Sometimes a person just gets off to a bad start in life and things go downhill from there. My brother was just such a person. A yellow baby, born jaundiced with a full head of hair and two painfully protruding teeth. Probably a FAS child (fetal alcohol syndrome). And that's not to say our mother was a lush. It's just that way back in the dark ages of the mid-twentieth century, it would never have occurred to anyone that a nightly imbibement would do anyone any harm. In fact, It was often supposed that it would do a little good, settle the nerves, bring on a little calm in trying times. It would be another forty years before it would become clear what misery this common custom would bring. Strike one.

     He was a bright kid, but emotionally unstable and uncontrolled. Born too early to have the benefits available today, counselling, programs, and understanding of his needs. No, in that era, he grew up a selfish, demanding child who mistrusted everyone, even his own mother. An incident was related to me about Tom as a young child from a time before I was born. At a hotel on a family vacation, he saw our mother on the other side of a glass door. He ran to her not realizing that a pane of glass separated them and crashed into the portal. The glass shattered and he received a nasty cut on his arm. When our Mother came running, the first words to leave his mouth were, "she tried to kill me." Another plea, a cry for help that could not have been understood in those times. Strike two.

     A great musical talent seemed to manifest itself in him at an early age, and it was, fortunately, allowed some leeway. His passion for the keyboard was the one thing that would bring him any sense of joy in his life. He had a ken for all things Jazz and learned to express himself in the improvisational art form early on. Yet for as great a positive as this was, it was also a negative. When you have an ear for Bird and Coltrane and you are part of a family where Liberace and Chico Marx were considered masters of the keyboard, a certain friction will naturally follow. Every flatted 13th progressing into a minor 7th would be countered with some comment like, "why can't you learn to roll those beautiful arpeggios up and down the piano?" Or perhaps even worse, "Vic Spiderback (Bix Biederbeck), now that's jazz music. I don't know what that is that you're playing." I can't really call this one a strike, but it ain't no base hit neither. Guess it's a foul ball.

     Somewhere along his twelfth year of life, my eighth, our father removed himself from the mix. To an adult, it was no surprise. There were literally years of screaming in the old homestead, irreconcilable differences. But to a kid, there never is an understanding of these things, especially when there is such bitterness and such change. Our lifestyle went from one of abundance to poverty. And our mother lost her mental health in the process. It was easier for me to adapt as I was still in single digits. What for me was more like an adventure, for Thomas, with his pubescent hormones beginning to rage, was pure hell, and the pain was compounded by our mother's nervous breakdown which led her to use us as pawns against our father. The worst of all possible worlds had converged, and had done so especially for my brother.

     Through it, he had his music, and even some great opportunity. A shining bright spot occurred around this time. There was a Jazz Festival in Las Vegas, and I don't know how, considering the turmoil, but somehow our mother and he and I were there (I am sure is was by his insistence). By then he was thirteen with a growing love of improvisational music, and in 1960, when things were still loose and uncomplicated, Tom found himself not only surrounded by Jazz greats, but actually able to jam with the likes of Miles and Dizzy, as they were gracious enough to humor a dumb kid. I mean, it wasn't much, he tapped a few keys on an old B-3 with a Leslie box while the old masters grinned, but to a squeaky voiced teenager, that was about as good as it gets.

     And as I recall, that WAS as good as it got. About that time, a downward spiral began which was evidenced by violent behavior and a nasty habit. With the ripping apart of our family, a rage began to grow in Tom which he started to express by lashing out at me. I spent years as the object of his pent up hostility enduring increasingly violent beatings. And at this time he began to discover something of the dark side of the entertainment business; a chemical affection served to further erode his self control. Things got pretty ugly between us brothers, and as I was unable to fend off his punishments, the only solution was separation. Tom went to live with his father and the man's new bride, which turned into a passage to the next level of the inferno.

     Misunderstandings, unappreciated talents, the ignorance of the times, and the selfishness of adults who should have known better, all these thing were part of Tom's predestiny. Now in a new home and still with a fondness for that magical elixir of the musical trade. A little flame under the spoon, a needle wiped clean on a dirty sleeve, a packet of horse cooking in tap water readying itself to give a little kick and a little comfort to a creative mind. Charlie Parker's nasty habit had strong appeal for an impressionable teen willing to experiment with this pain killer a few years previous to the coming drug revolution. Pioneer? Fool? Neither. Just a lost boy trying to deaden the pain that even then dogged his life. But what a boy would fail to see is that this pain killer would serve to plant the seeds of a new level of agony.

Tom Langhi: the psycho ward years

     Strike three. In baseball, three strikes and you're out. In the addled minds of Republican reformers, the expression holds the promise of punishment for those they consider malcontents. But in the real world, in a man's life, three strikes may only be the beginning. First base can be ten miles away, and strikes can be the only options the batter is afforded. Strike and strike again, misery without end. In a world of slogans, understanding will never be proffered, and judgement is a euphemism for misjudgment.

     Now living with our father, a very practical to-the-point man, those tracks on the smooth skin of a seventeen-year-old put his train on the mainline to the psychiatric hospital. A place that a minor could be committed and robbed of any say in what would be forced upon him. And in the sixties, they had the perfect answer to an errant mind. You take a rubber bite plate and insert it in the mouth, then lubricate the temples with a little electrolytic gel, charge up the generator, and place the electrodes. Voilą! Cured! Yeah, right. And if at first you don't succeed...

     From repeated dosings of kilovolts, Tom received two things, the elimination of huge portions of his to-date memory, and a warped image of filial love that would dog his relationships for the rest of his life. It was during this period of scientific torture that his "death wish", his underlying desire to commit suicide, first emerged. Another gift that would follow him all his remaining days.

     After years at the mercy of medicians and volleys of these abominable shock treatments, it was clear that the science of the sixties was only making things worse. Our father, reinforced by psychiatric charlatans, pointed Tom towards the exits and told him to go out in the world and make something of himself. Daddy Lou, himself escaping from adversity, having survied life in an orphanage after the flu epidemic took his parents, believed in the notion that a successful life was human nature. A person need only apply himself. And perhaps that is true if all your ducks are in a row, but for some, it only further demonstrates a warped image of love. And it was at this point Tom found his way back into my life and our mother's home. And at this time, with the cultural revolution of the sixties revving up to full speed, he once again became a cesspool of drugs without the slightest notion of how to be cool about it, almost like a neon billboard blinking, "Police, here I am. Come get me."

     Our time together was short. His flamboyant style of illegal excess was more than my less-than-innocent psyche could handle. It was fairly clear that he was headed for a place which I did not care to partake, so I cleared out and went to where he had just arrived from, our father's domain. A couple of months later, I found that I could not endure that life any better than he. And as I headed out from there to begin a life on my own, Tom found himself in the first of several scrapes that would make him a temporary guest of the state.

     From here our paths diverged for many years, and the details of his whereabouts are not completely clear. He did spend time on a commune in Oregon, and he worked at many less than notable jobs. There was a training program here and there, and the occasional scrape with the law, where our mother would always dutifully show up with a fist full of dollars and new second on her home hoping that this would be the time that he would "pull himself together and straighten out". A dream that would never be fully realized to her satisfaction, although over the years, Tom did manage to mellow out a bit, stay away from the heavy drugs, yet still continue his walk of self-destruction only in a more socially acceptable way walking hand in hand with our old pal, Mr. Booze.

     So where does that take us on this journey? I suppose the only place it could, to the end. Towards the end of his trek, after his years of life had taken some of the edge off, he did manage to rack up a few personal points of distinction. A few years of sobriety here and there during which his light would shine. And perhaps in spite of the sirens' song, regardless of his functionality, he put together a small recording studio and realized a body of work. It was not financially successful, but it was emotionally rewarding. He had also completed a culinary program and was about to embark on a career as a chef, a means of supporting his venture in the musical arts, but years of excessive living caught up with him. High Blood pressure, diabetes, the gifts that alcoholism brings began to destroy his body. His kidneys failed and after a year of trying to adapt to these changes, he decided to let nature take its course and see what there is to see on the other side of what we know here.