Thom Gossom has had a series of careers. In his memoir, “Walk -On,” he writes of his years at Auburn, 1970-74, playing football on a championship team and dealing with persistent and sometimes overt racism. He was one of 200 black students among 15,000. After what Gossom describes as “a couple cups of coffee” with the New England Patriots, he founded “Thom Gossom Communications” in Birmingham and organized campaigns for the expansion of the airport, among other projects. Then Gossom was “discovered,” so to speak, in amateur theatrical productions and had a solid career in Hollywood, with recurring roles in “In the Heat of the Night,” “Boston Legal” and a prize-winning role in “NYPD Blue,” among many others.
For the last few years, Gossom has turned to short fiction. His three volumes of stories: “A Slice of Life,” “Another Slice” and “The Rest of the Pie,” roughly track chronologically. The first was set mainly in Rosalind Heights, his childhood neighborhood, and shows boys growing up in the stresses of the ’60s and ’70s. In “Another Slice,” the action moves to L. A. and the problems become adult problems: drugs and violence, love and interracial dating.
Several of the characters in this third volume are transplants from Birmingham, coping with really big city life. This volume is in many ways the most interesting, with several stories set in the movie industry, stories that could only be told by an insider. For example the lead story, “Day Player, “ takes us onto the set with Bill, a Black actor in his sixties in a guest appearance. He plays the Reverend Whitehouse, a somber man of dignity—much like a number of Gossom’s roles—and he’s hoping that, somehow, it can shift to a recurring role. Bill has had good parts in the past, but fame is fleeting. A career in Hollywood is tricky, unpredictable business.
Other stories are set at an audition, in a jail cell and at a book festival. Another story I especially liked which takes place in Fort Walton Beach, Gossom’s present home, was “The Head Shop,” a Black barbershop, and it is surprising that more stories by African American authors don’t. We have long understood that the beauty parlor, for white southern women, is the center of information and communication. We saw that in Welty’s “Petrified Man “ and in the film “Steel Magnolias.” The Black barber shop is all that and more, a safe space where men speak out on race and politics, sometimes indulging in conspiracy theory.
In this piece, Freddie explains that Osama bin Laden was buddies with George H. W. Bush, which is why W never found Osama. Freddie further tells the gang that on 911, a U.S. government plane flew Osama’s relatives out of the U.S. Not all the men agree with this theory but they do concur that even though Obama is president, “Racism ain’t dead.”
