Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #006

Twisted Thoughts And Thoughtful Truths On Thursday #006 – The Ballad Of Peter Toma

…and so there he was, diving headfirst into the bathtub…

There you go, there’s your clickbait reason to keep reading…but we’ll get to that.

Lemme rewind a bit first, so that you’ll have a better understanding of how a guy named Pete Toma ended up in my bathtub.

As some of you might know about me, I’ve moved a hell of a lot in one lifetime.  Sometimes it’s an upgrade, sometimes a downgrade, sometimes just mere circumstances of life…you name a reason and I’ve moved because of it.  In this particular scenario, I was living in the top quarter of a four-plex basically on the border between cities called New Westminister and Burnaby here in British Columbia.  Nice enough place and decent sized rooms, all of which were occupied by three roommates just entering their twenties and trying to figure life out.  I was the proverbial third wheel, living with a couple, Rob and Jo.  It was originally supposed to be myself and my on/off girlfriend Susie at the time, but within about a week or so, Susie decided to continue living at home instead of adventure out into the open world with the rest of us crazies, and so that’s how I ended up flying solo in this situation.  The place had a gigantic living room, an even bigger porch, and friends that would stop by on the regular to smoke weed and hang out with us.  On any given day, that place could go from the three of us waking up the morning, to all-night parties filled with fifteen or twenty people.  The traffic became normalized; it was just life to us.  We were always happy to have other people around and for the most part, always open to a newcomer.  In fact, when I reconnected with one of my childhood friends at a late-night gas station window I was working one night, I simply sent him to my address in Burnaby, told him to knock on the front door, and tell them that “Jer sent him” – the rest would take care of itself.  And it did – I arrived home at like, seven in the morning like I usually did after my graveyard shift, and there he was, now fully integraded into our crew and still hanging out as the sun was coming up.  Like I said, it’s just what life was to us.

Everyone has their role to play, I figure.  Rob was younger than me, but like a reliable older brother in a way.  He held down the steadiest job of the three of us, as a butcher in a local grocery store.  Jo was a lot more sensitive and cautious, so even though she worked at a government job, her potential tenure there always seemed a lot more fragile.  As a roommate though, she was amazing…very loving, very kind, and very like me in the sense that we were both coming to grips with having to deal with manic depression that would threaten to take us over at any given time.  We understood each other on that level like no one else could, and bonded over that.  I suppose I saw myself as somewhat of a protector for the couple, and kind of like the moral compass for our whole group of friends…at least at first.  We’d have these absolutely amazing parties; it was like this place had its own gravitational pull to it.  We might see someone for a night…someone else might live on our couch for a week…and sometimes we’d see them again, and other times that might be the one & only time that our lives would intersect at all.  You never really know how that’s going to be at any point anyway, right?  Just enjoy the time you have while you’re having it – if it’s as awesome as you thought it was, there’s probably time tomorrow too.

For a quarter of a house that was generally filled with a multitude of different drugs, we attracted a rare quality of people – like, everyone we invited into that place was a genuinely good person, fully vetted by our own hearts & minds.  No one cracks the bat for a homerun one hundred percent of the time though – we weren’t infallible, we were just lucky more or less.  Shitheads exist everywhere, and even if you’ve got the greatest ability to read people in a way that can separate’em out, they exist in such a magnitude of numbers that a shithead or two is bound to find their way into the inside of even the tightest group of friends.  Location can play a role in that in circumstances like we were in too, and it did this time around.

We never knew the people directly across from us on the other side of the four-plex on the top level.  Despite being out on our porch every single day smoking ounces of weed a week for a couple years straight, we never bothered our top neighbor friends and they in turn, never bothered us either.  I couldn’t even pick them out of a lineup if you showed me a picture of them today…in fact, I’m struggling to recall if I ever actually laid eyes on them at all.  You’d hear them occasionally by the divider that kept our porches separate, but I don’t ever really remember meeting them.  In other words, they were the perfect neighbors.  Underneath us, not so much.  While we were pretty obsessed with doing all the kinds of mind-expanding drugs we could find from LSD to shrooms, DMT to salvia and far beyond, the occupants of the unit underneath us did all the destructive ones like cocaine and heroin, and pretty much spent their time yelling at each other around the clock for any given reason.  Not the ideal place for the mom to raise her young daughter, and the guy living with her at the time clearly hadn’t been around all that long.  For whatever reason, probably financial from what we could hear through the floor and open windows during arguments, they didn’t seem like they were able to separate from each other even though their personalities mixed like oil and water.  And then there was the unit down diagonal from us, which contained a couple of guys living bachelor life.  We didn’t even know they were there at first, but eventually we learned they were about the same age as us and invited them to come hang out.  Matt was a hothead half-Frenchman dude, who was more or less fine as a person, just not really on our frequency – but his friend Stu, aka Stumanchu, was the kind of person that anyone could get along with.  Matt was a mechanic, and I think Stu might have been too?  I can’t really remember to tell you the truth.  The main thing I remember about Stu was his relentlessly backwards hat, his true love of longboarding, and the fact that he was such a genuinely good guy to know.  Anyone that had a problem with a guy like Stu would say way more about the other person than it ever would him.  That was our little complex in a nutshell – a whole bunch of misfits if you looked at us on paper, but at least 50% of that place was cool.  For months, Stu became one of the regular people we’d see drop by to smoke a blunt or two after he got off work.  Matt, not so much…I think we had a couple interactions after we first met, but that was it.  It’s just one of those things you know?  We all have an idea of where we fit best when it comes to what forms a circle of friends, and if you can’t see yourself inside of one, you’re probably on the outside of it.  Much to Matt’s credit, we never had to have that conversation – he instinctively knew he was different from the rest of us, and to be frank, the guy was way too serious about everything when we met him.

And so, for months or maybe even a year, everything was the smoothest of sailing between us all.  We tend to remember the good times in life by choice, and with a little luck & a few photos, those memories never fade – but the bad times become burned into our brainwaves and we’re forced to recollect them like movies on repeat in our mind’s eye.  I’ll never forget coming home one day to meet the newest member of our group, a guy named Pete Toma.  Twice as thick as the rest of us in terms of body weight, with a distinct Italian look to him coupled with a Jersey style attitude, there weren’t many people around the whole lower mainland that quite looked or sounded like him…but somehow I knew this guy.  Not in the sense that we’d crossed paths before somewhere…not at all like that…I just knew him.  I either knew him, or had seen enough people that possessed a similar quality to him, or could sense evil from a quarter mile away…I don’t really know how I know the things I know when I’m first meeting a person, but I knew he was bad from the moment I met him.  With a big sly grin on his face and a strong handshake, we shook hands, and as I looked into his eyes I felt like I already knew everything I’d ever need to know about him.  Call it instincts or intuition or whatever you like – I knew Pete was a bad dude.

As it turned out, Matt and Stu weren’t quite able to make ends meet as much as they were hoping to, which is where Pete came in as their third roommate.  By the time I came home on that first day I had met him, he’d already spent half a day with Rob and it was like they were already best friends.  I sensed danger immediately, but like much of what I thought about anything at that point in my life, I wanted to keep this information to myself for the time being, until I was completely sure.  A first impression can always be skewed by mood or circumstance, and I like to think I’ve always given others the benefit of the doubt in that regard.  Maybe I’d prove to be wrong about Pete, even if I didn’t think that I would be.  For the weeks that followed, Pete was practically living at our place more than he was with Stu & Matt, and that was annoying as hell.  Rob was my best friend, but with polar opposite working hours, Pete basically had a level of access to the guy that I couldn’t prevent, and I could see the effect it was having pretty damn quickly.  A lot more late nights doin’ drugs & a lot more of his guard down way too quickly.  I remember coming home one morning to join in on the fun, but the fun had already more or less been had.  The drugs had run out, but Rob always kept a little behind somewhere, and when he went to get those, we did them right away to get me in on the action.  An hour or two later when he suggested that he should make a call and buy some more, Pete shot me this look that I will never forget seeing.  It was the look of a conman that had found his mark…a smartass smile that told me he wasn’t leaving until he had sucked every ounce of free shit and kindness that we had to offer the guy – and honestly it scared me in a weird way.  It was the kind of look that had a confidence to it, but also an intelligence as well.  As if to say that he was asserting his dominance as an alpha male, and that he knew I couldn’t stop him.  If I had needed confirmation of him being a shithead, it was in that moment that I became absolutely sure he was.  To this very day that look he gave me haunts my memories as one of the worst moments I’ve ever exchanged with another human being…it was like I looked directly into him, found out how horrible he was, and in looking back at me, it was like looking at someone that knew what I found & didn’t care.

What we didn’t know at first, was that even though Pete was supposed to be the means for Stu & Matt to make the rent on time, Pete was struggling for money himself.  While I don’t know this for a fact, my instincts tell me that he’s the kind of guy that has likely been fired from just about every job he’s ever had, and I’d absolutely assume that still hasn’t changed to this very day.  In any event, Pete was going to a concert of some sort in a couple days, and he’d convinced Rob to buy a giant sack of weed so that he could flip it around and make a profit they could split.  They separated it into smaller bags, probably added a little parsley or bullshit to it to increase the potential margin on “their” investment, and I just remember shaking my head when I saw Pete with his backpack all loaded up and ready to go.  After he left, I put in my first official objection and complaint about the guy to Rob.  I told him directly, there’s no chance that he sells any of that stuff dude.  And wouldn’t you believe it – who came home with a black eye that same night?  Pete told us all about how he got jumped, and how someone stole the backpack with all the weed in it.  With the physical evidence of his face right in front of us, Rob took him at his word – but I didn’t.  I didn’t know anyone crazy enough to punch their own face hard enough to give themselves a black eye by that point in life, but I was sure I did now.  Something just wasn’t right here.

In the weeks that followed, we all started to lose things.  Not the kind of stuff that you were sure you just used yesterday, but the kind of stuff that you’d have put down somewhere a week ago, and then became convinced it had been sucked into the void of stuff you’d find in the strangest places later on, like we all experience at times throughout our lives.  The thing was, it just kept happening & happening.  No matter what we seemed to want to reach for, it was gone and no one could explain where it went.  As much as I was sure it was Pete, I couldn’t prove it – but at the same time, how could it not have been?  We’d all been living there for so long at this point that the only thing that had substantially changed was that Pete Toma now lived there amongst us…so like…it’s gotta be Occam’s Razor, right?

No thief is ever perfect, this much I know.  The drug-fueled/motivated kind are even more sloppy, so it just becomes a matter of time before they slip up…if you’re patient enough to wait, you’ll catch them.  Originally, while I was probably as bummed out as anyone else that we had lost this thing or that thing, it was all fairly small stuff that didn’t really matter – but then one day, the thief in our midst took it way too far.  I got up to go to work, looked for my trusty Discman that was essential for beating the public transit blues, and I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Anyone that knows anything about me would know that this is crossing the line.  You could steal the food right outta my mouth and I’d be way less likely to complain about that than having no access to the music I wanted to listen to.  At first I was simply bewildered and pissed off – I had no choice but to go to work without my music and endure like, two hours on the bus in each direction listening to nothing but people-noise, which is unbearable to me.  But I couldn’t even fault a thief at that point…I was in such a hurry to get to work, that it didn’t even cross my mind that it might have been stolen, I just assumed I couldn’t find it in time before I had to leave.  Plus, I felt like I had a level of respect around this one particular issue that made me practically impervious to thievery – I was the one who brought new music to the group…I was the person that scoured the internet for days on end to find the coolest new songs…surely no one would fuck with me because of that, right?  When I got home and told Rob & Jo what happened, we were all incensed and we each took it personally.  We scoured the entire house, cleaning it from top to bottom until we were all absolutely sure that the Discman was nowhere to be found, which was theoretically impossible.  It had to be there somewhere, and if it wasn’t, that meant we could be 100% positive that it was stolen.  Someone was abusing our naivety and kindness, and if we ever fucking hated anything, it was that.  Because ultimately, we weren’t naïve at all.  We were unnecessarily trusting individuals, that’s all.  Test the boundaries of that though, and you’ll find out we were likely aware of the bullshit the whole time.

So at that point, we’re basically on lockdown.  No more leaving the door open for the homies to come in, thorough inventories on all our stuff every day, and a saddened group of friends that were equally as pissed off as I was that someone had fucked with my ability to listen to music, which was actually kinda nice to find out.  Not one of them suggested that I might have left it somewhere – they all knew my music was attached to me 24/7…any thief would have practically had to take the headphones out of my ears to take my Discman, or have grabbed it in the brief moments I was having a shower.  Our once safe little compound had become a little Fort Knox and the barriers we put up felt way too isolating.  It wasn’t the way we wanted to be, or the way we’d become accustomed to living, but until we had some kind of proof as to who it was or where the threats of thievery were coming from, we took no chances.  When Rob came to me, devastated that someone had taken some of our weed, it was tough to simply rule out paranoia or that he didn’t smoke it himself, but he was absolutely sure he had kept this one mighty nugget of green gold completely intact, and that there was about a quarter of its size missing in action.  I know the difference between a confused Rob, a misleading Rob, and a Rob that’s entirely sure of what he’s talking about.  Given the surrounding context, I was as convinced as he was that someone had taken some of his stash.  The problem was that very few people knew where it was, and even less had access to it.  I’m surprised he didn’t accuse me of taking it, given that I would have been one of the only people that might know where he kept it at any given time, but we were all thinking Pete by then.  It was around that point where I basically became obsessed with the idea of catching him in the act.

One day, Rob and Jo and I all went out to go shopping for groceries or something like that.  We all piled into this super old clunker of a car that Jo & Rob shared, and off we went.  I don’t know what caused it, whether it was me forgetting my wallet or something else that we needed for the trip, but we ended up having to turn around because there was something I needed to get.  Maybe I just felt like that could be the moment that we finally had the opportunity to catch Pete red-handed.  So we circled back, they kept the car running outside, and I hustled back into the house to go get whatever it was we needed.  As I got in there, I could see the shadow of something move on the floor in the hallway, and I instantly went from going about my merry way to feeling extra cautious.  I looked down the hall, and could see the open bathroom door.  In the glazed window at the back of the house above the bathtub, I could see a figure of some sort standing there.  Not really sure as to what was going to happen next, I patiently waited.  Maybe I was about to find out who the thief had been, or maybe it was just a friend stopping by.  The latter seemed less likely as the shadow wasn’t really moving towards the door on the porch, it was just standing there by the window.  Then after a moment or two, I saw it slowly start to move again.  Wedging some kind of butter knife under the latch of this window, where the top half was the only part that opened up and swung out towards the yard, the shadow popped the lock in the right direction and it began to pull up.  At this point, I still felt fully secure – you’d have to be a fairly small person to get inside that window, and even IF you could do it, there was still no easy way to actually get inside without first dropping into the bathtub.  At the very least, it’d take a significant amount of time, and I’d have the advantage because I’d be there watching the entire thing happen right in front of my eyes.  At the same time, I was assuming that none of this could actually be happening, because…well…how could it be?

I made myself scarce at the end of the hallway and just watched.  The window popped open slowly, and there he was…there were those shifty fucking eyes I was so familiar with by this point – Pete’s eyes – a THEIF’s eyes.  Looking inside & listening for a second, he quickly decided that we were still gone & that the house had to be empty – and he made the most ambitious move I’ve ever seen a big dude make in my entire life by legitimately trying to squeeze himself through that small-ass window.  That’s the thing about rats though right?  Don’t they say they can squeeze through spaces the size of a mere quarter?

…and so there he was, diving headfirst into the bathtub, just like I told you at the very beginning of this tale.  I could have scared him out of doing it, or even pushed him back out in the other direction, but to be completely honest with you, I was enjoying this moment in a very malicious way.  Ultimately I knew that the only way he had to go was down, and that at some point, the sheer gravity of this situation had to kick in.  As this big ol’ butt crossed the threshold of the window’s border and there was nothing to hang onto, he had no choice but to let gravity do the rest and he hit the tub with a huge thud as he crashed into it below.  As he got up slowly, I tried not to laugh as he assessed his situation with his bell so freshly rung…he was shaky on his feet, but Pete was one hell of a determined thief and he was clearly on a mission right now.  Knowing that he only had a little time before we’d return from shopping, he immediately started down the hallway, and just as he turned towards going into Rob & Jo’s room, I shouted at him – “JUST WHAT IN THE ALL-FUCK DO YOU THINK THAT YOU’RE DOING?”  He immediately stiffened from head to toe & backed up so slowly that it was like he thought I had a gun pointed at him.

He turned towards me and flashed that punkass grin my way.  “I…uh…yeah I just thought that I…had left…umm…” – he couldn’t lie fast enough, and he definitely didn’t expect to find anyone there at home.

“Get the fuck out of my house Pete,” I growled.  He looked at my face and studied it quickly.  He might have outweighed me by a buck-fifty at that point, but he was going to have a problem if he came at me, and he knew it.  So he turned around, went through the kitchen to the back door, and let himself out without saying another word.  I locked the door, went to the front to the car to tell Rob & Jo what had happened, and we sent Jo off with the money to do the shopping while we stayed to secure the house.  We all knew by that point that Pete Toma was a piece of shit, but this was the undeniable proof that we needed.  We didn’t want it – in fact, we tried to give him every possible chance to turn his shit around – but we got the proof we needed to know we had to cut ties with him forever, and we went to work on that right away.  We told Matt and Stu, who had similar stories of not knowing where some shit of their own had gone, and now there was too much mounting evidence against Pete.  He knew he had to book it from there, and he did.  I don’t know how much shit he had to pack up, and I don’t know where he went either, but he was gone within twenty-four hours or less.  Months later I’d learn that Rob was still trying to give him another chance to straighten up and fly right…he’d written Pete a letter to express his disappointment and such, like the guy would ever sincerely give a fuck.  Still, Rob was convinced that there was a good person inside there somewhere deep down, despite my objections and having never been convinced of that myself.  Pete came by the place one day to collect a few things he’d left behind, and I remember seeing him on my way to work…I nodded in his direction, confidently giving him a look that let him know I fucking WON the battle between us after all – a visible FUCK YOU, if you will.  I watched him look away, too embarrassed about everything he had done to engage with me any further.  I stayed and watched him drive away for my own peace of mind, and that was the last I ever saw of Peter Toma, thankfully.  I don’t spend many moments thinking about him for the most part, but every so often from time to time, I’ll remember that he existed & get a savage chuckle out of recalling what it was like to hear his big-ass body hit the bottom of the metal tub with the thump of 1000 idiots all at once…and hey, I thought that might be the kind of story that would make you smile too.  Sharing is caring, as they say – so you’re welcome.

The moral of the story is don’t be a shithead…but also don’t fuck with someone’s music y’all – especially mine – it just ain’t worth it.

All my love to you all.  Thanks for reading.

– Jer @ SBS