Tom Voss

The jetliner that fell into North Park that September brought with it the beginning of Tom's ill fortunes.

It was a matter of only one weekend, or perhaps only one sunset, and Tom knew that he wanted to move to San Diego. He had been living in Los Angeles and was down visiting friends for a short weekend in the Bird Rock area of La Jolla. An afternoon jog took him to La Jolla Cove at sunset. Tom never forgot a detail of that sunset. It was a clear, crisp winter day with just enough clouds and pollutants in the air to produce a magnificent, fiery sky. The sun was a huge bright ball, and as it slipped below the horizon, there was a pause and then the small crowd of lovers, romantics, elderly people, and tourists broke into spontaneous applause. Tom was moved. He jogged back to Bird Rock lighthearted and content. In Los Angeles after the weekend, he talked of nothing but San Diego. Within three weeks he had moved down.

Los Angeles had not been for Tom. He had grown up in New Jersey, and after the initial awe of the California beaches, the blondes, and the general lifestyle, he began to grow uneasy. He had the feeling that L.A., with the jammed freeways, the smog, the hustle of the upwardly mobile, and the crime, was merely New Jersey all over again, albeit with a larger contingent of displaced persons, and better weather.

Tom grew up in a well-to-do family and therein, it seemed, lay the roots of his restlessness. Never having had to earn anything for himself, never having been a newspaper boy or having to hold down a summer job or mow lawns for spending money, he found himself in possession of much (a motorcycle, a car, sports equipment, an expensive stereo), and none of it was really his. He had not worked for a penny of the money that paid for literally everything he had. Later, when Tom and I worked together in San Diego, he would ask me over and over again to tell him about the myriad odd jobs I'd held from age fifteen on, putting myself through college eventually. He listened with what was unmistakably a look of envy.

College was, of course, what Tom's parents had in mind for him. But when the time came, Tom was unsure if he even wanted to go at all, let alone what subject he might study. But he went. He struggled through a year at a small college in upstate New York. A semester into his second year he was academically suspended. Back home he fought with his parents and loafed around the house. The next year he tried junior college near home and it seemed for a time that he would turn things around. But in the next session he failed all his courses. The situation at his parents’ was getting worse and so Tom moved out and found construction work. A year later he was ready to try school again. He quit his job, moved back home, and re-enrolled in the junior college. He never finished the semester. After being kicked out of the house once, accepted back, and then leaving once of his own accord, Tom and an old high school friend left for Los Angeles in the fall of 1977. At about the time he was becoming disillusioned with L.A., he discovered San Diego and its sunsets.

Tom moved into a house in North Park, near University Avenue and Interstate 805, with three people who knew his friends in La Jolla. At once, he was right at home, falling in with a group of people much like himself, people from broken (or at least cracked) homes, jilted lovers, wanderers, dreamers. He found work on the night shift in the warehouse of Ektelon, a sporting goods manufacturer in Kearny Mesa. His days were spent at the beach, surfing, or at the zoo, where he could spend hours on end in the hummingbird cage watching those tiny creatures in their flight. It was something that never ceased to thrill him, something he once described to me as the only thing he knew that was both still-life and motion in the same instant. He went to the museums in Balboa Park frequently, attended any festival or special event that came along. On weekends he took his motorcycle out to the Laguna or Cuyamaca mountains or to the desert. He was constantly in motion, like those hummingbirds he loved so much, seeing and doing all that his adopted city had to offer. Girls who went out with him were never bored. His job paid rent and expenses and left him a little to play with. There were parties. Life was easy.

In the summer of 1978 I came to San Diego, displaced in my own right. I wound up working in the Ektelon warehouse with Tom. We became friends and in the hours we spent talking as we stood across from each other and packed boxes, I came to see the complexity of what on the outside seemed to be a simple sort of person. Socially I saw Tom from time to time. I didn’t mix well with his friends and roommates, who were heavy drug users (Tom was a frequent but not maniacal indulger), and after meeting them once or twice, I generally avoided them. Tom met a girl and began seeing her steadily.

The jetliner that fell into North Park that September brought with it the beginning of Tom's ill fortunes. The crash shook him. He lived relatively close to the scene, and for days he was visibly upset, claiming for a week afterward that he could still smell the burned human bodies when he sat in his room. He arrived at work one afternoon unusually angry over a minor traffic ticket. The next night he was arrested for drunk driving. In the next few months, things at the house turned sour. One of Tom’s roommates dealt cocaine. There were late-night visits from strange characters and a few possessions missing from Tom’s room. The police showed up one night and searched the place. They found nothing, but Tom felt trouble imminent. There were hassles with the neighbors and more police. Tom decided to move out. Curiously, instead of his roommates, he blamed North Park for his recent bad luck; he said he’d never move back there.

Tom and Tina, his steady girl, found a small apartment in the Hillcrest area. It stood directly in the landing path of Lindbergh Field. When a jet came in, all conversation had to stop. The planes were right over your head; outside you could look up and see the pilots' faces. I visited Tom and Tina there often. On warm nights we would sit on the street corner with cold beer and watch the jets swoop over our heads and land, and then seconds later the vortex of air that followed in their wake would swirl around us like some supernatural cyclone.

But things went no better for Tom after the move to Hillcrest. Despite the love he lavished on San Diego, the soul of the city, that intangible element in a place that dictates which individuals will be able to survive there, would not accept him. He involved himself in the city with a zeal he had shown for nothing else in his life. He followed local politics right down to the community level, and worked in it. He became involved in the growing movement to keep the Navy hospital out of Balboa Park. He collected for United Way charities in his neighborhood. Tom couldn't see how anyone could live anywhere else. He had found his niche, or so he wanted to believe.

His relationship with Tina was a roller coaster. Tina was from the Midwest. She had clean, farmer's daughter good looks and an attractive, vibrant attitude. She was also very mixed up. In the face of her independence from family and Midwestern values, her freedom and the hedonistic way of life she found in California left her baffled. One moment she would tell Tom he was the only one for her. A day later she thought it was a good idea if they began to see other people. Tom was continually off balance with her.

The crowd that gathered at Tom's apartment created problems as well. Among them was a group of gays — not the educated, cultured sector, but the less wholesome leather and lace pack. They knew Tom always had beer in the refrigerator and marijuana in his bedroom, and he was generous with both. There was a strange couple from next door — he just out of the Navy, with short hair and a new earring, about five-foot-two, insecure, and with a tendency to violence; and she a five-ten brunette, good-looking in a sullen, hard way, and always scantily clad.

Not long after Tom moved in, his car was vandalized; several hundred dollars and both his surfboards were stolen. He was oddly silent about the affair, refusing to call the police, telling me he knew who did it and that he would get the boards back, and then doing nothing. Tom's gay friends began coming around when Tom wasn't home. Once he found them there drinking his beer, playing the stereo, and Tina was not home. They said the door had been open. Once or twice Tina thought she was missing money. Weeks later Tom and Tina spent a weekend in the desert. When they returned Sunday night, they found the apartment ransacked, Tom's stereo gone and several other items also missing.

Relations with Tina grew worse. She spoke of moving out. Tom and I were talking it over one night at work when there was an emergency call for him. Tina had been working at a little sandwich place on India Street, south of Washington. Three black guys came in and one pulled a gun. While he held it against her skull and the second rifled the cash register, the third guy jumped up and down, madly screaming, “Kill her! Kill her!” After that night, Tina became unreachable. She quit the job and locked herself away in the apartment. When she did speak, and it was rarely, her conversation was distracted and often just rambled. Tom told me she was “going off the deep end,” fast. On top of that, Tina told Tom she now feared she was pregnant. It was late spring and Tina decided she was going to move back to her parents’ home. She and Tom argued, and her last words to him were that she would call him on Father’s Day to let him know if he was going to be a father. Tina left and Tom never heard from her again.

With summer came the coup de grace. Tom moved out of the apartment after Tina left, to a rooming house close to University Avenue in upper Hillcrest. It was dirty and depressing. There were drunks, midnight fights, a knifing. Tom was miserable there, but it now seemed that he was caught up in a downward spiral and he would do nothing to get out. I offered him a couch at my place until he could find something better. He refused. At work he was alienated. His gay friends had come by a few times and there were suspicions, especially after Tina left, that Tom was gay or at least bisexual. A couple of small minds made it uncomfortable for him. Aside from the snide remarks and comments about that, there was Tom’s mood, which was now persistently depressed. Even the people who liked him and ignored any rumors began to avoid him. He spent his free time now in a small Hillcrest bar. In July he was arrested for drunk driving on his motorcycle. At the end of July he quit work, saying he'd had enough. It was a bad time to be out of work. In the couple of years that had passed since his arrival in San Diego, the employment picture had become substantially more bleak. But as I talked to him, I got the feeling he didn't care about work.

In early August I was awakened by the phone at about five o’clock one morning. Tom was in jail. He’d been arrested at the rooming house. There had been a quarrel between a female neighbor and one of her many lovers. A gun was involved. Tom, however, had been there as a peacemaker, and when things were clear he was released and not charged. I went to pick him up. We drove to Pacific Beach to talk.

“I’ve got to leave,” Tom said. “I don’t know why but I’m not making it in this city. It’ll probably kill me if I stay.” There were tears in his eyes.

He stayed with me for a week, sold his car, and flew back to New Jersey. I sold his cycle for him and sent him the money along with a letter. I got a short note back saying he was okay and considering school again in January. I wrote to him again around Christmas but got no reply. A few months later I wrote again, and again I received no answer. I called once but no one was home. I haven’t heard from him since.