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 after 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.
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
