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

by David Sheff

"Hey, Dad," Nic says on the phone after Karen and I are back in California, "it's me, Nic."

  He is calling from his dorm. As he speaks, I imagine him wearing a worn-out T-shirt, his pants sagging and dirty, a black belt with metal studs holding them onto his hips, Converse sneakers, and his long curling hair pushed back out of his eyes. He seems excited about his school. Hopeful this time, hopeful as before, I continue my academic fantasy after we hang up, see him on campus, walking to his classes with his backpack on. I can hear his voice speaking out in discussions about dialectical imperialism, Nietzsche, Kant, and Proust.

  A month later, he sounds OK, but I detect his nervous breathing. Before he hangs up, I hear him sigh. I know that this is not easy. Nic is giving it the old college try.

  Besides classes, he has regular sessions with a drug and alcohol counselor recommended by the school. As we had agreed, he attends AA meetings and finds a sponsor, a grad student at the University of Massachusetts who has a group of students over to his house every Sunday morning for muffins, coffee, and a meeting.

  He reports in regularly and the weight on my chest begins to lift. As things get back to seminormal, he tells me more about his teachers. He speaks about new friends. He reports on the AA and NA meetings he attends throughout the week.

  A month later, Nic suddenly stops returning my phone calls. I assume he has relapsed. In spite of his protestations, and maybe (though I'm not sure) his good intentions, and in spite of the room in the substance-free dorm—which was not, Nic claimed with annoyance, substance free (he reported that the sounds of late Friday and Saturday nights included carousing, falling, stumbling, and throwing up)—Nic hadn't stood much of a chance.

  It was a gamble sending him to college so soon after rehab, but everyone, including his counselors at St. Helena, cheered the plan, because he was so convincingly devoted to it.

  I ask a friend, who is visiting Amherst, to check on him. He finds Nic holed up in his dorm room, obviously high.

  I prepare to follow through on my threat and withdraw my support, but first I call to discuss it with the Hampshire health counselor. I imagine her at her desk, the ticking heater, snowdrifts outside the window.

  I inform her of Nic's relapse, and when I do, she surprises me. She advises patience, saying that often "relapse is part of recovery."

  It is a counterintuitive concept. It's like saying that a plane crash is good training for a pilot. At Ohlhoff Recovery and at St. Helena, I heard that it can be more difficult for addicts to recover from subsequent relapses because of the progressive nature of the disease. However, it can and often does take time and mistakes for a person to understand the pernicious power of addiction and, moreover, to understand how easy it is to relapse. I may have heard it, but I have not digested the terrible nature of the illness, including its permanence. But I have also not fully comprehended that failure, even serial failure, may lead to success.

  "While it's true that among heavy users, some will go through treatment once and remain clean indefinitely, most will cycle through repeatedly, just as some smokers need multiple tries to kick cigarettes or dieters try over and over to slim down," said Dr. Rawson. "Treatment catches up with you," UCLA's Douglas Anglin, codirector of the UCLA Drug Abuse Research Center, told Peggy Ornstein when she interviewed him for a New York Times Magazine article about rehab. "For heroin users with a five-year history of addiction, it may take ten or fifteen years to help them come out of it, but if you start when they're twenty-five, by the time they're forty they're pretty much rehabbed. If you don't, most of them burn out by forty."

  This is not comforting. However, if treatment is conceived of as an ongoing process rather than as a cure, a different, more optimistic—and far more realistic—notion of success emerges. According to the National Treatment Improvement Evaluation Study, although addicts may relapse, a year after treatment their drug use decreases by 50 percent and their illegal activity drops as much as 80 percent. They are also less likely than before to engage in high-risk sexual behavior or to require emergency room care. Other studies have shown that they are less likely to be on welfare and their overall mental health improves.

  Every relapse is potentially lethal, though. It is an unsatisfying —and terrifying—fact that, yes, an addict may, even after relapse, get and stay sober, if he doesn't die.

  Prodded by my friend, Nic calls. He admits that he "fucked up," and promises that he will stop using.

  "Nic..." I hear the tone in my voice, that solemn, castigating, disappointed father tone, and I feel him turn instantly defensive.

  "Don't say it, I know," he says. "I had to go through it—to learn."

  Waiting is difficult, particularly a coast away, but I know that it will be a significant step if he can pull himself out of a relapse without my dragging him into rehab.

  Often relapse is part of recovery. I say it again and again, roll it around in my brain, and wait.

  He keeps in close touch and comes home for winter break. It is an easy visit. He seems to be doing much, much better. He slipped, that's all. Often relapse is part of recovery. He bleaches his hair with Clorox, burning his scalp in the process, but he seems all right.

  Nic returns to Hampshire for spring semester and, calling home one evening, tells me how excited he is about a writing class taught by a noted author and admired teacher. "It's virtually impossible for freshmen and sophomores to get into the class, but I'm going to try," he says. "I wrote a story—stayed up writing last night—and submitted it." The professor will post a list of accepted students on his office door on Friday.

  Late Friday afternoon, Nic calls, elated that his name was on the typed-out list, though his was the only one with an asterisk, corresponding to a note at the bottom of the page. The footnote read: "Come see me."

  Nic immediately went to the teacher's office. He was nervous—"all butterflies"—when he sat down across from the teacher, who asked, without small talk, if Nic was an addict. He suspected it because of the subject of Nic's submission. He had written fictionalized accounts of some of the memorable characters he met at Ohlhoff Recovery and St. Helena Hospital.

  Nic said yes, he was an addict in recovery.

  "Here's the thing," the teacher said. "If you stay sober, I'll work with you and help make you a better writer. If you don't, you're out. It's up to you." On Monday Nic shows up, shakes the teacher's hand.

  From his telephone accounts, it seems as if Nic is thoroughly engaged in this and other courses. He seems stable, attending regular twelve-step meetings and working with the sponsor. It sounds as if he is still thriving in his classes, and he is newly in love with a girl who drives him to meetings.

  I visit Boston in late winter. Nic and Julia, his girlfriend, come in from Amherst to meet me for dinner. It's a snowy night when they arrive at my hotel in Cambridge, bundled up in heavy coats and scarves.

  We walk through Harvard Square to find a sushi bar. They have their arms tightly wrapped around each other, the two of them intertwined, walking in step. The three of us have dinner and then we walk more. They talk with excitement about books—Hegel, Marx, Thomas Mann—politics and movies. Nic trounces us in the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game, though Julia nearly stumps him with, of all people, Hulk Hogan. It takes him five of the six degrees.

  "OK," says Nic, warming to the challenge. "He was in Rocky IV with Sylvester Stallone, who was in Cop Land with Ray Liotta, who was in Narc with Jason Patric, who was in Lost Boys with Kiefer Sutherland." Nic has on a satisfied smile. "And Kiefer Sutherland was in Flatliners with Kevin Bacon."

  I have traveled to Boston with a close friend of our family's, a subject of a book I am writing, who lives and works in Shanghai. The three of us meet him for coffee. Nic and Julia impress my friend, and before the couple heads back to Amherst, he asks if they're interested in spending the summer in China. He can help set them up with a job teaching English and they can do volunteer work, possibly at a preschool. He even has a place for them to stay. They greet the idea w
ith enthusiasm and gratitude. Flying home, I feel elated. Nic is moving on with his life. He has put his drug problem behind him.

  The school year winds down and the China trip is being planned. After working for six weeks in Shanghai, the pair will travel to Yunnan and Tibet. Beforehand, Nic will come home in late May, when he will work to make some money for the trip. Then Julia will arrive and together they'll leave for China. Nic seems thrilled with all this and about coming home—most of all about seeing Jasper and Daisy. They are overjoyed, too. His homecoming is marked by some trepidation, but also promise, which is why it is so devastating when Nic confesses the truth: that he has been using the entire time he's been home, using throughout the entire semester.

  He leaves, slamming the door behind him. I am stunned. No, I think. No, no, no. When, after school, Jasper and Daisy burst in and can't find their brother, they ask, "Where's Nic?"

  "I don't know," I say. I cannot stop my tears.

  With Nic gone, I sink into a wretched and sickeningly familiar malaise, alternating with a debilitating panic—every minute feeling his absence.

  In the morning, the cross-sticks below the skylight cast striped bars along the countertops. I sit down on a window seat in the living room, reading and rereading a lead paragraph of an article, when Jasper, with scruffy bedhead, comes into the living room holding a satin box, in which he keeps his savings of eight dollars. He looks perplexed. "I think Nic took my money," he says.

  I look at Jas, his strong growing body and uncomprehending eyes, and hold out my arms so he can climb onto my lap. How do you explain to an eight-year-old when his beloved big brother steals from him?

  PART IV

  If only

  Drunkenness—that fierce rage for the slow, sure poison, that oversteps every other consideration; that casts aside wife, children, friends, happiness, and station; and hurries its victims madly on to degradation and death.

  —CHARLES DICKENS, Sketches by Boz

  it's better now, death is closer,

  I no longer have to look for it,

  no longer have to challenge

  it, taunt it, play with it.

  it's right here with me

  like a pet cat or a wall calendar

  —CHARLES BUKOWSKI,

  "thoughts on being 71"

  15

  On a Wednesday night in late May, Karen and I hire a babysitter. We are going out. Another date devoted to Nic's addiction.

  We reluctantly drive up to Novato, a rural town on the northern edge of Marin, to an Al-Anon meeting. These nightly gatherings are the last place I ever expected to find myself. Like AA meetings, they fill church basements and libraries and community centers throughout the country. I am not a joiner. When I can, I avoid meetings at which attendees are implored to share their feelings. And yet I am here.

  I kept our family's problem a secret for a long time. It wasn't that I was ashamed. I wanted to protect Nic—to preserve our friends' and others' good impressions of him. But I have learned that the AA adage is true: you're as sick as your secrets. I have learned how much it helps to talk about my son's addiction and reflect on it and hear and read others' stories. Most counselors in the sessions that Karen and I attended recommended Al-Anon. Still, it has taken us a while to go.

  The meeting is held in a dingy room, with a dozen people sitting in plastic chairs set in a circle. Another circle. They serve Folgers coffee and powdered sugar doughnuts. Overhead, neon tubes flicker and hiss, and a wobbly fan ticks in the corner. The meeting is called to order. Clichés, some more annoying than others, spill forth. Al-Anon, like AA, seems to depend on them. They say: "Let go and let God." And those three Cs that help even if I cannot always believe them: "You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you can't cure it." No matter what they say, part of me believes that it is my fault. It was easy for me to stop taking drugs, but Nic could not stop. Maybe I started him off by giving him, along with my hypocritical warnings about drugs, tacit permission to use them. Now I look back in horror on the time I smoked with him. Addicts want to blame someone, and many have plenty of people ready to take the blame. Whatever I did was done naively and stupidly and because of my immaturity, but it doesn't matter. I blame myself. People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. "You didn't cause it." I do not believe it.

  My first impulse in the meeting is condescension. I look around with something bordering on loathing and think, What am I doing with these women in tinted hair and pantsuits and large-bellied men in button-up short-sleeved shirts and chinos? By the time I leave, however, I feel an affinity with everyone here—the parents and children and husbands and wives and lovers and brothers and sisters of the drug-addicted. My heart breaks for them.

  I am one of them.

  I have no intention of speaking, but then I do. "My son is gone," I say. "I don't know where he is." Tears. I can't get out another word. I am mortified by my public display, but I am also hugely relieved.

  As the meeting winds down, they repeat the Serenity Prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  Please please please grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

  I repeat it silently.

  Then they chant, "Keep coming back."

  I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood. There is better coffee. From Peet's. There is, finally, an amusing story. A man in a peach windbreaker says that to keep his medications—the Zoloft, beta-blockers, high-blood-pressure pills, sleeping pills, Viagra—out of his son's hands, he consolidated them into a single hidden bottle. The others in the room nod appreciatively: we know about hiding medications (and liquor) from our relatives.

  The man says that one day he had to rush out the door before a presentation and popped a beta-blocker from the bottle. At least, he had planned to take a beta-blocker. Instead, he swallowed a Viagra tablet. It kicked in just as he was about to stand up in front of a group to speak. There was no podium to hide behind.

  The mirth evaporates when an extremely shy woman, who mentions her "practice," so maybe she is a doctor or a lawyer, reveals in a fractured voice that she tried to kill herself a few days ago. She has pale, almost green, skin, no makeup, bristly hair, and eyes haunted by sleeplessness. She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. She then walked from her car out onto the bridge. "The wind cut into me, tears streamed down my face, and I looked down at the water," she said. "I would have had to climb up over a fence, and there was netting on the other side. I would have had to manage to climb over it, too. I decided it would be easier to get a gun. My father has one. He keeps it locked in a drawer near his bed at my parents' home. I have a key. To the house and the drawer. A gun would be quicker. Not so cold."

  She walked back along the bridge to where she left her car, but couldn't immediately find it. She thought she must have forgotten where she had parked. She looked around the lot, but her car was gone. She looked up at a posted sign. She had parked in a no-parking zone. The car had been towed.

  "It was so sick, I started laughing," she says. "I laughed and cried at the same time. That's when it struck me that I can't take my life as long as I can still laugh."

  Tears stream down her cheeks, and the rest of us cry along with her.

  I am back in Novato for another meeting in the church. I recognize many of the people here now. We hug one another. Elsewhere, everyone asks how I'm doing. Here, they know.

  A mother rocks lightly as she speaks. I stare at the white tiled floor, sitting hunched in the gray metal chair with my hands folded on my lap. The woman, in a plain business suit, sips coffee from a paper cup. Her long hair is plaited, and she wears a touch of peach rouge and black eyeliner. In a shaky voice, she tells us that her daughter is in jail for up to two ye
ars after a drug bust. The woman contracts, gets smaller in her chair. She bursts into tears.

  Everywhere I go now there are tears.

  Tears everywhere.

  She says: "I'm happy. I know where she is. I know she's alive. Last year we were so excited that she was enrolled at Harvard. Now I'm relieved that she's in jail."

  A white-haired mother jumps in to say that she knows how the other woman feels. "Each day I thank God that my daughter is in jail," she says. "I express my gratitude to God. She was sentenced six months ago for using and dealing drugs and for prostitution." She catches her breath and says to herself as much as to the group, "Where she is safer."

  I think: So this is where we get. Not all of us, of course. But some of us come to a place where the good news is that our children are in jail.

  I can't control it, and I can't cure it, and yet I continue to think there must be something I can do. "One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing on and on," wrote Tolstoy.

  I don't hear from Nic, and each hour and each day and each week is quiet torture like a physical pain. Much of the time I feel as if I am on fire. It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people. The people in the Al-Anon meetings are damaged, some of them visibly but all of them psychically. At the same time, they also are some of the most open and alive and giving people I have ever met.

  As they counsel in Al-Anon, I try to "detach"—to let go and let God. How does any parent let go? I can't. I don't know how.

  How could I have failed to know that Nic was using throughout these past months, even when he was in our home? I have been so traumatized by his addiction that the surreal and the real have become one and the same. I can't distinguish the normal from the outrageous anymore. I am so good at rationalizing and denying that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Or maybe it's only that, with practice, addicts become flawlessly gifted liars, and this coincides with parents' increasing susceptibility to their lies. I believed Nic because I wanted to believe him—I was desperate to believe him.