By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 Itook 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 wasthe 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