The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Page 4

  Tommy and I sweated together making the Cullen lawn, but mostly we played. That first summer, Mr. Cullen and my dad took us out and let us choose our first bicycles. Tommy and I settled on the identical model, the Schwinn Typhoon. It was big and heavy, with fat balloon tires and handlebars solid enough to carry a passenger. Tommy picked out a metallic red Typhoon. I went with metallic blue. We had our wheels, we had our freedom. Harbor Hills, every square inch of it, was our turf.

  Tommy and I bombed up and down the neighborhood streets, coasted no-hands down the little not-quite-hills, and stood on our pedals to huff up the other side. We rode to the school to shoot baskets. Rode through people’s backyards.

  We had only one restriction on our summer wanderings: no leaving the neighborhood. Despite the ironclad edict, soon after Tommy and I brought home our Typhoons we did just that. The bikes gave us mobility we had not known, and the temptation was too great. I felt like Adam with the apple. About a half mile from our house, along busy Orchard Lake Road, was a small shopping plaza with a supermarket, a pharmacy, a pizza parlor, a chicken take-out place, and knickknack shops. Our first trip to the plaza seemed terribly daring. Our hearts pounding, we peered at every passing car, fearing one of the neighbors would spot us and call our parents. But no one did, and soon the plaza

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  became our second home. We would hang out there for hours, buying candy bars and sodas with the money we had made by cashing in returnable bottles we found along the way. A small order of fries was 32 cents with tax at the chicken joint, and we would each cough up 16 cents to split an order, which we would drown in ketchup and eat sitting on the sidewalk.

  We swiped books of matches from the pizza parlor and would have wars in the parking lot, flicking lit matches at each other.

  We hung out at the record store and were soon hooked on Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and most of all, the Beatles.

  Mostly, though, we rode to The Outlot to swim and hang out.

  Mr. Cullen brought a no-nonsense, tough-love sensibility to his sons. Girls might need warm water to wash up in the morning, but cold water worked just fine for men. Suntan lotion was for softies. So were beach towels. Real men air-dried, and that’s what Tommy did every day after we swam, goose bumps rising on his skin. Soon I stopped bringing my towel, too.

  It was at The Outlot, when we pulled off our shirts to jump in the water, that the one big difference between us became obvious.

  I was chubby, pale, and bespectacled, with a blubbery spare tire hanging over my suit and little breasts that actually had a sag to them. Tommy was just the opposite, lean and muscular, not an inch of spare flesh to pinch. The sun turned his skin a deep bronze and his blond hair to a silvery white. I envied his Adonis looks.

  One day Tommy and I swam out to the wooden raft anchored in our swim area where a group of neighborhood girls our age sunbathed. In an attempt to show off, I took a running leap and dove into the water. When I climbed back on the raft, the girls encouraged me to dive again. I obliged them, and they asked again.

  And again. They were tanned and skinny, all legs and giggles, and they seemed fascinated by my running dive. I was basking in their attention until Tommy finally dove in after me and bobbed

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  up, his face inches from mine. “Don’t dive anymore,” he whispered. “They’re all just laughing at you.”

  That night after I took off my glasses and climbed into bed, I prayed to all the saints and angels in heaven, to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to make me less fat and more tan. Less clumsy and more athletic. More like Tommy, a boy the girls admired rather than ridiculed.

  Near the end of fourth grade, as spring was poised to burst into summer, Dad and Mr. Cullen drove Tommy and me far out into the country to a farm where each of us could pick out a free puppy.

  For months I had been pestering my parents for a dog, promising to feed and care for it, insisting I would not shun my responsibilities once the novelty wore off. Our family had always had cats, first Lulu and later Felix. Cats were fine, but I wanted a dog. After months of deflecting me, Mom and Dad gave in. I think it was mostly Dad convincing Mom that a boy and a dog were meant to go together. As a child, Dad had had Fritz the German shepherd, who was his loyal companion into adulthood, bringing laughter and joy into a childhood that wasn’t always easy. At the farm, the fathers told us to take our time and choose carefully because these pups would most likely be with us for the rest of our boyhoods.

  Tommy chose a black-and-tan mutt he named Toffee, and I brought home Shaun, a golden, long-haired dog of unknown an-cestry with a white blaze on his chest. I thought he was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Tommy and I sat side by side in the backseat of the station wagon, holding our puppies on our laps, letting them clamber over us and lick our faces. Soon they were tagging along with us everywhere we went. Within weeks, Toffee was struck and killed by a car, but Shaun would be at my side through the rest of my childhood—and I kept my end of the promise, feeding and caring for him every day until I left home for college.

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  It was 1967. While Tommy and I began another endless

  summer, my parents’ comfortable world was exploding around them. The Vietnam War was escalating, and my cousins Joey and Vince had both shipped out to fight, while my other cousins joined thousands of students in antiwar protests on the campus of the University of Michigan, my father’s alma mater. The Apollo space program, which hoped to put the first man on the moon, was reeling from a launchpad fire earlier that year that killed three astronauts, and America’s cities were tinderboxes of racial tension, ready to erupt in even deadlier flames.

  My sister, Marijo, had abandoned her pleated skirts and sweater sets for muslin smocks, bell-bottoms, and round wire-framed glasses, and began bringing home college boys with long hair, flowing beards, and names like Strike and Freedom, whom my parents greeted at the door with nervous smiles and awkward small talk. Tim, sixteen and enrolled at an all-boy Catholic high school, was lashing out against my parents’ orderly world. He would sit silently simmering through Sunday Mass, refusing to participate. He was fighting hard to grow his own hair out that summer, and my parents were fighting back with everything they had, convinced that long hair was a stepping-stone on the path to drugs, sex, and this new, loud, and radically unnerving music they did not understand. The strain began to show on my parents’

  faces.

  One afternoon I walked in from the beach to find Mom sob-bing inconsolably in the living room. My swimming suit was still dripping as I put my arm around her.

  “What’s the matter, Mom?” I asked.

  “It’s Tim,” she blurted out. “I’ve lost him.”

  “No you didn’t,” I insisted. “He’s not lost. I just saw him. He’s down at the beach. I just saw him there.”

  She bawled all the harder. “You don’t understand. I’ve lost him, I’ve lost him.” I rubbed her back a little, finally realizing it

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  was his heart and soul she felt slipping from her. “It’s gonna be okay, Mom,” I said.

  She dried her eyes on her apron and gave me a brave smile.

  “That’s what I keep asking our Lord for,” she said. “Now go get out of that wet suit, and I’ll make you a snack.”

  That year the Animals released “When I Was Young,” a song that Tommy and I adopted as our anthem. One verse in particular captured our ten-year-old preoccupations. It began: “I smoked my first cigarette at ten, and for girls I had a bad yen.” School had been out for just a few days when Tommy and I decided it was time to fulfill the prophecy. I don’t recall whose idea it was, but together we hatched a plot to buy our first pack of cigarettes.

  We had been fascinated by the idea of smoking for months.

  The teenagers down at the beach, at least the
cool ones, all smoked when no parents were around. It was clear that the short path to acceptance was to have a cigarette hanging from your lips. My uncle Father Joe was a devout priest. He also loved his Scotch, his Lucky Strikes, and the horse races, habits my parents tolerated but did not share. Mom and Dad knew that most smokers got hooked as teens, as Father Joe had, and told me they would buy me a gold watch for my twenty-first birthday if I stayed away from cigarettes until then. But the promise of gold could not compete with the promise of coolness. After one of Father Joe’s weekly visits, I snitched a snubbed-out, half-smoked Lucky from the ashtray, and Tommy and I raced into the woods on the edge of the neighborhood to try it out. He held the match to it while I puffed. Then I handed it to him and he puffed. Our eyes watered, our noses ran, and we coughed uncontrollably. Two puffs each and we had had enough. But rather than be deterred, we settled on a simple truth: filterless Lucky Strikes might work for Father Joe, but we needed to get our hands on something

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  smoother, something with a filter. The older kids all seemed to gravitate toward Marlboros, and they never seemed to cough or wheeze. That’s what we needed, a pack of Marlboros.

  The plan was hatched. The shopping plaza where we hung out had cigarettes, but only over the counter. We needed a vending machine safe from prying eyes, and we both knew what that meant: a road trip to Sylvan Lanes bowling alley. It was a good five miles away, but we knew it had a cigarette machine in the outer lobby, separated from the bowling lanes by glass doors. We set out on a hot June morning, pedaling through the back streets of the neighboring town of Keego Harbor until we got to the next village beyond that. We parked our bikes around the corner from the bowling alley, out of sight, and approached the door. We knew from the older kids that a pack of cigarettes cost 35 cents, and Tommy had brought a quarter and I a dime.

  “I’ll keep a lookout,” I volunteered.

  “Why do you get to be the lookout?” he asked.

  Because I was petrified, that’s why. I just said, “You’re faster than I am,” and Tommy seemed to see my logic because he grasped the coins in his fist and boldly strolled down the sidewalk and through the smoked-glass doors. He was in there forever, and I tried to look nonchalant as I kept my eye on the parking lot for grown-ups. It was early and all was quiet. Finally he burst out of the doors and came sprinting toward me. That was all the signal I needed to take off at full throttle. By the time Tommy caught me, I was around the corner and swinging my leg over the bar of my Typhoon.

  “Stop! Stop!” he hissed. “I don’t have them.” He held up the dime. “I got the quarter in, but then one of the workers spotted me.” Tommy had spent all that time in there studying the league schedules on the wall, trying to summon the nerve to drop in the dime and pull the lever. “Here,” he said, pressing the coin in my palm. “Your turn.”

  My pride trumped my fear. I couldn’t refuse the assign-

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  ment without unmasking myself as a total jelly ball of coward-ice. Inside, I perused the bulletin boards and gumball machine, all the while sneaking glances through the interior doors at the workers. When they seemed suitably distracted, I sidled over to the cigarette machine and yawned with great effect, stretching lazily and patting my mouth. Look at me! See how relaxed and at home I am here in the outer lobby of Sylvan Lanes. Just another ho-hum day. Not nervous at all. Bored, actually. Directly in front of me loomed the money slot. All I needed to do was reach out, slip in the dime, and pull the Marlboro lever. I rubbed the dime in my fingers, summoning my nerve. That’s when I heard a metallic clink and watched helplessly as the coin rolled across the floor. I was on my hands and knees, butt up in the air, peering under the machine when I heard the door swing open. I looked up, and there stood a man. In uniform. A very large man in uniform. My heart stopped. Dear Jesus, Dear Holy Spirit, Dear God the Father . . . A full second passed, and I could see him trying to process why a child would be sprawled on the floor beneath the vending machine. I smiled weakly. Then I realized his was the uniform of a deliveryman. He pushed a dolly loaded with beer past me and disappeared inside. What if he reported me to the manager? I wasn’t about to stick around to find out.

  Back outside, I explained our dilemma to Tommy, and we spent the better part of a half hour strategizing about what to do next.

  Twenty-five cents of our money sat in the machine and ten cents beneath it. The only prospect worse than getting caught would be someone coming along to buy cigarettes and getting our quarter.

  There was no turning back now. This time we would go in together.

  Tommy volunteered to dive for the dime; I would watch the doors and stand ready to pull the lever once he got the coin in the slot.

  Inside, the plan went like clockwork. Tommy quickly located the dime deep beneath the machine, scrambled to his feet, and without looking back, shoved it in the slot. “Pull! Pull!” he ordered.

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  I froze with fear. “Pull!” he yelled.

  I lunged in the general direction of the Marlboro lever and pulled. With a loud, happy burp, the machine dropped a pack of cigarettes down the chute and into the tray. I grabbed the pack and was about to dash out the door when I saw my mistake.

  Tommy saw it, too. “Oh no,” he said as if he had just witnessed a horrible accident.

  I wasn’t holding the manly red-and-white packaging of Marlboro. I had accidentally pulled the lever for a low-tar, low-nicotine cigarette recently put on the market to address health concerns.

  Tommy could not have looked more mortified had a decomposing body part spilled out at us.

  “True Blues?” he gasped. “True Blues! Oh God, girl ciggies.” It was a fate of unspeakable shame. I stared at them as if, through the sheer force of concentration, I might be able to transform them into Marlboros, like the priests transformed bread into the body of Christ. We both stood there for a moment longer before the precariousness of our situation sank in. We were standing in a public lobby holding evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

  “Crotch ’em!” Tommy barked, and I shoved them down the front of my shorts inside my underwear. We bolted out the doors and sprinted to our getaway vehicles. “Don’t run! Don’t run!” I insisted even as I raced as fast as my legs would carry me. We grabbed our bikes, got a running start, then hopped aboard with one foot as we swung the other leg over the seat. It was our well-practiced power takeoff, and it was the quickest way to go from zero to a full-throttle fifteen miles per hour. We pedaled off in a standing position, pumping furiously with everything we had.

  When we finally looked over our shoulders several blocks later, no one was following. We had pulled it off. So what if I had chosen the most unapologetically wimpy cigarette known to mankind?

  We had our smokes, our entrance to cool-kid, grown-up behavior. Tommy and I settled back on our seats and rode through the neighborhoods side by side, no hands, whooping and laughing as

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  we went. Ours were the joyful cries of victory. “True Blues,” he said, still in disbelief but now with more amusement than disdain. “Fucking True Blues.”

  “Fucking yeah,” I said. And we laughed some more.

  Across Erie Drive from my house was a vacant lot covered in high weeds. At the back of the lot, a rickety wooden stairway led down the steep bank to Cass Lake and a narrow sand beach. Someday, another fancy doctor’s house would rise there, but for now it was an absentee landowner’s investment—and Tommy’s and my personal clubhouse. It was totally private and totally ours.

  Right near the water’s edge was a large tree with a hollow in the trunk, perfect for stashing all sorts of boyhood contraband. Over the years, that hollow would safely and dryly hide copies of girlie magazines, purloined adult beverages, and bags of marijuana. On this day, it became the tabernacle for our first pack of cigarettes.

  Tommy and I rode directly there fro
m the bowling alley, ditched our bikes out of sight in the weeds, and made our way down to the water’s edge. There we ripped off the cellophane, tore open the foil, and each placed one of the long, skinny cigarettes between our lips. Tommy lit his own and then held out the match and lit mine. We puffed and coughed, puffed and coughed. Our eyes watered, our heads spun. Honestly, it wasn’t much better than Father Joe’s half-smoked Lucky Strike, but we persevered in the pursuit of cool. We each finished one cigarette, then passed a third between us.

  The moment was so heady, it seemed only natural to try out the new vocabulary we had learned that school year.

  “Fuck!” Tommy shouted at the top of his lungs. “Fuuuuuck!”

  “Shit!” I shouted. “Shiiiiit!”

  “Goddamn!” he yelled.

  “Motherfucker!” I added.

  “Son of a bitch!”

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  “Bastard!”

  We went on like this, passing the cigarette between us and happily screaming out every filthy word we could think of, our voices carrying over the water to nowhere. Part of us wanted to get them out of us, flush them from our souls, because we knew they were bad and wrong and sins to be confessed. Part of us thrilled at the rebelliousness of it. It was our way of letting the Sisters of Saint Felix, the priests of Our Lady of Refuge, and our very Catholic parents know they had not won the indoctrination battle quite yet. Not by a long shot.

  After we had buried the butts, we rubbed cedar boughs between our hands to mask the smell. Crossing the street to my house, we marched single file through the kitchen, right past my mother at her primary battle station, the kitchen sink, proceeded up the stairs past the matching statues of Saint Joseph and the Virgin Mary and into the bathroom. There we locked the door and squeezed gobs of toothpaste into our mouths, squishing and laughing and jabbing each other. We emerged moments later, reeking of nicotine, cedar, and Crest, and marched right past Mom again. If she noticed anything suspicious, she never let on.