The Story of Tom and Monica:
a San Francisco Serial Memoir

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I’ll write it as it comes, stop when I have to, continue when I can. There’s so much that Tom can’t remember anymore — he’s had an incredibly rich life, much of it before I ever entered the scene.

When I met Tom he invited me into a part of San Francisco that I’d only observed from the edges. To me, he was bigger than life. He was such a character for someone that young — always in motion, always rushing to the center of action, sharp, goofy, funny, brilliant, thoughtless and unaware of himself in a way I found so endearing, so maddening.

There was nobody like him. He didn’t try to dress like anybody else and he didn’t try to talk or act like anybody else. Tom was his own creation, bombing around San Francisco on his old green 10-speed bicycle in cowboy boots and a black wide-brim hat with a backpack that might carry a copy of Naked Lunch and a mason-jar mango martini (yeah, that was a whole lot of years before mason jars for booze were the hip thing) and definitely a bunch of handbills for his next production. He’d stop anyone he liked the look of, no matter how unlikely it was that they would show up for his concert series, he was so convinced that everybody should go, that anybody would love it. His hair was long and shaggy and he wore big round glasses. Cool wasn’t really something Tom understood or could have achieved if he tried. He was an intellectual fan-boy, an outsider on the inside. He revered rock and counter-culture and knew a whole lot about it. Around his neck he always wore his nikon camera which added a sort of an old codger look to his “style”.

Tom was the quintessential Peter-Pan-man-boy with an unwillingness to accept the hard facts of adulthood. That was such a huge part of his charm — women were drawn to him despite their better judgment and men secretly envied his stubborn determination to stand that ground. That Tom has faded away, his brain attacked by a degenerative disease that has hacked away at his memories and slowed down his thinking tremendously. Now he is a different kind of man-child…it’s as if he back-peddled that old green bike all the way back to childhood: still charming, still clowning, but the burning passion, the uncatchable, rapid-fire intellect, those are gone now.

Part 1
Today I started packing his shirts. I don’t think he’ll be wearing most of these anymore, but I’m picking out a few to take to his studio. If it has a Bob Dylan button pinned on the collar, or the John Lennon “Spaniard in the works” button on a pocket; if his ex-girlfriend, Dida, made it or if I brought it back to him from Spain one year, those shirts will be in the keep pile and I’ll drive them over to his little studio and see if we can fit them in his closet-crammed-with-negatives-and-prints. He hates to change his clothes now, but he hates to throw anything away even more. Luckily if he doesn’t see it he won’t remember it anyway.

We met in 1997 — I was an insecure singer-songwriter and he was a rock photographer curating the best concert series in San Francisco called the San Francisco Song Cycle. I showed up alone at the Transmission Theater on 11th Street to hear my friend Alice Bierhorst who was on the bill with Bobby Neuwirth, Chris Cacavas, Chris Von Sneidern and John Wesley Harding.

I’d never seen Tom before. I remember he had this funny, awkward grace when he walked/ran onto the stage to start the show. He spoke way too loudly into the microphone and had a deck of cards in his hand that he made the musicians draw from to determine who went first. (I didn’t know about his obsession with John Cage and Cage’s ideas on chance and indeterminacy back then. I probably didn’t even know who John Cage was before I met Tom).

Months before I had decided that I wouldn’t date anyone for a while, that I was terrible at choosing men and I had to give the whole thing a rest. But when I saw Tom up there, I thought, ‘there’s a guy I might like to know. He makes me laugh, he’s cute.

Continue on to parts 2 and 3 here: https://medium.com/@monicapasqual/the-story-of-tom-and-monica-a-san-francisco-serial-memoir-parts-2-3-a88565a57024

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