Beautiful Boy

by David Sheff

  What happened to my son? Where did I go wrong? According to Al-Anon, it is not my fault. But I feel solely responsible. I repeat the litany: if only I had set stricter limits; if only I had been more consistent; if only I had protected him more from my adult life; if only I had not used drugs; if only his mother and I had stayed together; if only she and I had lived in the same city after the divorce.

  I know that the divorce and custody arrangement were the most difficult aspects of his childhood. Children of divorce use drugs and alcohol before the age of fourteen more often than the children of intact families. In one study, 85 percent of children of divorce were heavy drug users in high school compared to 24 percent of those from intact families. Girls whose parents have divorced have earlier sexual experiences, and kids of both sexes suffer a higher rate of depression. Since more than half of first marriages and 65 percent of second marriages end in divorce, few of us want to face the fact that divorce is often a disaster for children and may lead to drug abuse and other serious problems. But maybe it's ludicrous to speculate, since many kids who go through divorces—some far more contentious than mine—don't resort to drugs. And many drug addicts I meet are from intact families. There's no way to know definitively. Were we crazier than most families? Not by a long shot. Maybe.

  What else can I blame? Sometimes I think privileged kids are prime candidates for drug addiction for many obvious reasons, but what about the legions of addicts who grew up in dire poverty? It would be easy to blame their poverty, if it were not the case that we encountered children from every socioeconomic class in rehabs and AA meetings. I would blame private schools if public school kids had fewer drug problems. Instead, the research confirms it. Addiction is an equal-opportunity affliction—affecting people without regard to their economic circumstance, their education, their race, their geography, their IQ, or any other factor. Probably a confluence of factors—a potent but unknowable combination of nature and nurture—may or may not lead to addiction.

  Sometimes I know that nothing and no one is to blame. Then I slip and feel utterly responsible. Then sometimes I know that the only thing that is knowable is that Nic has a terrible disease.

  I still have a difficult time accepting it. I replay the arguments on both sides. People with cancer or emphysema or heart disease don't lie and steal. Someone dying of those diseases would do anything in their power to live. But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.

  But, says Dr. Rawson, "A symptom of this disease is using. A symptom is being out of control. A symptom is the need to feed the craving." It is a force so powerful that one addict in a meeting compared it to the "need of a starving baby to suckle his mother—using was no more and no less of a choice than that."

  There's a practical reason for people to understand that addiction is a disease—insurance companies cover diseases and pay for treatment. It's good they do, because if you wait until the disease progresses, and it will, you end up paying for replaced livers and hearts and kidneys, never mind the mental illnesses of addicts who descend into psychosis and dementia, and never mind the costs of destroyed families who cannot work, and never mind the costs of addiction-related crime.

  Some people remain unconvinced. For them, addiction is a moral failing. Users want to get high, pure and simple. No one forces them to. "I'm not disputing the fact that certain areas of the brain light up when an addict thinks about or uses cocaine," said Sally Satel, staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Drug Treatment Clinic in Washington, D.C., and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "But it conveys the message that addiction is as biological a condition as multiple sclerosis. True brain diseases have no volitional component."

  But I remind myself: Nic is not Nic when he is using. Throughout this ordeal I strive to understand this force that has shanghaied my son's brain, and I sometimes wonder if his recidivism is a moral failing or a character flaw. I sometimes also blame the treatment programs. And then I blame myself. I go back and forth. But I always come back to this:

  If Nic were not ill he would not lie.

  If Nic were not ill he would not steal.

  If Nic were not ill he would not terrorize his family.

  He would not forsake his friends, his mother, Karen, Jasper, and Daisy, and he would not forsake me. He would not. He has a disease, but addiction is the most baffling of all diseases, unique in the blame, shame, and humiliation that accompany it.

  It is not Nic's fault that he has a disease, but it is his fault that he relapses, since he is the only one who can do the work necessary to prevent relapse. Whether or not it's his fault, he must be held accountable. While this ongoing, whirring noise replays in my mind, I understand when, at St. Helena, Nic admitted that he sometimes wished that he had any other illness, because no one would blame him. And yet cancer patients, for example, would be justifiably disgusted by this. All an addict or alcoholic has to do is stop drinking, stop using! There's no similar option for cancer.

  Parents of addicts have the same problem as their children: we must come to terms with the irrationality of this disease. No one who has not confronted it can completely understand the paradoxes. Since most people cannot fathom it, there's no true understanding, just pity that may come with thinly veiled condescension. Outside Al-Anon meetings, or apart from the parents who heard what we were going through and called to commiserate, I often felt separate, with a nearly impossible task of stopping my mind from its attempt to understand. Van Morrison sings: "It ain't why, why, why. It ain't why, why, why. It just is."

  It just is.

  Still, believing that addiction is a disease helps. Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has said: "I've studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There's a pattern in compulsion. I've never come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted. Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process."

  Nic's grandfather once came to visit us—years ago when Vicki and I lived for a year in Los Angeles. On the way to our apartment from the airport, he asked us to stop at a store so he could buy cigarettes. He tried to sneak it, but we saw that he had a bottle of bourbon in the paper sack. By the end of dinner, the bottle was drained. Within two years, he was dead. He had been a kind, loving, and hard-working family man, a farmer, whose life had tragically deteriorated. But because it was alcohol, rather than speed or heroin, his debilitation took decades. He was in his sixties when he died. "Alcohol does the same damage over a much longer term," someone said in a meeting. "Drugs get it over quicker. That's the only difference."

  Other than the potency and toxicity of their drugs of choice, ultimately the differences between using addicts and alcoholics become moot; they end up in the same place, similarly debilitated, similarly alone—similarly dead.

  I am reading Brideshead Revisited, and I'm struck that a hundred years ago Waugh wrote, "With Sebastian it is different." Julia is speaking about her brother. "He will become a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him ... It is in the blood ... I see it in the way Sebastian drinks."

  Brideshead: "You can't stop people if they want to get drunk. My mother couldn't stop my father."

  Substitute a few words and they are discussing my son: "With Nic it is different. He will become an addict if someone does not come to stop him ... It is in the blood ... I see it in the way he uses."

  "You can't stop people if they want to get high."

  After you spend some time in recovery programs, you never look the same way at a drunk or a stoner, whether at a party or in books or movies. Hunter Thompson's accounts of his gluttonous drugging and drinking are no longer funny to me. They are pathetic. There is nothing amusing about Nick Charles quaffing martinis—swallowi
ng them at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner; between, before, and after every meal—in the Thin Man movies. ("Come on, dear, let's get something to eat," Nick says. "I'm thirsty.") In one of these films, Nora jokes that her husband is a dipsomaniac. He is. Many people were charmed by the 2005 movie Sideways, about a wine enthusiast, but I was repulsed. To me, it was the story of a wretched alcoholic.

  There are functioning alcoholics just as there are functioning addicts, at least functioning until they don't. Maybe the only difference between them and winos and drugged-out bums on the street is some money—enough for rent, utilities, a meal, and the next drink.

  Some people maintain that designating addiction as a brain disease rather than a behavioral disorder gives addicts, whether they are using alcohol, crack, heroin, meth, or prescription drugs, an excuse to relapse. Alan I. Leshner, former director of NIDA who is now the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, agrees that addicts should not be let off the hook. "The danger in calling addiction a brain disease is people think that makes you a hapless victim," wrote Dr. Leshner in Issues in Science and Technology in 2001. "But it doesn't. For one thing, since it begins with a voluntary behavior, you do, in effect, give it to yourself."

  Dr. Volkow disagrees. "If we say a person has heart disease, are we eliminating their responsibility? No. We're having them exercise. We want them to eat less, stop smoking. The fact that they have a disease recognizes that there are changes, in this case, in the brain. Just like any other disease, you have to participate in your own treatment and recovery. What about people with high cholesterol who keep eating French fries? Do we say a disease is not biological because it's influenced by behavior? No one starts out hoping to become an addict; they just like drugs. No one starts out hoping for a heart attack; they just like fried chicken. How much energy and anger do we want to waste on the fact that people gave it to themselves? It can be a brain disease and you can have given it to yourself and you personally have to do something about treating it."

  I try not to blame Nic.

  I don't.

  Sometimes I do.

  16

  On this sunny June morning, though he promised Jasper and Daisy, Nic is not in the audience at their step-up ceremony.

  The head of their school, in a camel-colored sports jacket and bright necktie, has a warm smile, eyes that betray his boundless affection for his charges, and a voice that soothes. He beams along with the children and their parents. Standing behind a microphone, he conducts the ceremony, calling them grade by grade. At his instruction, they stand and then move en masse from the step they're sitting on to the next higher row. Jasper, in a collared white shirt, his brown hair combed down on his forehead, radiates up there among his friends. He is now a third grader.

  The headmaster says:

  "Will this year's first graders please stand."

  They do. And then he says:

  "Will next year's second graders please step up."

  Now it's Daisy's grade's turn.

  "Will this year's kindergarten class please stand."

  Daisy, in a soft blue dress with smocking—the dress was Nancy's when she was a little girl—rises along with her classmates.

  "Will next year's first-grade class please step up."

  There is thunderous applause and foot stomping. This is the school's tradition. Daisy and the other kindergarteners, when they step up to first grade, are greeted by a deafening roar. It's a poignant moment when the bottom tier is empty except for the kindergarten teachers, who are alone, anticipating a fresh group of five-year-olds who will arrive in the fall.

  Inside me there is a searing void. The contradiction between the innocence of the children up there and my absent son is almost too much to contain inside one brain at one time.

  After the step-up ceremony come speeches and the commencement of the eighth graders, who will begin high school in the fall. I am not the only parent with tears, but I cannot help thinking that mine are unique. I watch Jasper and Daisy dressed up—Jasper in the white oxford with its itchy collar, Daisy in her grandmother's dress, white socks, and Mary Janes—standing with their classmates, immaculate, nervous, and excited, and I remember Nic shining, too, standing tall, his life ahead of him. Where can he be?

  Outside, the sky is streaked with smears of blue, but the sign that the storm has passed—and that summer is coming—does not lift my mood. I am in the kitchen boiling water for tea. The phone rings. My anxious reaction is recognizable. Who else would call this early in the morning? It must be Nic. And yet as I reach for the telephone, I tell myself, "No, it's not Nic," so as to ward off the bitter disappointment when it isn't.

  It isn't.

  "It's Sylvia Robertson," a woman says, her voice chirpy. "I'm Jonathan's mother. I'm the team mom for the Angry Tuna."

  Jasper's swim team mom asks if we can work at the snack bar at next weekend's meet.

  "Of course. We'd be happy to."

  I begin to hang up.

  "Go Angry Tuna," she says gaily.

  "Go Angry Tuna."

  The kitchen is still.

  Along with china and teacups and glassware, a photograph dominates the open shelves over the sink. In the snapshot, we are on a boat on a lake somewhere. My father, wearing sunglasses and a fisherman's hat, waves and smiles. Daisy, on Karen's lap, is a baby. Her face is hidden underneath a wide-brimmed sun hat. The boys are in the foreground, smiling at the camera. Jasper, who just got a haircut so that his brown bangs rim his eager face, and Nic, with a short buzz and gleaming braces. My boys. The picture has a stamp on the back, 10 12 '96, which puts Nic at fourteen.

  Where is he?

  Meanwhile, over the hill, at Karen's parents' canyonside home, Don has just emerged from his lair and he settles into his regular sunny corner of the living room. Wearing old boat shoes and a threadbare T-shirt and shorts, he sits in a rattan chair reading about Admiral Lord Nelson. Nancy is busy down the winding pathway in her garden when it dawns on her that the wash is probably done. Her pruning shears tucked into a leather holster on a belt, she trudges up to the house.

  Removing her gardening gloves, Nancy enters through the lower door into the downstairs and goes into the packed basement with its distinctive smell of mold and laundry soap. Past the washing machine and the clothes dryer, there is a sewing room and a small bedroom, her son's when he was a teenager. There are bows mounted on the wall that were gifts from friends—members of the Blackfoot Indian tribe—to her parents. The room is now a spare where the grandchildren sleep when they spend the night.

  Before she can transfer the load of clean sheets and pillowcases to the dryer, she has to unload the tumble of clean clothes. She piles them, for later folding, on the bed.

  And gasps. There's a body under a pile of woolen blankets. Gathering herself, she looks closer, sees that it's Nic, a vibrating skeleton, sleeping, undisturbed by her cry.

  "Nic," she exclaims. "What are..."

  Haunted, with black eyes, fully dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Nic looks at her. He sits up.

  "What? Nan..."

  Both of them are stunned.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Nancy," he begins. "I..."

  "Are you all right?"

  He gets up, grabs his bag, stammers, apologizes.

  "Nic, no," Nancy says. "It's all right. It's just that you scared me to death."

  "I'm ... I'm sorry."

  "Nic, are you on drugs?"

  He says nothing.

  "You can stay anytime you want. It's all right. Just tell me. Don't sneak. You almost gave me a heart attack."

  He leaves the room and heads up the stairs. She follows him.

  "Have you eaten? Can I make you something?"

  "No, thanks. Maybe a banana. If it's all right."

  "Nic ... What can I do to help?"

  There are tears in her eyes. She blinks. "Just tell me what I can do."

  Nic mumbles something incoherent, an apology, a
nd takes a banana from the basket in the kitchen. He says thank you and mutters I'm sorry and then walks briskly out the front door and up the driveway.

  "Nic!"

  She hurries after him, calls to him, but he doesn't stop.

  By the time Nancy reaches the street, he's gone.

  Nancy calls to tell me what happened. By now Don is hovering nearby, listening to the news. Nancy has every right to be furious, but she apologizes to me. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't know what to do."

  I assure her that there was nothing to do.

  "I'm sorry he scared you," I say. "I'm sorry you had to see him like that."

  Nancy isn't listening. "I tried to get him to stay," she says. "He looked..." She stops herself and becomes choked up. "It makes me so damn mad!"

  On a crisp afternoon a few days after the step-up ceremony, I'm at a park where Daisy's grade is having an end-of-the-school-year party. A friend—a teacher and Daisy's friend's father—is leading the children in a game of his invention inspired by J. K. Rowling. His version of quidditch involves four balls of varying sizes substituting for the bludgers and quaffles and a Frisbee for the golden snitch.

  I am present, but I am absent. Parents can only be as happy as their unhappiest child, according to an old saw. I'm afraid it's true.

  Out of breath, Daisy runs up to me. "We need you on our team," she says. "Come on." She grabs my hand and pulls me into the game.

  There is no news for another week, and then Nic calls his godfather, who invites him over to his house near Twin Peaks. Aghast at Nic's appearance—"he looks like he could blow away in a strong wind"—he cooks him a pot roast, which Nic devours. He begs Nic to get help.