Beautiful Boy (3 page)

In telling our story, I resisted the temptation to foreshadow, because it would be disingenuous—and a disservice to anyone going through this—to suggest that one can anticipate how things will unfold. I never knew what the next day would bring.

I've strived to honestly include the major events that shaped Nic and our family—the good and the appalling. Much of it makes me cringe. I am aghast at so much of what I did and, equally, what I did not do. Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, "You didn't cause it," I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this.

Someone who heard my story expressed bafflement that Nic would become addicted, saying, "But your family doesn't seem dysfunctional." We
are
dysfunctional—as dysfunctional as every other family I know. Sometimes more so, sometimes less so. I'm not sure if I know any "functional" families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems. Like addicts themselves, the families of addicts are everything you would expect and everything you wouldn't. Addicts come from broken and intact homes. They are longtime losers and great successes. We often heard in lectures or Al-Anon meetings or AA meetings of the intelligent and charming men and women who bewilder those around them when they wind up in the gutter. "You're too good a man to do this to yourself," a doctor tells an alcoholic in a Fitzgerald story. Many, many people who have known Nic well have expressed similar sentiments. One said, "He is the last person I could picture this happening to. Not Nic. He's too solid and too smart."

I also know that parents have discretionary recall, blocking out everything that contradicts our carefully edited recollections—an understandable attempt to dodge blame. Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made stronger impressions. I hope that I am not indulging in parental revisionism when I say that in spite of my divorce from Nic's mother, in spite of our draconian long-distance custody arrangement, and in spite of all of my shortcomings and mistakes, much of Nic's early years was charmed. Nic confirms this, but maybe he is just being kind.

This rehashing in order to make sense of something that cannot be made sense of is common in the families of addicts, but it's not all we do. We deny the severity of our loved one's problem, not because we are naive, but because we can't know. Even for those who, unlike me, never used drugs, it's an incontrovertible fact that many—more than half of all children—will try them. For some of those, drugs will have no major negative impact on their lives. For others, however, the outcome will be catastrophic. We parents do everything we can and consult every expert and sometimes it's not enough. Only after the fact do we know that we didn't do enough or what we did do was wrong. Addicts are in denial and their families are in it with them because often the truth is too inconceivable, too painful, and too terrifying. But denial, however common, is dangerous. I wish someone had shaken me and said, "Intervene while you can before it's too late." It may not have made a difference, but I don't know. No one shook me and said it. Even if someone had, I may not have been able to hear it. Maybe I had to learn the hard way.

Like many in my straits, I became addicted to my child's addiction. When it preoccupied me, even at the expense of my responsibilities to my wife and other children, I justified it. I thought, How can a parent not be consumed by his child's life-or-death struggle? But I learned that my preoccupation with Nic didn't help him and may have harmed him. Or maybe it was irrelevant to him. However, it surely harmed the rest of my family—and me. Along with this, I learned another lesson, a soul-shaking one: our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself. I chose the perilous but essential path that allows me to accept that Nic will decide for himself how—and whether—he will live his life.

As I said, I don't absolve myself, and meanwhile, I still struggle with how much I can absolve Nic. He is brilliant and wonderful and charismatic and loving when he's not using, but like every addict I have ever heard of, he becomes a stranger when he is, distant and foolish and self-destructive and broken and dangerous. I have
struggled to reconcile these two people. Whatever the cause—a genetic predisposition, the divorce, my drug history, my overprotectiveness, my failure to protect him, my leniency, my harshness, my immaturity, all of these—Nic's addiction seemed to have had a life of its own. I have tried to reveal how insidiously addiction creeps into a family and takes over. So many times in the past decade I made mistakes out of ignorance, hope, or fear. I've tried to recount them all as and when they happened, in the hope that readers will recognize a wrong path before they take it. If they don't, however, I hope they may realize that it is a path they can't blame themselves for having taken.

When my child was born, it was impossible to imagine that he would suffer in the ways that Nic has suffered. Parents want only good things for their children. I was a typical parent who felt that this could not happen to us—not to my son. But though Nic is unique, he is every child. He could be yours.

The reader should know that I have changed a few names and details in the book to obscure the identities of some of the people herein. I begin when Nic was born. The birth of a child is, for many if not every family, a transformative event of joy and optimism. It was for us.

I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function.

—K
URT
C
OBAIN
, in his suicide note

My wife, Vicki, and I live in Berkeley in a whitewashed clapboard bungalow built in the 1920s, hidden from the street behind a wall of black bamboo. It is 1982, a summer of waiting. Everything else—work, social engagements—is biding time. Our baby is due in July.

An ultrasound identifies him as a him. We prepare for his arrival. We paint and decorate a nursery, furnishing it with a white crib, light-blue dresser, bookshelves stocked with Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, and, sitting sentinel on either side of the doorway, a pair of enormous stuffed panda bears, early baby gifts from a friend. Another friend has loaned us a family heirloom, a buttery yellow cradle in the shape of a new moon. It hangs from a chain in the corner of the living room, appearing to float above San Francisco, which glitters in the distance.

Vicki's contractions begin after midnight on the morning of July 20. As we have been instructed to do in our Lamaze class, we clock the intervals between them. It is time. We drive to the hospital.

Nic is born at dawn—our beautiful boy.

We are enraptured by our child. We willingly forsake sleep. We soothe his crying. We sing him lullabies. We fall into a languorous altered state, a dreamy contentment that would have appalled us had it befallen any of our friends. (Indeed, many of our friends
are
appalled.) Life is accompanied by a soundtrack of Pete Seeger, the Limelighters, and Raffi, whose songs, played over and over and
over and over and over and over and over, would crack any criminal into confessing after other forms of torture fail. Sometimes we just stare at the baby's tiny grasping hands and luminous, exuberant eyes.

We are among the first generation of self-conscious parents. Before us, people had kids. We parent. We seek out the best for our children—the best stroller and car seat recommended by
Consumer Reports
—and fret over every decision about their toys, diapers, clothes, meals, medicine, teething rings, inoculations, and just about everything else.

Before long the crib is replaced by a single bed with zebra sheets. We take walks in the stroller and a Snugli, play in Berkeley parks and baby gyms, and visit the San Francisco Zoo. Nic's library overflows.
Goodnight Moon, Pat the Bunny, Where the Wild Things Are, A Hole Is to Dig.
I read them so often I know them by heart.

"Milk, Milk, Milk for the Morning Cake."

"From here to there and there to here, funny things are everywhere."

"Dogs are to kiss people. Snow is to roll in. Buttons are to keep people warm. Boodly boodly boodly."

At three, Nic spends a few mornings a week at a pastel-colored preschool a short walk from home. His day includes circle time; games like duck, duck, goose; painting and clay; and songs. "Pulling weeds, picking stones," Nic sings, "we are made of dreams and bones." There is outside time on the climbing structure and swing-set. He ventures out on his first playdates, formerly known as going over to some kid's house. Sometimes we meet other families at a park with a concrete slide that follows a hillside down under a canopy of oaks. Nic spins on a whirling merry-go-round.

Nic is a natural architect and builder, constructing sprawling block, Duplo, and Lego Lilliputs. He loves Teddy Ruxpin, Pound Puppies, and the twin pandas. He scoots around the house on a big-wheeled tricycle and, on the red-brick front patio, in a plastic sky-blue convertible, a gift from my parents, which he powers like a Flintstones car with high-top-sneakered feet.

We visit Train Town in nearby Sonoma, where Nic conducts a steam locomotive past miniature barns and windmills. We travel to
Yosemite National Park—in spring, with wildflowers abloom, we hike to the waterfalls; in wintertime, we play in the snow in the valley watched over by Half Dome—and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where Nic is mesmerized by fluorescent jellies and circling sharks.

There are puppet shows and board games and singing along with the bashing of a tambourine. Wearing a kimono and flannel pajama bottoms and holding a plastic guitar, Nic sings at the top of his lungs:

Tingalayo, run my little donkey run
Tingalayo, run my little donkey run
Me donkey walk, me donkey talk
Me donkey eat with a knife and fork
Me donkey walk, me donkey talk
Me donkey eat with a knife and fork

Then he peels off the kimono and he's in his clown pajama top with polka dots, lime green and sky blue and cherry red. He's wearing fluorescent, swirly blue-green-pink rain boots.

We walk down the sidewalk, him shuffling in the too-large boots, my big hand enveloping his tiny one, his plastic guitar slung over his shoulder. He stomps in every puddle.

His eyes are thoughtful and the bronze sometimes melts into greenness, alive like the sea.

He dances a funny little dance as he walks along, holding a yellow umbrella over his head.

"Tut, tut, it looks like rain."

This apparent idyll distracts us from a looming catastrophe. Vicki and I have spent Nic's first three years in the tired but blissful half-sleep of new parenthood and then wake up in the harsh light and oppressive chill of a shattering marriage. I maturely address our disagreements by falling in love with a family friend. Her son and Nic are playmates.

Vicki and I share a devotion to Nic, but I am ill-equipped to deal with our escalating problems. When we visit a couples therapist, I announce that it is too late. My marriage is over. Vicki is caught off
guard. It is not the first relationship that I have sabotaged, but now there is a child.

Nic.

At home when his mother and I argue, Nic finds refuge in the laps of the pandas.

No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours. Like fallout from a dirty bomb, the collateral damage is widespread and enduring. Nick is hit hard.

We divide the china and the art and our young son. It seems obvious that joint custody is the best approach; Vicki and I both want him with us and have no reason to doubt the prevailing wisdom, that it will be best for him to continue to be raised by both parents. Soon Nic has two homes. On the days I drop him off at his mother's, we hug and I say goodbye at the white picket gate and watch him march inside.

Vicki moves to Los Angeles, where she remarries. We still both want Nic with us, but now that five hundred miles separate us, the informal yo-yo joint-custody arrangement is no longer tenable. Each of us believes with sincerity and vengeance that it is in Nic's best interest to be with us,
not
his other parent, and so we hire divorce lawyers.

Some attorneys successfully mediate agreements, but many custody battles wind up in court. Usually it's traumatic and expensive. Our lawyers charge more than two hundred dollars an hour and require five- to ten-thousand-dollar retainers. When we learn that judges often follow the arrangement recommended by a court-appointed child psychologist after he or she conducts a thorough assessment, our wiser selves and drained bank accounts prevail. Nic has been seeing a therapist since soon after we separated, and we hire her to conduct an evaluation. We agree to abide by her decision.

The doctor launches a three-month investigation that feels like an inquisition. She interviews us, our friends, and our families, visits our respective homes in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and spends long therapy sessions in her office playing checkers, cards, and blocks with Nic. He calls her his worry doctor. One day, while playing with a dollhouse in her office, he shows her the mother's
room on one side and the father's room on the other. When she asks him about the little boy's room, he says, "He doesn't know where he will sleep."

We meet in her office, among the toys and modern furniture and framed prints of paintings by Gottlieb and Rothko, and she hands down her verdict. Vicki and I sit in matching leather armchairs facing the doctor, an imposing woman in a flowered dress, iron-black curls, and penetrating eyes behind bottle-thick glasses. She folds her hands on her lap and speaks.