GH even creates a second character for me to play: a (you guessed it) rock star. This is something I wouldn’t have done back in the old days, as it would have smacked of sellout right when I was fighting for my identity as a musician, but radio and the whole music business are in dire straits and everyone is looking for a new way to get their music to the people. Bands are now fighting to get on TV shows like GH for the exposure. The character the writers of General Hospital come up with is a rocker named … Apollo Love. Wow, just when I was starting to have a little faith in soap writing, too. Huh. So I say I’m not playing a modern rock guy named Apollo Love. I suggest Eli Love, because I know from experience that writers are married to the names they concoct and won’t go too far astray. My strategy works and they say okay. There is no time during a shooting day on a soap to do drastic makeup changes to make this “Eli” guy look different from the “Noah” guy, so I give Eli an Australian accent. This really messes with my head having to jump back and forth between the two characters at the breakneck pace that is insisted upon by the directors and producers of a daytime drama.
I start playing more dates with my band. The shows are becoming something of a mutual communion between the audience and the band and me. It’s pretty amazing to see the great connection—part shared wealth of memories, part new experiences—that are the soul of our live show now. Our touring has gotten to a very manageable place as well. We fly everywhere (no buses ever, ever, ever!) and we go out for a few days, then come home for a few days. It’s the best of both worlds. On the road the performances stay fresh and exciting for us, and back home our families treat us like returning heroes every week. Barbara and I are doing well, to the point that if I get on her nerves, she’ll joke, “Aren’t you supposed to be going on the road soon, for Chrissakes?” It’s a warm place to be, even though Vegas still hangs from the corner of the room like a ninety-pound spider.
I’m feeling much more secure about my life on the road, keeping a handle on my sexual garbage and playing music for the sheer joy of it. My band is brilliant and we all actually really like each other and have such a great time on tour that when we play with other artists, some of their band members send requests: “If you ever need a [guitar player/drummer/keyboardist], here’s my number.” I’m having real fun again without the guilt and torture of sex and self-doubt. Yeah, that feels really weird to say, too, “the torture of sex.” Wow, never in a million years would I ever have thought I’d write that, but I’ve earned it, the torture of sex, through my bad use of it and the way I have hurt the ones I love. It’s still something I have to watch out for.
I go back into the studio and record a CD of songs I wish I’d written. They are covers of hits by other artists from the ’70s and ’80s because I need a break from writing after the fairly painful Shock album. It’s 2005, and cover records are a hip thing at the moment. Since I didn’t write any of these songs—with the single exception of “Cry”—I don’t have the same parental attachment I do with the songs I write myself. It’s a nice change to be in a studio without constantly worrying about whether the songs are good enough or not. It’s actually fun. Richard Page comes in and duets with me on a cover of Mr. Mister’s big song “Broken Wings.” We like it so much, we release it as a single.
Just before we start touring for the album, I happen to go to a Los Angeles Lakers game and they put me on the Jumbotron screen and play “Jessie’s Girl.” I want to say, “I’ve written other songs, y’know,” but I’m actually proud of the path this song has taken once I let it go. This is something I never could have imagined: the life this song would take on once it was out of my hands. Back in 1997, “Jessie’s Girl” was placed in a pivotal final scene in the movie Boogie Nights. A band called Frickin’ A has a hit with its JG cover. It turns up in TV shows like Friends and is featured in the films 13 Going on 30 and Keeping the Faith. The song gets me invited to one of Stephen Colbert’s early Colbert Reports to take part in a skit in which he forgets the lyrics to “Jessie’s Girl” and I prompt him from the side of the stage. For reasons still not clear to me, my photo permanently adorns his studio-set wall. Not only didn’t he pay me for my appearance, the cheap bastard, but years later he tried to sell that photo on eBay for $350,000 after the market crashed in 2008. If I wasn’t such a fan, I’d be upset.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, that song. In the web comic Penny Arcade, Gabe literally gets away with murder (a jury acquits him, finding his actions justified) after he proclaims “Jessie’s Girl” to be the greatest song ever written and kills a friend who is musically inexpert enough to disagree with him. Rolling Stone ultimately pronounces it the Number 1 requested song in the karaoke world (not quite sure what that means), and it’s one of the two most requested ’80s songs at clubs around the U.S. (the other being Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”). I frequently hear it blasting out of the amps of cover bands in clubs from city to city. More recently, “Jessie’s Girl” has turned up in the Vince Vaughn movie Couples Retreat and in the Robinson-Cusack-Corddry comedy Hot Tub Time Machine. The bloody song seems to be having better luck in films than I’ve had so far. And lately, in TV. Recently on the hit TV show Glee, Finn had occasion to sing it to his ex-girlfriend who had since become—coincidentally—Jessie’s girl.
I think that’s enough about “Jessie’s Girl,” so let’s move on.
I’m happy to report that by the time I record The Day After Yesterday, that album of covers, Mr. Darkness has been hanging out but keeping his distance for the most part, just giving me little self-deflating pokes now and then, the swine. Gomer is happy to have his own record label. Liam is at an art college studying acting, while Josh is getting ready to move to USC in a year. And Barbara and I are sound asleep when, in the middle of the night, we hear a knock at our front door.
The last thing I want to see at my door at 2:30 in the morning, having just been roused from a deep sleep, is a brace of young, buff sheriffs who look like they’re still in high school. But that’s who is there to greet Barbara and me when we finally answer their incessant and, at this hour, spooky knocking. And it scares us, with all that it portends, to have police at our house in the early hours of the morning. They apologize for waking us, then jump straight to the business at hand. “Do you know a Liam Springthorpe?” one asks. “Yes,” B and I answer in unison, “he’s our son.”
“He’s just been found bleeding and moaning on the side of the road,” is the official reply.
The world stops turning for both of us, and the moment is frozen forever. The sheriffs don’t have much more information than what we’ve just heard. They’re locals, and all they’ve received is a radio call. Because they were in the area, it fell to them to deliver the news. They add that our boy is, at this moment, lying unconscious in the emergency ward at the Henry Mayo Hospital in Valencia. They can’t tell us if he’ll make it or if he’s on the brink of death. Barbara and I both go into survival mode. Our sole, shared purpose is to save our son. I run to my car and take the longest ride of my life, to Valencia, about an hour from where we live. I’ve left Barbara at home with only a few words said between us. We know what we have to do. I go to him, she calls everyone she knows who can help—doctors, friends, nurses, anyone who may give us an edge in saving Liam’s life.
In a desperate tragi-comedy of errors, when I get to the hospital I’m in such a state and the signage is so bad that I can’t find the emergency entrance. I have to stop and ask a Chinese guy walking his dog (at four a.m.?) where the ER is. Struggling to keep a lid on my panic, I take his barely articulate directions and eventually find my way into the emergency entrance. The doors swish open and I run through to the check-in desk. A nurse leads me into a room veiled by sterile nylon curtains and I see him. Our son. He’s lying on his right side on a gurney with the covers pulled up to his chin. All I see is blood.
“The doctor will be in shortly,” the nurse says. Liam is unconscious and hooked up to all kinds of life-function monitors that surround his bed like
sentinels on a deathwatch. He looks like someone has beaten his face with a baseball bat. Caked dried blood is everywhere. His left eye is swollen shut; black, red, and purple and the size of a tennis ball. His hair is matted with dried blood, which covers the left side of his face, runs down his neck, and stains the blanket that is tucked in around his chin, cozy-baby style. His lips look like they’ve exploded from the inside. He is ashen and, save for all the damage, looks like our three-year-old baby boy, fast asleep in his crib where nothing and no one can ever harm him. It’s all I can do not to lose it.
I call B on my cell phone and tell her I’m here and he’s alive, but that we don’t know much yet other than that his left eye is in bad shape. She says she’s on her way. The local police who found Liam come in to talk to me. They amend the earlier news and tell us he wasn’t found lying by the road; he was discovered in the bushes outside an apartment building. They tell me the name of the building. “That’s where he lives,” I answer. I think of the kid who has the apartment below my son, a drug addict/dealer with whom Liam has exchanged insults in the past. I tell the cops and they leave to check up on this. The doctor comes in. “Your son looks like he’s been beaten very badly,” is what I hear from this man.
“Is he going to live? Does he have brain damage? Is his eye any good? Will he be okay? Can we save him?” I have a million questions.
“We don’t know anything yet. We’ll need to do X-rays and a CAT scan to see if there’s any bleeding in the brain. And we’ll also check for any spinal damage. We should try to pry that eye open to see if he still has any sight left in it. It looks like it took a pretty bad whack.”
“Well then, get on it, for fuck’s sake!!!” I want to scream, but I know that won’t help my son. Instead I tell the doc I’ll stay with Liam and ask if they would please come and get us when they’re ready for the tests. Some nurses enter the room to help me hold my son down while the doctor tries to separate the bloodied swollen eyelids of his damaged left eye to ascertain if there is any vision remaining. My son screams in pain through his delirium. The doctor finally relents and says that the swelling is too great. They will get him into X-ray. They all go to set this in motion and I’m left alone with Liam. I kiss him and tell him I’m here and that everything will be okay. He doesn’t hear me. I feel like I should be doing more than just sitting there holding his hand. I’m torn between wanting to drive to the drug dealer’s apartment, break down his door, and kill him, and to sit here with our boy like a good daddy should.
A nurse comes into the cubicle and says we’re being moved to a private room so we won’t be bothered. I take this as a sign that everything else will be handled quickly. I’m wrong. We are in this “private room” for twenty minutes and Liam is getting restless. His arm is obviously badly broken as well and he is moaning in pain. He still hasn’t spoken a recognizable syllable. Finally I allow the thoughts into my head: What if we lose our boy? Or he is crippled or brain-damaged or blind? I jump up and storm out to the front desk like the harpy who will destroy anyone to defend her child. The doctor says he’s been looking for us and didn’t know we’d been moved to a different room. They run their battery of tests, and I don’t leave my son’s side. Barbara arrives with information from our good friend Leonne, who is a psychiatric nurse and deep in the medical system. They’ve already got Liam cleared for transfer to the UCLA Medical Center to see Dr. K (as he is known), the preeminent eye surgeon there. Barbara is in shock at the terrible sight of her precious firstborn. We sit in silence with Liam while the test results are compiled. It seems to take forever. All we want is for him to live. We’ll deal with the rest as it unfolds.
The local cops return and ask me if I would step outside. In the hall of the emergency room, they want to know if my son has ever tried to hurt himself. This is so unexpected that I do a double take. Liam is passionate about the actor’s life he is entering, loves his music, has a good circle of friends, is connected to his family and his home, and gets plenty of interest from the girls he meets.
“How do you mean?” I ask.
“Has he ever shown any suicidal tendencies?”
Wait, is this my son or me that we’re discussing? The Darkness chimes in, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, if you get my meaning.” I hate this line of thought and push it out of my head with all the strength I have left. I listen, unbelieving, as they tell me they checked on the kid/dealer in the apartment below and he was not involved in any way, but that the screen on Liam’s third-floor bedroom window was pushed out and there is blood on the cement pavement directly below it. My son fell three stories to a rock-hard sidewalk, obviously landing on the left side of his face, and he’s still alive? The cops are focused on this as a possible suicide attempt. I’ve heard stories of parents being blindsided by their kids’ hidden issues—finding that their daughter has OD’d on a drug the parents had no idea she was even on, or walking into the garage to discover their “happy-go-lucky” son swinging from a crossbeam. I have a moment of doubt, but then quickly realize this can’t be the case with Liam.
“He didn’t jump,” I assure them, but I want to go to the scene of his accident and try to understand it for myself. I know my son, and maybe I’ll see something the police missed. I go back inside and tell Barbara that it looks like he fell from his bedroom window and that I’m driving to his apartment to take a look. She stays with our still-unconscious and bloodied boy. We are desperate to ask him questions. We hope he will eventually be in a condition to answer them.
The apartment building is ten minutes from the hospital. I park and walk around to the back, where Liam’s apartment faces out on to the hillside. I look up and see that the wire-mesh screen has indeed been pushed out far enough for someone to exit through the window. It looks so high from where I stand. How did he survive this fall? What could have possibly made him jump? At my feet is a large puddle of dried blood, already soaked into the porous concrete. From the amount of blood I can see, he must have lain where he fell for an hour or more, in the middle of the night, without anyone near enough to know or care or help, while we slept on, oblivious. I stare at the dark stain for minutes. We still don’t know how much of our son is left. I drive back to the emergency ward with all my questions.
The scans and X-rays reveal no bleeding in Liam’s brain, his spine is okay, and it looks like his eye is still there, although we won’t know if he has sight until the swelling goes down enough for the doctors to open it. His left orbital socket is badly cracked, which is not good, and his right arm is broken in three places. Again I think, “It’s hard to kill a Springthorpe.” We stay with him through the day until he’s taken to UCLA. B rides in the ambulance, I follow. He begins to regain consciousness, but he’s confused and disoriented. Family and close friends fill our son’s room at UCLA all through the night and the following day. Some break into tears when they see the condition of his face. Others go silent at the sight of him, damaged, semiconscious, immobile. Slowly he comes back to us. He begins to refocus and the story is finally pieced together over the next few days, and this is what is revealed.
Liam is fast asleep in his apartment when, in the middle of the night, he’s awakened by the loud and very obvious sounds of someone breaking in. He hears footsteps outside his closed bedroom door and sees the light suddenly switch on beneath the threshold. Still half asleep, confused, and believing he’s at home, where his bedroom window opens out onto a small tiled roof, he pushes out the screen and steps through the opening onto that roof. But there is no roof, and he drops like a stone, three stories to the hard pavement, landing on his left side, breaking bones, and knocking himself unconscious. Blood pools around his face from the wounds he receives and he lies there untended until the police arrive, summoned by a neighbor who tells the cops he’s been hearing moaning outside his window all night.
I momentarily want to kill this guy for not reacting faster, but I know this won’t help our boy now.
Some days later, once he is at
UCLA, one of the first phone calls Liam can take himself is from his good friend David, a fellow actor at college. Liam tells his concerned classmate the story of his accident, beginning with the person breaking into his apartment. “I think that was me” is the unexpected response from the other end of the line. Six months earlier, because David lives at his parents’ house far off campus, Liam had given his friend a key to his apartment and told him anytime he wanted to crash, just to let himself in. Of course by the time our son was awakened by someone he had mistaken for a bold and noisy burglar, he had forgotten this pertinent piece of information. A slightly inebriated David had let himself in that fateful night, slept his buzz off on the living room couch for an hour, then decided he could make the drive to his parents’ house after all. He headed back out, using the only route that did not take him past Liam’s unconscious form lying on the blood-soaked concrete, and therefore remained completely unaware of the chaos his late-night visit had just caused. For Liam, this must get filed in the “no good deed goes unpunished” category. I’ve always believed the Buddhist phrase “Everything is a blessing.” I’m still struggling to find where the blessing could be in this.
The doctors finally tell us that our son does have sight in his left eye but that the socket must be rebuilt or the eye will slowly drift out of alignment. Dr. K is an eccentric but genius eye surgeon, and he will perform the incredibly delicate, high-tech procedure on our son. Liam will wind up with a titanium eye socket along with bone grafted from his skull to make sure it all heals well and strong. Before he is wheeled into the operating room for the three-hour surgery, a nurse writes the word “yes” on his left cheek so that the correct eye will be operated on. A low-tech precaution to thwart a potential screwup, but better safe than sorry. Liam goes under the knife. The outcome is by no means a given, and we pray for the recovery of our boy as we hang in the waiting room, which is filled with families in similar straits regarding their own loved ones. There is a closeness born of silent understanding in this room.
Late, Late at Night Page 32
