Ham

by Sam Harris

“Miss Franklin, this is an honor. I am such a big fan and I can’t believe I’m meeting you and get to open for you. Thank you for asking me.”

  She lifted her sunglasses and peered at me with dull eyes and flatly said, “You sing like a black woman.”

  I presumed it was a compliment and laughed, but her expression remained frozen. She took a long draw from her cigarette and yawned, exhaling a thick, slow-moving cloud of smoke into my face. For the first time in my life, I wanted to smell like someone’s smoke. It was Aretha smoke. I decided right then that I would not shower before the show, or perhaps ever again. I’d been anointed.

  “H. B.!” she yelled as she walked past me and to the stage. “I want to start with the overture. I need to practice my entrance.”

  The band pulled out the chart and the music started. I sat in the second row and I could see Aretha waiting just offstage right in the wings. She lit another cigarette. The overture was a medley of her incredible history of hits: “Chain of Fools,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” “Ain’t No Way,” “Think,” “Natural Woman,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Respect”—it went on and on—electrifying and intimidating. And long. I knew it had to end at some point but it kept going for what I guessed was ten minutes. Enough time for Aretha to smoke two more cigarettes and finish off a bag of donuts.

  Finally, a series of Vegasy horn riffs built and built, changing keys for what surely would lead to the grandest entrance of all time. “Ladies and gentlemen—the Queen of Soul!” boomed over the system. Aretha crushed her cigarette with a twisted stomp, tossed her hat into the air behind her, and let her fur fall to the floor as she walked from the wings, grabbing the mic from a stagehand who’d been standing the entire time, holding it until she was ready.

  Aretha arrived center stage and looked out to the empty theater and said, “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together,” as her opening line. The band launched into the iconic introduction to “Respect” but she waved for them to stop. “I want to do that again.”

  “From your entrance?” Barnum asked.

  “From the top,” she answered.

  They played the overture again. All ten minutes.

  “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together . . . Wait a minute. I need to do that one more time.”

  I shifted in my seat, appearing composed and unconcerned, all the while thinking, You’re kidding, right? Okay, you’re Aretha Franklin, the greatest voice in the world, but seriously??! It was nearly 7:00, the doors were supposed to open in half an hour, and she’d not rehearsed a single song. More important, neither had I. She ran the overture two more times, always followed by “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together.”

  I was feeling a lot.

  Finally, Aretha moved on to “Respect” and in an instant, I was once again transported. I couldn’t help but revere her. She was singing to an audience of one. Me. And in a little while, I would sing to her.

  Her voice was coarse and smoke-worn. She gave nothing. There was no sense of performance, but it was just a sound check, and I knew she was saving it for the real thing. On her darkest day, Aretha would still be better than anyone else. After the one song, she announced she’d had enough and told Barnum the band could rehearse the rest without her. Jim Welcome hoisted her fur onto her shoulders, and they disappeared behind a veil of smoke before you could say “Rescue Me.”

  For the next forty-five minutes the band played through the Franklin songbook with a backup singer doing Aretha’s part. I looked at my watch every seven seconds. Jim Welcome returned and announced from the back of the house that it was nearly 8:30 and he had to open the doors. People had been dangerously waiting in the freezing cold for hours.

  I ran to him and asked about my songs. My rehearsal. My orchestrations. He said there was no time and the band would have to read my charts cold. I was young and vulnerable but not stupid. “There is no way I am going onstage without rehearsing new charts and no one who knows my music,” I bargained. “They don’t even know tempos!”

  Suddenly Jim Welcome began to panic, nervously shaking. In an instant, sweat poured off him as if his skin were a thousand-prick sprinkler hose turned on at full pressure. What little color he possessed drained from his shiny head and dripping face, like some sort of morphing, melanin-free superhero trick.

  “You have to go on!” he begged. “More than half the tickets sold are for you!”

  “Yeah, right,” I countered.

  “It’s true. It’s why we chose you. You’re fresh, man. The people want to see you!”

  I didn’t know what to believe. I had no one to step in. No one to stand up for me or insist on rehearsal or see the impending doom that had begun when the driver had failed to pick me up at the airport. All of this was new to me—the fame, the demand—all of which I lapped up hungrily. But I didn’t yet understand the power or need for self-preservation that comes with the fame and demand. At the bottom of it all, I didn’t want to disappoint the people who were there to see me. Or even just there. An audience in a theater expecting a show.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

  Jim Welcome’s eyes popped in desperation, knowing he was on the verge of a deal.

  “I will go on—for fifteen minutes. I’ll make up a story about how my music was lost by the airline and I will sing three songs, a cappella, and make the best of it.”

  Jim Welcome wept. He hugged me with his three-hundred-pound clammy, colorless body and told me I was a true star.

  The capacity crowd had been standing in subzero Siberian winds for much too long. Amputations of frostbitten digits would surely be necessary. I ran backstage as the house was opened and I heard the wretched mob charge into the warm theater. I suddenly remembered that I was still in my rehearsal clothes and had not brought show clothes from the hotel. I rushed back to my room and returned with only minutes to spare.

  Once in my dressing room, I breathed deeply and planned my strategy. Under normal circumstances I would have had time to get nervous, worrying about my voice cracking, the dry radiator heat, Aretha’s impression of me, the band, the sound, the lighting . . . just failing. But there was no time to do anything but dress for battle and plunge into the front lines.

  I could hear the audience on the dressing room monitor. It wasn’t the sound of excitement and anticipation. It was the sound of anger. Grumbling, justifiably hostile people whom I would momentarily face to sing a few songs with no band—a meager payoff for the rabble. A riot could break out and I would be the first casualty.

  Jim Welcome knocked on my dressing room door. It was time. I walked down the hall silently as if on my way to the gallows. We arrived at the wings and I was handed a microphone. A voice came over the loudspeaker. There was no welcome, no apology, no transition, no explanation or attempt to unite the crowd or create focus. Just: “Ladies and gentlemen—Sam Harris.”

  A little voice popped into my head that said, What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who the hell do you think you are? . . . And then I remembered. I marched onto the stage to the accompaniment of nothing, smiled broadly, and yelled, “Pretty pissed off, huh?!”

  The mostly African-American crowd answered with a laugh. “I know I would be!” I continued. “Are you numb? Can you feel your feet?” They cheered and howled and stomped on the floor like they were at a national election convention. We were bonded.

  “Do you see a band here? Do you even see a piano player? My charts got lost on the plane and I got no music! They made you wait outside in the freezing cold and for what? A little white guy with no music! Don’t you worry, the Queen of Soul will be out here soon with a band and backup singers and everything.”

  “We love you, Sam!” came a voice from the mezzanine.

  “Sing ‘Over the Rainbow’!”

  The crowd reignited in the request.

  “You want me to sing?” I hollered. “With no music? You got it! I will do anything you want. I’ll
sing, dance, tell jokes, make cookies. Hot chocolate. Hot toddies. I am your servant.”

  I sat on the edge of the stage with my legs crossed, Indian style.

  I sang “God Bless the Child.”

  I sang “I Am Changing.”

  I sang “Over the Rainbow.”

  With my voice the only sound, the great hall became an intimate room. Just me and a spotlight and them. It was pin-drop quiet during each song and then an eruption at the end. They were mine and I was theirs. And, shockingly, I was having an amazing time.

  After “Rainbow,” I rose and took a bow as the audience rushed down the aisles, crowding the thrust of the stage to reach up toward me. I ran the distance of the proscenium, touching as many as I could.

  As I headed stage right to make my exit, I saw the gigantic Jim Welcome sweating more than ever, practically translucent. He was giving me the old showbiz signal to stretch and was mumbling something I couldn’t make out. I strained my eyes to read his lips: “She-e-e-e’s No-o-o-o-t He-e-e-e-re. We-e-e Do-o-o-o-n’t Kno-o-o-o-w Whe-e-e-e-re Are-e-e-e-tha I-i-i-is!”

  You’re fucking kidding me.

  I knew that returning to the stage after my save-the-day triumph could only go downhill from there. I should have walked off. I should have said that it wasn’t my problem. I’d fulfilled my duty beyond-beyond-beyond the call. But something deep inside me, burdened and inspired by my “the show must go on” credo, coerced me to return to the fray and do something, anything, until they could locate the diva and get her onstage. I circled back to the boards, but I knew that I couldn’t make the audience think it was my choice.

  “They’re not ready yet,” I said, convincing them the delay was about production and not Aretha, to maintain her innocence. I plopped back down onto the edge of the stage and said, “Any requests?”

  “A Change Is Gonna Come!”

  It was my pleasure.

  I sang a song from my upcoming album, “I’ve Heard It All Before.”

  “Anything else? What do you want me to sing?”

  “The phone book! You could sing the phone book!”

  “Somebody bring me a phone book!” I joked.

  A stagehand came out from the wings with a phone book, getting a big laugh from the audience and me. Why not? I was relieved to have a gimmick, a bit, something to take up some time.

  I flipped to the businesses that began with A. I sang and riffed, musically commenting on each of them. “A-1 Auto Service” had a zippy jingle and “All Saints Funeral Home” had a wailing, soulful mourning vibe. The crowd hollered with laughter and then applauded wildly when I hit a long high note. Just as I got to “Cuyahoga Community College” I spotted Jim Welcome’s enormous soaking arms flailing in the wings. He was signaling for me to wrap it up. Aretha was standing next to him, smoking in every way, and looking impatient, as if I’d kept her waiting.

  I closed the phone book and said, “They’re ready now. I have had the best time with you tonight. It was scary to come out here so late, with no music, but this has been one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had onstage. Thank you.”

  I stood up and crossed to the down-center spot and resang the tag of my song: “If happy little bluebirds fly . . . beyond the rainbow . . . Why, oh, why can’t I?”

  I bowed and walked off the stage as the crowd roared. I passed Aretha and said, “They’re all yours—Go get ’em!” I was still enamored but digging deep to remain respectful, because what I really wanted to say was “Top that, bitch!” However, I suspected that she would, indeed, “top that,” and probably wipe the floor with me.

  Aretha Franklin was about to walk onstage and erase any memory of my existence.

  Her overture began. I took a seat just inside the wings, two feet behind Miss Franklin, so I could study her every move. She puffed and shifted back and forth, waiting for her entrance. I caught my breath, still tingling from the oddest episode of my career. I took the moment in.

  And then I took her in.

  Aretha Franklin, who was all of 250 pounds, was wearing a pinkish tube minidress that was tassled from her ginormous, hazardous breasts to her vast upper thighs. No one in her court had told her this was a bad choice and that she looked like a blood sausage stuffed into a 1920s flapper Halloween costume. I remembered the floor-length fur she’d worn earlier and thought that would have been a better option. But it probably would have been equally wrong to flaunt a luxuriously warm mink at an audience who’d been standing in the hypothermic, polar chill for untold hours.

  As her overture built to its endless finish, the announcer proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen—the Queen of Soul!” Aretha stubbed out her cigarette, pushed up her breasts, grabbed the mic, walked onto the stage, and unemotionally said, “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together.”

  And then the audience booed.

  They booed Aretha Franklin.

  She acted like she didn’t hear it. The band started “Respect” and she went on as if it were any other night. Maybe it was. But I was sure that once that voice started wailing “What you want, baby, I got it,” all would be forgiven. Then, just as she was about to start the first verse, Aretha waved to the band.

  “Stop!! Stop!” she said, shaking her head.

  Barnum signaled a cutoff and the band petered out in a slow, confused melt of noise. This was it. She was going to face the elephant in the room. The big, pink tasseled elephant.

  Then she yelled out, “I don’t want to sing that song. I want to sing ‘You Are the Sunshine of My Life’!”

  Barnum stood, stunned.

  “You heard me!” she reinforced, and the band rifled through their folders to find the music while Aretha blithely took a drink of water. The grumbling, confused, occasionally shouting crowd went unacknowledged. Barnum raised his hands and an upbeat introduction began to a song that, to my knowledge, Aretha had never recorded or even sung.

  The boos started up again.

  And a solid third of the audience got up and walked out, shouting at her up the aisles. Black audiences are the best, most dedicated audiences in the world. They are also the most honest. And they knew. They somehow knew everything. And they were not having it. They were looking for a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

  Aretha cut her show down to a scant half hour, about the same amount of time I had been on. She sang four or five of her big hits, but the overture was the only true acknowledgment of her extraordinary contribution to the American pop scene. When she finished, the mayor came onstage and awarded her the key to the city. I was called out for a final bow and saw that fewer than half the audience remained. The mayor, Aretha, and I walked off the stage together with nary a word. Then I told her I thought she was the greatest singer ever and she mumbled a simple “Thank you.” As we parted to our respective dressing rooms, the next frozen audience was being hustled into the theater while the previous one exited, and I heard Jim Welcome politely ask Aretha if she could please stay at the theater. We’d be going up as soon as possible.

  For the second show, I repeated my story about the airline losing my charts and decided to sing “Rainbow” as my opener, thinking the audience would be more apt to accept uncharted (literally) a cappella territory if I gave them something they wanted first. As I was about to begin, the piano player, drummer, and bass player poked their heads from the wings and offered to play. They knew what I’d been through and I was honored to have their support. They were consummate, magnificent, following my every move.

  Halfway through the song, I glimpsed over at the wings and saw my idol standing, staring, one hand holding a cigarette, the other firmly on her tasseled hip. This was a major moment for me and I knew it. I was singing for Aretha Franklin. I smiled at her like a smitten schoolboy.

  She didn’t smile back.

  I revved up for the big finish and milked, or rather drenched, the last eight bars for every bit of heart I could muster. At the end of the last note, which I held for about as long as Aretha’s overture, I gestured the c
utoff and threw my arms out and my head back. The audience gave even more to me than I had given them. Yes, I was showing off. I was showing off for Aretha Franklin, for the incredibly patient crowd, and for me. I was showing off to prove that I could handle anything, and that as long as I was honest onstage, it would all be okay.

  I looked to the wings for Aretha’s reaction in time to see her squash her cigarette under her kitten heel, gesture angrily to Jim Welcome, and turn away.

  Her back glared at me.

  I took a bow and was about to go into my next songs when I got the big wrap it up heave-ho signal from Jim Welcome. It was clear she wanted me off. Now!

  I shouted my good-byes and left the stage. Barnum began her overture. I didn’t feel comfortable standing in the wings with Aretha, so I went to my dressing room, shaking and a bit winded.

  She hated me.

  The dressing room monitor blared her introduction: “Ladies and gentlemen—the Queen of Soul!”

  “I feel. You feel. The important thing is we feel together.”

  • • •

  The next morning I was assured by the front desk that the airport was open and traffic was moving in spite of the ice storm from the night before. I dashed to the lobby early to meet my driver. He never came. I called Jim Welcome’s room from the reception desk. After twenty or so rings came the fumbling of a pickup and a barely audible, groggy “Ehh?”

  “It’s Sam Harris. My car isn’t here and I’m going to miss my flight.”

  He gently replaced the phone in its cradle, perhaps hoping I wouldn’t know he’d answered. I called back and after another ten or so rings, I heard him pick up and clumsily lay the phone down on a table.

  I convinced the front desk to give me his room number and I rushed to his door. I knocked! I banged! I yelled, “I know you’re in there!! Answer the goddamn door and get me a car!”

  I could hear him sweating.

  He never answered the door.

  I raced back to the front desk and was told there were no taxis waiting and it would take a while to get one. There was no way I was going to spend another minute in this fucking place. I persuaded the hotel manager to let a bellboy go off duty and drive me in his own car. We had to wait for what seemed like hours for the bellboy’s broken-down Toyota to warm up while he moved piles of dirty laundry from the passenger seat. I thought perhaps this was his home. Not even the sense-numbing cold could block out the stench of pot smoke ingrained in every pore of the vehicle, and I wondered if he was high at that very moment. More so, I wished I was. The bellboy maneuvered the icy freeway like an Olympic luge racer and deposited me at the airport in the nick of time.