He was happier than I’d seen him since we met.
10. Drilling Without Novocaine
“Mr. Harris,” roared the voice over the outdoor PA system. “Mr. Bill Harris. Your wife just called and your house is on fire.”
Mom was standing next to us, holding my five-year-old brother. She couldn’t have called. The townsfolk chuckled at the joke. We had gathered to watch the ribbon cutting for the new Sand Springs Airport, which was basically a paved strip in the middle of a thirsty field of cudweed and sand burrs. Fifteen minutes later, the voice came again: “Mr. Harris. Please go home. Your house is on fire.”
My father decided we’d better go.
As we drove toward our block, I could smell the smoke before I could see it. We arrived to find six fire trucks and twenty neighbors clustered on the street in front of our house. A heavy, peppery steam spiraled skyward and the remains of our house spit and stammered like the last stubborn kernels of popping corn. Everyone was so sorry. The rock structure of the house was standing, but what wasn’t burned was ruined by water and smoke damage. The fire had started in the basement from an electrical-wiring malfunction and gone up from there. My underground neighborhood productions would be over and my collection of Gene Kelly pictures was surely gone forever.
We sought comfort in Lot-A-Burgers, bought toothbrushes at a local store, and drove fifteen miles to Tulsa, where we stayed at the Camelot Inn: a big pink hotel complete with turrets, a massive iron gate, a moat, a drawbridge, and a swimming pool shaped like the top of a medieval spear. We’d lost the house but we were moving into a castle. A big pink castle. All we needed was someone on a purple unicorn to ride up and rescue us.
A week later, we moved into a small trailer home across the river on the outskirts of town. At first, we were a coalition of survivors—a family, hand in hand, bonded. “It’s just stuff,” my mother would say. “We’re all okay and it’s just stuff.” But the glass half-full soon evaporated and was shattered on the gravel drive that led to our mobile home.
At first I blamed the mounting tension on the trailer itself. The exterior was bad enough—metal-sheeted in a migrainey white. But the inside was a foulmouthed assault on the eyes, much too much to take in all at once: A tiny space with a vast sea of browns and more browns, matching harvest gold shag carpeting and pleated half-drapes, rudely interrupted by a pumpkin kitchenette and a dining area with a foldout table that featured built-in cup holders sized for beer cans, and framed by checkered, padded bench seats. I didn’t mind the individual trendy components. It was just that they were so condensed. Like walking into a swatchbook. Once, when my grandmother entered in a paisley caftan, I nearly went to the built-in knife block and gouged my eyes out.
It was also an assault on any sense of personal space. My brother and I shared a bedroom that was exactly the same size as the double bed inside it, so that you opened the door and climbed directly up onto the mattress like one of those blow-up bouncy houses at children’s parties. I figured it must have been dropped in before they attached the roof. We had no clothes so closet space was not an issue.
The thin walls, which could not even be considered fake wood paneling—more like a photograph of wood, with grooves cut in the laminate—were not nearly enough to muffle the accelerating arguments between my parents. As the weeks wore on, the Great Wall of China might not have done the job. Money, insurance, doubts, jealousies. The precariously stacked cinder blocks supporting our tin home became an appropriate metaphor for our family foundation.
I felt it my duty to do my part, to not make waves, and to be as strong and perfect as I could. At a dentist appointment for a cavity filling, in order to prove to myself and to my mother that I was tough and could handle any challenge, I declined the Novocaine before he drilled. The doctor insisted, but I was unrelenting. It was a filling, after all, not a root canal. He finally gave in, thinking I would cave when he began.
I found a focused spot on the wall, concentrating with all my might to block out the pain as the high-pitched buzzing drill invaded my mouth. The voices in my head played over and over: This is a test. For the next sixty seconds you will endure intense pain. In the event of a real emergency you will be prepared. This is only a test.
I didn’t give in.
I began to wear shoes and boots that were too small for my feet so that I would have a constant reminder that I was tougher than outside forces and I could block it out. At the end of the day, when my feet and toes were released from bondage, there was a surge of rapturous relief, a rush, a secret reward for suffering. Totally worth it.
I asked God for greater challenges to endure.
I should have been more specific.
• • •
Like every other year in Oklahoma, spring brought fields of dandelions, chiggers, and tornado season. One night, the sky grew dark with twisted spokes of low, smoky clouds. Then an angry rain came, heavy and unyielding. Though we all knew what it meant, Indian legend was that tornadoes flew over Sand Springs but never touched down. Still, basements and cellars were the routine, only this time we didn’t have a cellar or basement. Trailer homes don’t have cellars or basements. Memo was with us as we huddled around the TV set, adjusting the antennae to watch for weather warnings. The electricity went out. The tornado siren sounded. The rain pounded on the metal roof like a thousand machine guns. Then it stopped as if someone had turned off a switch.
Silence.
Then a series of sounds, as if instruments in an orchestra were being added, one by one:
The discordant wail of the faraway siren.
The crescendo of a slow, whooshing noise, as if heading toward a waterfall.
Then the low, tympanic rumble of an oncoming freight train.
Louder and closer. Closer and louder. Deafeningly louder.
Then it hit.
The trailer was slapped and kicked like a discarded Chef Boyardee can, tossing us about the tiny living room. Blown off the cinder blocks on both sides, but with the center ones remaining, we teeter-tottered up and down, side to side, as the furniture flew. In the strobe light flash of exploding electric lines, I saw a trailer roll, longways, outside our window. Hulking sheets of metal, entire sides of trailers took wing while my father held on to us with a strength greater than the force of God. Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
Stillness.
Silence.
The siren trumpeted the cyclone’s exit.
And the rain came again.
Tornadoes, like Baptists, travel in groups, and there was no time to wait for the next wave, so my father gathered us up to find shelter. Memo opened the screen door and it blew off its hinges, taking her with it a good ten feet. My father raced to her with my brother in his arms and scooped her to her feet. My mother grabbed my hand and, together, my family plodded through the rain and flood, knee deep, to a brick laundry facility a hundred yards away.
Inside the sturdy building, we joined other families, bleeding, crying, and in shock. The harsh fluorescent light sputtered on a woman with a great gushing wound on her forehead who refused to go to the hospital until she found her dog, which was probably somewhere in Oz by now.
My family was intact and unharmed, and I found myself disengaging, sort of floating above the crisis, observing the calamity all around me like a dream. It was as if I were invisible and had slipped into a book or movie without playing a part.
This is only a test.
The next day was sunny and breezeless and smiled with no accountability. And our family was united again. We were kinder, more available to one another and to everyone else. Together, with our neighbors, we scavenged through the debris, searching for clothes, photos, dolls—odds and ends and crumbs that could be salvaged of their lives. My tomboy girlfriend, Jonnie Tedford, and I rifled through the wreckage and would triumphantly hold up an unchipped cup, an unbroken picture frame, or a slightly bent tricycle to return to its grateful owner. Entire families were uprooted and destroyed and we were playing trea
sure hunt in the aftermath.
The night came, and we caught lightning bugs in a jam jar and used it as a lantern. Jonnie ripped the tails off the little insects and rubbed the glowing gunk on her face like war paint. I became enraged, transferring my silent anguish of the tornado disaster to the injustice of her senseless torture.
Big things were endurable, little things were hard.
• • •
Several months later, we moved into our rebuilt house, which was decorated with the latest trends in design, including green shag carpeting, a gold crushed-velvet sofa, a striped velvet La-Z-Boy, and a marble coffee table supported by scrolled, gold-painted legs. Hanging macramé netting held a vineyard of golden glass grapes at the entrance and clown paintings added a homey balance. The decor was not unlike the trailer’s, but more spread out and with no built-in beer can holders.
We began anew, immersed in our own beautiful White Trash Versailles.
It was a guise of normalcy, and moving back home relieved no pressure. Family time was the occasional convergence around the dinner table, always hurried and awkward, singularly purposed for fueling.
More and more, my little brother and I would press our ears to the basement door as our parents fought below. Mostly that meant my father yelling and my mother crying.
One day, I came home from school with severe stomach cramps. My mother rushed me to the town doctor, who prodded and poked. I moaned in agony. My father met us at the doctor’s office. This was becoming a big deal. I moaned a little more. And a little more.
As the attention and tension mounted, an odd unity developed: my parents had lovingly joined forces because I was the common concern. I squirmed, crinkling the sterile paper atop the cold examination table, and they stood on each side, holding my hands and gazing at me with tight-lipped smiles and reassuring nods. But I could sense their stolen looks to each other, their fear, their love, their apology. The doctor shook his head, as if I had only an hour to live, and they all left the room to confer and, presumably, make funeral arrangements.
Lying alone, I felt a rumble and then a gurgle and then suddenly released a great, voluminous bubble of gas. Elephantine. The table shook.
And the pain was gone.
I was in a panic. The pain couldn’t go away! It had to get worse to justify the drama—to justify my mother and father coming together. I waved my hand furiously to clear the air as my parents and the doctor reentered with a diagnosis: acute appendicitis. I would rupture if I didn’t have emergency surgery immediately, by the town doctor, who was also the mayor and postman and dogcatcher. Emergency surgery? I knew I had overplayed this, but really?
Act Two was in full swing. I had to go through with it. My parents had rediscovered their vows and I fully believed the gassy truth would separate them again, like the flatulent fumes dissipating into nothingness. We drove to the hospital, where I was promptly admitted and placed on a gurney. And from then on I remained present in body only: I pictured a camera above me, like I was on an episode of Medical Center. Chad Everett was my personal physician. I groaned and cried, holding out my hand, imagining the close-up of my trembling fingers tearing away from my weeping mother’s as they rolled me away to surgery.
Chad would take care of me. And then he would be with me in recovery. And then spoon-feed me applesauce and ice cream. And then we would live together and I would be his receptionist.
• • •
After I recovered from an unnecessary appendectomy, and for the next several years, a succession of less dramatic incidents occurred that served as temporary epoxy for my disconnected family. I broke an arm. I sprained ankles and jammed fingers and developed an astigmatism that required eye exercises with thick glass prisms.
My father left his teaching position and partnered with another ex–band director to start a new business: a music store, cleverly named The Music Store. It was an industrially bland building, located “on the line,” a four-lane service road that paralleled the freight train tracks leading out of town. They sold pianos and organs and sheet music, but their primary income came from selling band instruments to schools, which entailed traveling statewide to chum with band directors and principals and superintendents. My dad was a natural salesman with magnetic social skills and a good ol’ boy charm coupled with a gift for telling dirty jokes. Everybody loved him.
The Music Store flourished, so much so that they opened a second store in Tulsa—practically a chain! My father had become a successful businessman, full-tilt, and at long last, our family had some money. By the time I turned fifteen, there were better clothes, impromptu trips to Vegas, smoky poker nights, and, best of all—a new house! The Jeffersons were saying it perfectly in their theme song every week on TV: “Well, we’re movin’ on up!” Indeed, we were. With three times the square footage, three levels, two fireplaces, and an enormous pine tree–spattered yard atop a hill with a view of Tulsa, featuring towering smokestacks of oil refineries in the day and twinkling city lights at night. My father was so proud, and deservedly so. He had broken out of the confines of his undereducated blue-collar family and was his own boss. And everyone else’s.
If he had been a star before, he was now a superstar, and the title required his everything. Home was sort of a backstage, where he could shut down and regroup and didn’t have to be “on.” Even rare social occasions when friends and neighbors got together at our house were now considered depleting, debilitating. As soon as the last guest left, the other Bill emerged and retreated to his personal chair and television set without a word.
Click.
Something bigger than a sprained ankle was going to be necessary for family harmony and I prayed for the blessing of disaster.
We’d only been in the new house about a month and there was still furniture to buy, boxes to unpack, others in storage at my grandmother’s, and decisions to make about exactly where the clown paintings would best be featured.
My mother took me to an eye appointment in Tulsa and we stopped by the new location of The Music Store to say hello to my father, who wasn’t there. We were told we’d better get back home. They’d just gotten the call and my dad had already left:
Our new house was on fire.
Neither my mother nor I could really take in the news. How could this be true? We’d already lost one house to fire and we’d just moved into this one a few weeks ago—our new life, the dream house, the achievement of my father’s success. We drove home silently, our gazes fixed ahead, our hearts pounding and our minds racing about the possible extent of the damage. Maybe it was small. Maybe it was contained. Maybe it would be over by the time we got there and everyone would say “It was nothing.” Or maybe it wasn’t even true.
But I knew, deep down, that if it was true, it was my fault. A punishment for asking God for a catastrophe to put our family in league. Ask and ye shall receive.
We could see the billowing smoke miles before we arrived. It was true. Déjà vu, except with better real estate. We exited the highway and sped through the town, past our last house, which had burned down five years earlier, and up the hill. Fire trucks lined the street, and neighbors and close friends stood in the yard as if attending a bluegrass festival. We got out of the car and my mother raced to my father. They held each other as the firefighters drenched what was left of our house and a few brave volunteers dragged out scorched evidence of our existence. My brother was playing with a friend from our old neighborhood and was kept there to shield him from the panic.
A neighbor my age, befittingly named Malea Stoner, walked up slowly and intently, throwing her waist-length blond hair over her shoulder, and attempted to embrace me too intimately, almost sexually. I didn’t know what to do with her presumption—as if she could possibly understand or know that this tragedy was my doing. Her touch released some tiny increment of the poison and guilt bound up in me that would, in days to come, ripen into sorrow. I rudely shrugged her off and floated through the crowd, desperate for perspective, for salvation, some
action to delude or take it all back.
It would have been inappropriate to sing, so instead, I saw it all play out from a crane shot, cut with close-ups of the ash-stained firemen, the silhouette of my father’s arm around my crumpled mother, the slow pan of thunder-struck onlookers’ faces, and that particular quiet when something is lost. Then the underscoring began and swelled with tragic poignancy. I had to remember this feeling for later, when I could use it onstage.
I learned that my father had brought my grandmother’s used stereo console to my bedroom as a gift, and had put a favorite record of mine on the turntable and blasted the volume to surprise me when I got home. The stereo shorted out and my only possessions were literally the clothes on my back.
Neighbors packed us up with comfort food—country ham, mashed potatoes, and corn bread—and we drove to a motel just outside of town. I don’t recall where. After you’ve stayed in a pink castle you don’t remember anything else. I went to school the next morning, as usual, and everyone knew what had happened. Well, everyone except my ninth-grade algebra teacher.
Mrs. Sparks was the most meticulous, by-the-book taskmaster of the entire school. She had pencil-thin suggestions of lips and a beanie of solidly sprayed, sepia-dyed brown curls, and she wore a different pantsuit or, rather, uniform, for each day of the week. White for Mondays, brown for Tuesdays . . . If you were unsure of the day, you could just look at what she was wearing. She was also an amazing teacher and I truly liked her and I knew, or rather I thought, that she liked me.
I was underrested and overwrought as I walked to my desk and sat for her class. She asked us to pass our homework forward and open our algebra books. I raised my hand.
“Mrs. Sparks, I don’t have my homework or book. Yesterday—”
“Dummy row!” she demanded. And pointed to the far left row of desks reserved for those she considered lazy or stupid.
“But you don’t understand—”