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.
