Three long hours later a nurse comes to us and says everything went well. We are relieved but unsure what exactly that means. We hurry to post-op to see him. He is still out from the anesthetic, but Dr. K assures us his should be a good result. We’ll know for sure in a week or two. The next day we take Liam home and I leave for the road. I’ve cancelled a handful of dates to stay with our son, but it’s time I get back to my commitments. I call every hour on the hour to see how our boy is doing but it’s maddening to be so far away. When I get back home, he is on the couch looking miserable. He has a white gauze patch over his damaged eye. He lifts the patch to show me that his left eye is no longer tracking with his right eye. His vision is poor and he thinks he looks like a freak. “I can’t focus properly on anything. How can I be an actor with this?” he tells me in anguish, pointing to his damaged and wandering left eye.
I call Dr. K, furious about this result. I’m sure this deeply respected, even revered senior surgeon isn’t used to being yelled at by an unhinged musician. But he takes it well and tells me our son’s eye should soon come back on track. And sure enough, several weeks later, Liam calls to tell me that his eyes are tracking together again, and his vision is 100 percent. Looking at him today you would never guess what his face has been through. Having come so harrowingly close to losing him, B and I are more overprotective of him now than when he was little. And we’ve learned the hard way how fragile and resilient our kids really are.
I decide that Joshua needs a break. He and Liam are so close; Liam’s accident and hospitalization have been rough on him, too. And I could use a little R & R myself. We decide to go fishing. We ask Liam to come (B isn’t into fishing), but he declines, since he’s so relieved to be recovered and back in the flow of his art college. I tell him if he won’t come fishing, then the three of us are all going white-shark cage-diving sometime soon. And he agrees.
Josh and I head to the deep interior of Alaska. There are no roads and no cars, and the only way to get anywhere is in a floatplane, which takes off and lands on the many lakes that dot this pristine wilderness. Once we touch down on one of these inland seas and have unloaded everything from the plane, we hike each day, along with our guides, to the nearest stream to fish. Josh and I are both avid fishermen and this is the ultimate fly-fishing experience for us. We are absolutely in the middle of nowhere and glad to be away from the stress of the nightmare we’ve just lived through. It’s so great to be with him now as he reels in a giant salmon, screaming and hollering like he’s at a Lakers game.
It’s a healing trip (not as much so for the salmon we catch, but hey), and we stare in awe as great brown bears come out of the undergrowth and walk by us, not twenty feet away. It’s kind of like I imagine white-shark cage-diving will be, but without the cage. As a huge bear comes within munching distance our hearts beat faster and I ask which one of our guides has the gun. They say they don’t carry guns and tell us to raise our arms above our heads every time a bear comes too close, and shout, “Ho Bear.” “You’re fucking kidding me,” I say. But this silly move actually works. I’ll be damned. And no one gets eaten (except, again, the salmon).
Thanks to the years I spent off the tour circuit helping to raise Liam and Josh, the bond I have with each of our boys is strong and deep. It was so worth it. The only job that I am confident I’ve done my best at is being their father. And it is the one I’ve gotten the greatest joy from. Josh and I head home after three weeks of frontier fishing and scary big-bear moments. I’ve had time to clear my head up in the chilly North, and I prepare to do what I’ve known all along I have to do.
For our life together to be what we both want it to be, I must face B with my deceit in Vegas. The only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness. And that is what I pray for. She is furious with me and hurt that I would break her trust yet again. I owe my life to this girl. To grant her some privacy, I won’t go into the details of our consequent discussions but, needless to say, they are intense. Over time we heal and we stay together—and not in a resentful way, because there would be no joy in remaining in that kind of partnership. We know that there is no way to live together unless we can ultimately be honest and accept each other, warts and all. Even if I am the frog with the warts and she is the princess. And she is.
Life goes on. And so does touring. We shoot a new concert video, the first since 1985’s Beat of the Live Drum. We film at the beautiful Coronado Theatre in Rockford, Illinois. It’s the very first show for my new guitar player George Bernhardt, and he’s pretty anxious about it. He is a brilliant player, but thanks to a bad case of nerves brought on by the fact that his first show with the band is being recorded in a high-definition, eight-camera shoot, he screws up “Jessie’s Girl.” Rodger asks again, “What do you have to do to get yourself fired from this organization?” The funny fucker. But even this is apparently not enough to get someone canned. We do the song again for the cameras. George hasn’t messed that song up—or any other song—since. Then, in Atlanta, on a beautiful summer day while we prepare for the first of two nights in an outdoor venue called Chastain Park, I get a call on my cell phone. It’s one of those moments I could have lived my whole life without.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BIG BOYS DO CRY
CAPE
2007
I hear silence. Then there’s an odd, muffled sound. My first thought is that it’s either a fan who found my cell number and then got cold feet or a telemarketer who’s really slow on the draw. I’m about to hang up when I hear a wrenching sob. I look at the ID on my phone and see that it’s Amy, Sahara’s mother, calling. I get a chill. She’s crying so hard she can’t speak. Every time she starts a sentence, she chokes up and begins crying anew. I wait on the line and I know that whatever is coming is not good.
Eventually she gains enough composure to tell me the terrible news: Sahara (only twelve years old) has just been diagnosed with stage 4 brain-stem cancer. It’s the most aggressive form of cancer a child can possibly get. And it’s inoperable. I can’t think. I want to rewind the broken conversation we’ve just had and make it come out a different way. I can’t accept this information. Maybe I’m dreaming. It certainly feels like it. I have that light, floaty feeling as if all the blood is draining from my head. “What?” is all I can say. Amy repeats what she has just told me. But even before she is finished I know it is so.
I try, mentally, to put the image of our little Energizer Bunny—who loves to play pranks, have thirty “best” friends, travel the continent with her Harry Potter backpack filled with Juicy Fruit gum, lip gloss, ink pens, notepads, disposable cameras, and snacks, and who loves to hear the swish of a “nothing but net” basketball shot—into a hospital bed with a tumor on her brain. I can’t do it. No child should be dealt the diagnosis she’s just been handed. But it’s true. Amy has to go; she just wanted to reach out and tell me, knowing how much I love her little girl. I tell her I’ll talk to her soon; we’ll figure this out. Will we? She says good-bye and hangs up. My first thought is, “How could God let this happen?” Spent and breathless, I sink to my knees in my hotel room and offer up a “passenger-on-a-crashing-plane” prayer to save our girl. “Dear God, whatever it takes, don’t let her die.”
The picture that Amy just painted couldn’t be any bleaker, but if anyone can beat the odds, it’s Sahara. This is the girl who ate octopus sushi to win a $5 bet from me; who had an entire rock band and its crew catering to her every whim; who always took the side of underdogs at school and defended them with all her heart; who answered “I’ll do it,” when a little boy showed up at her school with the handcuffs (but no key) he’d stolen from his mother’s bedside drawer and suggested that they handcuff someone; who could climb into the hearts of people that didn’t even like kids; who loved to dress her obstreperous cat Semo in a variety of Build-a-Bear outfits; who (with Amy sitting beside her in the classroom) once queried a DARE officer who had asked if there were any questions, following his anti-drug lecture, “Do you think my mom is c
ute?”; who loved Las Vegas and who wasn’t afraid of anything.
My thoughts turn to Amy and her husband, Shannon. Having recently come so close to losing Liam, I have an idea of how they must be feeling. But there’s a slow-motion horror to a terminal diagnosis like this, much different from the heart-pounding emergency that B and I faced. Amy texts me later, “My heart is broken—my faith is shattered.” She says the doctors have told them that there is no hope. They tell her to take Sahara home and make her comfortable until she passes. But compliant acceptance is not Amy’s style. She dives into the world of malignant glioblastoma tumors with a tenacity born of mother love. She will do everything she can to save her girl. She goes online, talks to doctors, asks friends, searches for solutions both medical and alternative, and seeks answers from mothers whose children are similarly afflicted. We all have a vague belief that there is a cure for cancer out there somewhere—something they’re just not telling us. We’ve heard it’s experimental; it’s herbal; it involves stem cells, apricot pits, fasting, eating meat, being vegetarian. Jesus Christ, she’s twelve years old. Won’t someone save her?
The Darkness doesn’t screw with me on this one; it’s dark enough as it is. Maybe for once it’s even too dark for him.
The band and I must remain on tour, but I stay in close contact with Amy, Shannon, and their girl Sahara. My first phone call to Sahara after the diagnosis is full of phrases like “We’ll kick this thing in the ass” and “We’re gonna beat it.” She sounds bright, responsive, and positive, and she says, “Yes we are.” She is sure it’s just a matter of time before this is all behind her and we’re laughing and having fun again. I tell her I love her and that I’ll come and see her. She never loses her belief that her cure is just around the corner. A few more treatments away. One more journey. In the end it is decided that Sahara will undergo radiation and chemo, just like my sweet old man did over a quarter of a century earlier. Cancer has stolen so many people I love. It will not take this girl. Not on our watch. And so Amy, Shannon, and Sahara move forward to face the medical gauntlet that is the treatment of cancer in our lifetime.
My fans are good people. Really good people. I let them know about Sahara’s battle through my website, and they take up her cause like it’s their own, creating fund-raisers: charity auctions, sales of T-shirts and bracelets bearing Sahara’s name—anything that will make money to fund her treatment. It offers hope to all of us that the “official” exercise of charity fundraising will directly translate into saving her life. It’s all we can do. We can’t offer healing or medical expertise, so we raise money. Money equals success, right? We also offer up prayers by the millions.
My manager Rob, my agent Jim Gosnell, and I arrange to put on a benefit concert at the arena in Sahara’s hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, to show our support and help defray the costs of her mounting medical bills. She is beside herself when we announce this: she has always wanted us to play in “Cape,” as she calls it. We all wish it were just a normal gig. Because she is an avid and really excellent basketball player, her dad has taken to calling her “Hoops.” Her jersey number is 21. Remember that. We advertise the show as the “Hope for Hoops” concert. Sahara and Amy move into the Ronald McDonald House in Houston. Typical of Sahara, she wins everyone at M. D. Anderson Hospital over to her side and even sends Shannon out with her own birthday money to buy crayons and coloring books for the “sick kids” in the ward, not yet fully realizing that she is now one of those kids. The chemo begins and it makes her ill. While throwing up into the toilet one day, Sahara looks into her distraught mother’s eyes and asks, “Are you okay?” That’s the kind of kid she is. Amy waits until Sahara is asleep before she allows herself to cry.
When the band and I visit the Energizer Bunny in Houston a few weeks later, she has lost a lot of weight and her balance is off, but she’s still her vibrant self. She even comes to the show we’re playing in the area and is clearly looking forward to the benefit concert. The oncologist takes head X-rays to see how she is progressing, and Sahara is crushed to learn that the tumor is still there. She thought it would be gone in a month or so. We “grown-ups,” on the other hand, are thrilled that the tumor appears to have stopped growing. I guess it’s all a matter of your expectations.
By the time my band and I arrive in Cape Girardeau, everyone there is familiar with Sahara’s condition and her battle to win. The whole town shows up: the press, the mayor, her school, her basketball team, and her biggest fan: me.
Sahara is frail and thin at this point, but she tries her best to be our little Energizer Bunny still. I bring her up onstage and she gets a hero’s welcome from the crowd. Her favorite song of mine is “Love Somebody” and I jump off the stage to sit with her during some of it. She smiles like a star and takes it in stride. The audience cheers. They are cheering for her. The show ends, and at the meet-and-greet afterward she makes the time to take photos with fans and whispers to me, “Now I know how you feel.” She tires quickly.
Sahara goes home, and I go back to my hotel room and sit on the end of my bed. We did manage to lift some spirits and rally the town of “Cape” to our girl’s aid, but my Darkness, in the wee hours, reviews the evening a little differently. He tells me that it was all just a big letdown. The show is over and nothing has really changed; everything is still the same—the prospects of her survival, the therapy she is undergoing, the hospital she will soon return to, and the late nights where it all comes down on us. “What did you change?” is the question he poses to me as I struggle for sleep.
We go on with our tour and Sahara goes back to Houston to the realities of “last-ditch” therapy and her slowly deteriorating young body. The fan auctions continue, the plastic bracelet sales climb, and Amy and Shannon continue to pour their hearts and souls into saving their baby girl. The next time we get together, Sahara is confined to a wheelchair but still wants to come to the show we’re doing in nearby Tunica. The drugs that are helping her chances of survival are also making living painful for her. Her weight has now gone in the opposite direction due to the large doses of steroids that are part of her regimen. Her pale skin has multiple splits and tears because the drugs are thinning the tissue. And she won’t go out without one of her many hats now that her once-bouncy auburn hair is patchy, curly, and orange. The tumor is messing with her speech, and she’s having trouble being understood by anyone but Amy. Yet I recognize her words when she calls and leaves a message on my cell phone: “I love you,” she yells down the line to me. I wish I’d kept that recording.
One day, not long after, I log on to her website to catch up on the many messages family, friends, fans, and even supportive strangers have posted to her, and I read the following from her webmaster, Pamela: “I’ve started this blog at least ten times and hit the delete key, unable to find the words that convey what is in my heart and what is about to take your breath away: Sahara died this evening.” And it does take my breath away. How can she be gone? My natural instinct is to blame someone or something for depriving her of living her full span of years. Years that, I’m sure, would have yielded some amazing things, considering the powerful spirit that resided in her.
But instead of looking for someone to blame, I think back on moments that now seem beautifully guileless and precious beyond words. To the time, not too long ago, when Amy was making jokes about Sahara wanting to go shopping for a training bra. How she was starting to be aware of boys. Had, in fact, raced into the house one afternoon and dragged her mom outside into the backyard to confess “I kissed a boy today.” Now she is forever thirteen. The Darkness speaks softly to me one night after Sahara passes. “So much for all your cheerleading and fund-raising, huh? You really couldn’t do jack shit for her in the end, could you, jerk?” On this particular night, I would have to agree with him.
On the evening of Sahara’s death, Barbara and I are in the kitchen. We have a floor-to-ceiling window that looks out onto the entrance to our house. Both of us keep seeing a shadow darting to t
he front door. Not just once, but several times. I know it is Sahara. And we’re not the only ones. My band and I are playing in New York and Amy comes to visit. She is in Central Park taking photos when suddenly she sees a man walking toward her wearing a blue T-shirt with the word SAHARA printed across the chest in huge white letters. He stops, turns around, and goes back the way he came, but not before she snaps a photo on her iPhone. I’ve seen it.
Later, Amy and I are walking down 48th Street looking at guitar stores, something I love to do anywhere. We come to a small store that has one guitar in its main window. It’s an old and very vintage one from the ’60s. I notice the guitar is called a “Sahara” and Amy notices the price: $2,100. Sahara/21. Things like this happen again and again. Amy is with Sue Packard, my assistant from the Vegas days, seeing KÀ, the show that took over the MGM Theater after EFX closed. It’s hard for them not to think of Sahara when they’re together again in the town she so loved. They’re being seated when Amy hears someone a few rows back yell “Twenty-one” at the top of his lungs.
Eventually, months after Sahara has gone, Amy finds a videotape in her camera that she had no idea was there. It’s Sahara, self-filmed on the day she heard her initial diagnosis. She has the camera trained on herself and says into the lens, “When you see this I will be eating all the cheesecake I want.” She loved cheesecake. It was her favorite food in the world, and she would eat it all day long if she were allowed to, which she wasn’t. Our powerful little Energizer Bunny truly seems to be reaching out to us. There are messages from her on Valentine’s Day and Christmas, and her number 21 still keeps showing up. We all like to think our girl is letting us know that wherever she is, she is okay.
Late, Late at Night Page 33
