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Tom DeMar caught tagging in Paris.

…driving across America with Tom DeMar.
by Domenic Wrobel

I jumped in a Chevy van in the East Village of Manhattan with just a small bag, enough to cross the country. It was just myself, my twin sister (we're from Poland), my Chinatown sometimes-girlfriend/friend (she's Chinese/Philippine), and this guy behind the wheel I never met. My sister had an instant curiosity about him. She's 19, a tall sharp blonde who had never "been" with a man, saving herself for the real adventure, or something like that. My friend introduced us to Tom DeMar. "Ready to go west?" Hell yeah.

We drove out of a snowstorm and chased the weather all the way to Pittsburgh to get to Tom's mom's house where we crashed the first night. There I learned a little about Tom. His mother's Italian and Nichiren Buddhist. Tom went to college four years only to graduate and join an original metal band. He plays guitar. That's just the thing to do in Pittsburgh. We hit the night life there, ending up in a far off-bar with a group playing 80s retro to a full house of big locals tankin and "dancin'." The singer was like Dale Bozio from Missing Persons. Tom met an 18-year-old skinny African-American women's college basketball scholarship student and they lit each other's cigarettes (Tom doesn't smoke), my Chinese "friend" looking on a little too enviously.

So on the road again and thanks to some advanced trucker intelligence (Tom's mom dated a trucker for ten years), Tom took us on an alternate route due West instead of the sensible southern route through Tennessee, and bypassed a fierce storm that would have snowed us in for days. We drove through the night clear to the Oklahoma flats and then things got pretty boring in Texas by day. We wished it was never annexed. Tumbleweeds whipped across a limitless expanse and we might have gone out of our minds had it not been for the adventuresome tales Tom started spinning.

Tom quit his Pittsburgh band to move to New York City. Working a bartending gig, someone gave him his first club pass. So the first night on the scene he meets this young Jewish girl from Long Island who says she wants to manage him. And in fact she got him sent to Europe as a fashion model. So Tom's learning Italian and French and how to match ties whereas before he always shopped at the local Army surplus stores. He modeled Harley Davidson leather jackets and sang "Born to Be Wild" on New Year's Eve at a party in Budapest, Hungary. He moved in with an Italian girl and things were going well until he gets a letter from the States from none other than his long lost father offering to pay for a car rental to seek fraternal roots in the wartorn Balkans as a holiday gift for dear ole disappearing dad.

Tom Jr. never could pass on an adventure. Lucky to find a Spanish-make rental car last minute (a distant maternal
relative was found managing a rent-a-car agency in Milan – a perk for those with Italian bloodlines is that you have family everywhere who can help you), he kept to the right of speeding Mercedes with no limits on the autostrada. He drove himself into Zagreb, Croatia, stopping at some empty strip mall store with stacks of phone books in the window. There he met a college student on leave from a Sarajevo art school who spoke some English and insisted that Tom accompany her to a Miro exhibit in town, her favorite. Much later she brought him to the central post office for the call to the States for further directions to Lasigna, a town in tatters.

Driving south on winding dirt roads following a wild wide river of unknown depth past farms, unspoiled nature, and unreadable signposts, an hour's journey turned to twists and u-turns through little towns with twinkling holiday lights in the bitter winter cold with no heating system. A new course was plotted back to the Zagreb "Holiday Inn." On one final 3-point turn, the car got stuck in a ditch. Freezing alone on a desolate dirt road thousands of miles from home, it shouldn't end this way. A heave ho of the back end followed by a quick gun on the gas lifted the car up out of the ditch and speeding across the little dirt road and into the wild river. Well, almost. The little Spanish car had one feature above par – bitchin' brakes. Tom slammed on the brake pedal as hard as he hit the gas, spinning donuts in the grass and stopping inches from the lapping waves to barely save his own ass.

With nothing in his head but the sound of wind and water, Tom rolled slowly to the next sign in the distance which read "Lasigna 5 km." It was around 4 am. Dogs barked menacingly as he pulled into a farmhouse lot, waking the locals, and the lights turned on. Out came a tall lanky man with a gun. Drawing on Pictionary experience, Tom gave little stick figure diagrams with caveman utterances to the man speaking Serbo-Croatian. The man jumped in the car and gave directions, with a point or a nod. In a village with no phones there would be no calling the States collect. The sun had not yet risen as they pulled into a farmhouse outside town where a tall woman in a long work dress and boots was walking up a hill bearing a yoke with two buckets on her shoulders. Her piercing blue eyes Tom recognized in an instant.

A single tear followed the creases of her weather-beaten face as the man introduced her to Tom as his father's first cousin. It was almost as much emotion as she could bear since her mother, Tom's Grandfather's sister-in-law, passed away the day before Tom got there. The next day Tom joined the town at Aunt Slatitska's mother's house for the long march to the top of a hill where Tom's great aunt was interred in a grave which bears his family name. Beyond that little plot there's nothing to see but the rolling hills, the untamed river and uninhabited expanse. A man offered Tom a cigarette and he took it. Tom doesn't smoke.

Tom stayed in Lasigna for two days during the one time of year when they open the town hall and everyone dances wildly to the gypsy music and celebrates. At one point a group of women began laughing and someone translated to Tom that since his father's family came from that town he should marry there. It was time to move on. He drove east through the gorges and mountain passes of Sarajevo, south to the Adriatic Sea and up the Dalmatian coast to Italy again. Tom told us about finding his mother's family's roots in central Italy, speaking Italian and French, of his adventures modeling in Paris and Madrid, and returning to New York to study in the theater again. He had an offer to attend the prestigious Paris Film Academy but it was time to serve his country. At long last we saw the Texas tumbleweeds disappear from the Interstate as we entered New Mexico, then Arizona and saw the Grand Canyon.

Tom drove almost the whole way. When I took over the wheel, I saw him reading Congressional Theater, a book about the films and plays of the HUAC and McCarthy era. We made the west coast at last. We hung out on Venice Beach where Tom got some job painting a woman's apartment. He played guitar with Willow, Lost, and Autumn of the Blueberry Bus, runaway teens who work the boardwalk selling crystals they dig up in Arizona, or doing hair braids. I remember him trying to capture the new rhythm of the Pacific Ocean in his music. My sister and I flew back to New York and it wasn't a year before my sister flew west to stay with Tom in his Culver City guest house in a converted garage. So we keep in touch and for that I'm glad. People like us live from the heart. In Tom DeMar I found for peace, a friend.