Beautiful Boy (17 page)

I choose a highly recommended place in Oakland called Thunder Road and make an appointment. I steel myself to do the hardest thing I can imagine doing, using what is left of my waning influence—the threat that I will kick him out and withdraw all of my support—to get him to come with me. That I mean it—because I am convinced that this is our only hope—does not make it easier.

The next morning, when Daisy and Jasper are at school, I go into Nic's room, where he still sleeps soundly, his face relaxed and peaceful. A sleeping child. Then, as I watch, he twitches and grimaces and grinds his teeth. I rouse him and tell him where we are headed.

He rages. "No fucking way!"

"Let's go, Nic, let's get it over with," I plead.

He gets up, pushes his hair back with a trembling hand. He holds on to a doorjamb for support.

"I said no fucking way." He slurs, staggers.

"This is it, Nic," I say firmly. My voice trembles. "We're going. It's not a choice."

"You can't make me. What the fuck?"

"If you want to live here, if you want me to help you, if you want me to pay for your college, if you want to see us..." I look at him and say, "Nic—do you want to die? Is that what this is all about?"

He kicks the wall, smashes his fists on the table, and weeps.

I sadly say, "Let's go."

He rages some more, but follows me to the car.

You're safe,
I remembered whispering to Quintana when I first saw her in the ICU at UCLA.
I'm here. You're going to be all right.
Half of her skull had been shaved for surgery. I could see the long cut and the metal staples that held it closed. She was again breathing only through an endotracheal tube. I'm here.
Everything's fine...
I would take care of her. It would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

—J
OAN
D
IDION
,
The Year of Magical Thinking

I drive the old Volvo, faded blue and rusty from the salt air of the coast and dented from Nic's misadventures. It smells of his cigarettes. It is the car he had taken. Nic flops like a rag doll, pressed as close to his door, as far away from me, as possible.

Neither of us speaks.

Nic's electric guitar, buttercup yellow with a black pick guard, is in the backseat. Another leftover from his escapades lies beside it: an intricately carved bong made of a glass beaker and meerschaum stem. More: a flashlight, a copy of Rimbaud with a ripped cover, dirty jeans, a half-empty bottle of Gatorade, the
Bay Guardian,
his leather bomber jacket, empty beer bottles, cassettes, a stale sandwich.

He tries a few times to talk me out of it.

"This is stupid," he weakly beseeches. "I know I fucked up. I learned my lesson."

I don't answer.

"I can't do this," he says. "I won't."

He turns livid. Glaring at me, he says, "I'll just run away." He is supercilious and condescending—almost savage. "You fucking think you know me? You don't know anything about me. You have always tried to control me."

He screams until he is hoarse.

In the middle of his ranting, when I notice his slurring, I realize that he is high. Again. Still.

"What are you on today, Nic?" There's incomprehension in my tone.

An angry whisper comes from him. "Fuck you."

I look over at him, look deeply into his impassive face. Nic has many of his mother's handsome features. Like her, he is tall and thin and has her fine nose and lips. He had her fair hair before it darkened as he grew up. Even so, sometimes I have looked at his face and it was as if I were peering in a mirror. It was not only the physical similarities that I would see. I saw myself hidden in his eyes, in his expressions. It would startle me. Maybe all children as they grow up take on their parents' traits and mannerisms and become more like them. I see my father in me now in ways that I never did when I was young. In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately. I recall his soft eyes when they were elated and when they were disappointed, his face when he was pallid from illness and when he was burned red by the sun, his mouth and even each tooth from visits to dentists and the orthodontist, his knees from when he skinned them and I put on Band-Aids, his shoulders from putting on sun block, his feet from taking out splinters—every part of him. I know every part from watching him and living with him and being close to him, and yet driving to Oakland I look at his sullenness and anger and vacancy, his retreat and his turmoil, and I think, Who are you?

I pull up in front of the Oakland rehab and we walk through glass doors into an austere waiting room. As I inform the receptionist that we have an appointment, Nic stands behind me, belligerent on his heels with his arms folded across his chest.

She instructs us to wait.

A counselor, with black eyes and hair tied back in a long pony-tail, comes out and introduces herself, first to Nic and then to me. He acknowledges her with a grunt. As instructed, Nic follows her into another room. He hunches. His feet barely move him forward.

I flip through an old copy of
People,
and then, after nearly an hour, the counselor emerges and says that she wants to speak to me alone. Nic, palpably seething, takes my spot in the waiting room. I follow the woman into a small office with a metal desk and two chairs and a murky fish tank.

"Your son is in serious trouble," she says. "He needs treatment. He easily could die from all the drugs he's using."

"What can..."

"At eighteen, he is using and mixing more drugs than many people who are much older. He has a dangerous attitude—he doesn't understand that he's in trouble. He's proud to be so hardcore, wears it like a badge. This program isn't right for him. He is bordering on being too old and is at this point resistant to treatment. We see it all the time. He's in denial. It's typical of addicts, who maintain and believe that everything is all right, they can stop when they want, everyone else has a problem but not them, they are fine, even if they wind up losing everything, even if they are on the streets, even if they wind up in jail or in the hospital."

"Then what—?"

"He has to get into treatment now, whatever it takes. Not here, but somewhere."

She recommends other programs. In her somber tone and expression, I can tell that she holds out no great hope.

Driving home, the tension in the car builds and then explodes. Nic finally yells, "This is bullshit." I think he might leap out of the car as I speed along the freeway.

"It
is
bullshit," I spit back. "If you want to kill yourself, I should just let you do it."

"It's my life," he hoarsely screams. He cries uncontrollably, hysterically. He hits the dashboard with his fists and kicks it with his boots.

We pull up in front of the house, but with Daisy and Jasper home now, I don't bring Nic in. I sit with him in the car for another half-hour until he has exhausted himself. He is remote—somnolent from drugs and spent anger, his breathing slowed, and then, finally, he falls into a deep sleep. I leave him in the car, checking on him frequently.
Will you check on me every fifteen minutes?
In a while he trudges inside and heads directly for his bedroom. Jasper and Daisy silently watch as their brother's listless body drifts through the living room.

I have to find a program that will take him immediately. Before I lose him.

***

With Nic asleep in his room, I sit down with the kids. I explain as well as I can that Nic is once again on drugs and ill. I say that I am trying to find a hospital or a drug-rehabilitation program that can help him. I say that kids with a brother or sister or parent with a drug problem sometimes think it's their fault.

"It's not your fault. I promise."

They stare at me, sad and uncomprehending.

"Nic has a serious problem, but we're going to get him the help he needs. With help he can be all right."

Nic seethes and rails in and out of a tormented half-sleep, and I call more rehab programs. One, Ohlhoff Recovery House, in San Francisco, has an open bed. It is a well-respected program, recommended by many experts in the Bay Area. A friend of a friend told me that the program turned around the life of her heroin-addicted son. "He lives in Florida now," she said. "He has a family of his own. He has a job that he loves and, on the side, volunteers to help kids with drug problems."

Parents of addicts live for encouraging stories like this.

When Nic wakes up, I tell him that I have found a program in the city, and he somberly agrees to go in for another evaluation. He grimly follows me to the car.

Ohlhoff Recovery is located in a stately but ancient Victorian mansion with three stories, a central cupola, and a handsome woodpaneled lobby, where I wait while Nic goes in for an interview, this time with the director of the twenty-eight-day primary program—primary as in primary school; it's the initial step into rehab and recovery.

After their session, I am called into the stark room and I sit in the vacant chair. Nic and I face the director, who is behind a wooden desk. From her manner and the look of weariness in her eyes, I can tell that Nic has been as belligerent with her as he had been with the counselor at Thunder Road, but she seems less perturbed.

She begins, "Nic doesn't acknowledge that he is an addict."

"Because I'm not."

Undeterred, she continues, "And says he's only coming to treatment because you're forcing him to."

"I know that," I say.

"But that's all right. Many people don't come here by choice. They have just as much of a chance of getting and staying sober as someone who crawls in here, begging to be treated."

I say, "OK."

Nic glares.

"We will check him in in the morning for our twenty-eight-day program."

Nic hides in his room through dinner. We tell Daisy and Jasper that Nic is going into a treatment program in the morning, but that he is scared.

I sit with them after Karen reads their bedtime story. "I'm so sorry you have to go through this with Nic," I say for the nth time. How else can I help them? "It's such a sad thing to have this problem in our family. I hope you'll talk about it with your teachers and friends at school, at least if you want to. If you have questions or worries, you can always ask me or your mom."

Jasper solemnly nods. Daisy is still. She starts reading a Garfield paperback, which Jasper snatches from her. She scratches him and Jasper pushes her. They both wail.

In the morning, driving to the city, Nic is glowering but drained, hardly saying a word. He is a condemned prisoner, resigned and petrified. He holds back tears.

I park in front of the old mansion and walk with Nic, who carries a duffel bag of clothes. Hidden inside his torn dress shirt and big jeans, his head down, Nic trembles. We walk up the steps, making our way through a pack of cigarette-smoking addicts—at least I presume they are the program's resident addicts—clustered on the front stairs. I shake, too. Noticing Nic's suitcase and his apprehensive, furtive glances, a few of the men address him:

"Hey."

"Yo."

"Welcome to the nuthouse."

Nic meets briefly with the program director in the same wood-paneled office, and he is presented with a piece of paper:

"I, the undersigned, hereby request admission to the Alcohol and Chemical Recovery Program," etc.

He signs.

In the hallway, the director, standing with Nic at her side, says to me, "You may say goodbye now. Phone calls are forbidden for the first week."

I turn to Nic.

We hug clumsily, and I leave.

Outside, I feel a barely remembered glimpse of exhilaration from the chill in the air, but driving home, I feel as if I might collapse from more emotion than I can handle. Incongruously, I feel as if I have betrayed Nic, abandoned him, turned him in, though I do take some small consolation in the fact that I know where he is. For the first time in weeks, I sleep through the night.

The next morning, I enter his bedroom and raise high the shades and open wide the window that looks out onto the garden. The gloomy red room is strewn with books, half-painted canvases, grimy clothing, monster speakers, and, on the bed, the yellow guitar. Nic's Sharpie drawings of elongated men and women, their bodies grotesquely contorted, are tacked to the walls. The room has Nic's smell—not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.

Karen watches as I search his dresser and desk drawers and closet and gather up his hidden arsenal—the glass bong, hand-blown meth pipe, cigarette papers, broken shards of a mirror, straight-edge razors, drained Bic lighters, empty bottles—placing it all in a black plastic garbage bag, which I carry outside and put in the trash can.

Over the next few days, the barrage of advice from friends and friends of friends continues. A friend of Karen's, when he hears that Nic is in rehab, asks, "For how long?"

Karen explains that it is a four-week program.

Her friend shakes his head. "It's not enough."

"What do you mean?"

He tells the story of his son who had been through two four-week programs before they sent him to one that lasts a year. He is still in the combined rehab and high school. He is seventeen, so
they were able to send him by force. Karen's friend says, "Even with a year, we don't know if it's long enough."

Another friend tells us that rehab was the wrong approach, what Nic needed was Outward Bound. Some people believe in therapy, others abhor it. My sense is that the psychologists and psychiatrists who saw Nic over the years gave me useful advice and support, and possibly helped him, too, but in spite of their impeccable credentials and obvious devotion to their work, almost every professional we consulted was inexperienced with drug addiction and failed to diagnose it. Everyone has an opinion; well-meaning advice pours in endlessly. Karen and I listen intently. Though we ignore most of it, we are grateful for people's concern.