Back when I still thought I could be something, I took a night class up at Topine Community College with this guy who believed he was Thomas Jefferson reincarnated.
His real name was Chris something, but he made everyone call him Tom J. I had just started on my associate’s in electrical engineering at this point, and each night before our professor shambled through the door and started lecturing about transistors and electromagnetism, Tom J. would pace the front of the room and talk about his extraordinary life. One week he would tell us how he founded the University of Virginia, and the next, how he taught himself the discipline of architecture and designed his extensive estate, Monticello. Even though he probably just looked this stuff up online, he still put on a pretty convincing performance. In fact, by the third week of the semester, I started to forget I was looking at a lanky, blond-haired college kid from upstate New York. And the more I listened to him telling stories about his breathtaking accomplishments, the more I found myself aspiring to be a great man like him: a man of knowledge and skill and conviction, a man brave enough to forge his own path in life.
Around this time my dad lost his job at the refrigerated warehouse and started hanging around the house all day long. Sometime before dawn each morning he would plant himself on the living room couch, his pasty skin pushing like raw dough through the holes in his tattered long johns, and from this vantage, he would spend the rest of the day slowly flooding the house with a rolling cloud of gray cigarette smoke. With Mom gone a year and Tina off in the army, it was just the two of us left; but we didn’t have anything to say to each other. Ever since I chose college over the job he had set up for me at the warehouse, we hadn’t gotten along. I think he took my decision as a rebellion, as a rejection of him as my father, but that wasn’t the case at all. I just wanted to make my own way in life, instead of blindly following the path he had laid out for me. But even after I explained this to him, he didn’t want to understand. So for the next two months we didn’t exchange a word. He just sat there on the couch, eyeing me through the smoke.
Some time later, while running late for my engineering class on a rainy November night late in the semester, I pulled into the library parking lot up at school and found it stuffed with idling cop cars. Spinning hazard lights flashed off the gleaming pavement and climbed the brick facade of the library as a row of policemen in shining black rain slickers blocked off the entrance to the building. From a girl sitting in a red Toyota in a nearby parking space, I learned that Tom J. had barricaded himself inside the library with the kids from my engineering class and was threatening to burn the place down. Apparently he wanted the government to adopt Jefferson’s old idea of letting the U.S. constitution expire every nineteen years. The reasoning behind his demand, the Toyota girl said she had heard, was that by letting the constitution expire, each new generation would have the chance to reshape the nation according to their own ideals, thereby freeing themselves from the future laid out for them by their fathers. As I listened to her bellowing this over the squeak and thump of her swashing windshield wipers, the cold rain pelting the back of my neck, I glanced down at my soaked hands resting on the Toyota’s red door. The skin wrinkled and raw, my half-frozen fingers quivering just like my dad’s. It was here that I asked myself the question: do any of us ever truly free ourselves from the path set out for us by our fathers? Looking to the library one last time, I climbed back into my car and roared away from that place, my rain-slick hands trembling against the wet rubber of the steering wheel.
I didn’t go home for the rest of the night. Instead, I turned off my phone and drove around for a while, thinking about my dad, and my career, and my friend Tom J.
By midnight my head was still swimming from all the drama, so I stopped off at a cheap motel and got myself a room. When I woke up the next morning, I suddenly knew the answer to my career problem. I wanted to stick with engineering. If I was ever going to forge my own path and become a great man like my friend Tom J., I couldn’t give up so easily. I had to keep fighting, no matter how strong the opposition.
From here I turned on my phone to tell my dad about my decision. But before I could call him up, I saw that I had nine messages waiting for me in my voicemail. Seven were from friends and relatives. The others were from the police.
I played the ones from the police first. As I sat on the lumpy bed and listened to the monotone drone of a faceless officer, I learned that my dad had fallen asleep on the couch with a burning cigarette in his mouth. After that it didn’t take long for the carpet to ignite and belch crackling flames throughout the rest of our house. According to the coroner at the scene, my dad died from the smoke before a single flame touched his body.
***
One year later, amid the bump and rattle of my early-morning bus ride to the refrigerated warehouse, I caught my first bit of news about Tom J. since my dad’s passing. After the fire, I had closed myself off from the rest of the world: no laptop, no smartphone, and only a few long-distance calls to Tina. But when I reached page nineteen of the newspaper that morning, I read that they had finally finished rebuilding the library up at school. That’s as far as I got before I had to close the paper and rest it in my lap. Because whatever had happened to my old friend Tom J., I guess I still didn’t want to know.
STEVE GERGLEY is a writer and runner based in Warwick, New York. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Maudlin House, Pithead Chapel, Five on the Fifth, Asymmetry, and others. In addition to writing fiction, he has composed and recorded five albums of original music.
Like what you’re reading?
Get new stories sent to your inbox every Monday. Drop your email below to start >>>
OR Grab a Print Issue
Stories, poems and essays in a beautifully designed magazine you can hold in your hands.
NEW book release
We’re thrilled to release our first novel into the world. Alligator Zoo-Park Magic by C.H. Hooks has been called “A new spin on the mystical, mythical south.”
GET THE BOOK
