Wild Years (3 page)

The sixties began with upheaval for Tom. In 1959, when he was ten, his parents were divorced. Frank soon became involved with another woman; Alma remained single for years, and then she married a private investigator. After the breakup, Alma and the three children moved to Chula Vista, California, where Tom quickly became fascinated with nearby National City, a grimy suburb of San Diego near the Mexican border. “It was a tiny community,” he told a concert audience. “The main drag was a transvestite and the average age was deceased.”
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There, Waits became indoctrinated into a whole new world. He started hanging out with adults: pool hustlers, vinyl-booted go-go dancers, traveling salesmen, and assorted gangsters. As he tells it, National City was a sailor town, and the kids he knew had dads who spent more time at sea than they did at home. This made it a bit easier for him to deal with the absence of his own father —absent fathers were the norm.

“I guess most entertainers are, on a certain level, part of the freak show,” Waits told Barney Hoskyns of
Mojo
in 1999. “Most of them have some kind of wounding early on, either a death in the family or a breakup of the family unit, and it sends them off on some journey where they find themselves kneeling by a jukebox, praying to Ray Charles. Or you're out looking for your dad, who left the family when you were nine. And you know he drives a station wagon and that's all you've got to go on, and in some way you're gonna become a big sensation and be on the cover of
Life
magazine and it'll somehow be this cathartic vindication or restitution.” After the divorce, Frank Waits continued to teach Spanish, and he
still took his son on excursions south of the border. In Mexico, Tom would get a haircut, experience the culture, and learn a little of the language. “That's when I started to develop this opinion that there was something Christlike about beggars,” he explained. “See a guy with no legs on a skate-board, mud streets, church bells going . . . these experiences are still with me at some level.”
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Alma took the boy to church, but Tom just never warmed to the undertaking. For a while he went along to keep his mother happy, but that didn't last very long. Which is not to say that Waits never pondered the existence of a higher power or a deeper meaning to life. He just sensed that what he was looking for could not be found in organized religion, and he refused to credit the notion of heaven and hell.

“I don't know what's out there or up there,” he told Chris Douridas of kcrw-fm's
Morning Becomes Eclectic
. “Maybe a little office. Like when your car gets towed in New York . . . You have to go down to Pier 74, and it's four in the morning, and there's a Plexiglas shield. It's three inches thick with bullet holes in it and an old woman with bifocals, sitting there at a typewriter. You can see it, chain-ganged to hundreds of other cars over there. Your car looks ashamed and embarrassed. And you realize she's got your destiny in her hands. [Religion's] probably something like that. I mean, after you die . . . people think it's gonna be simple, but, please . . . It's gonna be an organizational nightmare . . .”
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A neighbor gave Tom an old piano, and they installed it in the Waits garage. Soon Tom had memorized all kinds of songs. He had an ear for music: he could play any tune he heard, despite the fact that he hadn't yet learned to read music. Somehow feeling that he should have mastered this skill, he faked it, and no one was the wiser. He'd just commit a song to memory and pretend that he was reading the notes as he played along.

A favorite haunt of Tom's at about this time was a local movie theater, the Globe. Seeking escape and inspiration, he'd sometimes spend the whole day there, catching ten films, hopping from screening room to screening room, subjecting himself to the manager's weird programming choices, soaking it all in. Waits recalls seeing a Globe double feature of Disney's
101 Dalmatians
and a gritty urban drama called
The Pawnbroker,
starring Rod Steiger. Cruella DeVil of
Dalmatians
has frightened countless young children, but Steiger's Holocaust survivor who sets up shop in Harlem is in a whole other league. Waits later remarked that whoever was in charge of programming at the Globe either had an extremely offbeat perspective on life or was completely deranged.
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Still, such experiences
were shaping Tom. He was catching some tantalizing glimpses of life's broad spectrum and starting to sense rich possibilities for art and entertainment.

Early in his career, Waits said that he first acquired appreciation for the blues while attending an all-black junior high school. He'd sneak out at night, head over to Balboa Stadium, and see shows by the likes of James Brown and the Famous Flames. Young Tom also became a huge fan of Ray Charles. Once, years later, while in the bathroom of a club in East St. Louis called the Dark Side of the Moon, he spotted some graffiti that read, “Love is blind. God is Love. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore Ray Charles must be God.”
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Tom Waits was already a believer.

Tom was an industrious boy. “I had a lot of different jobs when I was a kid,” he told the crowd at a 1990 concert. “I used to deliver papers. I had two routes because the first route was such a washout. It . . . didn't make me feel like a paperboy. It made me feel like a guy who just throws papers away. It started to get to me so I got another route — it was called the
Independent
. When I used to have to go collect for the
Independent
it was always so sad. A nice woman would come to the door and she'd say, ‘Wait a minute.' She'd say, ‘Bob, they're collecting for the
Independent,
' and off in another room I'd hear, ‘Fuck him!' It did nothing for my self-image.”
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By the time he was fourteen Tom was working on the graveyard shift at Napoleone's Pizza Parlor, an establishment he would later immortalize in the song “The Ghosts of Saturday Night.” Back in 1965, you got to Napoleone's by following National Avenue, past the infamous Mile of Cars, up to the north end of the strip. On the Mile Tom bought a 1955 Buick Roadmaster for $150, and it turned out to be such a lemon that he'd put another $3,500 into it by the time a dealer gave him $12 for the parts. National Avenue was also home to the Golden Barrel, Wong's Chinese Restaurant, and Escalante's Liquor Store. Napoleone's could be found between the Burge Roberts Mortuary and a Triumph motorcycle dealership.

The pizza parlor had been operating for twenty-five years before Tom Waits showed up, and few significant changes had been implemented during that time. Nor has Napoleone's changed all that much in the decades since. Of course the jukebox now plays cds instead of 45s — for some reason the featured Tom Waits cd is not
The Heart of Saturday Night,
which contains Waits's tribute to the place — but Napoleone's has retained a strangely comforting forties feel. Maybe this in some way explains why the teenaged Waits regularly made the five-mile trek to Napoleone's instead of seeking employment closer to home.

Joe Sardo and Sal Crivello, the man who still runs the place, gave Tom the job. Waits says that he was hired because the guy who washed dishes at Napoleone's was so large that only a skinny little runt could squeeze into the kitchen with him. Tom fit the bill,
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and his long nights of flipping dough, waiting tables, and swabbing the bathrooms began. His shift didn't end until 4:00 a.m. He had lots of time to think, lots of time to read, lots of time to study people. In 1999 he told Hoskyns that he'd gotten his first two tattoos while working at Napoleone's. “I got a map of Easter Island on my back. And I have the full menu of Napoleone's Pizza House on my stomach. After a while, they dispensed with the menus. They'd send me out, and I'd take off my shirt and stand by the tables.”
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On several occasions Waits has asserted that he never had any desire to escape that life — in fact, he harbored dreams of eventually owning his own restaurant. “In my formative years,” he told David McGee of
Rolling Stone
in 1977, “my ambitions didn't go much beyond just working in a restaurant, maybe buying into a place. Music was just such a vicarious thing. I was a patron. No more, no less.”
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More than twenty years later he told Hoskyns, “I'm still not convinced I made the right decision. I go back and forth. I'm doing this children's work. ‘What do you do?' ‘I make up songs.' ‘Uh, okay, we could use one of those, but right now what we actually need is a surgeon.' In terms of the larger view, there's no question that entertainment is important. But there are other things I wish I knew how to do that I don't.” Waits began writing while he was working at Napoleone's, but looking back, he's not convinced that those early works could really be described as songs. “Mostly they parodied existing songs with obscene lyrics.”
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Sal Crivello remembers it a little differently. He allows that Tom was a hard worker, but it was apparent even at that stage what his young employee truly wanted from life. Crivello insists that Tom was determined to become a musician. “He was fifteen years old. He was doing songwriting. He was playing several clubs then . . . coffeehouses and things like that. We'd always talk about it while we were working. I saw him going in that direction. I knew he was talented, but I just never thought he'd be that big.”

During his Napoleone's years, Waits never saw Sal out of uniform: an old apron splattered with marinara sauce, a paper chef's hat, and black rubber-soled shoes. Then one night — he thinks it may have been Christmas Eve — he was shocked to see his boss in an entirely different getup. Sal had arranged to go bowling with a girl he knew, so when his shift was done he disappeared into the back of the restaurant, changed his clothes,
and reemerged. Waits says it was like witnessing Superman exiting a phone booth. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Waits had always pictured Sal going everywhere in that stained apron, and he was captivated by the unexpected revelation. Surfaces, he could now see, were likely to be deceptive.
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Across the street from Napoleone's was Wong's Chinese Restaurant. When the Napoleone's staff got tired of eating pizza they'd set up a little trade with Wong's. Waits told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
that he'd shuttle a pizza across the street and “they'd give me Chinese food to take back. Sometimes Wong would tell me to sit in the kitchen, where he's making all this food up. It was the strangest galley; the sounds, the steam, he's screaming at his coworkers. I felt like I'd been shanghaied. I used to love going there.”
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Throughout this period Waits was still attending school, but he admits that he was just going through the motions. “I really started to shine after school,” he says, but while school was in session he drifted along, earning mediocre grades and getting into the occasional conflict with his teachers.
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Frank and Alma Waits, schoolteachers themselves, had little sympathy for him and refused to chalk it up to normal youthful rebellion. Despite their displeasure, Tom was unwilling to play the game any longer. Only music had the power to fire his imagination, and so he dropped out of school, took on more hours at Napoleone's, and began writing songs in earnest. “I thought high school was a joke,” he told Wiseman. “I went to school at Napoleone's.”
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Later, Waits cut his way through a series of dead-end jobs — janitor, cook, dishwasher, cabdriver, fireman, delivery guy, gas-station attendant —he even sold night crawlers to fishermen. He toiled at all kinds of jobs that involved wearing a hair net and rubber gloves. Waits later described himself during this era as being “a jack-off-of-all-trades.”
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But all these jobs were just a means to an end. The money he made permitted him to explore San Diego's nighttime netherworlds in his free time, and to him it was a good way of life.

When he finally landed a doorman job at the Heritage, a small club and coffeehouse in the Mission Beach area of San Diego, he found himself in a prime position to experience a wealth of musical styles. Budding rockers played the Heritage, as did folk singers, bluesmen, jazz musicians, and country singers. Anything that a given act might want to do was okay.

Officially, Waits was supposed to be the Heritage's ticket taker, but he quickly realized that he was also expected to serve as the bouncer. He was
issued a chair leg to defend himself with and instructed to get rid of the undesirables — obnoxious conventioneers and caffeine-buzzed punks.

Music was everywhere, on the job and off. Waits's friends were into whatever was in heavy rotation on am radio, generally content to catch a wave with The Beach Boys or zone out with the incense and peppermints of The Strawberry Alarm Clock. Waits hung back. Love-ins and peace signs didn't do it for him; he failed to idolize Jimi Hendrix; his bedroom remained unadorned with psychedelic posters. His decor choice was actually quirkier than that. Obsessed with lyrics, he pinned the words to Bob Dylan songs all over his walls. He also started listening to some of his parents' old 78-rpm records and was blown away by the Tin Pan Alley tunes of Cole Porter and George Gershwin. “I wasn't thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby,” he told David McGee. Waits also came to love jazz, discovering Mose Allison and Dizzy Gillespie.
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While his buddies were lining up for tickets to see big acts like The Beatles, The Who, and The Kinks, Waits was off indulging his less mainstream tastes. Over time, however, he has developed an appreciation for some of the music of the sixties. As he puts it, “The thing about a record is that it's a record: if you don't want to listen to it right now, don't listen. Listen in thirty years . . . In a sense, you put a record on and there it is. There's that moment they captured . . . I just heard ‘Kicks' by Paul Revere and the Raiders on my way here, and that's a cool song! ‘Wild Thing.' ‘Louie Louie.' I heard ‘Son of a Preacher Man' the other day, and it just killed me. There's a point in the song where [Dusty Springfield] just kind of whispers ‘The only one who could ever love me' really smoky and low. That's a sexy song! Hey, it's all out there.”
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