Ham

by Sam Harris

  Then there are the colors, which have included the entire spectrum from onyx to platinum—the last, a four-hour process during which my scalp was chemically burned to bloody boils, but even that did not deter me from insisting on “one more time!” to get the colorless color just right. This particular fashion choice came with a matching soul patch, which made me look like I’d just eaten a white cat and couldn’t find a napkin.

  Liver is a cruel mistress.

  Like the time I hired a publicist for the release of a CD. I’d used this guy before, when I was on a sitcom, and he’d gotten me a few good features and made sure I was included in all the studio publicity. He quickly provided a list of the publications that would review the CD, as well as the radio interviews he would schedule, the Los Angeles Times feature with photos he had all but secured, and a trip to New York to appear on The View, reaching millions. I’d done the show twice before and had a great time with the girl gang. They were smart and funny and I knew the power of their ratings.

  The record came out. Dates for the interviews were pushed and pushed but never materialized. The few reviews he acquired were from easily dismissible sources: Howard’s CD Blog wasn’t exactly Rolling Stone. The publicist seemed to be scrambling, supplying his own heaps of fancier prosciutto and shallots, but I did all the cooking. A photographer supposedly from the Los Angeles Times came to my house for a photo shoot but arrived with the faint smell of fresh liver. I pushed back the cloying notion that the publicist had just hired someone to pretend he was from the paper. But how could that be true? Who would possibly go that far in lieu of honesty or accountability? The interview was supposedly scheduled and canceled five times.

  With newly born Cooper and our supernanny, Blanca, in tow, I flew to New York to do The View. Upon my arrival, the publicist and all information suddenly went missing. His assistant passed on a few minor questions about a car service pickup for the show and song length, but she seemed to be stalling and I couldn’t get any facts. Then, suddenly, the appearance date itself was in flux. Still, I hung on through what was clearly a shell game as the publicist’s absence became more shrouded in increasingly odd and inchoate excuses: His cat was in the emergency room—for two days. Then his sister apparently broke out with a bad case of cancer and he had to fly to her.

  “That’s awful,” I said to the assistant, feeling suddenly small and shallow and guilty. “What kind of cancer?”

  “Liver.”

  “Come again?”

  “Liver.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I joke about something like that?”

  “You wouldn’t. It’s not funny. Nothing about this is funny.”

  “Okay, Sam, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Wait a minute,” I jumped in. Then, “Could you say it one more time?”

  “Say what?”

  “The kind of cancer.”

  “Liver.”

  “Thank you.”

  The universe was yelling at me.

  The excuses were dubious at best, but no decent person with half a heart could question sick cats and cancerous sisters. I was starving, the dinner bell was clanging, liver was on the table, and it was too late to change entrées. I had no choice but to remain in New York with infant and nanny—stuck, stymied, and cuffed, but clinging. Surely I’d not been sent there for nothing.

  Who would possibly go that far in lieu of honesty or accountability?

  Two nerve-wracking, pointless days later, I finally called Joy Behar, one of the cohosts of the show, and asked if she knew any particulars. She was an old friend and did some checking and called me back and said, kindly, “Sam, you are not scheduled to be on the show. An appearance was discussed but never set and we are solidly booked. We’d love to have you another time.”

  I realized in that moment that the publicist was a fellow liver smotherer. He had tried to book me and had gotten close enough to believe it would come together in time so that I would never know there’d been a glitch. And when it didn’t, there was nothing for him to do but flee.

  I flew back to Los Angeles and shaved my head.

  Sometimes a hairstyle change wasn’t enough. During a particularly liverish time in my life, I once went to a prominent cosmetic surgeon for a new nose, gargantuan and angular with a Roman bump at the bridge and devious alignment that suggested a former boxing career. I love big noses. I think they’re sexy and rugged. The surgeon looked at me cross-eyed and explained he’d have to graft it from pieces of my femur.

  “No problem,” I said, “I’m free Tuesday.” He politely asked me to leave.

  I’ve never once looked at the menu of life and said, “I’ll have the liver,” and yet I nearly salivated when my enthusiastic and trusted friend Rhonda innocently set up an opportunity in Florida for me to pitch my screenplay to a suspiciously “wiseguy” shipping magnate for financing.

  There is nothing about the previous sentence after the word “opportunity” that sounds like a good idea. Beginning with Florida. Nevertheless . . .

  I took my longtime pianist and musical soul mate, Todd Schroeder, and my producer, Effie Brown, with me, telling them that before we pitched the movie, we had to attend the magnate’s daughter’s thirteenth birthday ball, as I had agreed to sing as a favor, even though it was a job I would not have done for money. I shared that he’d asked me to invite Selena Gomez. “And could you get Justin Bieber too?” he’d thrown in. “I’ll pay a hundred grand.” I didn’t know Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber but I knew people who knew people who knew their people and I actually made calls.

  That was when I’d first fired up the skillet.

  The party was held in the ballroom of a chain hotel, which was decorated in Art Nouveau Ongepotchket, in keeping with the Florida aesthetic: If it’s really shiny, it must be expensive. The place was overrun with rich, entitled, and already cosmetically altered teenagers, and three hundred or so relatives and friends, who were dressed to compete with the decor.

  I was the warm-up act for the birthday daughter’s musical debut, and I barely got off the stage before a taped explosive introduction reminiscent of the 2001: A Space Odyssey theme heralded the entrance of the plain, blank girl, who was incredibly thin and somehow paunchy at the same time. It was her slump, I think—like a double-shift waitress at an all-night diner. A rhythmic pop track blasted at a thousand decibels and she sang-ish a song especially written and produced and coached by a team of Top 40 hit makers.

  Inappropriately underclad teenage backup dancers strutted and licked their teeth between each lip-synched phrase. Strobe lights blinked and wind machines blew back their weaves. The three-minute spectacle had cumulatively cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet the little darling evoked an attitude that said, “Doing this full-out would make me really really supertired.” On the final musical cutoff and provocative pose, I joined the screaming crowd with simulated enthusiasm, and the shipping magnate shrugged as if to say, “Whaddaya gonna do?”

  The evening ended with his standing in the ballroom vestibule surrounded by dusty plastic palm trees and ferns, pointing at his ex-wife as if casting a pox, and screaming, “You’re a whore!!” Then he threw his hands to the heavens and bellowed, “You’re killing my mama!!” before storming away. Mama, all of four feet six inches, hovered near the bar, uncomfortably spangled for the occasion, and I sensed she’d rather have been in a black kerchief, hunched over a wood-burning stove, stirring rabbit ragù with a stick. She didn’t speak a word of English, but she got the general idea.

  The next morning, Todd, Effie, and I arrived at the magnate’s house to pitch the movie as planned, and pretended nothing odd had happened the night before. He lived in a luxuriously tasteless McMansion, complete with Venetian-themed muraled, double-storied ceilings, mismatched imported marble, and ostentatious gold-leafed everything. It was like Versace and Napoleon had teamed up for a garage sale. There were Roman busts and glass mosaics that, if you looked closely, might have borne the likeness of
our host. The hallways were lined with framed photos of Al Capone and James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, and The Godfather lobby posters—the kind of characters, real and fictional, who he was rehearsing to be—all underscored by the gurgle of countless gasping, peeing cherub fountains. It was all too much.

  Part of me was afraid he would say yes and that I would have to see him and his horrible house again. But I wanted my movie made and, looking through the rose-colored Murano vase that sat between us, I decided that our shipping magnate was a sentimental fool, smitten with his vacuous daughter and old-country mama, whom his whore of an ex-wife was trying to kill.

  Add pancetta, cipollini onions, and stir.

  I pitched and sang and clutched and shucked and jived and hoped. Todd was strong support and Effie was on fire, spouting numbers and locations and Sundance deadlines. I noticed our host never looked her in the eye. After two hours, he saw us out with a handshake and a smile that shone like the gold chain on his exposed chest.

  The following days brought a multitude of questions, not about the movie but about Effie, a fiercely intelligent African-American woman with exceptional credits. Finally, he decided to pass, choosing to invest in his daughter’s singing career instead. We both knew there would never be enough. I also suspected that the real reason for his pass was Effie, the triple threat: Woman, Black, Smart.

  Ix-nay on the ack-blay oman-way. Don Vito Corleone would never approve.

  I wouldn’t consider replacing her and he wasn’t the kind of person I would ever want to be in business with. Plus his house was stupid.

  Of the vast variety of recipes in my Joy of Cooking Liver cookbook, my biggest glob of personal liver and my greatest attempts to cover it up would undoubtedly be my alcoholism. Alcoholism didn’t happen to me. No one led me down a garden path or lied to me or bamboozled me into becoming a pathetic drunk. My drinking was a seemingly calculated, entirely self-motivated attempt to cover my liverish life with distilled, fermented, and inebriating bacon and onions. Then my drinking became the liver and my life became the bacon and onions. And then it all stewed to the point of an unrecognizable goulash of delusional gook.

  I told myself if I could run five miles in the morning and never drink before a show, I couldn’t possibly be an alcoholic. When that criteria couldn’t be met, I simply stopped running and stopped doing shows.

  Pesky near-death stories kept popping up: Like the night I supposedly stepped onto a Juliet balcony on the twenty-seventh floor of a hotel and was climbing over the railing until Danny woke up and pulled me back. Or the time I came perilously close to falling onto a subway track seconds before the train rushed by and Danny pulled me back. Or the time I methodically filled a sink with toiletries, including a blowing blow-dryer, and was about to turn the water on until Danny pulled me back. Ironically, I had no memory of any of these dramatic stories, and Danny was curiously the only witness in each one. How convenient. I’d seen Gaslight. But it would take more than a few slightly unbelievable tales to convince me I was in trouble.

  Or less.

  It was finally the obese, inescapable burden of sadness—such a simple word—that finally led to acknowledging and treating my malady. And the beginning of my deliverance from liver. At one of my first 12-step meetings, a guy I’d never seen before said “I hoped you’d end up here” and described an alcohol-fueled night of decadent debauchery a hundred years ago, of which I had no memory. I wondered how many others there were. People I passed on the street, in grocery stores, at the dry cleaner, Starbucks. Intimate strangers.

  Denial ain’t a river in Egypt was an apt, albeit corny slogan. So was Wherever you go, there you are, though I wasn’t sure if it applied if you actually had no idea where you’d been.

  My name is Sam and I’m a liverholic.

  And acid reflux, like hangovers and hindsight, is twenty-twenty.

  • • •

  Liver or not liver? That is the question. Nearly all of the successful projects and relationships in my life are the result of long-term trust, high hopes, and steadfast grit. So, does the wisdom lie in pressing on or putting the dog to sleep and out of its misery? It is the rut that agonizes. But I can’t expect to vanquish the pain of loss unless I also forfeit the thrill of hope, and it’s not worth the trade. In the end, I would rather be bruised than cynical, trusting than suspicious, disappointed than apathetic.

  At this time in my life, however, there is less liver than ever before. Part of it is the wisdom of time and experience. Part of it is a sense of priority that comes with sobriety and parenting. Part of it is sheer exhaustion. And part of it is the growing consciousness that reality is okay, that fixating on a specific goal with inflexible criteria prohibits me from other, much larger possibilities unavailable to the myopic eye.

  More and more, I can smell the Big L at a mile and even when underemployed, my liver litmus comes with a shorter clock. For instance, I get out as soon as anyone asks me to invite Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber to a debutante ball in Florida. Liver and learn.

  Also, the stakes are no longer as extreme. They fall more often into the category of things like . . . appliances.

  My washer and dryer are liver. I know it now. In a little more time, I will donate them to my pediatrician’s outer office, where they can be made into stunningly, internally lit architectural aquariums, complete with a 16-Hour Fresh Hold Option with Dynamic Venting Technology. I will include the manual in the event they want to know what that is, in any of a number of languages except Korean.

  Liver is liver. But sometimes I will still hold out for paté.

  8. Crash Course

  By the time I got to the hospital in Amsterdam, Jerry had already died.

  He’d been my director, writer, mentor, friend, and father figure since I was nineteen, and now, nearly ten years later, I’d rushed to catch the next plane from Los Angeles upon receiving the call that “it’s almost time.” But I had missed the moment.

  • • •

  For the two years before I met Jerry, UCLA had given me opportunities that far exceeded anything remotely scholastic. When I was a sophomore, my housemate and best friend, Bruce Newberg, and I were so enthusiastic, obstinate and unrelenting about getting to write and produce our new musical—Hurry! Hurry! Hollywood!—that the dean of fine arts at UCLA actually allowed us our ambitious request in lieu of taking courses. I was given fake classes and fake grades and never met a professor. It was like they knew I was never going to graduate—or at least they hoped I would leave after I had exhausted everything the music and theater departments had to offer.

  I thought this was how show business and, well, life worked: you insisted on what you knew would be wonderful and people let you do it. I couldn’t imagine getting a finer education or anything more from UCLA unless they named a campus theater after me, so immediately after the curtain fell on our show, I left college to pursue my own course.

  I had other, bigger projects to beg for and get.

  I found family in a gang of young singers and comedians at a crusty Santa Monica club called the Horn, where we clumsily chiseled and hunted out our stage personalities, experimenting with new material and singing backup for one another in multiple sets, four or five nights a week, for twenty-five dollars a night and free drinks.

  The Horn was a dingy and dreadful and depressing place. Everything was painted black: the walls, floors, tables, chairs, bar, the stage. Not a chic, shimmery, lacquered black—a dull, gloomy black that made you want to drink the moment you stepped in. The only reason the place stayed open was that between the black everything and the dimmest murmur of lighting, no one was ever sure if the people they saw there were actually there. Hence, it was a magnet for a low-life clientele of barflies and cheating out-of-towners.

  What the Horn lacked in charm it made up for as a stomping ground for talented, young hopefuls—none of whom were getting anywhere. After I’d played there a few months, a stunningly beautiful cocktail waitress named Paris Vaughan told me, “My mo
ther would love you. I’m going to bring her to see you.” The following week, she did.

  “Hi, I’m Paris’s mom, Sarah.”

  I did the math. Paris Vaughan . . . Sarah. Vaughan. Oh. My. God.

  If I’d known beforehand that she was the plump woman in the silk caftan and turbulently crested wave-shaped wig, I doubt I could have sung. My dad had all her records and I’d grown up singing along, emulating her phrasing, tone, vibrato.

  “That was fuckin’ real, white boy,” she said, and wrapped me in her arms. She hadn’t been called “Sassy” for nothing. Sarah Vaughan liked me, and I was confident a pat on the back from such a legend would mean immediate stardom.

  Not so much.

  Record producers, A&R guys, and Vegas bookers occasionally came slumming, but glimmers of possibilities were always snuffed out like the messy tabletop candles in cheap red glass jars after last call.

  My father recognized and related to my fierce drive and, in a remarkable act of true belief, he decided I needed professional help (the show kind, not therapeutic, though it could have gone either way). If success in this business was what I craved, then my father wanted to help me get it faster, and the encouragement he was still unable to verbalize was voiced through action.

  By day, I worked part-time in the office of City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, and also in the office of television producer Pierre Cossette, and learned that politics was show business and show business was politics. During a visit from Oklahoma, my dad requested a meeting with Pierre and his associate Dee, and asked them who the best person would be to guide my particular talents.

  They gave him one name: Jerry Blatt.

  Jerry had been with Bette Midler since her bathhouse beginnings and had basically cocreated her Divine Miss M persona with her. He wrote and then directed all of her shows—and not just the funny stuff. The stuff that made you hurt. They said he would “get me.”