Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  Dad called, too, of course. I’d tell him everything was fine, all was well. But after a while, he wasn’t buying it. My responses grew increasingly terse and intermittent. When I finally quit answering his calls altogether, along with my daughters’, which only happened in the most extreme circumstances, he sent in the cavalry: my uncle Jim.

  Uncle Jimmy is my best friend in the world and Dad knew that if his younger brother asked me to do something, I’d do it. Uncle Jim has his own superpower: he gets things done. So he jumped on a plane to Los Angeles, pulled me out of a room in the Hollywood Roosevelt, and said, “I found a place. Let’s go.”

  I went. He checked me into a rehab center in Brentwood, where I stayed clean for about two weeks. I then lived in a rental off Nichols Canyon, in the Hills, with a sober coach. It was great—the beauty, the peace, the support—right up until the moment I relapsed.

  My lesson after a spring and summer of nonstop debauchery: no lesson at all.

  Just that it was awful.

  Unimaginably awful.

  CHAPTER TEN LOST HIGHWAY

  My penultimate odyssey through full-blown addiction became a shabbier, gloomier, more solitary version of the chromatic tear I went on through Southern California.

  I came back east. The trees soon were bare and the low slate sky seemed to hover inches above my head. In my mind’s eye, I can’t picture a single day during my months back there that wasn’t gray and overcast, a fitting, ominous backdrop.

  I had returned that fall of 2018, after my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie.

  Neither happened.

  For all the obvious reasons—my extended disappearances, my inability to stay sober, her need to stabilize and reorder her own life and family—Hallie and I called it quits. The relationship no longer helped either of us. Our attempt to reanimate Beau remained as doomed as it was from the start. The fallout piled up. I tried to explain things to my daughters, but how could I expect them to comprehend a situation I hardly understood myself?

  Next on my agenda was getting clean. I drove up to Newburyport, Massachusetts, an old New England shipbuilding-turned-tourist town thirty-five miles north of Boston. A therapist ran a wellness center where he practiced a drug addiction therapy known as ketamine infusion. I would make two trips up there, staying for about six weeks on the first visit, returning to Maryland, then heading back for a couple weeks of follow-up in February of the new year.

  After my many failed rehab attempts, I was certain that my getting clean depended on more than just being told addiction is a disease and that it requires 100 percent abstinence. While that works for many people, and at times has worked for me, I felt sure that underlying trauma was something that I needed to address, especially in the wake of Beau’s death.

  I’d done something similar in 2014 when I was treated in Mexico, with moderate success. That treatment—first using ibogaine, then 5-MeO-DMT, both psychoactive compounds—was mind-blowing in a very literal sense.

  The ibogaine therapy was dark. After I ingested it alone in a quiet room inside the Tijuana clinic, a slideshow of my life had flickered before my eyes, one image-burst after another. I can’t recall all of the visions, but I do remember having no control over them—that is, I couldn’t stop them.

  I also felt paralyzed, unable to move my arms, my legs, anything. It scared the hell out of me; I worried I’d never move again. A nurse would come in to check on me, the creaking of the room’s door screeching like nails on a chalkboard right next to my ear. Everything was heightened. That was followed by what they call a “gray day,” a period when I felt as if I’d been in a deep depression. I slowly came out of it, and twelve hours after it began, the treatment was over.

  I was taken from there to a beach house in Rosarito, a dozen miles south of Tijuana, to do 5-MeO-DMT therapy, which employs the gland secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad—that should give you an idea of the state I was in. A smart, gentle nurse assisted me through the whole thing, which lasted about thirty minutes, though it seemed more like three hours, or three days, or three years.

  It was a profound experience. It connected me in a vividly renewed way to everyone in my life, living or dead. Any division between me, my dad, my mommy, Caspy, or Beau vanished, or at least became irrelevant. It felt as though I was seeing all of existence at once—and as one.

  I know it sounds loopy. Yet whatever else it did or didn’t do, the experience unlocked feelings and hurts I’d buried deep for too long. It served as a salve. I stayed sober for a year afterward—until I stormed out of that therapy debacle with Kathleen.

  The ketamine sessions were equally intense, just as frightening, and not nearly as effective, though that’s more on me than on them.

  Originally developed as an animal tranquilizer and later used for surgical anesthesia during the Vietnam War, ketamine has become widely known for its illegitimate use as a club drug—Special K. Medical researchers have found it to be effective in treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. As an extension of that, it has also been used to help break the cycle of drug dependence.

  Its effect can be mind-bending and hallucinatory, though in a cogent, manageable way. You talk your way through whatever you’re experiencing or seeing. For me, fears and past traumas surfaced vividly: Beau and me staying up late as kids, afraid that we’d wake in the morning to find Dad gone; the two of us looking at each other from hospital beds after the accident; the accident itself.

  During and after those sessions, I longed even more for Beau’s and Dad’s presence, to feel their physical and psychic connection together, at the same time—the three of us as one again. I struggled to figure out how Dad and I fit together now, with such a large piece of the puzzle missing. I felt guilty and confused about that distance. I felt like I was killing off the one thing that could give me hope.

  The therapy’s results were disastrous. I was in no way ready to process the feelings it unloosed or prompted by reliving past physical and emotional traumas. So I backslid. I did exactly what I’d come to Massachusetts to stop doing. I’d stay clean for a week, break away from the center to meet a connection I found in Rhode Island, smoke up, then return. One thing I did remarkably well during that time was fool people about whether or not I was using. Between trips up there, I even bought clean urine from a dealer in New York to pass drug tests.

  Of course, that made all that time and effort ineffective. I didn’t necessarily blame the treatment: I doubt much good comes from doing ketamine while you’re on crack.

  The reality is, the trip to Massachusetts was merely another bullshit attempt to get well on my part. I knew that telling my family I was in rehab meant I could claim they wouldn’t be able to contact me while I was undergoing treatment. I’d made my share of insincere rehab attempts before. It’s impossible to get well, no matter what the therapy, unless you commit to it absolutely. The Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book”—the substance abuse bible, written by group founder Bill Wilson—makes that clear: “Half measures availed us nothing.”

  By this point in my life, I’d written the book on half measures.

  Finally, the therapist in Newburyport said there was little point in our continuing.

  “Hunter,” he told me, with all the exasperated, empathetic sincerity he could muster, “this is not working.”

  * * *

  I headed back toward Delaware, in no shape to face anyone or anything. To ensure that I wouldn’t have to do either, I took an exit at New Haven.

  For the next three or four weeks, I lived in a series of low-budget, low-expectations motels up and down Interstate 95, between New Haven and Bridgeport. I exchanged L.A.’s $400-a-night bungalows and their endless parade of blingy degenerates for the underbelly of Connecticut’s $59-a-night motel rooms and the dealers, hookers, and hard-core addicts—like me—who favored them.

  I no longer had one foot in polite society and one foot out. I a
voided polite society altogether. I hardly went anywhere now, except to buy. It was me and a crack pipe in a Super 8, not knowing which the fuck way was up. All my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs—feeding the beast. To facilitate it, I resurrected the same sleep schedule I’d kept in L.A.: never. There was hardly any mistaking me now for a so-called respectable citizen.

  Crack is a great leveler.

  Just like in California—like practically anywhere else I’d landed since this long bad dream began—each new day looked exactly like the one before it. Nothing occurred on a traditional wake-up/go-to-sleep continuum.

  If I knew my crack connection, meaning if I’d bought from that person before and had his phone number, I would start making arrangements to buy from him as soon as I neared the end of my stash. If I reached him, I had to figure out how to meet with him. If we agreed on a time and a place, it was almost always at the most random hour, in the sketchiest part of town.

  Impossible to factor into all of this: the waiting. No dealer works off a user’s urgent timetable. So you arrange to meet in front of a 7-Eleven on such-and-such street, then sit in your car and wait. And wait. An hour passes since the time he said he’d be there. He doesn’t answer his phone. You start freaking out. People keep going in and coming out of the store, and the man or woman working behind the counter keeps glancing your way, wondering why the hell you’ve been parked out there for two hours.

  By this point, you’re also about to jump out of your skin—you need that hit. You feel wholly depleted and it gets harder to keep your eyes open, even a little bit. You call the dealer’s number a couple of times. Then a dozen times more.

  You keep calling. He keeps not answering. The store clerk keeps staring.

  Hours later, the dealer shows. No explanation. Odds are he has arrived with less than you asked for, or he wants more money than you’ve already agreed to pay. It’s never straightforward. It’s always some bullshit negotiation. You finally take what he has and hope it’s what he says it is. Chances are better than even that the product is so trashed with look-alike filler as to have hardly been worth all the effort.

  You’re back on the phone three hours later, or eight hours later, cycling through the same routine two or three times more. By then, you no longer care or can tell whether it’s morning or night. There’s no longer any difference between 4 a.m. and 4 p.m.

  It’s so clearly an unsustainable life. The monotony is excruciating. It’s truly the same thing over and over—same movies on TV, same songs on the iPod. Your mind is devoid of any thought other than how to get your next hit.

  The motels where I stopped were frequented by active addicts who needed to support their addictions and pay their room bills. They ranged in age from their midtwenties to their forties and fifties. They were easy to spot. They stared out their windows or slouched outside their doors to see who might be a possible connection. Our rooms all faced one another, or they looked out onto a common parking lot. If you stared out your window long enough, you’d see who was going in and out of where, and who might have crack or information on where to find it.

  Somebody would eventually come over to my room to sell me something directly, or pass along a connection, for a finder’s fee. When we finished the transaction, the addict was usually out the door before I realized I was missing my watch or jacket or iPad—happened all the time.

  More frustrating was when they told me they heard so-and-so had some good stuff, but he was in Stamford, about an hour away. I’d head to Stamford, wait in a parking lot there for an hour. A guy would finally show up with nothing, then make ten calls before telling me about someone else with something in Bridgeport, a half-hour drive back up 95, where I’d have to wait another hour outside a bodega. Sometimes it paid off, sometimes it didn’t. There were a million wild-goose chases.

  One time I watched someone step into a room, close the door, then leave fifteen minutes later and head for his car. In a world filled with ex-felons carrying suspended licenses or no licenses at all and constantly bumming rides, this dude stood out. He was clean, barbered, and confident. But not cocky. He exuded… ownership. I caught up with him just before he pulled out and asked what I always asked: “Any hard?” Interactions like that were usually the beginning of one of two things: getting completely ripped off or a steady connection.

  That’s how I met John, who was the beginning of both.

  * * *

  John was a crack dealer from New Haven who’d already spent a decade in prison for dealing crack. In his mind, it was his only option. He said he had a family to feed. In a low, deliberate baritone, he told me stories about his life and kids. He engaged in discussions about world events. He was a rare thing in this particular universe: interesting. I ended up believing most of what he told me because I wanted to—because I had to.

  John was never threatening, never even raised his voice. His power was far more debasing.

  Much like Curtis in L.A., he was a master at feigned empathy. But Curtis worked in broad, easily detectable strokes that I just chose to ignore. Curtis wasn’t a full-time dealer. As a wannabe music impresario and jack-of-all-trades hustler, he had other revenue streams. He could afford to show some humanity. He would sit me down and encourage me to get cleaned up. He knew I was killing myself, and he told me. But virtually in the same breath, he’d sell me more crack and keep the party going.

  John was more of a miniaturist, a detail-oriented inveigler in the way he manipulated the human condition. Every gesture was purposeful, loaded, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

  John would be considerate in small, symbolic ways that felt momentous in this hypertransactional setting. He’d pick up a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice from a convenience store for me before he came by to drop off some crack. “You have to eat, Hunter,” he’d insist, spilling the contents of a bag onto my motel room bed. “You have to hydrate.” He’d show up sometimes simply to check on how I was doing, see if I needed anything, make sure I was caring for myself.

  Those minor acts of kindness were a seduction, of course, a kind of grooming. They were often followed by his insistence on the most trivial actions at the weirdest times. I’d be five dollars short on a $200 buy and he’d insist I go to an ATM immediately to get the cash—right after he’d bought me five dollars’ worth of OJ and a ham sandwich at a mini-mart. Or he’d say that he’d given me more product than he was supposed to the day before, so now I owed him an extra $100. Or he wouldn’t answer his phone for eight straight hours after he’d checked in on me and told me to call him anytime. As my frustration reached a breaking point, he’d call me back, say that he was on his way. He’d bring me a thermos of soup his wife made.

  It was Drug Dealer 101, as seen on TV. Except I didn’t have the option to dismiss him. He was a legit, reliable connection who allowed me mostly to avoid all the other knuckleheads out there who displayed many of the same deficits without any of his advantages.

  He was most masterful at making me dependent on him. I was forced to adhere to his schedule, his whims. Once he had his hooks in me, he’d raise prices, make me jump through more hoops. I’d be waiting for him in a parking lot where he was already an hour late. He’d call to say he was pulling in now. He’d pull in four hours later.

  He knew I wouldn’t leave. Every move he made reinforced the power he held. He was humiliating, which was the point. The more he could humiliate me or any other customer, the more beholden we’d become. He had a steady source of income, and I had a steady if exasperating source of crack. It created a constant, back-and-forth tension: he was my jailer and my savior, both at the same time. I assume it’s like Stockholm syndrome. There’s an enormous amount of abuse you have to take as an addict, much of it by design. The abuse perpetuates the addiction by feeding the addict’s sense of worthlessness, which swells the dealer’s profit.

  Still, after he’d shown up hours late and charged me way too much, I’d take a hit off the pipe and a
sweet, welcome relief would wash all over me.

  No one hooked me as mightily. No one played the game so mercilessly.

  * * *

  I felt trapped in my addiction’s deepest, most hollowed-out hole yet. Alone in dim, mildewy motel rooms, unable to reach out or be reached, I sometimes called on the only emotional anchor I still possessed: the Hail Mary.

  I repeated it over and over and over.

  I was raised Catholic and worked for the Jesuits, but the prayer’s effectiveness for me in times of distress is not tied to a deep-seated belief in the Church. At least not directly. While it’s a prayer every Catholic kid memorizes in the first grade, I learned it far earlier. It was the prayer my grandmother recited to me and Beau when she came into our bedroom at night to put us to sleep. She’d lie with us and scratch our backs while she told us stories about our mommy and what a wonderful and amazing human being she was. When she saw that our eyelids were heavy and about to shut, she would recite, aloud, three Hail Marys and one Our Father.

  When she finished and left our room, Beau would call out to me from his bed, “Good night, bud. See you in the morning,” and I’d have to call back, “Okay.” If I called out anything else, or if I just kept quiet—which I sometimes did, just to mess with him in a little-brother sort of way—Beau would stay up and pester me until I said it. For Beau, it was an obsessive, superstitious ritual: as long as he said, “Good night, bud,” and I answered, “Okay,” he believed that nothing could stop us from waking up to each other in the morning.

  I reenacted that send-off with myself many nights inside those sad little motel rooms dotted along I-95. With the muted rumble of semis barreling down the nearby highway and the inane chatter and cackles of other residents drifting through my door from the parking lot, I’d call out aloud, in the dark, “Good night, buddy. See you in the morning.”