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Parks loses Best Comedy series to Veep, which is bullshit. I mean, it was a likely conclusion but still disappointing. No one is particularly bummed about it. I guess it’s just how it goes. But it would have been nice to win, since the show just wrapped forever and one of the executive producers was just featured in the In Memoriam with his head in a vise.
After the awards ceremony, which takes a short lifetime, the entire auditorium at the Microsoft Theater files out of the same three side doors and walks in a herd to the Governor’s Ball at the convention center across the street. It is like walking into magic or the most expensive wedding reception I’ve ever seen. Thousands of twinkling lights hang from floor to ceiling. A huge, layered stage is in the center of the room like a gigantic cake with a band on top. Pink and magenta lights shine into every corner. Massive, white floral arrangements sit on every table. Every inch is dripping with money.
Right when we enter, we are greeted warmly by the woman you were dating on and off during the year leading up to your death. The one who came after Sarah. She’s a talent agent, which is why she’s here. We know her because she’s Jewish and from Houston, so we’re basically from the same tribe. You actually went on your first date when you were home last Christmas break—I remember how skeptical you were but how much fun you ultimately had. I don’t know why it didn’t work out between you two. Well, I do. Heroin. I know that you went to her house the night before you died and begged her to let you inside, to give it another shot. But she was already dating someone else by then, and your last-ditch effort failed. Yet another shame. She was a good one.
After hugs and goodbyes, we head to our table: 420, your birthday, the birthday of Hitler, and the National Day of Weed. We sit down with the Parks producers. Everyone swears they had nothing to do with the table number. Of all the numbers in the room, we are all randomly seated at 420? It’s a sign. It has to be a sign. (You did this, right?)
After a few minutes, we track down Amy Poehler and Mike Schur. Amy grabs us and squeezes us tightly. I remember when we first met her. It must have been 2010. Mom and I were visiting you in LA, and you were shooting a scene at some bar that would be the Snakehole Lounge in Pawnee, the fictitious Indiana town where the show takes place. At some point, the actors went on a short break, and Amy and Rashida Jones rushed over to meet Mom and me. They were both eating bags of potato chips. Amy was like, “Oh my gosh, is this your family?! We love him so much!” She embraced us both with enormous hugs. She asked what I did, and I told her I taught middle-school theater (which was true at the time), to which she responded, “I loved doing theater in school! What are you working on?” Mom jumped right in and responded, “She just directed The Importance of Being Earnest and she won first place at UIL!” This was just the most Mom moment. As if Amy Poehler gives a shit about my stupid middle-school drama competition. But you sure would have thought I’d said I was the president of the United States. Both of them were so excited about it. “Wow, that’s amazing!” When a production person came to pull them back to set to shoot the next scene, they apologized to us for having to go.
You always said Parks was the nicest set in Hollywood, and I learned then that it was true. These were normal, nice people. I’m glad that they were the people with whom you surrounded yourself on a daily basis.
That whole trip was so much fun. We got a real glimpse into your world. You had your own reserved parking space with the Parks logo and your name printed on it. For some reason, this stood out as being particularly impressive to me. We visited all the different locations on set. I took photos on Anne’s couch, at Leslie’s desk, in Ron’s office. It was delightful to hang out in Pawnee for a little while. That night, we went to a great little Italian restaurant with Mom, Johnny, and Taal. We ate and drank and laughed until our stomachs hurt. It was a perfect day and night. I would give anything to be here in LA right now with you still in it.
• • •
Now, standing there in our fancies, I tell Amy I chose her book, Yes, Please, for our summer reading assignment at school—it’s one of the many books I took from your bookshelves when we cleaned out your house back in February. You were always a voracious reader. The kids loved the book, obviously. I tell Amy that one of my students in particular is obsessed with her to the point of a restraining order. He was so excited that I was coming here and that I might possibly get to see her. She grabs my arm and says, “Ooh, let’s make him a video!”
We all head to an area of the room with more light. Mike Schur takes my iPhone and starts recording. He directs me to announce Amy casually, and then he’ll pan over to her for the surprise effect. (Is he really this great of a guy?) So I say, “Hey Nathan, I just have someone here who wants to say hi to you!” Then the camera pans to Amy. “Hi Nathan! It’s Amy Poehler. I hear that you like my work, and I know that I like yours even though I haven’t met you. So, I just wanted to say, Happy September, keep on being yourself, you seem really cool, and I hope meet you some day. Bye!”
Despite my initial dread and hesitation, it really couldn’t be a lovelier evening. The show has come to an end. We are here to honor you. We are here to celebrate your work with all the people who sat in a room with you every day for the last five years. This has nothing to do with heroin or death or tragedy. We aren’t sad or angry or resentful. We’re just proud. We are so proud of you, Harris.
At around midnight, I walk back to the hotel, barefoot, holding my shoes in one hand and Mom’s hand in the other.
19
Seven Months, Four Days
We all do this differently. Some people find comfort in visiting graves. Others don’t. I go on milestones—birthday, death day, etc. Mom never goes. Dad has been going by himself nearly every Sunday, though he still can’t say the words. He just says he’s going to “the office.” The first time we visit the cemetery as a family is on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, nearly seven months after the funeral.
On this, the holiest day of the year, we are mostly quiet. We feel our feelings independent of one another. Dad walks away and sits on a bench in silence. At one point, I join him, laying my head on his shoulder. I’m not sure he even notices me there. This is killing Dad. He’s seventy-three years old, and every passing day, he seems to move a little slower and grow a little weaker. I think it may actually be killing him.
After the cemetery, we head to synagogue for the afternoon service. We’d debated whether we even wanted to go this year. There will be so many people to face who will be looking at us with pity, as people now do. We decide to go to one service, Mom’s favorite, the contemporary service, A Confession for Our Time.
When we arrive, the only seats available are on the far sides of the chapel next to the plaques of congregants’ names who have passed away. Each name has a small, round light next to it that lights up the week of their Yahrzeit, or anniversary of their death. All of them are lit up for this holiest of days. The cavernous sanctuary must seat a thousand people, yet we happen to sit on the aisle directly next to your plaque: Harris Lee Wittels. There it is. In plaque form. Another permanent record. Seeing it sends Mom into a fit of hysterical sobbing. Her friends swarm around her like bees. The service starts shortly after, so she hasn’t fully recovered when everyone takes their seat.
Much of the service focuses on the ways a person has failed over the year: individually, as part of a family, as a member of society. The rabbi spends a good deal of time talking about the relationship between parent and child. He implores us to admit our shortcomings and decide to do better next year. You don’t have this option, so the whole thing feels like a masochistic exercise. I worried that this would be too much for Mom. She cries through this service every year, dead son or not. I whisper in her ear that we don’t have to stay. We can leave at any point. All she has to do is say the word.
It’s four o’clock when we sneak out of the sanctuary and step into th
e sunlight. Not yet sundown, so technically not time to break the fast, but in light of our shitty circumstances, we assume God will understand. We get in the car and head to pick up Iris from school together, a rare, and thrilling, occasion for her. When Mommy, Daddy, Bapa, and Momo walk through the door to Iris’s little classroom, she doesn’t know who to run to first. To her, this is a special day.
To break our fast (well, for Mom, Dad, and Mike to break their fast—like you, I never fast), we head to a new pizza restaurant down the street that pales in comparison to Star Pizza. Dad and I order a bottle of wine. Iris is enamored with the fire in the brick oven. She thinks it’s a giant birthday candle and sings the happy birthday song at least a dozen times. As we shovel appetizers into our mouths, Mom mentions her upcoming trip to Washington, DC. She’ll be attending a rally in a couple of weeks called the Unite to Face Addiction summit. They’re doing a comedy showcase in honor of you and comic Greg Giraldo, who also died of a heroin overdose. A comedy showcase at an addiction rally seems like an odd mix, but Tig Notaro is slated to perform, and she managed to make a recent cancer diagnosis funny. So maybe it will be funny? Quick editorial on Tig: I love her. She’s reached out several times since you died to check on us. A bona fide mensch. You had such wonderful friends.
Anyway, the organizers of the event read a piece I’d written about you a few months back and sent me an invitation to attend and speak at the comedy showcase. No part of me wanted to do this, so I passed the info along to Mom, who is eager to carry the torch. She wants to do the outreach and fight the battle and be involved.
This is nothing new. She’s always been involved. Growing up, she was a stay-at-home mom who was always available to pick us up for orthodontist appointments and sick days. She always kept the fridge and pantry stocked. She was always there when kids needed help—any kids, us or others. In middle school, when Chloe was incessantly fighting with her dad, Mom took her in for three months, no questions asked. She packed her a sack lunch every day. In high school, when Johnny’s mom, Grace, died from cancer, Mom all but legally adopted him.
Her primary role has always been Mom.
So, naturally, she’s no longer herself. She still lights up around Iris, but that’s about it. All her posts on Facebook are related to addiction, loss, grief, and isolation. It’s a whole other heartache to see her this way, this charming Southern lady who once glowed with her honeys and sugars and darlins and silver hair and green eyes and perfectly painted lips and ageless skin. It’s hard to see your mother in pain.
Iris is always bringing me Frozen Band-Aids to cover my owies. I have this teeny, tiny red dot on my knee that’s always been there, and Iris fixates on it. She touches it and studies it and says with great concern, “Mama, owie! Wha happen, Mama?” She’s so concerned with my being hurt. It’s hard to see your mother in pain.
Mom never expected this to happen. She feared and worried and fretted and obsessed and lost weeks and months of sleep—she knew it could happen, but a mother never expects her child to die. A child is supposed to bury a parent. There’s no way to prepare for the other way around. And now, where there used to be an innate buoyant light inside of her, a heaviness resides. A life sentence. The torture of waking up every morning and having to re-remember.
Plus, there’s a palpable stigma attached to overdose, especially heroin, that’s been hard for Mom to accept. It’s not an honorable way to die, like being a war hero or the victim of a natural disaster. There’s a hierarchy in death like there’s a hierarchy in life. When someone dies of breast cancer, no one questions where her parents went wrong. Sick people are victims; drug addicts aren’t. No one’s going on the internet and bashing a cancer patient for dying. One death feels out of a person’s control while the other feels like a choice—a very shameful choice. Although Mom has been spared complete and utter shame since you were “famous.”
“He wasn’t the stereotypical drug addict living under a bridge or in jail or stealing from his family,” she told me recently. “People revered him and honored him. No one looked at him and said his parents failed him. He was a high-class, functioning drug addict.”
Status is very important to Southern women.
Mom is very active and involved in her grief. She initially went to grief therapy and cried and screamed and pounded the floor—literally—until she dug down deep and had nothing left to say. The grief counselor put her in a support group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, but she couldn’t relate to that strain of tragedy. She felt different with her scarlet letter O, for overdose. She found a support group on Facebook called GRASP, which stands for Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing, where grieving mothers and other family members post photos and statuses all day long about the children they’ve lost, primarily to heroin. They post articles titled “Heroin in the Heartland” and “Breaking Point: Heroin in America.” They share quotes in script, surrounded by backgrounds of open sky, that read, “Your wings were ready, but my heart was not,” or “Those we have held in our arms for a little while, we hold in our hearts forever.” GRASP is the saddest place I’ve ever been.
The only place sadder is in the eyes of our father. He has no online support group. He doesn’t even know how to use the internet. Completely alone in his grief, he hasn’t talked to anyone since you died—not a therapist, not a friend, not a wife, not a daughter.
A few years back, you did an interview with Serial Optimist where you said Dad was “the funniest dude alive.” And he was. Remember when he knocked out his two front teeth attempting to play a harmonica and had to wear that retainer with two false teeth attached to the front? He would always take it out at restaurants and put it in other people’s water glasses. He ate from dessert trays as waiters described daily specials and took musicians’ violins out of their hands to badly serenade dinner patrons. When we were teenagers, he tried his hand at stand-up comedy at the Laff Stop open mic. A doctor by day, he called himself Dr. RIP and had that one terrible prop bit where he glued a dildo on a cereal box of Kix and made some joke about getting your kicks.
Your comedy career filled him with immense pride. He went into medicine but always secretly wanted to do what you did and was able to live vicariously through you. Whenever he saw you in person or spoke to you on the phone, he’d always run down his laundry list of show ideas, joke ideas, script ideas, and book ideas. He had so many ideas.
He’s no longer full of ideas. No longer funny. No longer alive. I hate you for doing this to him.
The night after our Yom Kippur cemetery family outing, Dad comes over to babysit Iris for a couple of hours. After putting her down for bed, I trap him into having a conversation—just the two of us. Sippy cup in hand, I head downstairs to find him slumped down, feet on the coffee table, remote control glued to his hand. He’s still in his work clothes that hang off him now because he’s lost so much weight. For his birthday in July, I bought him new jeans that are two sizes smaller, but even those are too big now.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen him this way—ransacked and vacant. This Yom Kippur, it’s because of you. Twenty years ago, it was because of me.
• • •
When I was fifteen, I fell hard for a boy. Let’s call him Ben. He was so cool. I only had my learner’s permit, but he knew how to drive. He drove a hand-me-down Chevy Monte Carlo with velvety seats. He played in a band and smoked tons of weed. I don’t recall him being particularly nice. I don’t recall him being anything definitive at all really. No matter. I loved him ferociously, and it consumed me.
Dad hated him, of course, which only made me love him more.
One afternoon while Mom and Dad atoned for their sins at Yom Kippur services, I had sex with Ben in my childhood bedroom, under a ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars.
I’m not sure where you were that day.
I remember being too scared to walk into the pharmacy and buy the pregnancy test, so Ben drove
us to our favorite diner to kill time. I ordered my usual chicken tenders basket with fries but couldn’t eat a bite because my stomach ached with the knowledge that I was in very serious—very adult—trouble. More trouble than I knew how to handle. I didn’t need a test to tell me that. My sore and swollen boobs were evidence enough.
Ben’s parents happened to be out of town that weekend, so we took the pregnancy test to his house, where I locked myself in the hall bathroom. My chest was clenched; my pulse, explosive. When I read the results, I fell to the ground, hitting my head on the counter on the way down.
I felt numb, empty, panicked, terrified, ashamed, sad, mad, and bad. Very, very bad. That night, we drank a 40-ounce of malt liquor in Ben’s backyard.
The next few days were profoundly heavy. It was the first time in my life I’d felt that kind of weight. While all my friends worried about an upcoming geometry test, I worried about how I would tell Mom and Dad I was pregnant.
Aside from the teen sex, drug experimentation, and cigarette smoking, I wasn’t a bad kid. I got good grades, had passions and interests, went to a competitive, specialized high school for performing arts. Teachers always gave me the highest marks in conduct. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a good kid who did a stupid thing. But getting pregnant at fifteen and having to deal with the emotional trauma, stigma, and shame of having an abortion taught me very early on that my actions do, in fact, have consequences. A leads to B, which leads to C, and C can sometimes really suck:
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, Mom weeps an ocean of tears and threatens to send me to boarding school.
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, I’m taken to a doctor the day after telling my parents and forced to look at the doctor’s kids’ baby pictures that sit on top of his desk while he makes sure I understand my options.
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 11