There aren’t many things that tether me to
holidays, sad to say. Mine are mostly memories scattered like pieces of broken
glass glittering at the end of a kaleidoscope. That’s why I’m glad – and a
little astonished – that one particular memory has become a sort of tradition
for friends and fans. As a teenager I was on my own quite a bit and one year something
I like to call my “Scrooge Christmas” ran me over like a train – a three-car
train. That story was Sullygrammed around the globe a few years back and it brought
a deluge of response that led to reprints and requests to see it reprised each
Christmas since. I have no twinkling Christmas tree to show you, no bronze
turkey with steaming trimmings to serve you, no mounds of presents to give on
the holy morn, so please allow me to offer up my humble tale once more…
Christmas cuts like a knife
sometimes. By any name holidays make us keen to emptiness and omissions
because they demand just the opposite. Sometimes that takes the form of
self-pity, sometimes it is expressed in charity to others, sometimes we are too
busy celebrating to notice what’s right before our eyes. When I was a young man
there was a Christmas when I experienced all three. That was the Christmas
I wrapped up a box of hate and gave it to myself, then opened it to find love I
could give to someone else.
There have been circumstances — bound in some
way to a place or a period of time — that have taken my compassion to another
level and made me a more complete writer. Such a time and place was a bitterly
cold Christmas when I was living in an old men’s hotel filled with human
wrecks. It was a hotel for very old men, indeed. I was 19.
The Lawndale was $7 a week the first year I
lived there (no, it wasn’t during the Civil War, though it did burn down
eventually). Could’ve fled back to the ‘burbs of Detroit for the holidays,
could’ve found a home-cooked meal. But I was proud, stupid, and a little
too martyred when I was actually in that horrid coffin of a room, which was not
often. I was doing selfless things gratis for others, I thought. And I was a
bit of a maverick, not succeeding where everyone said I was supposed to
succeed, nor given to letting my emotion show over the failures. Never mind
that I got a million dollars’ worth of self-pity out of it. I knew that writing
was an option that was open to me, but I had the camera pointed in the wrong
direction. It was pointed at me. I think a lot of writers start out like that.
When I did have to return to my room at the
end of the day – four walls I could almost touch all at the same time – I tried
to be numb. Do you know anything as seething with emotion as trying to be numb?
Or as blinding? I hated the Lawndale with such a passion that I was deaf and
blind to the human misery and loneliness there, and more importantly for a
writer, equally walled off from a lot of incredible stories. In this case,
the walls were paper thin, and you could hear the moans and the groans of the
dying and the drunk. There were unwritten laws peculiar to males at the
Lawndale. If someone came in beat up and bleeding, you might hear every drop of
blood dripping on the vinyl runner in the hall, but if you opened your door,
the gasping stopped. In that mistrustful place, you didn’t flinch before a
tiger. No quarter asked, none given. Fine with me. The people I cared for
didn’t live at the Lawndale. The place made my skin crawl. Above all, I hated
the man across the hall.
All the rooms were as tiny as mine, but
unbelievably the man across from me had a roommate. I never saw the
roommate, never wanted to, but I had a picture in my mind of a pathetically
submissive creature completely enslaved by the brute I did see. The bully would
come in, drunk and wheezing, and thirty seconds after his door clicked shut the
vilest verbal abuse I’d ever heard would begin. Sometimes it went beyond that,
and I’d cringe to hear the blows. But I never quite got the guts to go
stop it. Part of the code, you know.
Thus I lived, and so a new Christmas morning
came, and with it the hollow feeling that I was, in fact, truly alone. I know
now that this is absurd, particularly in a world teeming with emotionally
isolated people. But when you are young, there is nothing emptier than the
suspicion that your self-pity is justified. I had less to my name than $10 that
morning when I set out in my wreck of a car, the “Grey Ghost.” My destination
was the White Tower, a.k.a. the Porcelain Room, for a “scudburger” Christmas
dinner.
I don’t remember if there were any other
customers at the counter, but I vividly remember the old lady scraping the
grill. She was celebrating, you see. Celebrating. Not sitting at the counter
waiting to be served, celebrating. It took me a few minutes to come down to
that and catch the irony. I had to quit staring at my reflection in the glass
opposite first and realize that all the photos strung along a green ribbon on
one wall were probably her children and grandchildren. She shuffled back and
forth with the gait of someone with fallen arches and arthritis. And, damn, she
was singing. And she had on a silly Santa hat. And there was red and green
bric-a-brac and fake snow and angel hair all over the place. A wrapped present,
too, though you could see there was just fluffed paper in it. Don’t remember finishing
that scudburger, though it ranks right up there with memorable cuisine. No
doubt I was having a little trouble swallowing at that point, because if a
grandmother had to work on Christmas day and could be like that, then I had to
stop just taking from her and give something back, and I didn’t have anything
nearly that good. The scudburger had knocked my $10 in half, so I left a $5 tip
and got the hell out of there.
It was compulsive, and by no means
charitable, but I felt better cranking the Grey Ghost to life and starting up
Livernois toward Vernor Highway. Are you with me? Here’s where life starts to
improvise on the lesson I just learned and I start feeling like I’m living in
the present tense.
Hoarfrost is on the inside glass of the White
Tower, but out here it is arctic, and as I’m approaching the railroad tracks, I
see a man in a cardboard box. His head is cut and swollen, blood frozen in his
hair, and he’s barefoot. Lawndale rules do not apply in train yards, and the
poor bastard, who it turns out has just crawled out of a freight car, is going
to freeze very quickly, so I stop. He tells me the old story: got drunk,
rolled, left to fate. What strikes me is he is naked inside the cardboard box.
I mean, the rollers took everything, as if out of malice to let him die. You
can’t imagine the blubbering gratitude of a Tennessee man up to visit his
sister at Wayne State, who just about becomes a vice-icle when his binge turns
bad. It took us a couple of hours to find his sister’s apartment, because he didn’t
have a clue, except by scrutinizing every neighborhood as we inched up and down
the narrow streets off Woodward and the Cass corridor. Merry Christmas.
So now I’m feeling pretty good, except that I
have to go back to the old men’s burial ground and re-visit self-pity. Oh, I’d
been a good lad for a few hours, and learned something, but like a movie, it
was over. So the Lawndale ate me up as I climbed to the second floor and the
last room in the line – 210 – which was odd, because later in college I would
be in room 210, and again, teaching at Fordson High in Dearborn, 210. Anyway,
now that I was back in you know where, you know who came in on my heels and
started you know what. The bully was on a tear this time. Drunk, vile and
violent. I stood it as long as I could, and longer than I should have by
months. Then, when I thought he was going to kill his roommate with the blows,
I went out into the hall to stop this creature I loathed.
Thought I was going to have to fist his door
a couple of good ones, but as it happens it was slightly ajar. He was berating
his roommate with terms I cannot hint at writing here, and I could hear the
smack of flesh on flesh. So I took two steps toward the wedge of light, and
then I saw it all. The mirror. The face in the mirror. The whole room behind
him in the mirror. The marks from the fists were clear on the cheek above the
stubble. And I saw the last blow land. But the testosterone boiling in me
suddenly went as flat as water. Because he didn’t have a roommate.
He was beating himself. Berating himself.
Calling himself everything but a child of God. Nothing I had felt or thought
about him all those months could approach the depths of his own self-hate. How
could I have been so wrong? An epiphany moment for me? Yeah. You could say.
Damn my soul if I ever underestimate any human being that badly again. Though,
I’m sorry to admit, I’ve been over the line too many times since. My
self-loathing neighbor slammed the door when he became aware of me, but he
opened another to my future as a writer.
I’m not a soft touch. I believe in human
excellence and transcendence, if only we can get outside of whatever boxes
imprison our thinking. Low expectations cripple people, and are really a vote
of no-confidence. It doesn’t matter what that man at the Lawndale lacked. What
mattered was what he had, which was a mirror filled with more self-honesty than
most of us can stand. He knew who he was. What he was. And at that moment I
knew what he could be. I can’t tell you what truths you’ve discovered about
yourself or about the human condition, but I know that they will come out in
your life one way or another. Of course, you may have to look outside the box
to find them. We need to engage in that search with openness and vigilance. If
people happen to you today, opportunities happen. The world presents us with
limitless possibilities. Find the ones you can reach, according to who you are.
Until you do that, you have not fulfilled your own potential as an observer or
as a human being.
I’m most grateful for your interest in my
novels. If you are looking for a holiday gift to top off your giving this
year, may I suggest the hardcover edition of my historical novel CASE WHITE? There’s
a trade paper edition too, as well as a stocking-stuffer e-book you can
download immediately. All three are here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O79GQTE
