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

by Tom Sizemore

  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.

  After a little while my mom couldn’t deal with my dad’s back-and-forth anymore, so we moved out of the house again after the school year. This was a real separation—not like the one that we’d just had for the summer. We rented a U-Haul, which Aaron, two of my friends from Shelby Township, and I loaded up with all of our furniture and clothes. I don’t remember this, but my mom has told me that my dad was lying on the couch, quietly crying the whole time we were packing and leaving. She and Aaron drove the U-Haul back to Detroit while I took a separate car there with my friends. Aaron told me afterward that my mom was really worried the whole drive; he kept telling her everything would be okay and she just continued smoking cigarettes and looking concerned, asking him if he really thought so.

  As I said, things really changed for me while all of this drama was going on with my parents. I was just so angry with my father, and I couldn’t seem to let go of it. I had been such a good student at a very demanding school and excelling at both basketball and football, but so much of that was to please my dad that I felt conflicted about continuing to try so hard.

  Eventually my parents got divorced and Dad ended up marrying Suzanne. My mom eventually remarried, too—a Greek Orthodox doctor. I was able to forgive Suzanne in the end because she loved my father, although the divorce brought me far closer to my mother. She was the one, during those years, who really kept our dreams alive—she’d keep saying things like “You’re going to go to college, honey.” In many ways, she was the better parent.

  And here’s the way I ultimately feel: my father made an irretrievably bad decision in terms of what he did with our family. I’ve always loved him and have always felt like one day he’d come to regret what he’d done—he’s just too sensitive a man not to one day look back and feel that way.

  Back in Detroit, I fell in again with my old friends. There was this one guy in particular, Joe Klug, and he and I became the de facto leaders of our little group; we were always up to something.

  We also always needed money. Joe knew this older guy—he was around twenty-one—who ran this sort of party house a mile or so from our neighborhood; everyone called it “the foosball house” because he had a foosball table in the living room.

  The guy was a real thug; he could have had us killed. And he was the kind of a loser who always had younger kids around because he was hoping he could sleep with the girls. So one day when we were all over there, he showed me that he had a ton of mescaline, hundreds of hits, which he was selling. He showed it to me because girls liked me, and he hoped I could facilitate things for him—like if he said he liked a girl, I could go get her and say, “Hey, come with me” and bring her back to his bedroom.

  I told Joe about the mescaline, and we decided we were going to steal it. I was sort of a street kid and had a reputation for being very smart and daring and tough. I knew that the act of stealing it would be simple—you just put the shit in a bag and throw it out the window—but that doing it right and not getting caught would be the hard part. I knew we needed a plan.

  The deal at this guy’s house was that no one could use his bathroom, because it connected to the bedroom where he kept the mes-caline. So if you had to use the bathroom, you had to go to a nearby gas station. So one day I told him, “You’re not going to get laid if people can’t use your bathroom. No girl would think much of a guy who makes you do that.” He said, “Really?” He wasn’t all that bright.

  The brilliance of this plan was that everyone in the neighborhood knew that my friend Joe had to be home at five thirty every night for dinner with his parents. Joe could basically do whatever the hell else he wanted, but dinner at five thirty was written in stone at the Klug house. So one day Joe and I were hanging around the foosball house, playing foosball, listening to music. At a quarter after five, Joe made sure everyone saw him leave. But instead of going home, he just went and waited below the guy’s bedroom window, as I’d instructed. A little while later, I acted like I was going to the bathroom but actually slipped down the hall into the bedroom, where I grabbed the mescaline and dropped it out the window to where Joe was waiting. I’d told him, “Don’t try to catch it, just let it hit the ground, then pick it up and run like hell back home.”

  After that, I went to the bathroom and then went
back and started playing foosball again. Eventually the guy who lived there went back to his bedroom and realized that his mescaline was gone. I acted like I was just as stunned as he was and actually helped him search everyone who was there. Of course, he couldn’t find drugs on anyone. Later I went over to Joe’s, where we split the haul. I was pretty proud of myself: I remember telling Joe, “I can out-hood the hoods.”

  The craziest part of it all is that when that guy needed to buy more mescaline because he had all these people wanting it, I told him, “I know someone who might be able to sell you some.” But I wanted to get him desperate so that I could jack up the price, so I made him wait awhile. Then I had a friend sell the mescaline right back to him. I never got caught, and the guy was killed in a car accident twenty years later, so it’s safe to say I’m off the hook on that one.

  But at the same time all that was going on, I secretly wanted to be an actor, and a plan started taking shape in my mind. I had seen movies like Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Deer Hunter. I had read a book about James Dean and a biography of Montgomery Clift that made me even more fascinated by the prospect of pursuing an acting career. It was really Taxi Driver that did it, though: my dad and Uncle Barry took me to see it when I was thirteen, and halfway through, my dad whispered to my uncle, “We shouldn’t have brought Tommy to this.” But I didn’t agree. The movie blew me away. I’ve now seen it more than thirty times. And there was something about the alienation and beauty of actors like Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean that captivated me. Still, it was more than reverence that I had for them: I somehow already identified with them and saw myself as being at their level. It’s hard to explain how this was true, but basically, my life had always felt heightened to a degree—even as a kid my life felt very dramatic, and because I was sort of simultaneously wild but very together, I knew people gossiped about me. And I had a sort of anger that I didn’t know what to do with, and acting felt like it could be a way I could creatively channel it.

  My high school girlfriend actually coerced me into trying out for a play, and I thought I’d be teased to death for it. But I wasn’t, and from there I started singing tenor in musicals staged by local theater groups: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, HMS Pinafore, and The Music Man. I didn’t get the lead in The Music Man and was just in the chorus—I played a salesman in the opening train scene and also a townsperson—but the director, halfway through the rehearsal process, said, “I should have given you the lead.” I said, “Yeah, you should have; the lead isn’t any good.” I know it sounds like a cliché, but it’s like a light had gone on in me by that point: I’d found my calling. The summer after that, I played Conrad Birdie in a Grosse Pointe Players production of Bye Bye Birdie, which was a big deal in Detroit and gave me a great deal of confidence. Of course, my decision to be an actor was not a popular one with my parents. But at the same time, I was still kind of wild, and they were happy I’d found something I wanted to do. Also, eventually my dad appreciated the amount of reading that a serious theater student had to do, and he always maintained that if I didn’t succeed as an actor, I would nonetheless receive a great education.

  I didn’t exactly spread it around that I had acting ambitions, though. This was Detroit, and acting wasn’t a “man’s job.” Besides, I had connections at General Motors, so to speak, not at Paramount, so I knew that it wouldn’t, on a certain level, sound remotely realistic to anyone else. And back then I was interested in being the wonder boy—the straight-A student and athlete—and I really was for a long time. I made everybody feel better. I came from a background where I had a lot of environmental and societal pressures, but I handled it all well. Until, of course, I didn’t.

  But that was much, much later.

  CHAPTER 2

  JUST TRY AND STOP ME

  WHEN I LEFT home for college at seventeen, I thought I’d never come back. But I ended up leaving Michigan State after less than a year. It just wasn’t my cup of tea. I like cities, and East Lansing, Michigan, isn’t much of one. I think Woody Allen once said that he feels comfortable in a place where there’s a hospital around if you get in a car accident, and I feel the same way. But I also think, in retrospect, that it was when I was at Michigan State that I had my first protracted depression. I remember sitting in room 2A of Armstrong Hall and thinking that my boyhood was over and that even though the last five years of it had been mostly terrible, I still didn’t feel ready to be a man. When I decided to leave school, I took the money my dad had given me to pay tuition and hitchhiked to Florida with my friend Doug.

  I was doing some crazy things back then; I wasn’t serious yet. One night shortly after I’d dropped out, I went to a Led Zeppelin concert with my friend Clyde, and he had hash oil with him. I’d never tried anything like that before, but we smoked it and drank a fifth of Southern Comfort. And let me tell you, we lost our minds. We were walking into Detroit’s Cobo Hall and I said to Clyde, “Do you think people can tell that I can’t walk?” He said, “You’re doing fine—just keep walking.”

  When we got to our seats, we realized they sucked. We were kids—we couldn’t get good tickets—but we wanted to be able to see the band. We saw that there was a railing with about a fifty-foot drop on the other side and figured out that if we could make it over and down, we’d be in the area where you could actually see the band. So that’s what we decided to do.

  I shimmied under the railing and thought I would fall on my feet, but instead I landed on my back. Clyde was right behind me, and within seconds of him making it over the police were there. They arrested Clyde. I somehow managed to get away, but as I ran to the bathroom, I felt a throbbing in my wrist. I’d broken it badly. I ended up having to go to the hospital later that night, and I was quite dramatic when I got there. I asked the doctor, “I just want to see my mom—am I going to die?” The doctor said, “No, you’ve hurt your arm; you’re not going to die.” My mom came to get me, and she was very serious. I think she saw this accident as symbolic of the direction my life was taking. She said to me, “Tommy, you’ve got to do something about your life; you have so much going for you.” I swear to God, that’s the night I mentally became an actor. I knew she was right; something snapped inside me and I started right then to focus.

  My dad was practicing law by then, but he’d gotten an apartment on the Wayne State University campus back when he’d taught there and had kept the place. One day I was over there and we had a big fight that ended with him throwing me out. But as I stormed down the street, he ran after me, and when he caught up we just happened to be standing in front of the Wayne State Theater Department. He told me that the theater department there was good—better than it was at Michigan State, anyway—and I decided to enroll. From that moment on, I was a machine. I took twenty-five credits a semester and started getting straight A’s again. I was Phi Beta Kappa, and I starred in most of the plays.

  It was around the time that other people started to talk to me about my acting—to notice that I had promise. There was an acting coach there named Tony Schmidt who took me aside one day and said, “You need to understand something: you are very good at this, and I think you should take it seriously.” He told me he never said that kind of thing to students, since taking acting seriously as a career isn’t usually practical, but he felt compelled to tell me I should pursue it. He said, “Over time, you’ll discover that if you go to the right place where the right fight is being fought, which is New York City, the cream rises to the top.” He also told me that I needed to always remember that there was a time when all the great actors wanted to be in movies and weren’t. He said, “You’re one of the rare people—the only kid here—that I could see being in movies like Robert De Niro is in movies. I could see you doing that level of work because of your abilities already.” That was an amazing thing to hear.

  Some of what I was doing at Wayne State was beginning to get noticed by the local press. I remember that the Philadelphia Inquirer cal
led this wild turn I did in the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie “enthusiastically ludicrous.” I also starred in Waiting for Godot and A Christmas Carol. I honestly really was the star of Wayne, and it was a wonderful time in my life. I had my first real girlfriend, Anne Pringle, who was essentially the female star of the school, and we had an apartment a few blocks off campus.

  But I also knew that I still wanted to hone my craft. At the time, Temple University in Philadelphia had, apart from Yale, probably the strongest graduate theater department in the country. It was part of something called the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs, which was started by Robert Brustein, who founded Yale Repertory Theatre. As far as I was concerned, the best actors of our time had come out of the program—people like William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, and Robin Williams.

  The concept was to train an American actor to be able to do everything from Shakespeare to what’s called kitchen-sink drama—Sam Shepard’s plays are an example—to film. The program was established in twelve schools—including Yale, Juilliard, Temple, Brandeis, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Washington at Seattle, and Southern Methodist University—and they would hold auditions in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Orleans over the course of five months for some fourteen thousand applicants. Things are different now; Temple University’s theater program is largely overshadowed by others. But back then, Walt Cherry—a famous Australian theater director—had come to Temple and built an incredible theater program by bringing under one roof five of the best collegiate or graduate school teachers in the world. Eventually the collision of egos caused everything there to fall apart, but that was long after I left.

  I’ll never forget my audition. I showed up at the Palmer House, a big hotel in Chicago, and was completely overwhelmed: they had three floors reserved for the auditions, and it seemed like there were about a thousand actors there, all vying for these same few spots. I had a private audition with Cherry, after which, I assumed, the teachers would talk to me. So I walked up to their desk and stood there waiting. One of the teachers looked at me coldly and asked, “What is it you want?” I was twenty years old and intimidated as hell. I tried to talk, but nothing came out of my mouth, so he just said, “Well then, go back to your tribe.” That was my introduction to high-end acting: “Go back to your tribe.”