By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (2 page)

I remember as a kid seeing Uncle Carl get up from where we were all playing cards and go out to the entry vestibule, where he would make his drug deals. It was my first exposure to drugs and the way they had to be kept secret. Every half hour or so there’d be someone knocking at the door. Carl would let that person into the vestibule, which was closed off from the living room, find out what they wanted, then go into the basement where he kept the heroin, get the requested amount, return to the vestibule, and make the deal. When I asked my aunt Sally what was going on, she said, “Your uncle’s selling drugs.” I remember saying to her, “That’s what I thought! Is it dangerous?” She said, “Oh no. Not at all, Tommy. He’s a good drug dealer.” I think I was nine when that conversation took place.

But the truth is that I really liked Uncle Carl and Uncle Keith. Carl was a kind of bebop jazz aficionado and Keith was something of a hippie who loved the Rolling Stones. I remember one year when Keith returned home for Christmas. I was about twelve and asked him what he’d been reading. He said, “Tom, this drug problem has gotten out of control and I just decided to read the dictionary—I figured all the books were in it.” They were both characters.

Somehow, even though he was in that environment, my father never did drugs, and he was the only one out of all his siblings to graduate from high school. I know that he once took a hit off a joint
that his brother Ernie suggested he try and he later told me that it felt like the floor opened up and every monster and insecurity in his life came out and laughed at him. He never did a mind-altering drug again. He used to say that his addiction was reading. In retrospect, he really picked an addiction that fit his very private, almost shut-away, personality. You could talk to this fool for a half hour while he read, and if you asked him what was for dinner, he’d say, “Food.” You’d ask what kind and he’d say, “Ask your mother.” You’d ask where she was and he’d say, “Thomas, can’t you tell that I’m reading?” That was actually kind of a funny routine we had.

My mom’s family came to Detroit under circumstances not unlike the Sizemores’, and there was a bit of mystery around my grandfather Sam Schannault’s racial heritage. He always thought of himself as a white man, but he was the product of a union between an American Indian sharecropper named Nina and a Georgia plantation owner of French ancestry named Mr. Chennault; I believe my grandfather later changed the spelling to Schannault. Mr. Chennault was married and had a bunch of children who lived in the plantation’s main estate—a very large, luxurious home that I think is now an historical site in Georgia. When Mr. Chennault died, Nina and her kids, including my grandfather, who was maybe four years old, were expelled from the plantation.

When he grew up, my grandfather Schannault worked three jobs to keep his family off welfare. He’d do the morning shift in one factory and the evening shift at another, and also worked at a gas station. He also made their house into an after-hours joint in order to make extra money. You couldn’t buy liquor after 2
A.M.
, so Sam would open up his doors and sell it, running what is called a blind pig. Everyone in town who liked to drink—including, on occasion, Blevins Sizemore—would show up there. Sam wasn’t an alcoholic but he and
my grandma Schannault both drank. They really only had the club to make extra money. As a little girl, my mom hated all the people traipsing through the house late at night, talking loudly and laughing as drunks do, making the place stink of beer and cigarettes.

Sam didn’t age all that well: welding in the factory eventually gave him multiple hernias and made one of his arms significantly longer than the other. I also believe he slept about three hours a night because he worked roughly twenty-one hours a day. Still, he was the toughest man I ever met in my life. As a teenager he was about five foot nine but all brawny steel, and he and his brother Frank would go to bars in Tipton, Georgia, where they’d bet everyone there that Sam could beat anyone in a fight. And that’s exactly what he’d do—beat everyone. I hear his record was 119-0. My great-uncle Frank would supposedly say, “Sam, I’m afraid you’re going to end up killing one of these men one day.”

My mom was the fifth of Sam and Mildred Schannault’s kids. The order went Barbara, Shirley, Ronnie, Jerome, my mom, Larry, and Barry. Ronnie was friends with my dad, whom he very affectionately called “Big Ed,” and the two family houses were just a few streets away from each other. Later, Ronnie realized he was gay and ran away to New York. It was a different time, and I think he was sort of hiding out in shame. My mom was really the only one in the family who stayed in touch with him and he didn’t come home again until years later—the early 1980s—when he had AIDS and was dying.

Jerome ended up becoming a big pimp in Detroit. He had these two massage parlors that were really whorehouses called Foxy Ladies and Gentleman’s Retreat and everyone in Detroit (including the
Detroit News
and
Detroit Free Press
) called Jerome the Fat Man or the Slob because, honestly, he was kind of overweight and generally didn’t dress well. He was a total character. He’d say things like “Here I
am providing a social service—do you think most of the slobs walking through my door could get that kind of pussy on their own?—and those corrupt, no-good rats want to incarcerate me. For sellin’ honey? Doesn’t it make you sick? Disgusting. It’s disgusting.” He’d go off on these rants about how “the most twisted” whorehouses in the world were in Washington, D.C. (and he knew firsthand, since he’d been to them all!) and here the authorities were bothering him.

My mom, Judith Kay Schannault, met my dad when she was thirteen and he was fourteen. Apparently they even had some sort of “faux marriage” back when they were kids. My mom was incredibly beautiful and had a lot of boys wooing her.

Like I said, my dad was incredibly smart: it literally said “Boy Genius” beneath his high school senior yearbook picture. And one day when he was nine years old, his teacher brought him home from school so he could talk to his parents. The teacher said to Blevins, “Your son’s too smart to be in this school—he needs to go to a smart kids’ school.” Blevins was drunk at the time and couldn’t really hear what the teacher was saying, so he pulled out a shotgun and told the teacher to get off his porch. And then, because Blevins was so much to deal with, my grandmother didn’t want to confront him and upset him further, so my dad never did end up switching schools.

And yet even though he came from those circumstances, he ended up getting a full scholarship to Harvard. He went there for his freshman year and cleaned dorms to make pocket money. But he felt entirely out of place in his Salvation Army clothes. He came from a family of hillbillies who lived on a dirt floor, and all the Harvard kids were from another world. And even though he was getting straight As, he could never adjust to the Harvard environment. So one Friday he left his last class, walked to the bus station, and took the bus to New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He was thinking about becoming a
writer—he was artistic and well-read—or joining the Foreign Legion, but after about a day walking around more or less aimlessly, he realized he had just enough money to take a bus home to Detroit.

My guess is that my dad really missed my mom when he was at Harvard, and she was one of the reasons he wanted to come home. So he did. Harvard called Detroit—they had to call a neighbor because my dad’s family didn’t have a phone—and they told him he could come back, that everything was fine. They knew that he was gifted, and they understood his circumstances, but I think he was just too ashamed to go back. So he never returned to Harvard, and that’s something he has always regretted. Still, the life my dad was able to build with my mom was definitely an improvement over his childhood; my dad really got his family out of the Dark Ages.

My parents got married in a simple ceremony in Belle Isle Park in Detroit when my mom was nineteen. I was born in 1961, and I guess the place my parents were living in at that point was pretty bad. It didn’t even have any heat. My dad called the landlord to try to get the heat turned on there and was told, “What are you talking about? There’s no heat there to turn on.” Then one day the toilet fell through the floor because the floors were about as thin as sandpaper. My mom said, “I’m not staying here with my baby—I’m freezing to death, the toilet just fell through the floor, and I’ve had enough.” So when I was just a few weeks old we moved into a two-family flat on the predominantly white, working-class east side of Detroit with my maternal grandparents. We lived upstairs and they took the downstairs flat.

My brother Aaron was born two years later and we lived in the two-family flat for about eleven years. Our family actually still owns it, and my mom’s younger brother Barry lives there now. Because my parents both worked when Aaron and I were little—my mom for the ombudsman’s office and my dad teaching mentally challenged kids—my
grandmother looked after us a lot. She was really nurturing and, in a lot of ways, I felt like I had two moms. I got a lot of attention early on: I was a good boy, quite curious, and I was also the first grandchild of both my parents’ parents. And I was smart. I talked and learned to read early—I was supposedly saying complete sentences by the time Aaron was born and was reading by the age of four.

We didn’t really have a car because we kept thinking we were getting deals, only to learn we’d actually been screwed over. I remember my dad at one point got a Jaguar for two hundred bucks when at the time they cost $75,000. Mom said to him, “If you bought the car for two hundred dollars, it stands to reason that it’s not any good. There’s got to be something wrong with it.” My uncle Jerome opened the hood—my dad had never even opened it to look—and there was no engine. Jerome said, “Ain’t got no engine, first thing, that’s not good.” My dad just wasn’t good with stuff like that.

When I was in second grade and Aaron was in kindergarten, we moved to Ames, Iowa, for a year because my dad got a job teaching philosophy at Iowa State University. We were just a few weeks into living there when my parents decided one day, in the dead of an Iowa winter, to drop me and Aaron off to see the play
Rumpelstiltskin
. We’d never been to a play before, and it really wasn’t our kind of thing, but my parents must have had something they wanted to do that day because they didn’t tend to ever leave us anywhere on our own. But that day they took us to this theater, dropped us off, and told us to watch the play and then wait for them to come pick us up when it was over.

Aaron and I started watching the play and it was the most boring thing I’d ever seen in my life. It’s ironic that my first experience with theater was so terrible, given that I later came to love it so much, but what can I say? I still don’t like bad theater and this was bad. When
the actors came out and started yelling, “Hark!” I turned to Aaron and said, “They’ve got to be kidding.”

After about five minutes, I told Aaron we should leave and he said that we couldn’t—that we’d promised Mom and Dad we’d stay until the end and wait for them to come pick us up. I was frustrated but agreed to stay, and then counted the minutes until the curtain went down an hour and ten minutes later. We went out into the lobby, and that’s when we found out that it wasn’t over—that it was only the intermission and we had two more acts to go. Now it was a brisk winter day, maybe twenty degrees, with tons of snow piled on the sides of the streets, some of it higher than our shoulders. We’d just moved to the area and I didn’t know the first thing about the neighborhood or town we were in but I didn’t care; I’d had it. I turned to Aaron and said, “I’m going home, you want to come with me?” Honestly, I hated that play so much that I wouldn’t have cared if I had to walk to the center of the earth.

Aaron looked at me like I was crazy. “We’re miles from home!” he said with these big, wide eyes. I told him I knew that but that I could figure out the way back. He was torn. I could tell he was terrified to go with me but he knew I was serious, and he was also scared to stay at the play by himself. And the thing is, he had every reason to be scared. I didn’t know my way home at all and was completely bluffing.

Still, I had this vague idea that if we made a right, then a left, then another quick right, it would put us in the direction of where we lived. The snow was up to our hips, but I ignored that. “Come on!” I said to Aaron and just started walking the way I thought was right. He followed me but he was still panicked—he was saying things like “We’re gonna die, we should go back. We’re little.” And I told him, “I don’t care—I’d rather die than watch any more of that play.” At the time, I felt like I meant it. He kept asking me if I was sure I knew where I was going, and the truth was, the more we walked, the less certain I was.
But I saw how worried he looked and I remember saying to myself, “He can’t handle the truth.” So I told him yes, of course I was sure.

It turned out that I did. Or I got lucky. All I know is that we walked a long time in the freezing snow and eventually wound up at home. Even though we were both frozen solid, I kept telling Aaron that I wasn’t cold at all. That was probably my first acting job: convincing my little brother that I was almost warm in temperatures so cold. By the last two blocks I actually had to hold him to keep him from freezing, but I was still telling him it wasn’t cold out. Then, when we got to our front door and saw our dad coming down the steps, I told Aaron to act normal and not say a word. I said, “Hey, Dad, John’s mother drove us home, the play just ended.”

At first he believed us but then he felt our faces, which were frozen. He asked, “What’s wrong with your faces? Why are they so red and so cold?” I said, “Nothing, something must be wrong with your hands.” I thought that was pretty clever. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with my hands.” I said, “How do you know, are you a doctor?” Then he said, “Thomas, sit down.” I could tell he knew what had happened, and I thought I was going to get in trouble for putting my brother at risk. But instead he said he was really proud of me. He said to Aaron, “You’re lucky you’ve got Tom.” And that’s why that day sticks out so much in my head. My dad wasn’t easy to impress, but me being able to find our way home from miles away when we’d just moved in really impressed him.