Tommy's Stop

This is a true story. Tom, my high school friend and teammate, and I, despite interruptions over the course of forty years, now in our mid-fifties, remain connected to one another. 

We went to Concord High School in Wilmington Delaware, where we also attended the same church, Holy Child, less than a mile from the high school. Tom, even though he played no instrument and his singing was off-key, was also in our church music group, the SIGN of Peace. I was the group’s drummer. SIGN stood for Singing in God's Name. It was started by a guy named Gus, a shipbuilder from Pascagoula Mississippi, but that's a different story for a different time.

Tom and I were pretty inseparable during high school, though a grade apart and not in any of the same classes. Tom was a year ahead of me, but I took more advanced classes. He was not, it turned out, college material, nor even the U.S. Navy’s cup of tea, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

In those years, the demons that would torment us later would not be so visible. When I looked at Tom, I saw strength. Physical strength.  Being runners, we were thin. I was under 130 most of high school, and Tom was stockier, but 150 max — he would drop weight to wrestle at 132 —  yet he could bench 300 pounds.  I struggled to bench press my own weight.

We were better matched on pushups (100 was always the goal) and pull ups (three sets of ten) after a cross-country work out at Brandywine Creek State Park, our home course.

The Creek, as we called it, was also the home course for Salesianum, the all-boys school that had been the perennial winner of cross-country state championships since long before we joined Concord’s team.

In fact, Tom’s senior year, which was the fall of 1985 for the cross-country season, if Salesianum won it, would be their tenth state championship in a row, and their thirteenth in the past sixteen years, which was as old as I was that fall. So basically, they were the dominant champions of my lifetime.

We were a good team, winning the Blue Hen Conference that season, which was our public school league, but winning States was the thing.  We did have some good fortune going into that season: Though we couldn’t recruit, like Sallies did, we did have a new runner, Jim, also a senior, arrive the prior spring. His family moved to Delaware from St. Louis. The Missouri tags were still on his parents’ station wagon, which Jim drove to school.

That entire fall season, Jim, Tom and I would switch off winning any given race in a dual meet. Our team was undefeated, as we had good fourth and fifth runners, too, in Bruce and Bob.

Since we were in different leagues, Concord being public and Salesianum in the Catholic league, we never met them head-to-head. Not until the state championship meet.

The state meet was not at our home course, but it was nearby and familiar. The host was Bellevue State Park, and the course there is less hilly than the Creek. We viewed that as our advantage, as we were pretty good on the track, and tracks are flat. 

But Sallies had depth. There was their star, Tom H., who had the course record at the Creek from the Salesianum Invitational earlier that season (16:09 for 5k), but after him, it was up for grabs.

Unlike football, or even soccer, among boys’ fall sports, cross- country tends not to attract the fans. There is no marching band; there are no stands. It’s kind of a lonely sport in that regard, but then so is the training: Dozens of miles a week on roads and trails. Tom and I had run hundreds of hours together by the time the state meet rolled around. We would have great conversations on  two hour — or longer — runs covering sixteen to 18 miles, after church and before going to Sign of Peace practices, depleted and delirious from the adrenaline coursing through our veins.

To our pleasant surprise, people did show up for the state meet, and not just the reliable gallery of our parents. Teachers, fellow students, and not just the athletes from other sports. Maybe it was because this was the only state championship title where Concord really had a shot. Our football team was 8-8, and even our soccer team, which was generally better, was not in the hunt for a state championship. But we were.

A hundred and five runners, fifteen teams, each seven runners deep, lined up for the race.

It was the end of what had been a long season, and, honestly, I started the race feeling tired. 

After the first mile on the horse track before we went into the woods, I was well behind the leader, who was, as expected, Tom H., and Jim, to my surprise, was well ahead of me, too. I wasn’t going to be the first place finisher on our team that day, that much I knew. 

As I settled into the race in the second mile, the most graceful runner out there, Orlando from Delcastle, a tech school, was in the top three. Salesianum’s second man, Mike, was in fourth, so I resigned myself to fifth place and did my best to hang on. 

While I would have liked to be further ahead, I had to think as I ran, fifth isn’t so bad. First on my team as a sophomore, I was tenth the year before. Mostly, I worried that Sallies’ third man might catch me, and so I just fought the lactic acid, the heartburn and the fatigue as all of them built up within me, and pressed on. 

There was no spring in my step; lead or concrete had filled my shoes. I wasn’t yet running in molasses. I knew what that felt like, too, when your muscles get all tied up, and I was relatively sure I wouldn’t have a lactic acid attack, which happened once my freshman year, and I literally couldn’t finish. No, I would finish this race. 

Once we were out of the woods, we had to cross a parking lot and run past horse stables before finishing, again on the 1-⅛ mile dirt track, and at this point, I was mustering as much of a kick as I could. As I neared the finish line, fifth place fully in focus, I felt someone approaching me from behind,  coming up my right side. I elevated into the next gear. When I saw it was Tom, to my relief, I relaxed, and Tom passed me, finishing fifth. I was sixth. 

Scoring cross country is like golf: The lowest score wins, and the sum of the places of the first five finishers generates the score. Tom H. had finished first with a 15:45, and Jim managed to get second place with a 16:20. Orlando was third with 16:30, and Mike was fourth with 16:35. Tom and I were fifth and sixth with 16:44 and 16:45, the fastest 5k I would ever run. Christiana’s first runner was seventh and Sallies’ third man was eighth.

After the first three finishers on the Concord and Salesianum teams, we were tied! They were first, fourth and eighth, totaling thirteen. We were second, fifth and sixth, also thirteen.

The crowd went wild! I had never heard anything like it at a cross country meet before. Both teams had three finishers in the top eight. It was absolutely unheard of. 

Then things got quiet. At least in my head. I had to find a place to throw up, which was not uncommon for me after races, even though I never ate before a race. But I did drink some liquids for sugar to burn; that day, it was pineapple juice with protein powder, the source of my heartburn I was sure. And once that emptied, it was followed by bile. Tom, by contrast, could eat a pizza before racing. 

As a result of having to upchuck, I didn’t see the next dozen finishers, which included the remaining scorers on each of our teams: Sallies’ fourth and fifth runners were tenth and fifteenth. On our team, Bruce finished twelfth and Bob finished twentieth.

By any standard, both of our teams did exceptionally well. As a freshman, I was 21st, second on our team. We had one guy in the top ten. Five finishers in the top twenty most years would have won the state meet. Five finishers in the top fifteen had never happened before. So, we gave them a run for it, but Sallies won with a score of 38 to our 45. We were the underdogs that year, but we didn’t pull it off, and Salesianum’s dynasty continued.

Tom and Jim graduated the next June, but Tom didn’t leave. Instead, he became our assistant coach for cross-country in the fall, guiding me to a second place finish in the state meet that year. And he assistant coached track as well, where I became the indoor and outdoor state champion at 3200 meters, the metric distance for two miles. 

The summer after my graduation, Tom and I went to Maine as part of a Sign of Peace group trip, and this was the first time it occurred to me that Tom might be mentally ill: He would withdraw from the group and, at a sparsely attended minor league baseball game in Old Orchard Beach, sat by himself at the top of the stands, while the rest of us were in the front row. He may be manic depressive, Gus told me.

Tom came up to my college and was clearly out of place as my friends were much more erudite than he, but I never excluded him. He would do push ups while I did bong hits, having given up running to smoke full time.

Tom also started college, but dropped out after the first semester. I visited him once that fall, and we went to the weekend parties in West Chester. Later, he told me it was the best time he had in college.

I rarely went back home to Delaware after leaving for college. On a Christmas break that I was home, Tom and I visited his dad, Ed, who had become a junk dealer in New Castle. He lived in and vended out of a couple of double wide trailers down the way from the truck stops on Route 13, which we all knew from drives to Rehoboth Beach. Ed chain smoked Camel unfiltered cigarettes. 

A massive man with a prominent brow, Ed had opinions that he shared as generously as his cigarettes, which I decided to smoke after finishing my own pack of Camel lights. 

Before granting us our leave, Ed imparted advice about women, now divorced from his own wife, Tom’s mother. 

“Tommy,” he said, “there are only three types of women. You know that?”

Neither Tom nor I knew this. 

“That’s right, Tommy. There’s witches, bitches and crazy ladies.”

A few years later, Tom and I met at my mom’s house. It was August 1990. Concord had faded for me in a way that it never seemed to for Tom. But on this occasion, he was introducing me to his new bride. Both of us were newlyweds, actually. I had eloped the year before, marrying Linda, my college sweetheart and moved to the Bay Area before returning to Pennsylvania to finish my degree. Tom had knocked up his first lay, I was guessing, and was marrying her before going into the Navy. He was old school for sure.

A few months later, in Philadelphia, he woke Linda and me on a Sunday morning by announcing that he was outside our apartment window. The Med cruise he was on had taken a turn for the Suez Canal at what was the beginning of the first Gulf War. He was agitated, and it was unclear what had happened, but it had to do with a helicopter, another U.S. Navy ship, possibly friendly fire, and at least one fatality. 

Tom told us he had been medically discharged, and in the coming years, he would become a ward of the VA, sometimes inpatient at their mental hospital in Coatesville, and otherwise an employee of various fast food restaurants, to supplement his SSI disability check. 

We both ended up fathering four children before separating from our wives. We grew apart during that time. My family certainly knew Tom, but he tended not to wear well.  In fact, he had a way of becoming unwelcome by vocally sharing opinions, such as the virtues of having children and, related, the immorality of abortion. Even people who agree do not typically find that decorous dinner conversation, and, needless to say, not everyone agreed. 

Decades passed, and a couple of years after my wife and I separated, I got the news that Tom’s son Jeremy had been killed in a car crash at the age of twenty-three. I was leaving for London on business and unable to attend the funeral, so I met Tom when I got back. We met at Bellevue State Park. 

I had never met Jeremy. In fact, I had only ever met Tom’s wife twice and saw his first child, Cindy, when she was a toddler. 

Tom introduced me to Jeremy by handing me a laminated copy of the obituary, one of many he had made. 

We walked the horse track and both tried not to cry for the benefit of the other. We had gained weight, over a hundred pounds between us, and neither of us had the physical strength, endurance or fitness that we did the day we ran that memorable state championship meet. Walking was the order of the day, and, as Tom put it, driving had become the new running.  It was true for both of us.

A few years after that, Tom’s mother passed. I made a point of attending that funeral, especially given my inability to be at Jeremy’s, and it was clear that Tom had become persona non grata within his own family. 

He had never left Delaware, and still would frequent Concord sporting events until becoming ostracized from that venue as well, an incident that involved the cops arriving to escort him off property and the implementation of a restraining order. 

After Jeremy’s untimely death, Tom would call me regularly, sometimes daily, and when I was in town, he would drive up to my bachelor pad, occasionally joining me and my sons for dinner.

I had been humbled in my own life: Divorce and entrepreneurship can feel like a path to poverty when the double-edged sword cuts against you. 

So when Tom would call, I would talk to him. 

When my mom had a traumatic brain injury and I was doing drugs in parking lots to cope, Tom’s call would feel like a gift from God. It somehow legitimized my sitting in the parking lot: I wasn’t there just to do drugs. No, I was having a conversation like anyone else might; I just happened to be doing drugs at the same time. Discreetly, mind you.

When Tom would tell me about his thirty-thousand dollars in credit card debt, I could easily empathize and commiserate with him. My balances were greater by a factor of ten, as I tried to keep my business afloat. Sure, my access to resources was greater, but the number of mouths I had to feed, not just my own family, but employees, too, was commensurately greater as well. 

When Tom and I ran track in high school, one of our teammates, Chris, used to talk about “the short bus.” It was the bus that had the mentally disabled kids on it. At the time, we would say “retards.” 

The bus driver would say whose stop was coming up next. In Chris’ telling of the story, the driver would say, “Tommy’s stop!”  And then the hypothetical student and passenger, Tommy, would repeat it obsessively, and we would imitate him in a deep guttural utterance of the phrase, “Tommy’s stop, Tommy’s stop,” to our collective jocular delight. I guess it was a sort of meme, in today’s parlance. 

Tom did not ride that bus. He was one of us.  And he can call me and tell me about “Tommy’s stop,” and about the state meet against Sallies’ where, in his mind, we were winners after all, and about “witches, bitches and crazy ladies,” and about the homeless people he takes in, which invariably end up having to leave after two days, two weeks or two months. I listen to him, because I know what he is talking about. When he says he’s going to visit Jeremy, I know what he means about that too. That is, after all, Tommy’s stop.

THE END