Leslie F*cking Jones

by Leslie Jones

Secretly I’d grown weary of New York. I was missing LA, so after a couple of years there, in 2000, I headed back home. By this point, my father was sick. He was drinking a lot, and whatever other ailments he had, he didn’t make them any better by hitting the bottle so much. I’m pretty sure by this point he had cirrhosis, and a bad heart for sure. I think my dad knew that he was coming to an end, or that everything was coming to an end. While I was still in New York, one day he went to the facility where my mom was living—she’d been in a facility since 1987—put her in a truck, and started driving them east, back to Memphis. But by Arizona he’d had a heart attack, and my mother had developed sepsis, so my aunt had to fly there to get them both. I didn’t find out until after it happened—my dad made my aunt not tell me.