Drive, page 7
Otherwise? Nothing. Not one scrap of instruction for what to do in an earthquake.
I called the front desk. A high, shaky female voice, attempting to sound calm, answered with her standard greeting:
“Good morning. Welcome to the Pasadena Hyatt. This is Lindsey. How may I direct your call?”
I was so relieved to talk to Lindsey, who was going to make everything better and also save my life. To be honest, a slightly sturdier name like Martha or Carol might have made me feel better, but I was stuck with Lindsey.
“Lindsey! My name is Sharon Wheatley. I am on the 14th floor, and I don’t know what to do. That was an earthquake, right? What am I supposed to do?”
Silence.
I waited.
“Lindsey? Are you there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you have any instructions for me?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I am not allowed to give out any instructions at this time.”
What?? Did I hear that right?
So, I said, “What?? Did I hear that right?”
Lindsey stuck to her script. “I am not allowed to give out any instructions at this time.”
The room started shaking again, softer this time, but still horrifying, with a small aftershock.
“Lindsey, did you feel that? Did you feel that?”
Lindsey was shaken, literally. “Yes, ma’am, I did.”
“Okay, Lindsey, listen. I need you to tell me something. I have no idea what to do. Do I go outside? Do I stay here?”
“Ma’am, I have no instructions for you.”
And while maybe some of the details of this story are slightly fuzzy or could be contested in a court of law, the memory of what I said back to shaky Lindsey of the Pasadena Hyatt front desk is as clear as day.
I crazily yelled, “LINDSEY. I AM FROM OHIO. YOU HAVE TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO.”
Lindsey hung up, which seemed fair.
I started to make another call, to my parents, desperate to talk to them, even more desperate to be with them, to be safely five years old again and in their earthquake-proof house. My dad, specifically, has an answer for every situation. In massive thunderstorms we would sit and count between lightning bolt and thunderclap to gauge the distance. When the strike and the boom were one second apart my dad would move us to the basement. “Okay, kid, it’s getting close. Let’s move out.” And we’d head to the basement and play pool until the sky was quiet again. Basically, I needed my dad to tell me the “playing pool” equivalent for an earthquake. Where do I go to be safe? As I dialed him, the room started shaking again. I slammed the phone back down and rode it out.
One thing was crystal clear. No more phone calls. I had to get out.
I heard voices in the hallway and ran to the door, pulling it open like my life depended on it, which it did.
I saw my friends and castmates Traci Lyn and Eileen in the hall. We were all in Pasadena doing a national tour of Les Miserables, traveling around the country. Eileen and Traci Lyn were sharing a hotel room, trying to save some of their per diem. So smart. Why wasn’t I frugal enough to have a roommate? Jealous of their shared terror, I glommed on to them for dear life.
“Hey, you guys. Hey, hi. Where are you going? What are we supposed to do? I’m going with you.”
I shut my door and joined them without waiting for any response. We were all in our pajamas, in our twenties, and terrified. Eileen was from New York and hysterical (not helpful), but Traci Lyn was from Texas and had that kind of cowgirl we can handle this spirit, so she was immediately our leader.
Traci Lyn decided we should take the stairs and go outside. Eileen and I agreed, not because we thought it was a good idea, but because we were following Traci Lyn, who was our hero, our leader, the chosen one, the earthquake master. “Besides,”Traci Lyn pointed out, “maybe they’ll have coffee.”
Such a sensible and non-panicked idea.
We pulled open the door to the stairwell and looked up and down. We heard voices. Traci Lyn recognized the voices and said, “It’s Steve. This is what we should do.” Steve was on the crew and in charge of keeping us safe on stage, so now we were going to follow Steve.
We made our way down the fourteen stories and into the lobby, startled by the bright lights and piped-in music. The furniture was all over the place, moved around by the earthquake, but we made our way to the front doors, which miraculously still slid open automatically. I was reminded of disaster movies where the slightest bits of retained normalcy seem shocking.
Most of our cast and crew were out on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, talking and comparing stories. I looked up and saw the floor above mine had lost its windows. Our stage manager, Mike, did a quick head count, and we were all accounted for except for two people who were a newly formed couple now sharing a room. They did eventually turn up and won the story of the night. They’d been having sex in front of the sliding mirrored closet doors when the quake struck, and the doors had fallen on them. They were fine and laughing, telling everyone every detail. I noted that things could still be funny in an emergency, and I tried to laugh. But I couldn’t.
Despite being out of the building, I was still very scared. I stood near Mike, finding his presence both soothing and functional. He was my boss, but, more importantly, all critical information would come to him first. By standing right next to him, I could eavesdrop and immediately hear things I was supposed to hear later.
I overheard a whispered conversation about whether we’d be performing that night and while I could not hear exactly what was being said because the actors were still laughing about the sexcapades, I for sure heard Mike say something like “Well, you know, the show must go on.”
Does the show have to go on after a massive earthquake? And if it does, do I have to go on? All I wanted to do was make a break for it to a land that stood still. I wondered if the airports were open. I wondered if it was safer to drive. I wondered if there would be an aftershock or, worse, the big one, and the earth would open up and swallow us all alive. I didn’t feel safe anywhere, but I certainly would not feel safe climbing around on the massive two-story set of Les Miserables, the show we were allegedly doing that night because some jerk in the year 19-whatever said the show must go on. I decided Mike was not to be trusted, but he might have one piece of important information.
“Hey, Mike, any idea where there might be a pay phone?”
I had to talk to my parents. My mom and dad were on Eastern time. I checked the time; it was 4:45 am in LA, making it 7:45 am in Cincinnati. I could see the lobby TVs playing through the windows—BREAKING NEWS: MAJOR EARTHQUAKE IN LOS ANGELES AREA—with live footage of collapsed buildings and raging fires. My parents, avid TV watchers, were probably completely freaked out; they probably thought I was dead, or, worse, pinned alive.
Mike pointed me towards a long line in the lobby where other hotel guests had already started making calls.
I raced to the long phone line. My mom left for work in fifteen minutes, and I wondered if she would go. Was she sitting in front of the TV, ringing her hands in the way she habitually did, worrying about me the way she’d worried about my brother years ago when he’d attended the infamous Who concert where kids were crushed to death racing for seats? When he’d finally walked through the door hours later, stoned and unaware that anything had happened, my mother collapsed to the floor sobbing with relief. I wanted to facilitate my mother collapsing on the floor with relief. Her relief meant I was okay. She was a great barometer for worry.
As independent and worldly as I was, making more money than my mom and dad combined, traveling the country, “adulting,” as my daughter now calls it, I missed my mother so ferociously in that moment it almost knocked the wind out of me. I could imagine her buzzing around the house, getting ready for work. She was a classic morning person, who thrived with the routine of a 9-5 job. She dressed up and wore heels and took her lunch in a Russian dolls set of Tupperware, including a big container of lettuce and tuna or deli meat, as well as an extra smaller Tupperware inside it, housing her low-calorie vinaigrette salad dressing. Snapped into the lid were her folding utensils. Mom ate at her desk while simultaneously working and cracking jokes with the UPS guys. She then used her lunch break to take a power walk “in the sunshine.” My mother loved to work. She loved the schedule of it, she loved the routine of it, she loved getting up and looking nice for it, and, most of all, she loved getting away from my dad for the day. If I could not reach her, I could always reach him. He was always home. If my mother was a barometer for worry, my father was the guy who would tell me what to do in a crisis.
In sharp contrast to my busy mom, my dad loved not working. He regularly declared, “No one is going to put me in a cubicle and tell me what to do!” Statements like this caused my mother to arch her eyebrow and remind him her job paid for his precious cable news. He’d roar with laughter and say, “OK, honey, OK. You can pay the little bills. But I bring in the big bucks.” My mom would inevitably do something like pull the plug from the TV and walk out, and he would laugh and call her a “dickens.” I would plug the TV back in, both entertained and nervous. My parents were funny, but not for the faint of heart.
My dad was an entrepreneur and a salesman. He’d sold a plethora of things in his life—cars, bras, insurance policies—but his big money maker was his swimming pool company, PoolMaster of Cincinnati, which he owned and operated for my entire childhood. It had closed after he’d run out of business by basically building pools for every rich person in Cincinnati from 1970 to 1990. By 1994, he’d created a job working occasional job fairs. He was able to work when he felt like it, and he was his own boss, so he stayed up late and slept in until noon. My dad, although he never studied or worked in science, had an exceptional aptitude for it.
One hundred percent of the time, if you called my parents’ house before 12 pm, you were waking my father up. That never stopped him from answering the phone, though, which was perched right next to his head by the bed. He would pick it up on the first or second ring without opening his eyes, drop the receiver, and curse, like a drunk answering the phone after a three-day bender.
It was my turn to call. I dialed in my calling card number and their phone number and waited while it rang. I noticed the hotel had rolled out a free breakfast and the phone line disappeared. Pastries and coffee became more important than communicating, at least for a minute.
My dad picked up the receiver and immediately dropped it. I heard, distantly, “Oh hell, hold on a minute.”
There were sounds of banging as the receiver was dragged up from the floor by the cord and copious amounts of throat clearing before a sleepy, yet passable, “Well, hello there.”
My father always answered the phone as if he knew who was calling, and what’s more, that he knew you’d be calling at just that moment.
“Dad! It’s okay. I’m fine.” I was so relieved to hear his voice. I knew they must be so worried about me, especially now that I knew from some of the native Californians in the cast that this was a REAL earthquake, and a BIGGIE, not just some earth-moving Carole King song lyric type of event. This was, like, a natural disaster, like a RED CROSS IS COMING kind of disaster. Doing exactly what one might expect of the youngest child who is also an actress, I started to cry, some might say on cue.
“Hiya, kid!” He seemed unfazed. This was unfair. It was my big moment. I kept going.
“I’m calling to say I’m okay. I’m not hurt,” I sobbed.
“Are you crying?”
I’m pretty sure he sat up. Now we were getting somewhere.
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Look at the news.”
“The news? Hold on. Let me get the remote. I turned it down a little while ago. Looks like something is burning.”
I could hear Katie Couric’s voice getting louder. Reports are coming in from Los Angeles, where this densely populated area was just struck by a major . . .
Once my dad could focus on the TV he said, “It looks like LA had a whopper of an earthquake!”
“Dad. I’m in Los Angeles. Remember? I’m here.”
“Wait a minute. What? Oh, that’s right! You told me last night. You’re telling me you’re in LA right now?
“Yes!” I started to cry again.
His voice became low and serious.
“Did you feel it?”
“Yes! It knocked me out of bed! But I’m okay!” I cried harder.
He gasped for breath.
“Hot damn, kid! You just went through a 6.7 magnitude earthquake? I have always wanted to be in an earthquake! Now this is a great adventure! Tell me everything!”
This was not the response I’d anticipated. I expected things more in line with what other parents said to their kids, like “Thank God you’re okay!” or “Don’t take the elevator!” or “Stand in a doorway!” Later, when I reached my mom, her reaction was pragmatic and parental. “We have friends, the Browns, who live in Pasadena. Betsy is coming to pick you up, and you can stay at their house until you leave the LA area. I want you out of that high-rise.”
But in the early morning hours of January 17th, I stood in the lobby of the Hyatt and talked my dad through every detail of my traumatic experience/adventure. He laughed heartily about the news anchors diving under the desk. “Sounds smart, though. That’s a lot of weight hanging above them with all the studio lights.” He thought I should find Lindsey at the front desk and introduce myself, insisting that I might be the person to help put together a safety plan for earthquakes for the Hyatt chain. “I was a Safety Engineer in the Navy. I can help you with that. We can call it Escape the Quake.”The PoolMaster loved to name things.
An avid science buff, my dad barraged me with science facts saved up for just this moment. In soothing and sometimes mind-numbing detail, he taught me all about the science of earthquakes and why they can’t be predicted. He talked about the Japanese engineers who studied swaying bamboo in earthquakes and went on to build high-rises on rollers to withstand the shake. “Did you hear a loud sound?” he asked. “I did,” I told him. “That was probably the building rolling!” He was right. Known as the Northridge earthquake, it was the largest earthquake in the US in years. Most importantly, and this was the rolling sound, it caused my hotel to do something it was built to do: literally roll.
His excitement about the geology and engineering weren’t particularly interesting to me, but his enthusiasm and desire to share the experience with me made everything not just bearable, but more fun. Later, he’d answer the phone saying, “How big was it? Did it shake you good?” knowing I’d only called in the middle of the night because there was an aftershock.
The show performed the night of the earthquake despite a curfew in LA. Being in Pasadena, we were in a different county, so we went on as planned. As I walked in the stage door, I passed by dumpsters full of sheetrock that had fallen from the ceiling, which was more than slightly unnerving. We had a pre-show safety meeting where Mike told us to “do what we felt comfortable doing.” Considering Les Miserables had a tall, moving barricade as the major set piece, from which we often dangled many stories up, sometimes even upside down, the moment-to-moment decision about what felt safe kept us all on pins and needles. We had only one minor aftershock during the show, but it was enough to make us wonder what the hell we were doing on that stage. Personally, I tried to find my way under any set piece that resembled a doorway or a solid table, and I sang from under there. It was kind of like Chicken Little does Les Miserables.
Dad woke me up the next morning, calling me at the Browns’ house to excitedly say, “Hey, hey, hey! You’ve really made it now, kid. You guys are in USA Today! You’ll remember this for the rest of your life! It’s in black and white!” Sure enough, there was an article covering the decision that The Show Must Go On! despite the dangerous working conditions for the cast and crew. My dad cut it out and it lived, taped, to his end table for a couple of years, next to his water glass and TV remotes.
When I saw the wrinkled paper many months later, I noticed a little note in the margin: “She’s on a great adventure!”
I couldn’t help but think of him, constantly, as I drove around the country during this crazy time. He would have laughed and had an opinion on everything. But mostly he would have told me to focus on enjoying it. “This is a great adventure, kid. Don’t be scared, just drive,” he would have said. “Show your kids how to have fun.”
I have to agree with him.
After all, I am the PoolMaster’s daughter.
CHAPTER 7
THE GOLF BALL
“Now?” I yelled back. I heard the golf ball rolling and then a distinct plunk plunk plunk as it dropped down the stairs.
“Nope,” Tobi said, too quietly.
“Honey, can you be a little louder? It’s hard to hear you up here.” I worked hard to keep the edge out of my voice. I am forever working to keep the edge out of my voice.
“Mom,” Tobi said. “Listen. I’m hungry and I don’t really know what I’m doing and Desi!” I turned around in the seat to look back just in time to see Desi, the insatiable golden retriever, steal Tobi’s cookie off the dinette, leaving a slobbery trail of crumbs.
I swallowed my frustration—we all know not to leave food anywhere within Desi’s reach. For all of Desi’s laid-back fluffy vibe, there’s a skilled thief just under the surface. I reminded myself, they’re doing the best they can. I reminded myself, we are all doing the best we can. And Tobi is only twelve.
“Tobs, you’re doing great. Hang in there. Find the golf ball. Here.” I handed them a brand-new headlamp. “Martha got us all headlamps.” They put it on and were delighted to find myriad bulb settings, which they ran through in a dizzying light show. “Can you please make it steady? The strobe thing is going to give me a seizure.”
I rolled down the window and tried to find Martha in the rearview mirror. If I hit the brakes she showed up in the red glow of the light. Since our rental RV had no rear window, I had to rely on the side-view mirrors, which were currently set for Martha. I was a 5’4” driver in a seat designed for a 5’8” driver, driving the last leg of a twelve-hour trek that was supposed to be a six-hour trek.
