Ringo’s younger brother

 

March 10, 2010

 

(written January, 1981)

 

Everywhere Tom Starr goes people ask him if he is Ringo Starr of the Beatles, a question he claims is driving him crazy.

“It’s not that I have anything against the old boy,” he says. “But I’m me.”

Starr is a six foot two baker at the Union Avenue Dunkin Donuts in Paterson who wears a large white cowboy hat with a feather while he bakes. He says the feather is for luck.

“One time I caught food poisoning in New York City and they rushed me to the hospital where the nurse asked me that,” he says. “I told her now. But when I got to see the doctor, he kept calling me Ringo. I thought that was strange until I noticed that the nurse had put down Ring as my name on the top of my chart. That’s me. Ringo Starr from Indiana. Nobody listens to what I say anyway, so I might just as well be Ringo.

“I’ve always had problems getting people to listen to me. Back home they just called me stupid because they couldn’t get any education into me. They called me thick. The Marines just called me a hick. But at least in the Marines I got some respect. They don’t care two shoots about who or what you are as long as you obey orders. Heck, I would have stayed in the Marines if they hadn’t pushed me out, even though I had a girlfriend on the outside that didn’t like me being a Marine at all. Her and her mother tried to run my life. But what they nearly did was run me to death.”

Starr was born on Sept. 7, 19 59 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the sixth child of seven siblings, that had four fathers.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. I only knew the last of them. Me and Billy (William Starr) didn’t have to go through the bull our other brothers did, seeing one father go only to have another father come along to replace him.”

The oldest sibling is Jim Moore, age 39. The youngest is Billy, age 16. And according to Tom, the oldest and youngest are as different as night and day.

Starr grew up in the city of Indianapolis where he went to school.

“They weren’t teaching me nothing I wanted to know,” he says. “They kept saying I was slow. I wasn’t slow. I just didn’t get anything out of what they were teaching.”

So at age 16, he quit and worked a year as a finisher for a Dunkin Donuts.

“It felt real good having money of my own. Hell, in a house with seven boys, you’re lucky to have a bed and blanket and there were times when I didn’t even have those,” he said.

That’s when he deiced to join the Marines.

“I really don’t know why I joined. I guess it was to get away from everything at home. But I got there I found out it was just like home. All those guys acted just like my brothers. We were a family. We found and we got drunk, and when we got drunk we fought some more – just like at home.”

He spent two years, seven months and twenty seven days in the Marines, and calls Paris Island where he trained “a dirty little island filled with mud and bugs,” a place he says he hated with his whole heart when he first got there.

“I used to wake up in the morning wondering if I was crazy,” he says. “It took me a long time to decide that I was. That’s when I caught the sickness, something spread by the bugs there and it kept me in the hospital for over five months. I never really got over it, and eventually, the Marines let me go, saying I’d probably never recover.

“I told them I wanted to stay. They told me no way.”

That was December, 1979, and he made it back home for Christmas. His girl was waiting.

“She was more than a little peeved at me for joining the Marines and since I’m not somebody who writes home much that made things worse,” he says.

They planned their marriage for the following June: a big church, a big reception, a very big bill.

At this point, he started to have his doubts. It was also when he started having stomach problems.

“I think most of the pain came from the booze,” he says. “I was out every night for a couple just so I could relax.”

Meanwhile, his future bride and her mother helped him get his high school equivalency. They also helped him find a job selling shoes, and they helped him buy new clothing, new furniture for the new apartment the couple would occupy after the ceremony.

“They were so busy fixing up my life they forgot about me. They never knew exactly what I wanted. I didn’t know that either. But I knew wearing new shoes and a suit and bending over someone’s feet all day wasn’t it,” he says.

Then in mid-May – about three weeks before the wedding – the whole thing exploded. They were in his fiancé’s parlor making the final arrangement for the reception when he started hearing name after name he didn’t know, and got very confused.

“I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to invite my own family let alone all those stranger. So I told them that. Her mother looked at me queer as if realizing for the first time that I wasn’t the type she wanted her daughter to marry. She told me as much. I told her maybe she should find another horse to saddle. After that it was mostly shouting until I walked out, slamming the door behind me.

“For the first time someone had listened to what I had to say and they didn’t like. I walked around town in the dark for a long time lost. Not lost in the streets, but inside of me. Suddenly there was nobody telling me what to do. So I went and got drunk.”

But he did more than that. Somewhere in the confusion, he also swallowed thirty seven barbiturates.

“They were my mother’s and frankly I don’t remember taking them. I just remember waking up in the hospital with the faces of my family floating over me. I told them to stop moving so funny and that they were upsetting my stomach. They just laughed. Those were the first words I’d said in four days.

“Later, then they drove me home they weren’t laughing. They were too busy cursing.”

Neither his girlfriend or her mother bothered to come see him. They had closed the door on him and his problems, and he says that he was relieved and didn’t mind. But he did come immediately east.

“I just wanted some fresh air,” he says with a laugh, as he pounds the donut dog. “I came here and got some work with my brother.”

That was ten months ago and now he’s thinking about going back.

“I don’t know if I going to face anything,” he says. “I’m just going back. New York isn’t my home; it’s my brother’s. I’m from Indiana and no matter what happened in the past, it is where I belong.”

Then, he laughs again as if he has discovered something about himself and he turns and says, “besides, no matter where I go I’ll still be Ringo Starr.”