I text her and ask where she is. She says she’s at some sushi restaurant and texts me a picture of her dinner.
I ask if she’s playing cards later tonight.
She asks why—what’s wrong?
I say nothing.
It’s 6:45 when the phone rings, less than two hours since I spoke to the detective. It’s one of your best friends, Matt Marcus, who rarely/never calls me. He asks if it’s true. He tells me TMZ leaked the story.
TMZ leaked the fucking story before my mother can find out her only son is dead.
Finally, she is downstairs in the parking garage. She has gotten several texts. Several people have texted her about her son who has died. She calls me, panicked. She asks what’s going on. Her voice teeters on the edge of hysterics, high-pitched and shaky. I tell her to stay put. I’ll be right down. I sprint down the long hallway to the elevator, but she’s already on her way up as I am on my way down, and we miss each other. I get back on the elevator. I sprint back to their apartment.
Dad has already broken the news. I don’t know how.
She wails and wails and wails.
“Why? No! Not my baby! Oh God, NOT MY BABY!”
Her knees buckle.
She melts to the floor.
She pounds the floor.
She curls into the fetal position. She literally does this.
I hold her.
We cry.
People show up within the hour. They say various things at me. I retain none of it. The phone rings and dings a thousand times.
I just sit on the couch, stare at the wall, and cry.
The night goes on for a lifetime. At some point, Mike drives us home. I take one of my Ambien, prescribed as needed, and cry myself to sleep.
02 Before
March 2013
I learned Harris was a drug addict at five o’clock on a sunny Thursday afternoon in March, two years and eighteen days before he died. I was chopping cherry tomatoes in the galley kitchen of our tiny apartment on the bottom floor of a red-brick Houston fourplex. Martha Stewart has this recipe for one-pot pasta—it’s sublime. My wedding was three days away.
Soon, Mike and I would walk down the aisle to the Friday Night Lights theme song and spill our teary wedding vows under a beautiful, handmade lace chuppah. We would eat truffled macaroni and cheese and get day-drunk on the open bar and dance the Hava Nagila to the accompanying mariachi band. We would look around the room every fifteen minutes and be awestruck by all the love in this one place, at this one time. After the wedding, Mike and I would eat leftover wedding cake with plastic forks out of to-go containers in our hotel suite.
But first, I answered the phone.
It was Harris. We texted constantly, but he rarely called unless there was girl drama. I worried for a moment that he was calling to tell me he and his girlfriend (who was coming to the wedding) had broken up. This would have been par for the course, as he’d been in a series of toxic relationships since college that always seemed to end badly. But this relationship was different. It was the first healthy, long-term relationship he’d ever been in. They’d met at a party nine months before and, from that point forward, were inseparable. Although it couldn’t be possible, she seemed devoid of flaws. In his eyes—and in ours—she was perfect. A funny, creative, kind, beautiful musician who made him mix tapes and put up with—even indulged in—his shitty, fast-food eating habits. What a loss. And terrible timing.
Instead, he told me he was a drug addict.
And that he’d been spending roughly $4,000 a month on pills. Oxycontin, specifically. And that he planned to “work on it.”
Three days before my wedding.
None of this made any sense. We came from a good family. My dad, Ellison, was a doctor; my mom, Maureen, the PTO president. She chaperoned every field trip and minivanned us to and from all of our many after-school activities. We went to summer camps and Disney World. We all genuinely liked each other. Growing up, Harris was my loyal sidekick even though I constantly forced him to dress up in women’s clothing, wear makeup, and play various roles in the plays I’d create to be performed in our living room. Our house was always full of laughter. Much to my mother’s dismay, my dad, Harris, and I used to have epic water fights in the kitchen using the spray hose on the sink. Once, my mother sent us both to charm school. At one point during the culminating recital, Harris and I confidently picked up the water bowls meant for hand-washing and drank out of them like animals. Harris loved that story.
My brother, three years and three months my junior, was the success story every Jewish mother ached to brag about at her weekly mah-jongg game: a Hollywood wonder-kid who landed his first professional TV writing job on The Sarah Silverman Program at twenty-two years old—only six months out of college after she saw him doing stand-up in LA. Although unusual—the stuff that myths are made of, really—it wasn’t all that shocking. If anyone could fit into this dream scenario, it was Harris.
His career trajectory seemed preordained. He told his first joke at three years old. It was the summer of 1988. We were snacking in the kitchen of my mom’s best friend’s house. She mentioned Harris County, where we grew up in Houston, Texas. Reflexively, as if he was put on this earth for this moment and thousands more like it, he shouted, “I not Harris County, I Harris Wittels!” The whole room died laughing. He killed at the age of three.
And his whole life, he just kept chasing that high. As a seven-year-old, he would draw smiley faces on his butt, stick a toothbrush in it, and do entire monologues—out of his butt—for the family. He was part of a sketch comedy troupe in high school called Will
