Grateful American Page 3

  “There,” Dad said. “That’s how you edit film, Gary.” I took note and grinned.

  Years later, Mom and Dad moved out to California where Dad opened a West Coast office of his new editing firm, then called The Reel Thing. Mom came up with the name. Among the many TV series he worked on were Miami Vice, Hart to Hart, Dawson’s Creek, Baywatch, and Michael Mann’s Crime Story, which happened to be the first time I directed episodic television. In 1992, my dad edited Of Mice and Men for me.

  I think it’s very cool that he was so deeply involved in an industry so new in Chicago. When Dad started out, television had only been around for about twenty years—and already the industry was exploding. What’s more astounding to me, though, is when I think how Dad got his start in the business by developing film for the navy, which means in some ways my roots in film go all the way back to the United States military.

  When I grew up in Chicago, the North Side / South Side rivalry was as old as the city itself. Depending on who you talked to, the rivalry might be serious or only a chance for some good-natured ribbing. Even then, few people agreed completely on what the rivalry was about. The White Sox came from the South Side, Comiskey Park. The Cubs played on the North Side, Wrigley Field. The South Side of Chicago, where I was born, made its mark in industry. Railroading. The blue-collar working stiffs. The North Side, or northern suburbs, had more money. More white-collar business types. This part of Chicago was right on the lake, so folks from the North Side liked to go to the beach in the summer. The South Side suburb of Harvey, where I first lived, was actually so far south it was south of the South Side. But it was still gritty as could be. The address of the two-bedroom, one-bath, one-thousand-square-foot house my parents owned in Harvey was 14419 Sangamon Street, and my folks beat that address into my brain so I didn’t forget. As a kid I was free to roam the neighborhood, and they didn’t want me lost.

  My grandpa Dan was a South Side man—a big-framed, tough Italian guy who’d been through the war and worked for the railroad. Not a cuddly grandpa at all. He was never mean. He was just tough. And a little scary. As a kid, I was a little afraid of Grandpa Dan whenever my parents took us for a visit. But years later, when I started acting in high school plays, Grandpa Dan and Grandma Betty came to see me in the restoration comedy Tartuffe by Moliére. I was playing the title character and had all kinds of makeup on, a funny nose, and a crazy wig, and from the stage I could clearly hear one voice in the audience. Grandpa Dan wasn’t the kind of guy who laughed a lot. But I heard this bold belly laugh from the crowd, and I knew it was Grandpa Dan—strong, rich, and vibrant. Hearing his laugh was so affirming. I thought, Well, if I can get Grandpa Dan laughing like this, then maybe I’m not half bad as an actor. Maybe I’ll keep going.

  For first through third grades I walked to school by myself. Every morning, I passed a big mound of sticks, dirt, weeds, and thorns that beckoned to me. I liked to climb that mound and stand on top like a king. One morning I was messing around on top of the mountain and tumbled off. A thorny bush broke my fall, driving a huge thorn into my leg. Bloody, I got to school where they patched me up. My leg healed, and I forgot about it. Two years later, I looked down at my leg one day and saw something sticking out. The tip of a sliver of wood. I reached down and yanked it out. My eyebrows arched in disbelief. I had pulled out a two-inch-long piece of thorn that had lived in my leg unseen for two years. The scar is still there, a little indentation in my left calf muscle, to remind me. Perhaps it was some sort of life metaphor. Something dirty and thorny can live unnoticed in a person for a long time. Little by little, you hope, it works its way out, never to return.

  This was the height of the Cold War. The nightly news didn’t mean much to me as a kid, but I frequently heard about the tensions between Russia and the United States. In elementary school we had atomic bomb drills where we were all ordered to “duck and cover” underneath our desks. On the news, I heard about the Cuban Missile Crisis, a serious standoff between Khrushchev and Kennedy, and everybody prepared for nuclear weapons to land. I didn’t understand all of this, and I wasn’t fearful—but all the adults around me sure looked concerned. Even paranoid. What’s the big deal? I thought. If an atomic bomb explodes over your city, you just duck and cover under your desk.

  On November 22, 1963, I was walking to school near that same mound with the thorny bush, and another kid was climbing on the mound. He had a strange look on his face, and he chanted something over and over.

  “Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.

  Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.

  Kennedy’s dead. He got shot in the head.”

  The little kid was chanting naively. I thought he was just sing-songing nonsense. When I reached school, the teachers sent us all straight home again. Now I knew something big was up. We watched the news on our little black-and-white TV on Sangamon Street. Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed President Kennedy, and everybody in my family was sad. I walked outside; everybody was sad. We went to the store; everybody was sad. The whole country was grieving. I didn’t know anything about politics, but I knew that my president had just been shot. I was sad too.

  Not long afterward, Jack Ruby killed Oswald on live TV, and I watched the violence unfold in front of my eyes. As an eight-year-old, I didn’t know what to think about what I’d just seen. About all the turmoil in my country.

  About all the changes happening to America.

  Life wasn’t all sad. At the end of third grade, we moved from the South Side to a big old historic house in Highland Park, the north suburbs of Chicago, and in the fall of 1964, I started fourth grade at a new school called Indian Trail Elementary School. For Christmas I received my first guitar. Acoustic. I had no idea how to play, but I loved it. The Beach Boys had become my favorite band. My first record was Beach Boys Concert, a live record, and as the songs spun on my record player, I loved to hear the crowd cheering in the background.

  We lived four blocks from Lake Michigan, with a park at the end of our street. A lot of neighborhood kids went to the same school, so some of the guys and I grabbed our guitars and formed a band. We called ourselves the Beach Dwellers, an homage to my favorite band. We tacked up cardboard signs around the neighborhood and invited all the little kids to our first concert in my living room. None of us Beach Dwellers knew how to play, but a grand total of six kids came to the show (standing room only for a living room), and we put my Beach Boys Concert album on the turntable, wailed away with our guitars in our hands, and lip-synced along with the tunes. By the time we reached “Little Deuce Coupe,” everybody was dancing like crazy.

  Mom and Dad eventually invested in guitar lessons for me in fourth and fifth grade. My teacher played an electric and always dangled a lit cigarette from his mouth, and I emerged from each lesson with a headache and reeking of smoke. But he taught me scales and chords, and in sixth grade I formed another band, a real band this time. With a drummer. We played for some kid’s birthday party in my backyard, and we weren’t lip-syncing anymore. Performing felt fun and cool, and we sounded terrible, but at least we were actually playing. In seventh grade, I realized everybody and his dog plays the guitar, so I picked up the bass instead. As a bassist, you’re always in demand. We played the Kinks and the Yardbirds. I took to the bass naturally.

  I’ve always had curly hair, but all the cool kids in school—not to mention my musical idols, the Beach Boys—had straight hair. Cool straight hair. I began to hate my curly hair and felt like a dork, so I tried plastering it down with gel. That didn’t work. My hair looked frozen like plastic, but it still curled up on the ends. I noticed that after I wore a baseball cap during a ball game and took it off, the hat hair was there, but the curl was minimized. One morning Mom woke me for school and there I was, sleeping with a stocking cap on. I jumped up, took it off, and looked at myself in the mirror. Ha! The curl was gone! I felt just a little cooler at school that day.

  In sixth grade I went to another new school, Elm Place, across th
e street from Indian Trail, and right away earned a name as a terrible student. Every report card I brought home stunk. This had been going on since the first grade. Reading and writing didn’t come easily to me, and my handwriting was a mess. In fact, my handwriting remained a mess all the way through my teen years and into my twenties. Today, they’d probably diagnose some sort of learning disability. But maybe I just never learned the fundamentals. Mom was always kind, fun, and loving, but she carried a load at home, not only raising three kids, but also taking care of her mother and her sister, who lived in a couple rooms in our basement. Mom was very pretty, and at one time—while we were living in Harvey and I was still really young—she even worked as a part-time model. I remember seeing her on our little black-and-white television set on a show called Queen for a Day, walking out wearing a cute little outfit and displaying one of the prizes, a toaster or a blender or something similar. Dad, meanwhile, was always at work downtown in the city. Our house in Highland Park was a larger house, and I think Dad probably overextended himself financially, and that’s why he worked all the time. He loved us as a family. He just always needed to work to pay the bills since moving up to the northern suburbs was more expensive. So with Mom and Dad having their hands full, it was a rare moment that anybody was ever able to sit and do homework with me. At school I had trouble paying attention. I was always daydreaming, looking out the window, but somehow, I kept passing each grade with something like a straight D average.

  A big Jewish community lived in Highland Park, and lots of my friends went to synagogue on Saturday and had bar mitzvahs and things I didn’t quite understand as a kid. Summers, the older kids traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Israel was less than twenty years old as a state then, and all the Jewish families I knew wanted to be connected to the Holy Land. But I wasn’t raised with any sort of strong religious faith. We went to Sunday school until I was about six, but that was it. My great-grandfather Vito Sinise was Catholic and had raised his family Catholic, but when Grandpa Dan married Grandma Betty, she was Presbyterian, which caused a bit of a stir. I don’t remember having any big thoughts of God at a young age. God, faith, service—the things that became so important to me later in life—weren’t on my radar as a kid.

  Halfway through my seventh-grade year, my parents moved us to Glen Ellyn, a western suburb of Chicago. Dad’s business partner, Frank Romolo, and his family lived in Glen Ellyn, and Dad and Mom had fallen in love with the area. Dad’s business kept growing, and I was surprised to learn the big house we moved into was once owned by the Morton family, of Morton Salt fame. But the move felt rough to me. I was a lousy student in a new school where I didn’t know anyone, and I felt very out of place. I found some kids who played guitar, and we formed a band where I played bass, and music helped me make the adjustment. Music always helped me cope, and I played in a string of different bands: the Olde Molde, spelled in the Old English way; Uproot Confusion; and the Dirty Brain, named for a piece of brain coral I found while snorkeling on vacation with my family in the Virgin Islands. I brought it back home as a memento of the trip, and during our concerts we placed the spherically shaped coral on top of our rock organ and shined a spotlight on it. With its grooved surfaces, it looked just like a human’s brain, and after thousands of years in the ocean, it stunk like a dead fish.

  My future lay in either music or sports. I could have tossed a coin. I loved sports. In Highland Park I played baseball each spring. Winters, they’d freeze over the parking lot at my school, and we all played hockey. I was a huge Blackhawks fan, and Bobby Hull was my favorite player. I also loved football and rooted for the Bears. We organized a local football league for kids and played each other on weekends. I was a fast runner, always the quarterback or one of the halfbacks, and I was usually the kickoff return guy, running for a touchdown every chance I got.

  I played football through eighth grade in Glen Ellyn, but I was an undisciplined kid and never showed up for practice, so I never knew any of the plays. The coaches would just put me in to return the kickoff because of my speed—and nine times out of ten, I’d get a touchdown. When I reached high school at Glenbard West in 1969, I tried out for the team but realized every kid was twice as motivated as me—and twice as big, so that ended my football career.

  I played baseball in school through eighth grade too. Ron Santo, the third baseman for the Cubs, was my favorite, and the Cubs were in the playoffs in 1969. Even though I was born on the South Side, I’ve been a Cub fan since I was five years old watching them on WGN on the little black-and-white television in our living room. I dreamed of being a Major League Baseball player someday and wanted to play second or third base. But all that changed during the summer of ’69 after my eighth-grade year when I blasted a double into the outfield and rounded first, heading for second. Sprinting hard, I slid headfirst, my arm stretched long. The second baseman saw me coming, and right when I dived into second, he caught the ball and came down hard on my back with his knee. Thud! When the dust cleared, I couldn’t get up. They carried me off the field, and my dad took me to the ER. I was bruised, not broken, but for weeks it was hard to walk, and I didn’t play baseball anymore after that.

  That left music and my dreams of being a rock star. And I figured musicians all needed to be hard partiers—right? Woodstock! Rock and Roll! My parents liked to entertain and kept a bar stocked with various bottles of liquor. At the end of eighth grade, I decided to experiment. I had a metal box with a latch on it, so I gathered empty peanut butter jars with lids, cleaned them out, and stashed them in my box. When no one was looking, I sneaked small amounts of liquor out of my parents’ bar. Whiskey into one jar. Vodka into another. Vermouth into another. Wine into another. Always just a bit, so Mom and Dad didn’t notice.

  One Saturday night I decided it was time. Randy and I shared a bedroom, but there was a small attic room connected to our room that was private where I kept some of my music gear. When Randy was asleep, I went into the attic room with my metal box full of jars, shut the door behind me, and tasted the vodka. The whiskey. The vermouth. The gin. The wine. Next thing I knew, I was plastered, sick as a dog, puking into my metal case everything I’d eaten for the past month. My head spun, and I wanted to lie down somewhere, but thought I’d better clean out the box so no one would find out what I’d been up to. I bobbed and weaved down the front stairs, heard the TV on in the other room, and figured the coast was clear. I crept into the kitchen and started dumping the vomit into the kitchen sink. I was dizzy and nauseous, and as I looked up, suddenly my mother was standing next to me, her arms folded. She looked puzzled and concerned and angry at the same time.

  “Oh, hello, Mother,” I said, my voice sugary. “I’m just cleaning out my box. It was a little messy. How are you this fine evening?”

  The room started to go dark, and I realized I was passing out. Next thing I knew, Mom and Dad were wiping off my mouth, putting me to bed. I was grounded for a week. And no more box.

  You’d think I would have learned my lesson. But that was only the start for me. The times were changing, and the drug culture had begun its rise. America was exploding in a million different directions just as I entered my teen years, and it felt like the entire country couldn’t contain itself. We were at the peak of the Vietnam War, and it was going badly. We found ourselves in the age of revolution, the rise of the hippies. Everybody was anti-authority. Antiestablishment. I heard about Woodstock. The sexual revolution. Pot was everywhere, and by the end of eighth grade, although still on the football team, I felt caught between the athletes and the pot smokers.

  At thirteen, fourteen, I went to parties where the drug scene was “happening.” Kids sprayed oven cleaner into plastic bags and sniffed it, so of course I figured I needed to try. It’s a wonder anyone survived. Kids dumped spot remover onto rags and walked around sniffing wet rags, so I tried that too. Snorting spot remover gave me a crazy buzz. And since older kids were at these parties too, beer flowed everywhere, and the air was thick with pot s
moke. But at that time, I stuck to taking a few sniffs on my wet rag and that was it.

  For a couple of years, I went crazy. When we lived in Glen Ellyn, this buddy of mine told me how his dad drove his car to the train station, parked, and rode the train to work. My buddy knew his dad kept a spare key inside the engine compartment. So I hiked over to the train station, lifted the hood, found the key, and took the car. I didn’t have any particular place to go. Like an idiot, I made a left turn next to a sign that said, “No Left Turn,” with a cop right behind me. Red lights flashed in the rearview mirror and I pulled over. The cop came to my window and said in a low voice: “Driver’s license.”

  “Oh, yes sir,” I said, my voice as proper as a lieutenant’s, and I handed him my license. A fake. The name on the license was Carlos Huizinga. Age twenty. I was fourteen, looking twelve.

  “Well, Carlos,” the cop said. “This driver’s license has expired.”

  “What? That can’t be right.” My heart pounded.

  “Let’s leave the car right here.” He opened my door. “We’ll go down to the police station and figure out what’s wrong.”

  He took me down to the station, put me in a room, and stared straight through me. Clearly he knew I was full of crap.

  “Carlos. Is your name really Carlos?”

  “Oh yes, Officer. I had no idea my license was expired.”

  “Carlos. Can we call your mom and dad?”