I’d spent New Year’s Eve on the red-eye flying back from Los Angeles—I’d had an interview with Woody Harrelson, speaking of red eyes—and when I got home at six in the morning, the blinking light on my phone told me I had voice mail. “Hey Max,” Sammy said. “I got your e-mail. Hearing from you meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. Things are so horrible right now, I can’t even begin to describe it. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you. But I really do want to see you. I need to see you …” She sounded weird, like she was talking underwater, or maybe under sedation. Although, given what she’d been through over those five months, I doubted a drug had been invented that could soothe her pain. The good news was that Johnny was alive. A few hours after the fall, he woke up in his hospital suite in South Dakota, looked at the room full of doctors and nurses, and said, “Oops.” The fall obviously hadn’t affected his love of a good one-liner. In fact, incredibly, miraculously, the fall had barely mussed his hair.
