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

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 wonderboy—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
    W HEN 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 triedanything 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