Ham (18 page)

“He can't speak or sing until next week,” I said to the crowd. “But he wanted to come out and say hello.”

Donny entered and waved and smiled, a treat for the people who'd bought tickets with his name on the bill long before his vocal injury forced him out. Then we played a little vaudeville act. Voiceless Donny stood down center with me directly behind him, mostly hidden, and I slipped my arms under his. Then I sang “Puppy Love,” one of the big hits from his
Tiger Beat
childhood career, while he mouthed the words and I gestured. Our ventriloquist schtick was silly and stupid and the audience ate it up. Then Donny blew a kiss to the crowd and exited, leaving me onstage for the final bow as the orchestra began the play-off.

Afterward, Donny was like a schoolboy. He loved being onstage. He'd been playing to the masses and on television since he was a very small child, and even coming out after not having done the show was like oxygen for him.

One night, after curtain, Donny came to my dressing room and told me they'd forgotten to arrange his car service and asked if I could please give him a lift to his hotel after my driver dropped me at mine. “Of course,” I said. “Not a problem at all.”

The only catch, he told me, was that it would be awkward for him to come out of the stage door to waiting fans and not be able to communicate with them, being on voice rest. So could we please just make a quick excuse and get in the car and take off all in one swooping motion. I told him it was my policy to always meet people at the stage door to say hello and sign stuff, but he begged me to give that up, just this once. It seemed odd to me, but he was a fellow trouper and I wanted to be gracious, so I agreed to make the fast getaway.

The crowd waiting outside the stage door was the same size as usual, but there was a special excitement when the two Josephs emerged, and cameras snapped and flashed as they called out “Sam! “Sam!” “Sam!” “Donny!” My ego noted that there were three “Sam”s for every “Donny.” It made sense—I'd just performed and he hadn't.

“Hey, everybody,” I shouted, as we kept in motion toward the waiting Lincoln at the curb. “We'd love to stay and say hello, but we have to run. Donny is on voice rest and I have to get him out of the night air. But thank you for coming. I'm so sorry!”

I felt horrible. We waved to the fans and dashed to the car. Donny opened the back door for me and I slid in first. Then he lowered his head inside and said, “I just saw my driver. He's here after all, my mistake. You go on and I'll see you tomorrow.” He shut the car door and turned around with a wide grin and open arms.

“I'm not supposed to talk,” he practically yelled as he walked to the crowd. “But I know you've been waiting and I couldn't ignore you!”

I'd been played. He stole my people. I felt like an asshole, having sacrificed my stage door policy to protect him, and now I looked like a selfish schmuck.

But I knew that he needed them. He'd been watching me play to
his
audience, dress in
his
costumes in
his
dressing room, aided by
his
dresser. He saw that in six weeks I'd developed my own relationships and jokes with
his
company.

But when it came to the fans, he couldn't let me have them.

I was shocked at his behavior. And yet . . . and yet I understood him. Donny and I and the kid who hogged my spotlight were all very much the same. None of us could help it. We
needed
the audience. Without them we were nothing.

My driver pulled away and I looked back through the tinted windows to see Donny surrounded, smiling, laughing.

He was happier than I'd seen him since we met.

“Mr. Harris,” roared the voice over the outdoor PA system. “Mr. Bill Harris. Your wife just called and your house is on fire.”

Mom was standing next to us, holding my five-year-old brother. She couldn't have called. The townsfolk chuckled at the joke. We had gathered to watch the ribbon cutting for the new Sand Springs Airport, which was basically a paved strip in the middle of a thirsty field of cudweed and sand burrs. Fifteen minutes later, the voice came again: “Mr. Harris. Please go home. Your house is on fire.”

My father decided we'd better go.

As we drove toward our block, I could smell the smoke before I could see it. We arrived to find six fire trucks and twenty neighbors clustered on the street in front of our house. A heavy, peppery steam spiraled skyward and the remains of our house spit and stammered like the last stubborn kernels of popping corn. Everyone was so sorry. The rock structure of the house was standing, but what wasn't burned was ruined by water and smoke damage. The fire had started in the basement from an electrical-wiring malfunction and gone up from there. My underground neighborhood productions would be over and my collection of Gene Kelly pictures was surely gone forever.

We sought comfort in Lot-A-Burgers, bought toothbrushes at a local store, and drove fifteen miles to Tulsa, where we stayed at the Camelot Inn: a big pink hotel complete with turrets, a massive iron gate, a moat, a drawbridge, and a swimming pool shaped like the top of a medieval spear. We'd lost the house but we were moving into a castle. A big pink castle. All we needed was someone on a purple unicorn to ride up and rescue us.

A week later, we moved into a small trailer home across the river on the outskirts of town. At first, we were a coalition of survivors—a family, hand in hand, bonded. “It's just stuff,” my mother would say. “We're all okay and it's just stuff.” But the glass half-full soon evaporated and was shattered on the gravel drive that led to our mobile home.

At first I blamed the mounting tension on the trailer itself. The exterior was bad enough—metal-sheeted in a migrainey white. But the inside was a foulmouthed assault on the eyes, much too much to take in all at once: A tiny space with a vast sea of browns and more browns, matching harvest gold shag carpeting and pleated half-drapes, rudely interrupted by a pumpkin kitchenette and a dining area with a foldout table that featured built-in cup holders sized for beer cans, and framed by checkered, padded bench seats. I didn't mind the individual trendy components. It was just that they were so condensed. Like walking into a swatchbook. Once, when my grandmother entered in a paisley caftan, I nearly went to the built-in knife block and gouged my eyes out.

It was also an assault on any sense of personal space. My brother and I shared a bedroom that was
exactly
the same size as the double bed inside it, so that you opened the door and climbed directly up onto the mattress like one of those blow-up bouncy houses at children's parties. I figured it must have been dropped in before they attached the roof. We had no clothes so closet space was not an issue.

The thin walls, which could not even be considered fake wood paneling—more like a photograph of wood, with grooves cut in the laminate—were not nearly enough to muffle the accelerating arguments between my parents. As the weeks wore on, the Great Wall of China might not have done the job. Money, insurance, doubts, jealousies. The precariously stacked cinder blocks supporting our tin home became an appropriate metaphor for our family foundation.

I felt it my duty to do my part, to not make waves, and to be as strong and perfect as I could. At a dentist appointment for a cavity filling, in order to prove to myself and to my mother that I was tough and could handle any challenge, I declined the Novocaine before he drilled. The doctor insisted, but I was unrelenting. It was a filling, after all, not a root canal. He finally gave in, thinking I would cave when he began.

I found a focused spot on the wall, concentrating with all my might to block out the pain as the high-pitched buzzing drill invaded my mouth. The voices in my head played over and over:
This is a test. For the next sixty seconds you will endure intense pain. In the event of a real emergency you will be prepared. This is only a test.

I didn't give in.

I began to wear shoes and boots that were too small for my feet so that I would have a constant reminder that I was tougher than outside forces and I could block it out. At the end of the day, when my feet and toes were released from bondage, there was a surge of rapturous relief, a rush, a secret reward for suffering. Totally worth it.

I asked God for greater challenges to endure.

I should have been more specific.

•  •  •

Like every other year in Oklahoma, spring brought fields of dandelions, chiggers, and tornado season. One night, the sky grew dark with twisted spokes of low, smoky clouds. Then an angry rain came, heavy and unyielding. Though we all knew what it meant, Indian legend was that tornadoes flew
over
Sand Springs but never touched down. Still, basements and cellars were the routine, only this time we didn't have a cellar or basement. Trailer homes don't have cellars or basements. Memo was with us as we huddled around the TV set, adjusting the antennae to watch for weather warnings. The electricity went out. The tornado siren sounded. The rain pounded on the metal roof like a thousand machine guns. Then it stopped as if someone had turned off a switch.

Silence.

Then a series of sounds, as if instruments in an orchestra were being added, one by one:

The discordant wail of the faraway siren.

The crescendo of a slow, whooshing noise, as if heading toward a waterfall.

Then the low, tympanic rumble of an oncoming freight train.

Louder and closer. Closer and louder. Deafeningly louder.

Then it hit.

The trailer was slapped and kicked like a discarded Chef Boyardee can, tossing us about the tiny living room. Blown off the cinder blocks on both sides, but with the center ones remaining, we teeter-tottered up and down, side to side, as the furniture flew. In the strobe light flash of exploding electric lines, I saw a trailer roll, longways, outside our window. Hulking sheets of metal, entire sides of trailers took wing while my father held on to us with a strength greater than the force of God. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

Stillness.

Silence.

The siren trumpeted the cyclone's exit.

And the rain came again.

Tornadoes, like Baptists, travel in groups, and there was no time to wait for the next wave, so my father gathered us up to find shelter. Memo opened the screen door and it blew off its hinges, taking her with it a good ten feet. My father raced to her with my brother in his arms and scooped her to her feet. My mother grabbed my hand and, together, my family plodded through the rain and flood, knee deep, to a brick laundry facility a hundred yards away.

Inside the sturdy building, we joined other families, bleeding, crying, and in shock. The harsh fluorescent light sputtered on a woman with a great gushing wound on her forehead who refused to go to the hospital until she found her dog, which was probably somewhere in Oz by now.

My family was intact and unharmed, and I found myself disengaging, sort of floating above the crisis, observing the calamity all around me like a dream. It was as if I were invisible and had slipped into a book or movie without playing a part.

This is only a test.

The next day was sunny and breezeless and smiled with no accountability. And our family was united again. We were kinder, more available to one another and to everyone else. Together, with our neighbors, we scavenged through the debris, searching for clothes, photos, dolls—odds and ends and crumbs that could be salvaged of their lives. My tomboy girlfriend, Jonnie Tedford, and I rifled through the wreckage and would triumphantly hold up an unchipped cup, an unbroken picture frame, or a slightly bent tricycle to return to its grateful owner. Entire families were uprooted and destroyed and we were playing treasure hunt in the aftermath.

The night came, and we caught lightning bugs in a jam jar and used it as a lantern. Jonnie ripped the tails off the little insects and rubbed the glowing gunk on her face like war paint. I became enraged, transferring my silent anguish of the tornado disaster to the injustice of her senseless torture.

Big things were endurable, little things were hard.

•  •  •

Several months later, we moved into our rebuilt house, which was decorated with the latest trends in design, including green shag carpeting, a gold crushed-velvet sofa, a striped velvet La-Z-Boy, and a marble coffee table supported by scrolled, gold-painted legs. Hanging macramé netting held a vineyard of golden glass grapes at the entrance and clown paintings added a homey balance. The decor was not unlike the trailer's, but more spread out and with no built-in beer can holders.

We began anew, immersed in our own beautiful White Trash Versailles.

It was a guise of normalcy, and moving back home relieved no pressure. Family time was the occasional convergence around the dinner table, always hurried and awkward, singularly purposed for fueling.

More and more, my little brother and I would press our ears to the basement door as our parents fought below. Mostly that meant my father yelling and my mother crying.

One day, I came home from school with severe stomach cramps. My mother rushed me to the town doctor, who prodded and poked. I moaned in agony. My father met us at the doctor's office. This was becoming a big deal. I moaned a little more. And a little more.

As the attention and tension mounted, an odd unity developed: my parents had lovingly joined forces because I was the common concern. I squirmed, crinkling the sterile paper atop the cold examination table, and they stood on each side, holding my hands and gazing at me with tight-lipped smiles and reassuring nods. But I could sense their stolen looks to each other, their fear, their love, their apology. The doctor shook his head, as if I had only an hour to live, and they all left the room to confer and, presumably, make funeral arrangements.