The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

  Chapter 5

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  Afew weeks later, in July of 1967, we awoke to a pall of smoke hanging over the horizon. The city of Detroit was on fire. All three television networks were covering the riots live, and my family and I circled the television, mesmerized. The scenes were shocking. It was a war zone, just like in the movies, except this was real and it was taking place just thirty minutes down the John Lodge Expressway, in the city where I was born. Entire blocks were ablaze, burned-out cars smoldered, firefighters were taking gunfire from snipers on rooftops, the police were pinned down in their precinct houses.

  Terrified residents scrambled for cover, and angry mobs looted and torched store after store. Soon National Guard soldiers in ar-mored vehicles would rumble down Cass Avenue, and eventually troops from the 82nd Airborne, too. Detroit had long been a tinderbox of inequality and racial animosity, and the night before, a single spark—a police raid on an after-hours drinking club—had set it off.

  As we watched the mayhem unfold, the telephone rang. It was

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  Father Vin, my mother’s younger brother, who was the pastor of Saint Catherine’s, an inner-city parish once proud home to Polish and Italian immigrants arriving in this country to work in the auto plants but now steeply in decline. He needed help. He had thirty-five people, mostly women and children, crammed into the rectory with him. When the rioting erupted the night before, they began streaming to his front door in search of safety. He and his parishioners had spent the night huddled on the floor with the lights off, crawling from room to room on hands and knees, afraid a stray bullet could pierce a window at any moment. He was now working the phones, seeking places for the families to ride out the storm.

  Mom hung up and said to us, “We’re going to have some company for a few days, kids.” This did not surprise any of us. My parents were nothing if not do-gooders. Part of their Catholic faith was to help others less fortunate, and they threw themselves into various acts of charity with the zealousness of missionaries.

  Mom, it seemed, was always baking casseroles or collecting used clothing for families down on their luck, and Dad was constantly dragging us kids along to visit shut-ins and the like. One of my earliest memories was of accompanying my father to a tuberculosis sanitarium to deliver magazines to the patients, something he did once a month every month for years.

  On more than one occasion, my parents took in sick or con-valescing people who had no one else to look after them. One of them was a parish priest who lived with us for weeks, commandeering my sister’s bedroom as he recovered from back surgery.

  They both volunteered for every imaginable duty at Our Lady of Refuge, from changing the altar linens to leading rosary groups, and my father gave gallons of his blood to the Red Cross. “When you’re at the end of your life,” Dad liked to say, “it won’t be what you received that matters, but what you gave.” Father Vin knew that if he asked, they would say yes.

  An hour later, his black Chevrolet pulled into our driveway,

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  crammed with children. The effect was almost comical, with heads and limbs and torsos poking out in all directions. How he fit them all in there, I didn’t know, but one by one they un-tangled themselves and stepped out, seven of them, ranging in age from eight to fifteen, each grasping a paper sack containing meager belongings. They stood silently in the driveway, staring at us like we were aliens, and in a sense I suppose we were to them. Even before their neighborhood began to burn, they could only imagine a place like this, with its big, sprawling houses and parklike lawns, towering shade trees, and a lake and beach just down the street. Marijo, Tim, Mike, and I stared back with the same puzzled, slightly suspicious looks. We could not have been more dumbfounded had a flying saucer landed in our driveway and deposited a band of Martians. The children came from two families. They were clearly very poor and very dirty, dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs. The new arrivals had a streetwise, mess-with-me-at-your-own-peril toughness about them, even the younger ones. With our cigarettes and swear words, Tommy Cullen and I thought we were tough. In that instant I grasped the undeniable truth. We weren’t tough at all. We were sheltered suburban kids trying to act tough. These kids were the real thing. Until that day I’d had only the vaguest notion that places like Detroit, with its festering poverty and hopelessness, existed.

  My whole world was Harbor Hills, with its summer schedule of swimming and horseback-riding lessons and stolen puffs on cigarettes. We considered ourselves solidly middle class—just one car and an antiquated black-and-white television, after all—but I could tell from these kids’ faces that they saw us as impossibly privileged. It was as though they had just parachuted into the Land of Oz.

  My mother broke the silence. “All right, everyone into swim-suits and down to the lake. It’s too hot not to be swimming!” She directed all the boys into the garage to change, and all the girls upstairs. Only later did I learn her hidden agenda: she wanted

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  the opportunity to launder their clothing and underwear without embarrassing them.

  Down at the beach, the city kids eyed the water warily. Suddenly they didn’t look so tough. They looked afraid. What to me was a source of endless, effortless fun, to them was a deadly threat. Not one of them knew how to swim. Fortunately, our stretch of Cass Lake had a gradual drop-off. You could wade for yards and still not be up to your armpits, and even in the deepest part of the swim area the water was barely over a ten-year-old’s head. Soon we were all frolicking in the shallows, splashing each other, whooping and laughing. Shaun pranced among us, jumping and barking. In the water, the sun glistening on our wet skin, the differences of class and privilege washed away and we were all just kids on a hot summer day.

  Ours was a three-bedroom house, with my sister having the smallest bedroom to herself and my brothers and I sharing a larger room. When we got back from the beach, my mother had turned the boys’ bedroom into a dormitory for the visiting girls.

  That evening, when my father arrived home from work, he set up the tent trailer we used for summer camping trips in the backyard, and this became the boys’ domain.

  For five days and nights, as the riot raged unabated, eventually claiming forty-three lives, the children stayed with us, and gradually, cautiously, we became friends. One boy, Leo, was my age, and we took to each other. We swam and rode bikes and sneaked down to the shopping plaza to hang out. Tommy and I led him to the hollow tree where we stashed our True Blues. Leo knew all about smoking, including how to inhale. He showed us how to suck the smoke deep into our lungs, hold it for a few seconds, and then exhale it through our nostrils. Not only did this give us something unfathomably cool to show off in front of the older kids at the beach, but the head-spinning, stomach-churning rush was like nothing I had experienced before.

  Leo, it turned out, had another talent I could only dream of.

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  The kid could draw like no one I had ever met. Right before my eyes, he cranked out amazingly accurate renderings of any comic book or cartoon character I would toss at him. Superman, Batman, Flash Gordon, Captain America—he could do them all. From the Sunday comics, he would copy exact replicas of Nancy and Beetle Bailey and Dagwood. I, on the other hand, could barely make stick figures, and I swooned over his talent, especially after learning he had nurtured it on his own, with no help from any adult. I became his loyal groupie and he my artistic mentor. “It’s easy,” I remember him saying. “You just look at the lines and do the same thing.”

  With his tutoring, I managed to produce rudimentary versions of the Peanuts characters, and Leo was kind enough to say things like “See, I told you. You just need to look at the lines.”

  While we were swimming, smoking, and sketching, Mom was working. She went into full dorm-mother overdrive that week, reeling out towering platters of tuna-salad sandwiches for lunch an
d oversize trays of lasagna and hot dog casserole for dinner.

  Each meal, of course, began as all meals in our house did, with a prayer. Dad if he was home (Mom if he wasn’t) would ask for quiet and then bless himself, touching his fingertips to his forehead, then his chest, then each shoulder as he said, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” We did the same, dropping our eyes to the empty plates before us and mumbling along with the prayer hammered into us from earliest memory:

  “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ, our Lord, amen.” I had no idea what those words meant, and no curiosity to learn, either, but I happily rattled them off, knowing that no food would reach my plate until I did. It was just what we did in our home, one of the small prices of admission. Some kids had to take off their shoes at the front door; we had to pray before the first bite.

  I passed most meal prayers with a singular mission: to make my brothers laugh. In one of my proudest moments, I caught Michael’s eye just after he had sneaked a big swig of milk. When the

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  prayer began, he froze, holding the milk in his mouth. I made my most moronic face, crossing my eyes, and just as we reached the words “and these thy gifts,” Michael exploded in hysterics, milk spraying from both nostrils. And he, not I, was the one who got in trouble. Life didn’t get any better than that.

  One of my favorite parts of our house was the screened-in porch just off the kitchen. We did not have air-conditioning, and all summer our family pretty much lived out there, eating our meals at a glass table and sitting around late into the night in the dark listening to Mom spin stories about growing up as one of nine children being raised by a widow in the Great Depression.

  Her stories were tapestries filled with colorful characters—Uncle Bert the bootlegger and Aunt Lulu with the enormous bosom and the aged Mrs. Fink next door who was the target of endless childhood pranks. In one of Mom’s favorite stories, she described how she once called Mrs. Fink and pretended to be from the phone company. “We’re going to be blowing the dust out of your phone lines,” she said in her most grown-up voice. “You’re going to want to spread newspapers on the floor because they haven’t been cleaned in quite some time and it could cause quite a mess.”

  And then she and her brothers and sisters watched through the window with delight as poor Mrs. Fink did just that.

  My mom never lost that juvenile sense of humor. Every day was an opportunity for another prank, and I came to believe that one of her primary reasons for having children was to have a steady supply of subjects to torture. She would hold a pin in her lips and then pucker up for a kiss, pricking whichever one of us took the bait. She told us she could do magic, and if we would look up the sleeve of an old winter coat she had, we would see all the stars in the universe. When she finally coaxed a victim to put his head inside the coat and peer up the sleeve, she’d mumble some made-up magic incantation and then ask, “Do you see the stars yet?” When the victim, from under the coat, said no, still no stars, she’d add, “How about now?” and pour a glass of water down the

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  sleeve and into the person’s face. This delighted her no end. Of course, it worked only once per victim, and soon we were in on the conspiracy, luring various friends, classmates, and neighbors into her lair. My quiet father would just nod his head and smile patiently at his wife’s antics.

  With the seven Detroit kids in our house, my mother was delighted to have a new audience to subject to her tales and tricks, and she held court each evening after dinner. Before the week was over, every kid got a face full of water down the sleeve of that old coat, and every kid got a pinprick kiss. At first they didn’t know what to make of this nutty woman, but soon they were all calling her Aunt Ruthie and treating her like their own mother.

  Some nights, as darkness fell, we roasted marshmallows over dying coals in the backyard and lay in the dewy grass, staring up at the stars that our visitors had not even known existed, so obliterated were they by the city lights where they lived. And then Aunt Ruthie would bark the order for bath time—the girls one night, the boys the next—not letting anyone escape until she had inspected their feet and necks to make sure they had been properly scoured.

  By the end of the week, when Father Vin returned in his Chevrolet to collect the children and return them to the smolder-ing ruins of their neighborhood, we were all tight friends. More than that, really. We had become like cousins. Everyone hugged and promised to stay in touch. Leo presented me with a full-color portfolio of action heroes. I gave him my lucky rabbit’s foot, which I figured he needed more than I did.

  “Everybody in the car,” Father Vin ordered, and my mother handed each of them a paper grocery bag filled with clean, folded clothes she’d collected for them, and gave each of them a long hug and a kiss, this time without any pins. Father Vin’s good deed had an unintended cruel edge to it. He had dropped these seven children of the inner city into the magical Land of Oz, a place of lakes and parks and star-studded skies, and allowed them to

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  stay just long enough to realize what wonders lay beyond their grasp. They saw my life—they had to—as a fairy tale, a tantalizing dream from which they would soon awaken. The greater lesson was mine to take. Despite our differences of place and privilege, we were all just kids. Kids who loved goofing off and hated wearing shoes. Kids who forgot manners and found mischief. We said the same prayers to the same God, yet God had not blessed us the same. Even then, I found it unfair. What I learned in school, about all men being created equal, might be true. But I had discovered that all children did not grow up equal. Never again could I pretend the playing field was level, that all kids got the same shot at life’s boundless possibilities.

  “Thanks for teaching me to dog-paddle,” Leo shouted out the window as Father Vin backed down the driveway.

  “Thanks for the drawings,” I shouted back.

  I waved as the car disappeared down Erie Drive, the children’s happy faces peering back through the rear window. For a year or so, we kept our promise to stay in touch. And then, after Father Vin’s transfer to another parish in another city, we lost track of each other forever.

  Chapter 6

  o

  My parents had a lot of dreams for their four chil-

  dren, but none so all-consuming as the dream that

  one of us might someday heed the call to a religious

  vocation. If they could choose between having one of us become, say, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist or a parish priest, there was no question they’d pick the priest every time. As Dad frequently reminded us, a priest was God’s embodiment on earth. Priests did his work and were endowed with his infallible moral judgment.

  My mother held the same belief and was indescribably proud to have two brothers who wore the Roman collar. She herself came close to entering the convent after high school before realizing her true calling was as a mother and baker of the world’s most outrageously moist oatmeal cookies.

  Growing up, my brother Michael came closest to fulfilling their dream. While other kids were playing cowboys and Indians or astronauts and race-car drivers, Mike was down in the basement playing priest. Mom sewed him vestments out of scraps of corduroy and satin, and hemmed and starched old sheets to

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  serve as altar linens. An antique dresser from her childhood was drafted into service as an altar. Covered in Mom’s linens and other churchly accoutrements, it looked impressively official, and Mike behaved accordingly. With great solemnity, he donned his vestments and proffered blessings to any who would stand still for them. He said Mass—reciting the entire liturgy verbatim in Latin—and gave long, impassioned sermons. He consecrated cubes of bread and glasses of grape juice and sometimes drafted me into the role of altar boy as he distributed pretend Holy Communion.

  Micha
el led rosaries and wafted incense through the air. He made himself available to hear confessions, though as far as I know got no takers. When we brought home Dickie Bird and Lady Bird, a pair of parakeets, Michael bestowed on them the sacrament of marriage. After all, we were hoping they would start a family. And when Dickie turned up dead on the floor of the cage one morning, the young priest in training invited the neighbors in for what turned into a two-hour high funeral Mass, including a forty-minute eulogy. Dickie was one great parakeet, and yes, we all loved him dearly, but even I was impressed that anyone could find forty minutes’ worth of things to say about a bird. I spent the whole service admiring the tanned shoulders of Mrs. Selahowski in her sleeveless sundress.

  What some parents might have found alarming, Mom and

  Dad found boundlessly endearing, and they nurtured my brother’s budding vocation with enthusiasm. Mom armed him with candlesticks, hymnals, a crucifix, and an old pewter goblet to hold the grape juice. Dad faithfully captured my brother’s priestly re-enactments on 8-millimeter home movies. Their son might have been only twelve, but he was already on the road to the priesthood. It was everything they’d ever dreamed.

  I was another story. While Michael was saying Mass in the basement, I had found a different calling. My father was a longtime photo buff, and he subscribed to Popular Photography. The

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  magazine itself was quite boring, made even more so by the fact that Dad tore off and discarded the covers because they often featured pouty-lipped models sporting come-hither looks. But the tiny classified advertisements in the back grabbed my attention. One after another featured ads for photography courses.

  The ads promised that you, too, could lead the exciting life of a professional model photographer. And to illustrate just how exciting that life could be, many of the ads featured tiny thumbnail photos of that most exciting possibility of all: topless women. Topless women smiling into the camera, pouting into the camera, ignoring the camera. Some frolicked in the surf; some lounged on park benches or reclined in convertibles. Some were in bikini bottoms, others in nighties that had mysteriously slipped off their shoulders and fallen around their waists. One, I remember, was dressed for a horseback ride. She wore knee-high boots, riding pants, and a hat; she even carried a crop. The only things missing were her blouse and bra. It was impossibly provocative, this concept that women might set out on any given day having breezily forgotten a few essential items of clothing, leaving their wondrous milky bazooms fully, gloriously exposed. I holed up next to the furnace for hours with those magazines, studying the various pairs of breasts with the intensity of an anatomist. My God, it was better than the underwear section of the Sears catalog.