by Sam Harris
“Mr. Harris, you’ll be receiving an F for this assignment and there are no new books issued for free without turning in the old one,” she rattled.
“But I don’t have the old one,” I said. “Yesterday—”
“Then no new book unless you have the money!” she clipped.
“I don’t have any money,” I stammered, beginning to break.
“Then you don’t get a new book! Dummy row. Now.”
I started to get up, unable to argue anymore. I knew I was to blame for everything and the dummy row was an exile much more lenient than I deserved.
“Mrs. Sparks,” came a voice from the back of the room. It was Teri Mullins. “Sam’s house burned down yesterday and his homework and book were in it.”
Everyone waited to see if Mrs. Sparks would back down. She was famous for not doing so. After a moment, she pulled a ring of skeleton keys from her desk drawer and unlocked an ancient cabinet, snatching out a new book. She practically slammed it on my desk without a word and started the day’s equation. It was as close to an act of compassion as anyone had ever witnessed her commit.
That afternoon I joined my family at what was left of our house. Friends with shovels were digging through the wreckage, piling it to be hauled away. There was nothing whole left of my stuff. A fragment of furniture here, a melted cup there. Then I saw the strangest thing: a blue spiral notebook, charred on one edge but intact, glossy, peering from the wet black ash. I plucked it out and opened it. It was a report I’d written five years ago titled “What I Did This Summer” in which I told the story of our first house burning down. I couldn’t believe it was true. The only thing of mine that had survived this fire was my schoolboy’s account of the first one.
I flashed on a story my Memo had told me: In the early 1920s, she, her husband, Sam, and baby boy, Darrell, lived in a tiny wooden house on the plains of Texas. A tornado came and they took refuge in the cellar. Upon emerging, they found their house was completely gone, with no sign of it having ever stood. The small leather-stringed purse that contained all of their savings, fifty dollars, had flown away with the rest of their possessions.
They walked during the day and camped out at night, receiving blankets and food from generous but poverty-stricken residents as they traveled on their way to a new life with no real destination. On the third day, in the middle of a vast field, my grandmother happened to look down, and before her lay the tiny leather purse. It was the kind of miracle that seemed impossible, not even fictionally believable, and though my Memo had never told a lie, I’d questioned her honesty.
As I stared at the fourth-grade report on the first fire, the only surviving remnant of my room, I knew that my grandmother’s story was true. And I knew I wasn’t to blame for this fire any more than I was for the first. Bad things happen to good people sometimes. I tucked the singed pages into my jeans and filled a small plastic bag with ashes that had once been my house.
The next day I walked into Mrs. Sparks’s room and placed the bag of ashes on her desk in front of the entire class.
“Here’s my old book,” I said, matter-of-factly, “for your records.”
And I took my seat for class.
11. Comfort Food
“They’re blowing up New York!” shouted the voice, screened on the answering machine. “Pick up! Pick up!”
This was the third time the phone had rung, unanswered, at the ungodly hour of 6:00 a.m. I’d slept on an inflatable mattress, the only piece of furniture, not even really furniture, in our new house in Los Angeles, where I’d flown the day before after eight years of living in my beloved New York City.
I dragged myself up the stairs, certain that if anyone had called three times at that hour, someone must be dead. That was more true than I could have possibly imagined.
It was Liza, hysterically sobbing, and I grabbed the phone in a daze.
“What’s wrong?”
“Turn on the TV. They’re blowing up New York!”
It was just after 9:00 in New York, an ungodly hour for Liza, and I tried to make sense of the confusion. Liza kept her bedroom television on twenty-four hours a day and I thought perhaps she woke up to The Towering Inferno on Turner Classic Movies and thought it was real.
“Calm down. Take a breath. What are you talking about?” I muttered, switching on the tiny kitchen television, which, in partnership with a few pots and pans and some paper plates, were the only articles in my possession before the moving trucks were to arrive in the next few days.
And I saw it: the Twin Towers were both hemorrhaging fire and smoke and Liza screamed that two planes had rocketed into the buildings and it was an attack and the end of the world. We watched in silence forever and when the first building crumbled in a cloud of gray dust, done, gone, we joined hundreds of millions of others in a collective unspeakable gasp that shattered everything we ever knew.
• • •
A few months prior, Danny and I had decided to move to Los Angeles. For some time, Danny had expressed a desire to try the West Coast, but I hadn’t been interested. Now, after doing eight shows a week for eight years with barely a break, I needed a change, maybe explore more TV and film, something new. Plus I was turning forty. I’d become depressed and isolated, and when we had both been cast in a Los Angeles production of Hair in June, it had become a beacon of possibilities—and a temporary respite from my alcohol intake, which was accelerating by the bottle. I was certain a move across the country would change my course and, subconsciously, my drinking. Having sung the Act One closer in Hair while fully frontally nude in a spotlight for three minutes, anything was possible.
We’d given up our fancy brownstone apartment on the Upper West Side two weeks before. Danny had driven with the dogs, Zach and Emma, and dashed to a corporate gig in Las Vegas while I remained in New York, staying at Liza’s Upper East Side apartment, to musically supervise her appearance on Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration at Madison Square Garden.
She’d been asked to sing Jackson’s “You Are Not Alone” for two performances, each to be filmed and then edited into one special. The first was set for September 7 and the second, September 10. I was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles the next day at 9:00 a.m. on September 11.
The night of the first performance, backstage was aglitter with superstars who’d been invited to sing—an ever-joyous Luther Vandross, a skeletally thin Whitney Houston, Usher, Gloria Estefan, Marc Anthony, Britney Spears, and a host of others who were there to honor Michael, all leading to a performance by the legend himself.
Michael Jackson was forever pushing Elizabeth Taylor in a wheelchair throughout the bowels of the forum, as if they were kids at Coney Island. “Here we go,” he would squeal in his high-pitched breathy voice, pushing and then releasing Elizabeth’s chair as she whizzed down the hall, raising her arms in the air and squealing in delight.
When it was time, a stage manager knocked on Liza’s dressing room door and led us to the wings, where I kissed her on the cheek and whispered our traditional good-luck phrase, “Take no prisoners!” I started off and she grabbed my arm and said, “Really listen. I’m singing this for you.” And then I hurried to the director’s trailer to watch her camera coverage.
Despite the lineup of young hip-hop and pop stars, the reaction to Liza’s introduction was thunderous. She took the stage uncharacteristically timidly, as if not in the element she typically thrived. The music began and my heart pounded, as unsure of her vocal entrance as she seemed to be. Then she sang, low and slow. She applied the lesson she’d taught to me whenever I go outside myself: Listen to the lyric. The words will always give you a point of view and tell you what to do. Then I remembered she’d said “I’m singing this for you,” and though I’d been listening to the lyrics for weeks, I heard them in a new way.
Another day has gone and I’m still all alone
How could this be, you’re not here with me
Someone tell me why did you have to go
And l
eave my world so cold.
At first it was fragile and introspective, but as the song gained in strength, so did she. It suddenly hit me that this chapter of my life with Liza would be ending soon with my move to California. A gospel choir entered and supported her as she promised:
You are not alone, I am here with you.
Though you’re far away, I am here to stay.
I realized that I was getting a very private good-bye at Madison Square Garden, witnessed by an audience of thousands.
She brought down the house, and it was clear that Michael was emotionally destroyed, even behind sunglasses that covered most of his kabuki-made-up face.
Instead of attending the after-party, Liza and I went back to her apartment, exhausted but triumphant. She got in her Luigi-logoed nightshirt and worn red fluffy slippers, and I stepped into a cozy pair of sweatpants that predated the Clinton administration. I thought about all the times Liza and I had come from some event, some show, some backstage where, moments before, people had been clamoring for one of us, and instead of swimming in the adulation, we’d gotten a burger or gone to a midnight movie and gobbled popcorn and Raisinets until we were sated.
Somewhere in the middle of the late-night airing of From Here to Eternity, I pushed mute on the remote and turned to her and said, “You were great tonight. You did it. And you don’t need me for the second show. I really want to go to Los Angeles and start my new life and I love you but it’s time for me to go.”
It was now after midnight, on September 8.
We’d seen each other nearly every day for years, and the depth and complexity of our friendship had even at times become a threat to my relationship with Danny. He was my partner, my best friend, the person I’d committed to spending my life with. But the connection between Liza and me was like a private refuge to which no one gained entry and would take its toll on anyone.
I’d kept our moving to Los Angeles a secret from Liza until just a month before, not wanting to ignite any more emotion than was necessary and knowing that we would both deal better with less time to talk about it. But my saying I wanted to leave early suddenly made the move real. We’d had our two-week, live-in bon voyage party and now it was all ending.
“I understand. You need to go,” she said.
I changed my flight to September 10 and as I boarded the plane early that morning, I checked my last e-mail as an official New Yorker and saw that Patti LuPone had written me a send-off message:
Sam — You are making a mistake. You don’t belong in Los Angeles. It is a horrible awful place and your home and heart are New York. You are a traitor and I am not speaking to you ever again.
I knew she was only joking about not speaking to me, but the rest of her e-mail was dead serious.
• • •
Only twenty-four hours later, New York was burning and I had deserted her. Danny was stuck, imprisoned in Las Vegas, because all planes were grounded indefinitely. No rental cars were available and buses were completely booked. I knew he would find a way to our new home even if he had to hitchhike.
Phone reception was sporadic but I was able to learn that everyone I knew was safe, except for a neighbor friend, Laura Rockefeller, who’d never been to the Twin Towers until that morning, for a meeting at Windows on the World. Her absence was discovered when her dog, JT (named for James Taylor), was heard barking incessantly after his mistress did not return home.
I told my mother that my friend Diann Duthie had watched the second plane crash into the building, and she replied, “So did your father.” Suddenly I found myself screaming at my mother, “Not on TV! She watched it plunge into the tower from her window at 30 Rock! She saw it for real!”
The news played an endless loop of the planes, the collapse, the thousands of ash-covered citizens catatonically ambling north like tie-clad, high-heel-wearing zombies. My New York was unrecognizable. No horns honking. No natives shrieking. No trains rumbling. All oddly set against an untroubled, powder-blue sky, except for the impertinent interruption of tentacled, murky smoke that hovered over the south end of the island like a memory and a prophecy.
Three thousand miles away, I was desperate for community. That night I went to the house of my old friend Kelley Baker, where a group of mostly showbiz college cohorts were ostensibly meeting to find the same sense of community. When I arrived, they were sipping wine and noshing from a platter of cheeses and carpaccio and flaxseed crackers, bemoaning that the world was forever changed and nothing would ever be the same.
“Well, Disneyland will be next,” said one. “It symbolizes the American dream.”
“I think it will be the studios,” said another. “The Hollywood factory is seen as the center of American propaganda.”
“Los Angeles is such a target. It’s the center of how the world sees the United States and it’s everything fanatical Muslims hate.”
Suddenly a voice fired from inside my throat that surprised even me. “Los Angeles is the center of nothing!” I screamed. “It’s not a financial center, it’s not a military center, it’s not even a fucking fashion center! It’s like you all just watched a screener of a really scary movie and you’re discussing the sequel! You’re drinking your pinot and wiping Brie from the corners of your mouth, moaning about nothing being the same. Nothing has changed for you at all ! You live in a fucking vacuum and you have no idea what’s going on! Yes, this happened to Americans, but it happened more to New Yorkers.”
Much to my surprise, my college friends did not take offense. They sat mute, some even understanding, and the only sound was my quickened breath, as if I’d just run a race. Kelley put her arm around me and led me outside, where I could escape for fresh air, fresh anything. I sobbed in her arms for a while and then drove back to my new house and slept, didn’t sleep, on the inflated mattress with our dogs, who seemed to understand that something very sad was happening.
They were New Yorkers too.
Danny got home by sneaking on a Greyhound bus and I picked him up at the downtown station. The passengers filed off in a single line, respectfully, kindly, hollow. I began to realize I was wrong. In ways beyond the smallness of my judgment, something, indeed, had changed for everyone.
Danny and I talked. We cried. The click-clack of Zach’s and Emma’s toenails on the wooden floor echoed against the blank white Spanish stucco walls. We knew that it would be weeks before the moving vans would make it through state-by-state security checkpoints. Instead of our home in the hills being a clean slate for a new life, it just seemed barren. I couldn’t even muster a real grocery shop. That would mean planning ahead. We couldn’t delight in or even imagine a future. Where would we put the sofa? Who gave a fuck? What color should the kitchen be? How about black?
On the first Sunday after 9/11, Danny and I wanted to find someplace of worship where we could mourn with others who needed the comfort of collective citizenry. With no criteria for religion or denomination, we drove until we spotted a small, storefront chapel, crowded with polite and shell-shocked strangers—brethren of a common heart, silently engrossed in the solace of free donuts and coffee. We squeezed into a pew as the robed preacher entered and solemnly acknowledged the congregation with a nod. He would hold the staff to guide us. I took Danny’s hand and we breathed deeply, desperate for a shred of relief.
“Welcome,” he said, and took a sip of water. “This is a time when we are asking many questions. Why? How? Is it over? What does it mean?” He took another sip of water. “Last night when I was preparing today’s sermon, I knew there were feelings that needed to be addressed and answers that needed to be provided. But then I thought”—he paused for another drink of water—“the best thing we can do at a time like this is move on with as much normalcy as possible. So I’ve chosen to do the sermon that I had already scheduled for this Sunday . . . Please open your Bibles to—”
I turned to Danny. “I can’t do this. Let’s get out of—” And he was already gone.
In the next days, our lives
were as unchanging as the footage that played on every channel at every hour. Danny was glued to the television, somehow thinking something might make sense if he saw the buildings fall one more time. I couldn’t watch anymore, or ever again. We both knew that if our move had been scheduled for after September 11, we never would have left. We would have stayed in New York to be New Yorkers. Danny would have been one of those Samaritans who went to Ground Zero to dig and search only to be turned away.
Across the country, that impulse just made him feel impotent and purposeless. Our hands and hearts were tied and we were of no use to anyone. Any attempt to curb, moderate, or control alcohol intake would have been a futile and stupid choice.
Bill Wilson himself would have poured me a drink.
A haunting, cloying voice in my head suggested that if we hadn’t deserted our city, none of this would have happened. It was my fault—guilt and ego on a monumental level.
Patti LuPone e-mailed me: “I guess you were right,” and it cut through me like a knife.
Then Oprah Winfrey’s office called. She was doing a show called “Music to Heal Our Hearts” and would I please fly to Chicago the next day to sing? I’d performed on her show a few years before and she’d been everything I had wanted her to be. It was no surprise that, as perhaps the single most visibly powerful and reliable moral leader in our country at that moment, of course she was taking action. Of course she wanted to begin the healing. The surprise was that she would call me. Surely there were much bigger stars who would lend their voices to her aim.
My usual thoughts that analyze the career advantages of this kind of exposure were nowhere to be found. I was getting a chance to do something. Something that would give me a sense of service, of being a part of a solution, of using my gifts to make others feel better. Make me feel better.
The next morning my pianist, Todd Schroeder, came to my house and a taxi arrived to take us to the airport.
“What are you thinking of singing?” Todd asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “We’ll talk about it on the plane.”
