But here he was, nearly twenty years later, doing it again. What I understand now that I didn’t understand then is that he wasn’t ignoring me to punish me. He was ignoring me because he was punishing himself. When his children failed, it wasn’t their fault. It was his.
He needed to call his son and get on a plane and look him in the eye and love him through this because that’s what love is and that’s what the boy needed. But stoic he remained. My mom couldn’t get through to him. I couldn’t get through to him. I wanted to shake him out of his catatonia, but he seemed so fragile underneath all the effort to hold it together that I was afraid I might break him, so I didn’t.
My mom was nervous about the weekend. Once she got there, she had to spend the bulk of her days in meetings with strangers about addiction being a family disease. She was only able to see my brother for about an hour each day. She was lonely and sad. She wanted to do whatever it took to help her son but felt so out of place there. I had the urge to rescue her but had a baby who relied on breast milk, so I couldn’t.
Harris’s plan was to go to rehab for thirty days, then come back to Houston for a while, see the baby, and regroup. But toward the end of treatment, he changed his mind. When we talked about it over the phone, he blamed it on my dad. He said he still felt a lot of shame and didn’t want to put his recovery in jeopardy, so he would just go back to LA. Where he started shooting heroin in the first place.
After he served his time, he checked out and spent the night in the hotel with my mom. She reported back to me that it felt different than the last time he got out. His vibe wasn’t particularly open or communicative or refreshed. He was impatient and on edge. He seemed as closed off as he was when he arrived a month ago. Sobriety had lost its luster.
Once she got back to Houston, my mom started attending regular Al-Anon meetings. She’d always been willing to do anything for her children, whether it be chaperoning a field trip or going to an Al-Anon meeting. She was always a good and loving mother. Now she was a good and loving mother who woke up every day worried that it would be her son’s last.
18
Seven Months
You always said you’d take Mom to the Emmys someday, and here we are—she and I—standing in a large dressing room with cheap maroon carpet, staring into a mirror, draped in gowns strewn with beads and sparkles and rhinestones. I’ve never worn a gown like this. It’s so heavy. I imagine I’ll have to wear shapewear. I hate shapewear. I hate you for putting me in this position.
This is not how any of us imagined this would play out. In the future fantasy scenario, Mom is your date. You’d strut the red carpet together, hobnobbing with celebs as she clung proudly to your arm. You’d thank her in your acceptance speech as the camera panned over to her, dabbing her wet eyes with a tissue. Dad and I would proudly watch it all unfold on TV back in Houston. I would be wearing an elastic waistband, not a gown.
In three weeks, Mom and I are going to the Emmys without you. Parks and Recreation is nominated for Best Comedy Series, and you will be honored in the In Memoriam segment. An invite showed up in Mom’s in-box late August. She forwarded it to me with the overly exuberant message: “Please go with me!!!!!!!!!” She still composes emails in Comic Sans, which just adds to my frustration about the entire ordeal.
I was at work. I audibly grumbled. There was no way to get out of this.
The timing is terrible. My students just got back from summer break. We just moved into our new house a week ago. There are so many tchotchkes to shelve. I don’t want to leave my family for three days. I don’t want to take a day off work. I don’t want to fly to Los Angeles ever again. I don’t want to go to an awards ceremony in honor of my dead brother. Once again, why can’t Dad go? Why can’t he play the part of supportive husband? It’s landed on my desk since you died, and I never applied for the job.
I explain all my reasons to Mom but end the email saying I’ll go if it’s really important to her. As you know, she brings that out in people.
“It’s really important to me!!!!!!!” Again with the fucking exclamation marks. It’s too much punctuation with which to argue.
We book the tickets and buy the gowns. I go with one that has zero beading but plenty of flare. The top is silver and shiny like a fashionable suit of armor. The bottom part is a floor-length chiffon skirt with big silver and white horizontal stripes. Describing it makes it sound hideous, but it was quite beautiful. The only thing I’ve ever worn that comes close to this level of formality was my wedding dress. Mom goes for a white Monique Lhuillier beaded gown. I assume she’ll have to pay extra for luggage. It’s so fucking heavy.
The day before we leave for LA, Mom gets an email from Universal inviting us to an NBC pre-party on Saturday night. As much as I don’t want to go the Emmys, I really don’t want to go to this. None of this feels like a party. Plus, you hated these sorts of things. Mom, of course, feels otherwise and wants to see “famous people.”
She also feels it necessary to remind me several times to pack my dress and my shoes like I’m a fucking five-year-old. My frustration with her is reaching levels only experienced as an angsty teen living under the same roof. She is genuinely excited about the weekend. It is off-putting. She seems to have lost sight of the fact that we are going because you died.
We’re walking to the gate at the airport on Saturday afternoon when she says, “I am just so excited that you finally get a little vacation. You never get to relax!” The invisible tape I’ve put over my mouth out of respect for our grieving mother finally rips off. “Mom, we’re going to the Emmys because Harris died. Nothing about this is relaxing. I don’t even want to go.”
She’s stunned. Silence steals the space between us. We wait for the plane in silence, board the plane in silence, take off in silence. I can tell that she is genuinely hurt and throwing a silent temper tantrum of epic proportions. I recognize in this moment what my therapist was describing in our last session: my mother has conflated our emotional experiences. If she wants to go to the Emmys, I want to go to the Emmys. If she feels excited, I feel excited. This must be some residue of emotional grief.
Soon, the flight attendant rolls by to take drink orders. I order a white wine, crack open the top, pour it in the plastic cup, take a big sip, and turn to Mom.
“So, are you gonna ignore me the rest of the trip?”
“I just feel very guilty now,” she says in her delicate Southern drawl. “I forced you to come with me, and you don’t want to be here.”
“You didn’t force me. It’s just so hard to leave the baby. It’s a lot for Mike—”
“I know. I feel terrible.”
And now I feel terrible.
“Mom, it’s fine. I wanted to be here for you. Am I not allowed to be honest about how I feel?”
It goes back and forth like this for several minutes, she playing the I feel so guilty card, and I, the I want to be here/It’s fine one.
Finally, I finish the wine and beg: “Can we just move past this and try to have a good time this weekend? I don’t have the energy to argue about it anymore.”
She agrees. We move on.
• • •
Renting a car and driving from LAX is very familiar—we’ve done it dozens of times—but the fact that the car isn’t headed to your house in Los Feliz guts me. It’s exactly why I didn’t want to come here.
The hotel is downtown, right across the street from the venue, and all the streets are shut down for blocks in preparation for the event. When we check in, they hand us a fat envelope with our itinerary and tickets to both the awards ceremony and the Governor’s Ball. The tickets are gilded and beautiful. This is another world.
We check in and get dressed for the pre-party. It feels wrong driving up to the party in a rental Altima. There are paparazzi hovering outside. We walk up a short flight of stairs to long folding tables where NBC staff is checking people in. Our name
s are crossed off the list, and we head past security into the party. It is painfully loud. The music is pulsing and deafening. I have to shout to communicate with Mom, who is standing directly in front of me. It’s also hard to find anywhere to sit or stand. The place is packed with beautiful people in beautiful clothing who are schmoozing, kissing cheeks, and throwing their heads back in laughter. I have to turn sideways and squeeze in between people and their conversations to get from Point A to Point B. Point B is the sushi bar, where two men are preparing fresh hand rolls. I’m starving and would love a fresh hand roll. I grab a cocktail off a tray and make my way into the line. After the sushi bar, we squeeze over to the raw bar that’s overflowing with shrimp, oysters, and crab legs. I note how much you would love the food here but likely hate the party overall. This is not your scene. You would be the only one in a hoodie.
I turn to Mom and say, “No wonder he became a drug addict.”
We run into a few people from Parks and make small talk. Most of the evening is spent with Aisha Muhharar and her Jewish boyfriend, Ben. I’m grateful for the opportunity to finally meet her after hearing so much about her over the years. They manage to snag a table, and we sit and talk forever, mostly about Ben being great marriage material because of the Jew thing. We are biased.
I see why Aisha was one of your best friends in the Parks writers’ room. Like you, she is so down to earth and human. Conversation is effortless, despite the fact that we’re screaming at each other from across the table. It really is obscenely loud, and her boyfriend happens to have hearing loss (did you know that?) for which he recently got a formal evaluation and will soon be fit for hearing aids, so we talk all about that. He pulls up his audiogram, and I compare it to Iris’s, which I also happen to have on my phone. It’s rare for both of us to find someone else who knows how to interpret an audiogram. Instant bonding material.
• • •
After the party, we meet our childhood friend Johnny for ramen at Daikokuya in Little Tokyo. That was always your favorite place to take us when we were in town even though it was always mildly stressful because you were so impatient, and there’s only like five tables in the restaurant, and you have to put your name on the list and wait outside for at least an hour to be seated and you would smoke and pace so much it sort of soured the meal once we finally got to it. We would both get the tonkotsu ramen with the side of chicken fried rice. The Best. The broth is creamy; the noodles homemade. I crave it for months on end in the winter—and the summer, too. Year-round, really.
The last time we were at Daikokuya together was the first weekend you met Mike. It was spring break 2012. He and I stayed at your house. We went to that bar in Los Feliz and met up with Johnny and Taal, who—as we both know—has been struggling to find his way for a while but is having an even harder time now that you’re gone. You were probably his closest friend in the world, and he’s lost without you. Anyway, Johnny took one of my favorite all-time photos of us in the tiny waiting area of the restaurant that night. It’s been my Facebook cover photo for months now. We’re sitting there together with a space between us. There’s Japanese writing on the wall behind us. I’m looking down at my phone. You’re wearing a white T-shirt and a black hoodie. Your arms are crossed. You’re looking off in my direction with a satisfied grin and this unusually peaceful look on your face. I love this photo of us.
Mom and I put our name on the list and wait for Johnny outside. He was Jonathan when we were growing up, but now he’s Johnny. He was cool and funny in high school, but now he has a tattoo of a Tim Burton heart over his actual heart, and he’s getting art-world famous with his surreal, mostly pornographic, collages on Instagram. He sent us two framed prints for the new house. They are so cool. You would love them.
Johnny gets out of his Uber druuunk. The three of us squeeze onto a tiny bench, and he smokes a cigarette. I want one so badly in that way that you want to do what you always used to do with certain people. But I haven’t smoked a cigarette since 2007, and I’m certain if I smoke one now, I won’t ever be able to stop because life is so fucking hard, and I have a baby, and who wants to smoke around a baby? I love that joke you used to tell about that, about smokers justifying their smoking. Like, “Well, I’m in the car, so I should smoke. Or, I just smoked a cigarette, so I should smoke another cigarette. Or, oh, I’m around a baby, I should smoke a cigarette!” You would kill me if you were able to see how severely I just butchered that goddamn joke.
Johnny is exactly the medicine that Mom and I need. He has always made us—including you—laugh until we’re unable to breathe, the best kind of laughter. We eat ramen and drink beer and laugh obnoxiously loud and talk about sex (Johnny’s sex) and watch videos of Iris and cry about you and eventually head back to our hotel where we order up a cot for Johnny, take selfies, and stay up giggling slumber-party style into the a.m. hours.
• • •
The next morning, after a nice brunch with my in-laws, who live in LA, I find a hair app called Blow Me and arrange for a stylist to come straighten my hair in the hotel room. We get dressed. I put on mascara for the occasion and sparkly, dangling earrings that belong to Mom. My shoes hurt before I even leave the hotel room, and I know my heels will be bloody within hours. All of this is your fault.
Around three o’clock, we head out. It’s hotter than usual in LA today, and we have to stand directly in the sun in a very long line to get past the gates and security stations. Once we get to the front of the line, we take a photo next to the iconic gold statue that we can post online. The red-carpeted pathway on which we walk is parallel to the real red carpet with all the A-list celebrities, but there are so many photographers lined up along the sidelines that it’s hard to see what’s going on. It’s yet another very crowded event full of beautiful people in beautiful clothing. How did you do all this? (Drugs.)
Once we get into the lobby, it’s even more congested. We find ourselves stuck in a clump taking synchronized baby steps to get into the theater. Jon Stewart is standing right beside me. He’s very short. I am ever-so-slightly starstruck. It’s Jon Stewart. Of The Daily Show. (!!!)
We find our seats in the center section, next to the Parks and Rec people. I notice that I’m two rows behind Mandy Patinkin. This is a huge deal, as I have an irrational crush on Mandy Patinkin. Not the young one—the current one. He basically looks like how I imagine Mike will look in thirty years so, really, I have a crush on an older version of my husband. I snap numerous stalker-style pictures of him over the course of the night and post one on Instagram during the show, which drags on for hours. Tina Fey is standing in the aisle at the end of our row chit-chatting with Mike Schur, your boss and showrunner of Parks. The Orange Is the New Black ladies shuffle down the aisle quickly like giggly teenage girls to get to their seats before the show starts. They look stunning without the beige jumpsuits and face tattoos. And then, it happens. I spot Coach Taylor, which is basically like spotting the president! I get that I’m referring to a fictional character, but Friday Night Lights is our favorite show of all time, and this is a huge, huge fucking deal.
Remember when you sent me the full Friday Night Lights box set a few years back, before it came out for public consumption, and you taped that index card to the front and wrote Clear Eyes Full Hearts Can’t Lose in blue Sharpie? It’s still taped to my desk at work, next to years of neon Post-it notes from students that say U R Snapchat Famous and Your bebe is CUTE! and Should I go to college? One student wrote a Post-it recently that said, They say you should dance like nobody’s watching but really you should dance like everyone is watching so you will dance better. It takes me weeks to realize that this was a quote from one of your Vines. They quote you all the time. I want to text you so badly in this moment and say, OMG, I’m in the same room with Coach!! But I can’t. That is why I’m here.
Since the event is live, we are only allowed to get up and move around during commercial breaks, and in those commercial breaks
, chaos erupts. Everyone is up and schmoozing and buzzing around the room. There’s a big digital clock on giant flat screens on either side of the stage counting down the minutes and seconds until the end of the break. I leave to use the restroom and get a bottle of water thirty minutes in and a seat-filler takes my place. I was desert-level thirsty when we came in after the long line and the blazing sun and the clump of people in ball gowns, but they closed down the beverage station thirty minutes before the ceremony even started to get butts in seats for the big opening number. I saw Penelope Ann Miller try to sneak under the ropes only to be chastised by the man monitoring the bar and sent back from whence she came. The bar reopened once the show started, thus saving me from dropping dead of dehydration.
There are free tubs of fancy red lipstick next to every sink on the bathroom counter. I take one even though I don’t wear lipstick because it’s free. I put it on and look like a little girl playing dress up. I wet a paper towel and wipe most of it off before heading back into the theater. Jeffrey Tambor is accepting his award for Transparent. Were you alive to see this show? God, it’s good. You would love it.
My heart starts pounding during the segment before the In Memoriam segment. The screen displays a warning that it’s coming up next. Then the lights go dim, and Mom fetches Kleenex out of her purse. We grab hands tightly. The room falls silent. Your picture flashes on the screen for several moments with the caption Harris Wittels, Writer/Producer. It’s a shot of you playing Harris, the animal-control guy, on Parks. You’re wearing a flannel over a purple Phish T-shirt with a rainbow logo. Your head is in a vise. It’s the weirdest photo in the bunch. Mom and I cry. The people around us cry. When the slide show is over, the boisterous, bustling crowd is completely still, reverent and quiet. The whole room is focused on honoring those who have recently passed. You are the youngest one by several decades.
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 10