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

by David Sheff

  "What are you doing?"

  "He's in the slime pit. Would you tickle my knee?"

  I reach back and dig my fingers into the sides of his knee, which causes hysterics.

  "OK, OK, stop. I just wanted to remember what it feels like when you're tickled."

  Changing the subject, Nic asks if he can take Klingon instead of Spanish in school.

  "Why Klingon?"

  "So I won't have to read the subtitles in Star Trek movies."

  When I park in front of the school, there are still a few minutes to go before the cowbell will be rung. My greatest accomplishment of any day is getting him to school on time, but today something is wrong. Where are the other cars, the busy crowd of arriving children and the teacher who greets them? It dawns on me. It is Saturday.

  ***

  I do not subscribe to the concept of karma, but I have come to believe in instant karma, as it was defined by John Lennon in his song of that name. It means, in essence, that we reap what we sow in this lifetime—and explains my comeuppance when my girlfriend does to me what I did to my wife. (It actually isn't quite as reprehensible; when she runs off to South America, it is with a relative stranger.) Of course I am distraught, and Nic has to contend with not only my despair, but, upon my recovery after many pathetic months, my subsequent girlfriends, gifted at some things but not substitute motherhood. It is like The Courtship of Eddie's Father, but Eddie never went in for breakfast to encounter a lady in a kimono eating his Lucky Charms.

  "Who are you?" Nic asks. He shambles into the kitchen, a jarringly lit room with a black-and-white-checked linoleum floor. He's wearing his pajamas and Oscar the Grouch slippers. The object of the question is a woman with a volcano of dreadlocked hair. An artist, her recent exhibition included hand-tinted photocopies of intimate parts of her body.

  The woman introduces herself and says, "I know who you are. You're Nic. I've heard a lot about you."

  "I haven't heard about you," Nic responds.

  One evening, Nic and I have dinner at a Chestnut Street Italian restaurant with another woman, this one with blond curls and bottle-green eyes. Our dates so far have included Frisbee with Nic on the Marina green and, one Sunday, a San Francisco Giants game, where Nic snagged a foul ball. Back at the flat after dinner, the three of us watch The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. She flips through magazines in the living room while I read to Nic in his bedroom until he falls asleep.

  Usually, I am careful to lock the door to my bedroom, but this time I forget. In the morning, Nic crawls into my bed. When he notices the woman, who awakens, meeting his eyes, he asks, "What are you doing here?"

  She responds brilliantly. "I spent the night."

  "Oh," Nic says.

  "Like a sleepover."

  "Oh," Nic says again.

  I send Nic to his room to get dressed.

  Later I try to explain it to him, but I know I have made a ghastly mistake.

  It doesn't take much longer for me to realize that my bachelor-father lifestyle probably isn't great for Nic, and so I take a break from dating. Determined to stop repeating the embarrassing and enormously painful mistakes that led to my divorce and other failed relationships, I enter a period of singlehood, self-reflection, and therapy.

  Our lives are quieter.

  On weekends, we take walks around the Embarcadero and up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower; ride the cable car to Chinatown for dim sum and firecrackers; with our neighbors, Nic's unofficial godfathers, go to movies at the Castro Theatre, where an organist plays "Whistle While You Work" and "San Francisco" on a gilded Wurlitzer before the shows. We ride BART to Berkeley and walk down Telegraph Avenue, watching out for such regulars as the woman with dozens of slices of toast pinned onto her clothing and the Sensitive Naked Man who nonchalantly strolls by.

  On weekday evenings, after Nic does his homework, we play games. We often cook together. And read. Nic loves books: A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl, The Outsiders, The Hobbit. One night, on the occasion of one of Nic's many unbirthday parties—these are popular after we read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass—we set the table formally, placing stuffed animals at each setting. We dine with the stuffed animals, sitting like sultans on pillows.

  One summer evening in 1989, I am at a friend's dinner party, seated opposite a woman from Manhattan who is visiting her parents in Marin County. Karen, with dark brown hair and wearing a plain black dress, is a painter. She also writes and illustrates children's books. Karen says she is flying back to New York tomorrow, and I mention that I am going there next week to conduct an interview. There is awkward silence. My friend sitting near me hands me a slip of paper and a pen, whispering in my ear, "Get her phone number."

  I do.

  The next day I call her at her parents' house. I hear her tell her mother to say that she isn't home, but her mother ignores her, handing over the telephone.

  Yes, she says, she will meet me when I come to New York.

  Our first cautious date is at a friend's party on the Upper East Side. The Fine Young Cannibals play on the music system, waiters circulate with trays of Champagne and canapés, and then, though it is a sweltering night, I walk her the length of Manhattan to her downtown loft. It takes a couple hours, during which time we do not stop talking. Whenever we come upon an all-night grocery, we get Popsicles. It's dawn when we say good night at her front door.

  Karen and I keep in touch by telephone and letters. We see each other when she comes out to visit her parents and when I travel to New York on business. After six or so months, during one of her trips to San Francisco, I introduce Karen to Nic. She shows him her art books and they spend hours drawing cartoons. They work for days on long strips of butcher paper, creating an elaborately decorated scene of a park populated by Mr. Grouch, a rotund man sitting on a bench eating a tuna-fish sandwich; skinny Mr. Noodle and his noodle baby; Mr. Fake Hair; and Mr. and Mrs. No Body. (They have no bodies.)

  After living on the fifth floor of a walk-up in the shadow of the World Trade Center for six years, Karen moves in with us in San Francisco. Maybe Nic is just trying to ingratiate himself with this new force in his life, now that it is clear that she's sticking around, but he writes a report about her for school, in which he explains, "She lived in a big loft on top of a restaurant called Ham Heaven. Her loft was a cool place and you could light firecrackers on the roof ... She decided to come back to San Francisco to be with her new family, which is my dad and me and her."

  Soon after, we rent a place across the bridge in Sausalito so we can have a backyard. Our house is reputed to be one of the oldest in town. A rickety, leaky Victorian, it is slightly warmer inside than out, but not much. To compensate, fires roar in the fireplace and at night we pile on heavy quilts. Bundled up in down jackets, the three of us go tide-pooling along the seashore and ride the ferry across the bay, past Alcatraz Island, to San Francisco. We carpool with another family to Nic's school in the city. Nic, who is now a fourth grader, plays on the local Little League team. Karen and I cheer him on. In his green Braves baseball jersey and ball cap, he is a focused and poised second baseman. The other boys joke around, but Nic is solemn. His coach tells us that Nic is a leader; the other children look to him for guidance.

  Parents often gush about their children, but ask people who know Nic and they will describe his humor, creativity, and infectious joie de vivre. Nic is often the unwitting center of attention, whether in school plays or at dinner parties. One day a casting director comes to his school and watches the children on the playground and then interviews some of them. In the evening, she calls our house to ask if I will consider allowing Nic to be in a television commercial. I discuss it with him and Nic says it sounds fun, so I agree. He gets to spend ten dollars, but with the rest of the hundred-dollar fee, we open a college account in his name.

  The commercial, for a car company, opens with a group of children sitting in a semicircle on the floor of a kindergarten classroom. Their teacher, seated in a child's chair, reads to
them and then closes the book, setting it on her lap.

  "So, class," she says, "what does the Dick and Jane story mean to you?"

  A little girl with plaited hair and large blue eyes says, "The house is the mother."

  After a series of similar comments, a serious, dark-haired boy asks, "But what about Spot?"

  Nic raises his hand and the teacher calls on him.

  "Nicolas?"

  "Spot's the id, the animal force, searching for release."

  A girl with big brown eyes, her hair in a bouncy ponytail, rolls her eyes and shrugs. "Leave it to Nicolas to invoke Freud," she says, grumpily placing her chin on her fist.

  The final scene shows the kids at the end of the school day. They run out of the building to their parents' cars, lined up out front. Nic leaps into the backseat of a Honda and his mother asks, "What did you do at school today, Nicolas?"

  He answers, "Oh, same old stuff."

  A month or two after the commercial begins airing, we are at the movies. A man wearing a studded leather jacket and pants and black motorcycle boots recognizes Nic. "Oh, my God," he squeals, pointing. "It's Nicolas!"

  In May, Karen and I are married under roses and bougainvillea on the deck of her parents' house. With his skinny arms and neck jutting out of a short-sleeved oxford shirt, Nic, now nine, is nervous, though we try to reassure him. In the morning, however, he seems hugely relieved. "Everything's the same," he says, looking from me to Karen, around the house, and back to me again. "That's so weird."

  "Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Stepmothers always were." Truman Capote summed up the popular view of stepmotherhood. It's not a new sentiment. Euripides wrote, "Better a servant than a stepmother." And yet Karen and Nic grow closer. Am I seeing only what I want to see? I hope not; I don't think so. They continue to paint and draw together. They are always doing "together drawings," where one adds something and then the other, back and forth. They look at art books and discuss artists. Karen takes him to museums, where Nic sits on gallery floors with his pad on his lap. He makes feverish notes and sketches inspired by Picasso, Elmer Bischoff, and Sigmar Polke.

  She teaches him French—grilling him on his vocabulary as they drive in the car—and they are very funny carrying on conversations about their shared favorite books, the kids in his class, and movies, especially ones starring Peter Sellers and Leslie Nielsen, the Inspector Clouseau movies, Airplane, Naked Gun, and its sequels. For some reason, for four consecutive evenings they watch Pollyanna, trying to get through it, but each time they get too sleepy and shut it off. On the fifth night, however, they finish it. After that, the movie is a shared language they speak together. "Karen, you have a stuffy little nose," Nic will say, imitating Agnes Moorehead.

  Nic tries to get me to play a video game called Streetfighter 2, but I quickly tire of the bashing, head-butting, and biting. Karen, however, not only enjoys it but is good at it, beating Nic. She also loves Nic's music and, unlike me, never tells him to turn it down.

  Karen and Nic tease each other. Relentlessly. Sometimes she teases him too much and he gets mad. When we go out to eat, they always order milkshakes. He slowly savors his, but Karen drinks hers down quickly and then tries to steal Nic's.

  They play a word game and laugh their heads off.

  Karen says "Dave."

  Nic says "has."

  Karen says "a."

  Nic: monkey

  Karen: butt.

  I look up from my magazine. "Very funny," I say.

  Nic says, "Sorry. There."

  Karen: was

  Nic: a

  Karen: man

  Nic: who

  Karen: said

  Nic: that

  Karen: Dave

  Nic: has

  Karen: a

  Nic: monkey

  Karen: butt.

  They play it, and variations, over and over. I roll my eyes.

  Karen works a lot and resists doing motherly duties, but she starts driving carpool sometimes and, one evening, makes a meat-loaf for dinner. It's terrible and Nic refuses to eat it. Karen starts telling Nic to put his napkin on his lap, which makes him furious. She enlists him to help around the house, hiring him to kill slugs in the garden. He's paid ten cents a slug. Nic puts them on a shovel and flings them over the fence into the woods.

  Karen, whom Nic calls Mama or Mamacita or KB (she calls him Sputnik), admits that it is not a natural relationship for her. Once, in the car with Nic and Nancy, Karen's mother, Nic, tired and frustrated over nothing in particular, starts crying. Karen is amazed and asks Nancy, "What's wrong with him?" She responds, "He's a little boy. Little boys cry." Another evening, they are together at her parents', and Karen notices that as they sit around the television, Nancy pulls Nic close to her and rubs his back. He seems completely contented. Karen tells me about it as if it's a revelation. She says that at first Nic seemed foreign to her; she had not been around children since she was a kid. "I never expected this," she says. "I had no idea. I didn't know what I was missing."

  She doesn't always feel this way. On occasion Nic is churlish—toward me, too, for that matter—but the larger problem is inherent to the position of stepparent. Sometimes Karen says that she wishes she were Nic's real mother, but she is realistic about the fact that she isn't. He has a mother whom he adores and to whom he is devoted. Karen is frequently reminded that a stepmother is not a mother. She has much of the responsibility but not the authority of a parent. Sometimes I'm quiet when she gets on his case about having his elbows on the table, but though I always encourage her to say what is on her mind, I often rescue him. "His manners are fine," I insist, before I realize that I've undermined her again. The worst for Nic may be that he feels guilty about a close relationship with someone who is not his mother, which is typical, according to one of the many how-to-stepparent books Karen keeps on her bedside table.

  Sometimes we all acutely feel Vicki's absence. When Nic misses her, the telephone helps, though after hearing her voice he can be sadder. We encourage him to visit her whenever possible and to call her as often as he wants. We try to get him to talk about it. It's all we know to do.

  I sense that Nic is undergoing a fitful transformation, as if a tug of war is being waged inside him. He holds on to his stuffed crab and the pandas, but he has taped a Nirvana poster on his bedroom wall. Though he still often rebels against conventional habit and taste, more and more he succumbs to peer pressure. He is trying on an awkward preteen skulk, and he often wears grungy flannel and shuffles around in a pair of clunky Doc Martens. His bangs hang Cobainlike over his eyes, and he hennas his hair. I allow it, but not without considering whether I should, and meanwhile I force haircuts, even though he becomes furious with me. In choosing my battles, I weigh the relevant factors. Nic is occasionally moody, but not more than other children we know. There are minor reprimands—for writing "Sofia sucks" on a notebook, for example. (Sofia is a headstrong girl in his class.) Once he has to write a note of apology for interrupting Spanish class. For the most part, however, Nic continues to do well in school. In a report card, a teacher writes about his "burgeoning sense of kindness and generosity" and concludes, "I wonder at the gifts he will undoubtedly bring to the world."

  3

  What is now the town of Inverness on the Point Reyes Peninsula, an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was, a few million years ago, in Southern California. The arrow-shaped landmass still creeps north-ward at the unhurried pace of an inch or so a year. Inverness and the surrounding ridges, hillsides, and valleys, and miles of ranch-land and shoreline, will, in another million years, be an island floating off the coast of Washington.

  Inverness is separated from the rest of the continent by the twelve-mile-long Tomales Bay, which cuts a jagged line to the ocean directly over the San Andreas Fault. The submerged border may account for the looming sense of transience and fragility—and an ethereal grace.

  The town of Point Reyes Station is on the mainland side. It has a grocery store, an automobile r
epair shop, two bookstores, and restaurants that specialize in local foods—organic, free-range, and grass-fed. At Cowgirl Creamery, rounds of cheese are made from milk from the nearby Straus Family Dairy. Toby's Feed Barn carries a range of goods that sum up the local community: hay, lavender bath salts, fresh-pressed olive oil, dried pigs' ears, the Strauses' crème fraîche, and puppy dewormer. Down the street, there's a barbershop, a deli, real-estate offices, a hardware store, and a post office.

  The area has a diverse population. There are many first- andsecond-generation immigrant families who hail from Latin America and Mexico; Hollywood refugees; fine craftsmen, homebuilders, cabinetmakers, and stonemasons; fishermen and oystermen; and aged hippies (the town supports a tie-dye shop). There are former high-tech executives, teachers, artists, ranchers and farmhands, summer people, weekenders, horse people, masseuses, therapists of every persuasion, environmentalists, and a medical clinic that does not turn anyone away. There are a few old curmudgeons and a new generation of them. Indeed, some of the locals embrace differences but will avoid you after you show up at a community potluck barbecue with Ball Park—not tofu—hot dogs. On the one hand, there is an ardent social conscience—women who strip for peace. On the other, some locals will verbally assault you if you tread on a blackberry patch they have claimed as their own. Still, Point Reyes is mostly a place overflowing with generosity and magnanimity.

  Karen has a small cabin in a garden in Inverness, not far from town. We spend as much time as possible there these days, and the more time we spend, the more we appreciate the anachronistic sense of community and spectacular natural beauty. We regularly drag our old canoe down to Papermill Creek, draped over pasture-land like a silver ribbon. We paddle among river otters and, at high tide, set a course for a secluded inlet up the bay, where we go ashore for a picnic and uncover Miwok arrowheads on the rocky beach. We hike trails that crisscross national seashore and state parkland, where a billion wildflowers blossom in spring. The fields are parched gold by midsummer, when the blackberries ripen and blue irises come into breathtaking bloom. In winter, drenched, we bundle up and hike through the state park or along North and South Beach, where the Pacific Ocean waves reach more than twenty feet high, and watch the migrating gray whales.