My former roommate and friend, Tom Landry, died yesterday.
He was 57 years old.
I met Tom while working at the McDonald’s in Milford, Massachusetts, in 1987. I was a junior in high school, and he was a senior. We had little in common except for the music we listened to and the burgers we flipped, but Tom was uncommonly sweet and kind for a teenage boy. He possessed a blend of innocence and wisdom that I found deeply appealing.
Tom, Bengi, and I moved into a townhouse in Crystal Village in 1989 after I had graduated high school and had nowhere to live, and Bengi had decided that living in college dorms was not for him.
To make the place work financially, we invited Tom to join us. By then, he was still living with his parents, working in a warehouse, and probably making more money than both of us. Bengi and I shared a bedroom, and Tom had the other to himself. We decorated the walls with posters of heavy metal bands, supermodels, and Bart Simpson. Soon, Bengi and Tom bought hamsters and began building a series of tubes that extended from one room to another.
We called our home The Heavy Metal Playhouse, and that name stuck. Our friends, the strangers who became our friends, and the strangers who remained strangers spent enormous amounts of time in our home, drinking beer, watching movies, playing video games, and engaging in seemingly important but probably stupid conversations about life that people of a certain age seem to love.
It was a glorious time.
Tom remained our roommate for about eight months. He may have been sweet and wise, but Tom was not the neatest roommate. He left messes in the kitchen. Dripped toothpaste onto the sink and left it behind like tiny art projects. Considered every room a place for him to leave his clothing.
I still loved him, but he made me a little crazy.
Then Tom purchased mice, and things took a turn for the worse. For reasons we never understood, his mice would not remain in their cage, so we would find them wandering our home. They also smelled. The combination of Tom failing to clean their cage and the fact that they were mice made the smell inevitable.
The hamster probably smelled just as badly, but it was locked in plastic boxes and tubes, whereas the mice were kept in an open, wire cage.
Also, Bengi cleaned the hamster cages regularly.
Tom’s roommate status came to an end when two things happened simultaneously:
- Tom lost his job, and within a month, he couldn’t make rent.
- The mice began keeping Tom awake at night, so Bengi and I arrived home late one night to find Bengi’s computer chair in the hallway with the mice’s cage sitting atop it. The mice were busy eating the chair through their wire cage.
The lack of rent, plus the mice, was enough to send Tom packing.
Asking Tom to leave was Bengi’s job, and he did so brilliantly. He explained, in the gentlest of terms, that the longer he stayed in The Heavy Metal Playhouse, the more debt he would accumulate, when a perfectly good bedroom was waiting for him half an hour north in his parents’ home in Milford.
We assured Tom that he could always come back once he got another job and saved up some money, and we told Tom that he could hang out in our place whenever he wanted, just like the many friends and strangers whom we often found sleeping on couches, eating our food, and watching our TV.
Tom left the next day. We helped him pack and load his things into his boxy, white car.
Tom came back from time to time, but not as often as I thought and hoped he would. I think it was hard for him to come back to The Heavy Metal Playhouse after having been an integral part of it.
I worry I might feel the same when I visit the school where I taught for 27 years for the first time:
Do I belong here?
Do they even want me here?
Have they all moved on and forgotten me?
Tom Landry and I were friends in the early 1990s, when cell phones and email did not exist, so when I moved out of The Heavy Metal Playhouse after Bengi landed a job in Connecticut and I became homeless for a time before landing on my feet in a pantry that I shared with a goat, I lost track of Tom.
Absent phones and email, it was hard to stay in touch wth anybody.
When Facebook arrived, I quickly reconnected with many of the former Heavy Metal Playhouse friends whom I hadn’t managed to stay connected to in the years between, but I could not find Tom. Sharing a name with one of the most famous NFL coaches of all time didn’t help the search, but Tom was also never the most social person. He was shy and unassuming. He waited for you to reach out and rarely made the first move.
I can see him avoiding social media, thinking, “Why would anyone want to find me?”
Tom was living in Maryland when he died. I only know this because the brother of a former Heavy Metal Playhouse friend remained in touch with Tom through the years. I don’t know what Tom was doing with his life at the time of his passing, or in the intervening years between our time together and his death, but I hope he had a happy life.
He certainly died far too soon.
For over a decade, I had made it a goal to host a Heavy Metal Playhouse reunion. My first idea was to return to Crystal Village and host something in their main building, but when I inquired, the owners of the complex said they didn’t have a room for anything like that. I looked into function halls nearby but realized that so many of us are scattered across the country now.
Asking someone to travel from Santa Fe for an evening of reminiscing would be a lot.
Then Zoom became as ubiquitous as cell phones and email, so I tried to organize something a few years ago before getting pneumonia and canceling.
I’ve done nothing since.
I have a list of people I intend to invite, and hopefully, I can still find most of them. I looked at it yesterday. Tom’s name is second on that list, right below Bengi, because Tom, Bengi, and I started out together. We are the founders of The Heavy Metal Playhouse.
For a time, Tom was like family to me.
I loved him.
I placed the cursor behind his name last night and placed my finger on the Delete button, but I could not bring myself to depress the key.
Tom has passed away, but he will remain on that list of friends who, more than 30 years ago, were just emerging into adulthood and would gather on hand-me-down couches and beat-up chairs to drink beer, eat cookies, and watch “The Simpsons” and “Melrose Place” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” for the one thousandth time.
We gathered in a place that we affectionately came to know as The Heavy Metal Playhouse and imagined what our seemingly meager futures might one day amount to. We hoped and dreamed and wished for days at least as brilliant and joyous and fun as those days we were spending together, poor, sometimes hungry, sometimes cold, but almost always happy.
I have a notebook that Bengi, Tom, and I kept back then. It served as a communication journal in a time before text messaging and email. I have dozens and dozens of notes from Tom to Bengi and me, written in a tight, hard script.
Words written by a boy who was becoming a man who is no longer with us.
I have treasured that notebook since Bengi passed it onto me a year ago.
I will treasure it more now.
I have many photos of Tom from our time together, but my favorite is the photo of Bengi and Tom visiting me on Christmas Day following my near-fatal car accident.
Tom is in the foreground, looking unassuming, and Bengi is in the back, giving bunny ears to Santa.
We hadn’t moved in together yet in this photo. The Heavy Metal Playhouse is still months away from becoming a reality. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were on the cusp of making new friends, finding romance, hosting riotous parties, and learning to live for the first time as independent people.
About seven months after the accident that nearly took my life, we would move into 3 Commonwealth Avenue in Attleboro, Connecticut, Townhouse #2, and begin our adventure, but in this photo, we are simply friends.
Not yet roommates.
This is how I will remember Tom Landry:
A quiet, gentle, soulful young man who gave up a part of his Christmas Day to visit a friend who was feeling so very alone. Tom was a boy I loved, and I wish we had remained friends for all of my life.
I had not seen Tom in more than 30 years, but I still loved him.
Rest in peace, Tom.
