By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir

by Tom Sizemore

  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.

  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 y
ou 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 impor
tant 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.