Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  From there, we progressed in different directions.

  Beau became a dock manager—the guy in the hard hat and white lab coat who toted a clipboard as he marked shipments headed for the deep freeze and had the pallet drivers sign paperwork. He worked from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and never got his nails dirty. He worked desk jobs all through college.

  I unloaded the sixty-pound boxes from railcars filled from floor to ceiling, often working from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. It paid better and you earned overtime. I also worked at a local restaurant in Greenville, Delaware, as a waiter before being demoted to busboy, after which I was demoted to dishwasher. Later, I parked cars for a valet company and pushed a cart through the Senate office buildings to deliver photos taken with visitors.

  Beau clearly made smarter choices right from the start.

  In high school, Beau became known as “the sheriff.” Not only was he the designated driver, he was also the designated leader. Parents knew that as long as their kids were with Beau, they were safe. He would disqualify friends from a party because they drank too much; if Beau told you to stop drinking, you stopped drinking. He was the sole arbiter and everybody respected that. But he didn’t act like everybody’s mother; he was having as much fun as the rest of us. We all just knew that his judgment was intact while ours wasn’t.

  Beau was beloved, by me most of all. He was an engaging, approachable, and striking figure, even back then. He was quick with a smile in a way that was impeccably authentic. He exuded a sense of complete confidence in who he was, whatever the situation.

  People flocked to him, in any room, at every age. He was always full of energy, always needed to be doing something, whether it was playing sports or going out. He was captain of the high school tennis team and played varsity soccer. He knew early on he was headed into politics. It’s what he wanted to do. He was president of his class every year.

  He was also funny as hell, often with a shocking sense of humor. He could be biting, but he was never mean. He was competitive but not obsessively so—he wasn’t a jackass. He was almost compulsive in the way he dressed, which later meant the same khakis or jeans, an Izod polo shirt or Brooks Brothers button-down, and a variation of the same loafers, lined up perfectly against a wall before he went to bed. He had the longest eyelashes to go with those striking blue eyes. He had great hair. He was that rare kid who other kids didn’t resent for his good looks. Instead, everyone felt better just by being around him.

  He didn’t avoid conflict, didn’t back away from it, but he was slow to create it or engage in it. We argued as kids about kid things: whose turn it was on Atari, what TV show to watch, which side of the couch the other had to stay on. Later we’d argue about the best directions to take to get somewhere and what time we needed to leave. Beau was always late, his sense of time completely warped. If we had five minutes to be somewhere, and the location was twenty-five minutes away, he’d shrug and say, “We’ll make it.” It drove me insane.

  More than anything else, Beau was fun. He could fashion a great time out of the incredibly mundane. He loved music and he loved to drive and he usually combined the two. He was nuts about the first car that Dad got for us, a 1972 green Caprice Classic convertible with white vinyl seats, which he picked up at Manheim’s Auto Auction for $2,100. He and I spent a lot of time riding in cars together, and he always had music on and he always sang along. We loved to listen to WXPN, then the free-form college radio station broadcast out of Penn. His musical tastes ran from the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills & Nash to early R.E.M. and the Hooters.

  We were inseparable, often referred to by a single moniker: BeauAndHunt. We went together to every dance, every party. We double-dated, even for the prom. We had the same group of friends.

  We thought alike but acted on our thoughts differently. If we went to the highest point of a cliff to jump off into a quarry’s water hole, our instincts were the same: do it. But I had no filter. I’d walk up, look down, and say let’s go. Beau would arrive at the same decision, but he was almost clinical. He’d inquire about the water’s depth, inspect for rocks. In the end, we’d jump together. Friends viewed us as different but not as separate. Two sides of the same coin.

  The biggest difference between us: I drank and Beau didn’t.

  CHAPTER FOUR LOADED

  The first drink I remember taking was a glass of champagne when I was eight. My dad had just been reelected to the Senate, in 1978, and I was at an election-night victory celebration at Archmere Academy in Claymont, where Dad went to high school and Beau and I would go later. I took the glass under a table and drank the whole thing. I didn’t know what I was doing, really—to me, champagne was just a fizzy drink. I wasn’t trying to get drunk; it would have been just as likely for me to wind up under the same table stuffing my face with a piece of cake. Someone must have looked under there at some point and spotted this eight-year-old with an empty champagne glass, acting kind of goofy. Next thing I remember, my grandfather took me outside, somewhere near the football field, to get some fresh air and straighten up.

  The first drink I ever took knowing what I was doing—or, more accurately, knowing what I shouldn’t be doing—was in the summer between eighth and ninth grades. I was fourteen, staying overnight at the house of my best friend, who was a year older. His parents went out for a while and we swiped a six-pack from the garage, splitting it between us. When the parents came home, we pretended to be asleep in his room because three beers at that age left us drunk off our asses. I woke up early the next morning to make nine o’clock mass and felt like shit. I got up in the middle of the service, made my way outside, and threw up. Dad thought I had the flu.

  The troubling thing, looking back: Getting blasted and sick as a dog didn’t scare me or turn me off one bit. Instead, I thought it was kind of cool. While I felt a nagging guilt from disappointing my father, who didn’t drink and who encouraged us to stay away from alcohol as well, I wanted to do it again.

  A short time later, Beau and I went away to the Finger Lakes, as we did every summer to spend several weeks with our grandparents, the Hunters—Mommy’s parents, Louise and Robert. (Robert Hunter is my and Beau’s son’s namesake.) Their clapboard house with a wraparound porch sat on eighty wooded acres on the southern end of Lake Owasco, in the heart of God’s Country, in upstate New York.

  Beau and I loved our grandparents so much. They never got over their daughter’s death, of course, but they embraced us, and we embraced them, in a way that helped us all continue to feel the massive amounts of love that Neilia left behind. Dad insisted that we know our mommy’s parents and her life. So we spent the month of August with Mom-Mom and Da-Da at Lake Owasco, as well as every spring break at their winter home in Florida, all the way through college.

  Da-Da was a restaurateur who owned a downtown diner in Auburn, New York, a classic silver dining car on the Owasco River. (You can visit Hunter’s Dinerant today and see a picture of my grandparents on the wall behind the homemade pies.) As much as an eatery, it was a community gathering spot, and when my grandfather didn’t see someone come in for a while, he’d visit to make sure they were all right.

  The depth of his concern and generosity wasn’t known to Beau and me until he died, in 1991. At his funeral, people came up to us, one after another, to say that if it hadn’t been for our grandfather they never could’ve paid for college, or bought their first home, or started their business.

  Our days up there started with making the rounds with Da-Da, all three of us packed in the front seat of his yacht-like Cadillac Eldorado. One of us rode on our grandfather’s lap until we were eleven or twelve, when he’d let each of us drive by ourselves up the steep stone driveway, our heads barely peeking above the dashboard. We visited every relative within driving distance, starting with our great-grandfather and our great-aunt Winona, who didn’t really speak much—she had an intellectual disability—but had the sweetest smile that lit up the world whenever we arrived.

  We also spent time every trip w
ith Mommy’s two brothers: Uncle Mike, who would take us fishing, and Uncle Johnny, an electrical lineman for Niagara Mohawk who’d take us camping for a few days in his pop-up camper.

  It wasn’t until we were in our teens that Beau and I learned they weren’t our Mommy’s biological brothers. They were siblings in every way except by birth—they were actually her second cousins. Da-Da’s brother, who died before I was born, was an alcoholic who had a daughter about ten years older than Mommy. She had alcohol and drug problems as well, and had two children out of wedlock. Da-Da and Mom-Mom adopted them both at birth. I don’t think anyone was keeping that story from us all those years; we just always knew them as brothers who grew up together with our mommy.

  Those summers were free-range bliss: mornings with Aunt Winona; learning to play lacrosse with Uncle Johnny; going to Skaneateles to see Aunt Grace and Uncle Alan, who lived next door to the house where our mommy grew up; then swimming in the lake all afternoon, or playing thirty-six holes of golf and collecting balls, often when it seemed Beau and I were the only two people on the course. Our treat afterward was Texas Hots—wieners sliced down the middle with hot sauce—and soft-serve ice cream at the Skanellus Drive-In.

  We’d take day trips with Da-Da, like to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, two hours east. One summer the three of us found a submerged wooden boat that had washed up in the shallows of the lake. We dragged it out and spent the summer repairing and caulking it. When we finished, Da-Da rigged it with a tiny motor and off we went. Beau, Da-Da, and I were so proud of ourselves for getting it back on the lake—until the boat started taking on water as we made the turn around a second cove. We tried frantically to get it back to shore. The boat sank right where we had found it.

  Those summers became so deep-rooted in our lives that Beau and I went back there together for the last time in the winter of 2014. We stayed at the lake for two days, visiting everyone we could. Six months later, Beau was dead.

  But that summer before my freshman year in high school was cut short for me a couple of weeks after we arrived. The kid I drank those beers with had gone on a joyride with a girl we both knew. He was drinking as they sped down a long road, lost control of his car, and crashed into a tree. He survived, but the girl was killed—the ultimate guilt-inducing tragedy.

  I returned from the Finger Lakes early to be with him. His mother had asked me to come over, believing I had the ability to be empathetic while still giving my friend his space. I stayed with him the rest of that summer. He cried every day. I just sat with him.

  Yet when school started that fall, something changed. We drifted apart. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I’m sure it was because I had seen my friend all summer at his most exposed and unguarded—a horribly vulnerable place for a teenager to be. He’d shared so much pain that I think my presence was a constant reminder of it as he reentered the larger world. I’m sure he resented it as he tried to toggle between dealing with that tragedy and wanting to move on.

  My freshman year was awful. I stayed at Wilmington Friends, even though Beau had gone on to Archmere, and everything felt off and awkward, including having someone I thought was a close friend turn on me. I was four feet eleven inches tall and weighed 90 pounds—I’d sprout to six feet one inch, 175 pounds less than three years later—and played on the football team. The school was small enough that almost everyone played, even if only on the varsity practice squad. I loved football—the team won state that year—but I was so undersized that I sustained concussions and broke what seemed like every bone in my body: my arm twice, my fingers, a wrist, an ankle. Older guys picked on me because I got injured so often. That hurt more than the actual injuries.

  I must’ve been a sight. Even Beau later jokingly nicknamed me “Lucas,” after the title character in the movie starring Corey Haim as a scrawny, socially inept high school freshman who wants to play football.

  I was also becoming obsessed with girls, even though I hadn’t hit puberty—another source of ribbing by the older players. That spring, I went with a bunch of guys to a senior party and got really wasted. All of a sudden, I felt comfortable in a crowd filled with the same kids who’d made me feel uncomfortable all year. I went up to the prettiest girl in school, a five-foot-ten-inch senior, and asked her to the prom. She basically ignored me, God bless her, and I got hazed about it later, including by my former friend.

  Still, the drinking was a revelation. It seemed to solve every unanswered question about why I felt the way I felt. It took away my inhibitions, my insecurities, and often my judgment. It made me feel complete, filling a hole I didn’t even realize was there—a feeling of loss and my sense of not being understood or fitting in.

  I transferred to Archmere for my sophomore year. I drank in earnest in high school—mostly beer or on occasion a bottle of whatever someone had stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinet—though I didn’t drink during football season, and no one drank during the school week. But there were all of these old du Pont estates in our area, so we’d have house parties inside these aging, eclectic mansions. Beau was concerned about me drinking, but he never demanded that I stop. He wasn’t a scold. We never lectured each other about anything. Besides, I wasn’t out of control. I wasn’t driving drunk. Beau was usually driving me.

  My senior year was the roughest, from beginning to end. Beau had left for Penn, and even though he was only forty minutes away, his not being home was a big change for me. The dynamics were all off.

  Dad had dropped out of the Democratic primary for president a few weeks after school began. It was a confusing, angering disappointment for us all. Dad exited the campaign trail to preside as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee over the contentious and historically consequential U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, one of the tensest and most consuming periods of Dad’s Senate career.

  All of that paled compared to Dad’s life-threatening aneurysm, which knocked him down in February 1988, less than four months after Bork’s nomination was rejected by the full Senate. He was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center, where he was given last rites before surgery. My worst fear—losing Dad or Beau—seemed on the brink of coming true. He’d barely recuperated when he suffered a pulmonary embolism, and then he had surgery for another aneurysm—all within four months.

  I visited him at Walter Reed almost every weekend. He was barely recognizable: tubes everywhere, head shaved, staples across his skull. Severed nerves caused the left side of his face to droop. I had no idea how things would end up—from my perspective, none of it looked hopeful—and indeed he didn’t return to the Senate for seven months.

  When I wasn’t at Walter Reed I was mostly alone, with Beau away at school and Mom spending so much time at the hospital. I did fine in school, but honestly, I don’t have many good memories from that year at all.

  Then, in June, I did absolutely the last thing anybody else needed to deal with: I got busted for cocaine possession. It happened right after graduation, during Beach Week in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, an annual gathering of young knuckleheads. I’d done coke maybe three or four times before; there was a period in the spring, following football season, when guys started to use, though I wasn’t one of the regulars. But on the second night of partying I was doing it with a friend and a girl from our class in a car parked outside a house party. The police came to break things up, and someone inside must have told them what we were up to. Cops knocked on our window, found the drugs, and cuffed us.

  I was eighteen. I ended up doing a pretrial intervention with six months of probation, after which the arrest was expunged from my record. (I disclosed it voluntarily during a 2006 Senate committee hearing as part of my nomination to the Amtrak board of directors.)

  It scared me straight—for a while. I owned up to it and didn’t do coke again that summer or, really, more than a couple of times in college. Beau was surprised I did cocaine but he helped me get through it.

  I knew I’d let down Dad. He was still recuperating
, still in rough shape, and while he surely was upset, I also knew even then that there was nothing I could do that would stop his love. He was the strictest of any of our friends’ parents—we had a curfew; if we stayed over at a friend’s house we had to call him at midnight. Yet if you screwed up and it wasn’t something done out of meanness or intended to be hurtful, he would love you through it. So many parents use withdrawal as punishment for their kids. That was never my dad.

  This consequence was more his style: I started working twelve-hour days as a gofer at a construction site right behind our house. It was the worst job I ever had. Once, when they were building cinder-block foundations after a huge storm, I had to wade up to my waist in clay mud to mark where the blocks were. The guy operating the backhoe scooped out a huge pile of mud and water and, when I wasn’t looking, dumped it right on top of me. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

  I wanted to walk off the job right then—I should’ve walked off. But I knew I couldn’t. That’s how badly I’d screwed up in New Jersey.

  Beau didn’t take his first drink until he turned twenty-one, when it was legal. He drank socially after that, then quit at thirty. One reason: Dad and his vocal aversion to alcohol. Growing up, Dad had watched relatives he adored—smart, learned, working-class guys—as they engaged in these grandly intellectual conversations around his grandmother Finnegan’s dinner table. Then he’d watch it all devolve into disturbing drunkenness.

  Some of his relatives had struggled with alcoholism since high school. He saw it as a problem that loomed large in the family history. It scared him. He made a conscious choice not to be seduced by it and he encouraged Beau and me to do the same.

  Beau could. I couldn’t.

  * * *

  I was anxious to get to college. My first day at Georgetown I went and talked with the football coach. I ran a fast forty-yard dash and he told me to suit up—definitive proof that Georgetown football ain’t Alabama football. I played for about two weeks. It was awful. On the one hand, I was a walk-on on a team where everybody already knew each other from preseason workouts. On the other hand, because of the two-a-day practices, starting at 6 a.m., I missed out on everyone in the dorms staying up late and getting to know each other there. Not the most social person to begin with, I felt like I wasn’t meeting anybody. While Beau joined a fraternity at Penn, that option did not exist for me at Georgetown. Besides, I would never put myself in a position of letting someone decide whether or not they were going to choose me. I knew what my reaction would be to someone in that situation: Fuck you.