Ham by Sam Harris

Author:Sam Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Gallery Books

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

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