On Tom Petty, Who I Didn’t Know

Tom Petty is 33 years old, with blue wolf eyes and lank hair. He is thin and rangy, with a slow drawl and a shit-kicking grin. He’s a damn good writer, and he’s a drummer, too. To me, Tom Petty isn’t Tom Petty at all.

Tom Petty is a lonely American boy I met in the summer of 2017, a tumbleweed that drifted across the country and got stuck in a sewer grate in Brooklyn. I didn’t know Tom Petty then; I still barely know him now.

But I learned enough, in the early morning half-light that only the most ambitious road trippers see, that Tom Petty is the sound of America’s lonely, misty, never ending highways. His voice is the one you don’t hear at all, at the back of a party where everyone else is noisy, observing quietly and listening — always listening. He’s the sun-bleached log at the edge of the world, witnessing a young couple as they begin and end.

Tom Petty is the joint they share in a starry backyard in Williamsburg the night they kiss. He’s the beer they drink brazenly on a crowded beach as cops amble by. He’s the band playing to a backwoods dive bar and the shrug when nobody stays to watch. He keeps playing anyway.

Tom Petty is the bemused look you give a Canadian girl. He’s California and its invitation to try a simpler life, if you’re ever ready.

He’s the awkward silence over breakfast, so thick you have to laugh at it. He’s the plan to drive to Texas and never come back.

“Petty rocks” is the response of a boy who can’t say what he wanted to say.

He assures the quiet ones who wait silently, like resigned spiders, accepting they may never get what they want. They wait anyway; there’s peace in loneliness, and time promised them nothing. Sometimes, they get what they want and realize it’s not right after all; that’s when Petty gives them the courage to walk away.

I will never experience coming of age alongside his music, but I have learned Tom Petty is the tumbler of whiskey that stops him from taking anyone’s calls. He’s the pain of nursing a heavy heart like a good novel, which might someday become a good song. He’s the twilight chill asking why you never called back.

Tom Petty is America on the afternoon of the greatest, loneliest tragedy yet, wondering if those calls are the only thing that mean anything anymore.

That’s about all I know of Tom Petty. He seems like a nice enough guy. I can’t blame him for “Free Falling,” even though it makes it okay not to fight. He wasn’t wrong to convince America’s road trippers that aimlessness, like loneliness, can be pure and essential, like it’s built into the land.