tom and I remained good friends, and after I published one of my novels, Thompson’s Bounty, about a Coast Guard crew that gets pulled through time to the age of pirates, Tom called me and said that he loved that book and felt it needed to be a movie.

You see, after Tom graduated, he got into the movie industry and was a huge advocate of science fiction. He wasn’t high up in the industry, nor was he ever working to get up high into it. He took those types of jobs that are necessary, but most people don’t generally acknowledge. In other words, if there’s a guy who drives around on movie sets and takes the director around, or picks up the luggage for a cast member, he was that guy.

But being in that position, he was always talking with people who made movies, and he hyped my novel to some of the biggest names, itching for me to send him a screenplay, so he could pass it onto someone who had asked for it.

To put it simply, Tom was my biggest fan, and when you’re a writer, that is such a great thing to have. Every couple of months, he would call me, or send me a message, and he would love to talk about something I had written, depending on what kind of movie he was working on at the time.

I just received a Facebook message that his funeral has been announced and will occur in a few days. I didn’t even know he was sick. Only that I hadn’t talked to him for awhile. And I’m really sad about that. If there was any consistency in the universe, it was that Tom could brighten your day in a few seconds of a conversation. I don’t really mean to make it about me, but I really needed those moments. And now they’re gone.

Well, at least the San Francisco State University drill team can practice at midnight without the fear of some guy from the dorms scaring them half to death.