Catch Me (39 page)

“You’re going to love him, he looks all rocker and gross like those guys you like,” she’d said.

His named was Bryant and he was the drummer for a band that had been signed with a rival record label. My mother, once again, feeding me to the fish and knowing that I was the shark to catch them, took the opportunity and paired us together for that event. By the end of the night, I had Bryant and the rest of his band members dying to sign, not because I did much pitching, but because I got drunk and high with them and they thought I was the “coolest chick they’d met in a while.”

Bryant and I ended up hooking up in the limo on our way back to my hotel, which I informed Shea of on my way up to my room. Shea’s words were, “Why would you do that to me? Why would you hook up with another artist knowing I’ll have to see him at parties? What the fuck, Brooklyn?” Shea never called me Brooklyn, only when he was beyond mad at me. “Don’t call me again,” he’d said and hung up the phone. The funny part was that the reason I called Shea to tell him was because I wanted him to get jealous. I wanted him to care that I hooked up with somebody else and leave all the groupies he was hooking up with. I wanted him to look around and decide that I was worth more than them. I was an idiot for thinking he would.

I went up to the room and noticed Ryan wasn’t in the living room anymore. His room wasn’t completely closed, so I knocked a little and peeked in.

“Hey, Rye,” I said.

“Hey, Bee. How’d it go?” he asked, sounding sleepy.

The room was dark so I couldn’t see him clearly, but I heard him ruffling in the sheets and I knew he was in bed.

“It was good. Met a guy,” I said.

“Yeah? Cute?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Your usual grungy type?” he asked with a laugh. Ryan hated my usual type of guy. He was always saying I needed to hook up with a nicer looking guy, a preppy guy that would treat me right. I promised him that maybe one day I would stop hooking up with musicians and actually give the nicer looking guys a chance. He would laugh and say that I was going to marry a heavily tattooed guy with piercings and my mother was going to really disown me then.

I laughed. “Yeah, black eyeliner and everything,” I said.

“Nice,” he responded.

I yawned. “‘K, I’ll see you tomorrow. Maybe we can actually do touristy shit.”

“Yeah, that sounds good. I’ve always wanted to actually walk that damn bridge,” he said. “I’m sure you can see Alcatraz from there. Maybe we can go on one of those boat tours to Alcatraz,” he suggested.

“That would be cool!” I agreed. “Goodnight, Rye-Face. I love you.”

“I love you too, Bumble Bee.”

I went to my room and threw myself on the bed, not bothering to take off my makeup. I remember smiling about that and picturing my mom flipping the hell out over me going to sleep with an unwashed face. I went to sleep peacefully that night, despite my fight with Shea. I knew he’d come around, he always did.

Stretching my arms over my head, I rolled my neck and looked over the covers, catching a glimpse of the sun peeking in through the drapes. I groaned and pushed my head back into the pillow, wondering if Ryan was still sleeping. Ryan loved to sleep late, so I assumed he was, even though I wasn’t sure what time it was. With a sigh, I decided to get out of bed and groggily made my way to the bathroom. My limbs were sore from last night and the night before; the mix of drugs, dancing and sex catching up to me. After I showered, I noticed it was noon and decided to wake up Ryan. I stepped out of my room and noticed his door was still half-open. I looked inside and smiled when I saw him sitting up.

“Rye, I thought you would be sleeping,” I said, walking over to the window and opening the top layer of his curtains. I glanced at him over my shoulders and felt not as if my heart fell through my chest, but everything in my body just plummeted all at once at the sight of him.

“Ryan?” I shrieked, running to him with wide eyes that were already welling up with tears.

He looked gray. Lifeless. He was sitting up in bed but looked more like a stone sculpture than himself. I knew. I just knew. A majestic blue band was wrapped tightly around his bicep and his arms were laying over his crossed legs, his face hanging down over his chest, the needle in his right hand.

My heart went from still to sixty as wildfire spread through my body, my chest heaving out of control in sobs and breaths that would overtake me at any moment. Lurching forward, I wrapped my arms around him, trying to keep him warm because his body looked like it was freezing. He was so cold, so, so cold under my touch, so dead, so lifeless. My sobs started spilling out.

“Ryan, noooo,” I kept saying. “Please, no!”

I grabbed his phone from the nightstand and called 911. The operator picked up on the second ring.

“911 Emergency, how may I help you?” she said.

“My friend. I think he overdosed. Oh my God,” I said before losing my ability to speak. “Please, please help him,” I cried into the phone.

“Calm down, ma’am. What drugs did he take?” she asked soothingly, but I couldn’t calm down. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t think. All I could do was hold my friend in my arms. My best fucking friend. The only person who was there for me at all hours, any hour of the day to listen to me, to hold me, to kiss my tears away, to put up with my endless rants about my unloving parents. The only person that I could turn to with anything and know I wouldn’t be judged. And he was gone. I knew he was gone. I knew nothing I did, nothing the operator told me to do, nothing the paramedics would do when they arrived would save him.

“Where are you?” she asked, rushed. “I’ll have someone there shortly.”

I told her the number of our suite at the Fairmont Hotel and let the phone drop from my hands, unwilling to stay on the phone with her. I couldn’t bear to hold it up as I held the only positive thing in my life in my hands, knowing he had withered away from me without me being able to help him. I should’ve slept with him last night. We should’ve gotten a one-bedroom suite, like we usually did. Why had we gotten two rooms? What did we need all of that for? Those were all things I sobbed against him as I rocked him in my arms, refusing to let him go. Letting him go would be watching the light at the end of the tunnel disappear, and the worst part was knowing that it should have been me that was gone, not him.

He was the one with the bright future ahead of him. I was just Chris and Roxy Harmon’s fuck up socialite daughter, the one that didn’t have anything in her life worth raving about. I was nobody and I would be nothing without Ryan. I cried until I had nothing left in me. When the paramedics pounded on the door, I zombie-walked over to it, opening it and letting them in, not even bothering to look at their faces as they rushed over to Ryan. I stepped out of the way as they checked him and confirmed that he was gone. They asked me a million questions that I couldn’t make out through the hollowed sounds in my ears.

“He was fine last night,” was all I could offer between cries. “I just saw him last night.” My knees buckled and I fell on the floor as I thought about it. The more I thought about it the more fucked up this all was. “We were supposed to go to Alcatraz today. He always wanted to go to Alcatraz. He always wanted to walk the bridge,” I sobbed. “He always wanted to see the world.” I’d never felt such heartache and I never would again. Not like that. Nothing could ever hurt me as much as losing him did.

I rode with him in the ambulance and went to the hospital where they would perform unneeded tests. I knew how he died. They knew how he died. The one question everybody kept asking me was, “Did he have a reason to commit suicide?” The only question I could give them was, “Don’t we all?” It didn’t mean he did, though. It didn’t mean he purposely took his life. He wouldn’t. As fucked up as his parents were and as much as they bullied him for being gay, he wouldn’t have taken his own life. He was almost out of his house. He was supposed to leave for DC a couple of months later. He was waiting to celebrate my eighteenth birthday with me and then he would be gone. He was waiting for me. The way he always was. And he died because of it. He died because of me and everybody would constantly remind me of that.

Ryan’s mother blamed me and my “crazy rock star lifestyle.” My own mother blamed me for it, saying I always took things “too far.”

“You’re probably the reason he was gay,” my mother said a couple of days after his death. “You’re probably the reason he can’t bear to be with a woman.”

I had no response for that. What could I say? My mother didn’t even fully accept the fact that her own brother was gay and living with a man. You would think she at least had a reason, like religious beliefs that made her be that judgmental. She was weirded out about it. The funny thing is that Hollywood is very much like a small high school: everybody talks, everybody has gossip on everybody’s parents, and one of the many rumors I had heard was that my mom had been with one of my classmate’s mother back in the eighties.

I never found out if it was true or not, but rumor had it that they had a real relationship, not just a sexual one. My mother and another woman was something that didn’t bother me, as weird as it was, but it was something that I wanted to bring up every time she talked bad about my uncle or my best friend being gay. I never did, though. I never said anything to her because even though I wasn’t raised not to be disrespectful, I had set my own boundaries about it, and deep down I knew it would be wrong to bring up.

I fell into a deep depression after losing Ryan. I didn’t want to step foot outside of my room. I didn’t want to see or talk to anybody. I didn’t want to take Shea’s phone calls or know how he was doing. I shut down from the world for a couple of weeks. The only person who really cared was Uncle Robert, but he was busy working most of the time. My brother had gone off to Europe with his girlfriend Sarah because my father was opening up a Harmon Records branch over there. Hendrix would call me every other day to see how I was doing, but it wasn’t the same. My cousin Nina was living in New York and had just gotten kicked out of her mom’s house for God knows what. She came to visit me one weekend, which helped. She left thinking I was fine after she took me shopping and did a whole makeover on me. I loved Nina, but she should have known better than anyone that hiding your pain under your makeup and nice clothes was the easy part.

One afternoon, while I was lying in bed as usual, my mother barged into my room. She’d just come home from a trip to Belize where she was doing a photo shoot for her new skin care line.

“Oh, Brooklyn,” she said, running her fingers through my hair as I lay my head on her lap. I was happy for a moment, with her showing me attention the way she used to when I was a child. Despite all the hurtful things she’d said and done to me, I still wanted her. I still needed her. And she was supposed to want and need me too. She was my mother, dammit. She was supposed to care. She was supposed to show me love.

“I want to see a therapist, Mama,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes. I hadn’t said that to anybody at that point. Not even to my brother who’d asked me countless times. I didn’t want to admit the extent of my dark state, and I knew saying I needed a therapist would be doing just that.

My mother’s hands stilled in my hair. “Why would you need a therapist?” she asked, confusion clear in her voice.

She couldn’t possibly be that fucking blind. She couldn’t possibly not see that I was a mess. The only thing that kept me stable enough was my drug use, and even that was becoming unbearable to me, which was saying a lot. It felt like I couldn’t take enough to mask the pain, but I was too scared to take too much. I was scared of becoming a stone statue. I didn’t want to be gray. My mother would hate me if I was gray.

“I think I’m depressed,” I whispered into her pencil skirt. “You have nothing to be depressed about,” she countered.

She was so wrong. So very wrong, but I wasn’t about to list the endless reasons I had for my depression.

“I didn’t realize depression needed a reason,” I said, my voice hoarse.

She exhaled and twirled my hair. “Why can’t you pick one color and stick to it?” she asked, changing the subject. “Your hair is going to fall out if you keep dying it.”

I picked myself up, wiping my tears with my back to her so she wouldn’t know I was crying, and headed to my bathroom. Maybe I should have let her see me crying. Maybe I should have slit myself and let my hurt pour out in front of her.

“Nothing I do is good enough for you,” I said, taking a steadying breath as I held the bathroom door open.

“You’re right,” she answered. “Maybe if you actually did something with your life, I wouldn’t feel that way.”

“I’m seventeen, Mom,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Surely you remember being seventeen.”

She raised a perfect thin brown eyebrow. “Of course I do,” she said, smiling slightly. “And I was the best at everything I did. Even at seventeen.”

“Well, congratu-fucking-lations for being such a fucking winner,” I muttered as I stepped into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I switched on the shower but never made it in. I slid my body down against the door and buried my face in my hands before I started to cry.

When I got up from the floor, I turned off the water, changed my clothes, and called the car service that Ryan and I used sometimes to come get me. I didn’t trust that I would make it to San Francisco by myself. I had never actually driven there, Ryan always did. Just the thought of him made my heart ache, but I felt like I needed to go. I needed to be closer to him. I called my father on my drive, ready to tell him that I needed to see a therapist.