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

by David Sheff

  "Yes, yes, yes. But."

  "Are..."

  "Where's the old man?"

  Trailed by the kids and Karen, Nic comes into my bedroom. I want to greet him properly. I shakily stand and we hug.

  "So."

  "So."

  "Hey, Pop."

  "Hey, Nic."

  "So good to see you."

  "You too."

  I sleep for long chunks of every day, but Nic sits with me and holds my hand. When I sleep, he goes off for a bike ride. He brought his bike, threw it in the back of the car he recently bought from an AA friend. Standing there in bike shorts with their padded bottom and a shirt with a Motorola logo and calf-high socks and bike shoes that clip onto the pedals. He leaves the house for a ride down our road and then west along the Tomales Bay. I imagine him riding along the bay where he played and grew up and kay aked and swam and did drugs with his friends on the beaches riding out along the peninsula, along the long bay out past ranches and the Estero where we surfed.

  Back from the ride, he checks on me, peeking in, sits with me.

  He says: "I thought we were going to lose you."

  I eye him closely. "That's a switch."

  I am ready to sleep, and Nic goes into the kids' room to play with Jasper and Daisy. Then the next day, too quickly for us all, he has to get back to work. He leaves in the evening, drives south again, back to LA.

  Each day I seem to feel a little better for a little longer. "Many patients with a subarachnoid hemorrhage do not survive long enough to reach a hospital," according to a medical Web site I find online. "Of those who do, about 50 percent die within the first month of treatment."

  In the mornings and again before dark, Karen encourages me to walk with her in the garden. I complain, but make it as far as her studio before I return to bed exhausted.

  I am trying to make sense of what happened and what will happen. I don't even know what I want to happen. Somehow I want to get back to normal and yet I don't. I don't want things to go exactly back to normal. That is, I do not want to get back to the normal of worry about Nic.

  Sometimes I panic about the future. Sometimes I feel weak and pained about the past. But for today, Jasper and Daisy are fine. He is at camp for the week. She swims in the morning and then comes home. She reads me a book, Love, Ruby Lavender. Nic has moved again, this time into an apartment in Hollywood. He's excited to have a place with friends. He called this morning on his way to meet Randy for a bike ride down the coast.

  I turn my time in the hospital around and around in my recovering mind. I cannot forget when I couldn't remember his number, and I am struck anew that a brain hemorrhage—even that—could not remove the worry about him. I recall the many occasions when he was gone, on the streets, God knows where, when I fantasized that I could scrape him out of my brain, if only I could get a lo botomy, the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind, and I would no longer agonize about him, and agonize for him. I am grateful now to have it all—even the worry and the pain. I no longer want a lo-botomy, no longer want him erased. I will take the worry in order to take what has come through as the most important emotion after my hemorrhage.

  Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face—for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: "I have no son. He is dead to me." I have a son and he will never be dead to me.

  I do not relish but I am used to the perpetual angst and humming anxiety and intermittent depression that comes with Nic's addiction. I don't remember me before this. I am accustomed to the way that joy can be fleeting and I can sometimes fall into a dark pit. However, living with this over time, I am now being allowed—allowing myself?—to crawl up out of the pit and lift the veil that covers it and to witness, with visual and aural and tactile acuity, a slightly altered world, slightly brighter, richer, and vivider. I well up with tears for it. For all of it. On the one hand: the uncertain future. The possibility of another hemorrhage. The chance that my children will be killed in a car accident. The chance that Nic will relapse. A million other catastrophes. On the other: compassion and love. For my parents and family. For my friends. For Karen. For my children. I may feel more fragile and vulnerable, but I experience more consciousness.

  People who go through life-threatening experiences like mine talk about how everything becomes clear for them. They describe a revised understanding of what's important and what isn't. They usually say that they appreciate more than ever their loved ones and their friends. These survivors say that they have learned to cut out the extraneous in their lives and live for the moment. I don't feel as if everything is clear. In some ways, everything is less clear. Rather than less to consider, I have more—because of a heightened sense of mortality. Yes, I'm no less certain that my loved ones and friends mean more than anything. That was never a problem for me; I appreciated them from the start. I am no less certain that I should en joy the moment—appreciate what I have. I am no less convinced that I am lucky for so many things and most of all lucky to be alive. I have glimpses of the grandeur and the miracle, even as I feel the inexorable slide of time. The children growing up, with both the sadness and excitement of it. Mostly the inevitability of it. I feel it all.

  I am getting out more now. I take long walks in the solitary, mysterious woods, tranquil and silent, and see more intensely the color—still more greens, an infinite number, and the shoots and buds on woody branches before they open. I see a darting rabbit and, overhead, red-tailed hawks, great blue herons, and an osprey. God or no god, this barely ponderable and impossible-to-understand system of complexity and beauty is profound enough to feel like a miracle. Consciousness feels like a miracle. The constellation of these impulses that we call love feels like a miracle. The miracles do not cancel out evil, but I accept evil in order to participate in the miraculous. Nic, do you have a sense of your higher power now?

  He has been sober for more than a year. Again. A year and a half.

  He called this morning on his way to meet Randy for a bike ride down the coast. Jasper and Daisy and their cousins are outside playing on a homemade Slip n' Slide. Their laughter filters in through the light-filled leaves. I am left with a hole in my head, though my doctor has told me that it will grow together. I am left with a thought about Nic's head, too, a hopeful one. I recall Dr. London and her computer scans. Now that Nic has reached the year-and-a-half anniversary of his last experience with meth or any other drug, I have in my mind Dr. London's PET scan on her computer screen—the brain of her control group with a balanced chemistry and the normal fluctuations of the neurotransmitters in proportion to life events. I wonder if it is once again a picture of my son's brain.

  21

  Daisy sits near me on a boulder alongside the Big Sur River. It's late summer on a cool evening inside a cathedral of towering redwoods. They have furrowed bark like a topographical map and thick, sweet-smelling canopies that shoot skyward like medieval church spires. The day is gray with fog. We are sitting outside our tent, which Jasper and I managed to set up. This is no small accomplishment for us.

  After the hospital stint and recovery time at home, having missed much of June and July, I am trying to squeeze every last drop out of summer, clawing into the waning season, desperate to slow its departure. I am as ready as I ever will be to fully return to the living. It's time. The kids are going back to school in a week. My head is, they tell me, mended. The lock on the suitcase is repaired. And so I step out beyond the garden, beyond Inverness. Karen, Jasper, Daisy, and I fit in a few days' hiking and playing on the beaches of the Big Sur coast. Sitting at our camping spot aside the river, under these glorious trees, Daisy pronounces it a "beauteous day."

  We plan a hike, stopping first at a store to buy sandwiches. "It's a convenience store, but it's not very convenient," observes Jasper. "It's closed." We drive on and play a modified version of twenty questions. In the kids' game, seventy o
r more questions are allowed.

  Jasper is a "thing" that begins with h. It's taking us forever to guess what he is.

  We try another store. It's open.

  Back in the car, Jasper reminds us, "I start with an h."

  "Are you edible?"

  "Are you bigger than Brutus?"

  "Are you man-made?"

  "Are you a hole?" Daisy says.

  "What?"

  "A hole."

  "How did you guess?"

  "I peeked."

  "You peeked into my brain?"

  With a pack filled with a picnic lunch, we hit the trail, walking through a forest of Monterey cypress. We turn a corner and see, on a boulder near the trail, a California condor. In 1982, there were fewer than twenty-five of these magnificent creatures left in the wild, but now, because of the efforts of environmental groups devoted to preserving them, there may be more than two hundred. Here is one: a survivor, hope for its species, cocking its head, staring at us, and then, dramatically unfolding its expansive wings, gliding out onto a wind current over the Pacific.

  Just as we arrive back at the car, my cell phone rings.

  "Yo, what's happenin'?" It's Nic.

  We talk awhile and then he asks to say hi to the others. I pass the phone around. Nic tells stories about the people with whom he works. The kids and Karen tell Nic about our adventures in Big Sur. He wishes them a happy new school year.

  It's late in the day, with the sun setting. Time to return home. Our vacation is over. We drive on.

  "Pause," says Daisy. In spite of our admonitions, she clicks her retainer in and out.

  "I've been thinking," she says, apropos of nothing. "On the last day of my life, I would eat tons of sweets, because it wouldn't matter if you got cavities or if the food was bad for you, would it?"

  She continues: "Actually it would be sad to be old, because you guys would be dead." She is indicating Karen and me. "Even Jasper, because I'm the youngest. But you know, I don't think I will be so scared to die. I think it's like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home."

  ***

  On Tuesday morning, Jasper and Daisy have first-day jitters. On Tuesday afternoon, though, they are enthusiastic, telling us about their teachers and their friends. Jasper is in sixth grade now. It's the first year that he changes classes for math, English and history, science, and other subjects. Daisy adores her new teacher, who has asked the students to write a letter to her about their lives so she can get to know them better.

  "Dear Laura," Daisy writes. "I'm really looking forward to fourth grade. I want to get better at math. Spanish is not my cup of tea, but Señor Leon is funny. I do like science. I really like to read..."I just got a retainer and it's hard to say G. I'm getting better at it, though. It's still hard not to flip it around in my mouth."

  There's lots more—about her favorite foods and the dogs. "Jasper used to call Moondog Moongoggy," she writes. "Moondog died of cancer." The letter concludes: "My brother was a smoky guy, but he stopped. Don't worry it's not Jasper. It's Nic. He lives in LA. My dad David got a brain hemrij but he's better. Jasper flipped over on his bike. I don't want to tell you too much bad news, but I zippered my eye in my jacket. Now it's fine. Everything is A okay now. Love, Daisy."

  After summer hours, mornings are a challenge, but we get the kids to school on time today.

  I'm writing again. I am writing again after being unable to write a word.

  This afternoon, Jasper has soccer (he's juggling soccer, band, and swim team), and Daisy and I go for a walk. After collecting Jas, we head to Nancy and Don's for the weekly dinner.

  The kids are playing on the indoor swing. "Put on some shoes," Nancy scolds. "You'll get a splinter."

  After a roast with Yorkshire pudding, peas, and scalloped potatoes, we decide to spend the night so we don't have to drive back to Inverness. The kids do their homework—Daisy is practicing her multiplication tables and spelling words like cormorant, and Jasper is writing a book report on The Giver—and then they read. Afterward, the four of us gather in the downstairs bedroom where Karen reads aloud. We are on to the new Harry Potter.

  Dumbledore says to Harry, "Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it."

  And then we come to this:

  All in all, the temptation to take another gulp of Felix Felicis was becoming stronger by the day, for surely this was a case for, as Hermione put it, "tweaking the circumstances"?

  Finally Harry takes the drug.

  "What does it feel like?" whispered Hermione.

  Harry did not answer for a moment. Then, slowly but surely, an exhilarating sense of infinite opportunity stole through him; he felt as though he could have done anything, anything at all...

  He got to his feet, smiling, brimming with confidence.

  "Excellent," he said. "Really excellent. Right..."

  The kids are asleep.

  Karen and I walk up the narrow staircase to the drafty third-floor corner bedroom that looks out over trees that creak like rocking chairs. I check my answering machine in Inverness. I hear Nic's voice. It's brittle, breaking up.

  He is crying.

  No. Why.

  "Please call me," he says.

  I check the time. He called about three hours ago. Nic answers on the second ring.

  His voice is slurry, sticking to itself, his tongue in the way.

  "I want to tell you what's been going on," he says. "I want to tell you the truth. Three days ago we were at a party. Z. did a line. She asked me to do some with her. And I did. If she was going to go out, I was not going to let her go alone."

  Z. is the girl who broke his heart after their short time together. Before he relapsed last time. He's with her again, moved from his new apartment into hers.

  "Nic. No."

  "We've been high since then. Speed balls and meth." Speed balls are a combination of heroin and cocaine.

  "Now I took a sleeping pill to come down. I know I fucked up. I'm going to stop."

  I tell Nic the only thing I know to say, and what I know he isn't ready to hear.

  "You know who to call. Get help. Before it's too late. You and Z. both need help. You can't be together until you are well and sober."

  He hangs up.

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

  What was it this time? Approaching two years. The researchers said that it can take two years for a user's brain to fully recover. Nic has never made it two years since all this started.

  An eruption of the same old worry—all that could happen to him—but then I become overwhelmed by fatigue and fall asleep, my worry settling into a newly carved-out nook in my remodeled brain. Maybe this reflects something else that shifted in the hospital—the character if not the volume of the worry. Lying in the neuro ICU, I came to another startling realization when it dawned on me that Nic—and not only him, but Jasper and Daisy, too—would survive my death. It's not that they would be unaffected, but they would survive it. Possibly because there's a time in their lives when children are dependent on their parents, we tend to forget that they can and will survive without us. I did. By now, though, through Nic's addiction, I have learned that I am all but irrelevant to Nic's survival. It took my near death, however, to comprehend that his fate—and Jasper's and Daisy's—is separate from mine. I can try to protect my children, to help and guide them, and I can love them, but I cannot save them. Nic, Jasper, and Daisy will live, and someday they will die, with or without me.

  In the morning, I contemplate whether to tell the kids about Nic. In Daisy's letter to her teacher, she wrote, "My brother was a smoky guy." I suppose that is her way of summing up the drugs. And she said: "Everything is A okay now." I want everything to stay A-okay for her for at least a little while.

  I had so much wanted to end my book with Nic's letter to Jasper. It served too perfectly as a neat bow on the package, a happy ending. I wanted it to be the happy ending of our family's story about meth. I wanted
to move on from it. I wanted this now to be the post-Nic's-addiction phase of our lives. But no. It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.

  Nic's latest relapse is an undeniable measure of the relentlessness of this disease. It's not a new revelation, but a different iteration. Everything was going well for him. He had a girlfriend, so we cannot blame his loneliness. We cannot blame work that bores him, because he seems to enjoy his job and adore his coworkers. He considers them his good friends. He has a book deal and a shot at a job as an assistant editor at a magazine. His movie reviews have led to a few interviews and a review for Wired magazine. Perhaps most significant, he has a close group of friends who seem dear to one another.

  All of this is irrelevant now.

  Despite my knowledge that addiction does not respond to logic, I have held on to a vestige of an idea that the trappings of a life—girlfriend, job, money, solid friendships, a desire to do right by those you love—can make it OK, but they don't.

  Please God heal Nic.

  When I was in the hospital, many people told me they prayed for me, and I am enormously grateful to them. I never prayed. Perhaps I cannot pray because I never have, I do not know how, and I cannot conceive of a god to pray to. But as John Lennon said: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." Here I am with Nic using again and I know that there is nothing I can do and I cannot believe that we are here again and that the next telephone call could be the one I have feared for the past half-dozen years, and I am praying.

  Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic. Please God heal Nic.

  It's my plea to whatever higher power there is, the one they—they in the endless rehabs, the endless meetings—the one they promise is out there listening. I repeat it inside my head sometimes even without knowing I am saying it: Please God heal Nic.

  I pray even as the news in the papers makes my prayer seem insignificant in scale and wholly selfish. There is a devastating hurricane and flooding and suicide bombers and crashes and tsunamis and terrorism and cancer and war—endless and brutal war—disease and famine and earthquakes and everywhere there is addic tion, and today the heavens must be overwhelmed with the noise of all the prayers.