Tommy the Teen

This lovely young man was my bass player way back in the halcyon days of "The Tradesmen."

Tommy McBride, my bass player and a junior in high school, had responded to an ad I’d placed on Craigslist when he was seventeen and I was twenty-seven. This was what stuck in people’s minds most whenever we played, the fact that I had a very young bassist, who looked closer to twelve than seventeen. He had white freckled skin and a baby-fat belly. He wore Diesel jeans and T-shirts with the names of bands I hadn’t heard of, probably because I was too old. His standout feature was his hair—an orange out of a crayon box, a blinding copper that would be a liability to most, but for Tommy was just another instrument for him to play. He whipped it around to the stops and starts of our songs, twirling it like a whammy bar, refracting and tearing the beams of the lights until a blood-red sheen covered the stage. He remained in the band through all eight drummers.

He came from loads of money, went to a fancy prep school, and spoke five languages—one of them was French, and three were either dead or extremely marginalized. At the time of our first rehearsal he was studying for his Ancient Greek final. At lunch he spoke a whole sentence in Welsh. When he stood, he usually put one hand on his belly and one arm over his head, as if luxuriating in the contours of his youth. I called this his rock star pose.

Money and growing up in New York City had made him mature beyond his years. His parents let him stay out all night, take trips with his girlfriend to Venezuela, and chip in the same amount of money I did to keep the band going. He was a good musician, an energetic player, and rarely flunked out on rehearsals. For long stretches, when drummers disappeared and we had to endure endless rounds of replacement auditions, it was Tommy and I against the world – two unlikely partners working their fingers to bloody stubs, playing chunky riffs for days on end and talking about girls.

We shared a complicated relationship, a unique camaraderie based on our love for the early Who, The Wedding Present, and The Jam, as well as the fact that he was seventeen and I wanted to be seventeen. I instantly wanted him to like me. His youth was glaring and garish, and in many ways unbearable, but it was contagious. I wanted to go out with Tommy, get drunk with him, meet his friends, be his study partner for the PSAT’s. I wanted to be immature and silly; give him noogies and friendly jabs in the arm. My teen years had been extremely guarded, while his seemed open to a wealth of possibilities. Mr. and Mrs. McBride sent their boy to Collegiate School, an elite prep academy on the Upper West Side, what I thought of as Manhattan's Eton. “I’m one of three non-Jews in the whole school,” he would often say - usually in an effort to bridge some of the enormous gaps in our cultures. He wanted me to know that virtually all of his friends were Jewish. I believed him, and wished in great despair that the Jewish stereotype of wealth and educational pedigree had graced my family as it had Tommy and his entire Semitic circle. Tommy’s pals and girlfriends were all privileged Jews and occasional Asian-Americans—his closest friend’s father owned the distribution company that handled Roca Wear apparel. Until recently they had played in a punk band together called Naked Osprey.

The problem was that, for all of his devotion to the band, and the sheer bravery he showed in the face of the pressures of being a high school junior, I couldn’t help being bitter toward Tommy. He was the first rich kid I’d ever known, and my resentment was a natural reaction, based largely on the fact that, should the band fall on its face, his life would probably turn out all right. Mine, I feared, would not—such was the weight I had attached to the band, an organization that represented my third career change. Tommy could be in fourteen more bands and a chamber orchestra before deciding he wanted to be a marine biologist, then a film director, then a chairman of something. There was no need for him to assume the bassist position in my band for any reason other than a summer thrill, while I, a man inching steadily closer to that unspoken self-destruct date known to every unsuccessful young musician, was treating The Tradesmen as a matter of life and death.

There were other levels of bitterness, less unfair; grievances having more to do with Tommy himself than the life and time he was born to. I’d never met anyone who thought it a good idea to use the word “antediluvian” in conversation. “My uncle has an antediluvian Gibson amp I can use. He says it works flawlessly.” He was also a big fan of “absurdly,” “laughable,” and “existentialist.” I had developed a natural sympathy and compatibility with scholastic nerds, having been one myself and having been bullied consistently for it. However, Tommy’s use of language changed all that. For the first time in my life I wanted to take someone smaller, weaker, and eight grades below me, and kick the crap out of them.

No phone interaction between us ever lasted longer than thirty seconds. He would end each transmission with, “I gotta run, my history teacher’s taking me out for coffee,” or “I gotta run, I’m picking up my brother from the Sleater-Kinney show in D.C.” (His older brother.) I was bruised by his brush-offs, but always impressed at the amount of stuff he had going on. He was on the debate team. He was in the jazz band at school and had been recognized as the best upright bass player in the state (high school division.) He tutored the underprivileged in his spare time. That was exactly how he phrased it. “I’ve gotta run. I’m tutoring the underprivileged.”

He had the lamest, most grating sense of humor I’d ever come across in a man under fifty, and he often chose to repeat and amplify his jokes into a microphone while we were on stage. “We’d like to thank Mercury Lounge for their really big stage. It’s lots of room for us to do nothing on. (pause.) Cue laugh track please.” “This next song’s about a girl named Lauren who Eli used to have sex with. (Pause. To me.) What? It is!” And the crowned prince: “Hey thanks for singing along, Eli’s ex-neighbor-slash-girl-he-dated…”

It was all I could do to keep from pushing him off the stage with the broad end of my guitar. Instead I learned to play noisy song intros every time he opened his mouth. I knew he meant no harm, even though the things he said made us seem like a guest act from of the first season of Hee Haw and sent what little crowd there was careening toward the rear of the dance hall. Like any younger person, Tommy just wanted to be one of the guys, and to him that meant commenting on everything he saw, heard, smelled, sensed, or thought about. He once tried to engage me in what he deemed an important debate over ribbed or unribbed condoms. I abstained from answering. I learned early on that as much as I wanted to be his big brother—offer man-to-man advice, buy him his first martini, beat him at basketball—it was a role I could not play. There was nothing I could advise him on or help him with. He had been to scores of places I’d only read about. I was penniless, while he somehow had a Gold card. He knew people. I only knew him. If anyone was going to bail someone out of a jam, it would be Tommy, not me. He was my big brother. And while I still harbored brotherly affection for him, I was too busy thinking about nipple-twisting him into oblivion to acknowledge it. He was always on the top bunk, and somehow I believed I deserved it more.

When the inspiration to blanket the town in posters took hold of me, I drafted Tommy’s help with the grunt work, something he’d been remiss in doing since we’d joined forces, what with spring finals falling right in the middle of sweet sixteen season. To this point I’d handed out all the flyers, made all the ads, hunted down all the drummers. And while putting up signage was necessary labor that any band member should have been expected to do, I still took a certain undue elation in bossing him around. It was the last time someone like me would. Tommy was now beginning to tour the Ivy Leagues, running up and down the East Coast scouting the perfect place to get his degree in “Linguistics and French.” Before he broke away, I would detain him, forcibly if need be, to sweat under the summer sun for the good of my band. Before you ponce off to Harvard to begin analyzing irregular verb endings, my boy, you are going to attach hand-written posters to telephone poles with Scotch tape. The band will be able to say it hit its marketing quota, and you will be able to say you mucked in with the underprivileged to promote your scrappy punk group. This in turn will gain you street cred, something your Riverdale Country School comrades will envy more than your Audi A4.

It was I, of course, that was about to receive the sternest lesson in humility.