In the fall of 1958, things weren’t going well for eighteen-year-old Tommy Johns. He had graduated from Croton-Harmon High School that year and was working as a janitor, while living with his mother and stepfather and four younger siblings in an unheated, drafty wood house about two hundred yards from the railroad tracks and the Hudson River. His parents had money for beer, cheap liquor, and little else. One morning, Tommy got up, put on his oversized, secondhand Swedish army coat, told his family he was going to the corner store for cigarettes, and hitchhiked fifty miles to Manhattan.
Let out of the car in Greenwich Village, he wandered up Sixth Avenue, choosing that route for no particular reason. When he crossed the intersection at Twenty-eighth Street, he suddenly recognized the familiar figure of Gene Smith standing on the curb next to a tractor-trailer.
Tommy had gone to school with Smith’s son, Pat, and daughter Marissa, in Croton. He visited the Smiths’ spacious stone home in a quiet leafy neighborhood on the other side of town. Tommy knew that Mr. Smith had been a famous photographer for Life, covering World War II and other important subjects, and here he was, standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and looking forlorn.
Smith saw the kid approaching:
Tommy, what the hell are you doing here?
I left home this morning. I just ran away.
Well, we have something in common. I just left my wife and family. I got this truck with all my stuff. I need somebody to help me move it into my loft here. I need somebody to build shelves and cabinets and organize everything. You need a job?
Johns stayed in Smith’s loft for two years.
* * *
Tommy Johns joined a roster of outcasts that found their way up the stairwell at 821 Sixth Avenue and into Smith’s isolated and obsessive world. Smith scratched “Tommy Johns” or “T. Johns” in pencil or pen on more than twenty labels of his reel-to-reel tapes, but Johns’s identity remained one of the lasting mysteries of my research for a dozen years or more, as I was searching for the people Smith documented.
I learned to recognize Johns’s occasional voice on the tapes. He didn’t seem to be a musician, more a phantom. I imagined him relaxing ten feet from the recorder, smoking a joint and drinking a Rheingold—barely audible, just taking in the scene.
The Social Security Death Index provided no indication that Tommy Johns was dead, so I kept searching. My colleague Dan Partridge and I tracked down several dozen people around the country named Thomas or Tom or Tommy Johns—all about the right age—but none of them were the right guy. Then, in October 2009, Smith’s son, Pat, by now a retired race-car mechanic, sent me an e-mail: “I found him.” They had connected through a website dedicated to helping people find lost classmates.
Johns was living in the Dominican Republic under the name Tamas Janda, and we began corresponding immediately. He told me that Tamas Janda was his birth name, a fact he learned from his mother’s official papers after she died in 1967.
When Janda ran away from home and hitchhiked into Manhattan it was the first of many moves. He ended up working construction in Florida in the 1970s. Then hopped islands in the Caribbean, learned to cook, and opened a few bars and restaurants, including one, No Bones Café, that was written up in Caribbean Travel & Leisure. In early 2010, a friend offered cheap rent in a vacant mobile home in Orange City, Florida. So at age seventy, Janda moved again.
In the spring of 2011, I drove down to Orange City from North Carolina to visit Janda. He was waiting for me in his driveway when I pulled up. Janda’s white hair, mustache, and glasses set off his dark, outdoor skin and wrestler’s physique. It was about to start raining, so we shook hands and quickly went inside his trailer. We sat down at his kitchen table, and over plates of spicy chicken and several Budweisers, he told me his story while thunder rumbled into my tape recorder and rain pelted the trailer top.
I was born in 1940 three days after my parents passed through Ellis Island from Romania or Hungary or somewhere like that. They were gypsies running from Hitler and, you know, true gypsies aren’t sure where exactly they are from. My mother was Bertha Lillian Klimko Janda. My father was Joseph Janda. They divorced when I was a baby, and my mother married Lee Roger Johns. He adopted me in 1944, and they changed my legal name to Thomas Michael Johns. That’s still my legal name, but I’ve been going by my birth name since 1967.
My mother drank too much, and later she got into terpin hydrate cough medicine with codeine. My stepfather was worse. He made eighty bucks a week and spent forty on cases of beer and bars. They would fight all the time, sometimes with broken bottles, knives, and things like that. The cops would come over. We had a coal stove and that was our only heat. There was no insulation. You couldn’t have a glass of water beside the bed at night because it would freeze.
I had a lot of problems in high school because we were poor, my parents were drunks, and I wore thick glasses. I got bullied a lot. I was called bookworm and four eyes. I still have scars on my hands where bullies would burn me with cigarettes. When I was around fourteen I decided I wasn’t going to take any more shit. I started lifting weights and taking martial arts classes. I went back and kicked the shit out of everybody who had ever bullied me or made fun of my family. Sometimes I didn’t win the first fight, so I had to go back a second or third time. But eventually I kicked the shit out of everybody.
When I was about ten years old my mother got into really bad shape. She was barely making it. I was the oldest of five kids, and I learned to cook on the coal stove. As a senior in high school, they let me only go half a day so I could work and feed my brothers and sisters.
After high school I knew I had to get out of there. But it was painful. I realized that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how hard I tried, there was really nothing I could do for my younger brothers and sisters, not with my parents there. It was a sad situation. So I took off.
Gene had a studio couch and a reclining chair, and that’s where I would crash. My job around the loft was to make shelves, organize, and label everything. We never talked about money. I got paid with the roof over my head and there’d be food, booze, and occasionally dope to smoke. Gene drank a lot and he did speed. I never liked the idea of speed.
For my nineteenth or twentieth birthday Gene gave me a Mamiya thirty-five-millimeter camera with a fifty-five-millimeter lens and a detachable magazine. I took pictures with it and one day I took one of Gene standing in the loft—he had a Leica in his hand and his head was tilted. In the background you could see all the corkboards and foam boards with his work prints tacked to them. Gene’s cat Pending was in the background, too. He was a stray alley cat who took up living with Gene. People would ask, “What’s your cat’s name?” Gene would say, “His name is pending; I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
One day Gene said to me, “Tomorrow Eddie and Grace are coming by.” I didn’t know who he was talking about, but it was Edward Steichen and Grace Mayer from the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art. I think it was Steichen’s last year there before [John] Szarkowski took over. Gene encouraged me to show them some of my work. I’m a nineteen-year-old runaway nobody with only the clothes on my back and a camera Gene gave me and here come these important folks from MoMA. I showed them some pictures and they wanted prints of my portrait of Gene. It might still be in the MoMA collection somewhere, but my prints and negatives are long gone.
Janda got up from the table to get two more Budweisers. When he returned, he handed me one, and I asked him the question that had been on my mind since the conversation began.
Why did Smith let you stay in the loft for so long?
Janda’s eyes watered. He paused, then took off his glasses, wiped his face, and drank a sip of cold beer.
I was a hard-ass motherfucker most of my life, but I’m really a softie.
He paused again.
You have to remember that I was a real poor kid growing up in an environment that wasn’t particularly nice, and Gene knew that. He was a tremendously sensitive man. But he was also dead honest: honest to the point of pure pain. One thing he was honest about is that he was a poor husband and father. He didn’t fake it. But he was sincerely compassionate and empathetic. It’s almost as if there was an eye inside Gene that had to be filled. I don’t know how to explain this. Not many people are truly able to understand beauty and pain and ugliness. Most people don’t want to be reminded of their humanity, which is inherently painful and ugly. Gene sought that out.
Janda and I spent a couple more hours talking and listening to the rain. He told me about his hot pepper plants outside his trailer. A few weeks later he sent me several batches of different hot sauces and an envelope full of various pepper seeds.
* * *
Driving back to North Carolina the next day, Janda’s description of the unwanted human image haunted me—the beauty and pain he thought were inextricable, a conjoining that Smith preferred at the expense of himself and those close to him. There is also that thing, however to describe it, that kept me searching for Janda for a dozen years, and the Internet that helped me find him.