Beautiful Boy (7 page)

I'm not like them
But I can pretend
The sun is gone
But I have a light
The day is done
But I'm having fun

My heart is broke
But I have some glue
Help me inhale
And mend it with you
We'll float around
And hang out on clouds
Then we'll come down
And I'll have a hangover

Three months later, Nic, Karen, and I are sitting in the living room, with its cerulean wall panels framed in oiled redwood. The room is furnished sparsely with twin couches, covered with strips of red silk fabric from China that Karen found at a thrift store, and mismatched throw pillows. We watch Jasper, who is on a baby blanket. He starts to roll over onto his back and tries to crawl but doesn't go anywhere. Eventually, Jas gets in the right position, on all fours, and he huffs and puffs, rocks forward, and then begins crying. When he finally starts crawling, he goes sideways like a crab.

In the morning, Nic goes off to school as usual. But when he comes home, from his face I can tell that he is distressed. He drops his backpack on the floor, looks up, and tells me that Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. From Nic's room I hear Cobain's voice.

I found it hard, it was hard to find.
Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

After summer, Nic begins seventh grade. In her book
Operating Instructions,
Anne Lamott wrote, "The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words
hell
and
the pit
... It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, in Germany." These days there are reasons more troubling than preteen awkwardness and cruelty for parents to worry. A junior high school principal I know told me that she doesn't understand what it is, but things are worse for her students than ever before. "I can't believe the things they do to themselves and to each other," she says. In a survey of public-school teachers in 1940, the top disciplinary problems listed included talking out of turn, chewing gum, running in the halls, dress-code violations, and littering. More than fifty years later, they are drug and alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault.

When Nic enters seventh grade, he still seems to enjoy playing with Jasper, whose first word is
duck,
followed by
up, banana, doggie,
and
Nicky.
Nic meanwhile has discovered an unanticipated benefit of a baby in the family. The girls in his grade flock to Jasper. They come over to play with him—to bounce him around and dress him up. Nic is delighted with his expanding harem.

But Nic is also increasingly less interested in the carpool kids and instead spends most of his free time with a group of boys with buzzed hair who skateboard, talk about, but do nothing about, girls, and listen to music: Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Primus, and Jimi Hendrix. As always, Nic has eclectic and hip—and often fickle—taste. He does not seem to tire of some discoveries—Björk, Tom Waits, Bowie—but otherwise he is into the edgiest music and then grows bored with it. By the time a band, from Weezer to Blind Melon to Offspring to Green Day, has a hit record, he has discarded it in favor of the retro, the obscure, the ultracontemporary, or the plain bizarre, a list that includes Coltrane, polka collections, the soundtrack from
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,
John Zorn, M. C. Solar, Jacques Brel, or, these days, samba, to which he cha-chas through the living room. He discovers Pearl Jam, a song called "Jeremy," about a teenage boy in Texas who shot himself in front of his English class. Jeremy's teacher asked him to go to the office to get a late slip. He returned and told her, "Miss, this is what I actually went for," before turning the gun on himself. But most of all Nic listens to Nirvana. The music blasts like mortar fire from his room.

I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now entertain us

In early May, I pick Nic up after school one day to drive him to a dinner at Nancy and Don's. When he climbs into the car I smell cigarette smoke. At first, he denies that he has smoked. He says that he was hanging out with some kids who were smoking. When I press him, however, he admits that he had a few puffs with a group of boys who were smoking behind the gymnasium. I lecture him and he promises not to do it again.

The next Friday after school, he and a friend, with whom Nic is spending the night, are tossing a football in the garden in Inverness. I am packing an overnight bag for him and look for a sweater in his backpack. I do not find the sweater, but instead discover a small bag of marijuana.

When I was a young child, my family lived near Walden Pond, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Our home was next to a farm with apple trees, corn and tomatoes, and a row of stacked beehives. My father was a chemical engineer. He watched a television commercial that said to take your sinuses to Arizona. He had hay fever, so he did. He secured a job at a semiconductor plant in Phoenix. We drove west in our pea-green Studebaker, staying overnight along the way at Motel 6s and eating at Denny's and Sambo's.

We settled in Scottsdale, living in a motel until our tract house was built. My father's new job at Motorola was to grow, slice, and etch silicon wafers for transistors and microprocessors. My mother wrote a column about our school and neighborhood—science fair winners and Little League results—for the
Scottsdale Daily Progress.

My friends and I often reminisce about our childhoods, when things were different. It was a far more innocent world and a safer one. My sister, brother, and I, along with the rest of the kids on our block, played on the street until twilight, when our mothers called us in for dinner. We played ring and run, tag, and boys chase the girls. TV dinners—fried chicken, mashed potatoes with a pat of butter, apple cobbler, each isolated in its own compartment—set on folding trays, we watched
Bonanza, Wonderful World of Disney,
and
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
We were Cub Scouts and Brownies. We had barbecues, built go-carts, made cakes in my sister's EasyBake Oven, and rode inner tubes down the Salt and Verde rivers.

But I'm not certain if the wistful recollections of those times are justified. The news in our neighborhood traveled by way of our mothers' hushed voices. Charles Manson and 50-percent-off sales and fad diets were favorite topics on the sidewalk, at Tupperware parties and mahjong games, and in the beauty shop where my mother got her hair frosted. They whispered when a ten-year-old child who lived on our block hanged himself. Then a girl who lived two doors down was killed in a car accident. The driver, an older boy, was high on drugs.

The proximity to Mexico meant that drugs were abundant and cheap. Geography, however, probably didn't make a lot of difference. A smorgasbord of previously unknown or unavailable drugs flooded our school and our neighborhood, as they have flooded America since the mid-1960s.

Marijuana was most prevalent. Kids hung out by the bike rack after school selling single joints for fifty cents and ounce bags for ten dollars. They offered hits of their joints in the bathroom and while walking to and from our high school. One of my friends sought it out and, after smoking it, told a group of us about it. He said that he asked a boy we all knew was a stoner for marijuana and smoked the joint in the backyard of his parents' house, coughed a lot, felt nothing, and then went inside and ate a box of Chips Ahoy cookies. He began smoking almost every day.

A year or so later a boy on our block asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. It was 1968 and I was a high school freshman. It didn't do much for me, but neither did it cause me to hallucinate or to try to fly off the roof of our house, like Art Linkletter's daughter supposedly did when she tried LSD. That is, it seemed harmless, and so I didn't think twice about trying it again when I walked into another boy's house and his older brother passed me a glowing roach held by an alligator clip.

Of course it wasn't articulated, but pot, with its outlaw cachet, was a passkey into a loosely defined social circle. To be inside was a relief after my lonely geekiness in junior high. I laughed easier and felt funnier with a stoned—that is, less discerning—audience. Here was a palliative for raging insecurity. I experienced every
thing—music, nature—in a heightened, far more intense way, and was less shy around girls, a benefit that cannot be overstated for a boy of fourteen or fifteen. The world seemed at once obscured and more vivid. But even these probably weren't the main reasons I continued smoking. On top of the continuous peer pressure and the high, plus the sense of rebellion in lighting a joint, plus the camaraderie, and besides the ways that pot helped assuage my awkwardness and insecurity ... besides all this, marijuana helped me feel something when I felt almost nothing, helped me block out feelings when I felt too much. In precisely the way that pot made things both blurrier and more vibrant, it allowed me to feel more and to feel less.

Nowadays people of my age often say that drugs were different then—less potent pot and purer psychedelics. This is true. Tests of marijuana have shown that there is twice as much THC, the active ingredient, in the average joint or pipeful today than in the weed of a decade ago, which itself was stronger than in the 1960s and 70s. There are frequent reports that psychedelics and ecstasy are laced with or even substituted by meth and other drugs or impurities, though back then we heard of kids snorting Drano in place of cocaine. One thing is undeniably different. A body of research has unequivocally shown a wide range of dangerous physical and psychological effects of drugs, including marijuana. We thought they were safe. They weren't. I know that some people look back on what they consider the good old days of "harmless" drug use. They survived intact, but many people did not. There were accidents, suicides, and overdoses. I still run into a shocking number of drug casualties from the 1960s and 70s who wander the streets, some of them homeless. Some rant about conspiracies. Apparently it's a trait common in drug addicts and alcoholics. "Whenever his liquor began to work he most always went for the government," said Huck Finn about his drunkard father.

And so throughout Nic's childhood, ever since he was seven or eight, I talked to him about drugs. We spoke about them "early and often" in ways prescribed by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I told him about people who were harmed or killed. I told him
about my mistakes. I watched for the early warning signs of teenage alcoholism and drug abuse. (Number fifteen on one organization's list: "Is your child suddenly volunteering to clean up after cocktail parties, but forgetting his other chores?")

When I was a child, my parents implored me to stay away from drugs. I dismissed them, because they didn't know what they were talking about. They were—still are—teetotalers. I, however, knew about drugs from first-hand experience. So when I warned Nic, I thought I might have some credibility.

Many drug counselors tell parents of my generation to lie to our children about our past drug use. It's the same reason that it may backfire when famous athletes show up at school assemblies or on television and tell kids, "Man, don't do this shit, I almost died," and yet there they stand, diamonds, gold, multimillion-dollar salaries and cereal-box fame. The words: I barely survived. The message: I survived, thrived, and you can, too. Kids see that their parents turned out all right in spite of the drugs. So maybe I should have lied to Nic and kept my drug use hidden, but I didn't. He knew the truth. Meanwhile, our close relationship made me feel certain that I would know if he were exposed to them. I naively believed that if Nic were tempted to try them, he would tell me. I was wrong.

We are still nearer the winter edge of spring on this cool and misty May afternoon, the scent of wood smoke in the air—a remnant of the afternoon fire. This time of year the sun falls early behind the ridge and poplars, and so, though it is only four o'clock, the yard is shrouded in shadow. Fog swirls at the boys' feet as they toss the ball back and forth. It is a desultory game; they appear to be more interested in their conversation, maybe about girls or bands or the rancher who shot a rabid dog in Point Reyes Station yesterday.

The boy with Nic is muscular, a weightlifter who shows off his pumped-up chest and biceps in a tight T-shirt. Nic wears an over-large gray cardigan—mine. With his stringy hair and world-weary visage and languor, anyone else would guess he'd go on to smoke pot, at least. Yet in spite of his costume, and in spite of his variable moods—his increasing ennui and hunched surliness—and in spite of his new crowd that includes the school's tough, phlegmatic boys, when I look at Nic I see youthfulness and vitality, playfulness and innocence. A child. And so I am utterly bewildered by the tightly wound green buds of marijuana that I hold in my hand.

Karen sits on the living room couch, bent over her journal, drawing with India ink. Jasper is asleep near her on the couch, lying on his back with his hands clenched in tiny fists.

When I approach her, Karen looks up.

I show her the marijuana.

"What is that? Where did you...?"

And then: "What? Is it Nic's?" It is half a question. She knows.

As usual, I manage my panic by trying to forestall hers. "It will be all right. It was bound to happen at some point. We'll deal with it."

Standing on the deck, I call to the boys. They come over, Nic palming the ball, breathing hard.

"I have to talk to you."

They look at my outstretched hand holding the marijuana.

"Oh," Nic says. He stiffens a little, waiting, docile. Moondog comes up to Nic and nuzzles his leg. Nic is not one to fight back in the face of hard evidence. He tentatively glances up at me, his scared eyes large, trying to evaluate how much trouble he's in.