The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, page 2
“March 15, 1957, was a cold and clear winter day of little or no consequence until,” she’d say, leaning forward on the couch and pressing the palms of her hands together, the college actress performing, “I felt a kick.”
This had apparently occurred shortly after my father sat in his favorite recliner to read the newspaper and nurse his evening indulgence, a single Manhattan.
“What did you do?” I’d ask from my spot on the carpet at her feet.
“I ignored you,” my mother would say, feigning indifference with a dramatic pause and a wave of her hand. “After all, we weren’t expecting you for another five weeks.” She would then reenact how she had rearranged the two decorative pillows at the small of her back while sitting in her customary spot on the sofa kneading the beads of her rosary. “And when the pain returned, I offered it up for some poor soul trapped in purgatory.”
I learned at a very young age that purgatory was the nebulous place between heaven and earth where the dead must be purified of sin through the prayers of others before Saint Peter allows entrance through heaven’s pearly gates. “Give it up for some poor soul in purgatory” would be my mother’s mantra in response to any suffering I would endure throughout my childhood, though I don’t recall a single instance in which it proved particularly effective. It certainly didn’t rid her of the pain I was to inflict that evening and most of the following day. That my mother had been praying the rosary, however, came as no surprise. My mother was always in the midst of a novena to the Blessed Mother for one thing or another, including the time the water heater quit and we couldn’t afford a new one. I never asked if she believed the Blessed Mother would drop a new Jetglas from the heavens—my mother would have admonished me for being sacrilegious—but such was the depth of her faith and her devotion. Much later, after my mother’s death, I found her tiny blue novena book in the drawer of her nightstand with an incalculable number of lead pencil marks to record each of her fifty-four-day novenas.
“And don’t forget how you groaned,” my father would chime in from behind his newspaper.
“I didn’t groan,” my mother would say. “You make me sound like a barnyard cow.”
With that, my father would peek at me from behind his newspaper and smile.
My mother prided herself as a descendant of the toughest of Irish stock, but somewhere in the middle of the third decade of the joyful mysteries, her water broke, and I could no longer be ignored.
“Even before your birth, you left a stain on the carpet,” she’d say. The stain, an amoeba-shaped discoloration that no cleaner known to man could remove, served for years as a reminder of my untimely arrival.
Had my mother’s water not broken, my father might never have moved from his beloved recliner positioned near the fireplace we used once a year to burn the Christmas wrapping paper.
“Your father catapulted from his chair like it ejected him,” my mother would say.
“That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” my father would respond, still hidden behind his sports page.
“Samuel, your father sprinted up those stairs,” she’d say, gesturing over her shoulder to our staircase, “stuffed my clothes in a suitcase, and rushed out the front door.” She’d dramatize the latter by flinging her arm as if slamming the door. I loved it. “It was only after he threw my suitcase in the trunk and jumped behind the wheel that he realized he’d left me still struggling to get up from the couch.”
“Yes,” my father would say, lowering the paper, “and by the time I got back to the house, your mother had already managed to not only get her coat and handbag from the closet; she’d also had the presence of mind to unplug every appliance in the house!”
This would send me into raucous laughter. Every trip, no matter how far from home, started with my mother worrying that she’d forgotten to unplug some appliance and lamenting the catastrophic fire she was certain it would cause.
“The drive to Mercy Medical Center takes eight minutes, Samuel. I made it in five minutes flat,” my father would say with noticeable pride.
“That’s because you drove like a bat out of hell,” my mother would say.
My father would wink at me. “I’d mapped the route through the back streets.”
“You rolled through every stop sign. You’re lucky you didn’t get a ticket.”
“With a pregnant woman in the car? I would have received a police escort.”
It turned out the rush was much ado about nothing. As my mother liked to say, “You were early, but you took your sweet time.”
Her labor lasted thirty-two hours, a number she would remind me of whenever I acted up. Still, the wait turned out to be nothing compared to the stir my arrival caused. “You emerged with your eyes shut tight,” my mother would say, speaking in a hushed whisper that mesmerized me. In hindsight, I wondered if my entering this world with my eyes shut tight was a genetically predisposed instinct.
My father, who’d chosen to remain down the hall in the hospital’s waiting room, would at this point resume his narrative, explaining how the young doctor entered the room looking more perplexed than tired. “He said, ‘It’s a boy,’” but the doctor’s rote proclamation did not temper my father’s paternal instinct that something was amiss. “I sprinted down the tile linoleum into that room,” he’d say. “And when I entered, I found a crowd of nurses and hospital staff hovering around your mother’s bed like she was Marilyn Monroe.”
But my mother was not the object of their interest. It seemed that when the doctor had placed me upon my mother’s stomach to cut the umbilical cord, I’d finally opened my eyes. And that’s when the euphoria became bewilderment. The doctor froze, slack jawed. The attending nurse let out a yip, which she belatedly tried to cover by placing her hand over her mouth.
“Give me my son,” my mother had said amid the silent stares, whereupon the nurse had swaddled me in a blanket and handed me to her.
This was how my father found us when he waded through the crowd for a closer inspection and looked me in the eyes for the first time.
“What the Sam Hell?” he whispered.
3
My father turned quickly to the obstetrician, who had entered the room and retaken his position at the foot of my mother’s bed. “His eyes are red. Why are his eyes red?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said.
“Will they stay that color?”
But back then the doctor didn’t know, and he had little ability to research the question. He could only shrug. Another silence ensued, those present holding their collective breath, uncertain what to say or what to think of me. That’s when my mother again took over. “Out,” she’d ordered. “I would like everyone to please leave.”
“That was our first private moment together as a family,” she’d say when recounting the story. “Just you, me, and your father.”
Finally alone, my father started to ask the pertinent question. “Why are—”
But my mother was not interested in why my eyes were red, and she put up a hand to stop him. “I don’t care why,” she’d said.
Several more minutes passed before my father, ever pragmatic, said, “Well then, what shall we call him? We don’t have a name.”
Because of my premature arrival, they’d failed to reach a consensus. My mother suggested Maxwell, but my father had never cared for his name. He’d lobbied for William.
“But we do have a name,” my mother said. “A beautiful name. A name his father has given him. Samuel. We’ll call him Samuel.”
And so, my father being Maxwell James Hill, I became Samuel James Hill.
Sam Hill. Or, as I would soon become known, Sam Hell.
4
My mother wasted no time doting on me and recording every detail of my life, as evidenced by the dozens of scrapbooks and photo albums she filled and kept on the mahogany bookshelves in our living room. When it came to my life, my mother acted as if she were preserving the legacy of a future president for his presidential library. Even before cameras digitally recorded the date on individual photographs, she would write the day, month, and year on the white borders to note such momentous occasions as my first bath, my first meal in a high chair, and the obligatory first potty-training session. I also possess the hospital beanie and ankle bracelet I wore home from the hospital, as well as every report card I earned and every high school newspaper article I wrote. Whether my mother’s diligence was intended to document the extraordinary life she was convinced I was destined to lead or simply the result of her having too much time on her hands, I cannot say, but this meticulous recording of my life, along with the extended hours I would later spend with my father under the shade of that retirement center oak tree, allowed me to piece together much of these first years of my life.
My mother, of course, deemed my red eyes to be “God’s will.” And so, when some hospital administration types advised that hospital policy dictated I be examined by a specialist before I could be discharged, she turned them down cold. She suspected the hospital was more concerned with their potential legal liability than my health. “I’ll sign a waiver,” she’d said. “And we’ll be out of your hair.”
My mother’s suspicion was only partially accurate. It seems word of the child with red eyes traveled quickly through the hospital corridors and surrounding medical community, and there was no shortage of doctors eager to examine me. My mother brushed them aside as “charlatans.” “They were only interested in being published in the New England Journal of Medicine,” she’d told me.
My father, not a man to rock the boat, had suggested a compromise. “Perhaps we can allow one doctor to examine Samuel, just to be certain.”
My mother reluctantly consented, and both sides agreed upon Dr. Charles Pridemore, an ophthalmologist at the Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto.
I don’t know to what extent Dr. Pridemore educated my parents that day or on subsequent visits, but I soon became well versed in my “condition,” the only word my mother would ever use to describe my eyes. A soft-spoken, bearded man of quiet dignity, Dr. Pridemore would become a lifelong mentor and friend. What I recall about him from my youth, however, was that he always had the appearance and demeanor of a slightly distracted science professor—plaid shirts and wrinkled corduroys, an unkempt beard, wisps of curly hair protruding at odd angles, and glasses mottled with dust and fingerprints.
“Ocular albinism,” he’d later explained to me on one of my frequent visits, “is best understood with a rudimentary explanation of the components of the eye.” He used a diagram hanging on the wall to show me the two layers of pigment in the iris. “There is the front, which we see, and the back, which we don’t see, but which blocks light transmission. The iris without pigment is white,” he explained, chewing hard on his ever-present stick of spearmint gum. “And the presence or absence of melanin in the iris accounts for the color of our eyes. A lot of melanin at the front results in brown eyes. No melanin in front, blue eyes. Some melanin and the eyes can appear green, hazel, and every shade in between, depending on the amount and distribution.”
“And what about red?” I had asked.
“Technically, there is no such thing as red pigment.”
“But my eyes are red,” I said. And they were, though let me clarify. I am not talking about fire-engine, glow-in-the-dark red, or even the red of a ripe apple. The color was more subtle, bordering on pink. But I’m also not an albino. Though I was born a towhead, my hair gradually darkened to its current nondescript light brown. And though I burn if I don’t use sunblock, my skin pigmentation is otherwise normal. And that is how my mother considered me from the moment of my birth. Normal. In the hospital room, when Dr. Pridemore came to conduct his examination, she asked the only question that mattered to her. “Will it affect his vision?”
But Dr. Pridemore did not know that answer in 1957, there being scant literature on the topic. “All I can say is that Samuel’s eyes are very rare.”
“Not rare, Doctor,” my mother corrected. “Extraordinary.”
5
My father dutifully called the few relatives I had with the news of my birth. My father had been an only child, born and raised in Chicago. He had lost his father to cancer two years before I was born. His German mother, whom I referred to as Oma Hill, made an annual sojourn to Burlingame for the Christmas holidays. Either my birth did not rate a separate visit, or my father politely steered her away from coming. I presume my father thought it best to spare everyone Oma Hill’s lamentations about all the pitfalls that awaited a child born with red eyes.
Grandma O’Malley, on the other hand, rode the first bus from San Francisco to Burlingame, suitcase in hand. Also a widow, Grandma O’Malley had never possessed a driver’s license and saw little need of obtaining one. She raised my mother and my auntie Bonnie in a San Francisco Victorian in the Mission District, where bus lines were plentiful, specialty shops abundant, and she could walk to Saint James Catholic Church for morning Mass. Unlike Oma Hill, Grandma O’Malley did not acknowledge afflictions, neuroses, diseases, or maladies, a trait I have since attributed to her Irish heritage. She apparently marched into my parents’ bedroom, unswaddled me from my cocoon in the bassinet, and proclaimed, “Two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, ten toes, and a nose. Perfect.”
And that was her final word on the subject.
6
Sunday, three days after we arrived home from the hospital, my mother dressed me for my first visit to Our Lady of Mercy. It would take something far more severe than giving birth to keep my mother from attending Sunday Mass. My parents arrived early and marched down the long aisle to the third pew on the left, what would become our unwavering spot. My mother later would say this was so that God could note our presence, though a skeptic might believe it was to ensure a less divine being would take notice—our pastor, Father Brogan. Parishioners’ regular attendance at Mass, and their offerings in the weekly envelopes, went a long way when it came time to enroll their children in OLM’s crowded Catholic grammar school.
Before slipping into the pew that first Sunday, my mother took me to the alcove just to the right of the altar to present me to the Blessed Mother of Jesus Christ. Mary stood atop a globe, dressed in a blue-and-white shawl, rosary beads in hand and a snake crushed beneath her bare feet. It was the first of what would be many visits I would make to that alcove.
That my parents’ first encounter with intolerance would occur in church is less a commentary on Catholic hypocrisy than it is a testament to the frequency of their attendance. They were regular Sunday churchgoers, not “Christmas Catholics,” as my father dubbed those who attended Mass only on Christmas and Easter. Had my parents been as fervent about baseball, I’m sure the first inappropriate comment about the color of my eyes would have come from a child wearing a baseball cap and eating a hot dog. As it was, the offender was a young boy in blue knickers sitting in the pew behind us.
“Mom,” he’d apparently exclaimed, “what’s wrong with that baby’s eyes?”
“What did you do?” I would ask when my mother recounted this story.
“Why, I turned around and gave him a closer look,” she’d say. “Then I told him, ‘There’s nothing wrong with his eyes. God made them that color. They’re extraordinary.’”
Following Mass, my mother also did not hesitate to present me to Father Brogan. A petite man with a white beard and thick Irish brogue, Father Brogan hid his shock—it was not possible that he did not notice. According to my father, the priest scooped me into his arms, lifted me overhead, and pronounced me to be “a fine lad indeed.”
7
In my thirteenth month, I took my first step, or so I was told. I found no snapshot to document this momentous occasion in the photo album labeled 1958. I do know that I took this step at home during a weekday, prompting my mother to stage a reenactment when my father arrived home from work so he could capture it on camera. Some months after my mother died, I found a cardboard box containing canisters of film in her attic. In the grainy, silent film documenting that day, I’m standing in a diaper with wobbly legs and clutching the corner of our living room coffee table. My mother is also in the film, clapping her hands and silently coaxing me to let go, without success. It seems that I had become distracted by my mother’s rosary, alternately slapping the beads on the table or shoving them in my mouth and drooling. My mother, sensing an opportunity, took the rosary from me and dangled the silver cross just out of my reach.
“Walk for Mary,” she mouthed on the film. “Walk for Mary, Samuel.”
And that was when I responded, though not with my first step. In those black-and-white frames, my mother suddenly stopped clapping. Her eyes shifted from me to the camera a fraction of a second before my father dropped it. By the time he had recovered, I was in mid-walk, reaching for the dangling crucifix, a feat completely overshadowed by what had been my first uttered word.
“Mary,” I’d said.
To my mother, of course, this was solid evidence to support her conviction that God had a divine plan for me and my red eyes. If someone had told her that someday white smoke would rise above the Vatican before the proclamation of my name as pope, she would not so much have batted an eye. She immediately went to work to ensure that when that momentous occasion did occur, I would not embarrass her, as I did each time she took me to buy a new pair of shoes and I revealed holes in my socks. By age five I could recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, which meant I could recite the rosary. This tutelage often occurred at night, with me holding my own rosary and mimicking her devotion, and just as frequently on trips to kneel before that statue of the Blessed Mother in the alcove of the church.
“Prayers are like coins deposited in a piggy bank, Samuel,” my mother assured me. “Save them until you need them for something important.”
