By Bob Flaherty

Created 10/06/2009 – 04:00

column local news northampton

NORTHAMPTON – The airplane, one made of paper, soared ever higher into the Northampton night. As if programmed to a flight plan, the craft caught improbable currents and kept rising, rising, rising over a deserted Main Street at 3 a.m., while a city slept.

But Elliot Tarry, who had just moved to Northampton, was watching with his girlfriend from the open window of their third-floor apartment. They saw the plane climb higher still, to where they could almost reach out and grab it, and then they saw it descend and swoosh in for a long, graceful landing on the sidewalk below.

“We stuck out our heads, and there’s this little elf of a man down there, just grinning up at us,” said Tarry.

The elfish man was Tim Young, the eternal night owl, who, despite being deaf, loved music and the people who listened to it almost as much as he loved life.

So began what Tarry calls “a silent acquaintanceship” with the Zelig of Northampton, a man seemingly capable of being everywhere at once, a man with whom he had shared an indelible memory.

“To be able to achieve that level of greatness in something so simple as a paper airplane, you knew he was special,” said Tarry, a licensed massage therapist. “We made a connection that night that carried with me for 20 years.”

It’s been nearly two weeks since Young died alone in his condo at the age of 59.

He was not an office-holder, business owner or street cop, but we all knew him. He was the guy who walked around all day telling everyone who was playing in town that night and ran around all night trying to make their shows.

Lonesome Brothers singer and guitarist Jim Armenti speaks of Young’s sacred sheet: “He’d pull out this wrinkled handwritten page and describe all of the events he would see, all with a look of total amazement on his face, like each one was from another dimension, each show held the possibility of some kind of magic transformation,” said Armenti.

The handwritten sheet, known as “Tim’s Entertainment Report,” evolved into a neater, typewritten one he downloaded every morning at Forbes Library. But the approach never varied. From shop to cafe to people passing in crosswalks, he’d share the list and tout everyone on it – in a voice all his own. Some could make out every word, to others it was: “Tonight****Pearl Street****you gotta go*****very good!”

He’d get right in your face and make you feel guilty if you failed to commit. “I went to this show – where were ya?” he’d admonish.

“He sounded like the Martians in (the movie) ‘Mars Attacks,’” said Bill Dwight. “He was as much a fixture downtown as the cuckoo crosswalk sound and the crenellations on City Hall.”

But Tim Young’s patented fist bump was communication of the highest order. As Armenti describes it: “Whenever he appeared he came with a fist bump followed by the fist opening into a floral hand accompanied by ‘psssshhh,’ the sound of fireworks. For a guy who could barely hear, even with aids, he got a lot of sound into his head.”

Young’s connection

People have tried to explain the deaf man’s love of music, but that’s as hard to do as explaining your love of a particular genre to one who’d block his ears at the mention of it. Was it the beat, the sneeze of a high-hat, the unleashing of Jim Armenti’s fingers on the neck of a guitar, or the idea of someone getting up there and baring her soul? Young thrived on all of it. He heard it in a different way than most, but felt it like no other.

Of course, in crowded clubs nobody can hear anything anyway. It must have amused Young to see everyone strain to hear as they yelled across tables at each other. Some speculate that might have been the great equalizer for Timmy – here we are, all in here together, and none of us can hear.

The all-in-here-together part seemed a piece of the equation. “He was tuned in to that collective energy,” said Tarry. “Exhilarated by what everyone else was exhilarated by.”

“If you saw him in the audience, you knew he was listening and enjoying for the right reason,” said bassist Max Dermer of the band School For the Dead. “It was the perfect volume for him, when you think of it.”

For the record, Young grew up in Northampton. His dad was a professor at Smith College, his mom worked at the school he graduated from in 1970, the Clarke School for the Deaf. Four years later he graduated Northampton High. From there he got a degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, went to work helping design games at Milton Bradley and later worked as an actuary at Mass Mutual for years before being downsized.

Downsize away, he’d seem to say with his ever-present grin, it’s all good.

He started working for Al Houghton, the jack-of-all-trades guy with the big white beard whom concert-goers always see at Northampton nightclubs and halls. Together, Houghton and Young painted over 100 apartments and concert halls. He’d check in with Houghton every day at the Iron Horse: “Need some help? I’m available.” When Houghton didn’t have work for his pal and just had errands to run in his pickup, Young said, “I’ll keep ya company,” and climbed in.

“How many times had I heard that in 22 years?” Houghton mused. “‘I’ll keep ya company.’”

“He was like a golden retriever,” Houghton said of the pair’s relationship. “You feed him once in a while and all you get back is love. He was hard to understand, but we didn’t talk much anyway. But you didn’t have to communicate, he was so smart.”

A music lover working for nightclubs – how much more smart do you need? He knew all the bands, and all the players’ names. He watched them evolve, mature, get record deals, bomb, break up and get back together.

One day Houghton and Young were doing some carpentry downtown and Timmy was yelling out to half the people on the street. “Who are you yelling at?” asked Houghton, a kind-hearted soul who always appears grouchy.

“That’s the bass player for Fancy Trash!” cried Young. “Don’t you know that?”

“The only time I ever saw him mad was after a show at the Calvin and I’ve got him sweeping up out front,” said Houghton. “He gives me this look. He had a band to see – he had to get going.”

“We could have Bob Dylan playing here and the worst band in town at the worst hole-in-the-wall and it made no difference,” said Houghton. “Two, three songs, and he’s off to the next one.”

Grim discovery

It was Houghton who found him, in his bathtub; he knew something was wrong two nights before. “It was at the Los Lobos show. He said he didn’t feel good, had the sniffles. I sent him home. But he had this eerie look in his eyes, as if the spirit had left him. I never saw him like that before.”

Two days went by. No one had seen Timmy Young on the street, a shock in and of itself.

“I’m gonna find him dead,” thought Houghton, who called police, got the key from management and let himself into Young’s Raymond Place apartment. “I heard the dripping faucet, not another sound in the place, just the dripping faucet. I can’t get it out of my head. I went in, saw what I saw, and mechanically walked out. I’m in shock now, but I knew what I was going to find.”

By last Friday night the word was all over town. Gabe Bon, who handles security at The Elevens, knew instinctively that something had to be done. Bon got on his cell phone, called every band in town and threw a show together, the “Timmy ‘Fist Bumpin’ St. Peter at the gates of the Big Show in the Sky” memorial show, to be exact. For once, Tim Young’s beloved musicians made it easy – everyone played three songs. Which was about all Timmy was good for, before he got itchy for the next venue down the street.

“This is the show he’d be wishing he could come to,” said Rich Tardy, lead singer of one of the night’s headliners, the Swill Merchants. Tardy calls Fist Bump Timmy a fixture in his life. “I’ve only been here three years and I saw him five times a day,” said Tardy. “Matt (Silberstein) and I were walking downtown today and it hit us that we’re not gonna see Timmy again.”

“The second I moved here I knew he was a presence in Northampton,” said singer and keyboardist Carolyn Zaikowski, who goes by the name of Carolyn Conspiracy.

Aside from all the rockers hauling their gear in and out, there was a large contingent from the Clarke School, signing to each other from every corner of the joint. Young was secretary of the Clarke Alumni Council. Fellow alum Dick Mahaffey, 45, says he keeps looking around, thinking Tim and his smiling, caring face will magically appear. “He was the best supporting actor Community Sign Theater ever had,” said Mahaffey.

Young’s love of performance was not restricted to watching from the audience.

Greg Malynoski, who works in the development office of Clarke School, said that Young’s “connection to the hearing world is the epitome of what we teach.”

Clarke alum Rodney Kunath, class of ’58, roomed with Young for two years before the latter bought his Randolph Place condo in 1998. This New Year’s Eve will be hard to take for Kunath, the first one he won’t spend with his longtime friend watching the ball drop from Hotel Northampton’s roof and jumping around with all Hamp’s characters afterwards. “Tim never had an angry spirit,” said Kunath. “‘Things will get better,’ he’d say. Such a remarkable attitude.”

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