November 2014
After leaving rehab number two, in Oregon, Harris started an outpatient program in LA, four days a week for three hours a day. I checked in with him regularly during those first few weeks, but as October passed, he responded less frequently to my texts. I knew what it felt like when he detached. The same thing happened the first time he got out of rehab. After a while, the check-ins and doing greats became less frequent. The response time between text messages grew longer. I would go days without hearing from him, sometimes weeks. Every once in a while he’d send a request for an Iris video, but that was about it.
In one text, he told me he planned to go see Phish two weekends in a row at the end of October. The last show would be in Vegas on Halloween. Not even out of rehab thirty days, which is such a vulnerable time, and he planned to go to a musical drug den where he’d taken copious amounts of drugs in the past to, as he explained, “just listen to the music.” I begged him not to go—too many triggers and temptations—but he’d always done what he wanted to do, and this was no exception.
One time, he hosted an epic Fourth of July party at his house in Los Feliz that culminated in an angry letter from the homeowners’ association. In it, Manager Glenn explains:
It has come to our attention that you had a large crowd of guests in the front of your home on the 4th of July shooting off an arsenal of fireworks. In fact, the following day, there was a debris field in front of your property of spent shells, casings, and gun powder stains in the street. It is unfortunate that LAPD had to be called twice to control the situation and that a warning from the Post Patrol guard was also ignored for a party that did not disperse until 3 AM Friday with guests loitering in the front yard and street.
Harris gave no fucks about this letter. In fact, he proudly posted it on Instagram like a badge of honor.
I wasn’t sure if he planned to go to Phish this time around specifically to use drugs or if he would use drugs as a result of being back in that environment. Either way, it was a fucked-up, self-sabotagey thing to do, especially now that he’d been given an opportunity to play the role of Aziz’s best friend on Master of None. It was a substantial acting role, which is what he always wanted. Acting was his big dream. He loved playing Harris, the animal control guy, on Parks and Rec, and he wanted more of that. So why not chase that high? Why rock the boat now?
• • •
It was November 6, 2014, a week after Harris’s Halloween Phish binge. Our kitchen and living room were crowded with a dozen overstuffed trash bags of hand-me-down baby clothes from a friend. I was sorting and folding them into piles on the living room floor when I got a Facebook message from Harris’s old college girlfriend, whom I’d neither seen nor spoken to in fifteen years. It was disorienting to see her name pop up. Even more disorienting is that she told me he was using heroin again and that he hadn’t told anyone but her. She didn’t know what to do, but she wanted to do something, so she reached out to me.
The life was instantly sucked out of my body. My face went flush, my heart pounded, my breath slowed.
I called Harris immediately, and he actually picked up the phone. While I was relieved to hear his voice and know he wasn’t passed out or dead in a bathtub somewhere, I was unable to mask my anger as I recounted what she’d revealed. He brushed the whole thing off with a cavalier laugh that carried the weight of cheating on a diet and casually admitted, “Yeah, I relapsed at Phish, but it’s no big deal. I’m back on track now. I’m talking to my sponsor. I’m on my way to a meeting right now. I’ll call after the meeting. Don’t worry.”
He didn’t call.
Later that night, I texted him a photo of Iris I’d taken earlier that day. She was sitting peacefully in a swing at the park across the street wearing a houndstooth pilot cap that we put on to keep her hearing aids in her ears, a teal furry jacket, black leggings, and the yellow moccasins we’d bought the summer before in Utah. In the photo, she’s grinning from ear to ear. Her little dimple makes an indentation on her round, right cheek.
I hope you are going to a meeting tonight. I hope you will look at your beautiful niece’s face instead of putting a needle in your arm. I hope you will value the amazing opportunity you’ve been given on Aziz’s show and go back to working the Twelve Steps in order to keep your role. I know you’re the only one who can precipitate change so I hope you will be honest with yourself and go back to what you know. You have to admit you have a problem and that you are powerless. Not that you fucked up and it’s not a big deal and you can pop some pills and get yourself back on track. It has to start from within and you have to go to the support group. You mean the world to lots of people, Harris. I hope you will get the help you need.
He replied.
I’m going to hang with friends at UCB. I didn’t do drugs today or yesterday and I’ll keep not doing them.
I instantly responded.
I think we both know that’s bullshit. Go to the meetings. Every day. That’s how you’ll keep not doing them. You can’t do it alone.
And then he actually typed:
I only hear from everyone when I relapse.
I was seething.
Are you fucking kidding me?? I send you pictures and updates of Iris all the time. When you start using again, you stop responding. Look back at your texts. I am always there. Plus you literally told mom to leave you alone about the sobriety shit. So no one asks you about it so as not to rock the boat. But maybe we should more. Because clearly it’s still an issue. It’s very clear cut. Go to meetings, work the program, every day. When you stop, you relapse. If you could control your addiction yourself, you wouldn’t keep using.
My last message was time-stamped 10:15 p.m. He neglected to respond until 3:37 a.m., when I got the following text:
Okay. Look I fucked up. There is such a thing as a brief relapse. It’s called a ‘slip.’ I will stay on track til I see you Thanksgiving so here is my brotherly favor I’m asking… Please don’t tell parents. Keep this a secret like when we were in high school. I truly do not want to do that to them. I will check in with you more regularly. But at least wait and see if I fuck up again before we go freaking out for real. I’m alive, I’m going to a meeting with my sponsor tomorrow. I will not be able to look dad in the eye if he finds out I slipped. I will cancel my flight home. Please do this for me.
Once again, my brother was putting me in the fucked-up position of keeping a secret that could potentially kill him. Plus, he was just so full of shit. I didn’t believe a fucking thing he said anymore. But the most pathetic part was that I did it. I kept the fucking secret. If it had been an episode of Intervention, Jeff VanVonderen would’ve cut me down to size with those piercing, steely eyes of his and tell me I was enabling Harris and, thus, part of the problem. I hated both of us equally and didn’t respond to his text.
He sent another one at 3:48 p.m. the next day.
Hi Steph. Just left a meeting and feel really good. Just letting you know. Confessed all my sins.
I responded.
I’m glad to hear that. I didn’t tell Mom because honestly it will destroy her. She told me a few days ago she had a bad feeling that you were using again and that if you were, it was the last straw for her. I don’t want to break her heart. Please go to meetings every day. Please.
Harris: What do you reckon that means? The last straw.
Me: That she won’t be able to have a relationship with you anymore if you are using. No more contact—this is what she said. It’s too painful for her.
Harris: Okay I’m gonna call her now to check in.
Me: Are you going to tell her?
Harris: No. I’m going to stay sober. I had a hiccup.
Me: Do you have a game plan for how to make that goal a reality?
He responded immediately.
Meeting a day. Three calls a day. Steps.
• • •
Two weeks later, Pete Holmes aired a two-hour “Totally Weird” podcast in which Harris talked openly with the world about his heroin addiction and “recovery.” While I applauded his candor and could see from Twitter that he was inspiring the masses, it was infuriating to hear him talk about his sobriety when I knew he was using again. The whole thing made me sick.
As I listened to Harris tell his story, I had the bizarre experience of hearing things that I’d never heard before. Each new piece of information he revealed was like a tiny little stab to the heart with a scalpel. I knew he’d been keeping things from me since he started using, but it really blew my mind that I was hearing all of this for the first time alongside millions of strangers.
Harris wasn’t the first addict I’d known and loved, so I was aware that deceit was part of the disease. One of my best friends from childhood died of a drug overdose ten years earlier—a mix of cocaine and heroin. He was only twenty-five at the time. His girlfriend, another good friend from high school, was also an addict. I distinctly remember her nodding off in the middle of conversations and being hesitant to let her stay over out of fear that she would steal something. Addicts lie. I guess I just hadn’t put my brother in that box.
On the podcast, I learned a litany of new things about my brother.
1. He’d been going to dangerous parks in the middle of the night to score heroin.
2. He did this often.
3. He was robbed one night at one of these parks.
4. He called in sick from Parks for four days and sat at home alone, shooting heroin.
5. During this staycation, he had a “mini overdose.”
He told Pete Holmes that Robin Williams had gone to the same Malibu rehab as him. He said it’s sad when anyone dies, even though every single human dies, but that it’s extra sad that the world doesn’t have Robin Williams’s comedy anymore.
“And it’s sad for his family,” he said.
Then he paused. And I could hear in that small silence that he thought about his family. He thought about Mom and Dad. He thought about how destroyed they’d be if they lost him.
“If I go out again now that it’s shooting heroin, I could die. That’s it. It’s not fun anymore. It’s life or death now. I don’t want to do that to my parents. I don’t want to do that to myself. Um. So I’m taking it more seriously now. And I’m in a good place.”