Stephanie Wittels Wachs - Battling Twitter

 

 

I was changing my baby's diaper in a public bathroom when the phone rang. It was an LA area code, I didn't know it, so I pressed ignore, continued to deal with the dirty diaper, but it rang again. And my stomach dropped, because I knew. When I picked up, a detective told me, very matter-of-factly, that my only sibling, my lifelong best friend, my most loyal sidekick, had died of a heroin overdose. 

 

I can't remember exactly how she delivered that news, if it was he died, or he's dead or, “Your brother's dead,” but the idea is that it was over. His battle, his struggle, his war with himself was over. I screamed for my husband, who ran in and grabbed the diaper less baby who was now shrieking. I was shrieking too, and sobbing and hyperventilating. I hit the ground on this bathroom floor, and pounded my fists, and somehow pulled myself up to a standing position, and ran out of the building and was totally shocked to see that the world was still turning. 

 

The detective, who was still on the phone then told me that she tried to reach my mother, but she couldn't. I realized in that moment that I'd have to be the one to deliver that news and that it would be the most horrific moment of my life, way more horrific than this one. So, I got in the car, even though I had no business driving at all, and somehow the car got to my parents building. 

 

As I pulled into the driveway, I saw my dad. He was coming up from the parking garage like he did every weekday at 5 o’clock for 40 years. He's carrying his briefcase in his left hand, and he's got his white button-down shirt in his khaki pants and his black sneakers and he's coming towards me. And I'm thinking, this is so normal but this is the last normal day he's ever going to have. Once I say what I've come to say, it's going to destroy him. 

 

And so, we sit on this concrete bench outside the building, and I say it somehow in between sobs, he's dead or Harris died. He looked at me and said, “I knew when I saw you that he was gone.” And then, a tear ran down his cheek. We got up, and we made our way up to the 17th floor. But my mom was not home. I'm trying to figure out, what do I do now? Do I text her? Do I call her? What do I do? 

As I'm having this debate, the phone rings again. And this time, it's my brother's business manager, who I didn't know even existed. He told me that he was at my brother's house earlier that day when the detectives were there, and that there was a coroner's notice affixed to the front door now. When the word got out, it would be a runaway train out of our control. That's because my brother wasn't just my brother, he was a beloved comedian named Harris Wittels, and he wrote for TV shows like Parks and Recreation, and people loved him and his work. His death would be viral, breaking news. 

 

I needed to tell my mother before she heard it from the internet. So, I texted her something really casual, “What are you doing?” She said, “I'm at a sushi restaurant,” and texted me a picture of her dinner. I wanted to be like, “Mom, you got to come home now.” But I didn't want her to panic and then call or worse call and then drive. And so, when she said, “What's up?” I just didn't respond. 

 

A little while later, the phone rings again. This time, it's my brother's best friend. And he said, “TMZ is reporting that Harris died of an overdose. Is it true?” As I'm trying to process this new layer of nightmare, the phone rings again and this time, it's my mom. She's downstairs in the parking garage. Her friends have driven her home, because she got this cryptic text message about my brother. Her voice is so high pitched and trembling. I said, “Stay put, mom. I'm going to come right down.” 

 

I sprinted down the hallway, and I'm pressing the elevator button, and I go down 17 floors, and I'm looking everywhere and she's not there. And so, I get back in the elevator and bolt back into the apartment, and there she is in a little ball on the floor, wailing. My dad is wrapped around her. It was the saddest thing I've ever seen. 

 

My brother was always a recreational drug user, but things took a turn when he was prescribed OxyContin for back pain. He finally confessed to me three days before my wedding that he was, in his words, a drug addict, and that he was spending $4,000 a month on pills. $4,000 a month on anything isn't sustainable. So, after his first stint in rehab, he switched to heroin. 

 

I remember when I asked him how he learned to do that, he told me he'd watched a YouTube video. I couldn't understand how someone so epically smart and talented could be so self-destructive. It made no sense. I mean, nothing that he did made sense. Like, the night he died, for example, he did his favorite thing. He made a room full of people laugh at a comedy club, and he came home and he sent this beautiful email to my mother saying how grateful and happy he was. He told her he loved her. But none of that stopped him from using that night. None of that stopped him from dying. 

 

A few months after his death, Entertainment Weekly published his autopsy report all over the internet. And strangers flocked to the comments to say, “What a junkie and what an idiot.” My favorite one, “Anyone who sticks a needle in their arm deserves to die and elicits no sympathy from me.” I wanted to respond, “You are correct. Person on the internet, there is no sympathy from you. No bad things will ever happen to you. You can just continue to perch on your puffy white cloud, looking down with scorn upon the rest of us.” But I didn't, because what is the point, you know? 

 

No one comes to the internet to try to understand each other, much less the complex nuances of addiction. So, instead, I know this, because I posted something very thoughtful and sincere that I took a long time working on. It was about my brother and it was very loving. I was bombarded with notification upon notification of even more insensitive comments. 

 

So, this time, instead of taking the high road, I engaged more aggressively, which is exactly what my brother would have done. He was never one to shy away from an internet battle. In fact, the word, humblebrag, which you've heard came from his brain and now lives in the dictionary. And that phrase originated on Twitter. He would get so annoyed with people bragging in this self-deprecating way that he created this humblebrag account and started calling out offenders by retweeting them. 

 

And so, in the spirit of Harris, I started funneling my grief into fighting every single battle on the internet. No topic was off limits. I would go ham defending abortion, MeToo, healthcare, climate change, Halloween candy, all of it. [audience laughter] I'm not angry person by nature. I had this kid who refused to nap anywhere, but in the car, and so I was constantly stuck in parking lots and driveways. I had all this time to do it. I basically would just carry myself with the dignity of a person who never planned to apply for another job again. [audience laughter] 

 

I was walking into a bar a hundred times a day, metaphorically, picking a fight with the biggest guy in the room. I'm five foot tall, so no business doing that. People liked it, is the thing. The rush of all those hearts and retweets, it was intense. And also intense were the people who didn't like it. I was called a moron, an imbecile, a cunt, a fun little lollipop, triple dipped in psycho. [audience laughter] 

 

I was told to shut up, to relax, to fuck off, to move to China, to move to Mexico, to move to Venezuela, to move to Chicago, [audience laughter] to knock off my weepy emoting and virtue signaling, to renounce my citizenship. And the kicker, from a guy named Steve, “You're a woman. Shut the fuck and bake an apple pie. No one cares about your histrionics.” Well, I don't know how to bake, Steve. [audience cheers and applause]

 

So, I continued to log on. And then, a few months later, I got a postcard in the mail to my house where my children live. And it was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was anonymous. I don't know anyone from Grand Rapids, Michigan, but my name and address were printed in big black letters, and then the artwork was this Nazi propaganda thing and there was this World War II soldier displaying this armband. 

 

Instead of the swastika though, there was a Democratic donkey mascot. And then, on the bottom it said, “It's not fascism when we do it.” So, I was freaked out, and I went online that night and I tried to hide my address from public record, but since I'm not a judge or a military person or a medical examiner, I didn't qualify. 

 

At this point, I had already been thinking about deleting Twitter. [chuckles] My phone had started sending these horrific weekly screen time reports that was telling me exactly how much time I was spending on the internet. And it was like a full-time job, like eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. So, it's like that night felt like a natural breaking point. And so, I did it. I deleted the app and it felt really great for like five minutes. And then, I started freaking out about all the stuff I was missing. And so, I put it back on my phone. 

 

And then, the next day, I was at my daughter's ballet class, and I'm waiting in the lobby and telling another mom about the postcard thing. She's a therapist, and so her opinion is actually valuable. She shouted at me, “Delete it and detox.” Like, I needed to go to Twitter rehab. So, I did it. I deleted it. We had this great day. 

 

My family and I adopted a rescue dog. We spent the whole day outside. We played fetch. We paid attention to each other. By the end of the day, my batteries were recharged and I wanted to keep that feeling in my body forever. And so, I was like, “Okay, no more with this app. I can only look at Twitter when I'm on my computer.” And then, I swear to God, the next day, my computer died. I had to take it in to get repaired. I wasn't going to have it for 7 to 10 days. 

 

And so, I reinstalled it on my phone. But this time, I put it on the last page of my apps, so that I had to scroll over six pages to get to it. I made this deal with myself that I couldn't actually post anything. I could only scroll mindlessly. But then, I had gotten this big insurance bill that day, and I was really pissed off about it. And so, as soon as I logged on, I posted this long thread about insurance companies being evil. And I felt so disgusting after my slip that I deleted it again. 

 

And then, 12 hours later, I was sneaking peeks on my browser. I didn't tell my husband I was using it. I would use in the bathroom, I would use in the car, I would use in line at the grocery store, all the while knowing how destructive it was and doing it anyway, like, feeling this need to detox, and then relapsing being at war with myself over my use of it. And then, it occurred to me that this is how my brother lived up until the moment that he died, at war with himself, wanting so badly to be free of his addiction, but being physically unable to do so. 

 

Twitter isn't heroin. I'm not trying to make them equals, but that feeling that I get when I use it makes me understand and empathize in some small way with how awful it feels to not be able to control your own behavior, how much self-loathing accompanies that, how exhausting and defeating that can be. It's easy to look at someone with addiction and think, just stop. Just don't do it. Simple. But it's not. It's not simple. Because if it were, he'd still be here. Thank you.