Beautiful Boy (6 page)

The area has a diverse population. There are many first- andsecond-generation immigrant families who hail from Latin America and Mexico; Hollywood refugees; fine craftsmen, homebuilders, cabinetmakers, and stonemasons; fishermen and oystermen; and aged hippies (the town supports a tie-dye shop). There are former high-tech executives, teachers, artists, ranchers and farmhands, summer people, weekenders, horse people, masseuses, therapists of every persuasion, environmentalists, and a medical clinic that does not turn anyone away. There are a few old curmudgeons and a new generation of them. Indeed, some of the locals embrace differences but will avoid you after you show up at a community potluck barbecue with Ball Park—not tofu—hot dogs. On the one hand, there is an ardent social conscience—women who strip for peace. On the other, some locals will verbally assault you if you tread on a blackberry patch they have claimed as their own. Still, Point Reyes is mostly a place overflowing with generosity and magnanimity.

Karen has a small cabin in a garden in Inverness, not far from town. We spend as much time as possible there these days, and the more time we spend, the more we appreciate the anachronistic sense of community and spectacular natural beauty. We regularly drag our old canoe down to Papermill Creek, draped over pasture-land like a silver ribbon. We paddle among river otters and, at high tide, set a course for a secluded inlet up the bay, where we go ashore for a picnic and uncover Miwok arrowheads on the rocky beach. We hike trails that crisscross national seashore and state parkland, where a billion wildflowers blossom in spring. The fields are parched gold by midsummer, when the blackberries ripen and blue irises come into breathtaking bloom. In winter, drenched, we bundle up and hike through the state park or along North and South Beach, where the Pacific Ocean waves reach more than twenty feet high, and watch the migrating gray whales.

Indeed, the peninsula is surrounded on three sides by some of the wildest, most magnificent coastline anywhere. Until now, Nic rarely chose to go to the beach—he didn't like getting sandy—but soon he spends every possible moment near and in the water. We drive out to McClure's Beach, past sweeping arcs of yellow mustard flowers, to catch a minus tide. We walk along the shore to the
outcroppings and balance on slippery rock, watching the crashing waves, while searching tide pools for mussels, sea stars, anemones, and octopi. Nic watches Karen dive into the cold ocean in the middle of December at Limantour Beach. He jumps in, too. They whip each other with long strands of seaweed. When he gets out, he can't stop shivering. The Tomales Bay is warmer. When they swim there, Karen and Nic play a game in which she tries to buck him off her back. On the sandy beaches at Drakes, Stinson, and Bolinas, Nic skim-boards. He tries boogie-boarding and then surfing. He looks natural and elegant on a board. The better he gets at surfing, the more he wants to do it. We spend sublime hours together in the ocean. We pore over buoy and weather reports and head to the beach when the swell is up and the wind is offshore. Waxing his board on the beach, Nic is slender and strong, bronzed from the sun. He wears orange beads around his neck. He has long bending limbs, brown hands with dirty fingernails, and narrow brown feet. His light eyes with coarse black eyelashes slant down. When he pulls on his black wetsuit, he has the skin of a seal.

Enticed by West Marin, we build a house and painting studio in the Inverness hillside garden, moving in before fall, when Nic begins sixth grade at a new school—with trepidation.

After his first day, we sit in the high-backed dining chairs around a square purple table. Nic tells us that he thinks he is going to like this school after all. "My teacher asked, 'How many of you hate math?' " Nic says. "Almost everyone raised their hands. I did. She said, 'I hated math, too.' Then she gave this smile and said, 'You won't hate it when I'm finished with you.' "

He goes on to say that lots of the kids seem nice. He reports that after we dropped him off, he was walking through the corridor when he heard a boy call out to him: "Nic!"

He looks up.

"I was pretty excited, but then I thought maybe he was yelling to someone else and I was acting like a complete idiot, waving at him. But no, it was me. He remembered me from when I visited the school."

After the second day, Nic reports that another boy called him his friend. "This red-haired boy handed me a hockey stick in PE, and when this other kid said, 'No, that's my stick, I had it first,' the red-haired kid said, 'It's for my friend Nic.' "

Nic looks cool these days in pants that ride low on his hips, a Primus or Nirvana T-shirt, a slumped adolescent posture, and his red-orange-tinged hair. And yet he has essentially one ambition: coming home and being able to say, "Dad, I made two new friends today."

On a Friday, some of the children come over for a party. We drive to Stinson Beach, where they play sand tag and kickball and Nic teaches them to skim-board. Their preteen awkwardness dissolves as they play like much younger children, laughing without self-consciousness, tumbling and wrestling in the sand. Before dark, we drive back home, where they play Twister and Truth or Dare, with risqué questions like, "Do you think Skye is cute?" (Nic does: She's the big-eyed, brown-haired girl whose name, when he mentions it, makes him blush. He talks to her on the phone at night, sometimes for an hour or more at a time.) And, "In a fight to the death between Batman and the Hulk, who would win?" Dares include biting into a jalapeño pepper and kissing a Barbie doll. They eat pizza and popcorn, and their parents pick them up at ten.

Karen and I attend the school's art shows and plays. Nic is Viola in a production of
Twelfth Night
and George Gibbs in
Our Town.
Parents are invited to hear their oral reports on foreign countries. Nic, assigned Bolivia, after showing the country on a homemade poster-board map and describing its history, topography, agriculture, and gross national product, performs a song he wrote. "Olivia, oh, Olivia," he sings, "down in La Paz, Bolivia. My Olivia." He accompanies himself on guitar.

He cartoons a series of panels featuring a character called Super Cow the Avenger, who imparts lessons about nutrition. For a science assignment, he rigs our bathtub and shower stalls with buckets and rulers, measuring the amount of water used in each. (Showers are far more ecofriendly.) For another science project, Nic tests household cleaners and solvents on oil-drenched feathers to see what would work best to clean birds after an oil spill. Dove,
the dishwashing liquid, wins. He bakes an apple in the oven and through the oven window tracks its disintegration, reporting the result in a paper written from the perspective of the apple. "I am becoming dehydrated. I sigh, 'Hello? Out there? Can anyone hear me? It's getting hot in here...' "

Every morning and afternoon there are carpools between school and Point Reyes Station. When I drive, I sometimes educate Nic and his friends in the oeuvre of Van Morrison and the Kinks and guitar solos by Jorma Kaukonen, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Robin Trower, Duane Allman, and Ronnie Van Zant. (Air guitar is encouraged.) Nic and his friends often play the complaining game, Karen's invention. Nic, imitating the
Newlywed Game's
Bob Eubanks, is the announcer, explicating the rules. Contestants are awarded points on a scale of one to ten for unburdening themselves. The kids generally rail about their annoying siblings, jerks at school, unsympathetic teachers, and ogreish parents. Prosaic complaints receive middling scores. Admitting that you have had nightmares ever since you watched a horror movie in which teenage girls were stabbed and a man was buried alive wins eight points. When a girl tells about the time she was kidnapped by her father, she is applauded and awarded a ten. A boy also receives a ten for a fuming denunciation of his mother, who, he says, has dragged him to eight cities with four successive husbands. After months of hearing stories such as these, one girl uses her turn to complain, "I'm too normal. My parents have never been divorced and I have always lived in the same house." The other children sympathetically award her a ten.

Looking for a puppy at the Humane Society, Karen falls in love with a smelly, sad-eyed, near-starved hound sitting with its paws crossed on the cement floor of its kennel. She brings Moon-dog home, and also a ball of fur, a chocolate Labrador puppy we call Brutus. Moondog, who had never been inside a house before, lifts his leg on the floor and chews the wooden furniture. He tears through the house, baying and barking whenever a car drives by or when someone comes to the front door. He howls at the vacuum cleaner. Brutus hops in the grass like a bunny.

Every Wednesday we take the dogs and ourselves over to dinner
at Karen's parents' house. Nancy and Don live in a barnlike board-and-batten home tucked into the side of a wooded canyon a half-hour from Inverness. The main room is cavernous and airy, with a twenty-four-foot-high single-pane plate glass door that slides open. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, lining two walls, are filled with books about shells and rocks and trees and birds. There are also portraits of their three children (Karen, at five or so, has large brown eyes and pinned-back dark hair) and sand dollars and pewter plates and a painting of a marmot.

Don is a retired doctor. Karen grew up waiting in the car while he made house calls. Don grows tomatoes and squash in a terraced garden, but he spends most of his time in his second-story office doing his current job, evaluating studies designed to assess the effectiveness of new medicines.

Nancy, his wife of more than fifty years, works every day in the garden. She has gray eyes and silver hair cut in a pageboy. She is vivacious, handsome, gentle, and imposing.

None of Nancy and Don's children lives farther than San Francisco, and on any given afternoon it's not uncommon to find one or more of them sitting at the kitchen table in front of cups of reheated coffee and a plate of cookies, chatting with their mother.

The weekly Wednesday night dinners are raucous and memorable evenings with Nancy and Don and their three children and their families, plus occasional guests and a revolving pack of our various unmannered dogs, which hog the best couches and steal unguarded food off the dining table.

At these dinners, Nancy recounts every newspaper or TV news story of toxic mattresses, molested children, teen suicide, poisoning, shopping-cart handles infested with bacteria, shark attack, car crash, electrocution—mostly endless tales about the hideous deaths of children. She tells us about a swimmer who drowned because she held her breath too long. She says that someone was killed in Mill Valley when a tree fell on his car, completely squishing him. She reports news about skyrocketing rates of childhood depression, eating disorders, and drug abuse. "A girl drowned after getting her hair caught in a hot-tub drain," she says one day. "I just want you to know so you'll be careful."

These warnings are meant to increase our vigilance, but it's impossible to prepare for every possible calamity. It's one thing to be safe, but panic is useless and too much caution can be stifling. No matter. The bad news pours forth along with the rosemary au jus.

At one Wednesday dinner in October 1993, Karen, who is seven months pregnant, and I are sitting around the kitchen table with her parents and brother and sister. Nic is playing outside with Brutus when Nancy imparts the latest terrible news. The setting is Petaluma, a half-hour drive east of Inverness. A twelve-year-old girl was abducted from her bedroom. She was having a slumber party. Her mother was home at the time.

Within a day, pictures of Polly Klaas with her long brown hair and gentle eyes are plastered on every store window and telephone pole in town. Soon a psychopath is arrested; he leads police to Polly's body. Every parent I know mourns Polly's death, and we hold tighter to our children.

Kids in Nic's carpool are obsessed with the murder. One girl says that she would have screamed and run. Another says there is no way she could have. "The guy was a giant, over seven feet." Nic is silent for a while and then says, "You have to scream and run anyway. You have to try to get away." A boy says there was an accomplice. "The guy who kidnapped her stole her for a child prostitute ring." Then no one talks until Nic asks if the killer was really seven feet tall. The girl says, "Seven feet eight."

We parents talk about our children's fitful sleep and nightmares, and the kids respond with jokes they overhear at school. The ones they repeat in carpool aren't always about Polly Klaas.

"Jeffrey Dahmer's mother says, 'Jeffrey, I really don't like your friends,' and so he tells her, 'That's okay. Just eat the vegetables.' "

Nic never reads newspapers or watches the news, but there is no filtering out these disturbing events, because the kids—in car-pool, on the playground—become preoccupied by them.

Jasper is born in early December.

Nancy and Don bring Nic to the hospital to see the baby when
he is a few hours old. Jasper has swollen eyes because of some drops they put in them. Nic, sitting in a pink upholstered chair next to Karen's hospital bed, holds the baby, who is wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. He stares for a long time.

One can easily forget how tiny and delicate they are when they are just born. Back home in Inverness, when Jasper is sleeping, we check him to make certain that he is breathing. His presence with us seems tentative, and we worry that he could slip away.

We try our best to make the transition easy for Nic, who seems to like playing with Jasper, seems enchanted by him. Am I sugar-coating it? Maybe. I do know that it is complicated for him. In the best circumstances, second families must always be at least a little bit terrifying for the children from an earlier marriage. We reassure Nic, but he must wonder exactly where this new baby fits into our lives.

Karen and I are more tired. Jasper fights sleeping but passes out whenever he's in the car, so we drive him for long meandering rides to induce naps. Otherwise, not much has changed. Nic and I, often with his friends, surf whenever we can find the time. We play guitars together and listen to music. For New Year's Eve 1993, when I score tickets for the Nirvana concert at the Oakland Coliseum, I arrange for Nic to fly up from LA. It's an unforgettable evening. Kurt Cobain's performance is riveting, brilliant, and haunted. He sings: