The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  Right from the start, Mom’s little daffodil was no wallflower.

  Maybe it was the Cap’n Crunch cereal I devoured in vast quantities each morning, so sugary it made my teeth tingle. Maybe it was simply being the youngest of four and doing what was necessary to hog as much of my parents’ attention as possible. Whatever the reason, I was born with abundant energy and few tools for containing it. My earliest memories are of racing through the house like a miniature tornado, shrieking joyously at the top of my lungs. Sometimes Dad would simply swoop me off my feet and hold me off the ground, legs still pumping, until I calmed down

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  enough that I wouldn’t hurt myself. On one of my runabouts through the house, I grabbed Mom’s broom and held it over my head like a knight with a lance. “Stop! Now!” Mom ordered. I did, but only after the broom struck the large glass globe hanging from the foyer ceiling, sending it showering down on me in a thousand shards.

  That night at dinner, Dad pulled out his stopwatch and said,

  “Johnny, we’re going to try a little test. I want you to sit perfectly still for one full minute.”

  “Not a word, not a wiggle,” Mom added. It was clear they were convinced I could not do it.

  The first try, I lasted twelve seconds. Then thirty. Eventually I made it to sixty seconds, sitting there, grinning and twisting my face up, thinking this new game was great fun. The instant Dad clicked off the stopwatch and said, “Why, I’ll be doggoned, he did it,” I shot out of my chair like a Saturn space rocket and orbited the living room several times, pinging off the furniture.

  In kindergarten the teacher noted my need to practice self-restraint and helped by frequently sending me to the corner to sit alone. She called Mom to come get me only on special occasions, such as the day I used two of my fingers like a fork to poke a classmate in the eyes, just like Moe did to Curly in my favorite show of all time, The Three Stooges.

  When we got home after that incident, Mom said to me as she did after so many of them: “Johnny, go get George.”

  Mom was a firm believer in the power of spankings to modify behavior, and George was her enforcer. Before George had a name, he was simply the laundry stick, a thin board about eighteen inches long and two inches wide that Mom used to poke the clothes down into the suds in the washing machine. “Johnny, go get the laundry stick,” Mom would say, and I knew what was coming, a crack across the backside.

  Then one evening, my father treated us to dinner at a fancy restaurant, and all four of us kids, giddy with excitement, would

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  not settle down. Mom was too embarrassed to let the other diners overhear her threatening her children with a spanking, so from thin air she pulled two names. Looking at Marijo, she asked matter-of-factly, as if issuing pleasantries: “Would you like a little visit from Suzie when we get home?” And from her tone and the look in her eye, Marijo figured out right away that a visit from this Suzie person would not be pleasant.

  Then she leveled her calm gaze at my brothers and me. “And boys, how would you like to meet my friend George?” Subtlety being lost on me, I screamed out, “Sure!” Then Mom added: “You remember George, don’t you? My friend who lives in the laundry room?” Suddenly I didn’t want to meet George anymore.

  When we got home, she wrote the words on the stick in permanent marker where they remained for years, even as the soapy wash water faded them to gray: George on one side, Suzie on the other. From that day forward, the George-and-Suzie Spanking Stick was an effective part of Mom’s arsenal. Usually a mere threat of a visit from George or Suzie was all that was needed to pull us back into line, but when punishment was required, Marijo always got her spanking on the Suzie side and the boys on the George side. The stick struck fear in the hearts of all four of us, even though Mom’s whacks—and they always came from Mom, Dad not having the stomach for any type of corporal punishment—weren’t much harder than love taps. That didn’t stop me, however, from stuffing my pants with multiple copies of National Geographic to cushion the blow. I thought I was being outstandingly clever, but whenever Mom spotted a bulky load in my britches, she simply lowered her aim, to the back of my thighs.

  Our neighborhood was known as Harbor Hills, though it really had neither. What it did have was a pair of gentle slopes on my street and a small man-made boat basin carved out by bulldozers between the two not-quite-hills.

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  The boat basin fed through a channel into Cass Lake, one of the largest inland bodies of water in metropolitan Detroit and unquestionably the biggest selling point of Harbor Hills, which consisted of three streets arranged in a sort of caste system in relation to the water. Only those fortunate enough to have waterfront lots could actually see the lake from their homes. These homes were large and glorious beyond description, and the people who lived in them were doctors and lawyers and business owners.

  Elsewhere in the neighborhood, on the landlocked lots, the dads tended to work in more middle-income professions. They were draftsmen and insurance agents and plumbers, and of course, automobile workers. Many, many of them, my father included, were gainfully employed by one of Detroit’s Big Three—General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler. The farther away from the water you got in the neighborhood, the more modest the houses became.

  But there was a great equalizer in Harbor Hills, and that was The Outlot.

  The Outlot was a sort of grassy public space—not quite a park but more than a mowed field—covering a few acres right on the water. It surrounded the boat basin and was set aside by the developer for the exclusive use of the neighborhood. No matter how far back in the neighborhood you lived, you still had a piece of lake frontage to use as your own. There were big shade trees and picnic tables and, best of all, a small, stony beach with a raft and roped-off swimming area, where every kid in the neighborhood spent virtually every waking moment between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It was nothing fancy, but it was a beach, and that’s all that mattered. The boat basin, universally known as The Lagoon, was lined with rickety wooden docks, and every house in the neighborhood was assigned one side of a dock. When you bought in Harbor Hills, you were getting more than just a suburban home on three-quarters of an acre. You were getting a waterfront lifestyle without the cost of a waterfront home—a place to swim and sunbathe and water-ski and picnic with the

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  cool lake breezes in your face. My parents never experienced anything close to this growing up during the Great Depression, and like all good parents, they wanted more for their kids. They saved for years to move us out of the city to this Shangri-la on the shore.

  When you were lounging by the water on a perfect summer’s day, it was hard to believe the gray, belching auto plants of Pontiac were just a ten-minute drive away.

  In the summer, we swam and swam and swam. My brothers and sister and I were soon true amphibians, as comfortable in the water as out. This was a point of immense pride for my father, a landlocked city kid who only learned to swim, and then not well, when he joined the navy after Pearl Harbor. For my mother, who never learned to swim at all, it was simply a mystery. But summer wasn’t the only season when we gathered in The Outlot.

  In the winter, we shoveled the snow off The Lagoon and skated until our legs ached and our toes were numb. We skated in the daylight, and we skated at night, the ice illuminated by the glow of rudimentary floodlights rigged to a nearby power pole. Sometimes one of the dads would build a warming fire next to the ice, and we would huddle around it, all runny noses and rosy cheeks, our breath rising in steamy clouds. In the spring and fall, the kids of the neighborhood—and there were dozens of us—were again down at the water, hanging out, goofing off, soaking our shoes, throwing sand at each other, and skipping stones. Every Easter there was a neighborhood egg hunt, and every Labor Day the annual Harbor Hills picnic, the highlight of which was the decorated bike parade. There
were games and hot dogs and root beer on tap and, best of all, coal-roasted corn on the cob dipped in melted butter. The dads roasted the corn and ran the games; the moms anchored the potluck and dessert tables.

  But Cass Lake was only half of what lured my parents to Harbor Hills. The other half, an even more powerful draw for them, was Our Lady of Refuge. They believed fervently in their duty to raise their children as devout Catholics. That meant not

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  only Mass every Sunday—a nonnegotiable—but Mass on as many weekdays as possible, too. It meant receiving the holy sacraments of confession and communion and confirmation. It meant evening rosaries and Stations of the Cross, altar-boy training and staying up for Midnight Mass on Christmas. It meant smudged foreheads on Ash Wednesday and a Catholic education from the knuckle-rapping, hair-tugging, ear-twisting Sisters of Saint Felix in their brown habits and starched white face boards. The nuns, Mom and Dad assured us, were building our character.

  Our house was three doors from Our Lady of Refuge, and my mother could stand at the living-room window and watch us march across the backyards, not losing sight of us until we entered the back door of the school. They had worked hard and saved re-lentlessly to move here, but they never regretted a dime of the cost. This, they were convinced, was the perfect place to raise a family. Many of our neighbors were just like my parents, practicing Catholics drawn to the neighborhood’s twin attractions.

  The beach and the church were the two poles of our universe.

  All life, all activity seemed to gravitate around one or the other.

  We were either at the beach or at Our Lady of Refuge—in school or in church or waiting for confession or playing soccer or hard-ball on the athletic fields. Either that or we were on our bicycles riding between the two.

  To say my parents were devout Catholics is like saying the sun runs a little hot. It defined who they were. They were Catholics first, and then Americans and spouses and parents. Right from the start, their relationship was forged in their mutual devotion to Jesus and the Blessed Mother. One of their earliest dates was Mass followed by a rosary. As a kid hearing my mother tell the story for the umpteenth time, I could only sit, mouth agape in something approaching mortification, thinking, Oh my God, I have the squarest parents in the universe.

  For fun, my siblings and I would sometimes count the Virgin Marys in the house; at one point we were up to forty-two. They

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  filled every room, and they were not alone. Commingling with them were various likenesses of Jesus, Joseph, John the Baptist, Francis of Assisi, and an assortment of other saints and angels.

  There were crucifixes everywhere you turned in our house, the anguished, dying son of God staring down at us from the cross as we ate breakfast, brushed our teeth, and watched television.

  There were priest-blessed candles and holy water and palm fronds. Rosaries were scattered about in ashtrays and candy bowls. It was like living in a religious supply store. We even had an emergency Holy Communion kit, consisting of an aged oak box lined in purple velvet containing a silver chalice, a silver platter to hold communion wafers, two candleholders, and a cross. I had no idea where it came from, but it looked official and could be pressed into service by visiting priests who might want to say Mass at our dining room table. This happened more often than one might think.

  My mother was constantly inviting priests to the house, and once she got them there, inviting them to give a group blessing or lead a prayer or say Mass. The priests, knowing a home-cooked meal would follow, seldom refused. She was a gifted cook, and her promise of good food even managed to lure a couple of bishops.

  We kids treated them like rock stars, taking turns dropping to our knees and kissing the big rings on their hands. It helped that two of Mom’s brothers were priests. Father Joe and Father Vin, as we all knew them, visited often and, especially in the summer months, brought priest friends along to relax and enjoy the beach.

  It seemed we had clergy in our house more days than not, and they became a natural part of our family dynamic. Having Father O’Flaherty or Brother McGhee or even Bishop Schuster at the dinner table with us was just the way it was.

  Our family was many things, but first we were Catholics. Of all my parents’ dreams for their four children, only one was im-mutable: that we grow up imbued with the faith—devout, lifelong, practicing Catholics.

  Chapter 3

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  Despite my parents’ best efforts, you could say my life as a good Catholic boy got off to a rocky start.

  In the spring of 1964, I was preparing to celebrate

  First Holy Confession. Or at least that’s how the nuns put it— celebrate—as though we would be having a party with cake and balloons. To a Catholic school second grader, this was a watershed event, and the sisters at Our Lady of Refuge had been preparing my classmates and me for the holy sacrament for months. We had all been baptized as infants; that was our first holy sacrament, and thank God for that because, as Sister and my parents pointed out repeatedly and very matter-of-factly, baptized Catholics were the only ones getting into heaven. The Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and everybody else were heading straight for limbo, certainly better than hell but basically just an eternal waiting room outside heaven’s gate.

  Holy Confession was our second sacrament, and its importance could not be overstated. This was the Lord’s gift to us, our chance to purge the sins from our second-grade souls, to confess

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  our transgressions—the pilfered candy and whispered swear words, the cruel taunts and creative lies—and seek God’s forgive-ness. It was a beautiful thing, the nuns assured us. We would receive our penance from the priest, who was just a breath shy of God himself and had his full authority to forgive. A few Hail Marys, a few Our Fathers—maybe even a half dozen of each if we had some doozies on our list—and all would be bygones. We would walk out of the dark confession box with a spring in our step and a lightness to our shoulders because we would no longer be carrying the burden of sin. At least not our own sins. We were all stuck with Original Sin, thanks to Adam and Eve and the way they caved in to temptation and ate the apple, but there wasn’t anything we could do about that. It was kind of like being born with a genetic defect; you just had to deal with it. We could wipe out our own transgressions, though, and start over fresh. As with the bath Mom made my brothers and me take every Saturday night, lined up in a row in the tub, the old grime washed down the drain, leaving us clean and ready to start getting dirty all over again.

  There was another important reason for the sacrament of confession. It was a necessary precursor to the even more important sacrament of Holy Communion, in which the priest—who, did I mention, was just a breath shy of God himself?—would take an ordinary piece of bread and through a miracle turn it into the body of Christ. Not a symbol of the body of Christ, but an actual piece of his flesh. We’d be eating Jesus! And not only that, but we would get to dress up like we were getting married as we did it, the girls in lacy white dresses with veils and pearl-beaded gloves, the boys in navy-blue suits and ties just like our dads wore. The miracle, the nuns told us, was called transubstantiation—the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

  We would know it was real the instant we swallowed a little piece of Jesus because we would feel his presence in us. He would fill us with a warm glow, a joy a thousand times greater than the joy

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  of an ice cream sundae on a hot August day or the Detroit Tigers making it to the World Series (something that would actually happen a few years later and which we all considered a miracle in its own right). But first we had to scour the impurities from our tot-size temples to make way for the Lord.

  Sins were broken down into two groups. There were the run-of-the-mill venial sins—swearing, tattling, disobeying, coveting thy neighbor’s oxen. Then there were
the biggies, the mortal sins.

  This would include, for instance, slaying your brother like Cain did to Abel or worshipping false idols over the Lord thy God. The nuns assured us that the priests were very experienced and had heard every sin imaginable, even the mortals, and we shouldn’t feel ashamed to tell them anything. Besides, they assured us, it was totally confidential. The priests took a vow never to divulge your sins, even if you were a famous murderer the police were looking for. Not only was it confidential; the whole affair was completely anonymous. We got to kneel in a dark box and talk through a screen to the priest on the other side. We could see him, but he couldn’t see us. It was brilliant. He wouldn’t know who we were even if he did want to tell the police or, worse, our parents.

  Confession would be great, the first important step on the road to being lifelong Catholics and our ticket to salvation. It was the key to unlock our temples so that when we ate Jesus’ body and sipped his blood he’d feel right at home inside us.

  There was only one problem. My little temple carried a dark, shameful secret—two of them, actually—and I knew God would not wipe them clean with a few recited prayers or even a few hundred.

  The first had to do with Mrs. Selahowski next door, whose daughter Cindy Ann Selahowski was not shy about letting me know she intended to marry me someday. It was a prospect that made my blood run cold, which is why Mom loved to tease me about her. Mrs. Selahowski, on the other hand, held an entirely different allure. Young, thin, and blond, she was my first love. It

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  began when I was a preschooler. I played at their house nearly every day, and whenever Mrs. S. would walk into their rumpus room, I would gaze in adoration. When I was still napping in the afternoons, my mother would often lie beside me and doze off herself. I remember watching her as she slept, her face just inches from mine, and thinking she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world. After Mrs. Selahowski came on my radar, I re-vised my assessment.