It’s 1:30 a.m. Debbie and I are sound asleep, naked under the covers, when our daughter, Sara, along with her cousin, Sophia – both college seniors home for the summer – burst into the bedroom and flip on the lights.
“Mom, Dad! I need your help! Logan is missing!” Sara shouts.
“Sara!” I shout back, startled by the loud brightness of her entrance.
“What?” says Debbie groggily, emerging from sleep.
I pull on my pajamas and walk past Sara and Sophia, who crowd around Debbie, crouched under the covers.
“I called his phone and the bouncer answered!” yelps Sara, in a voice anxiously stoned. “He said he found Logan’s phone on a bench in the bar! Then I thought we’d better get your help!”
“Let’s go downstairs,” I say to Sara and Sophia, to give Debbie a chance to wake up and get dressed.
Sitting in the living room, eyes round as raccoons, Sara and Sophia stumble through an explanation. They’d been partying at DNA Lounge, South-of-Market, when Sara exchanged a series of texts with her cousin, Logan, who graduated from an East Coast college a few months earlier and was visiting from his largely Jewish Michigan suburban home. The texts:
Logan:
Outside
Ims o drunk
At tue edible
Sara:
we’re at the bar
Logan:
Can w/o hop
Sara:
what
where are you
right side
Logan:
Going hom
Sara:
Inside
Inside
Did you leave
we are leaving
Sara and Sophia hailed an Uber, expecting to find Logan at home. He wasn’t. Sara called his phone, which was picked up by the bouncer.
“Which is why I woke you up!” Sara exclaimed. “It was the right thing to do, right?”
“I’ll call Josh,” Logan’s father, Debbie said.
“No, it’s like five in the morning in Michigan,” I said. “It’ll freak him out. I’ll go look for him.”
It was agreed that Sara and I would go back to the club to see if we could find Logan.
“I have no idea how to conduct this search,” I said to Debbie as I put my shoes on.
“Me neither,” she replied. “But I’m calling Josh if you don’t find him in the next hour or so.”
DNA Lounge sits on 11th Street, between Harrison and Folsom streets, a short strip that features other late-night places, like Audio Nightclub and Oasis, bobbing in a surrounded sea of auto shops, warehouses, and freeway overpasses. As we drove from Dolores Heights Sara whimpered.
“We’re going to find him, right? It’s my fault. This is all my fault!”
“It’s not your fault. And, either five minutes from now, or five days, this’ll be a funny story.” I said, repeatedly, in response to her ongoing guilt-worry mantra.
We parked around the corner from DNA Lounge, walked past bubbles of young people intoxicated from a night out, found a bouncer sweeping outside the recently closed club, and explained our business.
“Yeah, he might be the guy who vomited,” he said. “I have his cellphone. I can get it for you.”
“Where do you think he might’ve gone?” I asked.
“Well,” the bouncer rubbed his chin. “He could’ve gone that way,” he pointed towards the Central Freeway, “which would be bad.” He slow-pivoted to face the direction of the Tenderloin, “Or, he could’ve gone that way, which would be way worse.”
As Sara and I continued our search, asking the bouncer at Audio Nightclub whether anyone was passed out inside – “If they’re passed out, we put them out,” she said – at home Sophia found some blankets and promptly fell asleep on the family room sofa. Debbie called San Francisco General Hospital’s emergency room and the police station; when neither had a record of Logan being admitted or booked, she called Josh. It was 6 a.m. Michigan time, an inauspicious hour to learn about one’s missing son, though there’s admittedly no perfect moment to hear such news. Josh was soon joined by Rebecca, his wife, who shared a text she’d received from Logan earlier that morning.
It read: “Save me.”
Parents of the Gen-Z generation tend to know too much about their children. While previous cohorts largely kept their salacious young adult humiliations and self-inflicted wounds from their moms and dads, Gen-Z likes to show off their emotional injuries, like a skinned knee in first grade. Parents are briefed, often breathlessly, about their kids’ bad dates, bad drug trips, awkward social moments, and deep feelings of inadequacy. While we appreciate the closeness, it can lead to a profound sense of parental powerlessness – are we supposed to kiss it and make it better? – and chronic frustration, the kind that prompts the hoary “in my day…” refrain.
In my day… I had many ugly experiences with drugs and alcohol that nary no one knows about, though one did appear in a comic book (True Travel Tales, by Justin Hall, another story entirely). So did Debbie. So did probably you. But Gen Z lives with their skin inside out, prone to quick feelings of mortification. They struggle to rescue themselves from emotional trauma. Who is responsible for making them so vulnerable? We parents, of course, further leavened by social media waterboarding. It’s hard to admit that we loved them too much, but maybe we did.
Debbie felt immediately nauseous, and not a little bit faint, when she read the “save me” text from Logan, which Rebecca had frantically screenshot and texted her. Was he being assaulted, mugged, worse? Two thousand-four hundred miles away, Josh and Rebecca felt a rising sense of panic. Debbie desperately scrolled through Sara’s texts, trying to match the timing of events. To her substantial relief she discovered that Logan’s “Save me” message came before his interactions with Sara. He must have sent it while he was still in the club.
Sara and I circled the blocks around DNA Lounge. Logan was wearing a white jacket. Every time Sara spotted someone wearing white, she’d shout, “Logan?!”
“No, that’s a Latino guy,” I’d say, squinting at the figure. “No, that’s a Black guy… No, he’s a homeless dude.”
More than an hour in, we called Debbie and told her we were ready to give up.
“Wait, I have Josh on the phone. Let me add him in.”
Josh clicked on. I repeated that we’d run out of search ideas and were coming home.
“Can you please look a little longer,” Josh asked, in a voice no parent wants to hear themselves make.
“Sure,” I said.
We kept driving in circles.
When our kids were younger, prompted by such Disney movies as Brother Bear, we’d talk about their spirit animal, their guardian guide. Sara’s was a wolf, due to her keen eyesight and excellent sense of direction. Mine was a turtle; steady, patient, and, I’d like to think, wise. But along with spirit animals our children – perhaps all of us – are dogged by spirit demons, the clammy hands of ghostly self-doubt and self-loathing. Sara’s is insecurity – no one likes me; I’ve done something wrong – perhaps the creation of middle-school bullying. Logan’s is shame and fear, possibly bred by growing up silently gay in a homogeneous suburb.
We all hope that in times of stress, when we need them most, our spirit animal will emerge to guide us. Sometimes they do. But so too do our spirit demons. Especially, if we’re in an altered state. If turned in the wrong direction, the medicines – alcohol, cannabis, whatever – track our weaknesses like a cheetah prowling after a Dik-dik. And then they pounce.
Debbie and Josh three-way called the police department to file a missing person’s report. The officer asked Josh to email photographs of Logan, a devastating request. Another hour passed. We called Debbie and told her we’d exhausted our search possibilities and were coming home, defeated.
As we walked into the house, I heard Debbie shouting on her cell, “Logan, where are you!?” She called out a Market Street address.
“I’m on my way!” I yelled and ran back to the car.
Logan has only hazy memories of what happened. Under the influence of a self-stirred cocktail of alcohol and marijuana, chased with underlying medications he regularly took, he’d vomited, gotten separated from his phone, was kicked out of the club, and, unable to get back in, stumble-ran screaming towards mid-Market, begging those he encountered to use their cell phone along the way. One can’t blame people for declining to hand over their expensive technology to a vomit covered intoxicated kid. He ended up a mile and half from DNA Lounge, oddly, at the not-yet-open Ikea store – though perhaps not so oddly, given the company’s tagline, “Home is where it all begins” – banged on the door, and was taken in by the security guard, who let him use his phone to call the only number he remembered: his father’s.
I parked alongside small clumps of wayward individuals – perhaps they’d once been a Logan – and walked the half-block to the Ikea store. Logan burst out, followed by James, the security guard. Logan ran over and hugged me fiercely, for not a small amount of time. After I released him, I walked over to James, a large Black man who looked bemused.
“Thank you for taking care of my nephew,” I said, shaking his hand.
“No problem,” said James, calmly. “Sometimes we all have to grapple with our humanity.”
Yes, James. Sometimes, we do.
All events described in this article are true, though some names have been changed.
Steven J. Moss