“You should. It works for me,” you said.
“Did you go outside to smoke last night in the middle of a snow storm?” Dad asked.
“Several times.”
“That’s unbelievable. You could have had pneumonia by now.”
And then: “I took a Zithromax, like, two months ago. My white cells are through the roof.”
Tonight, as I fight to get the medicine into my kid’s mouth as she writhes on the ground like a piece of bacon in a frying pan, I think of your magical white blood cells.
And I laugh.
25
Before
November 2014
Two weeks after the Pete Holmes podcast aired, we expected Harris to come home for Thanksgiving. It was the Tuesday before the holiday weekend, and he was supposed to land in time for dinner. I assumed he’d either want seafood or Mexican. I was already at work that morning when I got a text from my mom who copied and pasted a text she had just gotten from Harris. No preface or explanation. Just this:
Mom I love you and I’m sorry but I don’t think I can come home. I had another relapse and was scared to tell you but I’m dealing with it and am just not in a place to come home and pretend everything is fine. I’m sorry I’m such a fuck-up. I really wanted to be with everyone. I’m not trying to hurt you guys. I’m so sorry.
I erupted into screaming sobs because there was now a volcano where my heart should be. It was messy and hot and all over the place; bubbly and sticky and oozing. It was also very uncomfortable for everyone in the office. They quickly vacated the room. I called my mom and screamed into the phone: “What a fucking asshole! I knew he’d relapsed! I fucking hate him! What the fuck is wrong with him?! He ruins everything! He has destroyed our family. Fuck him!” This went on and on. Lots of fucks.
I worked at a school.
I was a raging bull. The togetherness I’d been loosely holding together all unraveled in this moment. I was so sick of his shit. Given the opportunity, I would’ve pummeled him and not stopped until I saw blood.
That night, my dad finally called Harris and asked if he wanted them to go out there to help him detox. Harris said yes. My dad said it would have to be Friday because they wanted to spend Iris’s first Thanksgiving with us. I thought, “Yet another first that Harris is missing. Another holiday he’s fucking up.” The hate grew deeper.
This would be the first time in our entire lives that our family wouldn’t be together for Thanksgiving. Harris would spend the day driving around LA with his drug dealer while his niece messily slurped up cranberry sauce for the first time.
Over the next few days, I purposely didn’t reach out to my brother. I’d been angry at him plenty in the past, but in those moments of typical sibling tension I just yelled at him for a little while, he yelled back, and it was over. This felt heavier, more permanent.
However, as shitty as I felt about Harris’s absence from Thanksgiving this year, I knew he felt a million times shittier. He was occupying the darkest space, sending texts like this to my mom:
I got back on suboxone and just feel like crap.
I miss you a lot. I hate this.
It’s my fault.
Mom confessed to him that her biggest fear was that her son was going to overdose whether he wanted to or not. Maybe he had a secret death wish. She said she was scared of losing her baby boy. He told her he wouldn’t do that to her.
“No one ever overdoses on purpose,” she said.
• • •
When my parents got to LA, my mom reported that Harris seemed empty, sad, and lonely. She cried a lot. The three of them spent a lot of time that weekend sitting in the dark with the curtains drawn, watching the giant television. My mom made a huge Thanksgiving dinner from scratch for Harris on Friday. He loved Thanksgiving food, and she loved him. She said he seemed grateful, as grateful as someone who was dead inside could be.
She also reported that Harris didn’t seem to be in any physical pain or experiencing any symptoms of withdrawal. “The Suboxone must really be working,” she concluded. My fear was that he wasn’t detoxing at all. My fear was that he was shooting up while my parents slept down the hall in the guest room.
That weekend, he and my mom had a candid conversation outside on his back patio. He was smoking, as usual. My mom told him she was on a merry-go-round with him and didn’t know if she could hang on for another relapse. It was killing her. “I’m an addict,” he said. “I’m gonna relapse. That’s what addicts do. But you’re my mom. You’ll always be there for me.” It scared the shit out of her. He was basically saying he was going to relapse again and again and again. He already had. He was telling her he wasn’t ever going to get better.
She begged him to come back to Houston and stay indefinitely. She said he needed to get away from this place and clean himself up and be with his family. Harris said he wanted to come home but had to finish up blah blah blah thing first. Granted, he was busy. He’d done so well in his career up to this point because he was reliable and hardworking. And funny. Very funny. However, his career wasn’t our priority—he was. He promised that when he wrapped things up in LA, he’d buy a one-way ticket home. It shouldn’t be longer than a week or so. He wanted to come home. He was on board with our plan.
• • •
I wrote him a letter that weekend that still sits in the drafts folder of my email, a letter that said exactly how I felt. The truth. How angry, hurt, betrayed, sickened, scared, and anxious I was about him every minute of every day. How I was terrified he was going to die. How I wanted my brother back. But I got scared and sat on it. I didn’t want to rock the boat. I didn’t want to make him angry or push him farther away. I just wanted him to come home. I figured if we could get him home, maybe we could make him stay. Maybe we could look into his eyes or hand him the baby and inspire him to change. Maybe we could save him. Sometimes, I look at this letter and wonder if things would have turned out differently had I sent it.
26
Nine Months, One Week, Four Days
I have an expansive digital record of our relationship for which I am grateful because my long-term memory is shit. When I type your name into my Gmail history, I can instantly pull up page after page of authentic samplings of you: your thought process, opinions, moments of weakness, moments of triumph, jokes, anecdotes, typos. I do it often.
I do it again when Aziz contacts me the first week of December about a piece he’s writing for the New York Times Magazine called “The Lives They Lived.” It’s an annual In Memoriam, and they’re going to honor you. His idea is to highlight some of the most Harris-ish digital interactions you had with the people to whom you were closest: texts, emails, chats, etc. There’s so many from which to choose. You really shined electronically.
Our G-chats date back to 2007. Eight years of mostly meaningless and meandering conversations about girls (you) and boys (me); work drama; daily stressors; parents’ birthday gifts; houses we should or shouldn’t buy; dreams we had; nightmares, too. It’s like a trunk of old letters buried in the backyard that I dig up, crack open, and spend hours exploring.
Harris: hey lemme run this thing by you
asked a girl out via facebook who we have a mutual friend, but i’ve never met
she seems cute and funny
well here
im gonna cut and paste the convo
“ya id be down for that. always open for a nice chat. cant this weekend going on a vacay haaaaay. maybe next week/weekend. talk to you soon.”—her
“Fuck off, it’s this weekend or never. Just kidding. Talk to you next week. Lookin forward to it and what not.”—me
was the “fuck off” too strong? she hasnt responded
thought it was funny
Me: that’s totally funny
Harris: ok cool
anyone would get it
Me: did you send it, like
, an hour ago?
if she doesn’t get it, she’s an idiot and fuck her
Harris: word!
• • •
Me: ok so real quick tell me—are you in love?
Harris: i mean i dunno. its still nascent
but we are happy yes
Me: i can’t believe you just used that word
but you feel like it’s clicking?
good job on that word
Harris: it is clicking.
• • •
Harris: did i tell u i’m gonna be on the real world?
(We both loved The Real World, so this was a huge deal. This was a huge deal for both of us.)
Me: What? No
Harris: i talked to this girl at a bar all night and there were cameras on us and i signed a release form and she wouldn’t tell me what it was for
and she gave me her phone number and told me to call the house tomorrow
and as she was leaving she whispered that it was the real world
so im gonna be the guy on the phone
and the guy in the bar
Me: OMGOMGOMG
Harris: and hopefully the guy in the night vision bedroom scene
Me: was she foine?
Harris: she was
they were doing their job thing
which was walking around with candy trays and trying to get tips and wearing these vests
for a group called the “meow meows”
and i said i’m in the ruff ruffs
and she giggled
and then she literally ripped my shirt off and put on her vest
and gave me the tray
Me: shut up!
Harris: and i started selling her candy
and getting a lot of tips
Me: That is fucking wild.
Were there sparks?
Harris: mad sparks
but i was wasted and on my A+ game
i was like whats yer name
and she was like kimberly
and i was like your last names burly?
she loved it
I need the digital record because my memories are unreliable. I worry that I won’t be able to keep you alive in my mind over time. I can see the outline of memories in flashing images like a slide show. I have an idea about the theme of an interaction, but I couldn’t write the scene. I couldn’t take a lie detector test. I worry that my fragmented outline of memories will become even more barren with time.
What sticks out most vividly are your facial expressions:
Like the one where you squint your eyes and crinkle your nose and scrunch your shoulders up like you’re hiding in your own face.
Or the one where you purse your lips tight into a pucker and raise your eyebrows.
Or the one where you have this totally blank, flat expression but there’s so much going on behind the eyes.
I can picture you sitting in front of the TV at two in the morning, wearing flannel pajama pants, a Phish T-shirt, and a hoodie, watching The Real World or something equally inane and eating leftovers out of a Styrofoam to-go container with your fingers. You never used silverware.
I can see you sitting on the couch, one knee bent, finger-pecking furiously away on your laptop. You never learned to type properly but were lightning-fast on a keyboard. You could have won a competition.
These are the images I saw on repeat for thirty years. They’re seared into my memory. Conversations are harder to conjure because they happened only once. I want to remember all of the things you said, but I can’t. I can listen to podcasts or stand-up DVDs or Mom’s home movies, but I can’t remember all the things you said to me on the phone at two in the morning while freaking out about a girl, and I want to remember those moments so badly because they’re all I have. We can’t create any more memories.
For some reason, I can remember lots of times as teenagers when we got fucked-up together:
Like the time you picked mushrooms in a field after it rained, and we dehydrated them upstairs in the middle of the night in the food dehydrator Dad bought to make beef jerky. The whole upstairs smelled like cow shit for days. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to notice. How?
Or the time we took acid in high school and hung out by the pool in my friend Nellie’s backyard until six in the morning. You accidentally took a sip out of the Coke can that was full of cigarette ash and gagged for several minutes. We laughed about it until we cried for weeks, months, years. I still laugh when I think about it.
Or the time you came to visit me when I was a freshman at NYU. You were only a high school sophomore, a little boy, but we somehow got you into a bar down the street called the Fat Black Pussycat. A dark place coated with red velvet. You drank too much and threw up all night. But it was funny.
Or the time in middle school when you and your friends rolled fake joints out of oregano and brown paper lunch sacks and Mom found it the next day, woke us all up at seven in the morning, and dragged us out into the backyard to bust us for smoking pot. I told her it was oregano and that you were stupid and went back to bed.
Why do I remember this stuff?
Because you died of a drug overdose?
Because I have to somehow make myself responsible?
I remember other stuff, too.
Like how you loved to make Hungry Man frozen dinners at three o’clock in the morning in our old house on Dumfries.
Or when you played the title role in the musical Oliver in middle school and said, “Please sir, can I have some more” in your little British accent so perfectly.
Or when you were the spotlight operator for The Boys Next Door in high school, and I was stage managing, and you were thirty minutes late for your call and didn’t give a shit, and we got into an enormous fight over the headset.
Or the time you made me go see the String Cheese Incident at Radio City Music Hall, and I threw my back out on the way to the concert walking down the stairs of my apartment building on Third Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street but went to the concert anyway because I knew how much it meant to you. Our seats were in the balcony and every time people jumped around, which happened excessively, the balcony would shake and I was certain we would die in a balcony-collapse freak accident.
Or the time we saw Phish at Coney Island and it was outdoors and rained the entire night, and I was wearing a white dress that was soaked all the way through and shivering on the train the whole two-hour ride back to Queens.
I remember that you used to suck your third and fourth fingers relentlessly so that they had these permanent indentations on them and you would drag your little, white blanket behind you everywhere you went, like Linus. The only time it wasn’t in your possession is when you had it in the freezer. You liked it best when it was really cold.
I remember the day you got the Freaks and Geeks box set. I got home around four in the afternoon and sat down next to you for what was supposed to be a momentary hello, but I was still sitting in the same spot at four in the morning. It’s filed away as one of my all-time favorite memories—just sitting with my brother, watching TV for twelve hours straight.
I remember that time when you were three or four years old, and you ran through Luby’s Cafeteria during dinner rush screaming “Shit, shit, shit!” and Mom warned you that she was going to wash your mouth out with soap, but you kept doing it. When we got home, she felt it was important to follow through but didn’t have bar soap, so she just squirted a bunch of liquid soap into your mouth. Before the soap could foam up and do its job, she immediately felt guilty and started scraping out the inside of your mouth with a washcloth. You were hysterical. She was hysterical. She spent the rest of the night apologizing, crying, and rocking you back and forth in the living room.
• • •
I didn’t remember this particular exchange from 2011 but got chills afte
r I found it while digging through my Gmail archives for Aziz’s New York Times piece.
Me: harris i had the most awful dream about you
it was the saddest dream i’ve ever had
Harris: oh no!
hurry cause i’m goin back to bed
Me: you died
and i was grieving
and my life was destroyed
the end
don’t die
goodnite
27
Before
Early December 2014
My parents left LA the Sunday after Thanksgiving with a promise from Harris that he would come home after the Parks and Rec wrap party in early December, which was being held in Vegas. Where he’d relapsed a month before. Of course, after the wrap party, Harris had to turn in a script for Master of None, so the trip was further delayed. Then he had some Emerson College master-class to teach. He was scheduled to come home on the second, then the ninth, then the eleventh. He finally got on a plane and made it home Sunday, December 14.
That night, I read Baby Beluga three times and Pat the Bunny four times. I rocked the baby and smelled her head and laid her gently in her crib. I kissed my husband goodbye and drove the fifteen minutes to my parents’ building, sick with anxiety and anticipation. In the elevator. Up seventeen floors. Down the hall. Into the apartment. Dad was watching TV on the living room couch. He barely acknowledged me.
Inside the guest room, all the lights were off, but light from the hallway spilled into the room to reveal a miserable, sick, empty version of my brother curled up feebly on the bed. He moaned and writhed in pain. His body temperature was up and down and up and down. There was sweating, shivering, aches and pains, nausea and occasional vomiting. It felt like I was watching The Basketball Diaries, which I found difficult to watch when it was just Leonardo DiCaprio playing a role. My little brother was in agonizing pain, and there was nothing I could do to help him. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen, worse than I ever imagined. This was what detox looked like.
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 15