In a cabin buried so far off the grid that no one could hear you scream, a voice could only whisper. Cry. Whimper. Whether it was a plea for help or a beg for change, it reverberated through the head of a man who had been dragged through the mud in every sense of the term. In his head, which was just as off-grid as the cabin, the thought permeated. “I can’t die yet. I don’t have a will for my daughter.” That thread, that single thought, that instinct, changed everything. Love was the last bump Reed ever needed. But certainly not the first he’d taken.
That cabin, and the surrounding cattle ranch outside of Silt, Colorado, was where Reed grew up—his ancestral home. It was idyllic in every way John Steinbeck wrote about. But what the mice and the men didn’t mention is how lonely it could be. Cows aren’t great conversationalists, and Reed’s closest friend lived miles away. The open country had plenty of upsides. “Building hay forts and chasing cows around, horses, bikes, dirt bikes, four-wheelers, building arbitrary fires and blowing stuff up.” Boy heaven.
In stark contrast to his ranch life, his summers were spent in the Thousand Islands (of sauce fame), New York, where his father restored antique wooden boats for a wealthier clientele. Winters among blue-collar ranch kids; summers learning handshakes and proper etiquette. From cattle to cotillion. Reed grew up fluent in two worlds and felt at home in neither.
At eight, a loud, rambunctious, uncontrollable Reed was put on Ritalin. Although his grades shot up, he felt muted, dimmed, less Reed. Because of his learning disability, they placed him in special classes, which did not match his intelligence level. He was a brilliant kid who didn’t fit into any box they placed him in. “I was always told my whole life that I was smart and had a lot of potential, but I never really felt that way.” He was small for his age, too, and got picked on for it. “All I wanted to do was be liked and be accepted,” and the medication, he felt, greyed the very personality that might have gotten him there.
Around this time, his parents’ marriage fell apart. His older brother, who was sent to boarding school, got to escape the worst fights—Reed wasn’t as lucky. Eventually, he opted to go back East and move in with his dad. It may be hard for us Californians to picture, but winters in upstate New York are brutal. Frigid, grey, and seemingly never-ending. There, Reed found the crowd he’d been drawn to—the rougher kids, the ones who partied. “I found them more authentic.” Home was quiet and predictable: the news, dinner, then hours alone. He craved connection, and the thrill of not knowing what came next.
Weed delivered both. His first time was at 13, on a Canadian island, at a house party—sprawled on an old ’80s glass bar and white leather finishing—the older readers know the ones and the younger readers have seen the movies. But after that, weed became an everyday vice. He remembers “greens being greener, music sounding better, the air smelling fresher, being in the moment.” For a kid who’d always felt a beat out of step, it was a revelation. “It was one of the first times I felt like I was there and present and not worried about the future or ruminating on the past.”
The bottle followed closely behind the bong. In the North Country, how much you could hold was a badge of honor; they drank for sport, and Reed competed on a professional level. “I was never drinking until I was satisfied or satiated. I was always trying to increase how much I could drink.”
Junior year, a friend named Jack asked Reed for an Adderall. Jack got caught, and Reed was arrested. Afterward, Reed was sent to an artsy boarding school in Massachusetts. Jack was sent to the army. Not long after, scrolling Facebook in English class, Reed saw the dreaded letter, “RIP.” His friend had been killed by an IED in Afghanistan. He was 19.
“Just because I was born on one side of the tracks and he was born on the other, I went to boarding school when he went to the army,” Reed says. The same mistake had sent them down two different roads, and only one of them kept going. “I realized that the world’s not fair and that we’re not all dealt the same hand.” Crushed by this, the trajectory of his life began to shift.
Boarding school gave Reed what he’d been hungry for—dormmates from Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico City, New York, Vermont. “This is what I’ve been craving my entire childhood: an authentic experience.” But the party had become an identity, and he carried that persona into college. “My identity became being able to party harder and longer and more than anyone else.” He could stay up all night and still turn in an A+ paper, and he took pride in that.
This is also when he picked up his first camera. A short film he made for a campus festival earned him a trip to Cannes. After graduation, a few days on a reality show led him to a producer, and Reed pitched an idea: his childhood best friend’s backwoods family back in Colorado, who raised bucking bulls and grew weed. He went out, lived with them, and filmed their misadventures. Three networks bid on it. “I was 23 years old and had a corner office at Discovery Studios, and was an executive producer. I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I started drinking a lot then too, out of imposter syndrome “
It should have felt like arrival. Instead, it felt like a con about to be exposed. “I was so insecure.” He’d think to himself, “Oh my God, it’s all going to come crumbling down at some point.” Like a soundstage of cards. When a network shakeup killed the show before anyone watched the pilot, part of him was relieved.
The years that followed blurred. Reed moved into event production, then scripted television, working his way from office PA to set work on shows like American Horror Story and Ratched. Cocaine joined the alcohol in a big way. He married a successful event producer, and they had a daughter together. He tried to limit the partying and found he couldn’t. His first 30-day stay in treatment led to about eight months sober. Following that, he and his wife split. Then the pandemic hit. Through divorce, the world on fire, against all odds, Reed managed to collect two years clean. “But just dry, really,” he admits now.
Then his father got sick. Hollywood was shut down in a writers’ strike, so Reed went to Florida to take care of him. There, he found him far sicker than he’d realized. They began sharing a drink at the end of the night, and for a while it felt like a gift. “I was able to ask him and talk to him in a real way.” Again, substances begot connection. But Reed didn’t stop at one. He was treating his hangovers by drinking in the morning. His drinking and using turned him into someone who wasn’t the help to his father and brother that he wanted to be.
Looking back, he can see the trap clearly. He drank because he was afraid—of losing control, of losing his father, of everything familiar slipping away. And the drinking made it all happen. “The way I treated the fear was by drinking, but then my drinking is what made all of those fears come true.”
“I didn’t get to say goodbye to my father,” Reed says sorrowfully. A stay in rehab followed, then a rupture with his brother that cut him off from the family home in New York—a loss that, he says, hurt more than the death itself. He’s still working toward peace with it.
That’s how he ended up in that Colorado cabin. Alone. Within two days, he had cocaine shipped to him. “I’m just going to drink till the coke’s gone and then I’ll stop,” he told himself, as many of us have. “That did not happen,” as many of us know it doesn’t. His spiral ended with that single whimper. The cry of reality. The realization that he had to live to be there for his daughter…in any way he could.
Then his phone started lighting up, as if a divine message had alerted his loved ones of his willingness for change. A friend from college began checking in. Then another from his time as a producer. Then others from days so long gone he thought they were forgotten. One called from Japan. One from New York. Photos of flights being booked to rescue him. How did they all know he was ready? Who or what told them?
His friend, 23 years sober, drove out to Colorado, took one look at him, and said, “You’re coming back to LA with me. You can hate me all you want when it’s over, but I’m driving you back.”
Something cracked open. “There are a lot of people out there that see something in me that I didn’t see in myself.”
After detox, Reed knew where he wanted to go. Beit T’Shuvah. The strange Jewish words that had kept appearing in his life, randomly, on different occasions through sobriety and through use. “It just seemed like God’s knocking on the window.”
At Beit T’Shuvah, Reed has thrown himself into the step work and reconnected with his old sponsor. He knows that the bottle was a symptom; recovery meant finding what it had been covering. “For the first time, I’m excited and looking forward to a sober future.”
The career he thought was over has quietly come back. He’s helping produce a film for a filmmaker he’s long admired and reconnecting with old friends in the industry—roles he wasn’t chasing. He credits letting go. “Your self-will is like gripping sand, trying to create your own destiny. The tighter you squeeze, the more slips through.”
He’s also learning to be his own man. “For the first time, I see a future that I will be able to claim as mine. Every day I’m closer to becoming the man I am meant to be.”
His father left behind a town full of people he’d helped. Reed still has the ranch where he grew up. But the inheritance he’s focused on now isn’t land.
“I was so spiritually broken that I thought the only thing I had to offer my daughter was my stuff. I didn’t even think that I was worth saving.” The land, the cabin, the will—he’d been thinking of himself as an estate and a father. Now he sees it differently. “I’m her father. The most valuable thing I can give her is a dad.”
Her true inheritance has nothing to do with money or land. It’s knowledge. It’s love…and Reed has set out to offer her that in spades. “The most important thing that I can do with my life is not about what I can give my daughter, but it’s about what I can teach her.” It’s that thread, that single thought, that instinct, which will lead him through the rest of his life. In the end, he went from not having a will for his daughter to having will because of her.