The soul of my best friend, James T. (“T” or “Tommy”) Bass, departed his body at 2:28 this morning.
Tommy was many things in his life – soldier, hippie, businessman, handyman, webmaster, and my spiritual advisor. He helped run the Magnolia Warehouse, a health foods wholesaler, in the 1970s, and served on the board of Sevenanda, the city’s health food co-op. He hung out with Capricorn Records in Macon, home of the Allman Brothers, but that was before I knew him.
When I met T. Bass 40 years ago, he was living in a van with an enormous dog named Thali, who would jump into the back of the van on command, and sleep on a shelf halfway up. When his past caught up with him, he and Thali would drive into the woods, as far away as Tennessee, where he would commune with nature until he felt better. He was friends then with two other writers who have since passed on, Jim Pettigrew and Russell Shaw. I knew Russell from my work covering tech and fell in with them over dinners at a nearby Mexican restaurant.
Tommy painted my house in the 1980s. He installed my home network and wrote books with me in the 1990s, he acted as my webmaster in the 2000s, and he told me his story in the 2010s. Tommy also signed his name with a yin-yang symbol and had t-shirts made with it, reading “T Bass: Handyperson”.
A Story Tommy Told Me
That story began in Americus, Georgia, where he went to high school with former Falcons’ coach Dan Reeves. On graduation he enlisted as a Marine and was at Parris Island when JFK was shot. He was sent to Vietnam and wounded 3 times, each time worse than the last, but they just patched him up and sent him back out because, as he said later, that was the job. He finished his tour as a prison guard at Okinawa.
Tommy returned home to a nation that rejected him. Conservatives spat at him as a loser. Liberals spat at him as a criminal. He became a vegetarian, a Daoist, practiced meditation, and when he finally caught up with his old outfit 30 years later, he was the only one not taking anti-psychotics.
The government offered no help for decades. He didn’t get his VA benefits until the Clinton Administration. In 1994 I put him up at the Willard Hotel while on a business trip, and when I finished took him to the Veterans’ Memorial. He stood there a long time, in his tattered jacket and long beard, looking for the name of a captain he’d lost. Then I saw a park ranger come out of his booth, walk up to him, and to my surprise, snap off a salute. “We built this for you,” he said kindly, before leading Tommy back to a book where he found the captain’s name, and those of others who had been gone for almost 30 years.
The Tommy I Knew
After that he began to recover. He got his benefits. He took to wearing his veterans’ hat. When his mother passed away, he bought the home he’d grown up in and lived there off-and-on until an accident two years ago took away his mobility. But he came back to Atlanta regularly, sometimes sleeping on our couch. (Shown here with my mom, who passed in 2016.)
Tommy was a regular at the Krishna temple, a friend to many in the movement for peace and for justice. He told me once that when Jimmy Carter was President, he brewed up some beer and took it to the White House, where it was accepted graciously. (I didn’t think he’d pass on until Jimmy arrived in heaven to meet him.)
Tommy taught my daughter meditation, he taught my son patience, and he taught me acceptance. These were just a few of his small gifts which he gave freely. After Thali passed, and then another big dog named Tui, he got two tiny dogs named Millie and BeBe. He gave these dogs no discipline, so whenever he visited, they would run off across the street or down the block, while he cried “Millie! Bebe! No!” That’s what I called them– MillieBeBeNo.
Goodbye Old Friend
If there was a kinder or gentler man, I never met him. He was my teacher as well as my friend. As he faded away at a nursing facility in Rome, Georgia, overseen by the VA, his older brother Lonnie, beloved sister Nancy, and a friend named Pete from the co-op days, I visited irregularly, putting a full day of Atlanta traffic into each hour spent watching him consume any food he was given, catching up on the TV he’d missed over his long, eventful life.
I wish I had gone up there more often.
