By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir (3 page)

But even though I was a tough little kid who could usually act strong in front of my brother, when I went to bed at night I always thought that someone was going to break into our house. I shared a bedroom with Aaron, and I’d always ask him if he heard certain noises I was sure I heard. Sometimes I’d even be crying when I asked. Then I’d beg Aaron not to fall asleep until I had. He’d try his best. When I was really scared, I’d go in and sleep with my parents.

I really wanted to be strong and smart like my father, who, after teaching for a long time, decided he wanted to be a lawyer, so he enrolled in law school at the University of Michigan. He never went to a class—he just read the books and took the tests because we were living in Detroit and he didn’t want to have to drive to Ann Arbor—but he was getting straight A’s. One day in the middle of his second year there, when he went in to get his test score, his instructor said, “You live!” My dad said, “Sorry I haven’t been here. I have children to take care of.” The instructor asked him if he could stay after class to talk and my dad said, “I really can’t. It’s just the law; what do you want to talk about?”

When he graduated, he practiced corporate law at one of the most respected firms in the nation, where the thinking was basically, if you have a problem and you can’t solve it, take it to Sizemore.

But because my dad had never gotten anything but A’s, satisfying him was next to impossible. I was in honors algebra as an eighth grader and I should have been in regular algebra, but the thinking was that because my father would have been in honors algebra, so should I. But I knew I was screwed in that class. It was like joining the track team and having to run at five in the morning. I just knew I wasn’t going to be able do it right. I was not as high an achiever as he was, so I fell behind, and once you fall behind in math, you’re screwed. And he wouldn’t let me move to regular algebra. If you had put me in that class and spun me around with my eyes closed, I wouldn’t know where I sat; that’s how confused I was.

I’d get really scared—probably irrationally scared—whenever my father tutored me. He was a tough guy, and when I was slow to understand some of the algebra problems, he’d get frustrated with me. He was just trying to push me to do better, and his manner was a little gruff. At one point my mom saw the way he was talking to me during
one of these tutoring sessions and she said, “Edward, that’s enough!” He ignored her and she said again, “I said that’s enough! That is my son, too, and that is enough!” he finally looked up. She said, “How do you expect anybody to even be able to read the word
the
when you’re in his ear like that? The pressure you’re applying right now is just wrong. I want you to leave this room.” I’d never seen my mom really get that hard with him. And because of that, he knew he was wrong. He started to say something, but she went, “Stop it. Leave him alone and get away from him. You’re scaring him.”

Another bad incident with my dad happened when I was in fifth grade and the music teacher picked me to sing “Silent Night” at the Christmas concert. It was a big deal because that role had always gone to a sixth grader and a girl, so I was really excited. But the night of the performance, I didn’t want my hair the way my dad wanted it, and I didn’t want to wear what he wanted me to wear. We had an argument about it—which he won and made me dissolve into tears. The fight escalated, and I ended up weeping: pictures from that day show how distraught I was.

When we got to school for the concert, my friends could tell I’d been crying. One of them, Michael, took me into a classroom and said, “Hey, Tom, are you okay?” He was so sweet. I told him what had happened and he said, “Forget about your dad; he can’t even do birthday parties.” I guess my dad had screwed up the game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey at Aaron’s recent birthday party. Then Michael went and got this girl Agnes, who was sort of my girlfriend. She came back to talk to me, and I remember her looking like a concerned Meryl Streep. She said, “Tom, your father’s a mean person sometimes, but he loves you.”

I said, “What about my hair?” She said, “It looks great,” though she told me later it actually looked like shit: all the curls had been
combed out of it, and I looked like I had a Bobby Sherman haircut. And I had on this dumb electric-blue shirt—I’d never worn electric blue in my fucking life—and I was so uncomfortable. I said, “What about this shirt?” and she said, “It’s beautiful.” She told me later she thought it was a terrible shirt, but she went into the hall and told this other little girl, “Go in there and tell him his hair and shirt look nice, because they’re awful.” Those were my core friends, and we took care of each other: we knew each other’s parents, and we were helping each other become little people.

Thanks to Michael and Agnes, I started to feel much better and when I went up to sing the song, the singing teacher, Miss Stohl, looked at me and said, “You can do this, honey.” I remember her playing the chord on the piano and then saying, “It’s Christmas.” Thinking about that moment makes me want to cry because she was so goddamn sweet. She looked at me through the whole song and mouthed the words to me until she knew I could handle it on my own.

When I hit the high notes, I saw a few people out there with tears in their eyes, including my mom and Miss Stohl, and when I finished, I felt like I was a star. There were about two hundred people there, and I literally had a receiving line afterward. It was such a precursor of what was to come: on the one hand, I loved the adulation, but at the same time I felt uncomfortable.

To discover that I could be as upset as I was and still come through made me feel like I could survive anything. And I think that’s probably when I realized I was a performer.

THINGS ARE DIFFERENT
now, but when I was a kid your parents could whip your ass in the front yard and no one would look twice. My mom
would say, “Be home by seven thirty,” and if you weren’t home at seven thirty, you got your ass kicked. And it worked: I was usually home at seven thirty. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that: it gets your point across.

At the same time that our parents were tough with us, Aaron and I both truly idolized our father. To us, he was like a Kennedy. I remember when Bobby Kennedy came to Detroit while he was running for president in 1968. I was seven years old. In the predawn hours my dad put me on his shoulders and we went out to Hart Plaza, where RFK was going to appear at noon, and started waiting for him. It was about five in the morning. When hours later Kennedy came out—with this beautiful tan, wearing a white shirt with his sleeves rolled up and with the sun hitting his hair in a way that made it look like pure spun gold—I just loved him. And the way he smiled and the way he talked only made me love him more. I remember thinking, “My dad’s like him.”

On his best days, my dad was the greatest father who ever lived: he learned everything he could about baseball so he could talk to us about it and take us to ball games. He hugged us and told us he loved us and how happy he was that we were his children. He’d play Beatles songs for us and write down the lyrics so we could learn them. He taught us to play pinochle and hearts; he even tried to teach us bridge. When we were little, he read to us every night, and then, when we got older, he made us summer reading lists that included books like
The Catcher in the Rye
and
A Separate Peace
. But probably the most important thing he did was explain to us that everyone was created equal. Because of where we were living and the way people thought back then, we had plenty of people around us who were racist and homophobic and sexist. And he’d explain to us that being that way wasn’t right. And I just thought he was so smart. Mom wanted
us to go to church, and he would say things like “Judy, how can you believe in this shit? Supposedly God’s got these Ten Commandments and if you fuck those up, you get eternal damnation, but at the same time He always loves you? How does that work? And how come He doesn’t pay income taxes? I’m telling you, this whole thing’s a racket!” He’d say things like “There’s a whole world out there, Tommy.” He’s the one who turned me on to Chet Baker and Marlon Brando and really pushed me to succeed.

Still, it was very much a mixed bag: the good parenting was very good and the bad parenting was often abysmal, and very hurtful. And that was ultimately more important than the good parenting because it left some very bad psychic scars.

My brother Aaron and my dad had a complicated relationship. Aaron, like my dad, is brilliant: he can play the guitar very well, even though he’s never had a lesson; he was the best track runner and football player and also a straight-A student. My brother was my best friend when we were little. I remember when I was seven and Aaron was five and an older boy threw a baseball at him very hard. I said to the kid who did it, “What are you doing? He’s a kid.” The boy said something like “It’ll teach ’em.” And then I hit this fucker in the face. I didn’t want anyone messing with my brother. For a long time Aaron was that typical younger brother, and I felt like I couldn’t shake him, but after a while, I didn’t want to shake him anymore. He was a sweet kid. And later he not only caught up to me physically, but started doing push-ups and became much tougher.

I don’t think all of the other ways we were living were healthy. It was really important to my parents that we excelled in school—it was always “We want you to go to Harvard like your father did. You can’t get B’s, you have to get A’s.” But I don’t think it’s right to think that you have to get an A and you have to win the football game or else you’re
a fucking asshole. Yet that’s how I was brought up and, when you’re twelve years old, that’s not a way to be talked to. I didn’t want to be called those names, so I became obsessively ambitious. I decided I was going to do everything I could to be the best student and athlete I could, and I missed out on a lot of things in my youth as a result. I saw life in really black-and-white terms: either you win or you’re a piece of shit. When I became an actor, I had the exact same mentality.

When I was in eighth grade, we moved north to Shelby Township, near Utica, Michigan; it was a beautiful time in our lives in many ways. I was on the honor roll and was quarterback on the football team. Playing football meant a lot to me, and I took a lot of pride in my athletic accomplishments in general. I’d played in a summer basketball program in Detroit, where I’d been the only white kid to make the squad, but being quarterback was even better.

However, things took a dramatic shift when I was in tenth grade and my dad met another woman. Suzanne had come to him for legal help after her husband was killed in a motorcycle accident; one thing led to another, and my dad and Suzanne ended up falling for each other.

All I knew at the time was that the man the town considered like Abe Lincoln—the bearded, brilliant attorney—suddenly fell off his pedestal. The realization about what was going on was slow. It all started when my best friend in Utica, a kid named Brian Hagel, who was nearly ubiquitous in my home at the time, said something one night when he was visiting. Brian’s parents had gotten divorced after his dad had an affair, and one night when my dad was “working late” again for the umpteenth time in recent weeks, Brian asked where my dad was. I said, “He’s working late.” And he just immediately busted out with “Your dad’s got a girlfriend.” Aaron and I were both sure that Brian was wrong. Something like that just didn’t seem possible.

I don’t know how long it was afterward that my mom found out. I think she started getting suspicious, too, or maybe she heard Brian say that. So one night when my dad was supposedly working late, she called his firm and asked where he was. The security guard there wasn’t supposed to tell you if someone had signed in or out, but she was able to get the guard to go up and check Dad’s office. The guard reported back that he wasn’t there.

When my dad got home that night, we were already asleep—Aaron and I had fallen asleep in the living room on the pullout couch and our little brother Paul, who was a newborn, was asleep in his bedroom. My mom accused my dad of having an affair, I guess, and I just remember waking up to screaming. It turned into this really big, disturbing evening where a lot of ugly things were said and Paulie was crying. The family was never the same after that. I was never the same.

I was, quite honestly, traumatized. It was like all the denial suddenly ripped away and I saw that my dad wasn’t perfect—he wasn’t the greatest man who had ever lived. It was an ugly divorce, too: it lasted from when I was fifteen until I was eighteen. We had been a very close family who did everything together, and this new state of affairs was a real shock. Neither of my parents handled the situation particularly well. Dad was going back and forth between our home and Suzanne’s for a long time; he’d swear things were over with her and then suddenly he just wouldn’t come home. And it would break our hearts.

One time he drove up in Suzanne’s Ford Pinto, and I was so pissed-off that I took a brick and tossed it right at the window, shattering the glass. But I wasn’t the only one who was angry: my mom was livid. One time she drove over to Suzanne’s and pulled a tablecloth off the table, sending all the plants and everything else on it flying. Suzanne was hiding upstairs in a linen closet the whole time. My mom found
her up there and told her off. It was ugly, although I understood my mother’s rage.

Another day, my dad was carrying the TV out of the house while he and my mom were fighting, and they got so angry at each other he chucked the TV right through the kitchen window. The next day, my mom went down to the TV store and said, “My husband likes to throw TVs through the window.” The guy at the store said, “He should get another hobby.” But I guess he felt bad for her because he gave her a free TV.

Our neighbor, a very sweet lady named Fern, was always counseling my mom about the situation—telling her that she had to save her marriage and saying that my dad was just going through a midlife crisis and would never stay with Suzanne. Fern would tell my mom to never leave her marital home and never let another woman get her husband. My mom tried so hard to make it work, but at a certain point, she just got fed up. The summer between my tenth- and eleventh-grade years, she packed us up and we returned to Detroit, where we moved back in with Grandma and Grandpa. We didn’t see my dad that entire summer, but my mom and dad decided to reunite that fall, so we went back to the house in Utica. It wasn’t long before the same pattern began to emerge: Dad would start staying at Suzanne’s and not coming home.