Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

by David Sheff

“I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.”

Thomas Lynch showed me that it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever.

This is the way that misery does love company: People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague—an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families. For whatever reason, a stranger’s story seemed to give them permission to tell theirs. They felt that I would understand, and I did.

However, in our story, I hope that there may be some solace, some guidance, and, if nothing else, some company.

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.

“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.”

Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made stronger impressions.

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.

A flight attendant leads him onto the plane. We say “everything” to each other. It is our way of saying I love you, I will miss you so much, I am sorry—the jumble of feelings when he comes and goes.

The bookshelves are stripped of many of the picture books to make way for the Narnia and Redwall series and E. B. White. Nic is trying hard to grow up, although selectively. He keeps the pandas and Sebastian, the stuffed Little Mermaid crab.

After a story, before Nic goes to sleep, he asks me to check on him every fifteen minutes. I sing to him. Close your eyes Have no fears The monster’s gone He’s on the run and your daddy’s here

And read. Nic loves books: A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl, The Outsiders, The Hobbit.

She reports news about skyrocketing rates of childhood depression, eating disorders, and drug abuse.

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 . . .

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,”

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.

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.

he and I strap our surfboards onto the roof of the station wagon and drive on the winding road that leads to a beach south of Point Reyes. We reach the surf break after an hour-long hike on a grassy path through sand dunes.

Rabbits skitter past us and a V formation of pelicans flies overhead. The sun hangs low; its rays seem painted on with a watery apricot wash. As dusk settles in, the fog pours like pancake batter onto the hilly ranchland and, from there, spills over the bay.

The disappearing sun projects a stunning array of ruby-red stripes along the western horizon. Opposite, the moon, fat and yellow, dangles low.

It is thrilling surfing, as good as it gets. Paddling out, there is no sound other than the smooth whoosh of the surfboard cleaving the water and then, at regular intervals, the rumble of a breaking wave. We ride one, paddle out, and then ride another.

Exhausted, famished, wind-burned, and waterlogged after a long session, we peel off our wetsuits, load up our backpacks, and walk back to the car.

“Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.”

Karen’s sister has given us soothing music by Enya, but Karen asks for Nirvana. She turns “Nevermind” up loud. Gotta find a way A better way I better wait I better wait

The noise level at our house has escalated. What with three children and Nic’s assorted friends and numerous amplified and percussion instruments and the two dogs, our house is a cacophony of singing, wailing, barking, laughing, yelping, Raffi, pounding, screeching, Axl Rose, thumping, crashing, and howling.

“IS HIGH SCHOOL BETTER?” a girl asks her older brother in I Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. “Well,” he answers, “they call you names but not as much to your face.” I hated high school, a Darwinian laboratory of cliques and random acts of cruelty and violence.

One of his favored writers, Charles Bukowski, holds the distinction of being the most stolen author in college bookstores. He once summed up his readers as “the defeated, the demented, and the damned.” Adolescents may be, or at least feel like, all of those things, but it worries me that these writers, particularly when they glamorize drugs and debauchery, are so compelling to Nic.

“You’ve got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen,” Anne Lamott wrote. “They don’t even talk about it in the Bible,

“Considering the level of maturity of young adolescents, the availability of drugs, and the age at which drugs are first used, it is not surprising that a substantial number of them develop serious drug problems,” writes Robert Schwebel, Ph.D., in Saying No Is Not Enough. “Once this happens, the effects are devastating. Drugs shield children from dealing with reality and mastering developmental tasks crucial to their future.

“The worst time for a person to be tampering with their brains is when they are teenagers,” she says. “Drugs radically alter the way teenagers’ brains develop.” As she explains it, experience and behavior help to set up a cycle that may deepen emotional problems. The biological underpinning may become more acute and more intractable. It enforces and reinforces the psychological problems, which become more firmly established.

Finally I call the police and hospital emergency rooms, asking if he is in jail or if there has been an accident. Each time I call, I brace myself for the unthinkable. I rehearse the conversation—the stolid, disembodied voice, and the words “He is dead.” I rehearse it to prepare myself. I go toward the thought, pace around it. He is dead.

In Ventura County, California, a man under the influence of meth raped and strangled a woman. Also in California, a meth-addicted mother was convicted of keeping her two young children locked in a cold, cockroach-infested converted garage.

The implications for the Central Valley in California, a source of a large percentage of America’s fruits and vegetables—and much of its meth—are significant.

Many other health risks are related to chronic meth abuse. A doctor who works at a San Francisco emergency room told me about the stream of meth addicts who come in with “blown-out”—literally ruptured—aortas. Addicts may cough up chunks of the lining of their lungs. Many meth addicts lose their teeth. Chronic meth use can cause Parkinson’s-like cognitive dysfunction, including deteriorating memory and mental acuity and physical impairment, including paralysis—results of meth-induced strokes.

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. “It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out,” he said. “I worship the people who survive. I’ll take the living and the healthy.” The living and the healthy. I do not know if my son can be one of them.

When I am alone, however, I weep in a way that I have not wept since I was a young boy. Nic used to tease me about my inability to cry. On the rare occasions when my eyes welled up, he joked about my “constipated tears.” Now tears come at unexpected moments for no obvious reason, and they pour forth with ferocity. They scare the hell out of me. It scares the hell out of me to be so lost and helpless and out of control and afraid.

I stare at him. If all that therapy didn’t help, then what? Rehab. There is nothing else. “Nic, you have to go into rehab. You have to.” He mumbles and falls asleep.

An admitting nurse at a northern California hospital may be the most accurate when she tells me the number for meth addicts. “The true number is in the single digits,” she says. “Anyone who promises more is lying.”

“Having six children doesn’t make you a good ob-gyn,” says Walter Ling, a neurologist and the director of the UCLA program.

The next morning, when Daisy and Jasper are at school, I go into Nic’s room, where he still sleeps soundly, his face relaxed and peaceful. A sleeping child. Then, as I watch, he twitches and grimaces and grinds his teeth.

“If you want to live here, if you want me to help you, if you want me to pay for your college, if you want to see us . . .” I look at him and say, “Nic—do you want to die? Is that what this is all about?” He kicks the wall, smashes his fists on the table, and weeps. I sadly say, “Let’s go.”

Everything’s fine . . . I would take care of her. It would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.

I DRIVE THE OLD VOLVO, faded blue and rusty from the salt air of the coast and dented from Nic’s misadventures. It smells of his cigarettes. It is the car he had taken. Nic flops like a rag doll, pressed as close to his door, as far away from me, as possible. Neither of us speaks.

In the car, however, I see a stranger. And yet he is a stranger whose every part I know intimately. I recall his soft eyes when they were elated and when they were disappointed, his face when he was pallid from illness and when he was burned red by the sun, his mouth and even each tooth from visits to dentists and the orthodontist, his knees from when he skinned them and I put on Band-Aids, his shoulders from putting on sun block, his feet from taking out splinters—every part of him. I know every part from watching him and living with him and being close to him, and yet driving to Oakland I look at his sullenness and anger and vacancy, his retreat and his turmoil, and I think, Who are you?

I don’t bring Nic in. I sit with him in the car for another half-hour until he has exhausted himself. He is remote—somnolent from drugs and spent anger, his breathing slowed, and then, finally, he falls into a deep sleep. I leave him in the car, checking on him frequently. Will you check on me every fifteen minutes?

The room has Nic’s smell—not the sweet childhood smell he once had, but a cloying odor of incense and marijuana, cigarettes and aftershave, possibly a trace of ammonia or formaldehyde, the residual odor of burning meth. Smells like teen spirit.

He says that one of the most difficult things about having a child addicted to drugs is that we cannot control it. We cannot save Nic. “You can support his recovery, but you can’t do it for him,” he says. “We try to save them. Parents try. It’s what parents do.”

Karen and I eat dinner on Haight Street and then drag ourselves up the hill to what we have come to call the Count Ohlhoff house—Count Olaf is the villain in A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Lemony Snicket books we read to Jasper and Daisy.

An HIV-positive gay man in the program with Nic, an addict who had been strung out on meth for seven years, speaks in a quavering whisper. “I lost most of my teeth,” he says, showing off a lonely pair of north-facing bicuspids. “I have holes in my lungs.” With shaking hands, he lifts his T-shirt and juts out his sore-infested, sunken belly. “This shit don’t heal. I cough blood. I cough pieces of my stomach. I hurt all the time.”