Tom

Let me preface this by saying I don't actually know Eddie Murphy. I'm a homeless blogger and I've seen some of his movies. I'm not starting with Eddie Murphy to sing his praises or call him a paragon of virtue. I'm starting with him because you've probably heard of him and you probably haven't heard of Tom Fejeran.

My first exposure to Eddie Murphy was catching the last ten minutes of an HBO special and he's playacting a conversation between a man and a woman who are romantically involved and at the end he's being the guy and bitterly saying things like "What have you done for me lately?" And I and my husband both were going "OMG! What a misogynistic JACKASS!"

And then a few days later we saw this hour-long special from the start and the first fifty minutes is the guy doing usual guy things and the gal being a strident feminist and repeating strident feminist popular memes of the era, including the Janet Jackson song line "What have you done for me lately?" And then at the end he's I guess had enough of her crap and is being all right back at you!

And we thought it was hilarious.

I eventually came to have more respect for him as a person -- granted I don't really know him -- than I have for most of the Hollywood crowd. I recently read the following about him for the first time on Wikipedia:

Murphy has paid for the funerals of several friends such as Redd Foxx and Rick James, and purchased a tombstone for the previously unmarked graves of Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas and Tim Moore...

I don't have the impression that's some kind of PR stunt. I used to watch The Little Rascals ("Buckwheat" was a character in that show) and I'm very aware that Black actors were underpaid and largely socially excluded. The first Black actress to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, sat at a segregated table at the Oscars and was unable to attend the premier of the movie for which she won it due to it being presented at a Whites Only movie theater.

Murphy doesn't pull his punches in comedy and he's not untouched by controversy, but he's impressed me as someone trying to genuinely work towards "the advancement of colored people" via some method other than just pissing on White people and I've appreciated his work for being -- or appearing to be -- what I once fantasized I would do: Entertain people, make people laugh and have a pleasant distraction from their difficult lives while not putting icing on the cow pie of serious social issues, not helping to keep them entrenched, getting people to think. And thereby pay MY bills.

I haven't pulled that off.

If you are familiar with Eddie Murphy and his life, his controversies as a Black American male who has done well for himself and therefore nothing he does is ever morally good enough and you know they will focus on details like how many children he has and spin it into a scandal while patting wealthy White men on the back for the exact same thing and you, like I do, mostly respect the man, please bring that mindset to the rest of what I have to say about a man you probably haven't heard of and who is no longer able to speak for himself to clear up anything I get wrong because he died some years ago.

Room for Improvement is listed in the About page for this blog. It's about Tom Fejeran and it's a relatively recent piece trying to say something meaningful about the state of the world by talking about my firsthand experiences with personal relationships. 

I've been slow to do that for fear of coming across as maligning a man I never actually fell out of love with and deeply respected without imagining he was perfect or infallible.

He was Guamanian, a culture I had no prior experience with, and he was a survivor of childhood sex abuse which was not common knowledge. He got extremely angry at me one day when I talked about something I knew about a mutual acquaintance that I believed he already knew and he lectured me that I was not to tell anyone he had been molested and told me his best friend didn't know.

He worked part-time as some kind of sex counselor and he helped me deal with some of my problems but he helped me almost inadvertently because he saw my problems through his eyes, most likely colored by his own unhealed trauma, and what he saw wasn't really what my problem was.

My problem wasn't so much "I was raped at the age of twelve, nearly five years before I hit sexual maturity and began menstruating shortly before I turned seventeen, so I was still physically very much a child and it hurt like a bitch, so I'm terrified of being hurt again."

My real problem was that I have a medical condition that causes significant problems with vaginal dryness and I got married young to the second person I slept with and I was the second person he slept with. Having both played by all the rules and not slept around casually, neither of us really knew what we were doing in bed and I couldn't wrap my brain around "Um, HOW does that WORK???" if someone is more well endowed.

There were good points to having married young with limited sexual experience. Neither of us really knew I had unusual difficulties and we had been accommodating it for years without thinking about that as accommodating a significant handicap.

That was our normal and I didn't spend years feeling like some kind of factory reject who would never be good enough because of that detail or something like that. But it also meant neither of us really knew how to put my childhood sexual abuse behind us and my marriage was likely essentially doomed from the start because of THAT. 

I believe we did a lot of things right and unusually well and the marriage lasted a great deal longer than it really should have and was a great deal healthier than it really should have been by all rights. But to my mind, it's a little like the relationship was born with a genetic defect we couldn't correct and no amount of being brilliant and working hard was ever enough to make it really work.

The other thing Tom did for me that he may not have known was really the most important thing he did and which I don't think we really discussed is he was the first man who believed I had a right to get my needs met.

I married my ex-husband in part because shortly after we began sleeping together, out of the blue with no prior discussion, he told me he was willing to meet my needs, all I had to do was ask. And then he spent seventeen years turning me down anytime I asked and telling me it was somehow MY fault and that I had bad timing or didn't know how to ask until one day I called BULLSHIT and told him "After seventeen years of this, if you told me your dick had fallen off this morning, I would call that a convenient excuse."

Plus other choice words to the effect that if you really wanted to meet my needs, you could. You just don't WANT to.

So it's not like I never tried to get my needs met, but I mostly didn't and I'm not more bitter about that because my ex being such a putz meant we never learned my girl parts don't really work and I never experienced my sexual frustration as "my fault -- because my body is defective." I just learned he was a putz and that's why I was always frustrated.

I was heavily involved with The TAG Project and probably began discussing IQ tests with Tom because of an incident on Cyburbia described here where someone posted an online IQ test and people got very invested in their score and huffy with me for being dismissive of the test.

Most likely, Tom spoke at least three languages and the first two were probably Chamorro and Spanish and English was likely his third language. He didn't think he was particularly smart and part of what happened on Cyburbia is that Americans were scoring better than other nationalities and I was going "Well, duh, it's an American IQ test and I bet you couldn't score as well in Spanish as our South American member scored in English. IQ tests are culture specific."

So I remember asking Tom "And what's your culture? And what's your first language?" And him telling me his first language was Chamorro and his culture was Chamorro-Spanish. And he had to stop telling me he's not all that smart or whatever he was telling me. I shut that down.

From what I gather, Tom was "a swinger" in his youth and married his first wife because he got her pregnant. They had four children and he made sure she got an education and a serious career though he never really loved her.

He was probably thirty or thirty-one when he began sleeping with his second wife who was seventeen at the time and people gave him a lot of flak about that. But she was likely legally the age of consent and I don't know who initiated the relationship, but she wanted to marry him because Tom was really good to people.

So he married her and they moved to his home of Guam because they visited and she liked it there. So people may have assumed he was older and he made her go where he wanted to live, but that's not at all what happened.

They had three kids together and he made sure she got an education and a real career and then she was unfaithful to him. He filed for separation but their youngest was just three at the time, so five years later when I met him, they were still legally separated, still living together and probably in line with Guamanian culture which kind of doesn't care what you do behind closed doors so long as you don't publicly embarrass anyone, most likely they were both seeing other people quietly -- which wasn't illegal and wasn't infidelity -- while they kept up appearances because they both had successful careers.

I met him at a time when I was extremely sick and I met him through a woman I thought of as my best friend because she was having an illicit affair with Tom and trying to figure out how to leave her marriage. 

My opinions in Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood are informed not just by firsthand experience with my own kids but experience talking with people on TAGMAX and my so-called best friend was one of them. She had two difficult children she was homeschooling and she listened to my opinions that I couldn't really substantiate with studies or the like and in short order walked back several of their phobias and other significant issues.

She also was brutally raped at gun point in her teens and I helped her get over that. She was sleeping with Tom and was my "best friend" but mostly I was her best friend and I did a lot for her.

Tom knew through her I had been raped and was basically okay and he was curious as to how that was. He was more sexually savvy than most people and working part time as some kind of sex counselor working with married couples seeing a marriage counselor and he helped me enormously but he wasn't really over being molested and raped as a child himself.

I initially told him to not burn my best friend and I no longer remember exactly what I told him. She gave him my contact information so he could tell me her husband knew of the affair and was reading her emails and it was a problem for her if I emailed her and then he was interested in me and I was not wanting to stab her in the back.

He didn't tell me much. She was no longer talking to me. He quietly put her on a plane personally and shipped her off the island.

She emailed me once or twice a couple of years later and said she was divorced and the ex kept the kids and life was better. I was still deathly ill. She was no longer in need of some kind of miracle. She quietly took the "Fuck you, got mine!" option and exited my life after I helped her with difficult children the professionals couldn't help and with recovering from a brutal rape the professionals also couldn't really help with.

And I've not publicly talked about that before because I felt it made me and Tom look like bad people. I no longer feel Tom somehow did something wrong and I no longer wonder if I somehow did something bad.

I think she basically used both of us and like his second wife, she very much wanted him because Tom was incredibly good to people and he moved her out of his life when he met me and realized I was like him: I'm actually good to people and she was never really going to be good to him like that.

Like every brilliant man I have known and was fond of, Tom had trouble finding a woman that really merited what he brought to the table and such men tend to be maligned by outsiders who feel he's supposed to be faithful etc. and never stop to think about how much he's being shortchanged when he does all the stuff society expects of a good man and in exchange for giving her a Christmas Feast, she gives him a pathetic bag of stale potato chips and insists they are even.

Tom is dead. He is beyond being harmed by my words and by the uncharitable interpretation some people may choose to have who are here to convince themselves their baggage is the moral high ground and piss all over me and other people in pursuit of venting their anger rather than trying to learn.

Nothing I say about Tom is intended to be disrespectful even though I don't think he got everything right and I don't think it makes the world a better place to whitewash it and pretend he did.