Never happened.
Instead, in the summer between eighth grade and freshman year of high school, my mother told me that we were moving again—this time to Philadelphia. It was too much; I cracked up. I fell into long fits of inconsolable staring, punctuated by occasional tears: “I can’t do this again. I’m just starting to fit in here a little bit. Don’t make me carry this ruined face into an entirely new school!” I descended further into a silent and lonely despair, a thoroughly broken kid.
The only way my parents could coax me into the car for the move to Philadelphia was to agree to the one condition I set upon the transition: that I could attend the same high school Wilt Chamberlain had attended so I could continue pursuing my NBA fantasy. Sure, my parents said. Just get in the car. Of course, once we arrived and they discovered that Wilt’s old school was one of the lowest performing in Philadelphia, I was off to Devon Prep, a predominately white Catholic high school run by hard-core, old-school, Hungarian Piarist priests. One of my last memories of that place is being forced to go to a school dance when my basketball team was on a road trip and finding the darkest corner of the gym where I could hide my pock-marked face.
Our new house was in Berwyn, about thirty minutes from downtown Philly. It had four bedrooms, a pool out back, and plenty of trees, and my isolation was absolute. I spent all my time working at various odd jobs, studying, and playing basketball. But while at home at night, I simply hid out in the basement, avoiding my parents, avoiding Luke, avoiding other kids, obsessively making tapes with a cassette recorder and a microphone poised precariously on a sock, mostly of rock bands from the 1960s and early 1970s, an era of peace activism about which I was enthralled. On the tapes, the house’s furnace cycling on and off is clearly audible behind the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix.
Hard as the move to Philly was, though, it was there that I began to figure out how to confront the unfairness of the world that so confounded me, and my path, ultimately, to Michael began to emerge more clearly.
I was able to talk my way out of Devon Prep and into the much cheaper Archbishop Carroll High School, run by the Christian Brothers order, on the grounds that since I was obviously headed for the NBA, I needed a high school with a bigger basketball program. Carroll wasn’t like some of the other Catholic schools. It had no specific uniforms, though a tie was required. And while it didn’t officially teach a Dorothy Day kind of activist Catholicism, we did hear a lot, informally, about farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez, peace activist Philip Berrigan, and other figures who stood up against unfairness in the way that Jesus did when he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and merchants who were ripping people off in the temple. What I also found at Archbishop Carroll were three teachers who changed the course of my life.
The first one, Garrett Woznicki, was an indefatigable hippie with thinning long hair and a Jesus beard. Mr. Woz was very unconventional and excitable, jumping around like a talk show host or sitting back with his feet on the desk, cracking wise but breaking down literature like there was no tomorrow. He used to swear a lot in class, and that would get us all going. Some of his analytical insights, though, were like bombs dropping on your head. My brother Luke was also his student, and he once asked Mr. Woz a question about Catcher in the Rye and Holden’s messianic complex. Mr. Woz wrote out an answer and gave it to Luke. It was so compelling that my brother still has that piece of loose-leaf today.
Mr. Woz not only put before me volumes of Kerouac, Joyce, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Beckett, but he invited me to think and talk about them. Me! The Lizard! I’d never had anybody so highly value the contents of my skull. He turned reading, for me, into an aerobic sport; I remember devouring books with such ravenous intensity that I would sweat over the pages, my head filled with tales of courage, inquiry, adventure, destiny, and redemption.
One afternoon, I was shooting hoops in the driveway with Bobby Kennedy, a classmate who had as complex a father relationship as I did. We often spent long hours together processing the warped and painful father-son dynamic, trying to figure out what it all meant. That afternoon, Bobby and I were playing one-on-one and talking when Bobby suddenly said, “Let’s get out of here.”
I thought he meant take the train into downtown Philly. “No,” he said, “let’s go to New York.”
New York? New York was way outside the Berwyn orbit.
“When?” I asked.
“Right now.”
Instantly, the idea made perfect sense. Just go. Get away from Dad, get away from school, get away from the whole world that judged me by my acne—just flee. Neither of us wanted to tell our parents what we were about to do, which I guess technically qualified us as running away. We left the basketball lying in the driveway. Next thing we knew, we were grabbing onto a slow-moving Conrail train and hopping on the back as it pulled out of the station, and we were off to New York.
New York was electrifying and terrifying at the same time for a couple of fifteen-year-old boys. We didn’t want to get rolled the minute we got off the train, so we practiced looking like New Yorkers. We stood in Penn Station watching people go by, and then practicing for each other how New Yorkers walked—with arms swinging and head held down as though getting ready to butt people out of the way. Predictably, a couple of Unificationists (or as we called them in our youth, “Moonies,” a term that has since then come to be considered derogatory)—who were all over the place back then and, little did we know, exquisitely skilled at trolling for lost youth—swooped in on us and with maximum warmth and cheerfulness offered us a place to stay. Not knowing any better, Bobby and I followed them to a hotel that was serving as their New York headquarters. Something made me stop, though. The vibe didn’t feel right, and I convinced Bobby to back away with me. The two who had lured us from Penn Station were stricken; they probably thought that if they had gotten us inside, they’d have us for good. They followed us for blocks, trying to get us to go back with them.
Bobby and I had very little money in our pockets, so we went to the YMCA. I went in first, and they gave me one little room that looked like something from a pre-war hospital, with one narrow cot. Bobby and I slept head to toe. Since the rooms were supposed to be for one person, one of us would have to go up to the room, open the window, and drop the key down into the alley so the other could come up as if going to a different room. During the day, we just wandered around, taking it all in. We probably looked like Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voigt from Midnight Cowboy. We were unkempt and disheveled, and what’s more, I had cut my toe on some glass and was limping around like Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo. Times Square of the late 1970s was a revelation for me. I’d never seen so much homelessness, so many vagrants, so much raw need. I would talk with everyone, learning their stories, trying to understand how they got where they got. The more I saw, the more I wanted to see; I kept pushing Bobby and me toward the seediest parts of town.
After about a week, our money ran out completely, and we went to Covenant House, the famous mission to runaway and homeless children. The people there took us in like long-lost family; after all, their first concern is to make runaways feel safe. They gave us a pretty nice room with a bathroom and let me soak and bandage my toe. Bobby and I spent several days there. Meanwhile, our parents were frantic with worry. The guys running the shelter must have slowly peeled the onion off our flimsy story in passing conversations. Finally, a member of the staff, about ten years older than we were, sat us down and asked, “Where you boys from?”
We were ready for him, we thought.
“Flatbush,” I said.
“Brooklyn,” Bobby said at the same time.
The guy smiled. “Which is it?”
“Flatbush.”
“Flatbush, yeah.”
“So, not Brooklyn,” he asked us.
“No sir,” Bobby said. “Flatbush.”
“Boys,” the man said. “Flatbush is in Brooklyn.” Bobby and I looked at each other in horror. That hadn’t taken long.
“You
guys are from Philadelphia, aren’t you? We got a call from some pretty disturbed parents who suspected you might be here. We aren’t throwing you out, but it sure sounds like they want you to come home.”
We were on the train home that afternoon, and our New York adventure was over. But the trip—hanging around Covenant House, wandering New York’s back alleys—really got me thinking about inequality as it relates to race, addiction, poverty, and homelessness. Those left behind and forgotten in cities like New York and Philly seemed particularly badly served in our society. The government had a whole Scrabble set full of acronyms for dealing with the poor—AFDC, SSI, HUD, and so on—yet it seemed that poor people only became poorer and more numerous. Something was wrong. Something was missing. The whole situation was unfair. There had to be a better way to serve the people marginalized in our society. The light bulb, though dim, was getting stronger. For the first time I began to get a sense of what I might do with my life. A mission was coming into focus.
The next year I took an evening class at Archbishop Carroll after basketball practice, and what set it apart was that unlike my gender-segregated daytime classes, there were girls in it. My face was so hideous with acne cysts that I would come in from basketball practice with a towel around my neck or over my head like a monk’s hood—to dry my hair, I’d say, but really I was hiding. The teacher—the second great influence of my high school career—was Joe Stoutzenberger, another man so lanky it makes me wonder if the school system paid these guys enough to eat properly. He taught world religion in a way the original Archbishop Carroll himself probably couldn’t have envisioned. Mr. Stoutz was very Buddhist in his outlook and mannerisms, and he spent weeks, while standing under the full-color crucifix on the wall, enlightening us on the tenets of other religions around the world and the centrality of compassion.
Mr. Stoutz led great discussions, and it was in his class that I finally discovered I had something to offer the world: I could listen and empathize. I could hear what people were saying, synthesize their thoughts, and lead discussions in a productive direction. I was probably particularly motivated because there were girls in the room, but I wasn’t really angling for them. The acne had made me a virtually asexual being. I only realized later that my facial and family afflictions had led me to deeper emotional frequencies that helped identify with others’ suffering and pain, which helped me to connect to people much more easily, especially those who themselves felt isolated. People told me that they felt “safe” around me, that I was emotionally trustworthy. That I was, in a way, the older boy from the Boys’ Town poster. It didn’t lift me out of my dark hole, but perhaps a tiny crack in all that blackness had appeared, and a little bit of light was seeping through, illuminating the beginning of a path.
Mr. Stoutz was very big on the notion that having faith in the community is the first step toward serving the community. We read Siddhartha, about the Buddha leaving the palace and discovering real life, and Mr. Stouz made that a requirement of his class—that we leave the palace of suburban Philadelphia and discover other realities. So I began wandering into downtown Philadelphia on the train, sometimes with my best buddy Joe DiStefano, to volunteer at a homeless shelter for men—my first, inchoate attempt to assuage my anguish over injustice by actually doing something about it. I’d go after school or on weekends and do menial jobs—ladling soup, cleaning up—and talk to the guys who’d ended up there. Many of them had spent their lives battling alcohol or drug addiction, and all manner of mental illness, and some, by their accounts, had just had crushingly bad breaks in life.
The people running the shelter warned me not to get too personally invested in the residents; they came and went, and I wouldn’t be any good to the organization if I had an emotional stake in any of them. But their pain latched on to me, at the cellular level, like a virus. In retrospect, it may not have been the best thing for my mental health at the time, because each of those gentlemen had his own tale of woe, and little by little I filled myself up with these tales of personal misery, adding them to my own. My acne was really aflame in those days. It was so bad—physically painful, not just emotionally gruesome—that my mother found some charlatan with a suction machine in his office that sucked the lesions off my back and chest with a loud thunk, pulling divots of flesh with them and leaving scars that were still with me two decades later.
Meanwhile, the more I ignored and defied my father, the angrier he grew; some evenings ended with him stalking me out of the kitchen through the porch out into the driveway under the basketball hoop and down all the way to the street, screaming at my back, making me feel like a worthless loser. Me. The student-athlete who simultaneously held down a paper route, a lawn-cutting business, and a YMCA gym job, while still volunteering at the homeless shelter. How could he look at me with such anger? And while we’re at it, how could there be a God with so much injustice in the world, allowing so much suffering? The leap of great unfairness from the personal to the global was in full development mode.
One night, waiting for the train home to Berwyn from Philadelphia, I stood at the edge of the platform, tortured by the hideous unfairness of everything I was feeling so palpably, strongly considering whether to step in front of the train. The engineer must have seen something was amiss; he blasted his horn uncharacteristically as he pulled into the station. I don’t even remember how, or why—maybe I was clinging to that sliver of light I’d discovered in Mr. Stoutz’ class—but I stepped back out of the way at the last second.
Meanwhile, my hoop dreams, or rather hoop delusions, were disappearing in a haze of painful injuries. Every year some part of my anatomy failed me. In seventh and eighth grades, the tendonitis was so bad in my wrists that I would tearfully run scalding water on them before games in the vain hope that the cysts would loosen up. My freshman and sophomore seasons were hindered by bone spurs and plantar fasciitis, making every step feel like hypodermic needles were being inserted into my heels. My junior year my cousin landed on my arm and broke it while I was roughhousing in Pittsburgh right before the season, making me miss the entire season. My coach didn’t speak to me for weeks after that. And finally my senior year I couldn’t run or jump because of tendonitis in my knees. Fed up, Coach Kirsch cut me, but I went to him in tears and begged him to let me stay on the team—I wanted to belong to something so badly. Coach Kirsch was tough, but he knew when someone really needed a lifeline, so he let me ride the bench, even though I often couldn’t even finish practices because of the pain.
Despite all this, one refuge I did not seek was alcohol or drugs. My dad drank, and I was so determined to be nothing like him, I swore off alcohol completely. Avoiding drugs was a no-brainer, as I felt steering clear of them might give me a competitive edge on the basketball court.
In my final year of high school, I had an experience whose significance wasn’t clear at the time. It all started with my being an insufferable smart-ass in Joan Kane’s Spanish class.
Ms. Kane—the third teacher who greatly influenced me—was very pretty and very unwilling to put up with my shenanigans. I was a discipline problem for her, just to get her attention. Poor Ms. Kane, though, had no other tools at her disposal but to give me one after-school detention slip after another, which was of course exactly what I wanted; it prolonged my time with her because detention, fortuitously, was held in her classroom. Though I cringe to remember it, I was so far gone that I’d write her platonic Shakespearean love notes suggesting that someday, when I was older, maybe she could see me differently …
One day during detention Ms. Kane stationed me at a desk as far from her as possible and handed me a pile of pamphlets. She was involved in some charity, apparently, and she wanted me to see what it was about. That would be my punishment, to read the pamphlets. I shuffled through them. They’d been issued by an organization called Amnesty International and another called Bread for the World. I’d never heard of either one.
For the next hour I looked at pictures and read stories of people who
were starving, who had been tortured, who were child soldiers, who were refugees, and who had experienced other atrocities that hit me right in the stomach. The misery I’d seen at the shelter in Philly or Times Square was nothing compared to what was going on in Africa. This was injustice on an operatic scale. This was unfairness.
It wasn’t an immediate change-your-life moment. I was too self-absorbed for that. But those images got squirreled away somewhere deep inside my adolescent brain and would, a few years later, end up changing my life.
All of these experiences led me to a very nocturnal, insomnia-fueled, internally focused productivity, evidenced by a growing collection of marble notebooks, dozens of them, angst-filled reflections overflowing every page of every book. These were my journals chronicling my high school tribulations. The amazing thing is that an entry would be dated July 15, 1980, 8 P.M., and there would be a few pages of writing. Then July 15, midnight, and there’d be a couple more. Then July 16, 1980, 2 A.M., and there would be three more. I was utterly consumed. And I barely made it out of high school; my grades—due to neglect and disinterest—descended in a free fall, and my behavior, attitude, and emotional state were not far behind. But make it out I did, and finally I went off to college in Washington, D.C., at Georgetown University. Free of my father, at last.
In my obsessive, guilt-ridden way, I became a total grind during my debt-filled freshman year at Georgetown University. While everybody else in the dorm was out drinking and partying, I’d be on the third floor of the library, consuming book after book unrelated to my course work with a voraciousness that, in retrospect, seems fairly desperate. There was too much injustice in the world for a guilty Catholic sinner like me to take a minute off. In my lonely, bruised state, I really believed it was partly up to me to rid the world of injustice. In order to get that done, I was going to have to learn all I could about how the world works.
Unlikely Brothers Page 3
