We got out the hose and sprayed them down, sponged their chests and bellies and legs as best we could, but it hardly had any effect. A couple hours later, same routine, same result. They just stank, no two ways about it. Whatever it was had saturated them. It would take days for the smell of death to leave them. They were covered in it. We all were.
THE GRIEF PEDDLER
Ten days after Lydia died I went to Los Angeles for my as-previously-scheduled post-Montreal victory lap. Like everything was somehow normal. Like that’s just what you do. Go kick some ass in Montreal, come home to bear witness to your little sister’s suicide, head off to Hollywood to try to maintain that heat! All part of the game.
I didn’t want to go. I was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other. I kept having nightmares: me walking into Lydia’s house, then up the stairs, through the doorway, until . . . the end. I drank myself to sleep every night, tried to knock myself out cold so I wouldn’t dream at all. But then I could barely get out of bed the next morning. My dog had to howl to rouse me. And then of course there were the flashbacks that seemingly came at random: driving, jogging around the park, in line for a burrito. There was nothing I could do about those. Hardly the time to go to Hollywood and chase the dream. But my family insisted I make the trip. Lydia would have wanted that, they said. She was my biggest cheerleader. She would be devastated if her death derailed all the progress I had made.
Like I gave a fuck. I was still too mad at Lydia to care what she would have wanted. But I could sense that my family needed it, and I suppose I did too. We needed a distraction, a break from the relentless misery that was consuming us. And if I could provide that in even some small way, I felt like I probably should. Every minute I was discussing Hollywood douchebaggery was another minute we weren’t all talking about death.
I told my manager to not set me up with any meaningless meetings. I was hanging on by a frayed thread; my threshold for bullshit was nil. He assured me that he would do his best. And if I felt overwhelmed or like I couldn’t maintain, he told me to just get up and walk out. I had nothing to prove to anyone.
So I shuttled from meeting to meeting, from general to general, from the Sony lot to CBS Radford, from Warner Bros. to Comedy Central, hundreds of meaningless miles racked up in a rental car as the strip malls of Los Angeles blurred together through the tears streaming down my face.
Some of the people I met with were the same people I had rubbed shoulders with in Montreal two weeks before, thousands of miles away, a lifetime ago.
“Adam!” they’d exclaim when I walked into the room, my black-and-white headshot sitting on the desk in front of them. “How’s it going, man! What have you been up to since Montreal?!”
Finding my little sister’s body, writing her eulogy, holding my mother while she weeps.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, that’s great! Listen, we are going to keep you in mind for anything that comes up. We’ve got our eye on you!”
At night I drank alone until I felt numb. Then I’d head out on foot. I never had a destination in mind, it just felt good to move. To remember that I was alive. That my limbs were working and could carry me in whatever direction I chose. I’d make turns down streets I didn’t recognize. I’d deliberately try to get lost. And when the neighborhood would inevitably turn seedy or dangerous, I embraced it. Like a lunatic. I would start talking to God through gritted teeth, quietly, beneath my breath. I would goad him, dare him to do his worst.
Go ahead, fuck with me. Do it. I want you too. Bring the darkness down upon me. I fucking dare you.
I was so full of hurt and rage that if anyone or anything tried to harass me I would have exploded. I felt like I could destroy anything I came up against. And I wanted to. I wanted to destroy it all. And should I come up against some force that I couldn’t take out, well then let it take me. Let this all come to an end. At least then Lydia and I would be together again, like pieces of popcorn on a movie theater floor.
But nothing ever came for me. God, the darkness, whatever forces pulse all around us, they lay dormant, satiated, belly full. They’d gotten all they needed from me, from my family. Cowards.
I kept going to meetings. Including one with Amazon. They liked our script enough to give us money to make a pilot. In Denver. Just like I always wanted. So there was that. I called home and let my family know. They were thrilled. And proud. I had sold a TV show. This was a worthy distraction. The trip could be called a success.
I was elated. And I didn’t care at all.
Before I went back home, a girl I went to high school with messaged me out of the blue. She was living in Los Angeles and had heard the news about Lydia. She said she was heading out to a friend’s beach house in Malibu for the day and wondered if I wanted to join. It was such a kind, unexpected offer I couldn’t even think of a reason to say no. I just accepted. When I showed up my friend hadn’t arrived yet. Some guy I had never met answered the door of a massive house, right on the water.
“You must be Adam,” he said with a smile.
I wondered what all he knew, what my friend had told him. Did he know me as Adam the comic, a funny friend from Denver visiting LA? Or was I Adam the guy whose little sister just killed herself? Adam the broken? Was there even a difference anymore?
He toured me around his house and then neither one of us really knew what to say. We just stood there in silence, both wishing our mutual friend would show up.
“You can go swimming if you want,” he offered. “I just got out, but if you feel like hopping in the ocean, by all means.”
I headed down to the private beach, a little swath of Malibu all to myself. The water was freezing so I made my way in cautiously, as if slowly absorbing the cold would somehow mitigate it. But it never does. Best to take it all on at once. I gave up and dove under the brackish waves, swimming as fast as I could to warm my body. Soon my feet no longer touched the bottom and I stopped swimming and just floated there, a tiny head bobbing on the surface of the water.
I took it all in: the surfers to my left seated on their boards waiting for the perfect waves, the rows of houses behind me, all glass and sleek, modern lines. I watched two brothers on the shore try to throw a regulation football that their little hands were far too tiny to grip. Overhead, column after column of pelicans approached, then disappeared down the beach. I tried to appreciate it all in the way my dad had taught me when I was a kid, to marvel at the beauty of the world and the miraculous turn of events that allowed me to ever be here in the first place. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t see any beauty. I couldn’t feel any wonder. Everything felt hollow. I didn’t belong there, or anywhere. I tried to sink. Tucked my knees into my chest and dropped to the ocean floor. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the water take me in whatever direction it thought I should go. I wondered if it would suck me out to sea, the way it did Wade and Lincoln all those years ago, back when the darkness first crept into our sunny little lives. But it didn’t. It wanted nothing to do with me. It just kept pushing me up to the surface. I was drowning. And I was so very much alive.
THOSE WHO CAN’T
Those Who Can’t saved my life. Temporarily, anyway. It made me want to continue living it. If only to see what would happen. I had spent the last eight years chasing stand-up comedy. Then my little sister died. Suddenly my act felt false. Like getting up onstage and not talking about Lydia was somehow a betrayal—to myself, to the medium. And yet to try to mine humor from what happened felt callous and cheap. What, was I going to unload a hot ten minutes about my sister’s suicide while dudes in trucker hats sucked down buckets of overpriced Bud Lights? Making a pilot was something else entirely. Something new. And Those Who Can’t wasn’t just my baby. It was also Ben and Andrew’s. It was not just a reflection of me. It was a reflection of the Grawlix. Which meant I didn’t have to feel guilty for not addressing what I was thinking about every day. This was not the place for that. This was a TV show about bad teachers. I could leave all the Lydia baggage behind.
>
It also represented the biggest career opportunity of my life. If we knocked this pilot out of the park, there was the promise of more. A TV show that we created, wrote, and starred in loomed on our horizon. We just had to execute. And I wanted that. In spite of everything I wanted to rise to the occasion, not mourn alongside it while it passed me by.
We called in every favor we could. We reached out to every talented person we knew in Denver to help. Our friends designed and dressed the set, they did our hair and makeup, our wardrobe, actors lent their services, local businesses donated food. A few of our funniest comedy buddies from LA flew out to play our fellow teachers in the fictional school. The Nix Brothers directed. It remains to this day the single most fulfilling creative experience I have ever had. We took no pay. We channeled every cent of the $50,000 budget into the production.
And it was fun. A fucking blast, actually. Which was such a relief. At that point in my life I wasn’t even sure if I could have fun anymore. I often forbade myself to. But there I was on set, laughing harder than I ever had, right alongside everyone else. Like one of the gang. Like nothing had changed. To be experiencing that much joy gave me the first glimmer of hope for my future. I was enjoying myself. And I was operating on a high comedic level. Realizing that I could do both of those things in the wake of Lydia’s death was revelatory.
Anna, my mom, and my dad were regular visitors on set that week. I think the buzz of it helped us all through those first few months. Adam and his friends are making a TV show. It was something new and exciting in the midst of everything new and heartbreaking.
I fooled myself into thinking, If I can just pour my grief into this, then everything will be okay.
Inevitably it spilled out, though. I couldn’t always contain it.
I went to my neighborhood bar alone one night. A friend of a friend approached me and asked if he could join. He knew what had happened and he shared that his brother also killed himself. We closed the bar down together. I let it all out, to this virtual stranger. We talked about it from every angle—the guilt, the anger, the sadness. The fear that from now on people will view you as somehow damaged, lesser. Or worse, pity you. We guzzled alcohol and mined our heartbreak like characters from some overwrought play. And it felt great. Like a catharsis. The next morning, I woke up to a pounding hangover and a Facebook message from the guy.
“Nice hanging, man,” it read. “Let’s do it again some time and we’ll both try and act less emo.”
It was funny. And nice. A perfectly appropriate gesture from a kind soul who could sympathize. I immediately deleted it. I felt ashamed, like I had done something inappropriate, like the whole experience had been some sordid, emotional one-night stand that I couldn’t put in the rearview mirror fast enough. I had done nothing wrong. He had done nothing wrong. But I was flailing. And that embarrassed me. I like to maintain control. And that night I had spun out. I chose not to interpret it as a sign of some larger need to address what was going on with me. Just like I was ignoring the flashbacks and nightmares I kept having, or my inability to accept that Lydia had killed herself. I kept calling the lead detective after the case had been closed, asking him new questions I had thought of, pointing out new leads that could indicate foul play. Only when he half threatened to walk me through the graphic crime scene photos to prove it was a suicide did I back off. And yet I didn’t heed any of those warning signs that I was coming unglued. I just kept working on Those Who Can’t.
We filmed a couple of scenes at my and Lydia’s alma mater, East High School. It filled me with immense pride to be walking down Rivera Hall, the one named after the beloved newspaper sponsor, who had passed away. I thought about him looking down on me. How proud he would be. I pictured Lydia right by his side. She was no doubt proud of me too. It felt good to think of her that way: proud, cognizant of what I was doing, enjoying the fruits of my labor. I started to see them as the fruits of our labor. I was overcompensating but I ran with it.
Lydia had very little to do with Those Who Can’t. But in my head she was carrying the production. I was entering a period of mourning where I was taking her on my back. Any career success I achieved, it was going to be for her, with her, of her. I was living for two now. Lydia had only gotten twenty-eight years; I was going to live out the rest for the both of us. Which meant I had to work twice as hard, succeed twice as hard, live twice as hard. It was meathead philosophy but it felt good, and right. Like a big brother ought to do. You couldn’t fix her or save her while she was here? Time to suck the marrow out of life in her absence. She didn’t get to so you damn well better. Not just for you, for her. Especially for her. And in Those Who Can’t it felt like I may just be doing that. I was fulfilling our mutual comedy-nerd fantasy.
Then we wrapped. And the next morning I flew to North Carolina, where we were meeting my aunt and uncle and cousins for Thanksgiving at a rental house on the Outer Banks. Seemed like a good time to get the extended family together, away from our dining room and Lydia’s empty chair. It was the first break I had taken since selling the script. My parents were already there. Anna, as was her custom, would be with her husband’s family in Nebraska. So, painfully hungover after the wrap party the night before, I boarded a plane, alone, took my seat, and thought, Well now what?
I didn’t know. Since Lydia died in July I had been breathing Those Who Can’t. I was obsessed with it, every detail of the script and preproduction, then production. But now, some five months later, it was done. We would have to edit it, sure, but postproduction was weeks away. And then we would have to wait and see what became of it, what Mother Amazon held in store, seedlings of hoped parsed out over the next few months and coming year. But that was all in the future. In the interim, there was the now—the blank, sudden now. And the reality of all that happened set in like it hadn’t since those first few weeks after her death. Things came back into focus and I was staring at the bleakness of my life again, at this unimaginable future. It was so terrifyingly unfamiliar. What was this place, this desolate, new landscape? For the previous thirty-two years it had been one thing, now it was something else entirely. It was like a limb had been chopped off, but I could still feel it. Lydia the phantom.
My parents bought me a first-class flight as a gift for a job well done on Those Who Can’t, and I promptly began sobbing as breakfast was served. The fifteen white men in the cabin around me didn’t know what to make of it. They fidgeted in their seats uncomfortably as they ate their omelets. They hadn’t been privy to this type of raw heartbreak since Obama was elected.
My cousin Molly’s boyfriend Mone came along with the family to North Carolina. They had been together for a few years. The first night there Mone pulled me aside and shared he was going to ask Molly to marry him. He was nervous and giddy. The next morning, we all watched from the balcony as it happened. He took her down to the beach, far from our prying eyes, until they were just two tiny figures on the shore. Then one figure was kneeling down on his knee in the sand. And then they were two figures embracing. Everyone on the balcony cheered, myself included, but inside I seethed. I had never been more jealous in my life. Not for me, for Lydia. Because she would never get a moment like this. That wasn’t fair. Why didn’t she get to experience that high?
And I felt so ashamed for being so jealous. I loved Molly like a sister; we had grown up together. This was my flesh and blood and I couldn’t be happy for her? What the fuck was wrong with me? My empathy had vanished. My capacity for joy was nonexistent. I looked at my dad and my mom there on that balcony, sipping celebratory mimosas, smiling. They were so happy for Molly, but I could tell they felt it too. I could see it on their faces. They would never get to share this with their youngest daughter.
That night my uncle Lauren built a bonfire on the beach and we all got drunk. I was the first to head down to the beach to join him. We drank and listened to the Atlantic pound the shore. A recent hurricane had cleared out the area. It had been difficult to get there but it was worth it. W
e had the entire place to ourselves. Not another person on the beach, except for us, two Caytons pondering the void. Eventually Lauren’s wife, Maynee, came down from the house, then my cousin Griffin, followed by the lovebirds Molly and Mone. We all wrapped blankets around ourselves and nestled down into the sand by the fire.
My parents were the last to join. By the time they ventured out they were both well on their way. They walked arm in arm, each drunkenly supporting the other. A thin, wood-plank walkway led over the dunes to the beach. As my parents stepped from the walkway down into the sand, they took a spill, clumsily navigating the surface change. The two of them toppled over and we all burst out laughing. Which they did as well. They laughed long and hard. Then they tried to get up but couldn’t because they were too shit-canned, too hopelessly stuck in the sand. And they just kept laughing at their dumb, drunk fate. It was the first time I had heard them laugh together since Lydia had died. It was the first time I had seen them smiling together. They had been through so much; the feelings of guilt I was feeling, they were tenfold for my parents. They were grieving in polar opposite ways; my mother retreating inward, my father bursting to talk about it. Most of the time they seemed on different pages. And here they were, like drunk teenagers in the sand, cackling. Happy. It was too much. I turned toward the ocean and walked toward the water, not sure if I was ever going to stop, tears streaming down my face. I wanted the ocean to take me away, just like I had in LA. But I couldn’t jump in. Then my family would know something was wrong. And I didn’t want to let them in. I didn’t want them to see me losing it. I wanted them to just enjoy this moment, to keep on laughing. I wanted them to laugh forever.
I needed help. I couldn’t do this by myself anymore.
Tragedy Plus Time Page 12
