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A Human Projectile—A Night in Port Huron—in July 1964 

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 was involved in a multi-car crash. After a number of days in the hospital and just hours before our arrival the bandages had just been removed, and to my ten-year-old eyes as I remember it—what I saw felt almost unreal. What sat atop his shoulders no longer resembled a human face — it was a swollen, purple mass, unrecognizable and almost inhuman. 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 completely covered in blood from the blunt force trauma, the stillness of it all almost too much to hold. People at the scene, interviewed years later, for sure thought that he was gone.

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, an underground garage to store his wheels at the mansion, a raccoon coat, high-falutin’ dates, runnin’ with the blue bloods, debutante balls, 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, his youthful face forever changed — felt like watching a god brought to his knees. He had been larger than life to me. 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 varsity 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 the outside of 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, become central to one of the most painful chapters of my life…. (continued in  – The Seventy One Dollar Send Off at 95 Lakeshore)

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