The Legend of Tom Kodak

I do not here distinguish at all the practical truths from the speculative; they are always the same.  And as we can say it is one of the most manifest truths, that a substance whose knowledge and power are infinite should be honored, we can say that it emanates at once from the light which is born within us, provided one can give their attention to it. We are transported beyond reason, and reason in every case perishes. We see a light infused into our understanding and can no longer be deceived.

-          Gottfried Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding (1704)

People will always say to me, “if there’s George Eastman that was involved with the company, who’s Mr. Kodak?”

-          Kathy Connor, Eastman Collection curator

The Legend of Tom Kodak

“George Eastman invented roll film. George Eastman invented little cameras that the roll film goes in. George Eastman made the [hiccup] George Eastman Kodak Film And Cameras Company. George Eastman was a millionaire and had millions of dollars.” The man looked to me over the rim of his pint glass. “Only one of those is true, and it’s not the first two.”

“Which is it?” I asked. Why I asked, I’ll never be sure. The man had just started talking, and as I was new in town and on my own that evening, I felt at leisure to humor him. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I was very lonely, far from my home, and not ready to yet retire to my bare rooms in the large apartments on Alexander Avenue.

“Which is what?”

“The third or the fourth?”

“The fourth.”

“He wasn’t a millionaire?”

“Of course he was!” He slammed his empty glass on the bar. “How do you think he built the mansion and gave all the money to school kids?”

I thought I was making him upset, so I dropped it. He was an older man, white hair and deep grooves beneath his eyes and across his forehead. His nose was red and bulbous. His glassy eyes sat beneath eyebrows that appeared to sprout in all directions at once. In short, he terrified me.

“The truth is this: George Eastman didn’t invent any roll film, he didn’t invent any roll film camera, he didn’t make any movie film cameras or movie films. He didn’t invent a fucking thing.”

“Who did?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” and he pointed to his empty glass. Taking the hint but unsure why I should, I ordered him another beer and bourbon neat for myself. He grabbed me by the arm and led me, somewhat trepidatious, toward a dark booth in one of the bar’s less-crowded corners. We sat, and he drank nearly half of his beer before beginning his story, the likes of which I have never heard before.

“Everybody knows that George Eastman was a big hot shot and a real mama’s boy. So he did stuff that you wouldn’t think a person could do, you know? For instance [hiccup] he shot like a million animals because his mom was afraid of animals and he promised her that he’d kill them all if it made her happy. And the fucker really tried. Elephants, goats, tigers, cats in the neighborhood…man, anything. And then he’d get them all stuffed up and put them in his house. Real goddamned sick if you ask me. But he loved his mom and she was a crazy bitch, so what are you going to do?

“Anyway, that’s not even the worst of it. But look, here’s the real story and it’s more like a legend than a story except that it’s completely 100% true to the reality. George Eastman didn’t invent a fucking thing. And his mom knew it and she didn’t even care. But he got a hundred million dollars and a mansion so what’s the deal? Kodak.” He pointed at me and I instinctually looked over my shoulder and then back again. “Kodak did all the real inventing.”

“His company?”

The man finished his beer and sent me for another one. As I walked to the bar, I glanced back at him and he was staring straight ahead as if I were still there. He looked older behind me than he had in front of me, and I considered putting the empty glass on the bar and simply walking out the door. But this would have been cowardly. I had nothing better to do, no friends, and a history of taking the easy way out. That, in truth, is how I’d landed in Rochester anyway because I hadn’t the courage to quit the job which had sent me here. And I hated myself for it. A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. I ordered another beer for him, and another bourbon for myself though mine was still on the table and but two sips low.

I sat down across from him. “You were saying that his company was responsible for the invention?”

“No,” he pointed a finger at me as I slid the beer to him. “You said that. I said Kodak did it all.”

“I was under the impression that he named his company Kodak, and that the name was simply memorable.”

“He did, and it is, but nobody knows shit to remember [hiccup] why is Kodak a memorable.”

“Why Kodak is a memorable what?”

“Because Tom Kodak is George Eastman’s cousin.”

“Who’s Tom Kodak?”

“Exactly, ‘who’s Tom Kodak?’ Nobody knows, but I know.”

We sat for a while in silence for a moment and drank. Then suddenly he excused himself and stumbled toward the bathroom. I feared that this story was like a lake with no bottom, and that the man telling it was more likely to drown than reach the other side. And for some reason, vainglory perhaps, I’d committed myself to swim with him for as far as he could go and then try to make it to the other side after he’d gone under. I tried to decide what the foundation of this story was so that I could better buoy him when he returned. But I needn’t have worried because that man that returned was an energized caricature of the one who’d left. I can only assume he’d fixed.

“Where were we?”

His speech had cleared so relatively remarkably that I took a moment to respond. “Um, Tom Kodak.”

“Tom Kodak is responsible for the Photographic Age, the entire photographic arts, every picture you’ve ever fucking taken or even fucking seen, colleges having money, black colleges having money at all, this city even still trying to be here anymore, and even George Eastman shooting himself in the goddamned chest, which he didn’t’ even do by the way.

“Here’s what happened. George Eastman isn’t a remarkable guy. He’s not bright, he’s a mama’s boy, right? But his cousin Tom Kodak is an orphan, he’s a cripple, he looks like shit, and he’s a fucking genius with all kinds of stuff. So George makes a deal with him: you come up with some good ideas, and I’ll sell them. So for like ten years nothing happens. And George is like ‘Tom, come on, you got to make something really good or else I can’t sell anything. Just give me something right now.’ And Tom is a scientist, and he says ‘You can’t make science go faster.’ And George says, ‘But my mother isn’t proud of me,’ and that’s when he starts shooting animals. But Tom Kodak he just keeps inventing and then one day he gets it when he’s watching George shooting at squirrels in the yard. ‘What if everybody could take pictures?’

“So for three years he works on type of film that just about any idiot could use, and then a camera that the film goes in that just about any poor-ass person could get their hands on. Like, the two together would cost two bucks back then, which is maybe 33 dollars or something. And he shows George, but he doesn’t really get it. ‘Who wants to take pictures?’ he says. But Tom puts his hand on his shoulder and is like, ‘Everybody.’

“So George decides fine, at least it’s something, and he starts the Eastman Kodak company. And you know what? Boom, right away, millions of dollars. And everybody is like, ‘Unbelievable! You’re a genius. How did you invent these cameras and roll film?’ And he says ‘I invented it.’ So that’s that; George Eastman becomes the face of the company, which was always the plan, and Tom Kodak doesn’t care because now he has millions of dollars to start making better cameras, better film, and he does.”

The man paused to drink his beer. Halfway through the story, I’d felt the urge to begin taking notes and had made some faint clandestine scribbles in a pocket notebook perched on my leg beneath the lip of the table. If this story were true, it was the most fantastic story I had ever heard. “So what happened to Tom Kodak?”

The man frowned and put his hand up to stop me from saying anything further. “He makes the Brownie camera. He makes the camera you take the pictures with and put it in the mail and the mailman takes it to the company and then they send you the pictures back. He makes a camera that has a little watch on it so you can run in front of it and make a selfie picture of you and your friends and whatever is behind you. He makes film so big that it can take pictures of stars and not burn up. He makes a camera so small that the CIA orders thirteen thousands of them so they can put them all over. And George Eastman keeps getting in the newspapers and saying how he invented all of this and they make a million dollars a minute. And so he builds a house.”

“The Eastman House? I’ve driven by it.”

“You’re fucking right, the Eastman House. But you didn’t see it.”

“I didn’t go inside.”

“Shut up. I mean, no one has seen all of it. And that’s because most of it is under the ground. Tom Kodak didn’t care about getting the credit. He was bad to look at, he didn’t have George’s confidence or salesman’s bullshit or anything. He just liked making cameras. But no one could know that it wasn’t George Eastman making the cameras, so they built a whole second mansion underneath the mansion. Why do you think it was always getting the walls moved? Because the foundation couldn’t hold one mansion upright and the other one upside down under the ground.”

“Wait – Why is the mansion upside down?”

He closed his eyes for a minute, as if picturing it. “Not upside down, under the ground.”

“You said it was upside down and under the ground.”

“No I didn’t. Tom Kodak lived and did his experiments in an underground mansion underneath the Eastman mansion where George Eastman could keep an eye on him and make sure that no one else knew what was really going on. And then his mother died and everything went sideways. He started yelling at his servants, he was crying all the time, he was giving away money to whoever wanted some. He gave money to eugenics and race purity scientists, and he gave money to black colleges. Makes no fucking sense. He went to Africa twenty times a year and shot as many animals as he could even though his mom was already dead. It was stupid, he was losing his mind, and Tom Kodak knew it and he thought he had to do something about it.

“Because all he wanted to do was make cameras and create the Photographic Age, and all George wanted to do anymore was cry and yell at the servants and shoot rhinoceroses and smoke cigars and put them out  in their hollowed out feet. He was fucking sick and he was going to ruin the company. So Tom told him that and that’s when George locked him in the basement and said if he ever told anyone, he’d kill him. But Tom didn’t want to tell anyone, he just wanted George to go back to caring about cameras and not just giving people money and shooting animals and yelling at the servants, alright?”

Again he left for the bathroom. I’d finished my second Bourbon, so I went to the bar to get fresh drinks. I looked at the faces of those around me, ignorant of what I now knew that the basis of Eastman’s work was a carefully crafted fiction only disguised by monomania, time, and the servility of his entombed cousin. Surely other people must know this story, yet they were silent. My drinking companion, that able swimmer, had broken the silence and now I was suspect of everyone. Others must know. And in their faces I now wondered if they knew that I knew, that we had moved from individual to collective knowledge and that I was to understand that this knowledge was a both a bond and pledge to uphold the secret truth. I realized that my notebook was in my hand and I quickly returned it to its pocket. I could no longer be so careless.

I returned to the table and handed him his beer. If he’d been electrified before, now he was electrified. “So Tom is in the basement, and George is upstairs and they never see each other except twice a week when George takes a gun, unlocks the secret bookcase that leads into the basement, and goes down to see what Tom is making. And the servants know that someone is down there because just because they’re poor doesn’t mean they’re retarded, but George says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s my secret laboratory for top-secret camera experiments. If you ever go down there, I’ll fire you and the government will put you in jail. So just send down sandwiches every day to feed my scientists.’ But the truth is that it’s just Tom down there making cameras 24/7. And if George thinks that a servant is getting nosy, he fires them and the government puts them in prison, because the CIA has all those little cameras and now it’s about national security and spy secrets. So George has everything covered, including Tom Kodak, who is basically a willing prisoner in the upside down mansion.

“So George goes down there every couple days with a gun and sees what Tom makes so he can take the prototype to the factory by the lake and have his above ground engineers and scientists, who are always saying, ‘This is amazing, how did you make it?’ And he just says, ‘Don’t worry about it. Make a million of them for shipment tomorrow.’ And Tom is totally fine with it even though George is crazy, but it’s when the mother dies…wait…I already said this part.”

“He went crazy when his mother died. He started shooting more animals, yelling at the servants…”

“…and Tom thinks he has to do something about it, because some days George comes down there and doesn’t even want to hear about the amazing new inventions. He just points a gun at Tom Kodak, his fucking cousin, and cries and screams nonsense. And Tom doesn’t care about his own life, he only cares about The Photographic Age and the future. So he just stands there and tries not to get shot. And then George goes back upstairs to give money to fascists and also black colleges, and white colleges too, and the orphans and dentists etc.

“And then his back goes out. He can barely walk, he can’t shoot anymore animals, he just sits in a chair and thinks about his dead mom. And Tom can’t get out of the basement mansion even though he’s just made the greatest invention in the whole world: a digital camera. It’s 1932 and he’s invented not only digital technology, but a camera that can use it.”

“You’re joking.”

“I am not. He’s got Leibniz’s books down there, he can count from 0 to 1, and he spends all day, an underground genius, just eating sandwiches and inventing the future. It’s not an amazing digital camera, it’s more like a dollar store digital camera, but it’s still a goddamned digital camera. And George is too sick to come down there and even look at it, let alone take it to his lake factory knuckleheads to make millions of them to throw the world into the Photographic Age, but now the Digital Photographic Age in which we currently live.

“So Tom makes a plan. He doesn’t care about his own life, he just wants to create the future. So he writes a note and slips it under the bookcase door that leads to the upper mansion. It says, “To my friend: my work is done. Why wait?” And when George finds the note, he doesn’t know what it means. But he can’t walk down the stairs to see what Tom is talking about. So he gets his gun all loaded, and opens the bookcase, and yells for Tom Kodak to bring up the thing he’s talking about, which is a digital camera.

“When Tom walks into the office, the first thing he does is look out the window because he hasn’t seen sunlight in decades, or a bird, or a cloud. But George hobbles at him and hits him in the head with his gun because he’s worried someone is going to see him, even though that wouldn’t make a difference because no one knows who Tom Kodak is. But George Eastman is all about his legacy now, and black colleges, and the orphans and dentists etc.

“So Tom moves away from the window and shows his cousin the camera. And George doesn’t get it, because it’s digital technology in 1932. And Tom just says, ‘This is going to change everything,’ which gets George’s attention. ‘What do you mean this will change everything? It’s just another camera.’ And Tom says, ‘But it doesn’t need film.’ And then George starts yelling at him. ‘Our entire business is film! We barely sell cameras anymore, but every camera on the whole fucking planet uses Eastman film! You have no right to change everything!’ and he points the gun at Tom Kodak.

“And Tom just puts up his hands. ‘We have been partners for a long time. We are the only family that either one of us have left. We are at the end, George. The world has turned at the same speed for billions of years, yet men’s lives seem to pass by ever quicker. Our lives, our moment on this Earth, are now just a photograph of something already passed into memory. And we have accomplished much. We have created the Photographic Age. But it’s time for the next future, and we are no longer a part of it.’ Tom Kodak lifted the digital camera to his face, and pointed it at his cousin who was still pointing a gun at him. And then both men took their shot.”

I wiped a hand across my face and dried my cheeks. “He shot him?”

“He did. The first ever digital photograph is of George Eastman shooting Tom Kodak in the chest.”

“And then what happened?”

“George heard one of his shout his name from downstairs, and he realized that he needed to move quickly or else his empire would fall. And so he grabbed the camera out of Tom’s hands and threw it down the secret stairwell and closed it. Then he grabbed another gun out of his desk, shot himself in the chest, and tossed it on Tom Kodak’s body. He figured the servants would think Tom fired first, then he shot Tom, and they’d take him, the Great Man, to the hospital which he’d given so much money to that he couldn’t possibly die there. And he was right, because he was dead in his chair before the first servant even made it into the room.

“But I always heard that he committed suicide?”

“Well, he did shoot himself. But when the servants came in, they found two dead bodies. And they couldn’t figure out how the second one had gotten into the house which, if you’re a servant, reflects pretty poorly on your servanting. So they covered it up. They buried Kodak somewhere on the mansion grounds in the middle of the night, and left George in his chair with the edited note on the desk because suicide is a nobler end than unexplainable double murder.”

“What note?”

“’To my friend: my work is done. Why wait?’ But now the note reads differently, because that’s a pretty bizarre suicide note. So they added three letters: ‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait? GE.’ And everyone knew about his bad back, and the cops couldn’t be bothered, so that’s what everyone thinks happened.”

“That’s incredible.”

“That’s truth. And there’s more.” He pointed to his empty glass.

I walked to the bar in a daze. The crowd was beginning to get restless with alcohol and the advancing night, couples began pairing up in chairs and against walls. A group of young people in kickball uniforms were cheersing one another, but whether it was defeat or victory I was unsure and couldn’t care. Though I had never heard of Tom Kodak before, and had only been in his town a short while, I nevertheless felt my heart hollowed out like one of Eastman’s callous rhinoceros ashtrays. It was a story of genius and madness, deceit and brutal truth, the way the past crashes on the shore of the present or maybe the other way around. How a camera flips an image to recreate it. And there promised to be more.

I took the drinks from the bar and turned back to the booth, but he was gone. I sat opposite his empty seat and waited for him to return from a trip to the bathroom from which he did not return, and never will. A man came running in from the other room and shouted for someone to call 911, and when the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later I followed the gurney at a discrete distance.