Angels get pretty good press around Christmas time. Lots of seraphic ornaments aglow with diodes, pageants with coat-hanger halos, and angel choirs rising like plastic ghosts on snow-capped lawns while celestial voices loop eternally from hidden speakers. Guess I never thought much beyond those blatant commercial representations as a teenager. I knew the Biblical imperative about entertaining angels unaware, but what finally did in the air-brushed version of cherubs with wings for me is a story that has become my annual holiday card to YOU, my friends and fans. And so…

Christmas cuts like a knife sometimes. Sometimes that takes the form of self-pity, sometimes as charity to others, and sometimes we are too busy celebrating to notice what’s right before our eyes. When I was a young man there was a Christmas that delivered all three. That was the Christmas I wrapped up a box of hate and gave it to myself, only to open it and find love.

It was a bitterly cold Christmas, and I was living in an old men’s hotel filled with human wrecks. I was 19. The Lawndale was $7 a week my first year there (no, not during the Civil War, though the hotel did burn down eventually). Could’ve fled back to the ‘burbs of Detroit for the holidays, could’ve found a home-cooked meal. But being proud, stupid, and a little too martyred holed up in that horrid coffin of a room, I did not. Doing selfless things gratis for others elsewhere seemed to justify it; 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. The camera was stuck in the wrong direction. It was pointed at me. I think a lot of writers start out like that.

When I returned to my room at the end of each day – four walls I could almost touch all at the same time – I tried to go numb. Do you know anything as seething with emotion as trying to go numb? I hated the Lawndale with such passion that I walled off the human misery and loneliness there. Though in this case, the walls were paper thin, and you could hear the moans and the groans of the dying and the drunk. There was an unwritten code peculiar to the Lawndale. If someone came in beat up and bleeding, you might hear every drop of blood dripping on the vinyl runner over the creaking and snapping floorboards 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 and its cast-offs made my skin crawl. Above all, I hated the man across the hall.

As I said, the rooms were tiny, but unbelievably the man across from me had a roommate. I never saw the roommate, never wanted to, but it wasn’t hard to picture a pathetically submissive creature completely enslaved by that tyrant. The brute would come in, drunk and wheezing, and thirty seconds after his door clicked shut the vilest verbal abuse you might imagine would begin. Sometimes it went beyond that to cringe-worthy blows.  But I never quite had the guts to stop it. 

A new Christmas morning came that year, and with it the hollow feeling that I was, in fact, truly alone. I know now that this is absurd. The biggest club in the world is the one teeming with emotionally isolated people. But when you are young, there is nothing worse than the suspicion that your self-pity is justified. There was less than $10 in my pocket that morning when I set out in my wreck of a car, the “Grey Ghost,” to a local White Tower, a.k.a. the Porcelain Room, for a “scudburger” Christmas meal.

I don’t remember if there were any other customers at the counter, but I vividly remember the white-haired old lady scraping the grill. She was celebrating, you see. Not sitting at the counter waiting to be served, celebrating. It took me a few minutes to catch the irony. I had to quit staring at my reflection in the glass opposite and realize that all the photos strung along a green ribbon on one wall were probably her grandkids. She shuffled back and forth on fallen arches, and, damn, if she wasn’t 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 it was just stuffed with more paper. I was having a little trouble swallowing at that point, because if an arthritic grandmother could shuffle around singing while she served a young martyr on Christmas day, what did that say about me? Suddenly the scudburger became memorable cuisine. It knocked my $10 almost in half; but I added the remaining fin as a 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. I had just awakened it seemed to the world around me, and so life took on a clarity that moved me suddenly into 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 is barefoot. Lawndale codes 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 mumbles the old story through chattering teeth of how he 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 takes us a couple of hours to find his sister’s apartment, because he doesn’t have a clue except by scrutinizing every neighborhood as we inch up and down narrow streets off Woodward and the Cass corridor. Merry Christmas.

So now I’m feeling pretty good, except that I have to return to the old men’s burial ground. I’ve been good for a few hours, and learned something, but like a movie, it is over. Fade to black, and I go back to the past tense:

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. He was on a tear this time. Drunk, vile, violent. I stood it as long as I could, longer than I should have by months. Then I went out into the hall to do whatever it took to end his rampage against another human being.

Thought I was going to have to fist his door a couple of good ones, but as it happens it was slightly ajar. The smack of flesh on flesh was rending as he berated his roommate in terms unfit to write of here. 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 as 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, 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. To this day I can’t hear Kris Kristofferson sing “Lord help me, Jesus, I’ve wasted it all, help me, Jesus, I know what I am…” without seeing that man’s haunted face.

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. “…angels unaware.” They may not be who you think.

Since this is my Christmas card to you, I’m including a dozen of my fav memories in the photos below that I’ve used for cards in previous years, plus two bonus photos: one of me and one taken by my friend Emma on her college campus in upstate New York. Merry, merry, and the happiest of holidays to you.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan