User:VGEpstein

Who I Am

My name is Vincent. I’m a mostly-retired used book and antique dealer residing along the banks of the Rondout Creek in Upstate New York. I have to admit that I don’t plan on spending very much time on Wikipedia, or making alterations to many of the pages other than that with which I’m immediately concerned. I appreciate what the site does and everything… I’ve just lived too close to Woodstock for too long to be anything but a little bored by even the most up-to-date socialist experiments.

How it Began

In 2003 or 2004 I got restless and took a trip into the village, to see what was on tap at a new tavern that had opened across from a dirty little beach, and a carousel that’s since been auctioned off piece-by-piece. Besides an admirable variety of local microbrews, the pub – which was called Doolittle’s – happened to feature a completely unknown local singer-songwriter, who was just setting up as I walked in. I hadn’t intended to stay late, but something about the way that the young man and his gawky girl companion went around setting up tall candles and cheap picture frames before the performance made me order a plate of French fries and hunker down.

The lad began his set at 10:00 sharp, to an audience consisting of me, the bartender, and the place’s rolly-polly proprietor, whose name was Paul. I asked Paul the singer’s name, and he told me it was Damien Tavis Toman.

Toman wailed as if he had stubbed his toe, played his big brown acoustic guitar with a warlike vehemence, and spent long periods of weird silence between each song, leafing through an overstuffed binder of dog-eared, handwritten lyrics. When he found one that caught his fancy, he would smile a little, clear his throat, and mutter (without looking up), something like, “This is an old song I wrote about the benefits of bloodletting upon the adolescent nerves.” Then the room would slowly fill up with his shrieks and hollers again, like a compression chamber of musty, Byronic sorrows.

Paul watched Toman dreamily, sometimes lifting his glasses to dispose of a tear, as Toman howled about the "drippings from the teeth of disloyalty’s accomplices", "girls swollen like grapes", etc. I asked him how he had discovered the young man, and he said that Toman had simply brought him a tape at about the time the pub first opened for business. He had allowed Toman to play for tips on Thursday nights at first, then moved him to Friday nights with the hopes of building business and intrigue. This wasn’t the town for it, though, he said: Toman belonged in New York City, where people would at least try to understand him.

Some time later, the local newspaper (which he would later write for) published a wild, ranting sort of suicide note from Toman, along with a photograph in which the singer looked characteristically worried, peering over his microphone. “A Cry for Help” was the headline. I took it for a publicity stunt, and dutifully returned the next Friday to join what I presumed would be a crowd of anxious curiosity-seekers. Instead there were two lesbians who shot pool throughout his set, and an indignant roughneck who called up “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox during the opening verse of one of Toman’s songs. Not long thereafter, Toman abruptly went into hiding, and the pub put boards on its windows and a “for sale” sign on its door.

Toman lost his nerve for facing the public, I guess, but his creative compulsion seems only to have expanded. Paul said during his days at Doolittle’s that Toman had more than 100 original songs in his repertoire, all packed into that three-ring binder. God only knows what went on in his personal life after leaving the shamefully indifferent public eye, but he seems to have composed relentlessly, filling album after album with increasingly more inventive, compelling, and personal work – a bewildering autobiography that only he can disentangle.

Why I Came Here

It seems to me that Toman wants the world to know who he is and to experience his work, but he’s embarrassed to “market” himself, and so he goes ignored. Some may call this fair, but I think it's a pity. Immediately after I created a modest Wikipedia page concerning Toman, it was invaded by some irritable little skeptic who wanted to have it deleted, because of Toman’s lack of “notability.” I just remember that when I was a kid, bits of senseless rubbish were constantly bouncing to the top of the Billboard charts, only to leave their creators forgotten and bereft a month later, never to be heard from again. And yet, by Wiki standards, anyone who makes a mark - however incidental - upon the Billboard could be defined as "notable" and worthy of having his or her article left blissfully unmolested (if utterly overlooked.)

We all know that the world has changed. It belongs now to the saboteurs.