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

by David Sheff

  10

  With Nic gone, and our old car with him, I once again call hospital emergency rooms. I once again call the police to see if he has been arrested. When I explain that my son is missing, a police dispatcher, before passing along the phone number for the jail, tells me that if Nic shows up I should send him to a boot camp where children, roused and shackled in the middle of the night, are taken by force. I have been reading about one of these—a boot camp in Arizona near my parents'. A boy died there over the summer. At the boot camp, children were beaten, kicked, starved, chained, and deprived of water in the 114-degree desert.

  I talk to other parents who have gone through versions of this and I am bombarded by their advice, too, much of it familiar and much of it familiarly contradictory. Once again, one says that if Nic shows up, I should kick him out. It makes no sense to me because I know where he would go, to his unsupervised friends' homes or perhaps to the squalid and treacherous lairs of his drug dealers. That would be that. All hope for him would be lost. One mother recommends a lockup school where she sent her daughter for two years.

  Nic has been gone for six days, and my desperation has built to a frenzy. I have never experienced grief like this. I spend frantic hours on the Internet reading harrowing stories of children on drugs. I call parents who know parents who know parents who have been through this. I try and try to understand what drugs mean to Nic. He once told me, "Every writer and artist I love was a drunk or an addict." I know that Nic uses drugs because he feels cleverer and less introverted and insecure, and he also carries the dangerous—and fallacious—idea that debauchery leads to the greatest art, whether by Hemingway, Hendrix, or Basquiat.

  In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out," he said. "I worship the people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy."

  The living and the healthy.

  I do not know if my son can be one of them.

  Somehow I never fall apart around Jasper and Daisy. I do not allow myself to; I don't want to worry them any more than they already are. To the kids, Karen and I acknowledge that we're concerned about Nic and, in doing so, try for a delicate balance. We don't want to scare them, and yet we don't want to pretend that everything is fine when they know—how can they not?—that it isn't. I'm convinced that failing to acknowledge this crisis will be more confusing and more damaging than the truth.

  When I am alone, however, I weep in a way that I have not wept since I was a young boy. Nic used to tease me about my inability to cry. On the rare occasions when my eyes welled up, he joked about my "constipated tears." Now tears come at unexpected moments for no obvious reason, and they pour forth with ferocity. They scare the hell out of me. It scares the hell out of me to be so lost and helpless and out of control and afraid.

  I call Vicki. Our acrimony since the divorce has been pushed aside by our shared worry about Nic. It is with relief that I come to see her not for what separated us but for what unites us. We both love Nic in a way that only parents love their children. It's not that Karen and Nic's stepfather aren't worried about Nic, but in long telephone conversations that no one else can be part of, his mother and I share a particular quality of worry—acute and visceral.

  Meanwhile, Karen and I go back and forth switching roles. When I collapse, she reassures me.

  "Nic will be all right."

  "How do you know?"

  "I just know. He's a smart boy. He has a good heart."

  Then Karen will lose it, and I console her.

  "It's all right," I say. "He's just mixed up. We'll figure this out. He'll come back."

  And he does.

  On a still, cold, and gray afternoon, a week later, he shows up at the house. Like the time I went to find him in the alleyway in San Rafael, he is frail, ill, and rambling—a barely recognizable phantom.

  I just stare at him standing there in the doorway.

  "Oh, Nic," I say. I gaze at him and then lead him by the arm to his room, where, still dressed, he lies on his bed, wrapping himself up in a comforter. I am glad that no one else is home so that, for the moment, I don't have to explain.

  I stare at him.

  If all that therapy didn't help, then what? Rehab. There is nothing else. "Nic, you have to go into rehab. You have to." He mumbles and falls asleep.

  I know that I must do everything possible to get him into a drug rehab program. I call counselors and other specialists for recommendations. Nic's therapist now agrees that rehab is essential, and contacts some of his colleagues who specialize in drug and alcohol addiction. My friends call their friends who have been through this.

  Nic sleeps.

  I call the recommended facilities in our area, inquiring about their success rates for treating meth users. These conversations provide my initial glimpse of what must be the most chaotic, flailing field of health care in America. I am quoted a range from 25 to 85 percent, but a drug and alcohol counselor familiar with many programs says that the figures are unreliable. "Even the conservative numbers sound overly optimistic," he says. "About seventeen percent of people who go through these programs are sober after a year." An admitting nurse at a northern California hospital may be the most accurate when she tells me the number for meth addicts. "The true number is in the single digits," she says. "Anyone who promises more is lying."

  The more I learn about the rehab industry, the more it seems in disarray. Some highly touted, and expensive, rehab programs are ineffective. Many rehabs employ one-size-fits-all-addicts programs. Whether private or public, some are only slightly better than useless when it comes to the treatment of meth addicts, according to Richard Rawson, the associate director of the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs at UCLA, who calls them "the Earl Scheibs of rehab. The paint job doesn't last."

  Dr. Rawson doesn't suggest that many programs don't have useful components. They tend to be rooted in the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, which seem to be essential to staying sober for most, if not all, alcoholics and addicts, no matter the drug. But other than that, they offer a slipshod patchwork of behavioral, psychological, and cognitive therapies. Many programs include lectures, individual counseling sessions, chores with harsh consequences for shirking, and confessional and confrontational group therapy, including badgering patients who resist the gospel of treatment. (According to the drug and alcohol counselors in these programs, resistance means denial, and denial leads to relapse.) Some programs offer life-skills training, such as résumé writing, exercise, group and individual sessions with family, and consultations with a physician and psychiatrists, who may prescribe medication. Some facilities offer massage and nutrition consultations. Some outpatient programs add a relatively new technique called contingency management, a system of rewards for abstinence. However, without standards based on proven protocols, patients are often subjected to the philosophies of a program's director, some of whom have no qualifications other than their former addiction. "Having six children doesn't make you a good ob-gyn," says Walter Ling, a neurologist and the director of the UCLA program. Even rehabs run by trained doctors and clinicians employ a wide range of treatments, many unproven. Most important: many programs fail to take into account the specific conditions of methamphetamine, which is, according to some experts, the toughest addiction to treat. But what else can I try?

  I choose a highly recommended place in Oakland called Thunder Road and make an appointment. I steel myself to do the hardest thing I can imagine doing, using what is left of my waning influence—the threat that I will kick him out and withdraw all of my support—to get him to come with me. That I mean it—because I am convinced that this is our only hope—does not make it easier.

  The next morning, when Daisy and Ja
sper are at school, I go into Nic's room, where he still sleeps soundly, his face relaxed and peaceful. A sleeping child. Then, as I watch, he twitches and grimaces and grinds his teeth. I rouse him and tell him where we are headed.

  He rages. "No fucking way!"

  "Let's go, Nic, let's get it over with," I plead.

  He gets up, pushes his hair back with a trembling hand. He holds on to a doorjamb for support.

  "I said no fucking way." He slurs, staggers.

  "This is it, Nic," I say firmly. My voice trembles. "We're going. It's not a choice."

  "You can't make me. What the fuck?"

  "If you want to live here, if you want me to help you, if you want me to pay for your college, if you want to see us..." I look at him and say, "Nic—do you want to die? Is that what this is all about?"

  He kicks the wall, smashes his fists on the table, and weeps.

  I sadly say, "Let's go."

  He rages some more, but follows me to the car.

  PART III

  Whatever

  You're safe, I remembered whispering to Quintana when I first saw her in the ICU at UCLA. I'm here. You're going to be all right. Half of her skull had been shaved for surgery. I could see the long cut and the metal staples that held it closed. She was again breathing only through an endotracheal tube. I'm here. Everything's fine... I would take care of her. It would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

  —JOAN DIDION,

  The Year of Magical Thinking

  11

  I drive the old Volvo, faded blue and rusty from the salt air of the coast and dented from Nic's misadventures. It smells of his cigarettes. It is the car he had taken. Nic flops like a rag doll, pressed as close to his door, as far away from me, as possible.

  Neither of us speaks.

  Nic's electric guitar, buttercup yellow with a black pick guard, is in the backseat. Another leftover from his escapades lies beside it: an intricately carved bong made of a glass beaker and meerschaum stem. More: a flashlight, a copy of Rimbaud with a ripped cover, dirty jeans, a half-empty bottle of Gatorade, the Bay Guardian, his leather bomber jacket, empty beer bottles, cassettes, a stale sandwich.

  He tries a few times to talk me out of it.

  "This is stupid," he weakly beseeches. "I know I fucked up. I learned my lesson."

  I don't answer.

  "I can't do this," he says. "I won't."

  He turns livid. Glaring at me, he says, "I'll just run away." He is supercilious and condescending—almost savage. "You fucking think you know me? You don't know anything about me. You have always tried to control me."

  He screams until he is hoarse.

  In the middle of his ranting, when I notice his slurring, I realize that he is high. Again. Still.

  "What are you on today, Nic?" There's incomprehension in my tone.

  An angry whisper comes from him. "Fuck you."

  I look over at him, look deeply into his impassive face. Nic has many of his mother's handsome features. Like her, he is tall and thin and has her fine nose and lips. He had her fair hair before it darkened as he grew up. Even so, sometimes I have looked at his face and it was as if I were peering in a mirror. It was not only the physical similarities that I would see. I saw myself hidden in his eyes, in his expressions. It would startle me. Maybe all children as they grow up take on their parents' traits and mannerisms and become more like them. I see my father in me now in ways that I never did when I was young. In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately. I recall his soft eyes when they were elated and when they were disappointed, his face when he was pallid from illness and when he was burned red by the sun, his mouth and even each tooth from visits to dentists and the orthodontist, his knees from when he skinned them and I put on Band-Aids, his shoulders from putting on sun block, his feet from taking out splinters—every part of him. I know every part from watching him and living with him and being close to him, and yet driving to Oakland I look at his sullenness and anger and vacancy, his retreat and his turmoil, and I think, Who are you?

  I pull up in front of the Oakland rehab and we walk through glass doors into an austere waiting room. As I inform the receptionist that we have an appointment, Nic stands behind me, belligerent on his heels with his arms folded across his chest.

  She instructs us to wait.

  A counselor, with black eyes and hair tied back in a long pony-tail, comes out and introduces herself, first to Nic and then to me. He acknowledges her with a grunt. As instructed, Nic follows her into another room. He hunches. His feet barely move him forward.

  I flip through an old copy of People, and then, after nearly an hour, the counselor emerges and says that she wants to speak to me alone. Nic, palpably seething, takes my spot in the waiting room. I follow the woman into a small office with a metal desk and two chairs and a murky fish tank.

  "Your son is in serious trouble," she says. "He needs treatment. He easily could die from all the drugs he's using."

  "What can..."

  "At eighteen, he is using and mixing more drugs than many people who are much older. He has a dangerous attitude—he doesn't understand that he's in trouble. He's proud to be so hardcore, wears it like a badge. This program isn't right for him. He is bordering on being too old and is at this point resistant to treatment. We see it all the time. He's in denial. It's typical of addicts, who maintain and believe that everything is all right, they can stop when they want, everyone else has a problem but not them, they are fine, even if they wind up losing everything, even if they are on the streets, even if they wind up in jail or in the hospital."

  "Then what—?"

  "He has to get into treatment now, whatever it takes. Not here, but somewhere."

  She recommends other programs. In her somber tone and expression, I can tell that she holds out no great hope.

  Driving home, the tension in the car builds and then explodes. Nic finally yells, "This is bullshit." I think he might leap out of the car as I speed along the freeway.

  "It is bullshit," I spit back. "If you want to kill yourself, I should just let you do it."

  "It's my life," he hoarsely screams. He cries uncontrollably, hysterically. He hits the dashboard with his fists and kicks it with his boots.

  We pull up in front of the house, but with Daisy and Jasper home now, I don't bring Nic in. I sit with him in the car for another half-hour until he has exhausted himself. He is remote—somnolent from drugs and spent anger, his breathing slowed, and then, finally, he falls into a deep sleep. I leave him in the car, checking on him frequently. Will you check on me every fifteen minutes? In a while he trudges inside and heads directly for his bedroom. Jasper and Daisy silently watch as their brother's listless body drifts through the living room.

  I have to find a program that will take him immediately. Before I lose him.

  ***

  With Nic asleep in his room, I sit down with the kids. I explain as well as I can that Nic is once again on drugs and ill. I say that I am trying to find a hospital or a drug-rehabilitation program that can help him. I say that kids with a brother or sister or parent with a drug problem sometimes think it's their fault.

  "It's not your fault. I promise."

  They stare at me, sad and uncomprehending.

  "Nic has a serious problem, but we're going to get him the help he needs. With help he can be all right."

  Nic seethes and rails in and out of a tormented half-sleep, and I call more rehab programs. One, Ohlhoff Recovery House, in San Francisco, has an open bed. It is a well-respected program, recommended by many experts in the Bay Area. A friend of a friend told me that the program turned around the life of her heroin-addicted son. "He lives in Florida now," she said. "He has a family of his own. He has a job that he loves and, on the side
, volunteers to help kids with drug problems."

  Parents of addicts live for encouraging stories like this.

  When Nic wakes up, I tell him that I have found a program in the city, and he somberly agrees to go in for another evaluation. He grimly follows me to the car.

  Ohlhoff Recovery is located in a stately but ancient Victorian mansion with three stories, a central cupola, and a handsome woodpaneled lobby, where I wait while Nic goes in for an interview, this time with the director of the twenty-eight-day primary program—primary as in primary school; it's the initial step into rehab and recovery.

  After their session, I am called into the stark room and I sit in the vacant chair. Nic and I face the director, who is behind a wooden desk. From her manner and the look of weariness in her eyes, I can tell that Nic has been as belligerent with her as he had been with the counselor at Thunder Road, but she seems less perturbed.

  She begins, "Nic doesn't acknowledge that he is an addict."

  "Because I'm not."

  Undeterred, she continues, "And says he's only coming to treatment because you're forcing him to."

  "I know that," I say.

  "But that's all right. Many people don't come here by choice. They have just as much of a chance of getting and staying sober as someone who crawls in here, begging to be treated."

  I say, "OK."

  Nic glares.

  "We will check him in in the morning for our twenty-eight-day program."

  Nic hides in his room through dinner. We tell Daisy and Jasper that Nic is going into a treatment program in the morning, but that he is scared.

  I sit with them after Karen reads their bedtime story. "I'm so sorry you have to go through this with Nic," I say for the nth time. How else can I help them? "It's such a sad thing to have this problem in our family. I hope you'll talk about it with your teachers and friends at school, at least if you want to. If you have questions or worries, you can always ask me or your mom."