I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, a nurse puts a mask over my face, a tear spills down the side of my face and onto the operating table as I drift off to sleep staring at a computerized sonogram image of a baby inside of me who I’ll never know. When I wake up, full of lead, a Depo-Provera shot is being administered in my ass and an HIV blood test is being shot into my arm.
I have unsafe sex, I get pregnant, Dad doesn’t speak to me for a solid month. No good morning, how was school today, pass the salt—nothing. I’m an invisible ghost who floats around the house haunting my loved ones. An invisible ghost who hates herself and will continue to hate herself for years to come.
Like most traumatic events, this ordeal had a tremendous impact on my future. Pretty much immediately after it happened, I developed this obsessive need to prove that I was “good.” I didn’t want to upset Mom and Dad any more than I already had, so I chose to be the very best version of myself. I spent hours every night doing my homework, stopped taking acid every weekend, auditioned for every school play and got leading roles, pulled back from the shitty boyfriend. From there:
I went on to graduate seventeenth in my high school class.
I attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and graduated with honors.
I got a master’s degree in theater education.
I spent ten years teaching at exceptional schools and cultivating relationships with hundreds of phenomenal students.
I married a wonderful man who is nothing like my shitty, teenage boyfriend. He is extraordinarily nice to me. He is also creative and inventive and funny and patient and wise and supportive and thoughtful and kind. He and I chose to have a child, and now I am a mother.
I gave birth to a magnificent daughter. She is my everything.
Things turned out okay for me, Harris. Maybe if you’d had a uterus and got pregnant at fifteen, you’d have also learned that actions have consequences and ultimately not stuck needles into your arms.
• • •
Dad wears the same face now that he wore back then: expressionless but radiating sadness. When I was a little girl, I would wait and wait at the back door for him to come home from work, and when the knob turned, it was the happiest moment of my day. Where is that man? Is he still in there somewhere or gone forever?
I want to snap him out of it somehow, to say the thing that will make him realize it’s not his fault, that he didn’t make his teen daughter pregnant or his grown son OD. I want to take his hand, walk him out to the car, put him in the passenger seat, drive him to a really good therapist, and sit there with him until his mind is fixed. I want to fly him out to a sweat lodge in the middle of the desert where a shaman can lead him through an intense guided meditation that will exorcize the demons and make him realize he deserves to keep on living.
Instead, I ask if we can talk. He sort of sighs, turns off Fox News, and says, “Okay, let’s talk.” I miss our collective political war with Dad. He always loved to egg us on and spar with his “liberal, commie” offspring. I sometimes think he’s actually a secret liberal who had a master plan all along to make his children liberal by pretending he believed the opposite. Now Mike and I are left to carry the commie torch, and it’s not as fun without you.
Dad avoids eye contact and talks softly, almost in a growl. It’s hard to know where to start. There’s so much to say.
“Dad, I’m worried about you. How are you not talking about this? I don’t understand.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Um, how devastated and sad you are?”
“I already know that. What do I want to talk to somebody about that for?”
“So you can stop blaming yourself?”
“Eh, it doesn’t happen that way.”
“So, what, you feel like you didn’t do enough to prevent it?”
“We should have had a better relationship.”
“Like from the beginning?”
“Yeah, from the beginning.” He pauses and reaches into his memory. “I was always too busy—working all the time. I remember we went on this camping trip one time. He’d come home from Camp Blue Star one summer, and they’d gone camping while he was there, and he was excited about it. So we decided we’d go camping together one weekend, and we went and swam a little bit and ate but wound up coming home early the next morning.” His voice trails off. “It just didn’t turn out to be fun like he thought it was gonna be.”
“Dad, I don’t think that’s true. Your perception is off. We went on vacations. You did Little League. You did Pinewood Derby. It’s not like you weren’t involved. You were very involved.”
This memory flashes in my mind of me driving our minivan when I was nine years old. We used to go to this dude ranch every year in Bandera, Texas, and I couldn’t ride the horses to breakfast every morning like you could because I was allergic to them. But Dad didn’t want me to feel left out, so he would let me sit on his lap in the minivan and drive it behind the trail ride. I loved driving that minivan.
“Do you still go to the cemetery?” I ask.
“Every Sunday.”
“And do what?”
“Just stand there.”
“Do you talk to him?”
“No. He’s dead.”
“So, you just stand there? Does it comfort you to be there?” I ask.
“No. I think it puts me in touch with how I feel about things.”
“Which is—what?”
“Which is…which is…what it is.”
He can’t articulate it.
“Sad?”
“Of course, it’s sad. For me, it doesn’t get any better.”
“It’s the same amount of shitty as it was from Day One?”
“Yep.”
I flash back to that first conversation after I found out you died, where we sat on the bench outside their building, and I broke the news between sobs. I don’t remember how I said it. I just remember his face going blank and a tear falling out of his eye. It’s like he’s still stuck in that moment, permanently shell-shocked.
“We used to go to Meridian, Mississippi,” he says, “And your mother used to film a lot of stuff there—she lost most of those films—but anyway, there’s just all those people in the films, and such a significant number of them are dead now. Gone. That’s the way things are. That’s the way life is. You just don’t expect to see it in a child.”
“Of course not. It’s a horrible tragedy.”
“No question about that,” he quickly adds.
“So, it’s just sadness from here on out?”
“I just think the effort it would take is not worth it.”
“That’s bleak.”
“I mean, your presence is a positive for me.” he adds. “And I know it’s a positive for your mother. And the baby. And Mike. I like Mike.”
“Don’t you think you should go to a therapist?” I’ve asked him this no less than ten times over the last several months, but the answer remains the same.
“No, I don’t think I should go to a therapist,” he says firmly.
“Just one session. What if I go with you?”
“Good lord, I’m not going, and you’re not going with me.”
“Dad, it is important to me that you continue to live.”
“I am living.”
“But there is a direct correlation to happiness and joy and life span, and like you said, this has been shitty and horrible, and our family went from four to three and, like, if we lost another person that would be horrible. We can’t lose another person, Dad.”
“You’re not gonna lose anyone,” he says in this way that brushes off everything I just said, and I start to cry.
“Would you please just go to one session?” I beg him.
“No.”
It’s a losing battle. I drop it.
/> Silence.
“Dad, why didn’t you wanna go with us to LA?”
“Because I didn’t wanna be there.”
“You don’t wanna be a part of anything,” I say critically.
“No, I just didn’t wanna go there and be in the house and see all the places and all that. I just didn’t wanna do it.”
“I just think you feel responsible. I wish you wouldn’t feel responsible.”
He sits forward as if he’s tiring of the conversation.
“If you feel responsible, then, I should feel responsible—” I start to say, but he cuts me off sharply.
“No, no, no, no. That’s the least true thing you’ve said. You were a kid helping a kid. You weren’t his mother. You weren’t his father. You were a close friend, but you weren’t responsible for raising him. You were brother and sister. Very close, but you didn’t raise your brother. I hope that doesn’t upset you.”
“I just feel like you’re saying you didn’t talk to him enough, and you didn’t have a good relationship with him, but I talked to him a lot, and I had a relationship with him, and he still killed himself. That’s what I’m saying, Dad. I don’t think anybody could have changed that.”
He considers this. “Well, that very well may be—”
“Harris wanted to be sober, but he just—I mean, I wish you coulda been there to hear the therapist from the sober living place. The British guy. He said they offered Harris a Vivitrol shot three times, and he turned it down every time. He never really said, ‘Hey, I have a problem.’”
“No, he never did. You’re right about that.”
“And that has nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t, Dad.”
“Okay. Well, thank you, Freud.”
“I want you to talk to me.”
“Okay. Well, we talked. We had a good talk. Anything else you wanna talk about? I’m worn out. How much do I owe you for this session?”
“This one’s free. I love you, Daddy.”
• • •
The rally in Washington is in two weeks. Mom has made plans to go by herself; airfare and hotel are booked. Dad isn’t on the reservation. I walk him to the door that night and ask once more if he’ll reconsider and go. Once more, he says no.
But something happens on the eight-minute drive from our house to his. When he gets home, he asks her to book him a plane ticket.
20
Before
November 2014
After leaving rehab number two, in Oregon, Harris started an outpatient program in LA, four days a week for three hours a day. I checked in with him regularly during those first few weeks, but as October passed, he responded less frequently to my texts. I knew what it felt like when he detached. The same thing happened the first time he got out of rehab. After a while, the check-ins and doing greats became less frequent. The response time between text messages grew longer. I would go days without hearing from him, sometimes weeks. Every once in a while he’d send a request for an Iris video, but that was about it.
In one text, he told me he planned to go see Phish two weekends in a row at the end of October. The last show would be in Vegas on Halloween. Not even out of rehab thirty days, which is such a vulnerable time, and he planned to go to a musical drug den where he’d taken copious amounts of drugs in the past to, as he explained, “just listen to the music.” I begged him not to go—too many triggers and temptations—but he’d always done what he wanted to do, and this was no exception.
One time, he hosted an epic Fourth of July party at his house in Los Feliz that culminated in an angry letter from the homeowners’ association. In it, Manager Glenn explains:
It has come to our attention that you had a large crowd of guests in the front of your home on the 4th of July shooting off an arsenal of fireworks. In fact, the following day, there was a debris field in front of your property of spent shells, casings, and gun powder stains in the street. It is unfortunate that LAPD had to be called twice to control the situation and that a warning from the Post Patrol guard was also ignored for a party that did not disperse until 3 AM Friday with guests loitering in the front yard and street.
Harris gave no fucks about this letter. In fact, he proudly posted it on Instagram like a badge of honor.
I wasn’t sure if he planned to go to Phish this time around specifically to use drugs or if he would use drugs as a result of being back in that environment. Either way, it was a fucked-up, self-sabotagey thing to do, especially now that he’d been given an opportunity to play the role of Aziz’s best friend on Master of None. It was a substantial acting role, which is what he always wanted. Acting was his big dream. He loved playing Harris, the animal control guy, on Parks and Rec, and he wanted more of that. So why not chase that high? Why rock the boat now?
• • •
It was November 6, 2014, a week after Harris’s Halloween Phish binge. Our kitchen and living room were crowded with a dozen overstuffed trash bags of hand-me-down baby clothes from a friend. I was sorting and folding them into piles on the living room floor when I got a Facebook message from Harris’s old college girlfriend, whom I’d neither seen nor spoken to in fifteen years. It was disorienting to see her name pop up. Even more disorienting is that she told me he was using heroin again and that he hadn’t told anyone but her. She didn’t know what to do, but she wanted to do something, so she reached out to me.
The life was instantly sucked out of my body. My face went flush, my heart pounded, my breath slowed.
I called Harris immediately, and he actually picked up the phone. While I was relieved to hear his voice and know he wasn’t passed out or dead in a bathtub somewhere, I was unable to mask my anger as I recounted what she’d revealed. He brushed the whole thing off with a cavalier laugh that carried the weight of cheating on a diet and casually admitted, “Yeah, I relapsed at Phish, but it’s no big deal. I’m back on track now. I’m talking to my sponsor. I’m on my way to a meeting right now. I’ll call after the meeting. Don’t worry.”
He didn’t call.
Later that night, I texted him a photo of Iris I’d taken earlier that day. She was sitting peacefully in a swing at the park across the street wearing a houndstooth pilot cap that we put on to keep her hearing aids in her ears, a teal furry jacket, black leggings, and the yellow moccasins we’d bought the summer before in Utah. In the photo, she’s grinning from ear to ear. Her little dimple makes an indentation on her round, right cheek.
I hope you are going to a meeting tonight. I hope you will look at your beautiful niece’s face instead of putting a needle in your arm. I hope you will value the amazing opportunity you’ve been given on Aziz’s show and go back to working the Twelve Steps in order to keep your role. I know you’re the only one who can precipitate change so I hope you will be honest with yourself and go back to what you know. You have to admit you have a problem and that you are powerless. Not that you fucked up and it’s not a big deal and you can pop some pills and get yourself back on track. It has to start from within and you have to go to the support group. You mean the world to lots of people, Harris. I hope you will get the help you need.
He replied.
I’m going to hang with friends at UCB. I didn’t do drugs today or yesterday and I’ll keep not doing them.
I instantly responded.
I think we both know that’s bullshit. Go to the meetings. Every day. That’s how you’ll keep not doing them. You can’t do it alone.
And then he actually typed:
I only hear from everyone when I relapse.
I was seething.
Are you fucking kidding me?? I send you pictures and updates of Iris all the time. When you start using again, you stop responding. Look back at your texts. I am always there. Plus you literally told mom to leave you alone about the sobriety shit. So no one asks you a
bout it so as not to rock the boat. But maybe we should more. Because clearly it’s still an issue. It’s very clear cut. Go to meetings, work the program, every day. When you stop, you relapse. If you could control your addiction yourself, you wouldn’t keep using.
My last message was time-stamped 10:15 p.m. He neglected to respond until 3:37 a.m., when I got the following text:
Okay. Look I fucked up. There is such a thing as a brief relapse. It’s called a ‘slip.’ I will stay on track til I see you Thanksgiving so here is my brotherly favor I’m asking… Please don’t tell parents. Keep this a secret like when we were in high school. I truly do not want to do that to them. I will check in with you more regularly. But at least wait and see if I fuck up again before we go freaking out for real. I’m alive, I’m going to a meeting with my sponsor tomorrow. I will not be able to look dad in the eye if he finds out I slipped. I will cancel my flight home. Please do this for me.
Once again, my brother was putting me in the fucked-up position of keeping a secret that could potentially kill him. Plus, he was just so full of shit. I didn’t believe a fucking thing he said anymore. But the most pathetic part was that I did it. I kept the fucking secret. If it had been an episode of Intervention, Jeff VanVonderen would’ve cut me down to size with those piercing, steely eyes of his and tell me I was enabling Harris and, thus, part of the problem. I hated both of us equally and didn’t respond to his text.
He sent another one at 3:48 p.m. the next day.
Hi Steph. Just left a meeting and feel really good. Just letting you know. Confessed all my sins.
I responded.
I’m glad to hear that. I didn’t tell Mom because honestly it will destroy her. She told me a few days ago she had a bad feeling that you were using again and that if you were, it was the last straw for her. I don’t want to break her heart. Please go to meetings every day. Please.
Harris: What do you reckon that means? The last straw.
Me: That she won’t be able to have a relationship with you anymore if you are using. No more contact—this is what she said. It’s too painful for her.
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 12