The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Read online

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  a football. What it kicked, though, was the bottom of the brass candlestick. My hands gripped the stick in the middle, making an efficient fulcrum point. As the bottom flew forward, the top jerked back. Simple physics.

  Scalding wax showered down on me, coating my hair and forehead, searing my skin. Wax ran over my eyebrows and into my lashes. It felt like someone had pressed a hot iron to my face.

  I heard my scream, as if from outside myself: Yeow! But the worst part, the very worst part, even worse than the scorching pain of bubbling wax on my skin, was my glasses. I was blind without them, and they were doused in wax, rendering them opaque. With a rip of fabric, I felt my foot break free, and I quickly regained my balance. But now I could not see a thing. I began to weave and swerve blindly down the aisle, caroming off the other altar boys and the ends of the pews. I heard Father’s whispered voice behind me: “For the love of God!” I peered desperately into the opaque-ness of my lenses and found a small break in the coating through which I could see. It was like looking through a keyhole stuffed with spiderwebs. The first thing I did was get my bearings. I was back on track, heading straight down the aisle. The next thing I did was find Barbie in the crowd. Maybe her head had been down as she prayed. Maybe she had her nose in her songbook. Maybe she hadn’t noticed a thing.

  When I finally located her, right there beside her parents, she was staring directly at me. The sweet, twinkly smile from a few moments earlier was gone, replaced by a big, openmouthed grin. Barbie was laughing. The whole congregation, it seemed, was laughing. The other altar boys were laughing. I think even Father was laughing. Who could blame them? I looked like a blind escapee from the wax museum.

  I peered through my waxy glasses at the shoulders of the boy in front of me and plowed ahead, past Barbie, past my parents, who were not laughing but grimacing, past everyone, and out the

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  rear doors. Later, back in the sacristy, I ran hot water over my glasses and combed as much wax out of my hair and eyebrows as I could. The other altar boys chortled at my public humiliation but in the end took pity and let me have the entire cruet of wine to myself. I accepted gratefully.

  Chapter 9

  o

  The Detroit riots had scared everyone and cracked the resolve of many families living in the city, pushing

  them to sell their homes at fire-sale prices and flee to the suburbs. One of those families moved into a new contractor house kitty-corner to ours on June 6, 1968—the day after Senator Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. My family sat glued to the television that day, but I mostly looked out the living-room window at the moving van across the backyards, depositing the new family in our midst.

  Even from a distance, I could see there were five children, and the oldest looked just about my age.

  His name was Ronald, and he was the world’s biggest Detroit Tigers fan, wearing his team letter jacket everywhere and usually carrying a souvenir program in his back pocket. On his first day in the neighborhood, as everyone else in the nation reeled in shock over the second Kennedy assassination in five years, Tommy and I wandered over to give the new kid our Harbor Hills Welcome Wagon treatment.

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  The boy barely came up to my shoulder and was skinny and pale with freckles all over his face; his toes pointed inward like a pigeon’s and his knees knocked together. Tommy walked right up to him and without saying a word slammed him hard in the chest with both palms, knocking him to the ground. Then we ridiculed his Tigers jacket and stomped on his souvenir program. I felt a little bad about it, but Tommy was convinced it was important to establish the neighborhood pecking order right up front. When Ronald did not cry or run away, we decided he was worthy.

  Tommy, who exhibited an early knack for ironic observation, quickly rechristened him Rock. Of course, Rock looked more like a twig than anything so unyielding as stone, which made the nickname all the more delicious. It stuck, and we welcomed him into our Secret Society of Smokers, Swearers, and Sacramental Wine Swiggers. Soon our constant twosome was a threesome.

  The following summer, the Sacorellis moved in directly behind the Cullens. Mr. and Mrs. Sacorelli had arrived from Italy as teenagers and brought a lot of the old country with them. He spoke in fulsomely accented English that reminded me of the man in the spaghetti-sauce commercials. Mrs. Sacorelli spoke no English at all, did not drive, and seldom ventured farther than ten feet from her kitchen stove. She lived to cook, and amazing smells of tomatoes, garlic, and veal filled the house and wafted across the neighborhood day and night. The Sacorellis made their own pasta, rolling the dough out on the kitchen table with floured hands. They stuffed their own sausages and hung them from the rafters in the basement to cure. They pressed grapes in a hand-cranked contraption that looked like a torture device, and kept oak casks of homemade wine below the hanging meats. Unlike the rest of us kids in the neighborhood, the six Sacorelli kids did not have to filch their booze. Before each meal, one of them was dispatched to the basement to pour a pitcher for the table and the whole family to share.

  Right in the middle of the Sacorelli pack was Anthony, a rosy-

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  cheeked cherub our age whose giant brown eyes brought every girl in the neighborhood to her knees. Tommy, Rock, and I did a quick assessment—let’s see, magnet for the opposite sex, check; a mom who would feed us vast quantities of delicious food but couldn’t understand anything we said, double check; and an unlimited source of free, untraceable booze. “You’re in, Sack,” Tommy proclaimed, and then we were four.

  Actually, we were five if you counted Shaun, my dog, who accompanied us everywhere—to The Outlot and the basketball courts, to the smoking tree and each other’s houses. He was so naturally well behaved, the whole family nicknamed him Saint Shaun. He tagged along without a leash, came whenever I whistled, and happily pulled me through the neighborhood on my bike.

  Some school days he showed up unannounced at the playground during recess and joined our soccer games. He spent hours at the beach with us, diving off the dock and reemerging with giant rocks in his mouth. He even raced along as we rode our bikes down to the shopping plaza for candy and French fries, waiting patiently outside for us to reemerge, his eyes fixed on whatever door I had entered.

  Shaun was a fixture in the neighborhood and was mostly well received. Those were more tolerant days, and the neighbors hardly seemed to notice that a dog, especially one as well mannered as he, was running unleashed through their yards and across the community beach. Only one person complained, and that was Old Man Pemberton. He had been retired for as long as anyone could remember and was as ancient as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Mr. Pemberton’s property abutted The Outlot and looked out over The Lagoon, and he spent hours every day fuss-ing about, hand-pulling dandelions from his grass, sculpting his hedges, watering flower baskets, and touching up the trim on his house. He scrubbed his driveway with soapy water and used a blowtorch to incinerate weeds that dared show their heads above the white pebbles surrounding his mailbox. The place, with its

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  giant picture windows looking out over the boat basin and the lake beyond, belonged in a magazine. It was perfect in all ways but one: it shared an unfenced property line with The Outlot. His emerald lawn blended seamlessly into the common property, and this drove Mr. Pemberton insane. As families walked through The Outlot to their boats or the beach, they invariably cut across the lower corner of his yard, causing him to glare and sputter. If the offenders were kids, he would shout out, “You’re on private property!” Eventually he painted a sign with a giant arrow and drove it into the ground on his property line, directing trespassers to stay on the other side. Every kid in the neighborhood promptly and gleefully ignored it. So did Shaun.

  Mr. Pemberton appointed himself the enfor
cer of neighborhood rules and was constantly scolding children for every imaginable infraction. “This isn’t a playground,” he’d yell. “No shouting!

  No jumping on the docks! No throwing sand! No glass containers allowed!” If teenagers were down at the beach after dark—and there was no better place to take a girl and a six-pack than the beach late at night—he would turn on the powerful spotlights mounted to the eaves of his house and dial the police. My free-running dog was a particular irritant to him. “Pets must be leashed at all times!” he would bark. “No dogs allowed on the beach!” “Yes, Mr. Pemberton,” I would mumble, and the next day Shaun would be right back there beside me, swimming and sniff-ing and diving.

  Of course, when Tommy, Rock, Sack, and I got together and felt the collective itch for wrongdoing that boys of a certain age are powerless to resist, Mr. Pemberton was almost always our target of choice. With four houses among us, our parents seldom knew exactly where we were. We could be howling around the neighborhood till midnight, and the Cullens would think we were all at the Sacorellis’, the Sacorellis would be sure we were at the Grogans’, and so on. It was a beautiful arrangement. Some nights we camped out in a tent in one of our backyards, and these nights were best

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  of all, especially if we knew neighborhood girls were also sleeping out. All four of our houses were roughly in a row—mine backed up to Rock’s, Tommy’s was across the street from Rock’s, and Sack’s was behind Tommy’s—and we could watch as each house went dark for the night. That was our cue to get up and wander around. Our top destination was the party store on the corner where we could buy loads of candy and where Tommy perfected the art of walking out with bottles of Boone’s Farm shoved down the crotch of his shorts. He did this while the rest of us created a diversion at the cash register, usually involving fumbled change or fizzing sodas. How he got away with it, I never understood, the theft was so obvious. The bottle filled the front of his shorts with a lusty exuberance that gave him the look of the most generously endowed thirteen-year-old on earth. With cocktails secured, we would lie on our backs in a field of tall grass, safely hidden from headlights, puffing our Marlboros and passing the bottle of wine.

  About halfway through the bottle, one of us would usually seize on yet another brilliant scheme to pimp Old Man Pemberton.

  We put dog feces in his mailbox and poured motor oil on his driveway. We collected trash from houses up and down the street and spread it across his front yard. One of our better schemes was to tiptoe to the side of his house where he stored his canoe and hoist it into the branches of a nearby tree.

  There were so many kids in the neighborhood, all of them avowed antagonists of the Pembertons, that the old man didn’t know where to begin. We were all suspects, and the older teens, who had the most reason to despise him, were the biggest suspects of all.

  Dad had his own vague suspicions, even if he couldn’t prove them. “Go easy on Mr. Pemberton,” he would counsel. “Show respect and give him his space. Someday you’ll be old and you’ll understand.” Dad was big on the Golden Rule and recited it often.

  “Remember, John, do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”

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  Mr. Cullen was less diplomatic. One afternoon he lined us up in the driveway, pushed his face up to ours, and said, “Get your hands outta your pockets, mon, and listen up. If I ever find out you’ve been messing with Mr. Pemberton or anyone else in this neighborhood, I’m going to ride your bloody ass to Singapore and back. Do you understand me, boys?” We looked at the ground and nodded. We understood perfectly.

  But then came the Fourth of July and the big fireworks celebration at Pine Lake Country Club.

  It was a private, pricey club with a spectacular golf course nestled along Pine Lake, the next lake over from ours and an easy bike ride away. Like many kids in the neighborhood, Tommy, Sack, and I worked as caddies there, schlepping golf bags on our shoulders and handing nine irons and drivers to the golfers. (Rock, if I recall, tried it once and never went back.) We earned four dollars for eighteen holes, and usually got a 50-cent tip. Sometimes we could squeeze in two rounds a day—sweaty, tiring work but not bad money when you could buy a loaded eight-inch pizza at the Village Inn for $1.79. Being a caddy had other privileges. If you didn’t mind dodging sprinklers and lawn mowers, you could golf for free on Mondays. You could always bum a cigarette and hear obscene jokes at the caddy shack. And every July Fourth, caddies were allowed to hang out in the employee parking lot of the country club for an up close view of the fireworks display. A very up close view. The club members were in their lounge chairs on the fairways where they could watch the pyrotechnics explode over the water. But we got to watch from a vantage point just yards from the launchpad, in a roped-off corner of the parking lot.

  The workers would drop a charge, mortar-style, into a steel tube, light the fuse, and jump back. Boom! Up it would streak into the sky above the water, blossoming into a rainbow of screaming colors and whistling streamers. Two other boys from our class at Refuge were caddies, too, and they joined up with us. One we called Doggie on account of the woebegone expression perpetu-

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  ally engraved on his face, even when he was laughing. Doggie looked like he had basset hound in his gene line. The other boy we all knew as Poison for his ability to traipse through poison ivy without getting so much as an itch. He was an adopted kid with a wild streak that made Tommy and the rest of us look like angels.

  Poison kept count of the number of bottles of Boone’s Farm he stole from local stores, and one day proudly proclaimed himself an ace, having surpassed one hundred.

  The six of us crowded around the launch site with the other caddies, mouths agape as the pyrotechnic rockets soared skyward yards from our faces. It was like being ringside at Cape Canav-eral for a space launch. That’s when we noticed the open crates of fireworks sitting just inside the rope line, unguarded.

  Over and over, workers filed over to the crates, grabbed a rocket or two, and filed back to the launchpad a dozen yards away. I’m not sure how we got the idea, or if we even discussed it.

  I can’t even remember which of us bent over the rope and reached into the crate. I just know it wasn’t me. And I know I thought it was a very bad idea. If an M-80 could blow off Kevin McConnell’s thumb and two fingers, as one with a faulty fuse had done a few years earlier, what could one of these babies do? But in the next instant there we were, scurrying along the edge of the parking lot in the dark, cutting in and out of the pine trees—in possession of a four-foot-long, ready-to-fire missile. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” I hissed as I raced to keep up. “Oh my God! Jesus Christ!”

  We cut through the back of the golf course, jumped fences, and made our way through a series of backyards and woods, avoiding all roads. The rocket was heavy and we took turns carrying it in teams of two. When we got to the field of tall grass where we liked to drink wine, we lay down out of sight with our prize and caught our breath. No one was following us; apparently no one had even noticed. As our fear of capture ebbed, we became drunk on the endless possibilities for our newly acquired arsenal. Just holding it in our hands was a narcotic. You could almost feel the pent-up

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  power pulsing beneath its skin, ready to be unleashed at the place and time of our choosing. We hashed out several scenarios but in the end all agreed there was no time like the present, and no audience more fitting, more deserving, and certainly more likely to respond in a memorable way than Old Man Pemberton.

  The plot was brilliant, pure genius. It would be hilarious, spectacular, epic. The prank to end all pranks. The escapade of a lifetime. After this caper, we could retire as mischief-makers, knowing our world-class reputations would be secure. We were going to launch a one-rocket fireworks show in Mr. Pemberton’s front yard. Directly in front of those big picture windows. The ones we
knew he sat behind in the dark, watching for teenage miscreants sneaking down to the water’s edge with their beer and blankets. He wanted something to see? We’d give him something to see.

  We had studied the workers at the country club. Launching looked simple. You dropped the rocket in a tube, lit the fuse, and stood back. Virtually foolproof. We hoisted our contraband and made our way through the fields and across Commerce Road to Harbor Hills, stopping on the way to pick out a length of clay sewer pipe, about six inches across and three feet long, from a construction site. It would make a perfect launch tube.

  A few minutes later, we lay on our stomachs beneath a gnarly apple tree in The Outlot. From this vantage point we could study the Pemberton house, all dark and quiet. Our destination was a clump of shrubs in the Pembertons’ front yard, behind which we could hide as we prepared our missile for launch. Two by two, we made the dash. No lights came on.

  Doggie and Tommy began kicking up the sod with their heels, digging a shallow hole, and Poison ground the sewer pipe into it, working it down into the dirt until it stood upright on its own. We checked the alignment and pronounced it just about perfect, with just enough arc to get the firework directly over the house before it exploded, its display showering down directly in front of the

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  picture windows. Sack and I slid the rocket into the tube. Then we all looked at each other. Who was going to light the fuse? Who was willing to take responsibility for this stunt of the century?