Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  But mostly they didn’t come back: You get burned. You feel ridiculous, you feel pathetic, and then you feel desperate and start all over again, trolling the same gas stations and liquor stores and clubs until finally—at 4 a.m., or 7 a.m., or 10 a.m.—you find a guy who comes through, who actually brings back enough to hold you over for the next four hours, when you’ll have to go through the same lousy routine all over again. The process can take thirty minutes or it can take ten hours.

  This time, it took thirty minutes. Before I gave the guy my $100, I’d told him to leave behind his Obama Phone—the free cell the federal government started giving to financially strapped Americans during the 2008 recession, under the Lifeline Act. Obama Phones are mocked by conservatives as another liberal scheme to redistribute wealth, yet the legislation was first passed in 1985 by President Reagan to give households access to communications and emergency services through home telephone hookup. That act was merely updated by Obama for a wireless world—to the delight of crack addicts and dealers everywhere.

  My guy didn’t want to give it up.

  “You gotta trust people,” he told me with a remarkably straight face.

  I thanked him for the life lesson, then told him to leave his cell or there was no deal. He left the phone and ambled off, then returned not long afterward with $100 worth of what he said was crack. You never know. Often it’s baking soda or crushed-up pills that somebody has turned into rocks. You light it up and you’re high before you even hear the pops—hear the “crack”—whether it’s the good stuff or not. The anticipation knocks your socks off; studies have shown, and my experience verifies, that the fiercest rush occurs in the nanoseconds before your lips touch the pipe. It’s not until a minute or so later that you can determine whether you’re smoking the real deal, and by that time your connection can be out of the car and long gone.

  In this case, however, what he brought back was damn good. I’d gotten his phone number off his cell while he was inside, and I turned our late-night one-off into a four-day Nashville run. I called him three or four times a day over that period. He was a godsend for me, and I was the best thing that ever happened to him: over those three days I probably handed him $1,500. The transactions became relaxed, almost matter-of-fact, like dropping in to buy vegetables from the same sidewalk grocer. We hardly ever exchanged a word.

  And except for those brief excursions, I stayed holed up in my hotel room with my pipe and my lighter and my crack.

  * * *

  I have to pause here a minute. I apologize. Every neuron in my brain is firing right now, shouting, Get me more of that! Get me more of that!

  That’s what recalling incidents like what I just wrote can trigger. Addicts know what I’m talking about. It’s a thin, wobbly line to straddle. While it’s important for someone recovering from addiction to speak honestly about what he or she went through, there’s also the risk of reigniting those old cravings, which can be fucking monsters.

  It’s the power of language, for good and for bad. It’s the reason characters are afraid to say Voldemort’s name aloud in Harry Potter and instead refer to him as He Who Must Not Be Named. They don’t want to unleash his dark power over them.

  There are times while writing this book when naming the things I’ve done becomes too much—crack’s dark power is unleashed. This is one of those times. Even though my mind realizes that the peace I once got from taking a hit off a crack pipe was temporary and ultimately self-destructive, it also understands that it felt better than the pain I experienced before I took that hit. Crack wasn’t the only answer to my ache. But, again, it was an answer, and certainly the most expedient one to that age-old question people won’t stop asking:

  Why can’t you quit?

  Because, motherfucker, it feels too good!

  So as I write this, I can still feel the hard, hot pipe on my lips, the heat ballooning inside my mouth, the smoke crisping my lungs. I still twitch with the muscle memory of the torch-blast rush that shot to every tip of every appendage of my body. Recalling the events of that night in Nashville, I still get a shiver down my spine.

  I can still feel myself seated in my car that late night—the throb in my lower back from those countless hours on the road, the creeping hunch of my shoulders, the racing of my heart—as the guy with the dirty nails and clean sneakers came out of the apartment building with my bag. I can still remember how I fumbled around the side pocket for a lighter and a stem. I can see myself reaching for a new ball of Chore Boy to use as a filter, then deciding to use the old one instead, knowing it was covered in resin and thinking how much better the crack would be if I could draw the smoke through it. I still remember that there were three new stems in a paper bag in the back seat and that I considered reaching around the headrest for one of them. I stopped myself because I thought I’d be better off doling them out, one day at a time, during the rest of my cross-country journey.

  I remember I planned to recook the crack back in my hotel room. Then I tried to remember if I had a spoon to simmer it in, or if there was a microwave in the room I could use to heat it up.

  I remember that I couldn’t remember.

  I still recall that I thought about stopping by a liquor store on the way back to the hotel. Then I realized I could call room service if I needed a drink but then thought about how much more expensive that would be than buying from the store. In the end, I ditched the whole idea, as if my decision not to drink that night was simply a matter of fiscal responsibility. I remember thinking about getting something to eat, too, then thinking, Fuck it, I have more important matters to attend to.

  What I really remember is getting back to my room at two or three o’clock that morning and stripping off my jacket and settling into a soft chair and pulling out the fresh bag and feeling that first real hit—not the rushed test hit I took earlier in the car with that blazing-eyed stranger looking on hungrily from the passenger seat. And then I remember why I’m remembering all of this: the sensation of being instantly transported—at something like warp speed, as if riding bareback on a rocket ship—to some far-off, beautiful place.

  Remembering all of those things feels like a terrible betrayal of where I am now. It induces an urge that’s completely counter to how far I’ve come. When you realize the effect those recollections can have on your mind and body, causing them to work against your deepest desire not to be in that place, you fear their ability to lure you back in. They prompt feelings of shame and guilt that, to be honest, only stir an enhanced sense of hellish excitement.

  Addict-think.

  I hate it. I hate recalling it. I hate the damage it caused, to me and others. Most of all, I hate still longing for the peace it provided.

  It was definitely not one of the beautiful things my brother talked about.

  * * *

  Folks at the wellness ranch in Sedona started blowing up my phone to find out when I’d be arriving. I ignored them. I finally got a call from Joey, who’d checked in days earlier and knew I’d pick up for him. He then put the Grace Grove people on, at their insistence. I minted a new excuse with each call: last-minute business complications, unforeseen family issues.

  Joey knew the drill: he understood from his own experience what was going on without my having to tell him. He just stayed the course and waited me out. After four days, I’d already given up on the notion of driving cross-country and booked a flight from Nashville to Phoenix, with a short pit stop in Los Angeles. I’d leave my car in Tennessee and pick it up when I flew back.

  I repeated the same sorry routine of smoking and rebooking I’d performed at Dulles. I cloistered myself inside my car at the airport, terrified I’d get busted going through security, or that I couldn’t handle the four-hour flight without a hit. I missed one plane after another.

  Finally, I boarded a late flight and made it as far as my two-hour layover at LAX. Desperate to smoke, I slipped out of the terminal with my carry-on and whatever drugs I had left and fired up in a parking garage
stairwell. I knew I wouldn’t make my connecting flight. I phoned Hallie briefly. She alone knew about my trip out west, and I told her what I planned to tell everybody: I’d made it to Sedona and everything was fine.

  I stayed that night at a hotel in nearby Marina del Rey, immediately calling a crack connection I’d made during a previous West Coast business trip. I’ll call him Curtis here. I’d first found him by using an alternative MO to my superpower: browsing online escort service ads, not for sex but for slipped-in references of offers to “party,” which meant, of course, they sold drugs.

  Before long, Curtis arrived at the hotel with crack, his prostitute girlfriend, and Honda, a tall, gaunt, affable twentysomething who had been a professional skateboarder until he broke practically every bone in his body. He’d since transitioned to a second career boosting Hondas. During a later stay in L.A., inside a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, Honda would patiently teach me how to cook my own crack.

  My unscheduled pause turned into a six-day bacchanal. Curtis and his crew made my suite their party house, rotating in and out for hours at a time. They blared music, ordered room service, and cleaned out the minibar—all on my dime and with my consent. They took advantage of my largesse but not unreasonably so; I was totally, completely out of my fucking mind. They preferred booze and weed to crack, while I hit the pipe like there was no tomorrow, strolling around in my underwear and generally acting insane.

  I never slept. Ever. I made a reservation each day on a puddle jumper from L.A. to Sedona, and each day I canceled it. I couldn’t make myself get on a plane.

  In time, even the night world’s regulars became uneasy. During one mix-up too stupid and tangled to detail, I nearly got in a fight outside an after-hours club on Hollywood Boulevard. Before the club’s two massive bouncers could intervene, one of their friends, a Samoan man built like a brick shithouse with braided hair down to his ass, pulled me away to cool me down.

  He went by Baby Down, a nickname derived from his older brother, Down—so-called because he could put anybody who hassled him “down” with one punch. You didn’t want to mess with Baby Down, either. As I’d learn, he was related to the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., a local group of Samoan gangsters-turned-rappers whose music became popular in the late 1980s and ’90s. Branches from that tree, I was told, had a monopoly on the doormen who worked LA’s strip clubs.

  That night, Baby Down ushered me to Mel’s Drive-In on Sunset and ate and talked with me until I settled down. It felt like a real, rare heart-to-heart. As badass as he looked and likely was, Baby Down seemed empathetic and bright beyond his obvious street smarts. He talked about helping me get cleaned up and back on my feet.

  * * *

  I finally decided to rent a car and drive to Sedona. I left Marina del Rey around four in the morning, on no sleep and in a cavernous Lincoln Town Car, taking I-10 out of California to start the five-hundred-mile jaunt.

  I made it as far as San Bernardino, seventy-five miles east. Snow-capped mountains emerged ahead in the breaking twilight. Exhausted, I checked into a hotel. I still couldn’t fall asleep, still couldn’t stop smoking. After a while, I got back on the road.

  And that should have been that—end of story, end of me.

  * * *

  Around 11 a.m., speeding east along the tabletop-flat highway that unspooled through the baked Sonoran Desert somewhere outside of Palm Springs, the temperature already closing in on ninety degrees, I nodded off behind the wheel. Waking up an instant later, I found myself in midair, the car having jumped a soft curb on the passing lane and soaring at eighty miles an hour into a cloudless blue sky, heading into the gulch that divided I-10.

  Nanoseconds unreeled in a kind of stop-action slow motion. I had what seemed like an eternity to size things up and consider my alternatives, even though, of course, I had no time at all. As my car made its descent into the median, I resisted the urge to do what my reflexes were imploring me to do: jam on the fucking brakes! I knew that would cause the Town Car to barrel roll the moment the wheels touched down and then throw me or crush me.

  Instead, I hit the gas the second the car landed in the gulch. I let it run for a moment until yanking the steering wheel to avoid a berm that serves as a turnaround for emergency vehicles and the police. The car spun into the westbound lanes—the same direction as the oncoming traffic. Miraculously, there was a gap in the traffic until my car stopped dead in the emergency lane, hissing and coughing. It rested on four flat tires, with cacti and scrub brush wrapped around the undercarriage.

  I don’t remember how long I sat there. It seemed like forever. I blinked behind sunglasses that had somehow stayed on my head. The luggage in the back seat was now scattered all over the front; the car’s interior looked like a war zone. I was shaking, still amped up from being in the middle of my twelve-day roll. Two police cruisers whizzed by without so much as tapping their brakes, like I was somebody who’d pulled over to take a leak or a tourist who’d stopped to ponder the roadside’s ceaseless, featureless panorama.

  I called the rental company and told them that somebody ran me off the road. The tow truck didn’t arrive for a couple of hours, and when the driver looked over the car, I told him that I’d wound up in the gulch. He shrugged.

  “Happens all the time,” he said before hauling me back to Palm Springs, where I climbed behind the wheel of another rental and continued on to Sedona.

  Then things got weird.

  * * *

  I stopped for gas somewhere in the high foothills while driving north through Arizona, rolled back onto the highway, then didn’t realize until two hours later that I’d pointed my new Jeep Cherokee in the wrong direction.

  Back on the right track, I found myself navigating a winding mountain road beneath a moonless sky well past midnight. There were no lights anywhere. Some sections had guardrails, some did not. I was determined to keep moving rather than pull over and wait until morning. I had called Grace Grove before leaving Palm Springs and arranged for Joey and Morgan, an ex-cowboy who managed the place with Puma, to pick me up at the rental car office in Prescott, an old western town about an hour and a half’s drive from the wellness center.

  As the high-desert wind rushed and whistled through the wide-open windows, I played an album of remixes by Mississippi bluesman R. L. Burnside as a kind of propulsive soundtrack. On one song, “It’s Bad You Know,” Burnside growls those words over and over. I played it almost continuously, like a gonzo incantation. I was out of my fucking mind.

  To stay awake, I chain-smoked crack and cigarettes, kept the windows down, and leaned into the bracing night air whenever I felt myself nodding off. At some point, the crack lost its oomph, but I kept lighting up anyway, out of force of habit. Sometimes I just slapped myself in the face.

  As I peered ahead into the pitch blackness, at times hunched so far forward my chest bumped against the steering wheel, an enormous barn owl suddenly swooped over my windshield, as if dropped straight from the inky night sky. I looked on in stunned wonder. It glided over the car’s hood until it was caught in my high beams. I didn’t know if it was real or a hallucination, but it sure as hell woke me up.

  Then, as abruptly as it arrived, the bird swerved off to the right, just out of range of my headlights. I swerved with it to stay on the road, and it led me cleanly around a sharp bend. It disappeared for a few minutes after that, as the road straightened, before reappearing again with its massive wings tilting first one way and then the other, guiding me through a series of tight, bounding switchbacks. I just kept following. It did the same thing four or five more times—disappearing, returning, gliding through dips and rises and hairpin turns at full speed, like a stunt plane at an air show, all but beckoning me to stay close behind. I’m not sure how long I followed the owl before it finally led me straight into Prescott. As it flapped off into the star-smeared sky, I shook my head and mouthed a soundless, still-disbelieving “Thank you,” over and over and over again.

  It was 3 a.m. Joey and Morgan had
waited on me for hours. When I pulled in, they weren’t amused.

  “You won’t believe what just happened,” I exclaimed, still dumbstruck by what I’d witnessed.

  I wanted to recount everything. How I shouldn’t even be there. How I’d lucked out in Nashville with a crack dealer who didn’t take everything I had at 2 a.m., including my life. How a hustling music impresario wannabe and his girlfriend looked after my best interests and pushed me to clean up instead of robbing me blind. How I didn’t kill myself or anyone else after sailing over the highway near Palm Springs. And lastly, how a giant bird—or guardian angel, or figment of my addled imagination—took me under its wings only minutes earlier to keep me from spinning off a mountainside and deliver me here, to this spot, at last.

  I wanted to tell them about all of it. But at that hour, in that place, my escorts made it clear they weren’t interested in my bullshit.

  “Whatever,” one of them said, signaling for me to get in the van.

  The car’s interior was a train wreck; I’d been piloting that rental for ten hellacious hours—smoking, swerving, losing my shit—with the contents of my bag scattered everywhere. Joey and Morgan, rushing to get the hell back, helped me clear it out as best they could. I hopped in the van with them and headed off to get well.

  Again.

  * * *

  I didn’t leave my bed for the next three days. Detoxing from crack isn’t as dangerous as quitting alcohol or as painful as getting off heroin. But a nonstop fourteen-day binge like I’d just gone through leaves the body depleted and dehydrated. Every joint ached like I had severe arthritis; my knees nearly disabled me and I thought the crick in my neck would be permanent. I had a fever and chills and near-panic-level anxiety and on the third day began to continually cough up a disturbing black phlegm. Lying alone in the clean, rustic setting of Grace Grove, with Joey checking in on me every hour and Puma slipping me herbal remedies, the only thing I craved was a crack pipe—the heat filling my mouth, the smoke singeing my lungs, that bareback rocket ride.