Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  There was no response, of course, which only made Beau’s absence more acute. Sometimes I woke in a panic because the nightmare my brother worried so much about had come true: nobody had responded “okay,” and now Beau really, truly, undeniably wasn’t there.

  So I’d chant the Hail Mary, like a mantra, like a hymn. Sometimes I went on for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t fall asleep, and I couldn’t stop repeating it. If I did, the pain of Beau’s distance came flooding back.

  Hail Mary, full of grace,

  The Lord is with thee…

  * * *

  One day, out of the blue, three or four weeks into this madness, my mother called.

  She said that she was having a family dinner at the house, that I should come, even stay in Delaware for a few days. It would be great; we hadn’t had everyone together in ages. I was in lousy shape but it sounded appealing. I pulled out of a motel parking lot, said goodbye to all that, and headed to Wilmington.

  I believe I arrived on a Friday night. I walked into the house, bright and homey as always, and immediately saw my three daughters. I knew then that something was up: Naomi had come in from New York, where she was in law school at Columbia; Finnegan came in from Philadelphia, where she was at Penn; and Maisy, then a high school senior, had come over from Kathleen’s house, in Washington. I then saw my mom and dad, smiling awkwardly, looking pained.

  A moment later, I spotted two counselors from a rehab center that I’d once gone to in Pennsylvania. That was it.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  My dad suddenly looked terrified.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” he cried out. “I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”

  My flat reply:

  “Not fucking this.”

  It was awful.

  I was awful.

  It devolved from there into a charged, agonized debacle. I refused to sit down with the counselors, refused to sit with my dad. Everybody was crying, which only made me angrier.

  “Don’t ever ambush me like this again,” I told my dad, and bolted out of the house.

  He chased me down the driveway. He grabbed me, swung me around, and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time. Everybody was outside now. When I tried to get in my car, one of my girls took the keys and screamed, “Dad, you can’t go!” I shouted back at her, “You’re not doing this!” I lashed out at my mother for deceiving me. I lashed out at I don’t know who else. It was a raw, appalling experience for all of them.

  To end it, I agreed to check into a rehab center, though not the one that the two counselors there had come from. I made up some excuse. It was nonsense; I always had a million excuses. Dad pleaded with me, “Anything. Please!” I could be suitably functional in high-pressure situations like that. I finally said I would go to another center nearby, in Maryland. Somebody immediately called to make arrangements.

  Hallie picked me up late that night and drove me the thirty miles to the center. We were done, but I guess we had that much left. We argued the whole way until we fell silent. When we got to the rehab center, I had her drop me off at the front gate. I walked through the lobby doors and, as soon as I saw her drive off, called an Uber. I told the staff there that I’d return in the morning, then caught my ride and checked into a hotel in Beltsville, Maryland, near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

  For the next two days, while everybody who’d been at my parents’ house thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag.

  I then boarded a plane for California and ran and ran and ran.

  Until I met Melissa.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN SAVED

  By the time my plane touched down in Los Angeles in March 2019, I had no plan beyond the moment-to-moment demands of the crack pipe.

  I was committed to one thing: vanishing for good. That was my lone, next-level goal. No matter how low I’d been before, a voice deep inside had always fought to pull me out of my nosedive. It’s why I’d allowed my uncle Jimmy to haul me from a West Hollywood hotel room months earlier and escort me to a rehab center. That turned out to be an unsuccessful three-week stab at sobriety, but it still left me with a glimmer of hope and striving to climb out of my ditch. It’s why I sought out something as fraught and audacious as ketamine therapy when I drove up to cold, gray Massachusetts that winter, as botched and pathetic as the attempt turned out to be.

  I would take one step forward and ten steps back—but I was still taking steps. I didn’t want to drown in addiction’s quicksand. I did not want those attempts to fail.

  I just couldn’t make them work.

  I longed for a connection with someone outside of addiction’s airless bubble—someone with whom I had no past, no baggage, and to whom I owed neither explanations nor apologies. I wanted to have conversations with someone who wasn’t a dealer or gangbanger or bouncer or stripper. Three years earlier, even as I’d craved those hotel mini-bottles of vodka in Amman, I could still sit across from the king of Jordan and discuss the plight of Syrian refugees, Middle East dynamics, and the existential obligations of being a great man’s son. I thought then that maybe that was my addiction’s low point—I thought that was the sound of me hitting bottom.

  Back then, I still hoped to paint again, still hoped my journal entries could someday turn into a book, still dreamed of hugging my daughters tight every day. If I could find some new treatment, some new approach, some new… lifeline, I thought I could still claw my way back out.

  During the nearly four years of active addiction that preceded this trip to California, which included a half dozen rehab attempts, that’s what I told myself after each failure. As bad as it got, I believed what Beau had believed: good or bad, it was all part of the process.

  Stepping off the plane this time at LAX, however, it was clear that all of the options I once clung to were now pipe dreams. I consciously stopped even pretending I would get better. I dove headfirst into the void.

  It’s hard to describe just how paralyzed and hopeless you can become in your addiction, how you can reach depths you never thought possible, and then drop even further—in this case, uncomprehendingly further. This period felt more dangerous, more fatally alluring, than any time before. I surrendered completely to my grimmest impulses. I was like someone picking out a firearm in a pawn shop, fully aware I was choosing a certain kind of death.

  Disappearing was the only thing that gave me solace. It meant an end to pain. It meant I didn’t need to think about how much I was disappointing my brother, even though I knew Beau would never think of it that way. I quit writing him letters, feeling as if I didn’t have anything authentic to communicate to him anymore. Disappearing meant freedom from feeling. Thinking that you have something to live for obligates you to muster the courage and energy to fight.

  I didn’t want to fight.

  I finally silenced the dialogue that I’d kept up inside my head about getting clean and rebuilding my life. It was ridiculously easy: I just drowned it out with more and more drugs. Now I never thought, as I always had at some point in the midst of my previous binges, I’m just going to do this until… I no longer said until. I no longer finished the sentence. I gave up on everything. I stopped trying to fool others into thinking I was okay. I stopped trying to fool myself.

  I was done with finding my way back into the world I had known my whole life. I was done trying to figure out how to return to a law firm. Done with the world of politics, of figuring out how to go out on the campaign trail with Dad, if it came to that, as I would have in any other election year. Done coming up with excuses for why I lived where I was living and why I did what I was doing.

  I was a crack addict and that was that.

  Fuck it.

  * * *

  My first call off the plane was to a drug connection.

  I took an Uber to my car, which I’d stored in the garage of someone who managed a place I had stayed at. (S
ide note: this being an L.A. friend at that time, he had tried to sell the car.) I went straight from there to pick up some crack.

  The next month and a half is a drug-befuddled blur. That’s not a dodge or a lapse in memory. Everything that followed my return to L.A. was a genuine, dictionary-definition blur of complete and utter debauchery. I was doing nothing but drinking and drugging.

  I spent the first couple of weeks at an Airbnb in Malibu. It was around then that Rudy Giuliani began his ad hominem attacks against me, in anticipation of my father’s run for president. They centered on my work for Burisma, with dubious details collected from his “interviews”—that is, drunken lunches and dinners—with former Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, both of whom have been subjects of corruption accusations.

  The smears came out of the blue, without warning. No one ever called to say, “Get ready for this, Hunter.” The first time I became aware of it was while browsing the Apple News feed on my iPhone.

  I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. I watched a video in which Giuliani looked beyond unhinged. He appeared to be drunk but almost intentionally so, as if it were part of a choreography designed to better rile his boss’s appreciative base. His accusations and insinuations were so outlandish, so outside of any reality, that it actually struck me that he was doing a disservice to himself. I couldn’t see how any of it would become an issue, even after Trump started weighing in.

  Breitbart and the rest of the right-wing crowd swiftly jumped on board and trotted out their familiar suite of distortions. They pounded me not only for my connection to Burisma but also for my work as a lobbyist and my first job out of law school, in Delaware. They questioned how I got fast-tracked in MBNA’s executive management program, failing to mention I was a Yale Law grad with my pick of opportunities.

  Those attacks prompted more mainstream news outlets to run stories that countered the distortions with actual reporting. Yet in doing so, in the name of objective journalism, each story repeated the attacks made against me. It became a predictable cycle in a media ecosystem that manages to spread falsehoods even as it debunks them. Trump and Giuliani understand that system as only mad scientists can.

  It drove me deeper into my hole, made me more certain there wasn’t a way back. I quit responding to the constant calls from Dad and my girls, picking up just often enough to let them know I was alive and seeking help, which in turn gave me cover to burrow back into oblivion.

  It was around this time that Adam Entous, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the New Yorker magazine, emailed me an interview request for a story he was writing about Burisma and how my work there squared with Dad’s anticorruption actions in Ukraine. He said he simply wanted to get to the bottom of the allegations.

  I had been obsessed with the magazine when I was younger and had other aspirations. I devoured every issue—the poetry, the fiction, all of it. I thought the pinnacle for a writer was to be published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, or Poetry magazine. It wasn’t snobbery. It was respect. That’s why I called Adam back, even though I didn’t know him personally. We soon began to talk by phone almost every night for the next several weeks.

  What started out as conversations about my business dealings, which we covered extensively, soon turned into a personal tell-all. From Adam’s perspective, the story was an attempt to understand my role with a Ukrainian energy company. For me, it was an opportunity not only to give my side of that story but to shout to the world, “Here I am!”—an emphatic counterweight to “Where’s Hunter?” I decided I wasn’t going to hide who I was anymore. You want to know about my life? Here are the gory details.

  Fuck it.

  So I talked. And talked. Each night, wherever I happened to be staying, I propped my cell on a desk or table in front of me or positioned it on my chest while I lay in a hotel bed, set it to speaker, and answered any question Adam asked from his home office in Washington, where he would call from after helping put his kids to bed.

  I didn’t tell him I was actively smoking crack at the time. Shortly after the interview sessions began, the noise from Giuliani died down for a bit and I moved to the Petit Ermitage, a discreet, ivy-cloaked boutique hotel tucked away on a quiet block between the raucousness of Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards in West Hollywood. I’d driven past it one day on my way somewhere else, was struck by its mysterious, half-hidden charm, and checked in.

  I didn’t notify my dad or his campaign about the New Yorker story. I didn’t want input from the communications team. They were only weeks away from publicly announcing, via a video released on the morning of April 25, that Joe Biden was running for president in 2020—joining the battle, as my dad put it, for “the soul of the nation.” I knew damn well how they would react to my story, which would be published in early July, just after the primary’s first debate: they’d flip out and do everything they could to quash it.

  I knew what the story would really do: inoculate everybody else from my personal failings. I wanted to make it so there couldn’t be anything held over my dad’s head. There would be no opposition press coming to the campaign saying, “We’re about to run a story on Hunter being a crack addict,” making everybody scramble to figure out what to do next.

  I was taking that problem off the table. Besides, nobody was going to vote or not vote for my dad because his son is a crack addict. Hell, even Trump knew that.

  I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew that our family was going to be attacked, and our lives turned upside down, no matter what. If political enemies didn’t come after me, they’d mug somebody else in the family. The only question my dad had to consider in deciding whether or not to run for president was the same one he dealt with in 2016: Is it worth it?

  He knows everyone in our family believes it’s worth it. Nobody said to him, “Joe, please don’t do this; they’re going to murder me.” It’s not in our vocabulary, not how we size up any political landscape. He knew I was in the midst of a personal slide. Yet the confidence my father has in me is evidenced by the fact that he still ran.

  What I didn’t count on when I agreed to talk for the New Yorker story, at least at first, was how cathartic the experience would be. The conversations became like nightly therapy sessions. I talked to Adam about Beau and Dad and how much they meant to me, about my personal and professional choices, about my alcoholism and drug addiction. I opened up about all of it with an honesty I hadn’t talked with to anyone else except a therapist, a fellow addict in recovery, or my family. I told him the truth about how I got to where I was.

  Subconsciously, the process kept me tethered to the only constant sources of love since the day I was born: my brother and my dad. I didn’t realize it at the time, but explaining those relationships was the one thing that kept my eyes open wide enough to recognize salvation when it eventually presented itself: I honestly believe I would not have been capable of seeing Melissa for what she would become to me if I hadn’t explored my most meaningful relationships during those interviews. It was a little miracle.

  The other twenty-two hours of my day, however, were spent doing every miserable thing I could to bury it all in a deluge of crack and booze. As personal as it was, what made coming clean to the New Yorker a relatively easy exercise was the fact that I thought I was doing it for the last time. I wasn’t clearing a path for reentry into the mainstream. I believed the story would expedite my fade-out—that after exposing myself for who I really was, without embarrassment or regret, I would no longer be welcome back in the world I’d left behind. It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, “This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!”

  I picked up where I left off during my last rampage through L.A., except now I was far less concerned with how I interacted with the “normal” world. By this point, that world was largely confined to the hotel management and staff at the Petit Ermitage. The usual parade of dealers and their hangers-on streamed in and out of my room at all hours, without any at
tempt by me or them to be the least bit prudent. We stuck out like sore thumbs; even in L.A., where everyone poses like a tough guy, I had guests visit at 4 a.m. who looked like they’d just stepped out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Sometimes I stashed my drug paraphernalia when a housekeeper came by; sometimes I didn’t. My belongings were strewn everywhere, along with pipes and baggies and baking soda, which I used whenever I cooked my own.

  My $300-a-night room looked like somebody set off a bomb in a crack house.

  As I always did, I rented the room a day at a time, unwilling or incapable of planning any further ahead than that. I’d call the front desk each morning to ask for another night’s extension. The routine was disrupted about two weeks into my stay when Curtis came by the rooftop pool one night for drinks. He got loaded and almost wound up in a fight with a big, swaggering drunk who earlier had been acting like a complete asshole—he’d jumped a line to the hotel’s unisex bathroom.

  Later that night, when Curtis and I stepped into the hotel’s elevator to leave the fourth-floor pool area, the jackass he’d almost scuffled with earlier got on board, too. Curtis practically bored a hole through the dude with his most menacing glare—which, believe me, is pretty damn menacing. We all left the elevator without incident, but the guy later told security Curtis had threatened him during the ride by giving him a peek at his gun.

  A hotel manager called my room the next morning. He said someone had reported that a guest of mine had threatened to kill him. I explained that the whole thing was blown out of proportion and had been resolved. When I made my usual call to the front desk a little later to re-up for another night, however, I was told my room had been booked in advance for the next week and there was nothing else available.