EndInsight

Catching Up With Tom
by Jim Welp

When I was a little boy, I had an imaginary fri/files/storyimages/named Tom. Having the advantage of imaginariness, Tom took many forms. Sometimes he resembled Jack Kennedy, our nation’s sexiest president. At other times he resembled Santa Claus, St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson or TV sing-a-long man Mitch Miller.

I thought about Tom recently during a moment of boredom. The boredom took me back to the languorous days of childhood, when imagination could make anything possible. It made me want to weep for today’s kids, who’ve had imagination robbed from them by zillion-channel TV, instant messaging, video games, steroids, Photoshop, Crest Whitestrips and cosmetic surgery.

Of course, the only problem with boredom is that it’s boring. So I summoned old Tom. It turns out he still lives in my hometown, where he works part-time as an imaginary companion to an Alzheimer’s patient in the local nursing home, Irritable Corridors.

It was great seeing him again after all these years. He was fit and charming but slightly wizened, sort of like Steve Martin if Steve Martin had Neil Young’s unhinged eyes. We caught up and exchanged a bit of good-natured ribbing. He said he always knew I’d turn out to be a liberal because I wet the bed and sucked my thumb well past the age when such behavior is socially acceptable. I reminded him that with a blink of my eyes, he could sp/files/storyimages/the rest of his life working for social justice and listening to NPR. God, it was just like old times.

So much had happened since we last spoke. Tom told me he’d traveled the country, earning money performing the role of Henry David Thoreau in a musical version of On Civil Disobedience. When the company closed its tour in Washington, D.C., he hired on with the CIA as an undercover spy, which was easy for him because he’s invisible to everybody except me.

He also penned a marginally successful novel — a science-fiction morality play about an everyman named Jim who overcomes his youthful bedwetting and thumb-sucking to become the world’s first liberal commodities baron, speculating in the lucrative nonpareil and ganache markets of the 1980s. (Perhaps you’ve read it — Candyass Capitalist?) A famous Hollywood producer recovering from conscience-transplant surgery optioned the movie rights but the project never got off the ground because the producer died when his body rejected the new scruples.

Despite the setback, the movie rights paid handsomely and Tom soon found himself awash in luxury-priced sobriety alternatives. Once, during a vision quest on a mountaintop sweat lodge in the Sierra Madres, he imbibed a big gulp of liquid mescaline and spent the next 72 hours rapping with Kierkegaard and Lao-tzu over the challenge of reconciliation in the nuclear age, only to come down from the buzz and discover that both philosophers had merely been his own knees. Crawling out of the fetal position, he henceforth restricted his inebriation to single-malt Scotch, the occasional sake bong and the historical fiction of Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich led him right to neoconservative politics, but he found its tenets too greed-centric and bigoted, so he returned to his first philosophical grounding, transcendental feudalism. This led him naturally to Wal-Mart, where he invented the profession of Extreme Greeter. As usual, Tom was ahead of his time: Wal-Mart dismissed him for practicing creativity on company time and summarily dismissed him, but not before giving him a going-away gift of a Remington 30-aught-6 semiautomatic rifle, which apparently in America is given to all workers who can’t hold down a job at Wal-Mart. Being familiar with Chekhov’s famous rule that if you introduce a gun into a story you must fire it, Tom immediately unloaded the Remington into the bowels of an annoying co-worker, who was — praise the Lord — also imaginary.

Down on his luck and unemployed, Tom turned to religion — a sect of Morey Amsterdam worshippers who interpreted the Dick Van Dyke Show literally — and in no time Tom was back on his feet, making obscure Yiddish wisecracks and writing for TV.

At this point in his recounted story, Tom glanced at his watch and said, “Listen, I hate to run, but I’m Keith Richards’ imaginary fri/files/storyimages/for the Stones’ North American tour and I’ve got to get back. But it’s been great seeing you. You were always my favorite imaginary friend.”

“Me?” I said. “You’re the imaginary one! Hey come back here!…”

Illustration by Michael Dwayne