Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Yearbook - Chapter 6: The Hardest Book to Read

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Chad’s mom said Chad never wanted things sugar-coated as a kid. He wanted the truth. Chad faces a truth he isn’t ready for when he uncovers information about The Driver that had been hiding in plain sight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I remember going into school that Monday. It also was homecoming week, so it was spirit week. And there was this really weird juxtaposition of people who didn't know Alicia, didn't know what was going on and were dressed for, I think it was tacky day or something. And they were all dressed up. It was just odd. Like it was a somber mood of here are all these people who are really happy and here are all these people who are clearly struggling. And the people who are really happy, like, well, why is everybody not dressed up? I thought this was going to be like all the past years. And so I think that whole week was just odd.

I think I realized it would be tonally dishonest to do this very grief-stricken, sappy piece on Alicia as if that's the effect that her death has had on me. Because it's not. Alicia's death is what I look back at as the turning point of when I became alive. Alicia was an artist. She was prolific. She was making art nonstop. Her parents' house

is full of her art. I have pieces of her art. Her parents have an apartment in Paris just full from ceiling to wall to wall of Alicia's art. She left an imprint on this world and she left one on my mind. I became an artist, which was not the plan. I heard people teach teenagers how to drive when they're 15 and 16 because they're not afraid of dying yet. You have to learn to drive a car before you learn to fear death. When people try to learn when they're 25, 26, it's too late. They have car anxiety. They have death anxiety.

What I'm saying is, Alicia died before fear grew into her point of view. And so I want to make sure that as we conclude this show, that we do it in a way that would resonate with her. She wasn't a somber person. She was alive. She was alive until a split second when

she was dead. That's not how it goes for most of us. I think LaLay probably has an even more acute point of view on who she was an artist because she was literally sitting right next to her in those art classes. I remember a lot of the things that she worked on. I remember I did the alphabet and it was a nature theme that I did. And she did the alphabet, but she did it with hands and feet. And it was unbelievable. I was like, is she tracing over a Michelangelo here? I don't understand how she can do this as well. And it's something I remember so vividly, this specific project that we worked on. The hands and feet thing definitely resonates.

When I was at her parents' house, they had a bunch of her stuff and it was like all hands and feet. Oh, was it? A lot of it was. Yeah. And they brought it up. They were like, I don't know what it was about this hands and feet thing, but I'm interested in both of you were really artistic and prolific artists as kids. What do you think makes a kid find joy or passion in art? I think the most important thing in that question is I would consider Alicia a true artist, whereas I think I'm artistic. And I think that's what I realized and maybe where some of the jealousy came from was when I saw someone as talented as that, I could be good at things, but there's a difference when she is staying after class and all she's doing there with the mirror and we both took art so seriously, but she would just sit in the mirror and she would feel her face. It wasn't just looking and drawing the lines and the expressions. She would feel it and that would translate in the work. And I think

that's the difference because I'm like, what's the assignment? Oh, a self-portrait. And then you do it. And that was the difference between her and really everyone else in our class. Everyone was pretty good, but she was just excellent. She was the kind of person that could make a life and career out of it because there was a love and a passion. My mom has known that I have been a serious person since I was very little. In our conversations, I wasn't like a kid who was just like, okay, we pray to God at night and that's it. I was thinking about God nonstop.

My parents had to answer questions that in some ways there are no answers to. I used to lay at night by myself in my room. Okay, I know there's God. I know there's heaven, there's space, there's stars, there's the galaxy. What's outside of all of that? This is me as like an eight-year-old starting to write about this kind of stuff.

And frankly, talking to my friend Alicia about a lot of this stuff because that's how she would think. Whereas I would think about those things and it would make me frustrated because there were no answers. I think she would see those same galactic questions with this soft, curious, delightful wonder that could lead her to artistry. That can make for a very serious child. I remember one time we were reading a book about black cowboys. You were like fives. I was in your room reading it to you as a bedtime story. It was a beautiful hardback book I had bought. And I thought, wow, this is going to be about black cowboys. It's going to be really neat, beautifully illustrated. And I got to the part where the cowboys were battling the Indians, Native Americans, but I think in the book they called them Indians. And you said something like

that wasn't right. And I don't want to hear about it anymore. I don't want to read this book anymore. And you just turned over and went to sleep. And I just closed that book up and we never took it out again. So the point is, as you got older, you wanted the real story. I don't want to hear that fluff about cowboys and quote Indians, so to speak. That's not right. And that's always been kind of how you were, but you have always used your friends, not use them, but cherish them in a way that helps be a buffer for you overall and helps you, you know, see how the world is. I was a kid always searching for that feeling of like, I was over Disney movies. Not all Disney movies. I loved The Lion King. Dad dies. That's some real shit. I'm in. But certain cartoons just weren't for me because. Dad dies. That's some real shit. I'm in.

But certain cartoons just weren't for me because it's just like, it's not real enough. I did and still do want the real story. I don't want just pieces of this in here. I want to know actually what happened in that car. So I'm going to read the Washington Post report of the accident.

A 16-year-old junior at James Blake High School in Silver Spring was killed Friday night when the driver of the car in which she was a passenger lost control and hit a telephone pole. Alicia Maria Bettencourt of the 14700 block of Silverstone Drive was pronounced dead at the scene after the Volkswagen Jetta driven by the driver, 16, spun out of control on Norwood Road north of Norbeck Road. The driver was also a student at James Blake. He was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where he was in stable but critical condition. A preliminary police investigation indicated that no other vehicles were involved and that speed may have been a factor. The car slipped onto the

right shoulder of the two-lane road and the driver tried to pull it back onto the road and overcompensated, sending the Jetta into a spin and into the pole on an embankment. Betancourt was wearing a seatbelt and shoulder harness, an airbag deployed, but it was not enough to soften the direct impact on the passenger side. I have imagined that moment so many times because this was a closed casket funeral,

so I didn't get to see Alicia, but I've imagined what she looked like. I've imagined how she looked right before it. Did she scream? Was she at peace? She always had this balance about her. Did she have it in that moment? Did the light just go out

without her even having a moment to react to what was happening? I don't know. her. Did she have it in that moment? Did the light just go out without her even having a moment to react to what was happening? I don't know. And I wish Alicia could take this moment to tell us, but I also want to hear from the driver on this. And so I have to be real right now. Alicia deserves her say in this project, but so does the driver. And it's for that same reason that I have to be real about what's going on as I try to get the driver to come on this show. And his reply is this. Hello, Chad. I appreciate you reaching out and wanting to include me in your project. However, I will have to respectfully decline. Thank you. He followed up about an hour later after sending me that text message and

texted, were you close with Alicia? That question vexed me. It hurt me. It deflated me. It exploded my entire point of view on what I'm doing here, which is an entire photo mosaic collage portrait of what it was like to lose this person for my life. And then the last person who ever spent time with her doesn't even know that we were close. I mean, it made me question if we were close. She told me about him, but I guess she didn't tell him about me. I replied to him, thanks for the quick reply with an exclamation point. I'm doing this whole like very peppy voice about this thing and I'm wincing at it. I said, yeah, Alicia and I were close. I'm still pretty close with her family.

Hoping to really highlight the good in her with this project and hopefully bring reflection and closure for some people. Her parents are participating as well. He said, I'm really, really sorry for your loss, Chad. Wish you the best. I thanked him. And then a month later, he texted me again, but it was a wrong number, which was kind of funny. He meant to text somebody else, I guess, named Chad. But when I read his text, I'm really sorry for your loss. I've had to think this guy, he has probably

had to send that same text a hundred billion times. He's probably had to learn how to not burden himself with the guilt of this thing. I mean, if I feel guilt as the person who was just like, man, I wish I would have asked her to go get ice cream so this didn't happen to her. Imagine being the person that drove the car. And even still, it feels kind of like a big airball. We didn't really connect here. This text exchange doesn't reveal anything to me about him or him about me. It just feels like another whiff.

I still just feel like I don't know this person, but I'm left to wonder, what does it mean that he didn't even know we were close? This is like one step below an obsession for me, I would say. I mean, because this was when it all felt real and it's still, I'm not normal. You know, I'm not easygoing. As easygoing as I was before that. And certainly, and people will remark on, they'll say, you're kind of serious. You know, I can be gregarious.

I can have fun. I can do all that stuff. But I think it really came from this event. I think it really came from this big question mark. This big, what the heck? Why did it have to happen? And why to this person? It's probably one of the most difficult ones. Not only learn to live with, but to

live life after the loss of a child, live it as joyfully as you can. So when Alicia passed, I was a total mess and I lived under a fog, under a black cloud. For me, it was like inhabiting a body that was not really my own. I was sort of going through the motions, but not knowing what I was doing. As you may remember, one of the things that I did in order to understand what had happened was to interview her friends, including you. And I didn't know what was going to come out of these interviews until I realized that all her friends didn't know what to turn to.

And it became a book to help other grieving kids know the ways that other teens grieve. Those interviews had a very healing effect, not only for the friends that sat with me, but also for me, because I learned about her through you. That was my way of understanding what had happened. She gathered those interviews and put them in a book that she titled Alicia After Image. I'm holding the book right now, and I got to say the thing, which is I didn't bring it to record today. I forgot it.

And I can't avoid facing the truth, which is I have had this book since Alicia's mom wrote it. And I haven't read it. Each chapter is named after one of Alicia's friends from back then. I read my chapter, I think, but I can't even remember what's in it. But I know I didn't read the book. And this book has stayed with me. I moved three times in college. I moved to California. I moved to New York. I moved to London, back to New York.

I moved to Berlin, back to New York again. And then I moved seven more times in New York. And this book has survived every move that I've made over the last 15 years. And yet, I haven't read it. I've always told people my chapter is the last one in the book before years. And yet, I haven't read it. I've always told people my chapter is the last one in the book before her mom's chapter, which ends it. But there's a chapter between mine

and her mom's chapter in the book. And that chapter is titled The Driver. And I must've known that at some point. And I think that probably really scared me away from reading this thing. But I have it now, even though I tried to leave it at home today for this recording. I guess there's no other way to get into this but to just rip the band-aid. I'm

going to the driver's chapter. It says Alicia was the girl he liked since the very first time he'd noticed her at the HF Festival the summer before his senior year. A pretty girl with a glistening smile. She was crowd surfing in a bathing suit top and pants. That was the first time he had talked to her. Already out the gate, I'm like, this is a side of Alicia I had no access to. Alicia crowd surfing? That's crazy to me. Off the top, this guy had a different point of view of her than I did. He says that they connected on music. He says that one day they were talking about music and he asked Alicia to come out to his car to listen to this CD he had just bought. The latest recording by Coheed and Cambria.

I have no idea what those are. You know what those are? I thought it was two different bands. It's a rock band, Coheed and Cambria. Oh my gosh, Alicia scampered across the parking lot. Is this your new car? Yeah. He opened the door of the Jetta and Alicia climbed in.

I'm paying for it. I put in $3,000 of the $8,000 my dad paid my cousin for it. Really? Where'd you get the money? Alicia asked. The driver rested his hand on the stick shift. I've been working at this sign shop. It's the best paying job I've ever had. He was getting paid $9 an hour. It's funny, as I read this, I can see him through my teenage eyes. He was like a grown-up. This is weird. I feel wistful.

I don't know Alicia like this at all. And I think back at it, we definitely didn't connect on music. Connecting with someone on music is like a whole other dimension of knowing them. This is an interview that Alicia's mom did with the driver. This is what he is saying happened. It says, when he came to pick up Alicia for the date on that night, it says, Alicia's mother leaned in the doorway and glanced at his car. Are you a good driver? She asked. I can so see Lulu asking this person this question. He says,

I think so. The driver replied. Says he couldn't believe he was finally going out with her. He was going to play In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth 3, the CD she had liked in the parking lot. They arrived in time for the last show at the Only, the Only Theater that is. Toward the end of the movie, the driver asked Alicia if she had a curfew. She told him it was 1130. He checked his watch. It was past 11. He asked if she wanted to leave. No, let's stay until the end. It's okay if I'm just a little late, Alicia said. They came out of the theater to a still night. A three-quarter moon shone among the clouds. Alicia's silver bracelets jangled as she talked on the walk across the parking lot. After she got into the car, the driver slid into his seat beside her. He grinned, wondering what

would happen at her front door when they arrived at her house. The lot was nearly empty as he drove out of the only shopping center. Music blared from the CD player filling the quiet evening. He glanced at Alicia. She looked so happy. Then he turned onto Spartan Road. That was the last thing he remembered doing that night, even though his mind constantly tried to recover lost details. Three days later, the driver woke up in a hospital bed. His father was by his side.

Tubes of all sizes were going in and out of his body. His mind was numb. It took a lot of effort to ask what had happened. His dad said he had been in an accident. He had crashed the car. For the past three days, he had been in a coma. He had broken the T11 vertebrae in his spine and was lucky he wasn't paralyzed. He would have to wear a brace for a while.

Did he remember anything his father wanted to know? No, he didn't. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The driver left the shock trauma center and was transferred to a rehab facility. One afternoon, he woke up feeling groggy. His father and a bunch of hospital people, including a psychiatrist, were standing by his bed. His dad spoke softly. Do you remember the girl in the car with you? He asked. Yeah, Alicia, the driver frowned, puzzled. She died in the crash.

What? The driver's eyes popped open. No, it's not true. I drove her home. His dad started to explain how that wasn't the case. But I walked her to the front door, the driver insisted. She gave me a hug goodnight. She did, I'm sure.

Oof. The psychiatrist interrupted to say that the driver's mind was playing tricks on him. But the driver remembered the warmth of Alicia's hug. He remembered her glistening smile. He remembered delivering her home safely and then driving away. How could he have imagined all that? The time came when the driver began to think of these memories as a dream. They couldn't be anything else. Overwhelmed by the facts, he started living in a fog.

Couldn't focus on the simplest tasks. Things that had mattered before didn't matter anymore. Every time he thought about that night, he felt himself sink into a dark bottomless hole all alone. His stomach turned at the thought of going back to school. He heard the rumor that some of the boys were going to jump him when he returned. Oof, Jesus, man. Still, he went back to Blake. He wanted to finish high school where he had started, but he didn't want to talk to anyone about what had happened. He was anxious about what people would think of him. He dreaded what they would say. These fears were what kept the driver from talking to Amanda in math for the rest of the fall semester. Amanda, there it is. Even though he sat right behind her, he was never able to utter a word. What could he say anyway?

He knew she had been Alicia's friend. He thought Amanda was mad at him. If he said something, she might pour out all her hatred toward him. And she would be right to hate him. Alicia had died because of him. And she would be right to hate him. Alicia had died because of him. It had been his fault. So he kept silent, enveloped by the fog, his mind elsewhere, daydreaming. The worst class was digital arts. He stared at the door the entire time, desperately wishing for Alicia to walk through it and end the nightmare. School days became endless.

He walked the crowded halls alone. He saw other kids staring at him and talking among themselves. At times, someone would ask, are you okay? But what was the person truly thinking? He didn't want people feeling sorry for him. He didn't like people knowing his name. He didn't want to be noticed at all. He wanted to be the kid he had been before that night. The quiet one in the back. He liked being that kid, but that kid was gone. Shortly after the accident, drove him to the crash site. His cousin pulled over by the telephone pole, but the driver couldn't get out of the car. He clenched his jaw, frozen in place. Couldn't make himself open the car door. Later, he had no memory of what the crash site looked like

then just a blank like so many things that had happened after the accident impossible to remember suggested to the driver that he keep a journal of his thoughts for many months he did he wrote so much and so often that he could not recall exactly when he started the letter of apology to alicia's parents right after he had come out of rehab started the letter of apology to Alicia's parents. Right after he had come out of rehab, the driver wanted to pay Alicia's parents a visit to tell them how sorry he was. He wanted to apologize. His dad and told him to wait, to get better first, to let things settle down. So he wrote his letter. It took him a long time to compose his thoughts and feelings into words. Mailing the letter gave him a small measure of relief. This is what he wrote.

I am responsible for the pain you felt when you first heard the news of your daughter's passing, and I am responsible for the pain you feel now and the void in your lives. I go over in my head a hundred times a day since I was first told the news of what had happened, how I could possibly That was his account. His book was published in 2008, and I haven't been able to get him to sit down with us to talk about how these feelings that I just read have fermented or evolved over the last 15 years. And I've avoided reading that chapter. I've avoided reading this book. I think on some level, I got possessive of my memories of Alicia and I didn't want them changed. I'm a person who will hide a book from friends until I'm done with it because I don't want anybody else's point of view to mess with my experience. I think that's what I've done with Alicia's life to this point.

You know, it's funny. I was going to end this episode by saying, I don't think that closure is coming. And having read that, I feel like closure is coming. And I don't think I wanted it. And I think for the first time, I can see the driver.

He's a full person now. He has feelings. This broke him. And now I want to talk to that dude more than ever. What I want to tell him is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that he had to experience that. I want to tell him it's not his fault.

But I don't think it would matter. I think that the only person who he needs to hear tell him that is not here. Let me tell you a little bit about the visits because we make a distinction. You have dreams, and dreams usually are having to do with a memory of an event. Usually the person is a certain age and there's a certain thing that's

taking place. And then there's a visit. The way I describe a visit, and I very vividly recall all of Alicia's visits, there is an actual interaction as a conversation. And not only is there a conversation in which you are receiving information and giving information, but there is also contact? You physically touch the other person. And when that occurs, there is a religious term, which is ecstasy, euphoria, because you are filled with pure, joyful energy. And you usually wake up crying tears of joy. That, to me, is about as close to the most pure, wonderful human experience anyone will ever have. So I remember the first time it happened, Alicia hugged me and I woke up crying.

It was just so marvelous. And thereafter, we've had a series, I've had a series of them and we joke around. We say, I get them because I'm the needy one. Lulu had her visit. Yeah, I had this amazing visit and then she stopped. She said, mom, you're okay. Now she visits him only.

That's the needy one. But it was something that I will never, ever experience. And I've been present in the birth of both my daughters. And yeah, I can tell you that's incredible, holding the baby and being the three of us together, but like that, nothing. It goes back to the dream that was not a dream, that was a visit for me. The first two weeks after Alicia's passing was very difficult.

It was such a shock. I was living in a body, but going through the motions, but it wasn't really me. Then I had this dream. And in this dream, it was a beautiful day, afternoon, golden lights. And there were cherry trees like the one I have in front of our house, both in full blossom. There were several of these trees, both in fall and in spring. The four of us were running, the four, Arturo and I, Veronica. I could see Arturo, myself, and Veronica running around, playing. And I could sense Alicia, but I could not see her.

And I was definitely positively certain that she was there. So I woke up with the conviction that Alicia still was, and I will say still is. I went out that door into my garden for the first time after her passing. And I began to see the plants and I knew Alicia still is. And it was like Alicia had told me, mama, estoy bien. And that was my cue to do whatever I needed to do to bring healing into this home. Because we were broken. It's one of the unexplainable contradictions of life. How can someone who is gone feel so remarkably present? I've lost people since Alicia. I've lost family members.

I've lost friends. And yet her spirit still remains present. We have uncovered this whole palette of colors and visits and memories of what people experienced after losing this person that we all cared about. I can't help but contrast that to the very one note, one shade feeling and point of view that I have had about Kenesha's death. When I think about this multi-dimensional kaleidoscope of feelings that this community had to Alicia over here, over there, there's a whole other community of people who have that same point of view on Kenesha. Look, here's the thing. For all intents and purposes,

point of view on Kenesha. Look, here's the thing. For all intents and purposes, Alicia was a white presenting Puerto Rican girl. And so I've always suspected that the world that we live in and the community that we come from treated her death with special care and walks and tears and legislation changes and all kinds of shit. And I also saw with my eyes, it very much felt like Kenesha's death was treated differently than that. You've heard Kenesha already on this show described as a girl who had sexy bitch tattooed across her chest. And that paints each person's point of view a certain way about how they think about this girl and how she died and what that means.

And, you know, fuck it. Some people on some level, they think subconsciously, well, that's what happens to girls like that. But girls like Alicia, that's a tragedy. I wasn't a part of Kenesha's community, but I want to know what happened over there. And that's what Deborah Monk, principal of her high school, who had to go visit her family in the devastation after Kenesha died.

I went over to Kenesha's house to visit with her family. Wow. I'll never forget that. That's the next day, the very next day. Very next day. They lived in this little house in Rockville, and I had never met them before. And I had flowers, and I just knocked on the door and told them who I was. They just, it's emotional to even tell you, they just hugged me.

I mean, I didn't know what kind of a reception I would get. They were so devastated and I think it meant a lot to them to just have somebody come and say, this is awful. We're so sorry. They were not hysterical. They weren't like, oh, we've got to get that girl. She's got to go to jail or whatever. They were just extremely sad. They had great hopes for Kenesha. And I think especially since we had just recently put her in honors classes, I think they thought she was going to make something of her life. That right there is very hard to hear.

Kenesha's family was excited. They were hopeful. I don't have kids. I have nephews. I love kids. I love my friends' kids. I just see the kids playing by the high school and the middle school in my neighborhood in Queens. They just carry an energy and it feels like it's all potential. school in my neighborhood in Queens, they just carry an energy and it feels like it's all potential. In these two cases, Kenesha's and Alicia's, it is tempting to feel like they die

and the potential all dies with them. I am still trying to look at these two deaths and ascribe a meaning. I need beginning, middle, and ending. I need them to lead me to some resolution. If I can't get the answers from this person, then maybe the answers aren't out there. I am hoping that Alicia's mom, who has probably spent more time as a parent, as a human, as an artist, trying to derive meaning from what happened to her daughter, I have to ask her, what is the meaning of this? What is this for? ask her, what is the meaning of this? What is this for? Why? I actually really do think there are some people who are special and I think she was special. And I wonder, is it maybe 16 years was what she was supposed to have and she didn't. And that maybe that's why she was prolific

as an artist, because maybe somewhere she had the wisdom that this would come to an end. All of the things that you've said about her visiting and just all these symbols and stuff, and it starts to become such a labyrinth to go through. But I really do go through it over and over and over again. And I guess maybe I'm wondering, you two were certainly much closer to her than I was. I know you've been doing the same and I wonder maybe you guys have figured it out. I don't know. I don't know that it's the why, but the what. What do you do with it?

And perhaps for you, this shocking event that changed you, that made you begin your adult life at an earlier age than you were supposed to, It's what brought you to this podcast and who listens to this podcast and is helped by it. I don't know, Chad. I do believe that things are connected. We're all connected in this world, one way or another. And when you're confronted with something as the death of a best friend, it's about what you do with it. It's not about what happened to you. It's about what you do with what happened to you. And that's Rabbi Kushner, not my words. So maybe it's this podcast.

I don't know. Maybe something else. But we're all connected. I think that why I keep spinning my head on this year is because this kind of feels like the year that life started. It feels like the year that I started. It feels like the year that I started being me. In seeing and talking to all of these people again about what became of their lives after this year, I realized that we are still connected. We're all still connected by this year when life began. And I'm going to keep trying to get ahold of him so that we can get his voice. But I don't know.

He said something that resonated with me, which is his mind filled in the gaps after he went unconscious. He thought he had memories of dropping her off at home, giving her a hug. He really believed that. And what I wonder in all of this project is how many of these gaps are we all filling in

with our imaginations? Because we're not there anymore. How many of these gaps am I filling in about my friend just because how many things am I saying are so about her that I just, I want to be so. He probably wanted so bad for that to be true and he had dropped her off and given her a hug. I can't help but wonder how much of that

all of us are doing as we tell the story of who she was to us. In the final episode, our crazy basketball season comes to an unexpected ending. And even though I feel like I'm ready to put this all to bed, Dax and Monica step in to help me try to figure out what I'm supposed to do with everything I've uncovered here. Thank you.