Tom had two sisters, and the childhood they passed together was fairly unremarkable. Frank was a frustrated guitarist, and he instilled in young Tom an appreciation of music. Despite his Anglo origins, Frank was fascinated by all things Mexican. By day he taught Spanish at a local school, and by night he played guitar in a mariachi band. Waits’s earliest musical memories are of the mariachi, romantica, and ranchera music Frank would play on the car radio. Alma was also of a musical bent, singing whenever she had a chance. Tom, however, never really felt that he came from a musical family. When Mark Rowland asked him about it for a Musician magazine interview, Waits cracked, “Not like Liza Minelli, all right? Contrary to popular belief, we don’t have the same mother. I took her out a couple of times, nothing ever happened.”4
The same Princeton audience that heard Waits relate the myth of his birth was also told a touching story of how Alma Waits nurtured her son’s musical curiosity. She got him his first musical instrument. “I remember it was Christmastime . . . As the snow fell down all over Whittier, I was coming home from work in the factory. I was right by Palace Pawnshop. There was a piano in the window. It was right next to an old bent-up saxophone, old Toro mowers, some dentures and shit. I knew I had to get my hands on that sucker. And it being Christmastime, I ran all the way home, pulled on my mother’s coat . . . [and] I said, ‘I just got to get my hands on that piano so I can get double-parked on Easy Street.’ Well, Mother, bless her soul, ran all the way down to Palace Pawnshop. The moon was high — she stood out in front of the pawnshop and goddamn if she didn’t throw a brick through the window and get it for me. What can I say? The rest is history.”
Tom had a gang of neighborhood buddies. They engaged in standard kid stuff — “hanging around in the Sav-On parking lots and buying baseball cards,” was how Waits described it to Rich Wiseman of Rolling Stone.5 Waits learned to play the piano at a neighbor’s house, and he tells the story of how he learned to play the guitar in a minor key from a childhood friend named Billy Swed. Billy also provided his pal with a verbal demonstration of the hard-luck lifestyle that has continued to enthrall Waits over the years. A twelve-year-old dropout who already drank and smoked, Billy lived with his overweight mother in a trailer on a polluted lake over by the local hobo jungle. Tom idolized Billy; he was convinced that the writing on Billy’s blue jeans was some secret musical code that he was incapable of cracking. One day, Tom went down to the lake to see his friend, but Billy and his mother had vanished. Tom insisted that he learned more from Billy than he ever did in school.6
He also received some life instruction from a young friend named Kipper. Kipper was handicapped — confined to a wheelchair. When they were both about ten, Tom and Kipper would hang out together, often racing each other to the school bus. Years later, Tom memorialized Kipper, and his neighborhood in general, in the song “Kentucky Avenue,” named for a Whittier thoroughfare.
Waits introduced that song during a 1981 concert with this childhood reminiscence: “I grew up on a street called Kentucky Avenue in Whittier, California. My dad was teaching night school at Montebello. I had a little tree fort and everything. I had my first cigarette when I was about seven years old. It was such a thrill. I used to pick ’em up right out of the gutter after it was raining. My dad smoked Kents. Now, I never liked Kents — I tried to get him to change brands. I used to repair everybody’s bicycles in the neighborhood. I was the little neighborhood mechanic. There was a guy called Joey Navinski who played the trombone, and a guy called Dickie Faulkner whose nose was always running. And there was a woman called Mrs. Storm. She lived with her sister. She used to sit in her kitchen with her window open and a twelve-gauge shotgun [sticking] out of it . . . so we took the long way around.”7
Waits has said that the musical persona he adopted was a slightly idealized version of his own father, and he’s also maintained that his musical tastes were influenced by two of his uncles, Vernon and Robert. Through the decades, the exploits of this pair of uncles have recurred regularly in Waits’s tales, and they have gradually reached Bunyanesque dimensions. Uncle Vernon had a hard, raspy voice. Young Tom wished he could sound just like him; and the adult Waits insists that he came up with his trademark vocals by imitating Vernon. His uncle’s voice was affected by throat surgery he underwent as a child. Family lore has it that the doctors left gauze and a small pair of scissors inside him when they closed him up. Tom says that years later, during Christmas dinner, these surgical relics again saw the light of day — Uncle Vernon, choking on his food, coughed them up.8
Uncle Robert was a botanist who also played the pipe organ for the local church, and Tom was intrigued by what he could do with the instrument. When Robert played the organ, the building would actually vibrate from the sheer force of it. The problem was, Uncle Robert’s music kept getting louder and more experimental, prompting members of the congregation to complain. Old favorites became swirling masses of sound. Cherished hymns ended up resembling “Lady of Spain.” The organ’s vibrations were stripping the paint off the walls. Finally, Uncle Robert was fired, but he never stopped playing. The church was eventually torn down, and Uncle Robert had the pipe organ delivered to his house, where the pipes extended right through the ceiling. Uncle Robert also had a piano that had — somehow — been left out in the rain. Most of the keys no longer worked, so Tom learned to play it using only the black keys.
Waits has described how taken he was with Uncle Robert’s house, which was in an orange grove. The place was a disaster area, clothes and trash strewn everywhere, but this was romantic clutter to Tom, a squalor born of long nights, hard work, and not enough money. The image of a downtrodden man in a downtrodden environment appealed to Tom so much that at one point he asked his mother why he couldn’t let his room get as messy as Uncle Robert’s. His mother pointed out that Uncle Robert was blind.9
One of Waits’s most famous remarks is that he slept through the sixties. In the early seventies most music-world denizens were still either on a post-Beatles psychedelic high or in a Southern California Jackson Browne folk-rock navel-gazing mode. Tom Waits seemed like such an anachronism — a grizzled, drunken hipster cat in roach-killers and a filthy beret who looked and acted like he’d just driven across town from skid row — that one could almost believe in that marathon sleep. But Tom’s sixties experience was actually much more unsettling than his glib comment suggests.
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.”10 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.”11
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 . . .”12
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.13 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.”14 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.”15
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,16 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.”17
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.”18
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.”19
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.20
Across the street from Napoleone’s was Wong’s Chinese Restaurant. When the Napo
leone’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.”21
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.22 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.”23
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.”24 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.
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