Beautiful Things

by Hunter Biden

  I was used to this; it happened all the time. I was the guy by the pool who got up every ten minutes to duck into the bathroom and smoke crack. I was the guy who sat by himself at the bar and piled up a $400 tab without buying drinks for anyone else. The staff must’ve thought, How is that guy still standing?

  As much as I thought I was in control, I wasn’t fooling anybody. Four or five days into a stay, I’d call the desk to reserve another night and be told there were no more rooms at the inn. Everyone was polite; they were always well-mannered. No one ever formally threw me out—though the Chateau eventually blacklisted me, putting me on their infamous unofficial rogue’s lineup that included the likes of Britney Spears, if that gives you an idea of how out of control I was.

  Now, the Petit Ermitage asked me to vacate my room by 11 a.m.

  There was no way I could pack up my wreckage by then, and I had no idea where to go next. I missed the morning deadline and had it extended to 1 p.m., then to 3. In the meantime, I settled into a shaded lounge chair by the rooftop pool and tried to pin down my next move. I slipped away every twenty minutes to hit the crack pipe in my room, on the same floor just down the hall. I finally got a bellman to help me round up my belongings and hold them for me in the lobby.

  At one point, a young, trim, artsy guy in a chaise lounge next to mine struck up a conversation. He’d done the same thing the day before, even though I’d made it clear I didn’t really want to talk with anyone. It was a tight-knit, very L.A. scene up there that I wanted nothing to do with—I hadn’t made new friends in three years unless they were involved with drugs.

  But here he was again, yakking away. This time he was with a tall, blond Daryl Hannah look-alike and a photographer friend. He’d obviously had too many drinks. “Here’s the most interesting person at the pool,” he greeted me as he sat down this time. “What’s your story?” He then proceeded to tell me his: all about his burgeoning career as a painter and sculptor. I nodded once in a while: I’d probably already drunk a quart of vodka that day, smoked crack continuously, and was operating on ten hours of sleep for the week.

  I don’t know how long he went on. The only thing I remember is that all of a sudden one of the trio turned to another and said, “You know who Hunter should meet? He should meet your friend Melissa.”

  They agreed right away and insisted I take Melissa’s number. I didn’t write it down; I told them I had a gift for memorizing phone numbers. Some friends of theirs came by after that and they left me alone. I continued to search my phone for another place to stay the night. When I finally got up to leave, the Daryl Hannah look-alike turned to me and asked me to repeat Melissa’s number. At that point, I could hardly remember my own name. She smiled as she pulled a pen from her purse and scribbled Melissa’s contact on my hand.

  An hour or so later I checked into the Sunset Marquis, a half mile away, and resumed my drinking and drugging. Sometime after midnight I noticed the number inked across my palm and texted someone named Melissa to see if she wanted to meet for a drink. I’m sure I had no good on my mind. Melissa’s response was swift, polite, and to the point: “No thank you. I’m asleep.”

  I shuffled into the shower and scrubbed the number off my hand. My crackhead brain sure as hell didn’t memorize it. I toweled off and reached for a pipe.

  If this were a more probable story—if this were a movie that followed my narrative arc to its more plausibly tragic outcome—my future would have ended there.

  It would’ve run off my hand with Melissa’s phone number and slid down the drain for good.

  * * *

  Instead, Melissa texted me in the morning. She asked if I wanted to meet for coffee; her friends had encouraged her to do so. I texted back that I could meet her at eleven at the restaurant inside the Sunset Marquis. I waited at a table there until she texted again to say she was running late and could we meet instead at one. A little later, she asked if we could make it four.

  Remarkably, I wasn’t already totally fucked-up; for reasons I still can’t decipher, I hardly smoked or drank at all that day, unlike every other day since I’d returned to Los Angeles. For one thing, I hadn’t shared my latest whereabouts with my traveling band of vampires. So my only human contact that day was with an actual civilian: Melissa. Yet when five o’clock rolled around, I assumed she’d blow me off again, and sure enough, she texted an apology for canceling so many times, then promised she would be there, for dinner now, at 5:15.

  I made my way to the dining room, not really clear why anymore, other than that I’d gotten myself into this mess and figured I’d let it run its disastrous course. That had been my MO for most of the last four years anyway. Still, I had showered and pulled on a pair of jeans and a denim jacket—what Beau and I used to call a Canadian tuxedo. It was my first actual date in twenty-six years. My relationship with Hallie belonged to a whole other category, and the other women I’d been with during rampages since my divorce were hardly the dating type. We would satisfy our immediate needs and little else. I’m not proud of it. It’s why I would later challenge in court the woman from Arkansas who had a baby in 2018 and claimed the child was mine—I had no recollection of our encounter. That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.

  Not that I was sure that this coffee-turned-lunch-turned-dinner with Melissa was going to head anywhere. I didn’t want a relationship, certainly nothing with strings attached. I just wanted to be gone.

  As I stepped past the restaurant’s outdoor seating area, set in a kind of lush secret garden, I spotted a woman seated alone at a table. Lit by the glow of L.A.’s gauzy spring light, with oversized sunglasses pushed atop her honey-blond hair to reveal the biggest, bluest eyes I’d ever seen, the woman I took to be Melissa glanced my way and flashed a bright, easy smile. It floored me. It was full of warmth and free of guile. A charge rushed through my body—the first genuine, non-crack-aided jolt to my system that I’d experienced since I could remember. It was electrifying.

  It was a bell ringer.

  My boots clacked under me as I continued on to the restaurant’s front entrance and navigated my way to the table. Tiny white lights were strung through trees that ringed a terraced wall. We both smiled as I sat down.

  I spoke up first.

  “You have the exact same eyes as my brother.”

  Then, not long after that, having no idea what I was going to say until it jumped out of my mouth:

  “I know this probably isn’t a good way to start a first date, but I’m in love with you.”

  Melissa laughed. Again, it was electric. When a waiter came by to take a drink order, I told him Melissa probably needed something strong “because I just told her I’m in love.” The three of us laughed aloud together.

  An hour later, Melissa said she was in love with me.

  An hour after that, I told her I was a crack addict.

  “Well,” she responded to that news, without blinking or hesitating, “not anymore. You’re finished with that.”

  My reaction:

  “Okay.”

  I had no idea what I meant. There’s a point you reach in addiction—a point I had so clearly reached—where you believe it’s impossible to ever be in a healthy, life-affirming relationship again. You’ve accrued too many deficits. When you tell a person who you really are—in my case: crack addict—you scare them to fucking death. They rightly become protective of their own hearts, their own sanity, no matter what they might think of you otherwise. With me, you could also toss in a messy divorce, a very public affair, and the daily grenades lobbed my way from the White House. Googling me was enough to send anybody running.

  Yet, in an instant, I knew this: I was finished with what I’d come to California to start. I went from completely giving up on the notion of ever trying again—trying to get clean, trying at life—to knowing I was finished with whatever kept me from trying both those things. Here was a magnificently beautiful woman sitting across from me,
dressed casually in a light blue denim blouse and jeans, speaking in the noblest South African accent, who was so fearless that she didn’t head for the hills the moment I said I was madly in love with her—and then that I was a crack addict. I was all in.

  I realize how crazy that sounds. But I was 100 percent sure of it; there were no butterflies in my stomach, only the certainty that this could be my last chance. For me, having the confidence to express that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with someone as well as confess my addiction was my way of saying, “You’re going to have to help me with that last one.” I wasn’t surprised in the least that Melissa didn’t balk. I saw something in her eyes the moment I looked into them: everything was going to be okay.

  Crack addict, alcoholic, tabloid mainstay, political punching bag—it all had become such a profound part of who I was that it made it seem impossible I’d ever find somebody willing to work past any of those things.

  Yet Melissa didn’t flinch. She didn’t turn away in shock or disgust. I told her about my addiction and my alcoholism. I told her about my divorce and about Hallie. I told her about my brother, my mother, my baby sister, my grief. I told her about my pain, about what they refer to in AA as the “God-sized hole” inside me. I rolled out an unvarnished version of the last four years and beyond.

  Melissa absorbed it all. There was no stigma to addiction for her. She had known and loved too many friends and acquaintances who’d battled it, and she was committed to staying in the battle with me. She saw addiction as something the soul had to work through and be done with before one could move on to the next great thing. Setbacks weren’t world-ending. She put a karmic topspin on Beau’s part-of-the-process approach, but they amounted to the same thing. I felt in strong and steady hands.

  Melissa then unreeled her story. She was a thirty-two-year-old activist proficient in five languages ranging from Italian to Hebrew and an aspiring documentary filmmaker who had spent time living with and filming indigenous African tribes. As a toddler she was placed in a children’s home for a year before being adopted by a South African family with three boys, in Johannesburg. She had come to the U.S. to visit friends in L.A. during a gap year after attending the University of Johannesburg, intending to go on to India, but stayed when she fell in love and got married. It didn’t last long. A two-year live-in relationship had ended just a few weeks before.

  In fact, Melissa explained that she’d canceled on me so many times that day because she’d just flown back from visiting one of her brothers, who now lived in Atlanta. He’d consoled her over the breakup of that relationship, which she knew she should’ve exited much earlier. I later learned she’d told me things that night that she’d never talked about with anyone.

  We hardly noticed the waiter whenever he came by; I guess we ate and drank. Two hours in we were discussing the kind of life each of us wanted. Before long, we mused about the kind of life we could have together. We both agreed we wanted to stay in California. When I told her about my three daughters, she said she’d love to have children someday. Not long after that, we talked about the possibility of that being something we could do together.

  It went on like that for more than three hours. It was intense, raw, utterly bewitching. Melissa later said she felt as if she’d met a friend she’d known her whole life, but whom she’d been separated from for years and was finally getting to see again. I felt completely at ease, wide-open, mesmerized.

  By the time we left, the tree lights strung around us twinkled in the gathering dusk. The scene had turned magical. I drove Melissa to meet up with a friend at the Chateau Marmont—thank God all I got was a smirk and a nod from one of the valets—and we went from there to a birthday party for another friend of Melissa’s at a nearby Mexican restaurant. Everyone was gathered around one big table. Amid all the unfamiliar faces, I felt a familiar twitch. I’d been so enraptured during dinner that I hadn’t hit the pipe all night. It was the longest I’d intentionally gone without using since I’d landed back in L.A. Now, before sitting down, I told Melissa I was going to run out to get a birthday gift, and assured her I’d be right back.

  I drove to the hotel and headed up to my room. Before locating my pipe, I settled into a chair near the window, took a deep, reflective breath, and closed my eyes for just a moment, pausing to absorb everything that had happened that evening. When I opened them again, it was 7:15 a.m.

  I panicked. I thought I’d blown my one chance at salvation. I fumbled around for my phone and saw a text Melissa had sent sometime after I left the restaurant the night before.

  “Is everything okay?”

  I texted back immediately to say how sorry I was. I told her I’d returned to my room exhausted and fell asleep. I promised it was an honest mistake.

  Fifteen long minutes later, Melissa replied.

  “Glad you’re okay. What are you up to today?”

  “Spending time with you?” I typed hopefully.

  Melissa asked if I wanted to come by her apartment and go from there to get breakfast. I raced over and apologized fifty times for flaking out the night before. She insisted it was no problem. We sat for a minute on the couch inside her modest one-bedroom in a pink stucco complex just up the street from the Petit Ermitage, whose verdant rooftop pool was visible from the fourth-floor walkway outside her front door. I lowered my head into her lap, then didn’t wake up until that night. Opening my eyes and seeing that she was still there, I remember telling her, with utter relief and without equivocation or exaggeration, “That’s the first time I’ve slept in three years.”

  From that day on, Melissa nursed me back to health.

  Nursed me back to life.

  * * *

  The first thing she did: took my phone, my computer, my car keys. She took my wallet. She deleted every contact in my cell that wasn’t my mom, dad, aunt, or uncle—anybody whose name didn’t contain Biden. Gangbangers, bouncers, valets—all gone. If you weren’t blood, you were out. When I protested that lifelong friends were getting erased in the massacre, Melissa calmly countered that they’d find a way to reach me if they were truly lifelong friends. She reset the password on my laptop and didn’t tell me what it was, ensuring that I had to go through her to use it.

  She dumped out all of my crack. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without her following me inside, sure that I’d hidden something in there. I had. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and she’d tail me into the living room. I’d insist I was fine, that I just couldn’t fall asleep, hoping that she’d head back to bed. I only wanted a minute to rifle through my bags for whatever residual dope I could find. I didn’t realize she’d already gone through every bag I owned and tossed out anything that resembled a drug, from Advil to my unused Lexapro.

  The vultures didn’t wait long to call and knock. Their cash cow was missing, and they wanted me back. They said I owed them money and tried to intimidate Melissa if I didn’t pay up. She turned to steel. She was merciless. She went through my bank records and checked off charges, like the $15,000 worth of purchases at a Best Buy in the Valley, where one of my dealers lived. She then told my former compatriots in debauchery in no uncertain terms that if they showed up at her door or tried to get in touch with me again she was calling the police and would otherwise turn their futures into a living hell. The South African beauty with the bottomless blue eyes made that crystal fucking clear. She changed my number and within weeks would find a house for us tucked high in the Hollywood Hills. She pushed away everyone in my life connected to drugs.

  It was all on Melissa. It’s no picnic trying to monitor and manage an addict. It’s an enormous amount of work. It’s onerous and frightening. Nobody wants to be anyone’s jailer, and Melissa was imprisoned as much as she felt she needed to temporarily imprison me. She had to put up with my whining and crying and scheming. I tried to negotiate an agreement for a slow weaning process off crack. She said no—hell no—though she did ease me off drinking by first allowing three drinks a day, then one drink, the
n nothing, while also arranging for a doctor to come to the apartment and administer an IV to remedy any nutritional deficiencies and aid with my withdrawal.

  When I tried to sneak around, she busted me. I tried to convince her through sheer force of personality that it wasn’t fair to make me stop using crack all of a sudden—that it was, in fact, dangerous.

  She called bullshit.

  I never ran, never resented her taking that kind of control. I knew she was saving my life. I was certain that if I had my keys and wallet and phone for two hours while she went out grocery shopping, I would relapse. The gratitude I felt only deepened the connection that was already deeper than anything I could imagine. I’m certain there was no one else in my life capable of doing what Melissa was doing, though not for lack of effort or love. At that moment, I required the impossible: a foreign body with a familiar soul.

  That was Melissa.

  When it sank in for me that there was nothing left of the substances I’d smuggled into her apartment, either consciously or accidentally, upon my arrival—that there was nothing still slipped between books on the shelving near the door, nothing tucked under a skateboard that leaned against one wall—I finally slept, fitfully, for three straight days.

  On the fourth day, I opened my eyes and asked Melissa to marry me. It wasn’t quite as direct as that. I couched it in a conversation about our future, set it loose like a trial balloon, light and breezy: “We should get married!” The next day we drove to the Shamrock Social Club, a hipster tattoo parlor up the street on Sunset, across from the Roxy. An artist there inked Shalom inside my left biceps in Hebrew lettering, exactly like Melissa had on her arm—sort of an engagement tat.

  The day after that, there was no ambiguity. We were just talking in the kitchen at some point when I suddenly and quite literally dropped down on one knee and blurted, “Will you marry me?” Melissa smiled, kissed me, then tapped the brakes slightly. “Yes, but let’s just wait for the right time.” I asked her to let me know when that right time would be. When we woke up the next morning, seven days after we’d met, she turned to me again and said softly, “You know what? Let’s do it.”