Even when he ran away Nicky made me laugh, although at the exact moment it happened, I did not find it amusing.
I had asked him to change his shoes for some family event, and Nick refused to do it. He took a great deal of pleasure by then in being oppositional, and one of the best ways to do it was with his clothing. He never wanted to dress appropriately for any occasion, yet when you finally got him to, he looked terrific. But just getting him to dress properly for school was a battle of Olympic proportions. It was always a huge struggle every morning as we argued over a shirt, a pair of pants, his hair, his shoes, and he insisted on wearing something totally inappropriate, sometimes I thought, just to get a reaction. The behavior itself wasn’t unusual, but the degree was. Eventually of course he would appear looking angelic and impeccable, and no one would have imagined the agony it took to achieve it.
We are a fairly conservative family. When Nick was young, I loved dressing the little children in pretty clothes, the older children always had a fairly preppy look, and my husband was then an extremely conservative and elegantly dressed man. What Nick liked best was to shock us. I tried to maintain a sense of humor about it, and remain rational, while giving him room to be himself, but at times he tried me sorely, and I lost it and would scream at him to pull himself together and for once get dressed without making a national crisis of it. It was more than a little trying, but certainly not worth getting an ulcer over. Most of the time I kept my perspective, but tried to remain firm about it. I felt that he, like everyone else in our cozy little world, should conform to certain standards. Nick was not of that opinion.
So, on the day in question, the day of the famous runaway, he was meant to wear a blazer and gray flannels, a tie, and respectable shoes to go to a family function. He chose to appear in some wild outfit, with worn-out sneakers. My mother was visiting, as was my stepmother, and I can’t remember what it was, but we were going to one of the staid family events that so intensely bored him. Bit by bit, and piece by piece, we argued his outfit together. He went along with all of it, releasing each item of inappropriate clothing like hostages, begrudgingly, but he did it. Except for the shoes. He wouldn’t change them. And I will confess that I yelled at him finally. He would drive me to that at times, though I never raised a hand to him, nor him to me or anyone else. Nick wasn’t violent, just mouthy. Very! And when he chose to be, extremely insulting. He could rile a grown-up faster than any kid I’ve ever seen, and regularly reduced adults to tears with his sharp tongue and ability to use it.
The shoes remained an issue. He would not change them. And I wouldn’t give in on this one. He made everyone late, as he often did. I felt everyone was looking askance at me with the usual silent accusation that said, “Can’t you do anything with him?” The fact was that I could, sometimes, but only if Nick was amenable to it. If not, I was out of luck. You could either give in gracefully or spend the next two days arguing with him. Nick did not give in on anything with ease or grace, unless he chose to, and if he did, he made you pay for it, with an attitude and vehemence that made you wish you’d never gotten into the tug-of-war in the first place.
I went upstairs to his room to check on him to see if he’d changed his shoes, and he was gone. And instantly, I sensed that this time something was different. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Nick had run away, but the funny thing was that he had actually changed into respectable shoes to do it. The torn sneakers had been left in the middle of the room like a message. So he had done what we wanted him to, but he was going to show us. Retribution.
We looked everywhere for him as I panicked. He was, after all, only an eleven-year-old boy, and because of my fame by then, the children weren’t allowed to go anywhere alone. I had no idea where to look for him, but we all spread out and ran around the neighborhood looking for him. I called 911 and reported him missing. A friendly policeman came to the house fairly quickly, as I wrung my hands and cried, of course feeling very guilty to have made such a fuss over a miserable pair of sneakers. And then, God only knew why, I glanced out the window.
We lived across the street from a small park that was about four blocks square, and there, directly across the street from the house, sat Nick, with a small brown bag, eating doughnuts and Hostess Twinkies. He looked vastly unconcerned, slightly amused, and was dressed beautifully, not only in shirt, tie, blazer, and proper shoes, but he had put on his fancy little trench coat as it was chilly. He looked like a very small banker or lawyer, sitting in the park and eating lunch, having just left his office. Later, I laughed about it, but at the time, I was livid. Everyone was upset, we had all run all over the place for an hour. My mother was horrified at how little control I had over my children and did not hesitate to say so. “Does this happen all the time? How often does he do this? You should put him in reform school.” Thank you, Mom. My mother is of the old school and a rather stern one. And then at least, she thought that children should be seen and not heard and behave the way they used to, or the way I did. But in time of course, as he did with all of us, Nicky taught her that things with him at least were different, and she fell in love with his crazy hair colors, wild outfits, and even his nose ring, because she understood who was behind it. It was hard to resist him.
I walked outside to my little renegade, with the policeman, who gave him a stern lecture and threatened to take him to juvenile hall as a runaway. Nicky looked up at him innocently, stood up respectfully, apologized, shook his hand, and offered him a doughnut. Who could resist him? He thanked the officer, looking deeply mollified, and we took him home and read him the Riot Act. We had been scared stiff about him. And finally, hours late, the rest of us looking disheveled and unnerved, while Nick looked calm, cool, collected, and perfectly dressed, we went off to our family event. It was one of only two times he ran away, and the other was barely more serious than this one. Running away wasn’t something Nicky did. He stood his ground, and stayed close to home. The chains of our love for him, and his for us, bound him closely.
6
Seventh Grade:
Slowly downwards
As you can see by now, some of the things Nick did were unusual, but none of them was so extreme that you could point a finger and say “Aha! There is something seriously wrong with this boy!” and then diagnose it. Some of his antics were in fact very funny, many were less so. There was sometimes a meanness to him at that age that upset me deeply, but even that was something you could explain away by virtue of his age, and of course others were quick to say that the shock of acquiring five younger siblings in as many years, and my ever-increasing celebrity and fame, were just hard on him. Perhaps the former, but in fact not the latter.
I was careful to keep my career well away from the kids, all my daily activities still centered around them, and my writing was something I did late at night, and seldom discussed with anyone. I did no interviews or publicity tours. I was a fairly ordinary mom to them, and that was how I wanted it, and kept it. But there was no denying that going from being the baby, the star, the focus of all attention, to being the fourth in a group of nine, was stressful for him. He was still hating Sam in those days, and being very vocal about it. She was eight, and he was twelve by then, and I worried a lot about the damage he was doing to her self-esteem. He was constantly critical of her, and at times really cruel about it. It was a full-time job buffering her from his overt meanness. And it was one of the many things that worried me deeply. For Samantha, more than Nicky. But perhaps because he made an about-face eventually, and adored her so completely, she seems to have survived it.
But seventh grade was the beginning of a long, at first slow, downward spiral for Nicky. For the first time in all his years, he began to act out in school noticeably. And believe me, they noticed. The child that I had been discreetly inquiring about for seven years in the same school, and even nursery school before that, and eventually even openly suggesting to them that he wasn’t “normal”—and who they had insisted to me was utterly wonderful—sudde
nly became a major headache for them.
I began getting calls from the school, and in seventh grade, Nick taught me a new skill, which I was to become an expert at for the remainder of his school years. Groveling. I added it to my repertoire of motherly feats and virtues. Anything to keep Nick in school, and then hope Nick would change. But the calls became increasingly frequent. He was mouthing off in school, and was openly disrespectful of his teachers. He wasn’t doing the work regularly and allowed himself liberties of behavior and attitude that they viewed with extreme displeasure. Nicky was no longer “fitting in,” and they no longer thought him cute, clever, or amusing. Suddenly they turned the tables on me, and began pointing out to me that his behavior was unacceptable and just too “different.” No news to me, but they seemed both startled and outraged, and expected me to change it, and impress the seriousness of their displeasure on Nicky. Nick found it vastly amusing. Nothing scared him.
The only thing that impressed him was when they threatened to keep him out of the lip-sync contest that year, which filled him with panic, and straightened him out for a while, until the contest. But more than anything, I was aware that he was no longer coloring within the lines of his school life. He was beginning to go over the edges of the picture they were painting.
And what made it even harder for him was that there was a fairly new headmaster at his school, who understandably didn’t want Nick creating problems. But torturing teachers seemed like good sport to Nick, and conceding to the headmaster was of no interest to him. I tried to explain to him that this was his show (the head’s), not Nicky’s, it was “his house, his rules, his marbles,” and he didn’t have to let Nicky play if he didn’t want to. But as with other things, and somewhat appropriate to his age and disposition, Nick thought he was invincible. As he said about himself, in one of his journals, in an entry he’d written later, at the time “I thought I was charmed. I figured I could handle or do anything because I was special.” He wrote that when he was twelve, in seventh grade. And he was special. To me certainly, but not necessarily to outsiders, and Nick couldn’t seem to understand that. The head of the upper school called me once a week, or every other week, but I felt as though every time I turned around, they were calling me to come to the school and apologize for him, which I did, though I can’t honestly say I enjoyed it. They also expected me to change his behavior, which, try as I might, I couldn’t.
I tried explaining to them that Nick was different, that he was not your ordinary kid, with ordinary ideas or behaviors. Even in my own family, he did not perfectly fit the norms or the rules the rest of us lived by. Nick was undeniably different, and the rules I had applied so uniformly to his three older siblings were just impossible to apply to Nicky. He wouldn’t conform to them, and what’s more, by then I had begun to suspect that he couldn’t. He was different and special.
The school recommended a new therapist, whom we went to immediately, and who was diligent about delving into the reasons why Nick acted the way he did. The therapist turned his attention to us, and the family, but the clear signs of Nick’s disease had not yet surfaced. I suspect it must have been too early to diagnose him.
Nick was like a burning cigarette tossed into the dry grass at the edge of a summer forest. He was a forest fire waiting to happen, and while the conflagration began to burn, and the flames began to devour him, none of us could yet see it.
Things began to go seriously sour for Nick that year. He began to experiment with drugs. Others have tried it at the same age, and come out the other end, but like everything else he did, Nick fell into it with a certain manic passion. He drank a little and tried pot, and along with a group of friends, late in the school year, he tried acid (LSD). That would have terrified me, had I known it. He reported it to me several months later. Nick was usually pretty honest, and even when he didn’t volunteer things, if I discovered them myself and questioned him, he was almost always honest about it. But when it happened, I didn’t know what he was up to. I only discovered it later, when he told me.
I think he also became sexually active in seventh grade, and was usually drawn to girls slightly older than he was, as he thought he could get further with them. And judging from the long lists of names in his diaries, the varying degrees of stars and ratings he gave them, and the things he claimed they did with him, if any of it is true, he was not mistaken.
I was at least fairly willing to look at that and face it squarely. I gave him assorted lectures about being responsible, not hurting people’s feelings, not being casual about sex and only sleeping with people he cared about, which, let’s face it, made me feel better, and Nicky must have laughed heartily at my romantic notions. He was a young boy in the grip of raging hormones, and out to enjoy anything he could get away with. But at least he was polite while he listened to me, and indulged me. I also made a rule at our pharmacy that he could charge prophylactics any time he wanted to, but nothing else. And if he did so, I promised not to ask questions, and didn’t. Practicing safe sex seemed to me more important than grilling him about it, and he got the message, and used condoms.
So in the seventh grade came the advent of sex and drugs, and the door to danger began to open. He was a handsome boy, much admired by all, as much for his willingness to be outrageous and take risks, and behave any way he wanted to, as for his good looks and charm. Nick was the boy everyone wanted to be like, or at least be with. And that year, he was asked to model.
He did a little of it, and it didn’t go to his head particularly. I think he actually found it boring, and began to think he wanted to do some acting. He went on a couple of interviews in Los Angeles, which my husband took him to, and they fell in love with him at the auditions, but my ground rules were firm. He could only go to Los Angeles to act during school vacations or on weekends, which made it too difficult for them to use him. And he was mad at me for it.
Nick at eleven or twelve (photo credit 1.17)
He was on one of those auditions towards the end of the school year, trying out for a part in a TV show that he could have been in that summer. And he was still on the plane, returning from Los Angeles with John, when a terrible tragedy happened. A group of his friends had been dropped off at a friend’s house for a party. Among them were Nick’s entire group of best friends, the boys he hung out with at school, and the girls whom they liked best. Coed parties began that year, and among the girls was a little dazzler he had gone to nursery school with and stayed close to. She was his closest female friend, and in first grade he wrote for a school project, “I want to get married to my girlfriend when I grow up. We will work together as an actress and a singer.” What he wrote is still framed on my office wall, where it has been since he first wrote it. Her name was Sarah, and she was a beauty. They were no longer “girlfriend and boyfriend” by then, but best friends in the nicest senses of the word, confidantes and cohorts. They talked to each other on the phone, daily and nightly, talking about who liked whom, “fixing up” their friends, and indulging in the little intrigues and romances that were appropriate to their age then.
And apparently the group got to the party a little too early. “No one was there,” Nick explained afterwards, having heard it from his friends, which meant that the “cool” people weren’t there yet. So they decided to go across the street to the Marina, to hang out for a while, and then go back to the party. It was a practice which, by my rules at least, was strictly forbidden. You didn’t go anywhere once you got to a party, you didn’t leave, you stayed there, and I never let kids do it when they came to my house. I didn’t want to be responsible for what happened to them when I couldn’t see them, and the policy was most of all for their own good. But for whatever reason, the “cool” group of Nick’s friends left the party.
The kids dashed across Marina Boulevard, which is a wide, dangerous street that feeds fast-moving traffic onto the Golden Gate Bridge, in this case at sunset. I know myself from having driven there that at certain hours of the day, sunset being one of t
hem, the sun shines in your eyes so blindingly you can’t always see danger coming towards you. Perhaps that happened to the driver who hit Sarah. I never heard the precise details of the impact, and couldn’t have borne to listen to them.
The group apparently split in two, with half of them crossing at the crosswalk, as they had been taught since they were small children, and the others choosing not to. Sarah was among them, with her long, flying blond hair, her huge eyes, her face like a cameo, her long graceful limbs in all their thirteen-year-old beauty. The driver’s vision was supposedly obscured by a passing van, and the kids must have flown at them like a flock of birds, unexpectedly and dangerously crossing their path. One of the other girls was grazed by the car that hit Sarah full on and flung her onto and through their windshield. And the details of the result are anything but pretty.
Sarah lay in the hospital with severe brain damage and assorted other injuries for a week. And all those who knew her were stunned and devastated. It was a tragedy that rocked everyone to the core, and none of the kids knew how to handle it. For many of them it was a shock from which they would not completely recover. And Nick among them. He was even less equipped than most to handle it, and for years, he surrounded himself with photographs of her, memorabilia, things she had given him. He dreamed of her, thought of her, wrote to and about her, and obsessed about her. There must be at least fifty agonized and devastated entries about her in his journals, all the way through high school. He never forgot her, and never got over losing her. She was his best friend and he loved her with all the passion and devotion of childhood.
His Bright Light Page 7