by David Sheff
This means that meth addicts can probably recover.
It's good news for a parent of an addict. Of course I want Nic to survive, but I cannot help wanting something more for him. I want him to be all right again. Though inconclusive and still debated, the researchers' findings suggest that he can be, if he stays off the drug. If he stays off the drug.
Karen and I eat dinner on Haight Street and then drag ourselves up the hill to what we have come to call the Count Ohlhoff house—Count Olaf is the villain in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Lemony Snicket books we read to Jasper and Daisy. Passing the smokers out front, we go through the wrought-iron gate. After absorbing decades of cigarette smoke and addiction, the courtyard garden we walk through appears unable to sustain life.
We are here to meet with Nic for a family group session. The meetings are held in a dank room. Karen and I, along with other visiting parents or spouses or partners and our addicts, sit on worn couches and folding chairs. A grandmotherly, whiskey-voiced (though sober for twenty years) counselor leads us in conversation.
"Tell your parents what it means that they're here with you, Nic," she says at our first session.
"Whatever. It's fine."
These are stark, haunting, heart-wrenching gatherings. We get to know the other addicts and their families. One of the meth addicts is a nineteen-year-old girl with the face of an ingénue, her tousled hair in a pair of coffee-colored pigtails, and dejected eyes. She has lost custody of her baby—the child was born addicted to meth. She looks like a child herself, except for the track marks. Other patients include heroin addicts, potheads, and an ancient, blotchy Days of Wine and Roses alcoholic. We hear their stories. The alcoholic repeatedly left his children and their mother without a goodbye. He would come home and apologize. "After the first four or five times, the apologies meant almost nothing to them," he says. He entered rehab when they left him. One boy, slightly older than Nic, with colorless hair and eyes, is from New York City. He came to San Francisco to study architecture, but, he says, "methamphetamine changed my plans."
It's no surprise that in a San Francisco-based program, nearly half of the patients are gay men whose drug of choice was Tina, their term for methamphetamine. Speed is a disaster in many urban gay communities, "returning them to the 1970s, before AIDS," according to Steven Shoptaw, a psychologist in the department of family medicine at UCLA. Health experts estimate that up to 45 percent of gay men in San Francisco, New York, and LA have tried crystal. Thirty percent of those with new HIV infections are users. Gay men in California who use speed are twice as likely to be HIVpositive as those who don't use the drug. Both straight and gay men and women use meth for sex marathons. "Speed sex" can be long-lasting and intense. Indeed, in the early stages, the drug can make a user feel "energetic, outgoing, self-confident, and sexy," said Gantt Galloway, a scientist in the Addiction Pharmacology Research Laboratory at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute. "But it's soon impossible to become aroused. By then a user is likely to have engaged in the type of sex that he wouldn't engage in without the drug—the type that spreads the virus."
An HIV-positive gay man in the program with Nic, an addict who had been strung out on meth for seven years, speaks in a quavering whisper. "I lost most of my teeth," he says, showing off a lonely pair of north-facing bicuspids. "I have holes in my lungs." With shaking hands, he lifts his T-shirt and juts out his sore-infested, sunken belly. "This shit don't heal. I cough blood. I cough pieces of my stomach. I hurt all the time."
At the third week's family group session, Nic, encouraged by his counselor, tells Karen and me that he won't be going to college. "I was going for you," he says. "I want to work. I want to be on my own for a while. I need to be independent."
When Karen and I leave Count Ohlhoff's, we are greeted by a sharp, biting wind. We pull our coats tighter and take a long walk down Fillmore Street and then over to the Civic Center. Karen is as shocked as I am about Nic's decision to shun college. To be hon est, I am still only paying lip service to the idea that Nic is a drug addict. Rehab is necessary, I believe, but he will be fine. I don't look at Nic the way I look at the other addicts in the room. Nic is a smart kid who has gone way out of control. Ignoring the warning from our friend, I have felt that rehab will, in these four weeks, sober him up and scare him enough so he'll understand that he has been on the verge of destroying his life. But that's all. He will return to college, graduate, and have a—a normal life.
Given my quixotic fantasy, I resent the rehab counselors, whose point of view is clear. For them, rehab is all that matters. Everything else must be put aside.
By the end of our walk, I have come up with a new interpretation. Nic is just postponing college. That's all. It makes sense. I adapt to this new scenario. Nic is only eighteen. Many people put off college and do fine.
At the fourth week's family group session, Nic surprises us again. This time he tells us that he has realized that he needs more time in rehab and asks if he can move into the program's halfway house. UCLA's Walter Ling said, "Time off the drug is the best predictor of more time off the drug." As scary as it is—I want this over, I want him cured—it's a sensible plan. Also, I admit, I am afraid of what will happen if he comes home.
And so we agree to let him move into the Ohlhoff halfway house. He does, and three days later, when I call to check on him, I learn that he has vanished.
12
At some point, parents may become inured to a child's self-destruction, but I do not. I do know the drill, though. I call the police and hospital emergency rooms. Nothing. I don't hear a word for a day, another day, and then another. Once more I explain it to Jasper and Daisy as well as I can. All they comprehend is that Nic is in trouble and their parents are racked with worry. Recalling the incident with the sheriffs in Inverness, Jasper asks, "Is Nic in jail?"
"I called the jails. He's not there."
"Where does he sleep?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe he has a friend and he sleeps there."
"I hope so."
I keep trying to fathom what is happening—not only to Nic, but to our lives, which are preoccupied with him. I am always careful around the little kids, but I snap at Karen. Mostly she tolerates my bursts of anger and frustration, but sometimes she gets fed up with me and my preoccupation with Nic. It's not that she doesn't understand, but sometimes enough feels like enough, and this is interminable. I do not sleep much. She wakes up in the middle of the night and finds me in the living room staring into dim flames in the fireplace. I confide that I can't sleep because I can't block out images of Nic on the San Francisco streets. I imagine him hurt, in trouble. I imagine him dying.
"I know," she says. "I do, too." For the first time, we cry together.
With increasing desperation, I want and need to know that he is OK, and so, on a cool, overcast morning, knowing that I am on a fool's errand, I drive across the Golden Gate Bridge with plans to scour the Haight and the Mission District, the neighborhoods where I suspect Nic might show up. After driving aimlessly through the Mission, I cross town, park on Ashbury, and set off walking down Haight Street. I duck into Amoeba, his preferred record store, and peek into cafés and bookstores.
In spite of gentrification, the Haight retains its 1960s-era funkiness, and the air is spicy with burning marijuana. Runaways—dyed hair, tattooed, tie-dyed, track marked, stoned—hang out in doorways. "The street kids still cling to the fantasy of the Haight Ash-bury, but it's no longer about peace and love," Nic once observed, "it's about punk music, general laziness, and drugs." (It's also about "all those terrible hippie teenagers from Marin begging for spare change," Dave Eggers adds in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.) I once heard a recovering addict describe her ex-boyfriend in a way that reminds me of these children: "He had black fingernails and drove a hearse. Everything about him cried out, 'Look at me, look at me,' and when you looked at him, he would snap, 'Who the fuck are you looking at?' " If you subscribe to the
idea that addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children—paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic—are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.
Ludicrously, I ask some of them if they know my son. They ignore me or glare. I step over or past them, looking into each one's face and wondering about them, wondering about their parents.
At Stanyan, I cross into Golden Gate Park, into a small forest, dodging rollerbladers and bikers on the pathways. Near the merry-go-round, I stop a police officer and explain that I am looking for my son, a meth addict.
"The tweakers are hard to miss," he tells me. He says that he knows where some may be hanging out and leads me along a path. "Try over there," he says, indicating a grassy knoll under a magnolia tree, where a dozen people are congregated.
I approach a girl who is sitting on a bench apart from the group. She is sylphic and wan, wrapped in a grimy French sailor's sweater. When I get nearer, I see the telltale marks of meth: the tense jaw and pulsing body. I introduce myself and she recoils.
"Are you a cop?"
I say no, but tell her that it was a cop who had pointed her out. I indicate the officer, who is walking away, and she seems to relax.
"He's cool," she says. "He only hassles you if you cause trouble or do drugs near the little kids in the playground." She points. Of course I know the playground. Nic used to play secret agent there.
After small talk, I tell her about Nic, and ask if she knows him. She asks me what he looks like. I answer, and she shakes her head. "That sounds like half the guys I know," she says. "You won't find him if he doesn't want to be found."
"Are you hungry? I don't have anything to do for a while. I thought I might get something to eat."
She nods, says "Sure," and so we walk to McDonald's, where she devours a cheeseburger.
"I've been on the crystal diet," she says.
I want to know how she got here. She speaks in a quiet, halting voice, answering my questions.
"I was not a troublemaker," she says at one point. "I was a sweet kid."
She tells me that she played with dolls, was "the Twister queen," marched in the high school band, liked history, and was good in French. "Comment allez-vous? Où est la bibliothèque, s'il vous plaît?" She says that she read voraciously and names her favorite authors, counting them on her thin fingers. It is a list that could have been Nic's, at least when he was younger. Harper Lee, Tolkien, Dickens, E. B. White, Hemingway, Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Dostoyevsky. "Fyodor was my god, The Brothers K was my bible, but now I don't read shit." She looks up and says, "Ya know, I was a pompom girl. No shit. I never made that prom, though."
Her giggle is self-conscious, and she covers her mouth with a shaky hand, then pulls at her stringy hair. "No fairy godmother saved the day."
A boy gave her meth when she was fourteen. That was five years ago. She slurps her soda, and then, rocking back and forth in her seat, adds, "Meth ... Even though I know how fucked up it is, if I had the chance to start all over I would do it again. I can't live without dope, don't want to. You can't imagine how good it gets when it's good, and I need that in my life."
She plucks a few pieces of ice from her cup of Coca-Cola and puts them on the table, flicking them with her fingers and watching them skitter across the plastic. She tells me that her father is a banker; her mother, a real-estate agent. They live in Ohio, in the house she grew up in. "It's white, roses, picket fence—the American experience," she says. Her parents hired a private detective to find her when she ran away from home the first time, catching a ride to San Francisco with a friend. The detective traced her to a homeless shelter and persuaded her to return with him. Back home, her parents brought her to a hospital to detox from crystal. "It was hell. I wanted to die."
She stole a jar of Valium, and, the day she was discharged, overdosed on it. After she recovered, her parents checked her into Hazelden, the well-known Midwestern drug-rehab facility, but she ran away from there, too. Her parents found her again and sent her to a different rehab center. "It's bullshit, a cult," she says of the programs. "All that God shit." She ran away again, scored crank from an old boyfriend, and hitchhiked back to San Francisco, riding most of the way with a meth-smoking truck driver. She settled in the Haight, where she began dealing and "slamming"—that is, shooting—crystal. She says she lives in a garage with a space heater and no running water, sleeps on an old mattress.
She tells me she uses crystal almost every day, smokes it and shoots it; stays up for seventy-two or more hours at a time; sleeps, when she does, for days; has "freaky" nightmares. She was in the emergency room three times, once each for pneumonia, some "stomach thing, I was coughing up blood," and for "freaking out." She makes enough money for coffee and cigarettes by panhandling. She stabbed a guy once, "just in the leg," and pays for meth by dealing. "When I can't pay, I give a blow job or whatever." She says this and then seems embarrassed, somehow jarred by the memory of an ossified emotion. She turns her head to the side and looks down. In profile, with her unwashed hair hanging down, she looks half her age. "I am a bitch if I can't score," she says. "On meth I'm all right."
"What about your parents?"
"What about them?"
"Do you miss them?"
"Not much. Yeah. I guess."
"You should contact them."
"Why?"
"I'm sure they miss you, and worry. They could help you."
"They would tell me to go back into rehab."
"Maybe it's not a bad idea."
"Been there, done that."
"At least call them. Let them know you're alive."
She doesn't respond.
"Call them. I know they'd want to know you're alive."
I drive home. Without Nic. Wonder about the girl's parents. If they are anything like I imagine them to be—that is, anything like me—whatever they are doing at this moment they are doing it perfunctorily with only a portion of their consciousness. They are never free of worry about their daughter. They wonder what went wrong. They wonder if she is alive. They wonder if it is their fault.
I torment myself with the same unanswerable questions:
Did I spoil him?
Was I too lenient?
Did I give him too little attention?
Too much?
If only we never moved to the country.
If only I never used drugs.
If only his mother and I had stayed together.
If only and if only and if only...
Guilt and self-blame are typical responses of addicts' parents. In Addict in the Family, a remarkably useful book, Beverly Conyers wrote, "Most parents, when looking back on how they raised their children, have at least some regrets. They may wish that they had been more or less strict, that they had expected more or less of their children, that they had spent more time with them, or that they had not been so overprotective. They may reflect on difficult events, such as a divorce or death in the family, and see these as turning points in their child's mental health. Some may bear heavy burdens of shame over past difficulties, such as an infidelity that damaged the family and caused mistrust. Whatever the parental failings may be, it is almost inevitable that the addicts will recognize these vulnerable spots and take advantage of the parents...
"Addicts may have many complaints, including major and minor grievances from years past. Some of their accusations may, in fact, have truth in them. Families may well have caused pain for the addicts. They may well have failed the addicts in some significant way. (After all, what human relationship is perfect?) But addicts bring up these problems not to clear the air or with the hope of healing old wounds. They bring them up solely to induce guilt, a tool with which they manipulate others in pursuit of their continued addiction."
Nonetheless: if only and if only and if only.
Worry and guilt and regret may serve a function—as a turbo
-charger of conscience—but in excess they are useless and incapacitating. Yet I cannot silence them.
After days without a word from Nic, he calls from the house of a former girlfriend. He is talking fast and obviously lying. He says he has quit on his own and has been sober for five days. I tell him that he has two choices as far as I am concerned: another try at rehab or the streets. My tough talk belies my impulse to rush over and take him in my arms.
He maintains that rehab is unnecessary—he will stop on his own—but I tell him that it isn't negotiable. He indolently agrees to try again, finally concluding, "Whatever."
I drive to the girl's house and wait outside, idling the car on the cul-de-sac. Nic dully climbs in. I notice a black bruise on his cheek and a gash on his forehead. I ask what happened. He looks skyward and then closes his eyes. "It was no big deal," he says. "Some asshole beat me up and robbed me."
I yelp. "And it's no big deal?"
He looks weary and empty. He has no suitcase or backpack, nothing.
"What happened to your stuff ?"
"Everything was stolen."
Who is he? The boy sitting near me in the car is not Nic, nor does he know anything about the child I remember. As if corroborating my observation, he speaks at last.
"What the fuck am I doing here? This is bullshit. I don't need rehab. It's bullshit. I'm leaving."
"Leaving? Where?"
"Paris."
"Ah, Paris."
"Getting out of this fucking country is what I need."
"What will you do in Paris?"
"Tom and David and I are going to play music in the Metro, set ourselves up with a little monkey, like the old organ grinders."
