Tommy Walnuts (2008)

I don’t know how many times I trudged up that hill with his lunch. Mother said he was kind to us when we needed it, so we need to look after him now that’s he’s alone. Me, I just do what I’m told.

I didn’t know what to call him. He looked even older than he was, and he was nothing and nobody to me. He sensed it. He seemed to know everything although he never went out.

“Everyone calls me Tommy Walnuts.”

OK, then. I’d sit in the milky sunshine next to the cobwebby window and watch him eat, while the cats – his cats?- the cats did figure eights through his legs. In all the time I was ever there I never saw him show the slightest interest in those creatures, but they hung by him like he was their mother. It was like he was the sun they orbited.

He never spoke while he ate. He’d murmur or grunt if you asked him a question, but shoot you a sort of withering look that made you refrain from asking another. When he was done, he’d take out a tin of tobacco and make himself a cigarette, and he’d smoke and he’d turn his eye towards yours, and it was like a signal that you could ask him something. He never asked me anything, except: How is your mother?

I can’t explain what that man knew, because he seemed to know everything. I’d go to school and the nuns would try to pound the numbers and the words and some sense into my head. It took a lot of hammering; at least at first. But then I had a mission. I wanted to ask this man something he did not know. I’d read at recess and at home and I’d sit in the library like a girl and scan the pages looking for the thing Tommy Walnuts would not know. I couldn’t find it.

How long is the Great Wall of China? How do you calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle? Who was the third vice-president of the United States? Did you know the Titanic had a sister ship?

“Two,” he said, and send me home to scour the shelves again.

One day he looked rough. He always looked old and beat, but he seemed sick. He coughed a lot when he smoked.

“Are you all right?”

“I am always the same. Makes no difference. Ask your questions.”

“How did you end up all alone here?”

He took a long drag on the cigarette. He looked around the empty room like a man on a stage surveying the audience before delivering his line. It was the first time he had ever even paused before answering me. I heard the clock tick, and the soft indistinct sound of a cat purring under his chair. A car sizzled past on the wet pavement outside.

He looked at me differently than before. I was sorry I had asked that. I’d gone too far. I was losing so I upset the board.

“I’m not alone. You are here.”

Tommy Walnuts knew everything.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

I’m working except when I’m sleeping. So you get more YouTube videos of people I’ve performed with at one time or another. At least the ones I can recall. People approach me from time to time and start talking about what a blast they had at such and such a venue for so and so’s fete or whosamajiggy’s convention, and I have no idea what they are talking about. I cashed the check and moved on. Glad you had fun, though.

I remember vaguely a night at least twenty years ago where some R&B combo I was in with too many members and not enough musicians played at a place called The Channel in Boston. It was a great big cave of a joint. I have no idea if it’s still there. We started the show, I think, and then we played with the headliner, John Lee Hooker. I had an elderly aquaintance hear about my job and inquire whether they might be related to Mr Hooker, as that was their maiden name. She was a descendant of Joe Hooker, the Civil War general. I said I didn’t think they were related but I’d be sure to give Mr. Hooker her best. I lied about the last part.

I remember the act that played on the undercard. The Joe Perry Project. Aerosmith got tired of money for a little while in the eighties and made little individual messes like this for a short time, until they got tired of no money.  Aerosmith used to play in my high school gym. I’ve sunk pretty low, musically, but at least I never played in the high school gym for the likes of… well, me.

For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the band I was in, or the names of any of the other musicians in it. The Dialtones? the Superfonics? ‘Nuff Said? Jay Murphy? No clue. I’d play with anybody at that point. I do remember that the Channel had sidefill stage monitors, which are big stacks of PA speakers in the wings of the stage, instead of just those wedge shaped floor speakers you are used to seeing in front of musicians.

I remember them, because the BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM coming out of them at flight deck level makes my ears ring to this very day.