Beautiful Boy

by David Sheff

  On the sunny May afternoon, Karen and I are silent as we drive to Nic's school. Students hanging out by the flagpole at the entrance to the campus direct us to the correct office in the lower floor of the science building. We are met by the freshman dean, who wears a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and sneakers. He asks us to sit down, indicating a pair of plastic chairs that face a desk covered with science magazines. Another man, boyish with dark flyaway hair, wearing an open-collared shirt, joins us. He is introduced as the school counselor.

  Outside the windows, boys, including some of Nic's friends, are whacking one another with lacrosse sticks on the green athletic field.

  The dean and counselor ask how we are holding up.

  "We've been better," I say.

  They nod. Without making light of Nic's infraction, they take pains to reassure us, explaining that many schools have zero-tolerance policies, but this one has what they hope is a more progressive and helpful approach, taking into account the reality of children's lives these days.

  "Nic will have a second chance," says the dean, leaning forward on his desk. "He will be on probation, and if there's another violation he will be out. We also require that he attend an afternoon of drug and alcohol counseling."

  "What exactly happened?" I ask.

  "Outside the cafeteria after lunch, a teacher caught Nic buying marijuana. The school's policy is that anyone selling drugs is kicked out. The boy who sold Nic the pot has been expelled."

  The counselor, his hands folded on his lap, says, "The way we view this is that Nic made a bad choice. We want to help him make better choices in the future. We view this as a mistake and an opportunity."

  It sounds reasonable and hopeful. Karen and I feel thankful not only that Nic has another chance, but that we aren't alone in trying to sort this out. The dean, counselor, and other teachers deal with this sort of thing all the time.

  During the hour-long conversation, I mention my concern that Nic loves surfing and might be exposed to drugs at the beach. It's a strange paradox that for many kids the high of riding formidable Pacific waves isn't enough. I've seen the surfers on the shore, in wetsuits, passing around joints before heading into the water.

  They glance at each other. "We have just the advisor for Nic," says the dean.

  He tells us about one of the school's science teachers who is also a surfer.

  "We'll call Don."

  "He's amazing. Maybe he could be Nic's advisor."

  Next they give us details about a center that offers drug and alcohol counseling.

  At home, we immediately call and make an appointment for the next day. The three of us meet a counselor, and then Karen and I leave Nic with him for a two-hour session that includes an interview and drug counseling. When we pick him up, Nic says that it was a waste of time.

  Don, the teacher, is a compact man with sandy-bronze hair and sea-blue eyes. His face is at once soft and rugged. From what we hear, he is rarely effusive, but guides children with a steady and patient hand and an infectious enthusiasm for the subjects and the students he teaches. He is one of those teachers who quietly change lives. Along with teaching science, he is the school's swimming and water-polo coach. In addition, he has a group of advisees. Nic be comes his newest charge, which we learn a few days after the meeting, when Nic is back in school after his suspension.

  "This guy!" Nic says as he runs into the house, throwing down his backpack and heading for the refrigerator. "This teacher..." Nic pours cereal into a bowl and begins cutting up a banana on top. "He sat with me at lunch. He's amazing." He pours on milk. "He's a really good surfer. He has surfed his entire life." He grabs a slice of bread. "I went to his office. It's covered with pictures of breaks around the world." He slathers peanut butter on the bread, then grabs the jam from the refrigerator and spreads some on top. "He asked if I wanted to surf with him sometime."

  In a few weeks, the two of them go surfing together. When Nic returns, he is elated. Don regularly checks in with Nic at school and he telephones the house. As the school year is about to end, he begins a campaign to sign Nic up for the swim team, which will start again in fall. Nic is obdurate. No way. But Don ignores Nic's rebuffs. Throughout the summer, he frequently phones Nic in Los Angeles, checking in to see how he is faring. He continues to ask Nic about the swim team. After a late-summer surf session back in northern California, he proposes a deal. Come fall, if Nic will attend one swim-team practice, he will stop harassing him about joining.

  Nic agrees.

  Nic is fifteen, a new sophomore, and as promised he shows up at the initial swim-team practice, then the next, then the one after that. With his fit, lanky body and arms muscular from plowing through thick waves on a surfboard, Nic is already a strong swimmer, and he improves rapidly under Don's coaching. He enjoys the camaraderie of the team. Mostly, he is inspired by Don. "I just want to please him," Nic tells Karen one day after a meet.

  The swimming season ends around Christmas break. By then Don has successfully recruited Nic for the water-polo team, too. Nic is elected cocaptain. Karen, Jasper, Daisy, and I are regulars at his games—Karen and I sitting with the other parents, Jasper and Daisy climbing up and down the metal grandstand and chiming in at random moments, "Go, Nicky!"

  Nic also shows promise as an actor. One night Karen, an assort ment of our relatives and friends, and I are astounded by a student-directed performance of Spring's Awakening, the 1891 play, often banned or at least censored (but not in this production), by Frank Wedekind. It is a story that faces with frankness the sexual awakening of a group of adolescents unable to turn to the adults in their lives for help. A girl who takes an abortion pill dies; another character commits suicide.

  Don encourages Nic's interest in marine biology. As Nic's sophomore year winds down, he tells him about a summer program at the University of California at San Diego devoted to the subject. One day Nic comes home waving a brochure and application printed out from the program's Web site, asking if he can go. Once his mother and I confer, Nic applies.

  On a morning in late June, the view out the jet's window is gorgeous. The sky is pink and the Pacific Ocean, where it abruptly meets the coastline, sparkles dreamy blue, as optimistic as Southern California could possibly be. Upon landing in San Diego, we get our suitcases and pick up a rental car. We drive north until we reach the turnoff for the small beach town of La Jolla. Exiting the freeway, we drive Nic to the UC campus and check him in. Nic is a bit nervous, but these kids seem welcoming. Like him, a few have brought along surfboards, a comforting sight.

  We say our goodbyes. Daisy grabs Nic around the neck with her tiny arms.

  "It's okay, bonky," he says. "I'll see you soon."

  Nic checks in frequently by phone. He is having a blast. "I may want to be a marine biologist," he says one day. He tells us about the kids in the program and how he and the other surfers get up early before classes to walk down the steep trail to Black's Beach. He says that he has decided to go through the camp's certification program for scuba diving. On a night dive near Catalina Island, he swims with a pod of dolphins.

  When the program ends, Vicki picks him up and he spends the rest of the summer in LA. It goes by quicker than usual, and soon he is home again, preparing for his junior year.

  It is Nic's strongest year in school yet. He has a close-knit group of friends with whom he seems engaged and with whom he shares impassioned concerns about politics and the environment and social issues. Together they protest an execution at San Quentin. A friend of ours who is also there sees Nic sitting on the sidewalk. Tears stream down his cheeks. Nic loves his classes. Writing remains one of his strongest subjects. Along with his creative writing for an English teacher who inspires him to write short stories and poems, he joins the staff of the school newspaper as an editor and columnist. He pens heartfelt personal and political columns about affirmative action, the Littleton, Colorado, shootings, and the war in Kosovo. He attends editorial meetings and stays late into the evenings to help proofread
the paper. His columns are increasingly bold. One examines the time he sold out his most highly held ideals. It is about some of our dearest friends, the couple who became Nic's unofficial godparents. One of them is HIV positive. He gave Nic an AIDS bracelet, "one with the same AIDS ribbon that you see all those idiotic celebrities wearing, the one that is handed out at the door as they enter the Oscars," as Nic writes. "To many of those people, that ribbon is probably nothing more than fashionable, but on the bracelet from my friend, it symbolized hope. I was told that the money for it went to finding a cure for the disease."

  Nic wrote that he wore the bracelet every day, "but then I got older. Though my feelings about my godparents never changed, I worried what other people would think. I began hearing people at my high school say horrible things about gays...[and] I began feeling uncomfortable about wearing the bracelet ... Finally, I stopped wearing it." Then, Nic continued, he lost it. "I'm sorry I lost the bracelet," he concluded, "but maybe its absence symbolizes more than its presence would. It symbolizes that I didn't have the strength to stand up for my friend."

  Encouraged by the journalism instructor, Nic submits this and other columns to the annual Ernest Hemingway Writing Award for high school journalists. He wins first place. Next he submits a column to the My Turn section of Newsweek, which the magazine publishes in February 1999. The piece is an indictment of long-distance joint custody. "Maybe there should be an addition to the marriage vows," Nic writes. " 'Do you promise to love and to hold, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall live? And if you ever have children and wind up divorced, do you promise to stay within the same geographical area as your kids?' Actually, since people often break those vows, maybe it should be a law: If you have children, you must stay near them. Or how about some common sense: If you move away from your children, you have to do the traveling to see them"? He poignantly describes the effect of his years of our joint-custody arrangement: "I am always missing someone."

  Nic's taste in books and music continues to evolve. His onetime favorite authors, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain, have been replaced by an assortment of misanthropes, addicts, drunks, depressives, and suicides: Rimbaud, Burroughs, Kerouac, Kafka, Capote, Miller, Nietzsche, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. One of his favored writers, Charles Bukowski, holds the distinction of being the most stolen author in college bookstores. He once summed up his readers as "the defeated, the demented, and the damned." Adolescents may be, or at least feel like, all of those things, but it worries me that these writers, particularly when they glamorize drugs and debauchery, are so compelling to Nic.

  At spring break, the two of us set off on a tour of colleges in the Midwest and on the East Coast. We fly to Chicago, arriving on a hazy morning. We have a free afternoon, so we visit the Art Institute and museums and, in the evening, attend a play. Nic sits in on classes and stays overnight in a University of Chicago dorm. In the morning, we fly on to Boston, where we rent a car. After two days touring schools in the city, we drive to Amherst, where we arrive after dark. We stop in the center of town and eat dinner at an Indian restaurant. Afterward, we ask directions to our hotel. The man we ask bellows urgently in response.

  "Go straight!" he shouts. "You will come to two lights." He looks fiercely into our eyes. "Take a right! You must take a right, never a left!"

  Nic and I follow the instructions exactly, Nic directing me in the same volume and tone used by the man.

  "Stop!" he yells. "Right! Right! Right. You must take a right, never a left!"

  Our final stop is Manhattan, where Nic tours NYU and Columbia.

  At home, he fills out his college applications and we plan his summer. He and Karen continue to speak French together. He has an aptitude for language; memorization is easy for him and he has a flawless ear. What he lacks in vocabulary he makes up for in a fluid Parisian accent and, with Karen's help, an arsenal of French slang. Toward the end of the school year, in fact, his French teacher encourages Nic to apply to a summer program in Paris to study the language at the American University there. Vicki and I confer and decide to send him.

  Nic spends much of June in LA and then travels to Paris for the three-week session. When he reports in by phone, he says that he's having a great time. His French is improving and he has made good friends. He even landed a part in a student film. "I love it here, but I miss all of you," he says one time before hanging up. "Give my love to the little kiddos."

  When the program ends, Nic flies home and I meet him at the airport. Waiting at the gate, I spot him disembarking from the jet-way. He looks terrible. He has grown taller, but that's not what I notice first. His hair is shaggy and unkempt. There are black circles under his eyes. Somehow he is grayer. His manner alarms me. I detect a simmering sullenness. Finally I ask what is wrong.

  "Nothing. I'm fine," he says.

  "Did something happen in Paris?"

  "No!" he replies with a flare of anger. I look at him suspiciously.

  "Are you sick?"

  "I'm OK."

  Within days, however, he complains of stomach pain, so I make an appointment with our family doctor. The examination takes an hour. Then Nic comes out and says that I should join him. With his arms folded across his chest, the doctor regards Nic with concern. I sense that there is more he wants to say, but he simply announces that Nic has an ulcer.

  What child has an ulcer at seventeen?

  7

  After high school, I enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, even closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. My roommate was from Manhattan. Charles had a trust fund. His parents were dead. I never learned the truth about how they died, but alcohol and drugs were involved. Perhaps suicide. "To have lost one parent, Mr. Worthing, might be considered a misfortune," Charles would say, appropriating the famous line in The Importance of Being Earnest. "To lose both looks like carelessness."

  Charles was awkwardly handsome, with a strong nose, brown curls, and coffee eyes. He had alluring and prodigious energy. He impressed me and others who met him with his worldliness, stories about Christmases with some Kennedy relations in Hyannis Port and "the Vineyard," and summers in Monaco and on the Côte d'Azur. When he took me and other friends out for dinner at a French restaurant, he ordered—in French—escargot, foie gras, and Dom Perignon. He regaled his audiences with tales of boarding school high jinks that could have (and may have) come out of Fitzgerald; sexual escapades that could have (and probably did) come out of Henry Miller. If you mentioned that you needed a new shirt, he would recommend a tailor in Hong Kong who for years made his father's suits. He claimed to know the best watchmaker on Madison Avenue, bartender at the Carlyle, and masseuse at the Pierre. Mention that you had tasted a good California wine and he would tell you about a Château Margaux he drank with a Rothschild scion. Everything about him was contrived to inspire awe. Including the way he drank alcohol and took drugs. He did both with what at the time I found to be impressive determination.

  I discovered that there were two parallel universities in Tucson. One was attended by students who took college with at least some degree of seriousness. The other—the one I attended—was chosen by Playboy as one of the top party schools in the nation.

  I was an amateur when compared to Charles, who never let school or anything else get in the way of his dissipation, though there would be intermittent hangovers accompanied by guilty resolutions to do better, followed by Champagne or margarita toasts to his new assiduousness.

  Charles had friends, also from New York City, who shared a pink adobe house on Speedway Boulevard on the far end of Tucson from the university. They were not on trust funds, but they had money for parties and steak dinners earned by dealing frozen magic mushrooms they smuggled in from the Yucatán.

  At the time, Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and its sequels were popular on college campuses. Castaneda, an anthropologist, chronicled his pursuit of the knowledge of a Yaqui Indian shaman who taught him a quasi-re
ligious philosophy reminiscent of various Eastern and Western mystical traditions. Integral to Don Juan's spiritual exploration was the consumption of psychotropic drugs, including peyote, datura, and psilocybin mushrooms. My friends and I were intrigued, and the books encouraged us to view our trips on mushrooms or other psychedelics not as debauchery but as intellectual inquiry. Somehow we also justified marijuana, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel's, Jose Cuervo, cocaine, and random uppers and downers.

  I recall quite distinctly tripping in the red-rock high desert outside Tucson and watching a Mexican daisy transform into a man's face. Soon it and the daisies around it morphed into the fresh-faced visages of thousands of angels, and then the entire ensemble began whispering the answer to the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life? I moved closer so that I could hear what they were saying, but the murmuring voices gave way to subdued laughter, and the array of somber faces turned into a field of laughing English muffins.

  By night, after a full white moon had risen low on the horizon, I decided that if the people in Italo Calvino's book, which we were reading in a lit class, could use ladders to climb onto the moon, why not me, but I gave up the idea when Charles announced that it was time to go clubbing.

  Charles bought drugs for studying, and they helped for half an hour or so. Then we would be too high to concentrate on anything other than which bar to visit. Copious amounts of drug and drink never deterred Charles from driving, and he crashed two Peugeots. Thankfully—miraculously—he never harmed anyone, at least as far as I know. I rode shotgun, which now I know was a form of Russian roulette.

  He blasted the Rolling Stones. He played his favorite song, "Shine a Light," incessantly and loudly, singing along with Mick Jagger,