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

by David Sheff

If you subscribe to the idea that addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children—paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic—are seriously ill, slowly dying. We’d never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.

She says she lives in a garage with a space heater and no running water, sleeps on an old mattress. She tells me she uses crystal almost every day, smokes it and shoots it; stays up for seventy-two or more hours at a time; sleeps, when she does, for days; has “freaky” nightmares. She was in the emergency room three times, once each for pneumonia, some “stomach thing, I was coughing up blood,” and for “freaking out.”

I torment myself with the same unanswerable questions: Did I spoil him? Was I too lenient? Did I give him too little attention? Too much? If only we never moved to the country. If only I never used drugs. If only his mother and I had stayed together. If only and if only and if only . . .

Nonetheless: if only and if only and if only. Worry and guilt and regret may serve a function—as a turbo-charger of conscience—but in excess they are useless and incapacitating. Yet I cannot silence them.

When we return, Nic says that it’s time for him to go to his room. We walk with him a little way down the corridor. He holds on to my arm. He feels almost weightless, as if he could lift from earth. We all awkwardly hug. “Good luck,” I say. “Take care of yourself.” “Thanks, Papa. Thanks, KB.” “I love you,” Karen says. “I love you, too.” He looks at me and says, “Everything.” Tears flow.

At home I sleep, though unsoundly. In my nightmares, Nic is on drugs. I rage at him. I plead with him. I weep for him. High, he does not care. High, he stares back blankly and coldly.

Nic wanders shakily down a hallway toward us. He is pallid, moving slowly, as if each step causes searing pain. He seems genuinely happy to see us. He gives us warm hugs, holding on to each of us for a long time. His cheek presses against mine.

When we meet Nic for lunch, he has some color back in his face and some life back in his eyes. He is freer in his movements, no longer constricted by pain.

When it is his turn, Nic says, “I’m Nic, and I’m an addict and alcoholic.” I have heard him say it before at other sessions, here and in San Francisco and at a couple AA meetings I attended with him, and yet still it jars me. My son the addict and alcoholic. It fills me with a certain pride to hear him admit something that must be extremely difficult to admit. But does he really believe it? I don’t. Not really.

IN THE PROGRAM, patients keep journals, and Nic shares an entry with us: “How the hell did I get here? It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was on the goddamn water-polo team. I was an editor of the school newspaper, acting in the spring play, obsessing about which girls I liked, talking Marx and Dostoyevsky with my classmates. The kids in my class are in college. This isn’t so much sad as baffling. At the time it all seemed so positive and harmless.”

“While it’s true that among heavy users, some will go through treatment once and remain clean indefinitely, most will cycle through repeatedly, just as some smokers need multiple tries to kick cigarettes or dieters try over and over to slim down,”

When, after school, Jasper and Daisy burst in and can’t find their brother, they ask, “Where’s Nic?” “I don’t know,” I say. I cannot stop my tears.

it’s better now, death is closer, I no longer have to look for it, no longer have to challenge it, taunt it, play with it. it’s right here with me like a pet cat or a wall calendar —CHARLES BUKOWSKI, “thoughts on being 71”

you’re as sick as your secrets.

Whatever I did was done naively and stupidly and because of my immaturity, but it doesn’t matter. I blame myself. People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. “You didn’t cause it.” I do not believe it.

By the time I leave, however, I feel an affinity with everyone here—the parents and children and husbands and wives and lovers and brothers and sisters of the drug-addicted. My heart breaks for them. I am one of them.

I have no intention of speaking, but then I do. “My son is gone,” I say. “I don’t know where he is.” Tears. I can’t get out another word. I am mortified by my public display, but I am also hugely relieved.

She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. She then walked from her car out onto the bridge. “The wind cut into me, tears streamed down my face, and I looked down at the water,” she said. “I would have had to climb up over a fence, and there was netting on the other side. I would have had to manage to climb over it, too. I decided it would be easier to get a gun. My father has one.

“It was so sick, I started laughing,” she says. “I laughed and cried at the same time. That’s when it struck me that I can’t take my life as long as I can still laugh.” Tears stream down her cheeks, and the rest of us cry along with her.

We hug one another. Elsewhere, everyone asks how I’m doing. Here, they know.

The woman contracts, gets smaller in her chair. She bursts into tears. Everywhere I go now there are tears. Tears everywhere.

She says: “I’m happy. I know where she is. I know she’s alive. Last year we were so excited that she was enrolled at Harvard. Now I’m relieved that she’s in jail.”

“Each day I thank God that my daughter is in jail,” she says. “I express my gratitude to God. She was sentenced six months ago for using and dealing drugs and for prostitution.” She catches her breath and says to herself as much as to the group, “Where she is safer.” I think: So this is where we get. Not all of us, of course. But some of us come to a place where the good news is that our children are in jail.

I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it, and yet I continue to think there must be something I can do. “One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing on and on,” wrote Tolstoy.

The people in the Al-Anon meetings are damaged, some of them visibly but all of them psychically. At the same time, they also are some of the most open and alive and giving people I have ever met.

How could I have failed to know that Nic was using throughout these past months, even when he was in our home? I have been so traumatized by his addiction that the surreal and the real have become one and the same. I can’t distinguish the normal from the outrageous anymore. I am so good at rationalizing and denying that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Or maybe it’s only that, with practice, addicts become flawlessly gifted liars, and this coincides with parents’ increasing susceptibility to their lies. I believed Nic because I wanted to believe him—I was desperate to believe him.

What happened to my son? Where did I go wrong? According to Al-Anon, it is not my fault. But I feel solely responsible. I repeat the litany: if only I had set stricter limits; if only I had been more consistent; if only I had protected him more from my adult life; if only I had not used drugs; if only his mother and I had stayed together; if only she and I had lived in the same city after the divorce.

Addiction is an equal-opportunity affliction—affecting people without regard to their economic circumstance, their education, their race, their geography, their IQ, or any other factor. Probably a confluence of factors—a potent but unknowable combination of nature and nurture—may or may not lead to addiction.

Sometimes I know that nothing and no one is to blame. Then I slip and feel utterly responsible. Then sometimes I know that the only thing that is knowable is that Nic has a terrible disease.

But, says Dr. Rawson, “A symptom of this disease is using. A symptom is being out of control. A symptom is the need to feed the craving.” It is a force so powerful that one addict in a meeting compared it to the “need of a starving baby to suckle his mother—using was no more and no less of a choice than that.”

Some people remain unconvinced. For them, addiction is a moral failing. Users want to get high, pure and simple. No one forces them to. “I’m not disputing the fact that certain areas of the brain light up when an addict thinks about or uses cocaine,” said Sally Satel, staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Drug Treatment Clinic in Washington, D.C., and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “But it conveys the message that addiction is as biological a condition as multiple sclerosis. True brain diseases have no volitional component.”

But I remind myself: Nic is not Nic when he is using. Throughout this ordeal I strive to understand this force that has shanghaied my son’s brain, and I sometimes wonder if his recidivism is a moral failing or a character flaw.

If Nic were not ill he would not lie. If Nic were not ill he would not steal. If Nic were not ill he would not terrorize his family. He would not forsake his friends, his mother, Karen, Jasper, and Daisy, and he would not forsake me. He would not. He has a disease, but addiction is the most baffling of all diseases, unique in the blame, shame, and humiliation that accompany it. It is not Nic’s fault that he has a disease, but it is his fault that he relapses, since he is the only one who can do the work necessary to prevent relapse. Whether or not it’s his fault, he must be held accountable. While this ongoing, whirring noise replays in my mind, I understand when, at St. Helena, Nic admitted that he sometimes wished that he had any other illness, because no one would blame him.

I often felt separate, with a nearly impossible task of stopping my mind from its attempt to understand. Van Morrison sings: “It ain’t why, why, why. It ain’t why, why, why. It just is.” It just is.

“I’ve studied alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, marijuana and more recently obesity. There’s a pattern in compulsion. I’ve never come across a single person that was addicted that wanted to be addicted. Something has happened in their brains that has led to that process.”

“Alcohol does the same damage over a much longer term,” someone said in a meeting. “Drugs get it over quicker. That’s the only difference.”

I am reading Brideshead Revisited, and I’m struck that a hundred years ago Waugh wrote, “With Sebastian it is different.” Julia is speaking about her brother. “He will become a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him . . . It is in the blood . . . I see it in the way Sebastian drinks.” Brideshead: “You can’t stop people if they want to get drunk. My mother couldn’t stop my father.” Substitute a few words and they are discussing my son: “With Nic it is different. He will become an addict if someone does not come to stop him . . . It is in the blood . . . I see it in the way he uses.” “You can’t stop people if they want to get high.”

There are functioning alcoholics just as there are functioning addicts, at least functioning until they don’t. Maybe the only difference between them and winos and drugged-out bums on the street is some money—enough for rent, utilities, a meal, and the next drink.

“The danger in calling addiction a brain disease is people think that makes you a hapless victim,” wrote Dr. Leshner in Issues in Science and Technology in 2001. “But it doesn’t. For one thing, since it begins with a voluntary behavior, you do, in effect, give it to yourself.”

Just like any other disease, you have to participate in your own treatment and recovery.

No one starts out hoping to become an addict; they just like drugs. No one starts out hoping for a heart attack; they just like fried chicken. How much energy and anger do we want to waste on the fact that people gave it to themselves? It can be a brain disease and you can have given it to yourself and you personally have to do something about treating it.” I try not to blame Nic. I don’t. Sometimes I do.

ON THIS SUNNY June morning, though he promised Jasper and Daisy, Nic is not in the audience at their step-up ceremony.

Inside me there is a searing void. The contradiction between the innocence of the children up there and my absent son is almost too much to contain inside one brain at one time.

I am not the only parent with tears, but I cannot help thinking that mine are unique. I watch Jasper and Daisy dressed up—Jasper in the white oxford with its itchy collar, Daisy in her grandmother’s dress, white socks, and Mary Janes—standing with their classmates, immaculate, nervous, and excited, and I remember Nic shining, too, standing tall, his life ahead of him. Where can he be?

Outside, the sky is streaked with smears of blue, but the sign that the storm has passed—and that summer is coming—does not lift my mood. I am in the kitchen boiling water for tea. The phone rings. My anxious reaction is recognizable. Who else would call this early in the morning? It must be Nic. And yet as I reach for the telephone, I tell myself, “No, it’s not Nic,” so as to ward off the bitter disappointment when it isn’t.

The boys are in the foreground, smiling at the camera. Jasper, who just got a haircut so that his brown bangs rim his eager face, and Nic, with a short buzz and gleaming braces. My boys. The picture has a stamp on the back, 10 12 ’96, which puts Nic at fourteen. Where is he?

And gasps. There’s a body under a pile of woolen blankets. Gathering herself, she looks closer, sees that it’s Nic, a vibrating skeleton, sleeping, undisturbed by her cry. “Nic,” she exclaims. “What are . . .” Haunted, with black eyes, fully dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Nic looks at her. He sits up. “What? Nan . . .” Both of them are stunned. “What are you doing?” “Nancy,” he begins. “I. . .” “Are you all right?” He gets up, grabs his bag, stammers, apologizes. “Nic, no,” Nancy says. “It’s all right. It’s just that you scared me to death.” “I’m . . . I’m sorry.” “Nic, are you on drugs?” He says nothing.

“Have you eaten? Can I make you something?” “No, thanks. Maybe a banana. If it’s all right.” “Nic . . . What can I do to help?” There are tears in her eyes. She blinks. “Just tell me what I can do.” Nic mumbles something incoherent, an apology, and takes a banana from the basket in the kitchen. He says thank you and mutters I’m sorry and then walks briskly out the front door and up the driveway. “Nic!” She hurries after him, calls to him, but he doesn’t stop.

I am present, but I am absent. Parents can only be as happy as their unhappiest child, according to an old saw. I’m afraid it’s true.

Aghast at Nic’s appearance—“he looks like he could blow away in a strong wind”—he cooks him a pot roast, which Nic devours. He begs Nic to get help. “I’ll be fine, I’ve stopped using,” Nic lies. “I just need to be on my own for a while.” After Nic leaves, my friend calls. He tells me about the visit and then grows quiet. “At least I got him to eat something,” he says.