Ham

by Sam Harris

  As it got closer to showtime, I began searching through the arrangements. Some of them were from friends and family, most were from people I didn’t know—supportive TV viewers who saw me as the American dream, and celebrities whom I’d never met. But none of them were from the guy I was dating in Los Angeles. His name was Stephen and he was an entertainment lawyer and I was planning on spending the rest of my life with him. We would be a historic team like Norma Shearer and Irving Thalberg, which he didn’t know yet but would find out soon enough.

  At the half hour call, instead of preparing for the biggest night of my life, I was tearing through the flowers like a madman and the hallway looked like a gardener had gone on a psychotic mowing rampage. But there was nothing from Stephen. It occurred to me that Jerry had hidden the flowers to sufficiently freak me out and give me an edge for the show. It would be just like him to try to make me vulnerable so that I went on in need. I pushed him up against the dressing room door, put my nose to his, and growled, “Where. Are. My. Flowers?!”

  I went on in need.

  The show was otherworldly for me. And a bit jarring for the audience at times, especially the part where I pulled a gun out of my tailcoat breast pocket at the end of “God Bless the Child” and shot myself in the head. Then the Pancakes entered in Pierrot costumes and masks, holding bouquets of colored balloons on long strings, and we sang a song about being committed to a mental institution.

  The audience was farmisht, as Jerry would say. But they were willing.

  After “Over the Rainbow,” they rushed the stage and I exited to find Jerry in the wings, jumping up and down. I knew I was going back out for an encore, but he said, “Let ’em beg.” He pushed me by the shoulders down the hall and, in our euphoria, we somehow walked out of the stage door and onto Fifty-Sixth Street. The door slammed behind us, jarring us into reality. I turned the brass knob to get back in. Locked! We rattled. We banged. We screamed. Nothing.

  The crowd was chanting inside and I was trapped outside! After several minutes of kicking and shrieking, the old stage doorman, who’d been watching from the wings, came to look for us and heard our desperate calls.

  I ran back to the stage and as I was about to go on, Jerry stopped me and said, solemnly, “I really didn’t take the flowers. Stephen didn’t send any. He didn’t send any flowers, Sam.”

  Jerry knew what he was doing. And I knew what he was doing. And he knew that I knew that he knew what he was doing. But it still worked. My encore was the Janis Joplin song “Cry Baby”—all about being treated like shit and still remaining a doormat, and I’d practically had the word “welcome” tattooed on my chest when it came to relationships. I gave the performance of my life and ended in a melodramatic puddle on the floor at its finish.

  After the show my mother and brother and closest friends, who had flown in from everywhere, came to my dressing room. I realized my father was missing, and my mom told me he thought it was too crowded backstage. I left my guests and, after a lengthy search, found him smoking in a hidden alleyway, where he could tell me that I had done good without the distraction of other compliments.

  A downtown hotspot hosted an after-party and I barely slept before being interviewed on the Today show, and then rushed to the airport to get back to Hollywood in time to shoot a variety television series—all in twenty-four hours. I was already feeling like the overextended, poor-me, piece-of-meat, nobody-suffers-like-Sam-does lonely star who is used up. I’d been rehearsing that role since I was twelve and I was finally getting to play it, complete with episodes of secluding myself in the bathroom only to emerge hours later smelling of Jack Daniel’s and Cheez Whiz.

  Jerry loved and played into the drama, but he was mostly protective. He stayed with me in Los Angeles to write my first concert tour show while I finished my first album. One Sunday morning, I ambled into the kitchen for coffee and found Jerry sitting in the breakfast nook reading the Los Angeles Times. I sat next to him and flipped through the Calendar section. I’d had a feature article the Sunday before and I was eager to see if there were any comments from readers.

  The “Letters to the Editor” page was curiously missing.

  “Where’s the rest of the paper?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jerry mumbled, his face buried in the sports section, which I’d never seen him read.

  “Part of the paper is missing.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  I was disheveled and morning puffy, but I jumped into my clothes, still pooled on my bedroom floor from the previous night, and headed to the corner market called World’s Finest Meats. They weren’t the world’s finest meats. They weren’t even the block’s finest meats. In fact, no one was quite sure what animals their finest meats came from. But they also sold sundries and newspapers, so I ventured in and began leafing through the Times.

  “Hey!” came a voice from in front of the world’s finest meat counter. “Hey!! Sam Harris, is that you?”

  I looked up to see an African-American of Amazonian proportions and questionable gender, wearing a yellow tube top and a pair of capri pants that wouldn’t capri on anyone shorter than six-foot-two.

  “Good morning.” I smiled.

  “I thought that was you. My sister said she saw you in here once. She was so excited. But now that I see you for myself—you just an ugly little thang.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Somehow this person felt that because she had seen me on TV, I must not be an actual human with actual feelings.

  “I’m sorry,” I actually said, throwing money on the counter and tucking the paper under my arm as I hurried out.

  I walked in the door of my house in a daze. Upset. But more so, perplexed. Had a woman-who-might-have-been-a-man just said to me “You just an ugly little thang”? And she-he-whatever was black! Black people were my people! How could this be?

  I told Jerry what happened and took a shower to collect myself. Once dressed, I returned to the breakfast nook and found the paper neatly folded. I flipped through the Calendar section but, once again, the “Letters to the Editor” page was missing.

  “This can’t be happening!” I complained in disbelief.

  Jerry was washing morning dishes with a casual homey air that brought to mind Aunt Bea from old episodes of The Andy Griffith Show—if Aunt Bea had been a muscled, bearded gay man with a streak of lypple green in her hair.

  “Wha-at?” he said in singsong innocence.

  I knew something was up. I’d seen the Lucy episode where she cut an article out of the newspaper to avoid Ricky’s wrath.

  “Okay, where is it?” I demanded.

  “Where is what?”

  “Where is the page? I know you took it.”

  He was drying a pan. “You know, if you turn the flame off right after you put the eggs in, they don’t overcook and they stay really fluffy.”

  “You’re hiding something from me! Where is the paper?!”

  Jerry reluctantly reached under the sink and pulled the missing section from the very bottom of the trash can. It was covered in soggy coffee grounds and gooky eggshells. He wiped it off as much as he could and shyly handed it to me. I scanned the page and found it:

  Dear Editor,

  Why are you wasting valuable column space on Sam Harris? I don’t get it. He sounds like a cross between a police siren, Ethel Merman, and Arnold the Pig.

  I paused to absorb the full effect. Then I turned to Jerry, who was standing sweetly with a dish towel in his hand.

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU LET ME READ THIS!” I screamed, and stormed out of the room.

  • • •

  When Jerry was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he and Sean moved to an apartment they’d taken on a picturesque canal in Amsterdam. He was writing a movie for Disney that was to star Bette, and the disease was so mired in taboo that he was afraid he’d be fired if they found out. If anyone found out. Bette, her husband, Harry, and her business partner, Bonnie, along with me and my partner, Ed, were the onl
y ones who were privy to the shameful secret. We flew to Amsterdam several times to see him, swearing to keep quiet, even when it came to our closest mutual friends. As autumn descended into winter, each trip was a progressive snapshot of a weaker, more aged, insufficient Jerry. “I had to get AIDS to get a jawline and cheekbones,” he joked, grinning, from his hospital bed.

  I could not show my grief to him, nor Sean, nor anyone back home, so from Amsterdam, I found myself traveling to Auschwitz-Birkenau for some sort of cruel sanctuary, to experience the concentration camp in the biting, opiate cold, at its worst. Anything green would have seemed wrong.

  The camp was oddly unsupervised and I saw only two other visitors, as silent as the white, dead sky. I wandered throughout the desolate place, row after exacting row of rotting bunkers among a geometric landscape of teetering brick chimneys rising like Legos from naked cement foundations.

  I found the exact spot in front of the train tracks where boxcars of unsuspecting Jews and other outcasts had arrived for selection, and sat on the frozen ground among footprints, petrified like muddy fossils, left from tourists on warmer days. I lay in a bunk that was cramped, even by myself, with oddments of stubborn straw poking up from between the wooden planks. In the museum, photos of skeletal prisoners with lifeless eyes looked too much like Jerry. But that’s why I’d come, I supposed. For the injustice.

  Several weeks later, on January 18, Sean called me in Los Angeles at 4:00 a.m. and simply said, “It’s almost time.” I got the first flight out of LA to New York to London to Amsterdam and I rushed from Schiphol airport to the hospital. But I missed Jerry’s passing by an hour. For nearly a decade, he had been there for me at every important moment of my life, and I had failed to be there for his last.

  A doctor led me to a strikingly white room where a gauzy lemon haze of sunlight formed a trapezoid through a single window. Jerry would have totally loved the light. And that I noticed it. In the center of the room was a waist-high wooden slab of birch or ash or beech. Jerry lay on top, covered with a sheet as white as the walls. He didn’t have his glasses on and it seemed wrong. I would need to find his glasses.

  Sean insisted that Jerry be laid to rest in their newly adopted country, and we were joined by Jerry’s mother and father and sisters and Bette later that day. He was buried the next morning in a Jewish cemetery dotted with lopsided headstones dating back to the eighteenth century, etched with weathered Dutch names like von Hofwegen and Klerx. It was surreal—like some kind of foreign period-piece indie film. The air was sad. Black, naked trees reached down like knobby-knuckled, arthritic fingers. Six pallbearers, dressed in formal gray tails with gloves, spats, and top hats, silently carried the pine casket in procession as a bell heavily tolled over and over again. And over and over again. And over and over and over again. We walked behind the casket, led by Sean, who had planned the whole thing with the funeral director like a Dutch Jackie Kennedy. His mustache revealed a breakfast of suikerbrood with hagelslag and hot chocolate with slagroom.

  “What the fuck is this?” came a voice from behind me. It was Jerry’s seventyish mother. “Stop with the bell already.”

  At graveside, Bette sang “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” and I sang “The Boat Song,” which Jerry and I had written together. Both had been requested by him—or so Sean said. I didn’t believe Jerry ever acknowledged he was going to die so I couldn’t imagine him making funeral plans, much less this version. It was all too maudlin. And just too Dutch.

  The only thing remotely Jerry was the headstone, which Sean had had engraved with a line Jerry wrote for one of Bette’s shows:

  DID I SING THE BALLAD YET?

  WAS I WONDERFUL?

  Memorials were planned to celebrate Jerry in Los Angeles and then New York. The LA ceremony brimmed with so many people whose lives had been touched by his genius, including a very mournful Marc Shaiman, the composer, who was incensed at the secrecy of shame that had cheated him out of saying good-bye to his good friend.

  The New York memorial would be the most important. It was Jerry’s city and his people. The Actors Playhouse was the venue, a few short blocks from the apartment on Bleecker that Jerry had rented since the 1960s. Bette and I and a few others arrived early to place flowers, the piano, a podium, and the screen for the slide show.

  When nothing was left to be done, there was still time to spare and I was anxious and needed an activity. I looked down and noticed that the carpeting was nubby. I found a pair of scissors in the box office and began crawling on the floor, row by row, seat by seat, snipping clots of carpet. I knew it was stupid and fairly pointless but it was the kind of thing Jerry would have done—like using red bar straws as gels in the crappy Italian restaurant where we started together. Lost in my own world, my head suddenly bumped against something. I looked up and it was Bette. We were nose to nose. She had a pair of scissors and was crawling on the floor, row by row, seat by seat, snipping clots of carpet. We smiled at the improbability and of-course-ness of the moment. I wanted to believe in an afterlife where Jerry was laughing at the extraordinary in the ordinary.

  One way or another, he had trained us well and we were products of his neurosis.

  • • •

  That night, after the memorial and the family get-together at the mandatory Chinese restaurant on Seventh Avenue, Sean, Jerry’s sister, Cynthia, Bruce, and I went to the apartment to recover and reminisce. I felt blank. Jerry’s influence and friendship was so large that I couldn’t find specific memories. There was no place to begin. I couldn’t get past the end. His gaunt face. The bizarre Dutch funeral. And more than anything, that I wasn’t there for his death. That I had missed the moment.

  At about two in the morning, a scream of sudden brakes and the squeal of skidding tires were followed by a metallic crash that broke our reflection. But no one moved. We were spent. It was New York. Things happen. Then I found myself racing down the stairs and out to the street.

  The accident was bad. The car was buckled around a streetlight, which was akilter but still illuminating the scene. The warped passenger door fell open and a man covered in blood, probably in his thirties, crawled out slowly and fell to the street. I ran to him and, with the help of another man, carried him a few feet to the small set of stairs at the entrance of the corner building. His head was a pincushion of tiny shards of glass and blood streaked his face and hair like red ink. There were no visible major wounds and he was breathing fine, if not talking.

  Someone called an ambulance and a small crowd gathered, but no one with any medical knowledge came forward, so I sat with him on the stairs. He edged himself up and lay splayed across my lap, and I wrapped my arms around his chest.

  And then he died.

  There was no gasping last breath or final, wisdom-filled declaration. No fluttering of the eyelids or clawed outstretch of hand. No moan or even the raising of his chest for a last, releasing exhalation.

  He just . . . died.

  I remained with him until the ambulance came and then I went back upstairs, covered in the blood of a stranger, and remembered Jerry.

  9. Ham

  I fear that my karmic lesson in this lifetime is humility. And I think that lesson is beneath me.

  It was the tradition at Central Elementary that the role of Santa always be played by a third grader in the annual Christmas show, so, as a lowly second grader, I was relegated to a mere elf in the chorus. Our music teacher, Mrs. Fisher, who was also my private piano teacher, wrote an inspired original show with original songs every year. We didn’t live in New York City, or even Tulsa, but come the holidays, the Sand Springs grade school Christmas show had a world premiere. That year, the story line was that Santa had disappeared, and all of the North Pole was desperately searching for him in time to save Christmas. Penny Bare played Mrs. Claus. She was given a powerful scene near the end in which she wished and prayed for her husband’s safe return. When the phone rang, rather than answer, she stared at it, unable to pick it up, and sang a song co
ntemplating the caller, hopeful that it was Santa or at least someone with information as to his whereabouts.

  I’d loved the song since the first time I heard it when Mrs. Fisher taught it to Penny, along with our backup elf parts. Mrs. Fisher conducted, the flab under her upper arms swaying in time to the music, creating a fleshy metronome that was both mesmerizing and slightly disconcerting. But the tune had a catchy hook:

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, my phone is ringing.

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, who can it be?

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, dare do I answer?

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, I sweetly sing.

  Its melody haunted me day and night and I crooned it around the house and school yard, nonstop.

  On the night of our single performance, my elf-mates and I wore little outfits made of green felt, with red spiked trimming around the collar and matching hats with silver bells sewn at the end. We entered in a line and stood just downstage of a flimsy cardboard flat, broadly painted as a wintery candy cane workshop. One sneeze from a sniffly elf could have taken the whole thing down.

  Penny began her monologue and I looked out into the audience of radiant and proud parents. The Clauses’ phone rang on cue and the pianist began the musical boom-chuck introduction. Penny registered all the angst and anticipation of the caller and Mrs. Fisher nodded for her to sing, dictating the strict tempo with dangling upper arms.

  There was absolutely no premeditation.

  Yes, I’d sung it a thousand times, and perhaps had even fantasized about playing the part myself. So I . . . just . . . started . . . to sing her song. Not humming along, lost in my head. Loudly. Like there should be a spotlight on me.

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, my phone is ringing!

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling, who can it be?!

  Mrs. Fisher frowned and discreetly shook her head. I didn’t know why. Penny didn’t come in at all. She just turned to me and glared. It was then that I realized I was singing. And Penny was wondering why a fucking elf was upstaging her big number.