Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

by David Sheff

  Indeed, the peninsula is surrounded on three sides by some of the wildest, most magnificent coastline anywhere. Until now, Nic rarely chose to go to the beach—he didn't like getting sandy—but soon he spends every possible moment near and in the water. We drive out to McClure's Beach, past sweeping arcs of yellow mustard flowers, to catch a minus tide. We walk along the shore to the outcroppings and balance on slippery rock, watching the crashing waves, while searching tide pools for mussels, sea stars, anemones, and octopi. Nic watches Karen dive into the cold ocean in the middle of December at Limantour Beach. He jumps in, too. They whip each other with long strands of seaweed. When he gets out, he can't stop shivering. The Tomales Bay is warmer. When they swim there, Karen and Nic play a game in which she tries to buck him off her back. On the sandy beaches at Drakes, Stinson, and Bolinas, Nic skim-boards. He tries boogie-boarding and then surfing. He looks natural and elegant on a board. The better he gets at surfing, the more he wants to do it. We spend sublime hours together in the ocean. We pore over buoy and weather reports and head to the beach when the swell is up and the wind is offshore. Waxing his board on the beach, Nic is slender and strong, bronzed from the sun. He wears orange beads around his neck. He has long bending limbs, brown hands with dirty fingernails, and narrow brown feet. His light eyes with coarse black eyelashes slant down. When he pulls on his black wetsuit, he has the skin of a seal.

  Enticed by West Marin, we build a house and painting studio in the Inverness hillside garden, moving in before fall, when Nic begins sixth grade at a new school—with trepidation.

  After his first day, we sit in the high-backed dining chairs around a square purple table. Nic tells us that he thinks he is going to like this school after all. "My teacher asked, 'How many of you hate math?' " Nic says. "Almost everyone raised their hands. I did. She said, 'I hated math, too.' Then she gave this smile and said, 'You won't hate it when I'm finished with you.' "

  He goes on to say that lots of the kids seem nice. He reports that after we dropped him off, he was walking through the corridor when he heard a boy call out to him: "Nic!"

  He looks up.

  "I was pretty excited, but then I thought maybe he was yelling to someone else and I was acting like a complete idiot, waving at him. But no, it was me. He remembered me from when I visited the school."

  After the second day, Nic reports that another boy called him his friend. "This red-haired boy handed me a hockey stick in PE, and when this other kid said, 'No, that's my stick, I had it first,' the red-haired kid said, 'It's for my friend Nic.' "

  Nic looks cool these days in pants that ride low on his hips, a Primus or Nirvana T-shirt, a slumped adolescent posture, and his red-orange-tinged hair. And yet he has essentially one ambition: coming home and being able to say, "Dad, I made two new friends today."

  On a Friday, some of the children come over for a party. We drive to Stinson Beach, where they play sand tag and kickball and Nic teaches them to skim-board. Their preteen awkwardness dissolves as they play like much younger children, laughing without self-consciousness, tumbling and wrestling in the sand. Before dark, we drive back home, where they play Twister and Truth or Dare, with risqué questions like, "Do you think Skye is cute?" (Nic does: She's the big-eyed, brown-haired girl whose name, when he mentions it, makes him blush. He talks to her on the phone at night, sometimes for an hour or more at a time.) And, "In a fight to the death between Batman and the Hulk, who would win?" Dares include biting into a jalapeño pepper and kissing a Barbie doll. They eat pizza and popcorn, and their parents pick them up at ten.

  Karen and I attend the school's art shows and plays. Nic is Viola in a production of Twelfth Night and George Gibbs in Our Town. Parents are invited to hear their oral reports on foreign countries. Nic, assigned Bolivia, after showing the country on a homemade poster-board map and describing its history, topography, agriculture, and gross national product, performs a song he wrote. "Olivia, oh, Olivia," he sings, "down in La Paz, Bolivia. My Olivia." He accompanies himself on guitar.

  He cartoons a series of panels featuring a character called Super Cow the Avenger, who imparts lessons about nutrition. For a science assignment, he rigs our bathtub and shower stalls with buckets and rulers, measuring the amount of water used in each. (Showers are far more ecofriendly.) For another science project, Nic tests household cleaners and solvents on oil-drenched feathers to see what would work best to clean birds after an oil spill. Dove, the dishwashing liquid, wins. He bakes an apple in the oven and through the oven window tracks its disintegration, reporting the result in a paper written from the perspective of the apple. "I am becoming dehydrated. I sigh, 'Hello? Out there? Can anyone hear me? It's getting hot in here...' "

  Every morning and afternoon there are carpools between school and Point Reyes Station. When I drive, I sometimes educate Nic and his friends in the oeuvre of Van Morrison and the Kinks and guitar solos by Jorma Kaukonen, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Robin Trower, Duane Allman, and Ronnie Van Zant. (Air guitar is encouraged.) Nic and his friends often play the complaining game, Karen's invention. Nic, imitating the Newlywed Game's Bob Eubanks, is the announcer, explicating the rules. Contestants are awarded points on a scale of one to ten for unburdening themselves. The kids generally rail about their annoying siblings, jerks at school, unsympathetic teachers, and ogreish parents. Prosaic complaints receive middling scores. Admitting that you have had nightmares ever since you watched a horror movie in which teenage girls were stabbed and a man was buried alive wins eight points. When a girl tells about the time she was kidnapped by her father, she is applauded and awarded a ten. A boy also receives a ten for a fuming denunciation of his mother, who, he says, has dragged him to eight cities with four successive husbands. After months of hearing stories such as these, one girl uses her turn to complain, "I'm too normal. My parents have never been divorced and I have always lived in the same house." The other children sympathetically award her a ten.

  Looking for a puppy at the Humane Society, Karen falls in love with a smelly, sad-eyed, near-starved hound sitting with its paws crossed on the cement floor of its kennel. She brings Moon-dog home, and also a ball of fur, a chocolate Labrador puppy we call Brutus. Moondog, who had never been inside a house before, lifts his leg on the floor and chews the wooden furniture. He tears through the house, baying and barking whenever a car drives by or when someone comes to the front door. He howls at the vacuum cleaner. Brutus hops in the grass like a bunny.

  Every Wednesday we take the dogs and ourselves over to dinner at Karen's parents' house. Nancy and Don live in a barnlike board-and-batten home tucked into the side of a wooded canyon a half-hour from Inverness. The main room is cavernous and airy, with a twenty-four-foot-high single-pane plate glass door that slides open. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, lining two walls, are filled with books about shells and rocks and trees and birds. There are also portraits of their three children (Karen, at five or so, has large brown eyes and pinned-back dark hair) and sand dollars and pewter plates and a painting of a marmot.

  Don is a retired doctor. Karen grew up waiting in the car while he made house calls. Don grows tomatoes and squash in a terraced garden, but he spends most of his time in his second-story office doing his current job, evaluating studies designed to assess the effectiveness of new medicines.

  Nancy, his wife of more than fifty years, works every day in the garden. She has gray eyes and silver hair cut in a pageboy. She is vivacious, handsome, gentle, and imposing.

  None of Nancy and Don's children lives farther than San Francisco, and on any given afternoon it's not uncommon to find one or more of them sitting at the kitchen table in front of cups of reheated coffee and a plate of cookies, chatting with their mother.

  The weekly Wednesday night dinners are raucous and memorable evenings with Nancy and Don and their three children and their families, plus occasional guests and a revolving pack of our various unmannered dogs, which hog the best couches and steal unguarded food off the dining table.

  At
these dinners, Nancy recounts every newspaper or TV news story of toxic mattresses, molested children, teen suicide, poisoning, shopping-cart handles infested with bacteria, shark attack, car crash, electrocution—mostly endless tales about the hideous deaths of children. She tells us about a swimmer who drowned because she held her breath too long. She says that someone was killed in Mill Valley when a tree fell on his car, completely squishing him. She reports news about skyrocketing rates of childhood depression, eating disorders, and drug abuse. "A girl drowned after getting her hair caught in a hot-tub drain," she says one day. "I just want you to know so you'll be careful."

  These warnings are meant to increase our vigilance, but it's impossible to prepare for every possible calamity. It's one thing to be safe, but panic is useless and too much caution can be stifling. No matter. The bad news pours forth along with the rosemary au jus.

  At one Wednesday dinner in October 1993, Karen, who is seven months pregnant, and I are sitting around the kitchen table with her parents and brother and sister. Nic is playing outside with Brutus when Nancy imparts the latest terrible news. The setting is Petaluma, a half-hour drive east of Inverness. A twelve-year-old girl was abducted from her bedroom. She was having a slumber party. Her mother was home at the time.

  Within a day, pictures of Polly Klaas with her long brown hair and gentle eyes are plastered on every store window and telephone pole in town. Soon a psychopath is arrested; he leads police to Polly's body. Every parent I know mourns Polly's death, and we hold tighter to our children.

  Kids in Nic's carpool are obsessed with the murder. One girl says that she would have screamed and run. Another says there is no way she could have. "The guy was a giant, over seven feet." Nic is silent for a while and then says, "You have to scream and run anyway. You have to try to get away." A boy says there was an accomplice. "The guy who kidnapped her stole her for a child prostitute ring." Then no one talks until Nic asks if the killer was really seven feet tall. The girl says, "Seven feet eight."

  We parents talk about our children's fitful sleep and nightmares, and the kids respond with jokes they overhear at school. The ones they repeat in carpool aren't always about Polly Klaas.

  "Jeffrey Dahmer's mother says, 'Jeffrey, I really don't like your friends,' and so he tells her, 'That's okay. Just eat the vegetables.' "

  Nic never reads newspapers or watches the news, but there is no filtering out these disturbing events, because the kids—in car-pool, on the playground—become preoccupied by them.

  Jasper is born in early December.

  Nancy and Don bring Nic to the hospital to see the baby when he is a few hours old. Jasper has swollen eyes because of some drops they put in them. Nic, sitting in a pink upholstered chair next to Karen's hospital bed, holds the baby, who is wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. He stares for a long time.

  One can easily forget how tiny and delicate they are when they are just born. Back home in Inverness, when Jasper is sleeping, we check him to make certain that he is breathing. His presence with us seems tentative, and we worry that he could slip away.

  We try our best to make the transition easy for Nic, who seems to like playing with Jasper, seems enchanted by him. Am I sugar-coating it? Maybe. I do know that it is complicated for him. In the best circumstances, second families must always be at least a little bit terrifying for the children from an earlier marriage. We reassure Nic, but he must wonder exactly where this new baby fits into our lives.

  Karen and I are more tired. Jasper fights sleeping but passes out whenever he's in the car, so we drive him for long meandering rides to induce naps. Otherwise, not much has changed. Nic and I, often with his friends, surf whenever we can find the time. We play guitars together and listen to music. For New Year's Eve 1993, when I score tickets for the Nirvana concert at the Oakland Coliseum, I arrange for Nic to fly up from LA. It's an unforgettable evening. Kurt Cobain's performance is riveting, brilliant, and haunted. He sings:

  I'm not like them

  But I can pretend

  The sun is gone

  But I have a light

  The day is done

  But I'm having fun

  My heart is broke

  But I have some glue

  Help me inhale

  And mend it with you

  We'll float around

  And hang out on clouds

  Then we'll come down

  And I'll have a hangover

  Three months later, Nic, Karen, and I are sitting in the living room, with its cerulean wall panels framed in oiled redwood. The room is furnished sparsely with twin couches, covered with strips of red silk fabric from China that Karen found at a thrift store, and mismatched throw pillows. We watch Jasper, who is on a baby blanket. He starts to roll over onto his back and tries to crawl but doesn't go anywhere. Eventually, Jas gets in the right position, on all fours, and he huffs and puffs, rocks forward, and then begins crying. When he finally starts crawling, he goes sideways like a crab.

  In the morning, Nic goes off to school as usual. But when he comes home, from his face I can tell that he is distressed. He drops his backpack on the floor, looks up, and tells me that Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. From Nic's room I hear Cobain's voice.

  I found it hard, it was hard to find.

  Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

  After summer, Nic begins seventh grade. In her book Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott wrote, "The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit ... It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, in Germany." These days there are reasons more troubling than preteen awkwardness and cruelty for parents to worry. A junior high school principal I know told me that she doesn't understand what it is, but things are worse for her students than ever before. "I can't believe the things they do to themselves and to each other," she says. In a survey of public-school teachers in 1940, the top disciplinary problems listed included talking out of turn, chewing gum, running in the halls, dress-code violations, and littering. More than fifty years later, they are drug and alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault.

  When Nic enters seventh grade, he still seems to enjoy playing with Jasper, whose first word is duck, followed by up, banana, doggie, and Nicky. Nic meanwhile has discovered an unanticipated benefit of a baby in the family. The girls in his grade flock to Jasper. They come over to play with him—to bounce him around and dress him up. Nic is delighted with his expanding harem.

  But Nic is also increasingly less interested in the carpool kids and instead spends most of his free time with a group of boys with buzzed hair who skateboard, talk about, but do nothing about, girls, and listen to music: Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Primus, and Jimi Hendrix. As always, Nic has eclectic and hip—and often fickle—taste. He does not seem to tire of some discoveries—Björk, Tom Waits, Bowie—but otherwise he is into the edgiest music and then grows bored with it. By the time a band, from Weezer to Blind Melon to Offspring to Green Day, has a hit record, he has discarded it in favor of the retro, the obscure, the ultracontemporary, or the plain bizarre, a list that includes Coltrane, polka collections, the soundtrack from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, John Zorn, M. C. Solar, Jacques Brel, or, these days, samba, to which he cha-chas through the living room. He discovers Pearl Jam, a song called "Jeremy," about a teenage boy in Texas who shot himself in front of his English class. Jeremy's teacher asked him to go to the office to get a late slip. He returned and told her, "Miss, this is what I actually went for," before turning the gun on himself. But most of all Nic listens to Nirvana. The music blasts like mortar fire from his room.

  I feel stupid and contagious

  Here we are now entertain us

  In early May, I pick Nic up after school one day to drive him to a dinner at Nancy and Don's. When he climbs i
nto the car I smell cigarette smoke. At first, he denies that he has smoked. He says that he was hanging out with some kids who were smoking. When I press him, however, he admits that he had a few puffs with a group of boys who were smoking behind the gymnasium. I lecture him and he promises not to do it again.

  The next Friday after school, he and a friend, with whom Nic is spending the night, are tossing a football in the garden in Inverness. I am packing an overnight bag for him and look for a sweater in his backpack. I do not find the sweater, but instead discover a small bag of marijuana.

  4

  When I was a young child, my family lived near Walden Pond, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Our home was next to a farm with apple trees, corn and tomatoes, and a row of stacked beehives. My father was a chemical engineer. He watched a television commercial that said to take your sinuses to Arizona. He had hay fever, so he did. He secured a job at a semiconductor plant in Phoenix. We drove west in our pea-green Studebaker, staying overnight along the way at Motel 6s and eating at Denny's and Sambo's.

  We settled in Scottsdale, living in a motel until our tract house was built. My father's new job at Motorola was to grow, slice, and etch silicon wafers for transistors and microprocessors. My mother wrote a column about our school and neighborhood—science fair winners and Little League results—for the Scottsdale Daily Progress.

  My friends and I often reminisce about our childhoods, when things were different. It was a far more innocent world and a safer one. My sister, brother, and I, along with the rest of the kids on our block, played on the street until twilight, when our mothers called us in for dinner. We played ring and run, tag, and boys chase the girls. TV dinners—fried chicken, mashed potatoes with a pat of butter, apple cobbler, each isolated in its own compartment—set on folding trays, we watched Bonanza, Wonderful World of Disney, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We were Cub Scouts and Brownies. We had barbecues, built go-carts, made cakes in my sister's EasyBake Oven, and rode inner tubes down the Salt and Verde rivers.