Shattered

When I was ten years of age, when on July 19, 1964, a week before his 21st birthday, my parents and I stood before my oldest brother’s hospital bed in a room at Port Huron Hospital, frozen in utter shock and disbelief at his appearance. In the wee hours of the morning days earlier Michael had been hurled like a human projectile — head first through a car windshield when the car he was riding in with three friends — Mike Cherry, Dave Hopp & Mike Szmigiel — slammed into another in a multiple car accident. After a number of days in the hospital and just hours before our arrival the bandages had just been removed, and what sat atop his shoulders no longer resembled a human face — it was a swollen, purple mass, unrecognizable and surreal. It could have been the head of an alien from a Twilight Zone episode. I can’t shake the image—his body crumpled and cast onto the cold pavement, his head bloodied from blunt force trauma, the stillness of it all almost too much to hold.

I remember feeling sick — not just from the sight, but from what it meant. This was my brother — the coolest guy on the planet. He had it all: a Jaguar, a Morgan, a raccoon coat, high-falutin’ dates, and the swagger that came with running the hottest rock-and-roll bar in Detroit, The Red Carpet, where a few years later Seger and others would play on their way to hitting the big time. To see him like that — stripped of his cool, absent his youthful face — felt like watching a god brought to his knees. He had been larger than life to me long before that crash. I still remember him driving me to my first bona fide tennis tournament one summer when I was twelve — The Detroit News Novice Tournament for newcomers — in his gleaming British racing-green Morgan. The smell of the leather warmed by the sun. The low growl of the engine. Pride sitting shotgun beside him — it all felt like belonging to his world, if only for a day. I won that tournament, the first in what became a long string of victories that brought trophies, titles, high-rankings and number one and two positions on the high school team and a spot on Michigan State’s team freshman year. In a way, he was part of my fate — not just by driving me there, but by giving me the quiet push to believe I belonged and had the right stuff.

It wasn’t always mentorship, though. When I was nine, that same brother dressed me for my inaugural football game at the Grosse Pointe Neighborhood Club in a brand-new shiny silver and blue Detroit Lions uniform that had arrived at the house earlier in the week. In true wise-guy fashion, he told me to pull my jockstrap up over my uniform pants. Believing he knew best, I did exactly as he said. I can still see the scene — me, running across the field to where my teammates were on the sidelines beaming with pride and excitement, until the laughter erupted. I was the joke of the day, the punchline of my own debut. Chalk up another zinger of a prank orchestrated by the consumate prankster! At my wedding, I gave him a sentimental, monogrammed jockstrap—a nod to that long-ago incident. True to form, the consummate jokester lifted it to his face and wore it like a mask.

That was us — he, the prankster, always in control of the wheel; me, the wide-eyed kid just hoping for the ride. Whether he was driving me toward triumph or steering me straight into humiliation, he shaped me in ways I wouldn’t understand for decades.

But time has its own sense of irony. That same brother I once worshipped — the one whose brush with death and near destruction broke my heart as a boy — would, forty five years later …. (continued in – Shattered Part II)

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