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

by David Sheff

  The morning blue sky is marred only by a smoke line from a jet.

  I drive through the town, following the directions that arrived in the mail from the treatment center. I turn down a dirt road lined with sagebrush and scrawny pines. It's like a scene in an old western. The place looks as if it once was a ranch. There are bunk-houses and a chow hall and a ramshackle main house and outbuildings sided with split logs. A line of log cabins on a ridge that looks onto the high desert. The place is rustic and modest, unlike Count Ohlhoff's old Victorian mansion or the austere modern hospital in the wine country or the stately brownstone on Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan or Jace's LA Melrose Place.

  I fill out forms in a small office and then wait outside for Nic. It is cold, but I have a thick coat.

  There. Nic.

  Deep breath.

  Standing under a sagging awning on a low porch of a rundown cabin, Nic.

  Nic in an army jacket and a purple paisley scarf.

  Nic in a faded T-shirt and cords with tiny leather patches and black leather sneakers.

  His gold and brown hair is curly and long. He pushes it out of his eyes.

  Nic walks down the rickety steps toward me. His face: thin and angular. His eyes flash at me with—?

  "Hey, Dad."

  If I admit how good it is to see him, I may be accused of forgetting the fury and terror, but it is good to see him. I am scared to death.

  He walks over. Reaches out his arms. I smell his smokiness and embrace him.

  While we wait for Vicki, we make small talk. Then Nic looks shyly up at me and says, "Thanks for coming. I didn't know if you would."

  I walk with him up to an outside smoking area under a wood roof with a few weathered chairs and a fire pit.

  I'm afraid and I don't want to want to see him and I don't want to be happy to see him.

  We meet some of his friends. There's a girl with pierced ears and inch-short bleached hair and a boy with no hair and a boy with curly black hair. A man who looks as if he spent his life in the sun comes over and shakes my hand. His skin is rough, brown wrinkled leather. He shakes my hand and tells me what a great son I have.

  Nic smokes. We sit near the fire pit and he says that things are changing.

  "I know you've heard it before, but this is different."

  "The problem is that I have heard that before, too."

  "I know."

  We go inside to meet with his chief therapist and wait there for his mother, who soon joins us. Vicki's wearing a beige jacket, her hair long and straight. I glance over at her. It is difficult to look her in the eyes even after all these years. I feel guilty. I was a child—exactly twenty-two, a year younger than Nic is now—when we met. I can try to forgive myself, whether or not she forgives me, because I was a child, but some things you just live with because you cannot go backward. I have been nervous to see Nic, but I was also nervous about seeing Vicki. We may have become closer over these past few years, we have, but though we talk on the phone and console each other and support each other and debate interventions and worry about the lack of good insurance (she is working now to get him back on her policy), we have not been in the same room for more than a few minutes since our divorce twenty years ago. Come to think of it, last week was our wedding anniversary, or would have been. The last time we were together for more than five minutes was Nic's high school graduation, when Vicki and I sat next to each other and Jasper sat on my other side. Afterward, Jas whispered, "Vicki seems nice."

  The therapist says that in her view Nic is doing well, is where he should be considering everything, asks us to notice how things compare and contrast with his previous times in rehab. She asks us all to think about what we would like to get out of this weekend. She wishes us luck.

  Nic, Vicki, and I have lunch. There's a spread of food. Tamales, salad, fruit. Nic eats a bowl of cereal.

  After lunch he leads us to another building, into a room with two wood-paneled walls and two white walls covered in patients' artwork. The floor tiles are off-white, some of them buckling. It smells of coffee that has been sitting all morning on a burner.

  A circle of chairs waits for us.

  I look over at Vicki. She has been a journalist for more than twenty years, but when we met she was working in a dental office in San Francisco. The office was below the northern California headquarters of the newly founded New West, where I was an assistant editor, my first job after college. It was an office devoted to New Age dentistry designed for pleasure, not pain, an airy place with a vaulted ceiling supported by exposed rough-hewn wood beams. Italian lights dangled from crisscrossing wires; there was a jungle of hanging potted ferns. Music—Vivaldi, Windham Hill—was piped in through patients' headphones, nitrous oxide through their masks. Vicki wore a white smock over a Laura Ashley print dress. She had dawn-blue eyes and Breck-girl hair. She was a recent arrival from Memphis, where she had an uncle who was a dentist, which somehow qualified her for her job as a dental assistant. It took her four tries before she got my x-rays right, but I thought, Blast away, because, on nitrous with her levitating before my eyes, I was content. We married the following year. I was twenty-three—exactly Nic's age now. The check to the pastor of the pretty white church bounced. No one but two friends were there in Half Moon Bay. We have not seen those friends since. I was twenty-three, and three weeks ago I turned fifty. My hair is no longer gray, it is white. It's getting like my father's cotton-white hair.

  The chairs are filled. I look around the circle. The patients and their parents and one's brother. Here we go again.

  Two therapists lead us. One has dark hair, one is light blond, both wear scarves, and both have eyes that are kind and intense. They take turns speaking. They set forth ground rules and expectations.

  I think, This is bullshit. I have been here and done this and it did no good whatsoever.

  First there is a questionnaire to fill out. Each of us. I set to work. After a half-hour or so, we take turns reading our answers. One mother, responding to the question "What are your family's problems?" reads, "I didn't think we had any problems, but I guess if we didn't we wouldn't be here. I thought we had a good family." She begins crying. Her daughter puts a hand on her mom's knee. "We do have a good family." Once again I'm back in a room with people like me, people hurt by addiction and uncomprehending—baffled and guilty and angry and overwhelmed and terrified.

  Next is art therapy.

  Art therapy!

  I have been through too much to be sitting on the floor finger-painting with Nic and my ex-wife. I am raging inside. Why did I come? Why am I here?

  We are given a piece of paper divided, for our family, into three wedges. Nic, Vicki, and I sit on the floor around the paper in a triangle. A triangle.

  As instructed, I start drawing. I choose chalk. I just start pushing the chalk around on the paper.

  The heater is turned up too high. There is not enough air.

  Vicki, using watercolors, paints a pretty scene like a beach or whatever it is. I am still raging. She is drawing a sunset. Bright and light blue and swirls. She is drawing a pretty picture, as if we were here together at family art day at Nic's preschool with a blue sky and a green grassy field. But then I look over at Nic's third of the paper. Using ink, he draws a heart. Not a valentine heart, not Cupid's heart, but a heart with muscle and tissue and ventricles connecting to an aorta, a pumping heart inside a body. His body. Attached to the aorta, a face, and then more faces at different angles with expressions of fury and desolation and horror and faces in pain. I draw with my chalk. I have made some kind of thick line coming up from the bottom of the paper, some river coming up, but then it splits open and flows into the two top corners of the page. I push so hard that the chalk disintegrates into powder.

  What's the point, it's a waste of time. Now Vicki has—here it comes, dark watery black is on her brush now and the pretty light blue sky is gone, covered with the watery swashes of black and sweeping, pouring brushstrokes. Nic begins writing h
ard, a word, I, two words, am, three words, sorry, writes them again, writes them again, writes them again, writes them again. He cannot, it seems, stop writing them. It is bullshit, a cheap attempt at—it is not bullshit, he is trying with excruciating desperation, which I can feel coming from him, to say something, to get out something that he cannot get out.

  It's easy to forget that no matter how hard it is for us, it is harder for him.

  My drawing—now there are drops, tears, from the two branches of the tributary and six circles above it. Then I know—I have drawn the opening up of my brain and all that is in there—tears pain blood rage terror. The broken suitcase with the circles, its contents—me, former me—spilling out.

  His mother has drawn a small red smear in the center and there is a drip from it—blood there, too.

  Nic is writing I am sorry, and I want to cry. No, I think, don't let him in again. No don't let him in again. No don't let him in again.

  We take turns, family by family, describing what's on the pages and what it felt like working next to one another. Vicki's red isn't blood, it's a red balloon that she wants to hold on to, to take her away from the black storm. Nic looks at her and says how remarkable it is that she is here. I look up at her and here she is. I look at Nic. Here is Nic with his parents. I feel sadness, overwhelming sadness, that she has gone through so much, and mostly sadness that Nic has gone through so much, and then me, us, and I am mortified to feel sadness, mortified to feel ... Oh, Nic, I am sorry, too, so so sorry.

  Nic says that the work he's doing here isn't about finding excuses for his debauchery or his craziness and it isn't about blaming anyone. It is about healing. His therapists have told him that he has to work through whatever it is that causes him to harm himself, to put himself in danger, to turn from those friends who love him, to lash out at his parents and others who love him, to lash out at himself, mostly at himself, to try to destroy himself. He is an addict, but why? Besides the luck of the gene-pool draw, what is it? They want him to face it all so he can heal and move forward.

  People in the other family groups talk about their pictures, what they evoke, what working on them was like. Then we comment on one another's. One girl, Nic's friend, says how different the images are in our family's pictures and how intense each one is, but she says that Nic's heart leads into ventricles and my stream of chalk looks like a broken artery.

  Somehow I am crying. Nic's hand is on my shoulder.

  When we emerge before sunset, an imperious moon hovers over the mountain. I look at it and understand that I have not held out hope for this new program, not because I don't hope that it works and not because it cannot work, but because I am terrified to my core to hope again.

  I go to a bookstore and buy Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. I want to escape for tonight, and I want to hide in someone else's story. Back in my motel room, the first thing I open to is the epigraph from Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster. I read it and read it again. "Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important and when you say of a thing that 'nothing hangs on it' it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing—how am I to put it—which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won't have things hanging on it for ever." I am almost shaking. I think, How innocent we are of our mistakes and how responsible we are for them.

  This is about healing, not blaming. Is it possible to get beyond blaming? At one point Vicki says that she used to carry around so much anger toward me that it was as if she had on a backpack filled with bricks. "It's such a relief not to be carrying them around anymore," she says. After some of her comments in our next group session, I tell her, "Maybe there are still a few bricks in there." She acknowledges, "Yes, maybe there are." But we are now united in one of the most primal of human behaviors, trying to save our child. The therapist says that the weekend is not about blaming, but about moving beyond lingering resentment. A father here says, "Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die."

  In the morning, I again drive up to the treatment center. There's Nic in a New York Art Academy T-shirt, bell-bottom jeans with frayed cuffs, and a multicolored coat. He wears a knit cap low over his eyes. We drink coffee.

  The families have a collective group therapy session. It's an appallingly vulnerable position—group therapy with an audience. But I admit that it's a relief to say what's on my mind. When Nic speaks, I feel a range of emotions—anxiety, fear, exasperation, anger, sorrow, remorse—and there are bursts of pride and dangerous flashes of memory of what we have had, and of love. I want to open up and hear Nic and believe him, but I am unwilling to tear down the fragile dam that I have constructed to protect myself. I am afraid I'll be drowned.

  Parents are suckers. I am a sucker to contemplate opening to the idea of healing. And yet ... Suddenly I recall when I prayed for Nic. I never planned to pray. I just looked back and realized I had been praying. What did I pray for? I never said Stop taking drugs. I never said Stay away from meth. I said, Please God heal Nic. I prayed, Please God heal Nic. Please God heal every ravaged person in this room, the dear ravaged people on this planet, these dear, wounded people. I look around at them. They are brave. They are here. However they got here, they are here. They are here and so there is a chance.

  At the final session of the last day, we are instructed to think about the future. The future. It's fraught with danger. We map it out. Literally. Our leaders give each family large sheets of paper with a shape drawn in the bottom left-hand corner representing one piece of land—where we are—and a shape in the top right corner representing our destination. Between them are small circles, stepping-stones.

  The instructions. Indicate where you are today. And where you want to go. Indicate the steps—concrete steps—you can take to get there. Think about the next few months, not the rest of your lives. Where do you want to go, and what steps will you take to get there. "And oh," the therapist says, "the rest of the area of the paper is a swamp. To get across it from where you are now to where you want to go, using the steppingstones, you must avoid the perils in the swamp. Indicate the pitfalls lurking there, waiting for you."

  Nic, using a thick red marker, has no trouble identifying the perils. There are so many—all the old mistakes, habits, the temptations of drugs. He draws a hypodermic needle. There is so much red that it is almost impossible to find room to write on the small circles, the steppingstones. The stones look so small, so unsteady, in comparison. But on them, Nic writes our family's plan and his plan. How we will go slow, taking small steps forward. How we will support, not impede one another. Nic's steppingstones include AA and other conscientious work that will, he hopes, repair his relationships. He mentions Karen and looks up at me. "I really love Karen," he says. "We are friends—I miss her." With Jasper and Daisy. "I know it will take a long time," he says. There's a lot to write. When the map is complete, it is clear that his mother's and my tasks are not inconsiderable—to step back, be supportive, but let Nic's recovery be his recovery as we work on creating healthy, as Nic describes them, loving and supportive, but independent, relationships. But most of the hardest work falls on Nic's shoulders, because the perils are waiting for him, enticing him to fail. The perils in slashing red marks are pernicious and ubiquitous and sinister. It is a swamp, and it will take a miracle for Nic to navigate it. Just as I think that, I look over at Nic's mother and I look at Nic. We three are here together, and I think, This is a miracle. Is it too much to hope for others?

  I fly home. I feel as if someone has sawed through my chest and made a series of cuts from my clavicle to each shoulder blade, then back at the center, cut southward through the middle of my chest and stomach to just above my groin, and then more horizontal cuts from the tip of one pelvic bone to the other. Then, with plastic-gloved hands, he reached into the flaps of flesh and pulled them back on one side and then the other, tearing the sinews and muscle and skin so that I am here with my guts exposed.

  The feeling does not abate. I am ho
me again and Karen is off with Daisy at the orthodontist, which leaves me alone with Jasper, who is playing guitar—what he terms the "pluckage" for a song he is recording on Garage Band. He adds drums, other percussion, and synthesizer. Next he records his voice, improvising funny lyrics. For the chorus, he repeats the word doughnuts as if it is the dénouement in the libretto of an opera. When the raucous composition is complete, he burns it onto a CD.

  It's time to ferry him to lacrosse. Driving, we listen to his music and then to the White Stripes. When we get to the field, he leaps out of the car, throws on his uniform, and runs to his friends.

  I stand on the sidelines. The boys in their gladiator gear breathe vapor like dragons because of the chill. They race after the small white ball, scooping it up into the mesh pockets at the end of their sticks, hurling it forward to one another on the field.

  My cell phone is in my pocket, but it is off, a state formerly unthinkable. As the family therapist noted, the phone connected me to Nic, and each shrill ring provided a jolt to my heart like a defibrillator. Apparently it jolted each of our hearts. Every call fed my growing obsession with the promise of reassurance that Nic was all right or confirmation that he was not. My addiction to his addiction has not served Nic or me or anyone around me. Nic's addiction became far more compelling than the rest of my life. How could a child's life-or-death struggle not? Now I am in my own program to recover from my addiction to his. The deep work occurs in therapy, but I take practical steps, too. Like turning off my cell phone.

  After practice, Jasper and I go to a sporting goods store. He has grown out of his cleats and needs new ones. To help pay for them, he uses a gift card left over from Christmas. Standing by the cashier, when he retrieves the card from his wallet, a piece of paper falls to the floor.