Grateful American Read online

“Um. I don’t think they’re home.”

  “Carlos. What’s their number?”

  I broke, and my words tumbled out in a rush—“Officer, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s not my name. It’s Gary. Gary Sinise. And that’s not my license. It’s not even my car. It’s my friend’s dad’s.” I was wailing now, my voice cracked and pleading. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry . . .”

  They called my dad. Dad came to the police station. Dad drove me home. Dad wasn’t happy. I was grounded for a long, long time.

  I mean, c’mon. What was I thinking? Did I look like a twenty-year-old Carlos?

  Not all my shenanigans contained even an element of humor. Dad had a big Buick Electra, and when I was fourteen I regularly lifted the keys, crawled out my window at night, and drove the Electra around town. One time a buddy said, “Hey, my dad owns a music store. We could use some speakers for our band.” So one night I sneaked out and picked up my buddy in the Electra. We drove over to his dad’s store. My buddy opened it with a key. We stole some big column speakers and put them in the Electra. I dropped him off and took the equipment back to my house. It was five in the morning when I unloaded the speakers into our garage. I’d just closed the trunk of the Electra and was walking into the garage for the last time when my dad came out.

  “Gary. What are you doing?” His voice boomed.

  “Uh. Oh, good morning, Dad. Um, my buddy was moving. We needed to get the equipment out of his house.” I talked fast, caught in a web of deceit.

  Dad took one long look around his garage. He didn’t ask how I got the speakers from my buddy’s house over to our house. He just shook his head and walked back inside.

  Eventually I carried the speakers up to my room, hooked them up to my record player, and blasted music through the house. I’d become a thief and a liar and a near-failing student—and as a fourteen-year-old I couldn’t care less about any of it.

  Today, I know I was heading down a dark path. My mom had her hands full, and my dad was often gone, so I usually had to figure things out on my own. Sometimes my conclusions weren’t so great.

  At my best, I developed initiative as a kid. I don’t mean by stealing stuff. I mean by forming my own bands, by drawing people together. I was often the neighborhood organizer, and if I wanted to play baseball, football, or hockey, I simply gathered some kids together and we’d play. I developed a mind-set that if something needed to get done, then I needed to do it; otherwise, it might not happen. It’s a mind-set that’s carried me a long way. If you can think it up, if you can dream it up, then get off your butt and make it happen. Good things come from focus and effort.

  At my worst, I learned lessons the hard way. When I look back, I see how I did stupid and even dangerous things like sniffing oven spray and stealing cars (well, borrowing cars, just without asking to use them), and I wonder how that stupid kid doing stupid kid stuff ever survived. It’s no excuse, but the country itself was going crazy in those years. In the late 1960’s climate, if all the tie-dyed rock stars I knew were blowing weed and doing drugs, then it felt easy as a kid to conclude that I’d better do drugs too. That’s what was going on in America in those days, and even though for a time I went back and forth trying to avoid it, like a lot of teenagers, I got caught up in all that craziness.

  Later in life, I would grow to realize that I’d been born into a land of opportunity, just like Vito Sinise envisioned when he came through Ellis Island and arrived at America’s sea-washed, sunset gates. The true freedom I eventually discovered in my later youth wasn’t a license to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. The true freedom acted as a force beckoning me to do something meaningful with my life. All I needed to start on that path was a push in the right direction.

  But all that would come later. Midway through high school I was still caught. Thankfully, I would begin to channel my energies differently during my junior and senior years. I’d find a new road thanks to an incredible teacher named Barbara Greener Patterson—and thanks to a moment I’ll never forget with Bernardo, leader of the Sharks.

  CHAPTER 2

  Baptism

  It was February 1971, Mom and Dad had moved our family back to Highland Park, and I’d changed schools yet again. All the hippies at Highland Park High School hung out in the “Glass Hall,” so named because it had lots of windows and a door that opened to the school’s parking lot. Kids used to sneak out that door, go into the parking lot, jump into their cars, and smoke doobies between classes. This winter day the door was closed against the Illinois wind, blowing hard and unsympathetic from across Lake Michigan. I was a sophomore and played lead guitar in a new band, and me, the bass player, and the drummer all slouched against the wall in the Glass Hall. We called ourselves Half Day Road after a stretch of highway that divided our two northern Chicago suburbs, Highland Park and Highwood. We thought we were the real stuff. More than anything I just wanted to fit in at this new school and jam with my new band. But the life I hoped for was all about to change.

  She walked straight toward us, a teacher named Mrs. Barbara Patterson. She was a powerhouse of a gal, a tornado of a woman. Blonde hair. Set jaw. The power of poetry running through her veins. She slowed when she neared us, stopped, and gave a diminutive sniff. Our clothes were cool and raggy, and my bandmates and I all wore scruffy jackets. I’d let my hair grow crazy and curly; it sprung out horizontally in a wild mass of thicket.

  Mrs. Patterson was the theater teacher. She looked at us and said, “I’m directing West Side Story for the spring play. You guys all look like you could play gang members. Come and audition for the play.” It sounded more like a dare than a request. Then she was off and walking fast on her way down the hall, and we shrugged it off and laughed, and one of us scoffed, “Who cares about plays?”

  We needed to display bravado among ourselves, we three boys. Rebellion was the unwritten rule of 1971. None of us had ever been in a play before. But on that cold winter day, a warmer thought began to blow in the back of my mind. The previous year, when I was a freshman over at Glenbard West in Glen Ellyn, the school had put on West Side Story. All the kids went, so I did too. And you know what? That play wasn’t half bad. All those Jets and Sharks running around, fighting with knives, rumbling in the streets. Pretty cool, I’d thought. Me and my ragtag buddies at Glenbard went out and bought jean jackets afterward so we could dress like the Jets in the play.

  The bell rang and I didn’t move. As a rule, I skipped most classes, but that day I thought twice, sighed, and ambled into history class and slid into a seat near the back. The teacher was saying something about a book I hadn’t read. My eyes glazed and I stared out the window, working hard to become invisible. Years later, I came to love history, but that day in the classroom, I was still a horrible student. Yet for some reason teachers kept passing me year after year. I was sixteen years old, and I still didn’t read or write well. My sister and brother were both better students than I was, and they were into sports: Randy played football and Lori was a cheerleader. Nothing much made sense to me except the Who; Jimi Hendrix; Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the fringe jacket I always wore.

  The hour passed. Class ended and school was over for the day. One of my bandmates found me, and I said, “Hey, let’s see what’s going on at this audition.” He said sure, so we ambled over to the cafeteria where the audition was taking place. We didn’t know what to do or even what an audition was, but we spotted a line of girls heading into the cafeteria. Every girl’s hair was flowing and parted in the middle, and they all wore beads with their bell-bottoms cut low at the waist. The groovy sight was all the prompt we needed to head in there with them. We scribbled our names on the sign-up sheet and found seats.

  Kids packed themselves tight inside the makeshift audition hall. Someone shouted a handful of names, and a bunch of kids went up to the stage and were handed scripts. The first kids read their parts and sat down and another handful of names were called. Hey, that’s me. I jumped onstage, grabbed a scrip
t, and found out which character I was supposed to read. One of the kids in my lineup started reading his character’s dialogue. Pages rustled and turned. Another kid started reading his lines. Another kid. Another. Man, they’re really blowing through their lines fast, I thought, when suddenly dead air blasted against me and silence filled the room. A lone cough echoed off the back wall.

  “Hmm-hum, hey there,” I said, glancing about me. I was at least four lines behind. “Hang on, Jason. I gotta find my place. You guys are going too fast.”

  The kid who’d just read wasn’t named Jason. I didn’t know his name, but I’d delivered my retort in such a good-natured nasal twang that my faux confidence cracked everybody up. The kid was smiling. The audience was chuckling. Even Mrs. Patterson grinned. So I ran my finger down the page, found my spot, and read my line. Everything cranked up again as the others continued reading their dialogue. In a flash it was finished. So that’s an audition, I thought. Well, that wasn’t half bad.

  Next morning in the hallway near the drama department, a list was posted. Everybody crowded around to look. Me too. I scanned down the list—way, way down. I kept scanning but didn’t recognize any of the names. Well, who cares?! I thought, but kept reading. My eyes kept scanning down, scanning down. Toward the very end, when I saw this, a soft light came on inside my soul:

  PEPÉ---------------------------------------------GARY SINISE

  Pepé was a Shark. A gang member. He was in the chorus and had to dance a little and even had a couple of lines. The role required an actor’s touch. I tried to take in all it might mean, seeing my name on the hallway list. I didn’t know anything about acting, and I knew I fumbled my lines in the audition because I couldn’t keep up with the other readers. But maybe, just maybe, my ability to entertain the crowd had caused Mrs. Patterson to see I’d taken her up on her dare. Maybe she saw some sort of potential I didn’t see in myself yet. Because the words on the hallway list didn’t lie.

  I was in.

  Let’s backtrack in time, back before the audition. Maybe a couple months earlier.

  I’d come to this new high school and fallen into a pattern of smoking dope and skipping class and smoking more dope, all the while trying to find friends. Just another kid caught up in this American craziness. At Highland Park I tried acid once when my parents weren’t home, and I was high for about ten hours. Paranoia stalked me the whole time. I told my sister, and she sat with me for a while. Her face turned into a skull, then into a witch’s face. I grew scared, threatened to throw myself into the pool, and never dropped acid again. But I still scored pot anytime I wanted.

  There wasn’t much to hold any of us together. Culture? That was changing. Morals? What were they? This was 1971. Religion? My family stopped going to church when I was a little kid, and we weren’t raised with any sort of faith, nothing to provide an anchor. As a family—as a nation—these were tough times. Most days, I was floating on the open sea. Every evening, images of the Vietnam War splashed across our TV screens. It was the first war shown on television, and every night that screen showed only bad news. Since the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, America had been involved in the war in a serious way, and it continued to kill plenty of Americans each day of each week of each month of each year. My folks were scared the war was never going to end. They figured due to the constant bevy of Ds and Fs on my report cards, I’d be drafted within three years and sent to Khe Sanh.

  I’d lived in Highland Park years earlier, before all the moves across the city, back and forth to here and there and God knows where else. The last time I’d lived near Highland Park I’d had a couple of friends, but they didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, and I didn’t know why. Kids don’t talk about these things. So I needed to find new friends. As a sophomore, then, I was a bit of a loner in a new high school, lost and wandering and having trouble connecting with new friends. The only thing that ever remotely worked for me was rock and roll. Music at Highland Park High School ushered me into the Zeppelin crowd. We formed our own band, and then I had two pretty good friends in high school. Two guys who shared the love of music.

  Every so often during afternoons at Highland Park, I actually shuffled off to a few anti-war “moratoriums,” as they were called. Students wore black armbands and noodled away on guitars and crooned Peter, Paul and Mary songs. All over our country at universities and high school campuses these protests were happening. I didn’t go to these moratoriums because I actually protested anything. I went because if you told your teachers you were at one of these protests, then it was okay to cut classes. Plus, there were girls there.

  High school proved a struggle for me every day. Ravines bordered Highland Park High School. One Thursday I ditched my second-to-last class and climbed down into one of the ravines, hid under the bridge that spanned it, and sparked up a joint. Inhaled it down. Sparked up another. When I came back for my last class, my eyes were bloodshot and my heart rate racing. I felt a strong urge to eat a bag of potato chips.

  The next day after school, I went back to the ravine with my two bandmates in tow. Somehow the three of us had laid hold of three bottles of Boone’s Farm apple wine, and we drank a bottle of wine each while simultaneously puffing away on joints. We had a gig scheduled in half an hour, and this was what rock and rollers did, man. The mighty Half Day Road was performing at the high school dance, and we had to get loaded before we rocked.

  My bandmates and I finished our wine, smoked the last of our pot. We wobbled up to the school and headed up onstage. Grabbed our instruments. I yelled, “Hello Highland Park!” and our drummer started banging away on his kit. The bass player jumped in with me and my guitar, and we blasted away on our instruments for a while with the room still good and blurry. The tube top girls in the front row danced with their arms toward the stage. But something wasn’t right. I glanced at my bass player, and he glanced at me, and we both started cracking up. We were halfway through our first tune, and it hit us that we weren’t playing the same song. We had no idea what our drummer was playing. It might have been a third, completely different song altogether. He never told us.

  We laughed about that one for days. A couple of weeks later Mrs. Barbara Patterson met us in the hallway, and I started inhabiting Pepé the Shark. Something genuinely began to change in me.

  Play practice was after school every day for five weeks, and you couldn’t go to play practice unless you’d been at school during the day. So for the first time in a long while, I started going to classes regularly. I found myself meeting a whole new crowd of folks, theater kids. I discovered they were smart. Cooler than I’d first thought. Funny. Passionate. Driven toward acting with the same drive I’d always poured into music. I noticed that since starting play practice, I was smoking far fewer doobies.

  But my old life still pulled at me. Two weeks into rehearsals, somebody threw a huge party. Not a theater kid. Just a kid whose parents were out of town. By the time I rolled in, fifty or sixty teens were already drinking, smoking, dancing, making out in the stairwell. I had a dime bag and pulled a couple of other kids into the laundry room with me because it’s good to share. We all lit up my joints, and I recognized four of the kids but not the fifth. He was a strong-looking dude, maybe nineteen. Must be somebody’s older brother, I thought, but the fact that I didn’t know him didn’t concern me, because, Hey, he’s at the party—somebody must know him. Right? He said he was a dogcatcher for the city, and he smoked pot right along with us, or at least it looked like he was smoking. We puffed away, and all told stupid jokes and laughed, and I didn’t watch him too closely as the high set in. He brought the joint up to his face again. Puffed. I guessed. Everything was cool, particularly when the dude glanced around the circle and said, “Hey, where can I buy some pot for myself?”

  I said in a cool, gravelly voice, “Well, I have some. I’ll sell it to you.”

  He nodded and I nodded, and when all the joints were smoked, I sold him a nickel bag, and he followed me outside the laundry room,
outside the house to my car. Followed me all the way. He said, “Man, that was really good pot. Thanks for selling it to me.”

  Why’s he following me? “Sure, sure. Okay,” I said. And I brushed him off and went home.

  Man, the things you don’t realize when you’re stoned.

  An hour later I got a phone call from a buddy who’d been at the party. He sounded worried and he talked all jumbled, breathless, like he’d been running. “Dude. The police raided the party. Came in with a real show of force. Rounded everybody up.”

  “What are you talking about?!” I said. Then it clicked. The dogcatcher wasn’t lying about what he did for a living. It was just slang. He worked for the city all right—the police department! And I’d gone and sold pot to the dogcatcher. I was the source of the weed!

  “Yeah.” My friend’s voice dropped on the phone. “And they’re looking for you.”

  I hung up, totally freaked out. As the night wore on, I paced around my bedroom, trying to think up a plan. I didn’t sleep. Early the next morning I went over to my new girlfriend’s house. We lurked around in her basement together, then a knock sounded on the front door. She climbed the stairs, and I heard the front door creak open. Words. I strained to hear. Two policemen. They were there to get her, to take her down to the police station so they could question her . . . about me. My heart thumped.

  She came downstairs to get her coat, her face white as a ghost. Looked me straight in the eyes, didn’t say a word. Left. I hid out downstairs for ten minutes, made sure the coast was clear. My car sat around the corner out of sight, and I ran to the car, jumped in and drove to the train station, bought a ticket on the Northwestern, and headed into the city. I caught another train and headed out to Glen Ellyn, where I used to live. I knocked on the door of an old friend’s house and asked if I could lay low for a few days until the heat blew over. Saturday passed. Sunday. I kept calling classmates who’d been at the party to ask what was happening back home. Word was the police were questioning everybody. They knew who I was. It was the height of the drug culture, and police were busting people left and right. I was a fugitive hiding out in Glen Ellyn, and the police were hunting for me. Holy crap! I’m actually on the lam.