Ham (19 page)

Lying alone, I felt a rumble and then a gurgle and then suddenly released a great, voluminous bubble of gas. Elephantine. The table shook.

And the pain was gone.

I was in a panic. The pain couldn't go away! It
had
to get worse to justify the drama—to justify my mother and father coming together. I waved my hand furiously to clear the air as my parents and the doctor reentered with a diagnosis: acute appendicitis. I would rupture if I didn't have emergency surgery immediately, by the town doctor, who was also the mayor and postman and dogcatcher.
Emergency surgery?
I knew I had overplayed this, but really?

Act Two was in full swing. I had to go through with it. My parents had rediscovered their vows and I fully believed the gassy truth would separate them again, like the flatulent fumes dissipating into nothingness. We drove to the hospital, where I was promptly admitted and placed on a gurney. And from then on I remained present in body only: I pictured a camera above me, like I was on an episode of
Medical Center.
Chad Everett was my personal physician. I groaned and cried, holding out my hand, imagining the close-up of my trembling fingers tearing away from my weeping mother's as they rolled me away to surgery.

Chad would take care of me. And then he would be with me in recovery. And then spoon-feed me applesauce and ice cream. And then we would live together and I would be his receptionist.

•  •  •

After I recovered from an unnecessary appendectomy, and for the next several years, a succession of less dramatic incidents occurred that served as temporary epoxy for my disconnected family. I broke an arm. I sprained ankles and jammed fingers and developed an astigmatism that required eye exercises with thick glass prisms.

My father left his teaching position and partnered with another ex–band director to start a new business: a music store, cleverly named The Music Store. It was an industrially bland building, located “on the line,” a four-lane service road that paralleled the freight train tracks leading out of town. They sold pianos and organs and sheet music, but their primary income came from selling band instruments to schools, which entailed traveling statewide to chum with band directors and principals and superintendents. My dad was a natural salesman with magnetic social skills and a good ol' boy charm coupled with a gift for telling dirty jokes. Everybody loved him.

The Music Store flourished, so much so that they opened a second store in Tulsa—practically a chain! My father had become a successful businessman, full-tilt, and at long last, our family had some money. By the time I turned fifteen, there were better clothes, impromptu trips to Vegas, smoky poker nights, and, best of all—a new house! The Jeffersons were saying it perfectly in their theme song every week on TV: “
Well, we're movin' on up!
” Indeed, we were. With three times the square footage, three levels, two fireplaces, and an enormous pine tree–spattered yard atop a hill with a view of Tulsa, featuring towering smokestacks of oil refineries in the day and twinkling city lights at night. My father was so proud, and deservedly so. He had broken out of the confines of his undereducated blue-collar family and was his own boss. And everyone else's.

If he had been a star before, he was now a superstar, and the title required his everything. Home was sort of a backstage, where he could shut down and regroup and didn't have to be “on.” Even rare social occasions when friends and neighbors got together at our house were now considered depleting, debilitating. As soon as the last guest left, the other Bill emerged and retreated to his personal chair and television set without a word.

Click.

Something bigger than a sprained ankle was going to be necessary for family harmony and I prayed for the blessing of disaster.

We'd only been in the new house about a month and there was still furniture to buy, boxes to unpack, others in storage at my grandmother's, and decisions to make about exactly where the clown paintings would best be featured.

My mother took me to an eye appointment in Tulsa and we stopped by the new location of The Music Store to say hello to my father, who wasn't there. We were told we'd better get back home. They'd just gotten the call and my dad had already left:

Our new house was on fire.

Neither my mother nor I could really take in the news. How could this be true? We'd already lost one house to fire and we'd just moved into this one a few weeks ago—our new life, the dream house, the achievement of my father's success. We drove home silently, our gazes fixed ahead, our hearts pounding and our minds racing about the possible extent of the damage. Maybe it was small. Maybe it was contained. Maybe it would be over by the time we got there and everyone would say “It was nothing.” Or maybe it wasn't even true.

But I knew, deep down, that if it was true, it was my fault. A punishment for asking God for a catastrophe to put our family in league.
Ask and ye shall receive.

We could see the billowing smoke miles before we arrived. It was true. Déjà vu, except with better real estate. We exited the highway and sped through the town, past our last house, which had burned down five years earlier, and up the hill. Fire trucks lined the street, and neighbors and close friends stood in the yard as if attending a bluegrass festival. We got out of the car and my mother raced to my father. They held each other as the firefighters drenched what was left of our house and a few brave volunteers dragged out scorched evidence of our existence. My brother was playing with a friend from our old neighborhood and was kept there to shield him from the panic.

A neighbor my age, befittingly named Malea Stoner, walked up slowly and intently, throwing her waist-length blond hair over her shoulder, and attempted to embrace me too intimately, almost sexually. I didn't know what to do with her presumption—as if she could possibly understand or know that this tragedy was my doing. Her touch released some tiny increment of the poison and guilt bound up in me that would, in days to come, ripen into sorrow. I rudely shrugged her off and floated through the crowd, desperate for perspective, for salvation, some action to delude or take it all back.

It would have been inappropriate to sing, so instead, I saw it all play out from a crane shot, cut with close-ups of the ash-stained firemen, the silhouette of my father's arm around my crumpled mother, the slow pan of thunder-struck onlookers' faces, and that particular quiet when something is lost. Then the underscoring began and swelled with tragic poignancy. I had to remember this feeling for later, when I could use it onstage.

I learned that my father had brought my grandmother's used stereo console to my bedroom as a gift, and had put a favorite record of mine on the turntable and blasted the volume to surprise me when I got home. The stereo shorted out and my only possessions were literally the clothes on my back.

Neighbors packed us up with comfort food—country ham, mashed potatoes, and corn bread—and we drove to a motel just outside of town. I don't recall where. After you've stayed in a pink castle you don't remember anything else. I went to school the next morning, as usual, and everyone knew what had happened. Well, everyone except my ninth-grade algebra teacher.

Mrs. Sparks was the most meticulous, by-the-book taskmaster of the entire school. She had pencil-thin suggestions of lips and a beanie of solidly sprayed, sepia-dyed brown curls, and she wore a different pantsuit or, rather, uniform, for each day of the week. White for Mondays, brown for Tuesdays . . . If you were unsure of the day, you could just look at what she was wearing. She was also an amazing teacher and I truly liked her and I knew, or rather I thought, that she liked me.

I was underrested and overwrought as I walked to my desk and sat for her class. She asked us to pass our homework forward and open our algebra books. I raised my hand.

“Mrs. Sparks, I don't have my homework or book. Yesterday—”

“Dummy row!” she demanded. And pointed to the far left row of desks reserved for those she considered lazy or stupid.

“But you don't understand—”

“Mr. Harris, you'll be receiving an F for this assignment and there are no new books issued for free without turning in the old one,” she rattled.

“But I don't have the old one,” I said. “Yesterday—”

“Then no new book unless you have the money!” she clipped.

“I don't have any money,” I stammered, beginning to break.

“Then you don't get a new book! Dummy row. Now.”

I started to get up, unable to argue anymore. I knew I was to blame for everything and the dummy row was an exile much more lenient than I deserved.

“Mrs. Sparks,” came a voice from the back of the room. It was Teri Mullins. “Sam's house burned down yesterday and his homework and book were in it.”

Everyone waited to see if Mrs. Sparks would back down. She was famous for not doing so. After a moment, she pulled a ring of skeleton keys from her desk drawer and unlocked an ancient cabinet, snatching out a new book. She practically slammed it on my desk without a word and started the day's equation. It was as close to an act of compassion as anyone had ever witnessed her commit.

That afternoon I joined my family at what was left of our house. Friends with shovels were digging through the wreckage, piling it to be hauled away. There was nothing whole left of my stuff. A fragment of furniture here, a melted cup there. Then I saw the strangest thing: a blue spiral notebook, charred on one edge but intact, glossy, peering from the wet black ash. I plucked it out and opened it. It was a report I'd written five years ago titled “What I Did This Summer” in which I told the story of our
first
house burning down. I couldn't believe it was true. The only thing of mine that had survived this fire was my schoolboy's account of the first one.

I flashed on a story my Memo had told me: In the early 1920s, she, her husband, Sam, and baby boy, Darrell, lived in a tiny wooden house on the plains of Texas. A tornado came and they took refuge in the cellar. Upon emerging, they found their house was completely gone, with no sign of it having ever stood. The small leather-stringed purse that contained all of their savings, fifty dollars, had flown away with the rest of their possessions.

They walked during the day and camped out at night, receiving blankets and food from generous but poverty-stricken residents as they traveled on their way to a new life with no real destination. On the third day, in the middle of a vast field, my grandmother happened to look down, and before her lay the tiny leather purse. It was the kind of miracle that seemed impossible, not even fictionally believable, and though my Memo had never told a lie, I'd questioned her honesty.

As I stared at the fourth-grade report on the first fire, the only surviving remnant of my room, I knew that my grandmother's story was true. And I knew I wasn't to blame for this fire any more than I was for the first. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. I tucked the singed pages into my jeans and filled a small plastic bag with ashes that had once been my house.

The next day I walked into Mrs. Sparks's room and placed the bag of ashes on her desk in front of the entire class.

“Here's my old book,” I said, matter-of-factly, “for your rec­ords.”

And I took my seat for class.

“They're blowing up New York!” shouted the voice, screened on the answering machine. “Pick up! Pick up!”

This was the third time the phone had rung, unanswered, at the ungodly hour of 6:00 a.m. I'd slept on an inflatable mattress, the only piece of furniture, not even really furniture, in our new house in Los Angeles, where I'd flown the day before after eight years of living in my beloved New York City.

I dragged myself up the stairs, certain that if anyone had called three times at that hour, someone must be dead. That was more true than I could have possibly imagined.

It was Liza, hysterically sobbing, and I grabbed the phone in a daze.

“What's wrong?”

“Turn on the TV. They're blowing up New York!”

It was just after 9:00 in New York, an ungodly hour for Liza, and I tried to make sense of the confusion. Liza kept her bedroom television on twenty-four hours a day and I thought perhaps she woke up to
The Towering Inferno
on Turner Classic Movies and thought it was real.

“Calm down. Take a breath. What are you talking about?” I muttered, switching on the tiny kitchen television, which, in partnership with a few pots and pans and some paper plates, were the only articles in my possession before the moving trucks were to arrive in the next few days.

And I saw it: the Twin Towers were both hemorrhaging fire and smoke and Liza screamed that two planes had rocketed into the buildings and it was an attack and the end of the world. We watched in silence forever and when the first building crumbled in a cloud of gray dust, done, gone, we joined hundreds of millions of others in a collective unspeakable gasp that shattered everything we ever knew.

•  •  •

A few months prior, Danny and I had decided to move to Los Angeles. For some time, Danny had expressed a desire to try the West Coast, but I hadn't been interested. Now, after doing eight shows a week for eight years with barely a break, I needed a change, maybe explore more TV and film, something new. Plus I was turning forty. I'd become depressed and isolated, and when we had both been cast in a Los Angeles production of
Hair
in June, it had become a beacon of possibilities—and a temporary respite from my alcohol intake, which was accelerating by the bottle. I was certain a move across the country would change my course and, subconsciously, my drinking. Having sung the Act One closer in
Hair
while fully frontally nude in a spotlight for three minutes, anything was possible.

We'd given up our fancy brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side two weeks before. Danny had driven with the dogs, Zach and Emma, and dashed to a corporate gig in Las Vegas while I remained in New York, staying at Liza's Upper East Side apartment, to musically supervise her appearance on
Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration
at Madison Square Garden.