Beautiful Boy

by David Sheff

  "I'll be fine, I've stopped using," Nic lies. "I just need to be on my own for a while."

  After Nic leaves, my friend calls. He tells me about the visit and then grows quiet. "At least I got him to eat something," he says.

  There's no news for a fortnight, nothing but a perpetual state of anxiety.

  Again I check jails to see if he has been arrested. Again I call hospital emergency rooms. Then Karen's brother sees him, or thinks he sees him, on Haight Street, huddling on a street corner, shifty, jittery, and suspicious-looking.

  1 am beside myself—uncomprehending, terrified. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the incapacitating worry when I don't know where he is. I imagine Nic on the streets of San Francisco, like a wild animal, wounded and desperate. Like some off-the-deep-end anesthesiologist presiding over his own brain surgery, Nic trying to manage the flow of drugs in order to achieve a high, which rapidly and necessarily becomes less about euphoria and more about avoiding the hell of withdrawal.

  In the drawer of the old desk in his room, I find a scribbled journal entry in a marbled composition notebook that lists a typical day's menu.

  1½ grams speed

  an eighth ounce of mushrooms

  2 klonopin

  3 codeine

  2 valium

  2 hits of e

  Back in my office, I try to write, but I'm catatonic. Karen comes in and sees me, sitting and staring, and she sighs. She is holding a small slip of paper.

  "Look," she says, handing me a canceled check. It's made out to Nic. The shaky signature is an obvious forgery.

  I say, "He wouldn't..." but even as I say it, I know I'm wrong. Karen dearly loves Nic, and she is stunned and wounded and fuming.

  "Poor Nic," I say. "He wouldn't do this if he was in his right mind."

  "Poor Nic?"

  She angrily turns to leave the room. I call after her, "But this is not Nic."

  She looks at me and shakes her head. She doesn't want to hear it. I can't make excuses for him much longer.

  I spend several more nights in anguish and dread.

  Then, one night, the kids asleep, Karen having read to them from the Arabian Nights, she has the newspaper in bed and I am writing in my office when I hear something.

  The front door?

  With a racing heart, I go to investigate and collide with Nic in the hallway.

  He grunts hardly a "hey," then rushes past me, aiming for his bedroom, though he stops briefly when I demand, "Nic? Where have you been?"

  He acts put upon, snarling, "What's your problem?"

  "I asked you a question. Where have you been?"

  He responds with all the incredulous indignation he can muster, then peers over his shoulder at me, mumbles "Nowhere," and continues into his room.

  "Nic!" I follow him, entering the smoky red cavern, where Nic is opening and slamming dresser drawers. His eyes scan the bookshelves in the closet. He has on a T-shirt, red, faded, and ripped-up jeans. His red Purcells are untied. No socks. His movements are frantic. He's obviously searching for something—I assume money, drugs.

  "What are you doing?"

  He glares at me.

  "Don't worry," he says. "I've been sober for five days."

  I grab his bag, which he has set on the bed, unzip it, and rummage through the pockets of his jeans, unrolling his socks, shaking out blankets, and unscrewing a flashlight. (It is filled with batteries.) While I do this, Nic leans on the doorjamb, blankly watching, his arms folded across his chest. Finally, with a barely perceptible acrid smirk, he says, "You can stop, OK." He gathers up a pile of clothes, stuffs them back into the canvas bag. "I'm leaving."

  I ask him to sit down and talk.

  "If it's about rehab, there's nothing to say."

  "Nic—"

  "Nothing to say."

  "You have to try again. Nic. Look at me."

  He doesn't.

  "You're throwing everything away."

  "It's mine to throw away."

  "Don't throw it away."

  "There's nothing to throw away."

  "Nic!"

  He pushes past me and without looking up says, "I'm sorry." He rushes down the hall.

  When he passes Karen, he says, "Hey, Mama," and she stares at him, uncomprehending.

  Karen stands with me, still holding the newspaper. We're both looking out the window as he disappears down the deserted street.

  Short of tackling him, what can I do?

  Though I want to hold on to him, and though I dread the haunting vacancy and debilitating worry when he's gone, I don't do a thing.

  I am awake at four A.M., along with other parents of drug-addicted children, children who are—we don't know where.

  It is another interminable big-moon night. Suddenly I think, It's Nic's birthday. Today my son turns twenty.

  I fight off stabbing urges to second-guess myself. There must have been something I could have tried. I should never have let him leave. I should try to find him.

  By now we have been told a hundred times that drug addiction is a progressive disease. I still don't quite get it until the next morning when the phone rings. It's Julia, Nic's girlfriend, whom I met last winter in Boston. Now, with Nic gone, their China plans by the wayside, she is calling from her family's home in Virginia, her voice breaking up. She has been crying. "Nic stole hypodermic needles from my mom's house when we visited here last month," she tells me.

  "Needles?"

  "They were for her cancer medication. He also stole morphine." She sobs.

  "I don't know what to say."

  "I don't either."

  After a pause, she says: "I can tell you one thing. Don't help him. Don't give him any money. He'll try everything to get you to help him. Then his mom. If you help him, it will only kill him faster. It's one of the few lessons we learned from my sister's addiction."

  "I had no idea. I'm an idiot. I thought he was doing better. I thought he got through the year at school sober."

  "You wanted to believe him just like me."

  She is about to hang up the phone.

  "From our family's experience with my sister, the best advice I can give you is to take care of yourself."

  "You take care of yourself, too."

  Even after everything we have been through, I am stunned. Nic is injecting drugs—shooting them into his arms, arms that not that long ago threw baseballs and built Lego castles, arms that wrapped around my neck when I carried his sleepy body in from the car at night.

  We have promised to take the little kids to the Monterey Bay Aquarium the next day. The disparity between our two worlds continues to stun and overwhelm. Sometimes it seems as if it is impossible that both worlds coexist.

  There is no point in sitting at home waiting for the telephone that doesn't ring.

  We strive to carry on with our lives.

  We drive to Monterey, stopping on the way in Santa Cruz, where we hike down a cliff, following a series of jagged footholds, to a cave just above the foaming and churning Pacific. The lower rocks are slippery with seawater. The kids swim nearby at Cowles Beach. My children—all three of them—seem as comfortable in the ocean as on land. They are like dolphins.

  At the aquarium, we watch a film of a languid bay and hundreds of feeding cormorants. The birds seem to be playing and splashing in the surf. Then, out of nowhere, the water erupts with evil gray, a mouthful of teeth, a great white shark, and a cormorant is swallowed whole. The shark's tail whips around like a snapping rope and disappears.

  I feel like the cormorant. A shark has appeared from the depths. I stare at it and helplessly see the approach—and with it the precariousness of Nic's life—see how close he is to dying. As physically sick as the image makes me, I cannot fend it off.

  After the aquarium, we drive south on Highway 1 to Carmel, where the kids play on the beach and then, in a park, climb on an ancient madrone with bark peeling off like an old sunburn. Watching them, I relax for a moment, but anxiety has taken up permanen
t residence in my body.

  We are driving home. We do not talk about Nic. It's not that we're not thinking about him. His addiction and its twin, the specter of his death, permeate the air we breathe. Karen and I try to gird ourselves in case the next telephone call brings with it the worst possible news.

  Nic is still gone. Life does not stop.

  Karen is working late in her studio, and I take Jasper and Daisy into town for dinner at the Pine Cone Diner. Afterward, we walk to the grocery store. The Palace Market is nearly deserted. I wheel a cart up and down the aisles. Jasper and Daisy keep tossing Cocoa Puffs and Oreos into the cart and I keep removing them, until finally I snap at them to stop. I send them off in different direc tions for things we actually need, milk, butter, bread. I'm in an aisle vaguely scanning a wall of dried pasta when the Muzak system plays Eric Clapton's song about the death of his son.

  "Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?"

  It's more than I can tolerate. I break down in the middle of the market. Jasper and Daisy, their arms loaded with the items on their lists, both race around the corner at the same time and catch my tears. They are appalled and afraid.

  Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully. Avoid Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," from the Polaroid or Kodak or whichever commercial, and the songs "Turn Around" and "Sunrise, Sunset" and—there are thousands more. Avoid Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," and this one, Eric Clapton's song about his son. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sneaked up on me one time. The music doesn't have to be sentimental. Springsteen can be dangerous. John and Yoko. Björk. Dylan. I become overwhelmed when I hear Nirvana. I want to scream like Kurt Cobain. I want to scream at him. Music isn't all that does it. There are millions of treacherous moments. Driving along Highway 1, I will see a peeling wave. Or I reach the fork where two roads meet near Rancho Nicasio, where we veered to the left in carpool. A shooting star on a still night at the crest of Olema Hill. With friends, I hear a good joke—one that Nic would appreciate. The kids do something funny or endearing. A story. A worn sweater. A movie. Feeling wind and looking up, riding my bike. A million moments.

  We hear nothing more for another fortnight, then he sends me an email. My initial reaction is relief—he is alive, at least semicoherent, and mobile, if only enough to get to a public library to use a computer. He asks for help, some money, so he doesn't have to live on the streets. I write back that I will help him return to treatment, but that is all. I am not parroting any Al-Anon tough-love script, nor have I become callous. I have been defeated by meth and have given up. Bailing him out, paying his debts, dragging him to shrinks, counselors, and scraping him off the street—it has been futile; meth is impervious. I have always assumed that vigilance and love would guarantee a decent life for my children, but I have learned that they aren't enough.

  He declines my offer.

  Nic's writing teacher at Hampshire, the one who accepted Nic into his class after they shook hands, hears that he relapsed and writes to me: "Sober Nic sparkles. I've buried too many people over the years not to be sick about this news."

  After another anguished week, Nic calls, collect:

  "Hey, Pop, it's me."

  "Nic."

  "How're you doing?"

  "That's not the question. What about you?"

  "I'm all right."

  "Where are you?"

  "The city."

  "Do you have a place to stay? Where are you staying?"

  "I'm fine."

  "Listen, Nic, do you want to meet?"

  "I don't think it's a good idea."

  "Just to meet. I won't lay any trips on you. Just for lunch."

  "I guess."

  "Please."

  "All right."

  Why do I want to meet him? No matter how unrealistic, I retain a sliver of hope that I can get through to him. That's not quite accurate. I know I can't, but at least I can put my fingertips on his cheek.

  For our meeting, Nic chooses Steps of Rome, a café on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach, the neighborhood where I raised him. Nic played in Washington Square opposite Saints Peter and Paul Church. We would browse City Lights, the bookstore, and walk backward down the nearly vertical streets to the wharf, where we sat on the curb and watched the Human Jukebox play his trumpet and then ate banana splits at the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory. Across Broadway in Chinatown, we picked up bok choy and melons, and on our way home stopped at Caffe Trieste for coffee and hot chocolate. Sometimes we ate an early dinner at a sushi bar, where Nic ordered customized tempura with only orange vegetables (carrots and yams). Or we went to Vanessi's, the Italian restaurant where the waiters, in burgundy coats and creased black pants, lifted Nic and set him, tow-headed and a gap between his front teeth, on a stool at the counter stacked with telephone books. Nic's eyes would grow round while watching the pyrotechnics of the line cooks splashing brandy into saucepans. The liquor ignited, and Nic was thrilled. The cooks had his order memorized: kid-sized caesar salad, ravioli triangolo, and zabaglione whisked in a banged-up copper bowl. Walking home, we passed the girls who hung out in front of the Broadway strip clubs, whom he knew by their costumes, Wonder Woman, She-Ra, Cat Woman, et al. He was convinced they were superheroes patrolling North Beach. When he got sleepy, I carried him home, his tiny arms wrapped around my neck.

  At Steps of Rome, I sit at a corner table, nervously waiting for him. Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on in my life, have betrayed me, I am in unknown terrain. Steps of Rome is deserted except for two waiters folding napkins at the bar. I order coffee while racking my brain for the one thing I haven't thought of that might reach him.

  I wait until it is more than a half-hour past our meeting time, recognizing the suffocating worry, and also the bitterness and rage.

  After forty-five minutes, I decide that he isn't coming—what had I expected?—and leave. I am unwilling to give up, however, and so I walk around the block, return, peer into the café, and then trudge around the block again. Another half-hour later, I am ready to go home, really, maybe, when I see him. Walking toward me, but looking down, his gangly arms limp at his sides, he looks more than ever like a ghostly Egon Schiele self-portrait, debauched and wasted.

  He sees me and stops, then cautiously approaches. We tentatively hug, my arms wrapping around his vaporous spine, and I kiss his cheek. He's chalk-white. We embrace like that, and then sit down at a table by the window. He can't look me in the eyes. No apologies for being late. He folds and unfolds a soda straw, rocks anxiously in his chair, his fingers tremble, his jaw gyrates, and he grinds his teeth. We order. He preempts any questions, saying, "I'm doing—great. I'm doing what I need to be doing, being responsible for myself for the first time in my life."

  "I'm so worried about you."

  Silence. Then:

  "How are Karen and the kids?"

  "They're OK, but we're all worried about you."

  "Yeah, well."

  "Nic, are you ready to stop? To return to the living?"

  "Don't start."

  "Jasper and Daisy miss you. They don't—"

  He cuts me off. "I can't deal with that. Don't guilt-trip me."

  Nic scrapes his plate clean with the side of his fork, drinks down his coffee. When he brushes back his bangs, I notice a welt, which he touches with his fingers, but I don't bother asking.

  After we say goodbye, I watch him rise and leave. He's shaking and holding on to his stomach. Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything. Every time we reach a point where we feel we can't bear any more, we do. I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate. He's just experimenting. Going through a stage. It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs. At least it's not heroin. He would never resort to needles. At least he's alive. I have also learned (the hard way because, as it turns out, there's no other way to learn such les
sons) that parents are more flexible with our hopes and dreams for our children than we ever imagined. When Nic was growing up, I thought I would be content with whatever choices he made in his life. But the truth was that I fully expected he would go to college. Of course he would. It was never questioned. I pictured him in a satisfying job, with a loving relationship, and eventually with children of his own. However, with his escalating drug use I have revised my hopes and expectations. When college seemed unlikely, I learned to live with the idea that he would skip college and go right to work. After all, many kids take a circuitous route to find themselves. But that began to seem unrealistic, and so I concluded that I would be content if he found a sense of peace. Now I live with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one.

  Summer ends.

  Every time the telephone rings, my stomach constricts. Long after the euphoria from meth is no longer attainable—Tennessee Williams described the equivalent with alcohol in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: "I never again could get the click"—addicts are agitated and confused, and most stop eating and sleeping. Parents of addicts don't sleep, either.

  17

  In some towns, noon is marked by ringing church bells or I chiming clock towers. In Point Reyes, it is announced by a rooster's crow followed by the harmony of mooing cows from a public address system atop the Western Saloon.

  The crowing and moos stop us for a moment.

  I'm at the farmers' market at Toby's Feed Barn with Daisy and Jasper, and it's like a scene in Oklahoma! Our neighbors and friends are buying tomatoes, cucumbers, salad greens, and Cowgirl Creamery cheeses.

  We run into my brother and sister-in-law and their children next to baskets of Early Girls and basil and other herbs ready for planting, lined up along a mural that depicts a scene of locals, including Toby in his knit cap and, when she was a baby, my niece.