Beautiful Boy (30 page)

I am working in my office, but I join her in the living room. "What are you talking about?" I ask. Immediately I am protective. My knee-jerk reaction is that Karen is overreacting, paranoid—always ready to blame Nic.

"No. Someone—" She stops. "Come look."

I follow her, and my mind clicks from defensiveness to acceptance. Nic has been here. He broke in. Together we check throughout the house and find, in our bedroom, a broken deadbolt on a French door. The door's redwood astragal is splintered beyond re
pair. Only then do I notice that my desk drawers have been ransacked.

Each time Karen or I discover another violation, we are hit anew by a combination of sadness and fury. How could he do this? We closed our bank accounts when he forged our names on our checks, canceled credit cards when he stole them. We'll have to do it again. Now I call a locksmith and a burglar-alarm company.

I also call the sheriff, reporting the break-in. If anyone had told me before I encountered addiction that I would be calling the sheriff on my son, I would have thought that that person was the one on drugs. I don't want Nic arrested. Imagining him in jail sickens me. Could anything good come of it? Suddenly I share the feelings of the parents I met in some of the Al-Anon meetings whose children were in jail and who said, "At least I know where she is." And: "It's safer." The sad irony is that as violent as jail can be, as bleak and hopeless, it is probably safer for Nic than the streets.

The locksmith who comes is a burly man in jeans and a work shirt. I show him the locks on the doors and windows that we want him to change. It's an expensive and humiliating experience, because I'm honest when he asks, "Just a precaution or have you had any problems?"

My voice catches when I reply, "My son."

The next day, we hear from friends who live in Inverness below Manka's, the former hunting lodge that is now a renowned restaurant. A workman arrived this morning, meeting his crew, and saw two boys duck out a window of their house. The boys cut along the side and retreated in an old sun-faded red Mazda. The boys were quick in their flight, but the man, whom we know, recognized Nic. I go over to the house. The remnants of Nic's night are untouched: he and his friend slept on the living room floor. Nothing much is disturbed, but there are cotton balls, silver foil packets, and other accoutrements of smoking and shooting meth.

Where else might Nic break in? It's never easy to fathom exactly what motivates a drug addict, but I am struck that Nic is drawn back to places where he is loved—our house, our friends', his grandparents'. It's probably merely convenience, when he doesn't know where else to go, but could it be an unconscious desire to return home to safety? Whatever the reason, when he inflicts his craziness upon us, it becomes even more difficult to feel compassion. We become afraid of him.

It is the next morning, and Karen is outside when, surreally, she sees Nic drive by in his Mazda, smoke billowing from the tailpipe. They make eye contact. He steps on the gas, gunning the car, which creeps up the hill past the house.

Karen, puzzled, does a double take. Yes, it is Nic. She calls to me.

I jump in the car and chase him. What will I do? I suppose I will just tell him how heartbroken we are. And warn him that the police have been called. He had better stop, get help, call Randy.

I drive the winding hillside streets above our house. There was a wildfire here ten years ago. Forty-five homes and more than twelve thousand acres burned. The returning oaks, pine, and Douglas fir are now the size of small Christmas trees. I drive streets that snake through canyons and on the ridge side, but I can't find him.

I head back down the hill and pull into our the driveway, noticing that our other car is gone. I run inside. Jasper and Daisy tell me that Karen saw Nic driving down the hill—somehow I had missed him—and she leaped in the car. She is following his ancient car in our own ancient car, the beat-up, rusted-out Volvo station wagon that can hardly reach forty miles per hour.

I try Karen's cell phone, but it rattles and rings in the bedroom, a few feet away from me. The kids look worried, so I reassure them. By now they know that Nic has relapsed, but how can they understand what it means that their mother has jumped into the car, left them home alone, and driven off in pursuit of their brother?

She doesn't come home for almost an hour, by which time I am crazy with worry, but for the kids' sake pretending that this is normal, again reassuring them. We wait in the living room. When Karen pulls into the driveway, we rush outside. She says that she followed Nic down Highway 1 and up over the mountainous Stinson Beach Road. Finally she realized that it was ludicrous—what would she have done if she'd caught him?—and so she stopped.

"What
would
you have done if you caught him?" Jasper asks.

"I'm not sure," she says. She looks beleaguered; she has been crying.

Later, when we're alone, she confides to me, "I wanted to tell him to get help, but mostly I was chasing him—chasing him away from our house—from Jasper and Daisy."

It's not that we need a reminder, but the absurd morning tells us how out of control our lives have become. It was foolish to try to chase him, but we have succumbed to the irrationality that festers along with addiction.

Three days later, on Sunday morning, the phone rings, but no one is on the other end. Then it happens again. There's a number on the caller ID that I don't recognize.

Using the reverse lookup feature on anywho.com, I learn that the phone is under a familiar name. It takes a while for me to place it. It's the parents of a girl Nic knew in high school. I call but reach an answering machine, on which I leave a message. "I'm trying to reach my son. His name is Nic Sheff. He called from this number."

The girl's stepmother returns my call. I am astounded by what I hear. "You're Nic's father? It's so nice to talk to you," she says. "What a great son you have. He's a pleasure to have around. We've been so worried about April, and he's such a good influence on her."

"A good influence on her?"

I sigh and tell her about Nic's relapse and disappearance. She is stunned. She explains that her stepdaughter has been in and out of rehab for drug addiction and Nic has seemed so supportive of her recovery.

In the afternoon, Nic calls. He tells me everything—he has relapsed, is using meth and heroin. I have rehearsed my response. I shakily tell him that there's nothing I can do. It's up to him. I say that the police are searching for him, that his mother reported him missing to the Santa Monica police, and that the Marin sheriffs are patrolling our home and the home of our friends where he broke in. I say, "Do you want to wind up in jail? That's where you're headed."

"God," Nic says. "Please help me. What do I do?"

"All I know to tell you to do is what you already know. What do they tell you in the program? Call your sponsor. Call Randy. I don't know what else to say."

He is crying. I say nothing. This isn't how I want to respond. I want to drive to the city to get him. But I repeat, "Call Randy." I tell him that I love him and hope that he gets his life together. I may sound resolved or resigned, but I'm neither of those things.

I hang up. My temples pound. I want to call back. I want to tell him I'm coming. But I don't.

Randy calls in a half-hour or so. He says that he heard from Nic and encouraged him to return to LA. "I told him that I miss him," Randy says. "I do. I told him to get his ass back here—I'm waiting. He sounds ready to come in."

I breathe. When I thank Randy, he says, "No need to thank me. This is how I stay alive." He adds, "And I really do miss that knucklehead."

Vicki and I talk. We are both relieved to hear that Nic has agreed to go back to LA, to Randy—to the program. However, we're both shell-shocked, unable or unwilling to accept that everything may be all right again. It's all too precarious.

In the evening, Vicki calls. Nic, who had enough money left for a taxi to the airport and a plane ticket, made it back to LA. She picked him up at the airport and dropped him off at his apartment, where his roommate welcomed Nic home with a pat on the back.

Nic immediately retreated to his bedroom, where he fell asleep. When I call, Ted tells me that Nic is sleeping it off. "Detoxing isn't any fun, but he has to go through it," he says. "There's nothing you can do. Just pray."

Nic calls in the morning. His voice is hoarse. When I ask how he feels, he gruffly responds, "How do you think?" He recounts his departure from San Francisco. "I did what Randy told me to do," he says. "I prayed. I just kept saying, 'Please help me.' I kept repeating it. When I was getting ready to go, April saw me and freaked out. She grabbed on to my leg and was crying and screaming that I couldn't leave. But if I stayed, we'd both die. I told her, but it didn't help." He cries. "I fucked up bad."

Over the following days I try to be optimistic, but I'm in a con
fused frenzy. I still act as if I'm OK around Daisy and Jasper, but I break down with Karen.

I go to an Al-Anon meeting in a room at a church in Corte Madera. I am shaking, unable to restrain myself, and when it's my turn, I blurt out a reconstruction of the past couple weeks. As I'm speaking in a rush of tears and panic, I think, Someone else is talking. This is not my life. Finally, drained, I say, "I don't know how all you people in this room survive this." And I cry. So do many of the others.

After the meeting, as I help fold and stack the metal chairs, a woman whom I have never met comes up to me and hugs me, and I horrify myself by weeping in her arms. "Keep coming back," she says.

Sometimes it startles me that life goes on, but it does, inexorably. Jasper comes into my office. He wears short flannel pajamas and furry slippers. Daisy, her slept-on hair messy, has on a T-shirt and rainbow-striped pants and she carries Uni, her stuffed unicorn. Then Karen, the kids, and I make waffles. After eating, Jasper and Daisy launch a game of hide-and-seek. Jasper is it, and Daisy zooms down the hallway. He calls, "Ready or not," and hunts her down. He discovers her, coiled like a cat inside the same basket she always hides in. Jasper tips the basket and spills her out onto the concrete floor and then trips over her sprawled body and falls on top of her. They laugh like hyenas. Daisy uncoils and leaps up, making a run for it, with Jasper in hot pursuit. They careen by us and dive into Nic's vacant bedroom, designated base in spite of the bad memories that seem permanently soaked into the walls.

Next they dress and go outside and throw a lacrosse ball back and forth. Within minutes, as always, they lose the ball. The garden has a mystifying power of attraction for balls: lacrosse balls, tennis balls, soccer balls, footballs, baseballs—and not only balls, but paper gliders, model rockets, Frisbees. They look under bushes and hedges for a while but the ball is gone into the garden's black hole. The kids give up and sit on the gravel, from where we overhear their handclapping game: "Lemonade, crunchy ice. Beat it once, beat it twice." Next we hear Jasper say, "Do you think that Nic looks like Bob Dylan?" The other night, we watched a video that
had in it a performance by Dylan in Greenwich Village at twenty or so years old.

Daisy doesn't respond directly, but asks, "Do you know why that guy does drugs?"

Jasper says, "He thinks it makes him feel better."

"They don't. They make him feel all sad and bad."

Jasper responds, "I don't think he wants to do them, but he can't help it. It's like in cartoons when some character has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil whispers into Nicky's ear and sometimes it gets too loud so he has to listen to him. The angel is there, too," Jasper continues, "but he talks softer and Nic can't hear him."

In the evening Nic reports that Randy almost had to drag him out of bed and onto a bicycle. "I felt like I wanted to die," he says, "but Randy didn't take no for an answer. He said he would pick me up, so I got ready. Randy was there and I got on my bike and felt like shit, didn't think I could pedal down the block, never mind up the coast, but then I felt the wind, and the memory in my body took over and we rode for a while." There is some life back in Nic's voice, and I am left with a hopeful image: Nic on his bike in the Southern California sunshine, riding along the beach.

On the weekend, when Nic calls again, he is eager to talk. He expresses astonishment that he relapsed. "I was sober for eighteen months," he says. "I got cocky. It's this trick of addiction. You think, My life isn't unmanageable, I'm doing fine. You lose your humbleness. You think you're smart enough to handle it." He admits that he is ashamed—mortified—about this relapse and claims that he is redoubling his efforts. "I've been going to two meetings a day," he says. "I have to start the steps all over." Of course I am relieved (once again) and hopeful (once again). I'm always evaluating: What's different this time? Is it different? Indeed, he is making progress, the kind you learn to measure day by day. Randy helps him get a new job. Together they begin to work the twelve steps again. Each day before or after work, they go on long bike rides.

At home in Inverness, Karen and I work on an analogous re
covery. Through Al-Anon and the therapist Karen and I continue to see on occasion, we understand the ways that our lives have become unmanageable, too. Mine has. My well-being has become dependent on Nic's. When he is using, I'm in turmoil; when he's not, I'm OK, but the relief is tenuous. The therapist says that parents of kids on drugs often get a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome made worse by the recurring nature of addiction. For soldiers back from battle, the sniper fire and bombs are in their heads. For parents of an addict, a new barrage can come at any moment. We try to guard against it. We pretend that everything is all right. But we live with a time bomb. It is debilitating to be dependent on another's moods and decisions and actions. I bristle when I hear the word
codependent,
because it's such a cliché of self-help books, but I have become codependent with Nic—codependent on his well-being for mine. How can a parent not be codependent on a child's health or lack of it? But there must be an alternative, because this is no way to live. I have come to learn that my worry about Nic doesn't help him, and it harms Jasper, Daisy, Karen—and me.