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

by David Sheff

  When Nic is asked to write his memoir, he enthusiastically goes forward. And the reaction inspires me to want to write more about it—to go deeper. Soon I have a book deadline, though I would continue writing without one. Writing is enormously painful, and writing this story is sometimes excruciating. Writing every day, I go through the emotions I felt at the time of the story I'm remembering. I relive the hell. But I also relive the moments of hope and miracle and love.

  Later in February, we plan to spend the weekend skiing at Lake Tahoe. Nic gets a few days off work so he can join us. The kids ski together. In the evening, Nic tells them PJ stories by the fire.

  When we talk about it, Nic seems emphatically committed to his sobriety. I have learned to check my optimism, but still, it's good to hear Nic discuss the life he is rebuilding and building anew in LA. In addition to his book, he is writing short stories and movie reviews for an online magazine. It seems so fitting that he's reviewing movies, since they are such a big part of his life. Every day in LA, Nic bikes, swims, or runs. Sometimes he does all three. Nic and Randy ride up and down the coast from Santa Monica. They ride through the canyons, up hillsides, through the city, and along beaches.

  When I drive him to the airport after his visit in the mountains, he tells me that he loves his life. He uses those words. "I love my life."

  He says that his rides with Randy enliven and sustain him. "The high is so so so so much better than drugs ever were," he says. "It is the high of a full life. Riding, I feel it all."

  Yes, I am optimistic. Do I stop worrying? No.

  It is June 2. A few days before this year's step-up ceremony at Daisy and Jasper's school—she is stepping up to fourth grade, Jasper to sixth. Karen and I are home in Inverness. Suddenly I feel as if my head is exploding.

  People use this as an expression. Not this time. I really feel as if my head is exploding.

  "Karen, call 911."

  She stares at me a minute, doesn't comprehend what I'm saying. "Are you..."

  She places the call.

  It takes ten or fifteen minutes for three men, carrying boxes and machines and a stretcher, to arrive. They set up near me in the living room. They ask questions and perform a preliminary examination while strapping on a blood-pressure and heart monitor. They ask which hospital I prefer.

  I am in the back of an ambulance.

  I lie in the ambulance with two men hovering over me. They talk to me. I cannot understand. I am sick, repeatedly throwing up into a plastic receptacle, apologizing.

  When the ambulance arrives at the hospital, Karen is waiting in the emergency room with her father. An admitting doctor or nurse discusses options when I hear Don quietly say something.

  "Have you considered a subarachnoid hemorrhage? Maybe you should do a CT scan."

  The doctor or nurse eyes him with some uncertainty but says, "Yes. We'll do a CT right away."

  I am wheeled down a corridor and into an elevator. I am not panicked or fearful that I will die because I am too confused for such a straightforward thought. I feel a strange peacefulness.

  I am moved from my gurney onto a long plastic board and from there onto another gurney that moves like a conveyor belt until my head is inside a small tunnel. I am told not to move. White light, a clonking noise, blue light.

  I am wheeled back to the emergency room. By then, I don't know. I don't know.

  My condition worsens. I hear the phrase cerebral hemorrhage. I know only that I have heard of it and can roughly decipher the words cerebral, the brain; hemorrhage, bleeding.

  Late at night Karen goes to her parents', where Jasper and Daisy are asleep. In the morning, early, the telephone rings. Karen, who has not slept much, answers it. A nurse—my nurse—is calling. "I should warn you. He can't speak."

  At the hospital, a neurosurgeon takes Karen aside and tells her that he wants to drill a hole into my skull and insert a shunt. "It will alleviate the pressure." She gives her permission.

  Karen's sister is a nurse at the University of California Medical Center and her close friend is a neuro-oncologist there. The doctor visits me at the hospital and, after consulting with my surgeon, arranges for me to be moved to the neuro ICU at UC in San Francisco. I take another ambulance ride, this one over the Golden Gate Bridge into the city.

  The neuro ICU.

  I am crawling out of my skin—too hot, unable to lie still, with drugs to combat drugs—antinausea, antiswelling, anticoagulant, antipain, blood pressure made higher by the anxiety, requiring more medication that causes more anxiety. I am taped and strapped and stuck with needles, and tubes protrude from my body—from my arms and my penis and the top of my head—like Neo in Matrix. At some point my pubic hair is shaved for angiograms. I itch from the morphine. I am blasted by harsh lights and hear/feel ceaseless pounding from shrill monitors.

  Nic.

  Where is Nic? Where is Nic? Where is Nic? Where is Nic? I must call Nic.

  I cannot remember his telephone number.

  Three one zero.

  What comes next?

  On a time cube on the bedside table, shimmering numbers, radioactive blue-green, re-form so that the two morphs into a three and the five and nine dissolve into a pair of boxy zeros. Three in the morning.

  Three one zero. That is his area code.

  If only I could quell the incessant sonarlike pinging. If I could extinguish the humming ice-white lights. If I could recall Nic's telephone number.

  The nurse berates me for fiddling with the shunt that sticks out of the top of my head.

  I forgot. I'm sorry.

  When she's gone, I reach up with my unencumbered hand and trace the plastic tube from where it juts out like a pear stem from the shaved patch at the top of my skull.

  The thin hose loops upward like a curling flume to an S hook that dangles from a metal stand. From there, it makes a swan dive, plunging into a sealed plastic bag.

  I move my head to the right. A fraction. When I do, I see the tube like an errant artery carrying a trail of clear fluid tinged with red. The liquid, slowly dripping into the bag, is draining spinal and brain fluid. The red is the hemorrhaging blood. A nurse explains again: I am bleeding deep inside my brain in the subarachnoid space. When this happens, it is almost always caused by an aneurism, a weakened spot on an artery that leaks blood. I surmise that often the bleeding is lethal; it can also cause temporary or permanent brain damage.

  A new nurse. She pushes buttons on the monitors. "Please, will you help me call my son? I don't remember his telephone number. I have to call him."

  "Your wife will be here in the morning," she says. "She'll have the number."

  I need the number now.

  "Get some sleep. It's too late to call him now anyway."

  Voices drone from the nurses' station.

  Three one zero.

  The telephone number begins three one zero, the area code nearest the beach in Los Angeles.

  The beach.

  White sand.

  Nic is running. He turns onto a fire trail that leads through brush above the canyon near a deserted cove overlooking Malibu. His lanky long body and strong legs running.

  In a headband.

  Big sneakers and running shorts and a T-shirt tight around his muscular chest.

  His eyes the color of tea, and clear.

  I rely on his voice on the telephone to calm my agonizing worry even though I know that his voice is adept at deception. I no longer know the truth and yet I will choose to be reassured if I can hear him.

  Hey, Dad, it's me. What's happening? Are you all right?

  I'm sure he is all right. I am never sure that he is all right.

  Three one zero and.

  Some of the times when Nic wasn't all right it got so bad that I wanted to wipe out and delete and expunge every trace of him from my brain so that I would not have to worry about him anymore and I would not have to be disappointed by him and hurt by him and I would not have to blame myself and blame him and I would no longer
have the relentless and haunting slide show of images of my lovely son, drugged, in the most sordid, horrible scenes imaginable. Once again: I wished in secret for a kind of lobotomy.

  I was in wretched anguish and yearned for relief.

  I longed for someone to scrape out every remnant of Nic from my brain and scrape out the knowledge of what was lost and scrape out the worry and not only my anguish but his and the burning inside like I might scrape out the seeds and juicy pulp of an overripe melon, leaving no trace of the rotted flesh.

  It felt as if nothing short of a lobotomy could alleviate the unremitting pain.

  It sinks in: I am in the neuro ICU after a cerebral hemorrhage, not a lobotomy but near enough.

  I am in a white room in the Medical Center at the University of California, San Francisco, haunted by sonar monitors and kind nurses asking me if I can remember my name (I cannot) and the year (2015?).

  I have had a kind of brain scraping, a potentially lethal one, and I cannot recall my name and the year and yet I am not spared the worrying that only parents of a child on drugs—I suppose any parent of a child in mortal peril—can comprehend.

  Is he in mortal peril? His beautiful brain, poisoned, possessed, on methamphetamine. I wanted to remove him erase him elide him from my brain, but he is there, even after this hemorrhage. We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron. They supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper even than our selves.

  My son. Nothing short of my death can erase him. Maybe not even my death.

  What is his telephone number?

  Nic.

  A monitor like a mallet hitting my skull. "Get some."

  "What?"

  "Some sleep."

  A nurse. Rousing me.

  "Nic?"

  "Calm down, dear. It's all right. Your blood pressure is up."

  More pills and a paper cup of water with which to wash them down.

  "Nic—"

  "Get some sleep. It will help more than anything."

  "My son?"

  "Get some sleep."

  "Will you please help me dial—"

  "Get some sleep."

  I am agitated and—apparently—tearing at the shunt. The nurse, looking fatigued and discouraged, is here, having rushed in. She says she will give me another injection of pain medication.

  The drugs do not allay my terror. I want to call him to be sure that he is all right. I need to call him. I cannot remember. What is his number? It begins with three one oh.

  "Please, dear, go to sleep."

  In the morning, Karen is here. A doctor enters. "Can you tell me your name?"

  Once again I sadly shake my head.

  "Do you know where you are?"

  I ponder this for a long time and then ask, "Is that a metaphysical question?"

  The doctor doesn't immediately respond. When he finally does, he has decided that, no, a straightforward answer would suffice.

  Karen is in tears.

  "Who is the president of the United States?"

  I stare blankly.

  I say: "Will you tell my editor about the suitcase? It is broken. Tell him that the locks don't work."

  "The suitcase?"

  "Yes, the locks don't work. The suitcase is broken."

  "All right. I'll tell him."

  The broken suitcase, my brain. Filled with everything I am. I cannot remember my name and I do not know where I am and I cannot remember his telephone number, the digits have spilled from the suitcase with the noise and mess of an overturned bucket of Legos or Nic's collection of tiny seashells from China Beach when he was—was he four? They have spilled out because the lock has broken.

  My son is in danger. I cannot forget it even now, with my brain awash with toxic blood.

  Nic.

  "What is your name?"

  The nurse again.

  "Can you dial my son?"

  "What's his telephone number?"

  "Three one."

  "Yes?"

  "I can't."

  The nurse injects me with a sedative and painkiller and a thick warm wash fills up my toes and legs and pours into my limbs and it bubbles up like oozing tar. It fills up my belly and chest up through my shoulders and down my arms and into the base of my neck and up the back of my neck and up into my damaged head, soothing. Deathlike sleep beckons like the descent of a dead man with a concrete block on his feet who has been thrown into a bottomless lake and I fall down and down and down and yet even now I wrack my injured brain, What comes after three one zero?

  I have my own room, but there is no privacy. The door is open. It is always light. Once or twice I ask Karen or a nurse to open a window for air, but then I get ice cold. Karen's sister visits when she has a few minutes between her rounds in other wards. I feel better when she is here.

  And mostly I feel better when Karen is here. She rests on my bed under the neon tubes enclosed in plastic underneath the square white ceiling panels with a constellation of pin-sized holes. She rests with me and she reads to me and I fall asleep. She is juggling the kids, everyone else, everything, our lives, but I want her with me, need her with me. When she is here, everything else falls away—worry, fear. Lying with me, Karen holds my hand and we watch the only television channel that I can tolerate—the only plot that I can follow—a broadcast of an unchanging picture of a mountain.

  I miss step-up day. I miss Daisy's birthday.

  A succession of doctors ask: What is your name? What is the date? Where are you? Who is president? They instruct me to hold out my arms, palms up. How many fingers am I holding? Wiggle your toes. Put pressure against my arm. Now with your feet.

  Test after test. They reveal that there is no aneurism. Ten percent of people who come in with a subarachnoid hemorrhage have no aneurism.

  More tests.

  Today I can answer the doctors' questions.

  David Sheff.

  June 11, 2005.

  San Francisco at the Medical Center.

  I twist completely inside out, from feeling extremely unlucky—how did I get here?—to feeling like the luckiest person in the world. If I need confirmation, it comes when they tell me that I am ready to begin to move a bit. I try walking. I am shaky. With a nurse's help, I drag myself out of my room and move down the drab yellow neon-lit corridor past a YOUR SAFETY IS OUR GOAL sign. I see into other patients' open doors. One man is unconscious in his hospital bed. He has scars like the stitching on a football on his shaved skull. Another man sits up in bed rambling. A woman, knocked out, and then a man and then another man have blackened eye sockets, almost as if their eyes have been gouged out.

  On my walks, I see the ill and maimed, the frightened and feeble, fighting to stay alive. There is a window near the ICU that looks out at San Francisco—you can see the new, twisting, copper-skinned De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, rows of Victorian houses and blocky apartments. I look at them and then back at the faces that pass by me in the corridor—a tremulous, shrunken yellow-haired ghost with palsy, grasping a metal walker in his white claws, and a shriveled woman with petrified eyes on a gurney pushed by an aide.

  Jasper and Daisy come to see me. Their light fills the room. I reassure them. I'm going to be fine. They scramble into my bed. I can't respond too much and I worry that it scares them, but I can't do anything other than tell them I love them. I thought it would be good for them to see me, that I'm all right, but maybe my judgment isn't the best it has ever been.

  Nic calls.

  Nic calls.

  Nic.

  Is fine.

  Nic has been speaking to Karen every day since I arrived in the hospital. He jokes about the hole in my head. He says that he is coming up to visit me.

  Nic is fine.

  ***

  After two weeks, Karen drives me home. From bed, I see the garden through the room's glass doors. I
am stunned by color, the greens of every leaf, plant stalk, and cypress needle. And soft white. Hydrangeas. Sun yellow. Roses. Lavender. Violets growing from the cracks on the terraced stepping stones. I watch a small bird with purple feathers preen and flutter its wings in the birdbath.

  I eat ripe peaches. They are all I want to eat.

  I sleep most of the time, but play Crazy 8s and Nickels with Jasper, and Daisy reads to me. Every day. Nic and I talk on the phone. Karen and I lie in bed together side by side, she reading the Times and me trying to read a sentence in a magazine. Finally I make it through a capsule review in The New Yorker. When I make it through a Talk of the Town piece I feel as if I have earned a Ph.D.

  Karen and I hold hands. I am swept over by the elusive, pure, and precious feeling that settles here with us in bed.

  Karen and I walk together through the garden.

  "Nic called. He'll be here soon. How do you feel about seeing him?"

  "I can't wait."

  Nic pops through the front door and is met by barking Brutus, followed by charging Daisy and Jasper. I can hear them from my room.

  "Hi, Nicky." "Nic."

  "Bop!"

  "Nickypoo!"

  "Dais!"

  "Hey."

  "Ouch."

  "Nicky."

  Barking.

  "Boinkers."

  "Poopyboy."

  Then Karen.

  "Hey, Mamacita!"

  "Sputnik."

  "KB."

  "So good."

  "And you."

  "To see you."

  "How was?"

  "Quick. Fine."

  "Good."

  "The drive."

  "You too."

  "I got a football."

  "Foosball?"

  "Do you want to draw?"

  "But."

  "Football."

  "To play?"

  "Yes, but."

  "I have chalk."

  "Chalk? In a."

  "Will you tell us a PJ?"