Fuck you, heroin. Fuck you.
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding Harris’s hand, trying not to audibly sob. My worst nightmare was that I would lose him, and it now felt closer than ever. We didn’t say much, maybe even nothing. I mostly sat there and shared the space with him. All the anger faded away. My brother wasn’t a selfish asshole who was determined to ruin my life. In fact, this wasn’t about me at all. My brother was sick. Sick. And all I wanted in this moment was to be there for him.
On the way home, I called a friend who had gotten sober years before and had managed to stay sober, get married, and have a couple of kids. He was confident that the only chance Harris had for success was long-term care. Ninety days was okay; 120 was ideal. Thirty days was akin to doing nothing at all. Thirty days produced just another high: the high of sobriety. You feel great after thirty days, better than you’d ever felt before, and in this euphoric state, you think, I can use just one more time. Harris had no chance of kicking this thing if he continued to do thirty-day stints. He’d already failed twice. Something in his approach had to change. My friend gave me the names of several excellent facilities in the Texas area. I wrote them all down and thanked him profusely. I would have to have a conversation with Harris tomorrow—a real conversation, no bullshit, no eggshells.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is in a coma, unresponsive. Talking to Harris felt a lot like that. I headed to my mom’s after work the following day. It was around four thirty in the afternoon. The shades were drawn in the living room. I sat on a stool at the kitchen island, eating cheese, while Harris laid on the couch a few feet away. It was hard for him to sit up for more than a few minutes at a time. My mom and I urged him to check into a local detox facility, to do this under medical supervision. It was too much to do on his own and medically unsafe. Seeing the state he was in, I tried not to bombard him with too much but ended up saying most of the stuff that’d been piling up for months. I told him he was going to die if he kept living like this. I told him I wanted him to be there to see his niece go to kindergarten, graduate from college, walk down the aisle. I told him about the necessity of long-term care—he had to give it time. He had to relearn how to function without drugs, and history had proven the futility of thirty days.
He said very little but was open to moving into a sober living facility once he got back to LA. He also agreed to go to a hospital here in Houston to finish detoxing safely, under medical supervision. Thank God. It would be a short stay, a few days at most, but it was something.
He checked himself in, and as soon as he’d gotten the heroin out of his system, he checked himself out. We didn’t even have time to visit—it was that quick. Harris had no desire to stay in some rehab on the outskirts of Houston. If the first rehab was the Ritz and the second was the Holiday Inn, this was a Motel 6 on the side of a dirt road next to a state prison. He was still extremely lifeless and depleted once the drugs were out of his system, which continued to take a toll on his body, but he was no longer having the severe physical symptoms I saw a few days earlier that had scared me so much.
However, since sobriety/relapse was now a pattern, I suspected the urge to use was still very much alive.
28
Before
December 22, 2014
My mom’s birthday fell two days after Harris checked out of the local detox facility. It was also three days before Christmas. She had made reservations months ago at her favorite steak house in Houston and made sure about twenty-five times via email, voicemail, and group text that Harris would be home for the occasion. I’d arranged for a babysitter. But nothing was as we thought it would be and no one felt like steak, so she canceled the reservation. Knowing how disappointed she was about everything, I threw together an extremely last-minute pizza party at our house.
It was clear that my mom needed a formal opportunity to make a wish, so I bought her a giant, white sheet cake with white icing from the grocery store bakery and some colorful birthday candles. These shitty white cakes have always been her favorite. Harris obviously wasn’t in the mood to celebrate or even sit up, for that matter. He wanted to stay home in the dark, but she begged and guilted and nagged and pleaded, if only to come to my house for a little while, to which he begrudgingly agreed but showed up an hour late and had a hard time doing anything other than lying on the couch or smoking alone on the back porch. I joined him outside after dinner, of which Harris couldn’t eat a single bite. Star Pizza was always his favorite, but he was still too sick to keep anything down.
There, on the porch, it was finally just the two of us. No Iris, no Mike, no Mom, no Dad, no texting or computer screens, no 1,500 miles. Just us. Just me and my little brother having a face-to-face conversation in real time. It was the last just-us, face-to-face conversation in real time we’d ever have.
I pushed the screen door open, and it slammed loudly behind me. The night smelled refreshingly wintery for Texas. Harris was sitting on a brown wicker armchair with festive Hawaiian-print seat cushions, holding a lit cigarette in his left hand and texting with his right. I sat down on the matching love seat across from him and smiled. A peace offering, if you will. He put the phone down in his lap and placed his deflated attention on me.
“You feeling okay?” I knew the answer but had to start somewhere.
He shrugged.
We sat there for a few moments in silence. I watched him smoke. I had smoked a pack a day for over ten years and quit cold turkey seven years earlier. I’d long ago lost the urge to smoke, but all I wanted in this moment was to chain-smoke a dozen cigarettes in a row. I remember how we used to climb out on the roof at our old house on Dumfries to smoke cigarettes after our parents went to bed. I disabled the alarm system on my bedroom window so that it wouldn’t beep when the window opened. One day when I was fifteen or sixteen, my dad brought home an ashtray, presented it to me, and said, “If you’re going to kill yourself by smoking, please do it outside. I don’t want to rush you to emergency room at three in the morning because you’ve fallen off the roof.”
“Do you think therapy is helping?” I asked Harris.
“I don’t know. He keeps trying to uncover something awful that happened in my childhood that fucked me up, but it was all so normal, right? I mean, you and Ben gave me a whip-it when I was eleven, but—”
“So this my fault?”
“No.”
The scene he’s referring to flashed in my mind. Me, Harris, and Ben all sitting on the floor of my bedroom doing whip-its with a metal cracker and balloon, sucking in the nitrous oxide, holding our breaths, and falling backward for thirty seconds at a time. Harris was wearing his Little League uniform.
“’Cause I was fourteen. I was a kid too.”
“I know, but you didn’t turn into a drug addict,” he said.
“And?”
“I mean, I resent it.”
“You resent that I’m not a drug addict?”
“Just bein’ honest. I’m supposed to be honest now.”
“Okay. Well, for the record, I don’t take responsibility for you shooting heroin.” A tense silence fell between us. “Do you really think I did this to you?”
“No.” Pause. “Dad did.”
“What?” I ask incredulously. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know. I can’t love. Like Dad. I literally don’t know how to connect to people with my emotions.”
“Harris, at some point you’re gonna have to take responsibility for your own shit.”
“I know. I know it’s no one’s fault. I’m the fuck-up. These are just feelings.”
“You’re not a fuck-up! You’re everyone’s favorite! How do you not know that? People love you—we all love you—but you disconnect. You do that. You disconnect from me all the time.”
“Steph, that’s not true! I love Iris and Mike, but you got married and had a bab
y and that was kind of it for us.”
“So I abandoned you?”
“That’s not what I meant. We just stopped being best buds—or at least that’s how it felt.”
The door opened and my mom walked out holding the baby who needed to eat.
And the conversation was over.
29
Ten Months, Three Days
If I were Mom, I can’t imagine wanting to celebrate another birthday ever again now that you’re gone. I certainly don’t. And yet her birthday comes again this year the same as it has every other year. Six of her friends put together a small birthday lunch in honor of her sixty-fifth birthday and ask me to join them. I pick Mom up around noon and we ride over to the restaurant together. In the car, we talk about you. We always—and only—talk about you. Or Iris. We talk about her, too.
Once seated, everyone pours a glass of prosecco and makes a toast to beautiful Maureen. They say all sorts of loving, supportive things, which she deserves a thousand times over.
I am last to speak. I raise my glass high, say “Fuck this year,” and pour it down my throat.
• • •
A decade ago, things were good. You were alive in body and spirit. You were the real Harris, the one before the drugs. We made that elaborate birthday video for Mom on her fifty-fourth birthday that she loved. Remember that video? We drove around Houston all day, smoking cigarettes and shooting hours of footage, which you edited—expertly, in my opinion. We seem so happy in it. I watched it several times in a row after Mom’s birthday luncheon. I love how it starts. You used the first section of that Bright Eyes song about the woman who’s flying to meet her fiancé and the plane crashes, and as it’s going down, the stranger beside her pretends to throw her a birthday party, and he says, “Happy birthday, darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much.”
We loved that part. Even though it’s about a bunch of people plunging to their deaths, there’s still something so uplifting about it. You used it to underscore the intro title card, which read: “Happy Birthday, Mama. Your family loves you very, very, very much… So, here you go.”
The first shot fades up on you at our first location. You’re sitting at a table, a textured wall behind you, distracted by the goings-on of the noisy restaurant. “So basically,” you say, “before we started shooting this video, we thought, let’s get into the mind of Mom. You know, let’s delve into the depths of—”
The camera pans up to a bouncy, boyish waiter at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, the go-to when the bars close at 2:00 a.m.
“What’s up, how you doin’?” he asks.
Focusing the camera on the waiter, I ask him to say happy birthday into the camera: “Happy birthday to me!”
I laugh. He bounces around a little bit more.
“To who?” he asks.
“To Mommy,” I reply.
Exuberantly, he shouts “To Mommy! Happy birthday, Mommy!”
I pan back to you. You’re laughing and genuinely enjoying the spirited exchange.
“I’m gonna put some fish sauce here,” the waiter says. “Use it for your fried egg rolls. Here are some tofu spring rolls.” He turns to the camera as if he’s addressing Mom and says: “It’s what your daughter likes.” (He knows this because I used to come in there no less than four or five times a week for these spring rolls. God, they’re so good. I want them right now.)
“My mom likes these, too,” I tell him.
“She likes that, too? Okay!” And he darts away.
I pan back over to you, giving me a thumbs-up. “Okay, carry on, young Harris.”
You raise your eyebrows and smile. “As I was saying, we decided to come to Mai’s because, you know, Mom loves the spring rolls. We figured this was a good place to start our venture into the world of Mother. And also, um, thank you for lunch, Mom. We are charging it to the credit card.”
The next shot is you swiping the credit card at the checkout counter. “Thanks, Mom.”
Title card: We then wanted to speak with all the people who come into contact with Mom on a regular basis. As it turns out, all of them are Vietnamese.
Next, we interview the lady who used to do all of Mom’s tailoring and several women who work at her nail salon. One of them says, “Happy birthday, Maureen. We love you all here!”
Title card: Isn’t that sweet? They love you all here. Every single one of you.
Later that night, we interview your drunk friends. All of them are sitting around a green-felt card table in the extra room of our old house that was haunted and always ten degrees colder than the rest of the house. Remember when Mom held a séance with that woman named Madame Buttons the summer we moved in to exorcise the bad energy? So fucking weird.
We tore down the house that used to sit on our property and built a new one when I was in the third grade. A Jewish family of four had lived there before us. We knew them peripherally. They belonged to the Jewish Community Center and went to the same neighborhood schools. They looked like us: a mother, a father, a son, a daughter. They seemed so normal. But the husband snapped one day and pulled a knife on his wife in the kitchen. His son was in the house. The mother screamed at him to run and get help, but by the time he got back, it was too late. His father had killed his wife and then killed himself. And their kids were left without parents. They were the token tragic story everyone talked about. I wonder if this is how people feel about us now. Are we the token tragic story everyone talks about now?
The craziest part is that a few years ago, you randomly ran into the daughter (who is now a grown-up) in an LA comedy club, and she recognized you because you said the name of our street growing up in your act: Dumfries. And that was the name of her street. That was the name of her street where she lived when her father killed her mother then killed himself. That was where she lived when her entire world changed in a single moment.
Anyway, the room upstairs is haunted, and you and your friends used to play poker up there. In the video, there are ten of you hanging out, drinking beer, and playing cards. It’s extremely loud. That room was always extra echoey: “Hi, Maureeeen!” They all chime in and latch on to the end of her name and scream it out and raise their beers and make toasts.
Title card: What they meant to say was they love you…and thank you for letting them constantly destroy your home.
Now let us here from the man—you spelled hear like here; if you were alive, I would text you now and give you all sorts of shit about it—who we all love… but seriously wonder how on earth he ever became a doctor.
Cut to Dad, standing in the middle of your room wearing cargo shorts and a dirty, white T-shirt: “Say, um, Maureen Morris Wittels, you think I miss you or is this a banana in my pocket?” He laughs heartily at his own joke, takes the banana out of his pocket, and starts to peel it. He sits down on the foot of your bed and continues: “Fifty-four years old. (Sigh.) Not a kid anymore but more beautiful than ever. And, um, happy birthday. Sorry your life hasn’t worked out like you planned it, but hey, it’s your own fault, you married me, but I digress, so um…” He takes a bite then rubs the banana all over his nose. “So, um, happy birthday.” He sticks it in his ear. “Hey is this a banana in my ear? And, I love you. Bye Bye.”
Title: And now, what the kids have to say…
Cut to you, sitting in a spinning desk chair in front of a backdrop of red curtains that hung in your room growing up. You say, “Um, my stand-up career actually got started by trying to make Mom laugh. The old toothbrush-up-the-ass-draw-a-smiley-face-on-your-ass trick—uh, that’s still one of my most popular bits that I do today on stage.”
Then you cut to a close-up of my face in my room doing this stupid nasally voice that always made Mom laugh. It’s really stupid and grating. I have no idea why she liked it. “Hi, Mom, this is my birthday message to you. I just wanted to say happy birthday and I love you very, very, ve
ry much, and it’s really nice of you when you gave me a bath when I had to get my mucus sucked out of my face because I was dirty and for a mommy to do that to her big child is so nice, and you’re the nicest mommy ever in the whole wide world, and I love you and, um, I just want to say happy birthday.”
Then, back to you: “Mom always had unorthodox parenting techniques. Brings me back to the time I had a wart on my hand and mom swore the trick was a raw potato. Can’t be cooked, can’t be french-fried, lyonnaise, can’t be anything. It has to be raw. She cut it in half, made me rub it on the wart, and then buried it in the backyard. I think it had to be like a full moon or something. And I thought it was very weird. But the wart did in fact go away. Granted, it went away after I went to a real ‘doctor’ [air quotes] and he ‘froze it off’ [air quotes] ‘medically’ [air quotes]. But I still hold the potato largely responsible for that wart being gone today.” You do your little pinched-lip, Harris nod. An early version of your original Small Mouth character. “Happy birthday, Mom, love you.” Then, you purse your lips into the shape of a kiss and follow it up with an awkward grin and eyebrow raise.
The music swells: “Birthday” by the Beatles.
Title Card: Happy Birthday! We Love You!
30
Before
December 25, 2014
Every family has its traditions. Even though we grew up in a Jewish household, Christmas was ours. It doesn’t make any sense, but the root of it is that my dad didn’t want us to feel left out, so he incorporated Santa Claus into our childhood and, over time, it grew and grew into this epic family tradition. As kids, we would leave milk and cookies out for Santa and the reindeers and spend long, restless nights in sleepless anticipation of all the epic shit awaiting our frenzied entrance. We would wake up before the sun came up and run into a living room littered with perfectly wrapped presents. Presents on the floor, presents on the table, presents on the sofa, presents in the kitchen. Wrapped presents, presents in gift bags, presents in envelopes. Presents everywhere. Only crumbs remained on the plate we’d left out and the milk was all gone. A letter from Santa sat on the fireplace underneath the Christmas stockings that were stuffed with lottery tickets, candy, and Playboy magazines for Harris, compliments of my dad, the resident weirdo. Over the years, the letters became the focal point of the day. It was the one time a year when “Santa” expressed his feelings to the “little girl” and “little boy” who lived in our house. It meant a lot to all of us.
Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful Page 16