Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  Then, over Memorial Day weekend 2016, I flew to Monte Carlo to attend a meeting of the Burisma board. I felt strong enough by then to bring along my oldest daughter, Naomi, presenting the trip to her as a gift for graduating earlier that month from Penn.

  The weekend quickly turned contentious—then disastrous. The board meeting itself was unremarkable and mostly pro forma. However, I soon stepped on a stage to discuss global economics with a panel of esteemed, never-met-an-opposing-opinion-they-couldn’t-dismiss economists and former ministers of finance from across Europe.

  My first mistake: saying what I meant. My second mistake: being right about it.

  I posited an opinion that the referendum on Brexit, to be held in the United Kingdom in just a few weeks, had a damn good chance of passing. Conventional wisdom held that Brexit was a long shot. But conventional wisdom was dissolving with the rise of far-right populism around the world, including in Poland, Brazil, and France. In the U.S., Trump had become the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee. It didn’t take a psychic to see where things were headed. All you had to do was stick a finger in the air to gauge the winds of change.

  I didn’t argue that Brexit was a wise choice for the UK. But as with similar movements elsewhere, that didn’t appear to matter. I put the odds at better than even that the Brits would cut off their nose to spite their face and vote to eject from the European Union, despite what seemed like the prevailing view to the contrary. Yet my fellow panelists, who’d invested their careers in establishing and preserving the EU, would have none of it. Basically, they called me crazy.

  I could’ve just let it roll off my back and moved on. Or I could’ve responded more diplomatically. Instead, when the group of graybeard wise men dismissed my Brexit handicapping with what I took to be patronizing arrogance—What does an American know?—I pulled my finger out of the air and stuck it, metaphorically, in the esteemed panel’s collective eyeball.

  The discussion quickly turned combative, then bordered on ugly. I spotted Naomi squirming in the audience.

  I got through it but reached for a couple of drinks afterward. That night, while Naomi went off with Zlochevsky’s daughter, I wandered into the hotel nightclub and drank some more. Monte Carlo provides a temptation for any taste. When I went to the restroom, someone offered me cocaine.

  I took it.

  I regretted the slip immediately. When we returned to the States, I went straight to the clinic and confessed to my counselors what I’d done. I even discussed it at that day’s group session. I saw my relapse as a troubling but hardly irreversible setback. I was still committed to recovery.

  Then a counselor told me he had to inform Kathleen of what had happened—that was the deal cut when I started there. He also said I needed to take a drug test, even though I’d just admitted what I’d done. Kathleen and I had been separated for close to a year and our divorce was imminent. The drug test was not covered by the privacy guidelines in HIPAA and could be used in court against me. I felt ambushed. I refused to take the drug test while continuing to own up to what I’d done. I didn’t want it on paper. I just wanted to get better.

  The debate grew heated. A counselor at another clinic had already told my daughters months earlier that if they spoke with me they’d be complicit in my death—in my mind, an infuriating breach. So I was working with a short fuse anyway. That fuse was then lit by the clinic’s stubborn insistence on a drug test to prove something I’d openly conceded.

  I stormed out of the building. And like any proper addict or alcoholic, I embraced my resentment to stoke my addiction.

  That, in a nutshell, is addict-think.

  I jumped on the bike I’d ridden there and headed straight to an area near Franklin Square, at Fourteenth Street and K, a longtime drug bazaar blocks from the White House. It was a warm late afternoon and the streets were mostly cleared out. It didn’t take me long to spot the person I was looking for:

  Bicycles.

  Almost anyone who lives or works in DC has at one time or another seen Bicycles—also known as Rhea, a homeless, middleaged Black woman—weaving in and out of traffic or swerving around sidewalk pedestrians on a mountain bike that looks three times too big for her. She usually sports a backpack and a baseball cap, and has a sharp, piercing voice that can be heard a block away as she shouts for everybody to get the hell out of her way, which she does almost continuously. (Because I believe Rhea still lives on the streets, I’m using a pseudonym for her.)

  I first met Rhea sometime around my senior year at Georgetown. I’d been out drinking with friends one night, got into a foul, to-hell-with-it mood, and broke off from the pack in the middle of the night to visit this same park. It was at the height of the crack epidemic, in the early 1990s, and with a fledgling addict’s wrongheaded sense of misadventure, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about.

  A crackhead seemed to spontaneously generate in front of me. He asked what I was looking for. I told him I wanted some “hard,” the street term for crack cocaine. He said sure, just give him $100, he’d be right back. I called bullshit: I wasn’t some naïve college bro, or at least that’s what I tried to project. The guy said no problem, he’d leave behind one of his shoes to ensure his return. That made a certain 2 a.m. sense to me: Who’d take off without returning for his shoe? He assured me he’d be back with my request in no time.

  I stood there in the pitch black, in a park you wouldn’t want to loiter around in the middle of the day, let alone the middle of the night, and waited—gripping his ratty old shoe.

  Ten minutes later, with the crackhead long gone, this tiny Black woman, a few years older than me but looking twice my age, rolled up on a bike with a shoe that matched the one I was still holding.

  “You stupid motherfucker,” she said in a loud, exasperated tone. “You fell for one of the oldest cons in the book. You stupid…”

  “Who the fuck are you?” I shot back.

  I tried to maintain my streetwise pose. It must have been laughable.

  Bicycles then explained with a kind of world-weary patience that dealers often keep old, thrown-away shoes hidden nearby to rip off easy marks like me. To prove her point, she’d retrieved a shoe the crackhead had stashed away.

  I stood there like the dumb, gullible college bro I was. Bicycles then sold me what little crack she had on her, and told me to get the hell out.

  “You going to get hurt, boy.”

  * * *

  Fast-forward two decades later:

  After storming out of the clinic, I spotted Bicycles wheeling by, motioned for her to come over, and asked if she could get me some hard. Since my days at Georgetown, I’d handed her change or bills when I saw her on the street and we’d become passing acquaintances. Washington can be a small town like that. More recently, since I’d moved into my apartment, she occasionally rode by my second-story window and called out to see if I needed anything. She’d take whatever money I threw down, buy me cigarettes or whatever else I needed from a nearby 7-Eleven, and keep what was left for herself.

  Bicycles’s response to my request for “hard” this time was flat and knowing:

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  Bicycles is a decades-long user, not a dealer; whatever she sold she did only to make enough money to buy. But I persisted. She didn’t require much convincing. She needed my money as much as I needed her access to drugs; she’d take my $100 to buy ten dime bags, hand over eight, and keep two for herself. The relationship was symbiotic: we’d exchange money and drugs despite the fact that each of us sincerely wished the other didn’t use. It was two crack addicts who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.

  A one-act crack farce.

  After going through those ritual motions of concern, Rhea snapped the $100 from my hand, pedaled off, and returned minutes later with what I wanted.

  I’m not exactly sure of the sequence of events that followed. But I do remember that the first hits I took resulted in only a slightly better bang than I
got that time back in college. Then, like now, I pushed the small rock of crack into the tip of a cigarette and lit it up.

  Like most things one wants to become successful at, smoking crack requires practice and the right tools. I returned to the same spot the next day, and this time Rhea arrived with the works: crack, a pipe, and a screen. She also gave me a brief tutorial to make sure I took a proper hit.

  I spotted a chair half hidden by a pillar in front of a closed coffee shop. I settled in, lifted the pipe to my lips, lit the rock, and inhaled. In an instant, I experienced what’s called a “bell ringer”—crack’s holy grail.

  The sensation is one of utter, almost otherworldly well-being. You are at once energetic, focused, and calm. Blood rushes to every extremity; your skin ripples with what feels like bumblebees. Eyes get jangly yet stay alert. Eardrums compress to the point that every sound pours through with such intensity—like a shot through a rifle barrel—that you think you’re having auditory hallucinations. You’re actually just hearing with hypersensitivity—you’re a field dog. You pick up the merest peep from a block away.

  I chased that high, on and off, for the next three years.

  * * *

  If the intent when reaching for that first hit is to anesthetize yourself so you won’t feel the hurt or shame you felt just moments before, then crack is your new best friend.

  After that first bell ringer, I smoked it every day for the next two weeks. It was, indeed, my new best friend; booze was now like an old high school buddy I still got together with but saw less of as time went on. I spent a couple of thousand dollars on crack in those first two weeks, with Rhea serving as my conduit. Before I knew it, I was all in. In the big, bad world of functional substance abuse, as practiced in polite society, I’d crossed what for many is an unfathomable line. I knew it as I crossed it. I’d lift a crack pipe to my mouth, flick the lighter with my thumb, and before inhaling think, What the fuck!

  But my new best friend turned more and more demanding. Addiction’s most self-defeating algorithm: if you’re numbing yourself against acute feelings of emptiness or trauma or self-loathing, those feelings will double in intensity as each high tails off.

  The antidote is simple: more. Yet the more of the drug you use, the less effective it becomes—the less bang that you and your self-worth get for your buck. There’s an antidote for that, too: lots more. The power of not feeling, if only for increasingly fleeting seconds, remains the only power you have.

  Crazy as it sounds, a substance abuser often feels like a smarter version of a non-abuser. I wasn’t a sloppy or mean drunk; I wasn’t an addled or dangerous crackhead. Whether it’s genetic or physiological, I have the capacity and tenacity to use to excess, and a single-minded unwillingness to quit. That makes addiction easy rather than hard. I had figured out how not to feel bad while still going on about my business. I couldn’t comprehend how people who weren’t addicts didn’t understand how great crack cocaine is. I mean, if you knew how good it made you feel, maybe you wouldn’t look at me like I had three heads.

  Of course, it’s all delusional and self-defeating—but not at the moment. At the moment, you can do crack around the clock, every day, and still make your meetings (sometimes), still return your calls (sometimes), still pay your bills (sometimes).

  And when you can’t do those things? There’s always crack to make you feel not so bad about it.

  Here’s the thought you never have:

  Put. The. Pipe. Down.

  Crack is just an answer. It’s not the answer, but it’s the most obvious answer to the question non-abusers ask addicts all the time.

  Them: Why do you do drugs?

  Us: Because they make me feel good.

  All that was ahead.

  * * *

  Rhea eventually moved into my apartment and stayed for about five months.

  It was raining cats and dogs one evening when she stopped by under my window to see if there was anything I needed. She was soaking wet, and I insisted she come inside. She lugged her bike up to the second floor, saw a mattress in my empty second bedroom, and fell asleep there.

  The next morning, I went to work and left a spare key. When I came home, she was still there and nothing was missing. Three days later, she was there still. Five days later, I cut her her own set of keys. She never officially moved in; I never officially said, “Take the spare bedroom.” But she didn’t move out until I moved out.

  I know it sounds insane. Yet I also knew Rhea was smart enough, and had been on the streets long enough, to realize she had a good thing. She was the most honest crook I’ve ever known. She’d call me at work and start the conversation with “I found some of your credit cards…” Or: “I didn’t steal your ATM card. I took it. The difference between stealing and taking is me telling you I used them. I won’t ever lie.”

  “Rhea,” I’d say with a sigh, “we have to get over that.”

  Rhea is also the funniest person I know, as well as the most eccentric. She’s plagued by obsessive-compulsive behavior from her years of addiction. She dresses in clean, well-maintained clothes and always smells fresh—or fresh-ish. She showers twice a day when she can and brushes her teeth and cleans her nails obsessively. She has slept on the subway for days or even weeks, using a small public storage unit to stow her clothes, which she keeps compulsively tidy. Inside my apartment, she watched only true-crime shows, feeding a paranoia that slipped into something more acute when she smoked too much and went too long without sleep.

  One TV episode detailed the story of a clinically insane guy who broke into houses, lived in the walls, then killed everybody. He was eventually caught but escaped from prison. I was in L.A. when Rhea watched it, and she called me in a panic. When I got home, she’d put tape over my door’s peephole, as if passersby could peek in. She was certain the wall-living maniac was still on the loose and about to show up any minute.

  Rhea told me endless stories about her childhood. She was raised in her grandmother’s house in southeast Washington, DC, near RFK Stadium, and so was a Washington football fan. Neither parent was around and there was little supervision. She was… mischievous. She’d sneak into the police precinct station, loiter around the lobby, then crawl beneath a bench and spend the night. Other times she slept in the backs of parked police cruisers, hiding in the rear footwell and riding around without the cops knowing. She once saw a Prince concert after sneaking into the arena two days before the show and sleeping under the bleachers.

  When she was around sixteen, she decided to go to Tampa to see Washington play in the Super Bowl. She slipped onto a train bound for Florida and made it all the way to Norfolk. A porter spotted her as she headed to the dining car. When he asked for her ticket, Rhea said her parents had it. “Honey,” the porter said before turning her over to authorities at the next station, “you and I are the only two Black people on this train. So I don’t know who you think your parents are.”

  When she got older, Rhea lived for two years in motel rooms she never paid for. She sneaked into the rooms as cleaning ladies finished up, then slid under the bed before the guests returned, staying there through the night.

  This was at the height of the crack epidemic, and Rhea got swept right up. Violence was out of control, and women living on the street were especially vulnerable, day and night, to sexual assaults.

  She told me she had seven children, one on death row, another in prison for life. She didn’t know the whereabouts of the five others. I overheard her talking on a phone once or twice with a sister who lived in the area, but that appeared to be the extent of their relationship.

  When Rhea didn’t have a place to stay, she had buildings she could sneak into and sleep in the stairwells. There was an apartment in a public housing complex that she sometimes rotated into and out of with a couple of other people, staying as a guest as long as she could. She had to check in at the guard stand out front, where they kept track of visits, and she’d constantly get in arguments there over whether she�
�d exceeded the number of times she could go in.

  Rhea avoided the police like the plague. She hadn’t been arrested in a long time, but she told me she had priors—petty crimes, creeping into houses, usually of people she knew—and she was such a known entity on the streets that she was scared to death of being sent away for a long time for some trivial bullshit. I never saw her so much as shoplift.

  Rhea survived for decades on streets that lose people every day. She could be a handful, as you might imagine. She had a hair-trigger temper and anger issues, but she also wasn’t beyond putting on the persona of a mentally ill madwoman whom other street people wouldn’t mess with. It helped keep predators from doing what predators do, which is prey on a little woman who was now an aging little woman.

  Among the many maladies associated with her long-term crack use, Rhea suffered from peripheral neuropathy. She told me the painful condition was induced by an allergic reaction she had to cocaine mixed with lidocaine, a numbing agent often used for legitimate purposes as a nerve block. She’d lose feeling in her extremities: fingers, toes, nose, the tips of her ears. When the weather turned cold or she smoked too much, her nose and ears blew up like balloons.

  Now Rhea was living with me. I was gone much of the time, traveling for family, or business, or just trying to disappear. But when I was home, the two of us interacted like a deranged, crack-addled version of The Odd Couple, her Felix Unger neatnik habits crashing against my slobbier Oscar Madison tendencies.

  She commandeered the TV and only watched those true-crime shows, with the volume turned way up. It drove me insane. I’d wear headphones, or pace the room and shout for her to turn the damn thing down. The angriest I ever got at her was when she took a belt I loved and cut it in half to fit her size-nothing waist. Rhea weighed maybe eighty-five pounds soaking wet.