Beautiful Boy (8 page)

"Come inside."

Karen and I stand facing the boys. I look to her for guidance, but she is as uncertain as I am. I am shaken not only by the discovery that Nic is smoking pot, but by the even more perplexing fact that I had no idea.

"How long have you been smoking this stuff ?"

The cornered boys look at each other. "It's the first time we bought it," Nic says. "We tried it one other time."

I think: Do I trust him? This too is a radically confounding proposition, one that has never crossed my mind. Of course I trust him. He wouldn't lie to me. Would he lie? I know parents whose children are in constant trouble at school and at home. The most disconcerting part is the dishonesty.

"Tell me exactly what happened."

I look at his friend, who hasn't said a word. He stares at the floor. Nic answers for them both: "Everyone does it."

"Everyone?"

"Almost everyone."

Nic's eyes aim at the long fingers of his boyish hands, which are spread out wide on the table. He closes them and stuffs his fists into his pockets.

"Where did you get it?"

"Just somebody. Some kid."

"Who?"

"It's not important."

"Yes, it is."

They tell us the boy's name. "We just wanted to see what it was like," Nic says.

"And?"

"It's no big deal."

Nic's friend asks if I am going to call his parents. When I say yes, he begs me not to. "I'm sorry, but they need to know. I am going to call them and then I'll take you home."

Nic asks, "What about the sleepover?"

I glare at him. "We'll take him home and then you and I will talk."

He is still looking down.

The boy's father, when I call, thanks me for letting him know. He says that he is concerned but isn't entirely surprised. "We've gone through this with our older kids," he says. "I guess they all go through it. We'll talk to him." He resignedly adds, "We are so busy. We can't monitor him."

When I call the mother of the boy who sold them the pot, she is livid, adamant that her son wasn't involved. She charges that Nic and the other boy are trying to get her son in trouble.

When Nic and I are alone, he is contrite. He nods when I tell him that Karen and I have decided to ground him. "Yeah, I understand."

Our thinking went like this. We don't want to overreact, but even more, we don't want to underreact. We issue a punishment to show how seriously we take the breach of the rules of our household as well as our relationship. There are consequences for one's actions, and we hope that these are appropriately onerous. In addition, I am wary of his new crowd of friends. I understand that I can't choose his friends for him, and forbidding friends might only make them more attractive, but at least I can minimize the time he spends with them. The other part is simply that I want to watch him. To look at him. To try to fathom what is going on.

"How long am I grounded?"

"Let's see how things go over the next two weeks."

We sit down on facing couches. Nic appears genuinely chastened. I ask, "What made you want to try pot? It wasn't very long ago that the idea of smoking anything—a cigarette, never mind marijuana—repulsed you. You and Thomas"—I mention one of his city friends—"used to get in trouble for throwing away his mother's cigarettes."

"I don't know."

Using the red pen that is lying on the coffee table, he begins to scribble crosshatched lines on the day's newspaper.

"I guess I was curious." In a minute, he says: "I didn't like it anyway. It made me feel. I don't know. Weird." Then he adds, "You don't have to worry. I won't ever try it again."

"What about other drugs? Have you tried any?"

His incredulous look convinces me that he is telling the truth. "I know this was stupid," he says, "but I'm not that stupid."

"How about alcohol? Have you been drinking?"

He waits before answering. "We got drunk. Once. Me and Philip. It was on the ski trip."

"The ski trip? To Lake Tahoe?"

He nods.

I recall the midwinter long weekend before Jasper was born, when we rented a cabin at Alpine Meadows. We let Nic bring along Philip, a friend we like, a soft-spoken, easy-to-be-with boy. He is small, with hair combed down over his forehead. We are friends with his parents.

We arrived in the mountains at night, just before a blizzard shut down the roads. In the morning, the pine trees were dusted white. Nic had skied before, but this time he and Philip decided to try snowboarding. As a surfer, Nic thought it would be easy to switch over. "You're carving snow instead of water," he had said. "They're
both about balance and gravity." Maybe, but he spent most of the trip tumbling down the mountainside before he finally got it.

Now I ask, "When did you have an opportunity to drink? Where did you get liquor?"

His body rocks back and forth on the couch. "One night you and Karen went to sleep early," he says. "We were hanging out by the fire watching TV. We got bored and wanted to play cards, but I couldn't find any. I went around looking and found the liquor cabinet. We got glasses and poured in some of everything—only a little of each so no one would be able to tell. Rum, bourbon, gin, sake, tequila, vermouth, Scotch, some weird-ass green shit, crème de something." He pauses and says, "We drank it all. It was gross, but we wanted to see what it was like to get good and drunk."

I remember the night. Karen and I had been awakened by the sounds of the two of them throwing up. Simultaneously, in the two downstairs bathrooms. We went to check on them. They were sick throughout the night. We thought they had the flu.

In the morning, we called Philip's mother. "Yes, the flu is going around," she agreed. The boys were ill the next day on the long, windy drive home down from the Sierra. One time we couldn't make it to the shoulder of the road quickly enough, and Philip threw up out the car window.

"That was the only time. I haven't touched anything since. It makes me sick to think about it."

His reasonableness is disarming, but I take in this information like a punch in the gut, reeling as much from the deception as the drunkenness. And yet at the same time I appreciate Nic's candor. I think, At least he's coming clean.

Then he says: "If it's any comfort to you, I hate all this. I'm not making an excuse, but"—after a moment—"it's hard."

"What's hard?"

"It's hard. I don't know. Everybody drinks. Everybody smokes." I think about his beloved Salinger, from the mouth of Franny: "I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."

On Monday, I call his teacher and tell him what happened. He sets up a conference with Karen and me for after school. We meet with
him in his vacated classroom, the three of us sitting at students' desks.

The teacher has given me one of Nic's binders of work—mathematics, geography, literature. Nic has covered a page with ballpoint graffiti, a buxom, big-eyed girl, hollow-eyed men, and blocky initials. In style and content, these drawings contrast sharply with the chalk mural of a scene from the Middle Ages meticulously shaded over the entire green board along the front of the classroom. The students' expressive self-portraits are pinned up on another wall. I easily pick out Nic's: harshly drawn, more of a cartoon, it is a boy with a wild smile and big, wide-open eyes.

The teacher is built like Ichabod Crane, with receding, flyaway auburn hair and a crooked nose. Bending forward on the small chair, he pages through Nic's folder in front of him. "He's doing fine in his schoolwork," he says. "He's doing
quite
well. I'm sure you know. He's a leader in the class. He gets other kids—some who wouldn't necessarily be engaged—he gets them excited about contributing to the discussion."

"But what about the marijuana?" Karen asks.

The teacher, way too large for the student's chair into which he is folded, leans uncomfortably on his elbows. "I have noticed that Nic is being pulled by the students who the others see as cool," he says. "They're the ones who sneak cigarettes and—I'm only guessing—probably smoke pot. They may. But I don't think you have to be overly concerned. It's normal. Most kids try it."

"But," I say, "Nic is only twelve."

"Yes." The teacher sighs. "That's when they try it. There's only so much we can do. It's a force out there. The children have to figure it out sooner or later. Often sooner."

When we ask for his advice, he says: "Talk to him about it. I will, too. If it's all right with you, we'll talk about it in class. We won't mention any names." Whether out of guilt or resignation, he repeats, "There's only so much we can do. If we work together—the school, the families—then maybe."

"Would you forbid him from playing with...?" I name the boys. "They don't seem to be a very good influence."

The leaves of a tree outside the window flicker in the afternoon
sun as the teacher mulls the question. "I would encourage healthier friendships, yes," he says, "but I'm not sure how far you'll get by forbidding him. From what I've seen in the past, when you forbid children, they usually sneak what they want. Steering them works better than forcing them. You can try."

He recommends a book about teenagers and he promises to keep in close touch.

It is breezy outside. The schoolyard is abandoned except for Nic, who is waiting for us. He sits on a tiny swing in the kindergarteners' playground, his long legs bent underneath him.

Alone in our bedroom, Karen and I talk it over, sorting out our puzzlement and worry. What am I worried about? I know that marijuana can become a habit and Nic could be sidetracked from his schoolwork. I worry that he could go on to try other drugs. I warn Nic about pot. "It really can—often does—lead to hard drugs," I say. He probably doesn't believe me, just like I didn't believe the adults who said it when I was young. But in spite of a myth perpetrated by my generation, the first to use drugs en masse, marijuana
is
the gateway drug. Almost everyone I know who smoked pot in high school tried other drugs. Conversely, I never met anyone who used hard drugs who didn't start with pot.

I begin to second-guess each of my past decisions, including our move to the country. I have never fantasized that any American suburb or exurb or country town, no matter how remote, is far enough away to be untouched by the perils most often associated with inner cities, but I thought that towns like Inverness must be safer than the Tenderloin. Now I'm not sure. I wonder if we should ever have moved out of San Francisco. Moving probably was irrelevant; this would have happened wherever we lived.

I blame my hypocrisy. It makes me wince. How can I tell him not to use drugs when he knows that I have? "Do as I say, not as I did." I tell him that I wish I hadn't used them. I tell him about friends whose lives were ruined by them. And meanwhile, in my mind, as always I blame the divorce. I tell myself that many children of divorce do all right and many children in intact families don't. Regardless, there is no way to undo what I know to be the most traumatic event of Nic's life.

The next few days, I continue to talk to Nic about drugs, about peer pressure, and about what cool really is. "It may not seem like it, but it is far cooler to be engaged, to study and learn," I say. "Looking back, I now think the coolest kids were the ones who stayed away from drugs."

I know how lame I sound and how I would have responded at Nic's age: "Yeah, right." Even so, I try to convince him that I know what I'm talking about, that I understand the ubiquity and the persistent pressure to do drugs, that I understand their seductiveness.

Nic seems to listen intently, though I am unsure if or how he is taking it in. Indeed, I sense that my close relationship with Nic has changed. Now I am the occasional target of his exasperation. We sometimes argue over sloppy homework or half-done chores. But it's confusing, because it all seems within the realm of acceptable and expectable adolescent rebellion.

Three weeks later, I'm driving Nic to a doctor's appointment for a checkup. I turn down the music on the tape player and start in again. I know there is no point in haranguing him because he will just shut down, but I want to cover every angle. In the conversation that has been going on for weeks now, my tone has ranged from warning to pleading. Today is less strained. I inform him that Karen and I have decided that he is no longer grounded. He nods and says, "Thanks."

I continue to watch him over the next few weeks. Nic's somberness seems to have diminished. I file away the marijuana bust as an aberration, maybe even a useful one because it has taught him a salient lesson.

I think it did. Nic is in the eighth grade. And things seem much better.

He rarely hangs out with the boy who had been (I'm convinced) the worst influence on him—the one who, according to Nic, sold him the pot. (About this, I believe Nic, not the boy's mother.) Instead, he spends a lot of his free time surfing with his West Marin friends. We surf together, too, driving up and down the coast, chasing waves from Santa Cruz to Point Arena. On these outings, there's time to talk, and Nic seems open and optimistic. He's motivated in
school, too. He wants to do well, in part to increase his chances of being accepted at one of the local private high schools.

Nic continues to devour books. He reads and rereads
Franny and Zooey
and
Catcher in the Rye.
After reading
To Kill a Mockingbird,
he turns in a book report in the form of a tape from Atticus Finch's answering machine with messages for Scout and Jem from Dill, and anonymous, threatening phone calls to Atticus for defending Tom Robinson. He reads
A Streetcar Named Desire
and then tapes a radio interview with Blanche DuBois. For an assignment about
Death of a Salesman,
he draws a cartoon bemoaning the Lomans' family values. Next is a biography project for which Nic, dressed in a white wig, white mustache, and white suit, walks onstage and recites, in a lilting southern accent, the life story of Samuel Clemens. "My pen name is Mark Twain. Sit back and let me tell you my story." There have been no more indications that he is smoking anything—neither marijuana nor cigarettes. In fact, he has seemed happier and guardedly excited about his upcoming eighth-grade graduation.