Ham

by Sam Harris

  The Briscoes set a date, and I arranged for excellent seats at the show and dinner at a popular actors’ hangout for after. I was excited. “Hometown boy does good” is, after all, the ultimate showbiz story.

  It was the musical’s second season, and patrons previously unable to secure tickets were now coming in droves. On the night that the Briscoes attended, the audience was, thankfully, low on the Japanese tourists who would sometimes fill nearly every seat and mostly just gape, smiling fixedly and hunching forward as if they were expecting something really funny to happen . . . that never seemed to happen. They didn’t get any of the brilliant Mel Brooks inside jokes, and it was like playing high comedy to an oil painting of an audience. An anime oil painting of an audience. But on this night the house had been exceptional, laughing at every ridiculous gag, and I felt particularly on. As soon as the curtain rang down, I dashed up the stairs to my dressing room and haphazardly removed my makeup, changed into street clothes, and rushed back down to the stage door of the St. James to meet the Briscoes.

  There they were. Briscoe looked exactly the same—maybe a few more pounds around the gut, but the same roseate face and swiped hair and that odd sea-leaning thing. Marva looked the same too. Squat and round and happy-happy-happy, with her uncommonly turned-up nose, bright green eye shadow from lashes to brow, and a vibrantly red-framed open mouth, wide as a yawning cat. They just stood there, smiling from ear to ear, like the Japanese audience I thought I’d avoided. They could have been a photograph but for Briscoe’s oscillation, and I found myself swaying with him, slightly, slowly, side to side, just to keep eye contact. In the silence, I could already imagine the kudos and prepared myself for humility.

  “How ya doin’?” they both finally said, practically in unison.

  “Uh, fine . . . I’m so happy to see you,” I said, as I wiped my face with a towel, still a bit sweaty from the heat of the show.

  “Ya look great,” said Briscoe.

  “Thin,” Marva added, as if this was a bad thing.

  I suppressed my need to ask, So did you enjoy the show? . . . And how about me?

  Instead, I brought them into the magic land of backstage, where anyone, particularly anyone with any theatre in their blood, gets that undeniable euphoria of the inner sanctum where civilians are rarely admitted.

  I waited for a response as they entered the hallowed vestibule, where the walls and pipes had been painted layer over layer in backstage beige, like rings on an ancient oak, marking the seasons of George M. Cohan, Beatrice Lillie, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Gertrude Lawrence, and landmark shows including Oklahoma!, The King and I, and Hello, Dolly!

  “Hmm . . .” was all I got.

  I was sure their silence was evidence of their starry-eyed state. I took them on a tour, showed them the set.

  “The wings are smaller than I thought they’d be,” Briscoe observed.

  I walked them onto the stage where the ghost light had just been set and they could view the ornate house from the actor’s perspective.

  “I can’t believe you have to walk up stairs to get to your dressing room? What a pain in the ass,” was all Briscoe could muster. “When I was at Oklahoma University, it was much better than this. Bigger. More up to date. This place is O-L-D-E.”

  Marva nodded in agreement. They were clearly disappointed. Neither of them ever mentioned my performance. They never even acknowledged I’d been in the show. Or that there was a show, for that matter.

  I found myself seeking, no, begging, for Briscoe’s approval. I introduced him to the cast and crew, all of whom said lovely things about me. The praise prompted nothing. Nada. Ignored. We walked out of the stage door, where Marva commented on a chorus boy’s ass. I signed a few autographs, apparently nothing unusual for them. We went into the restaurant where the owner, Angus, greeted me with a hug and walked us to a primo table I’d reserved. Zero. We ran into recognizable stars of other shows. Zip. I dropped so many names we were lucky the floor didn’t give way. I tried everything. Every desperate trick from my Actor’s Kama Sutra Multi-Positions to Pleasure and Dazzle Relatives and Hometown Visitors handbook. Zilch.

  Throughout dinner, the Briscoes talked nonstop about their trip, including several incredible shows and performances they’d seen on Broadway, and details of their lives at the shoe store they now owned in Tennessee.

  “The Earth Shoe is going to make a comeback. Mark my words!”

  I finally stopped digging and sat back and noshed on seared tuna, attentively nodding and being a good host.

  But my mind darted and fished for some possible explanation: maybe my flamboyance as Carmen Ghia really had scared them. Or perhaps Briscoe felt jealous, or somehow mocked, or completely outside the very profession he was supposed to have represented to me as a student, and his wife just followed suit to protect him. Or maybe they were just overwhelmed by my whole world and didn’t know what to say.

  I flashed back to the day I’d been so unsupportive of Briscoe performing in our high school production of Bye Bye Birdie twentysomething years prior—the day I’d snatched the last remains of his original identity and morally relegated him to the sentimental but inferior role of the wind beneath my wings.

  It occurred to me that if I had been more aware, less brutal, perhaps Briscoe would have heaped on the accolades and shown the pride that every student, no matter how old, seeks from past teachers. But I hadn’t been. I’d cheated him out of much more than a performance—and now, unconsciously or otherwise, he was cheating me out of much more than mine.

  I never learned the real reason. I never asked. At first I was too hurt. Then too angry. Ultimately, impervious. But one thing I know for sure: old actors never die—we just teeter a bit and wait for our comeback.

  Like Earth Shoes.

  13. “I Know, Baby. I Know.”

  I am eight years old, playing tag in the searing, gummy heat of summer. One of the older kids from the next block interrupts to introduce us to another kind of game, “only a lot more fun,” he swears. He asks who wants to be first and I volunteer. He hands me a brown paper bag and tells me to put it over my mouth and breathe in and out as deeply as I can. After half a minute or so, he tells me to spin around as I continue to breathe into the paper bag.

  I go faster and faster and I start to get light-headed. My lips tingle. I can feel the blood drain from my cheeks as rapture engulfs me. I am released from the bondage of my eight years on earth. I am free.

  The next thing I remember is opening my eyes to find a circle of my friends’ spinning, concerned faces staring down at me. Something wet trickles from my forehead and down the side of my face. I touch it and see that it is blood. I had passed out and hit my head on a rock.

  The older kid leans in. “Hey, Sam, are you okay?”

  “Let’s do it again!” I say.

  Five years later, summers remained thick and sticky but the games had changed. My second cousin Jay was coming to visit for a week, taking a bus from Texas, and I was elated. I’d only met him a few times, and even as a small child he’d possessed an air of enviable danger—my polar opposite. He was only nine months older than I, but when he arrived, his shoulder-length hair, worn jeans, and weathered backpack suggested he was much older, maybe a ripe fifteen. And after a thirteen-hour bus ride, “ripe” was the accurate word. The pungent consequence of his travel would have disgusted me coming from almost anyone else, but it just made him more fascinating. Once we were alone in my room, he impressed me by puffing his cheeks out, forcing air up into his closed mouth, then opening it to emit a trace of cigarette smoke still left in his lungs. I hated smoking, I hated that my parents smoked, but on Jay it was meritorious.

  On Friday night, my parents went out for a rare date-night and Jay and I put my eight-year-old brother to bed. I anticipated the excitement of staying up late to watch Love, American Style and watch Jay smoke. But as soon as we were alone, he asked, “What kind of likker do your folks have?” Clearly, he had a different plan in mind. Ja
y had the supercool distinction of being the son of a man who worked at Seagram’s, which qualified him as an expert in all things alcohol. With equal parts fear and excitement, I led him to our newly transformed basement, which now boasted bright red shag carpeting, veneer paneling on every wall, a yellow distressed-brick fireplace, and an ornately framed painting of Parisians in the rain. Tucked in the corner was a wet bar and an unlocked liquor cabinet. Jay’s eyes twinkled at the prospects.

  Something was going to happen.

  He pulled out bottles of all varieties: whiskey, bourbon, vodka, rum. He mixed a bit of each of them into a large plastic tumbler, added ice, and, after a quick jaunt upstairs to the refrigerator, a mixer of cherry Kool-Aid. “Try it,” he said, thrusting the tall glass toward me like Eve with an apple.

  “Are you really supposed to mix all those different kinds together?” I questioned. Jay looked at me, head cocked to the side, an eyebrow raised.

  “My dad works at Seagram’s,” he pointedly reminded me.

  Who could argue with that? I took a sip. The sweetness of the Kool-Aid cut the burning bite of the concoction, but the feeling was hot and hard, abrupt and arresting. Jay looked at me with wide-eyed promise, as if a key had been turned and an instant change was going to occur. It did. I took another sip and it trilled through my body like summer rain. Then another sip. Then a gulp.

  Within minutes, I was happier than I’d ever been. I was as cool as Jay. I acquired an ease and access to a Sam I’d only fantasized about. I grew courage and teeth and said “shit” and “damn” and wanted to say “fuck,” but that probably would have required heroin.

  Jay mixed another drink for me and one for him. And then another for me. He talked about girls and I nodded in agreement. The alcohol somehow allowed the freedom of my true self and the guise of my false self to coexist—like a magic elixir.

  I asked for another Kool-Aid cocktail and he suggested I hold off. Hold off? I knew from experience that if one of anything was good, two would be twice as good. And if two were twice as good . . .

  I made myself another. Jay declined.

  I walked to the front porch and placed my hands on the iron railing. The moon peered through tendrils of clouds, punctuated by stars. I stared out from the tiny hill on which our house was perched and found an introspection and perspective that I’d never known—so obvious but unavailable to me until this moment: my whole, giant, tiny world lay before me like a map of my life.

  Across the street were “The Woods,” where, the summer before, the neighborhood boys and I had found the wreckage of a car and placed its severed roof over a five-foot-deep hole we’d dug in the ground. We camouflaged it with leafy branches and made an entrance slide from an old pine tabletop. It was the perfect fort. On my own and as a surprise, I’d been inspired to drag a bag of cement through the brush on a piece of cardboard, mix it with water from the creek, which ran from nowhere to nowhere, and pour a paved patio just outside the entrance. After it hardened, I landscaped with manicured wildflowers indigenous to the area. The other boys hated it, but I was bossy and relentless, so it stood. They did, however, draw the line when I suggested running curtains around the perimeter of the car top.

  I gripped the porch railing and scanned the grove of snarled blackjack oaks, festooned with gingerbread cookie–shaped leaves. Other secrets were hidden within. The Woods was also the setting of my first sexual experiences with a boy, in that inaugural bloom of our youth: playful at first, mostly friction, then mutual masturbation, then more. After each time we vowed never to do it again, the dialogue always being the same: “It is wrong.” “It is sinful.” “We should not do this.” Until one of us would call the other and say, “My parents are gone for a couple of hours,” and we understood the code.

  Once, my accomplice had some sort of pimple on his penis and came to me, convinced that we must have syphilis or gonorrhea, which we’d learned about in a graphic, gruesome film shown in gym class. Somehow, we missed the part explaining that venereal diseases could only be acquired by having sex with someone who had one, and thought that it might just materialize from contact—especially sinful contact. The film’s lesson had been abstinence, not safe sex, so we were certain we would end up wandering pell-mell through the streets of Sand Springs, demented and blind, finally dying in an alley behind Dean’s Coney Island, where we’d survived on scraps of discarded chili dogs. This would be better than confessing our damnable tryst in exchange for antibiotics.

  After a few days, the pimple disappeared and we carried on.

  Having entered our teenage years, our encounters took on a different meaning; a different, prickling guilt. Especially for him, because he was definitely and completely into girls. It was confusing. All influences of authority—parents, teachers, God—said that premarital sex with a girl was a sin. But teenage hormones were raging and my partner in crime’s justification was that, with a guy, the perimeters seemed to be a little more vague. We knew it was wrong to be a fag, but we certainly weren’t fags! After all, there was no kissing allowed, though I attempted it many times. He would graciously pull away. He knew. And he was kind.

  Contemplatively drunk, I knew I had to get out of this place.

  I gazed farther beyond the woods to the lights of the baseball field and I flashed on my failed Little League tryouts.

  I had to get out of this place.

  My eyes wandered to the top of the hill beyond the woods, taking in the steeple of Broadway Baptist Church, and recalled the Sunday school teacher who told me the Holocaust was a myth.

  I had to get out of this place.

  Across and to the right was the practice field for the high school marching band, where I’d heard E. E. Bagley’s march “National Emblem” echo over the town nearly every morning of my life at 6:30 a.m. when my father was the band director, reminding me that he was in charge—and he had a theme song to prove it.

  I had to get out.

  I’d not yet heard the phrase “never mix, never worry” and apparently neither had cousin Jay. The map of my life was starting to spin and my stomach began to cry mutiny. I fixed my focus behind the practice field to the home of my best girlfriend, Teri Mullins, who was my accompanist every time I sang at anything for school.

  I staggered into the house and found the phone, stretching its long cord to the middle of the living room floor where I could sprawl. As I began to dial, each revolution of the rotary wheel spiraled in an infinite whirlpool . . . 2 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . What was Teri’s number? I’d dialed it a thousand times. Finally, I was able to complete the call and, thankfully, it was Teri who picked up.

  “I’m going to die,” I slurred calmly. “I am going to die in the next few minutes and I wanted to tell you I love you and you’re my best friend.”

  Teri immediately recognized my condition and I detected a slight titter of congratulations. She’d already tried alcohol, pot, and boys. Until now, we had only one of those things in common. “You’re not going to die,” she assured me.

  “But I want to,” I retorted, not sure if I was speaking as a result of my current emergency or in a more honest, general way.

  “You’re not going to die. And I love you too. Now go outside and get some air and I promise it will get better.”

  Jay helped me to my feet, as precarious as a newborn calf’s, and back out to the porch. I steadied myself on the railing overlooking the garden and did what I always did for clarity or escape:

  I sang.

  I slowly lifted my hands, acquired balance, and I sang.

  “The Star Spangled Banner.”

  At the top of my lungs.

  Jay warned that someone was going to call the police, but I was resolved to a big finish.

  O’er the land of the free!

  And the home of the brave!

  I waited for the applause in my head to reach its peak and then promptly threw up into the vincas. And then I threw up again. And again. Acidic to what I prayed was the last drop. Weakly, I lowered m
yself to the cool cement porch and closed my eyes, commanding the wretched sickness to disappear while clinging to the euphoria. I forced my heavy lids open to find june bugs dizzily penciling their shadows around the porch light, seemingly drunk as well. Suddenly, several blurry Jays entered the frame, looking down with more than a tinge of concern.

  “Hey, man, are you all right?”

  “Am I dead yet?” I replied.

  He undressed me and gently put me to bed, offering a trash can into which I would puke over the next hours, while he lay snoring in the twin bed a few feet away.

  The next morning I woke, my eyes poisoned and my head pounding out of rhythm with my throbbing pulse, like a drummer with a bum arm. My breath was raspy and rank and a thought worse than death pushed its way through my swollen brain: it was Saturday and I had flag girl practice.

  I was the drum major in our junior high band and had taken on the responsibility to choreograph the squad through the summer in preparation for the fall. Our latest routine was set to “Black Magic Woman,” and I had some seriously complicated, crowd-pleasing moves to teach. But I could hardly move myself.

  Rather than walk the endless mile to Squirrel Hollow Park for practice, I decided I would tell my mother the awful truth and she would let me go back to bed. It would be worth it. My father was gone for the day and I was grateful, certain my mom would be more sympathetic. Though the half-empty liquor bottles and vomit-covered vincas had already tipped her off, she let me go through the grueling act of confession, and then finally said, “Sam. I know.”

  I cried to her, swearing I would never drink again. She insisted I walk to practice anyway, reminding me that it was my responsibility and not the flag girls’ fault that I was a hopeless drunk. Then she tortured me. “And when you get back, I’ll make some chili hot dogs for you and Jay for lunch. Really spicy, meaty chili with beans. How does that sound?”

  I ran to the bathroom and vomited again. Then I showered to remove the stench of my transgression and went to twirl deliriously spinning, nausea-inducing flags.