Beautiful Boy (20 page)

"Been there, done that."

"At least call them. Let them know you're alive."

She doesn't respond.

"Call them. I know they'd want to know you're alive."

I drive home. Without Nic. Wonder about the girl's parents. If they are anything like I imagine them to be—that is, anything like me—whatever they are doing at this moment they are doing it perfunctorily with only a portion of their consciousness. They are never free of worry about their daughter. They wonder what went wrong. They wonder if she is alive. They wonder if it is their fault.

I torment myself with the same unanswerable questions:

Did I spoil him?

Was I too lenient?

Did I give him too little attention?

Too much?

If only we never moved to the country.

If only I never used drugs.

If only his mother and I had stayed together.

If only and if only and if only...

Guilt and self-blame are typical responses of addicts' parents. In
Addict in the Family,
a remarkably useful book, Beverly Conyers wrote, "Most parents, when looking back on how they raised their children, have at least some regrets. They may wish that they had been more or less strict, that they had expected more or less of their
children, that they had spent more time with them, or that they had not been so overprotective. They may reflect on difficult events, such as a divorce or death in the family, and see these as turning points in their child's mental health. Some may bear heavy burdens of shame over past difficulties, such as an infidelity that damaged the family and caused mistrust. Whatever the parental failings may be, it is almost inevitable that the addicts will recognize these vulnerable spots and take advantage of the parents...

"Addicts may have many complaints, including major and minor grievances from years past. Some of their accusations may, in fact, have truth in them. Families may well have caused pain for the addicts. They may well have failed the addicts in some significant way. (After all, what human relationship is perfect?) But addicts bring up these problems not to clear the air or with the hope of healing old wounds. They bring them up solely to induce guilt, a tool with which they manipulate others in pursuit of their continued addiction."

Nonetheless: if only and if only and if only.

Worry and guilt and regret may serve a function—as a turbo-charger of conscience—but in excess they are useless and incapacitating. Yet I cannot silence them.

After days without a word from Nic, he calls from the house of a former girlfriend. He is talking fast and obviously lying. He says he has quit on his own and has been sober for five days. I tell him that he has two choices as far as I am concerned: another try at rehab or the streets. My tough talk belies my impulse to rush over and take him in my arms.

He maintains that rehab is unnecessary—he will stop on his own—but I tell him that it isn't negotiable. He indolently agrees to try again, finally concluding, "Whatever."

I drive to the girl's house and wait outside, idling the car on the cul-de-sac. Nic dully climbs in. I notice a black bruise on his cheek and a gash on his forehead. I ask what happened. He looks skyward and then closes his eyes. "It was no big deal," he says. "Some asshole beat me up and robbed me."

I yelp. "And it's
no big deal?
"

He looks weary and empty. He has no suitcase or backpack, nothing.

"What happened to your stuff ?"

"Everything was stolen."

Who is he? The boy sitting near me in the car is not Nic, nor does he know anything about the child I remember. As if corroborating my observation, he speaks at last.

"What the fuck am I doing here? This is bullshit. I don't need rehab. It's bullshit. I'm leaving."

"Leaving? Where?"

"Paris."

"Ah, Paris."

"Getting out of this fucking country is what I need."

"What will you do in Paris?"

"Tom and David and I are going to play music in the Metro, set ourselves up with a little monkey, like the old organ grinders."

Over the next twenty-four hours, Nic's mood ranges from agitated to comatose. In addition to the monkey, his plans include backpacking to Mexico, joining the Peace Corps, and farming in South America, but each time he ultimately comes around to a grim resignation that he will return to rehab. Then he again says that he doesn't need it, he is sober, fuck you, and then he says he needs drugs and cannot survive without them. "Life sucks, which is why I get high."

I am unsure if another four weeks of rehab makes sense, but I know it's worth trying. This time I manage to get him into St. Helena Hospital, improbably located in the Napa Valley wine country.

Many families drain every penny, mortgaging their homes and bankrupting their college funds and retirement accounts, trying successive drug-rehab programs as well as boot camps, wilderness camps, and every variety of therapist. His mother's insurance and mine pay most of the costs of these programs. Without this coverage, I'm not sure what we would do. For twenty-eight days, they cost nearly twenty thousand dollars.

The following morning, Nic, Karen, and I drive past endless yellow fields and green ones—mustard flower, geometric vineyards—on our way to the hospital.

Above the Napa Valley, off the Silverado Trail, I turn the car onto Sanatorium Road, which leads to the hospital. Nic looks at the sign, shakes his head, and wryly remarks, "Great. Therapy camp. Here we go again."

I park the car and see Nic looking over his shoulder. He is thinking of making a run for it.

"Don't you dare."

"I'm scared, all right? Jesus!" he says. "This is going to be a nightmare."

"Compared to getting beaten up and almost killed?"

"Yeah."

We enter the main building and follow the signs to the substance-abuse program. We take an elevator to the second floor and from there walk down a corridor. In contrast with Ohlhoff Recovery, this is a sterile hospital—gray carpeting, fluorescent light, endless hallways, nurses in white, orderlies in blue. We sit on a pair of upholstered chairs near a busy nurses' station, filling out forms. We don't talk.

Then a nurse with a Harpo Marx hairdo and large pink glasses comes for Nic. She explains that he will be interviewed and undergo a physical examination before he is admitted. To me, she says, "It will take about an hour. He'll meet you here."

Karen and I go downstairs to the hospital gift shop and from the meager selection buy him a few toiletries. When we return, Nic says that it's time for him to go to his room. We walk with him a little way down the corridor. He holds on to my arm. He feels almost weightless, as if he could lift from earth.

We all awkwardly hug. "Good luck," I say. "Take care of yourself."

"Thanks, Papa. Thanks, KB."

"I love you," Karen says.

"I love you, too."

He looks at me and says, "Everything." Tears flow.

The program at St. Helena is similar to the one at Count Ohlhoff's, though it includes more exercise, with yoga and swimming in the hospital's kidney-shaped pool, plus consultations with staff physicians and a psychiatrist. It emphasizes education, with lectures and films about the brain chemistry of addiction, and daily AA and NA meetings, plus an expanded two-day-a-week family program. At this point, I am not sanguine about rehab, but I allow myself a sliver of hope. As in the Springsteen song, "At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe." Mine is a mix of this hope and, once again, tenuous relief because I know where he is.

At home I sleep, though unsoundly. In my nightmares, Nic is on drugs. I rage at him. I plead with him. I weep for him. High, he does not care. High, he stares back blankly and coldly.

Other people visit the wine country for its cabernet and pinot noir, mud baths and good food. Karen and I make pilgrimages for family weekends at the hospital. Before our first St. Helena session, a counselor tells me that an addict's prognosis is far better when his or her family participates. "We worry most about ones without families," she says. "Nic is one of the lucky ones."

"You will find Nicolas greatly changed," she remarks as we walk down a white hallway. "But he's feeling pretty depressed. They all do when they're detoxing, and meth is the worst."

Family sessions at the hospital are structured differently than at Count Ohlhoff's. We first gather in a large room with lines of chairs facing a lectern and TV monitors. The hospital offers four education forums on alternating Sundays. Our first is on the disease model of addiction. This is an alien concept for me. What other diseases include, as a symptom, the willing participation of the victim? Each time Nic does speed, he makes a choice. (Doesn't he?) Smokers may bring on their lung cancer, but otherwise cancer patients are not responsible for their condition. Drug addicts are. (Aren't they?)

The lecturer explains that addiction is genetic, at least the predisposition to addiction. That is, Nic's genes are partly to blame, the potent mix of his ancestry: my dark-complexioned forebears, Russian Jews, mixed with his mother's fair Southern Methodists. Vicki's father died of alcoholism, so we didn't have to look far in the family tree, though no one really knows exactly how the predisposition is passed down. Roughly 10 percent of people have it, the
speaker says. If they do, drugs or alcohol "activates" the disease. "A switch is turned on," she says. Once it's activated it cannot be deactivated. Pandora's box cannot be closed.

A man interrupts. "You're letting people off the hook," he says. "No one forced my son to go to his drug dealer, to score, to cook up meth, to inject heroin, to rob us, to rob a liquor store and his grandparents."

"No," she answers. "No one did. He did it himself. But nonetheless he has an illness. It's a tricky illness. Yes, people do have choices about what to do about it. It's the same with an illness like diabetes. A diabetic can choose to monitor his insulin levels and take his medication; an addict can choose to treat his disease through recovery. In both cases, if they don't treat their illnesses, they worsen and the person can die."

"But," the same man interjects, "a diabetic does not steal, cheat, lie. A diabetic doesn't choose to shoot up heroin."

"There's evidence that people who become addicted, once they begin using, have a type of compulsion that cannot be easily stopped or controlled," she says. "It's almost like breathing. It's not a matter of willpower. They cannot just stop on their own or they would. No one wants to be an addict. The drug takes a person over. The drug, not a person's rational mind, is in control. We teach addicts how to deal with their illness through ongoing recovery work. It's the only way. People who say they can control it don't understand the nature of the disease, because the disease is in control."

No, I think.

Nic is in control.

No, Nic is out of control.

After the presentation, there are questions and answers. Then we meet in another room. We sit in a circle of chairs. Another circle. We are becoming used to these surreal circular gatherings of parents and children and significant others of addicts. We take turns introducing ourselves, sharing abridged versions of our stories. They are all different—different drugs, different lies, different betrayals—but the same, dreadful and heartbreaking, all laced with intense worry and sadness and palpable desperation.

We are dismissed for lunch, to dine with our family member in
the program. Nic wanders shakily down a hallway toward us. He is pallid, moving slowly, as if each step causes searing pain. He seems genuinely happy to see us. He gives us warm hugs, holding on to each of us for a long time. His cheek presses against mine.

We choose sandwiches wrapped in plastic and pour coffee into plastic mugs and carry them on trays to an empty bench outside on the balcony. After taking a bite of his sandwich and then pushing it away, Nic explains his lassitude. He has been given sedatives to aid in the come-down process. He says that the medication is distributed twice each day by "Nurse Ratched"—he impersonates Louise Fletcher in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
"If Mr. McMurphy doesn't want to take his medication orally," he says, with a drawl accompanied by a menacing look, "I'm sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way."

He chortles, but it's a weak performance; he is too sedated to put much verve into it.

After lunch, he shows us his room, with twin single beds and nightstands and a small round table with two chairs. It looks comfortable, like a modest hotel room. Indicating the bed by one wall, he tells us about his roommate. "He's a great guy," Nic says. "He was a chef. A drunk. He's married with a baby. Look..."

He picks up a photograph in a bamboo frame on the bedside table. An angelic baby girl, around two years old, and her mother, a beauty with a churned-up sea of yellow curls and a light-filled smile. "She told him this is his last chance," Nic says. "If he doesn't stay sober, she'll leave him."

On Nic's bedside table is the Alcoholics Anonymous
Big Book
and a stack of recovery literature. There is a small closet and a dresser into which he stashed the small pile of his folded clothes we brought along.

Next he guides us onto the balcony, which looks out over vineyards.

"I'm so sorry about everything," he blurts.

I look at Karen. We do not know what to say.

Another weekend in wine country. The morning lecture is on the "addicted family"—that is, us.

"I probably don't have to tell you that this is a disease that affects families, too," the speaker, a program counselor, begins. "They don't sleep, they don't eat, they become ill. They blame themselves. They feel rage, overwhelming worry, shame. Many people keep their suffering to themselves. If your child had cancer, the support from your friends and family would flood in. Because of the stigma of addiction, people often keep it quiet. Their friends and family may try to be supportive, but they may also communicate a subtle or unsubtle judgment."

Apparently the family dynamics are predictable, illustrated in a mobile that hangs from a ceiling on one side of the lectern. Pointing to the mobile, the speaker explains all of our roles with disturbing accuracy.