NOTES FROM THE WORKING CLASS: It's Too Bad, Tommy Wooten

Tommy Wooten was a working-class kid who went to Gorton High School in Yonkers. He lived in a two-story wood-frame house, a walk-up, on Voss Avenue. Multiple families shared apartments under its flat, dilapidated roof, connected by a common front door and a single stairwell. Tommy’s family had an apartment with five cramped rooms. Each room had a small built-in wall heater that looked like it was held together by duct tape. 

Tommy’s bedroom, small as a prison cell, had a metal peek-a-boo window looking out to a shrub-shaped tree. White-painted water pipes suspended from the ceiling assured slow running water. 

I never knew Tommy, but I knew a lot of boys like him. He set the de facto standard for Yonkers boys in the 1970s: poor students, all bluster, fun to hang out with, always looking for the next big party. The Yonkers culture celebrated boys like Tommy. There was no reward for taking the path of the straight and narrow. Without an education, the most Tommy could hope for was a blue collar job at Con Ed. 

Even today I’m haunted by Tommy Wooten because of what became of him. He died in a car crash. There are car accidents every day, but the brutality of Tommy’s car crash lingers. 

I heard about Tommy’s death from my sister. She liked him, not in the romantic sense, it was just a like, before there were likes on Facebook. She said he lived in a dump with a single mother, no father, but he was bright and kind. The last time she saw him at Untermyer Park, he told her he had bought a car, and he was going to quit drinking. 

Ten years after Tommy died, I wrote about a car accident like the one he was in. My first novel, “Italian Girls,” described a car wreck that took place late one night in the Bronx. The main character “Cookie Colangelo” died in that wreck. Her Grandmother insisted on keeping her casket open, so the world would see the bloody outcome of drunk driving and learn a lesson. 

I never finished writing “Italian Girls,” maybe because I killed the main character. The unfinished manuscript became fodder for four other books, including the Yonkers Trilogy. In the new incarnation, Cookie Colangelo was too smart to die at the hands of a drunk driver. She lived long enough to leave Yonkers. 

Like Cookie Colangelo, I left Yonkers, but I keep going back there to understand myself. There are also other things I want to understand. I want to know why boys like Tommy Wooten never stood a chance.  

Tommy Wooten died on a Monday night in September, a school night. Looks like he didn’t plan to go to school the next day. Neither did his friends. Technically, they died on Tuesday. It was three in the morning. It took several days to identify one boy; the other, Kenneth J. Vinchkowksi, also a student at Gorton High School, died at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. The unidentified boy turned out to be Michael Flynn, the son of Yonkers Fire Captain Bert P. Flynn. 

Evidence gathered at scene of the accident indicated the boys had been drinking. There are more Irish Pubs per capita in the Bronx than in all of Ireland. Tommy stepped full throttle on the gas of his 1966 Buick Opel. Traveling at high speed, the car suddenly swung into the southbound lane and hit a transit pillar. Tommy attempted to swing the car into the northbound lane. The car split in two on impact. The boys slammed under the car engine like a broken nesting doll, one jammed into the other. Tommy and the unidentified boy (Michael Flynn) died instantly. The third boy (Kenneth J. Vinchkowksi) died a few hours later at the hospital.  

The wake for Tommy Wooten was held at Whelan Funeral Home. Tommy had possessed enough charm to make both girls and boys sob at his wake. Throngs of grim, pinched-white onlookers passed by his open casket. His mother wanted to display the full carnage of his body. No one wanted to look but everyone did. A large bandage swathed his head that had been smashed like a turnip against a steel subway stanchion. And despite the undertaker’s best efforts, it was evident that his body had been cleaved in two. 

It seemed cruel and punitive for Tommy’s family to expose his broken body to the world, but people do terrible things when they’re suffering from grief. His friends wanted to remember him the way he was when he was alive, all bluster, fun to hang out with, always looking for the next big party.  

Tommy’s open casket might resemble the showing of the brutally murdered Emmett Till, but Tommy wasn’t a victim of racism or a national symbol of white men’s hatred for people of color. Tommy was a victim of himself, and the culture that encouraged young men to be their own worst enemies and then admired them for being losers. 

Tommy Wooten’s death made an impact me; he not only killed himself, but he took the lives of two other kids. I left Yonkers, a culture that exalted guys like Tommy. I left a culture that wanted to show Tommy’s broken body to teach us a lesson. Like Tommy, I am lost but in a much different way—no matter how far I travel, Yonkers travels with me. Some of us are more lost than others, and it is not always easy to understand the difference.