Beautiful Boy (12 page)

Encouraged by the journalism instructor, Nic submits this and other columns to the annual Ernest Hemingway Writing Award for high school journalists. He wins first place. Next he submits a column to the My Turn section of
Newsweek,
which the magazine publishes in February 1999. The piece is an indictment of long-distance joint custody. "Maybe there should be an addition to the marriage vows," Nic writes. " 'Do you promise to love and to hold, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as you both shall
live? And if you ever have children and wind up divorced, do you promise to stay within the same geographical area as your kids?' Actually, since people often break those vows, maybe it should be a law: If you have children, you must stay near them. Or how about some common sense: If you move away from your children, you have to do the traveling to see them"? He poignantly describes the effect of his years of our joint-custody arrangement: "I am always missing someone."

Nic's taste in books and music continues to evolve. His onetime favorite authors, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain, have been replaced by an assortment of misanthropes, addicts, drunks, depressives, and suicides: Rimbaud, Burroughs, Kerouac, Kafka, Capote, Miller, Nietzsche, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. 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.

At spring break, the two of us set off on a tour of colleges in the Midwest and on the East Coast. We fly to Chicago, arriving on a hazy morning. We have a free afternoon, so we visit the Art Institute and museums and, in the evening, attend a play. Nic sits in on classes and stays overnight in a University of Chicago dorm. In the morning, we fly on to Boston, where we rent a car. After two days touring schools in the city, we drive to Amherst, where we arrive after dark. We stop in the center of town and eat dinner at an Indian restaurant. Afterward, we ask directions to our hotel. The man we ask bellows urgently in response.

"Go straight!" he shouts. "You will come to two lights." He looks fiercely into our eyes. "Take a right! You
must
take a right, never a left!"

Nic and I follow the instructions exactly, Nic directing me in the same volume and tone used by the man.

"Stop!" he yells. "Right! Right! Right. You
must
take a right, never a left!"

Our final stop is Manhattan, where Nic tours NYU and Columbia.

At home, he fills out his college applications and we plan his summer. He and Karen continue to speak French together. He has an aptitude for language; memorization is easy for him and he has a flawless ear. What he lacks in vocabulary he makes up for in a fluid Parisian accent and, with Karen's help, an arsenal of French slang. Toward the end of the school year, in fact, his French teacher encourages Nic to apply to a summer program in Paris to study the language at the American University there. Vicki and I confer and decide to send him.

Nic spends much of June in LA and then travels to Paris for the three-week session. When he reports in by phone, he says that he's having a great time. His French is improving and he has made good friends. He even landed a part in a student film. "I love it here, but I miss all of you," he says one time before hanging up. "Give my love to the little kiddos."

When the program ends, Nic flies home and I meet him at the airport. Waiting at the gate, I spot him disembarking from the jet-way. He looks terrible. He has grown taller, but that's not what I notice first. His hair is shaggy and unkempt. There are black circles under his eyes. Somehow he is grayer. His manner alarms me. I detect a simmering sullenness. Finally I ask what is wrong.

"Nothing. I'm fine," he says.

"Did something happen in Paris?"

"No!" he replies with a flare of anger. I look at him suspiciously.

"Are you sick?"

"I'm OK."

Within days, however, he complains of stomach pain, so I make an appointment with our family doctor. The examination takes an hour. Then Nic comes out and says that I should join him. With his arms folded across his chest, the doctor regards Nic with concern. I sense that there is more he wants to say, but he simply announces that Nic has an ulcer.

What child has an ulcer at seventeen?

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, even closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. My roommate was from Manhattan. Charles had a trust fund. His parents were dead. I never learned the truth about how they died, but alcohol and drugs were involved. Perhaps suicide. "To have lost one parent, Mr. Worthing, might be considered a misfortune," Charles would say, appropriating the famous line in
The Importance of Being Earnest.
"To lose both looks like carelessness."

Charles was awkwardly handsome, with a strong nose, brown curls, and coffee eyes. He had alluring and prodigious energy. He impressed me and others who met him with his worldliness, stories about Christmases with some Kennedy relations in Hyannis Port and "the Vineyard," and summers in Monaco and on the Côte d'Azur. When he took me and other friends out for dinner at a French restaurant, he ordered—in French—escargot, foie gras, and Dom Perignon. He regaled his audiences with tales of boarding school high jinks that could have (and may have) come out of Fitzgerald; sexual escapades that could have (and probably did) come out of Henry Miller. If you mentioned that you needed a new shirt, he would recommend a tailor in Hong Kong who for years made his father's suits. He claimed to know the best watchmaker on Madison Avenue, bartender at the Carlyle, and masseuse at the Pierre. Mention that you had tasted a good California wine and he
would tell you about a Château Margaux he drank with a Rothschild scion. Everything about him was contrived to inspire awe. Including the way he drank alcohol and took drugs. He did both with what at the time I found to be impressive determination.

I discovered that there were two parallel universities in Tucson. One was attended by students who took college with at least some degree of seriousness. The other—the one I attended—was chosen by
Playboy
as one of the top party schools in the nation.

I was an amateur when compared to Charles, who never let school or anything else get in the way of his dissipation, though there would be intermittent hangovers accompanied by guilty resolutions to do better, followed by Champagne or margarita toasts to his new assiduousness.

Charles had friends, also from New York City, who shared a pink adobe house on Speedway Boulevard on the far end of Tucson from the university. They were not on trust funds, but they had money for parties and steak dinners earned by dealing frozen magic mushrooms they smuggled in from the Yucatán.

At the time, Carlos Castaneda's
The Teachings of Don Juan
and its sequels were popular on college campuses. Castaneda, an anthropologist, chronicled his pursuit of the knowledge of a Yaqui Indian shaman who taught him a quasi-religious philosophy reminiscent of various Eastern and Western mystical traditions. Integral to Don Juan's spiritual exploration was the consumption of psychotropic drugs, including peyote, datura, and psilocybin mushrooms. My friends and I were intrigued, and the books encouraged us to view our trips on mushrooms or other psychedelics not as debauchery but as intellectual inquiry. Somehow we also justified marijuana, Quaaludes, Jack Daniel's, Jose Cuervo, cocaine, and random uppers and downers.

I recall quite distinctly tripping in the red-rock high desert outside Tucson and watching a Mexican daisy transform into a man's face. Soon it and the daisies around it morphed into the fresh-faced visages of thousands of angels, and then the entire ensemble began whispering the answer to the ultimate question: what is the meaning of life? I moved closer so that I could hear what they were saying, but the murmuring voices gave way to subdued laughter, and
the array of somber faces turned into a field of laughing English muffins
.

By night, after a full white moon had risen low on the horizon, I decided that if the people in Italo Calvino's book, which we were reading in a lit class, could use ladders to climb onto the moon, why not me, but I gave up the idea when Charles announced that it was time to go clubbing.

Charles bought drugs for studying, and they helped for half an hour or so. Then we would be too high to concentrate on anything other than which bar to visit. Copious amounts of drug and drink never deterred Charles from driving, and he crashed two Peugeots. Thankfully—miraculously—he never harmed anyone, at least as far as I know. I rode shotgun, which now I know was a form of Russian roulette.

He blasted the Rolling Stones. He played his favorite song, "Shine a Light," incessantly and loudly, singing along with Mick Jagger,

Well, you're drunk in the alley, baby
With your clothes all torn
And your late night friends
Leave you in the cold grey dawn
Just seemed too many flies on you
I just can't brush them off.

On a drug-fueled whim, Charles and I decided one night to drive to California to see the sunrise, and so, after packing up an arsenal of drugs, we barreled west to San Diego. It was still dark when we arrived at the beach. Sitting on the sand, blankets over our shoulders, staring out to the horizon, we awaited the sunrise. We smoked joints and talked. After a long while, one of us noticed that it was light. We turned around. It must have been ten or so. The sun had risen hours earlier.

"Oh," Charles said with striking insight. "The sun rises in the east."

Another time, while driving to Tucson after visiting my parents in Scottsdale, we offered a ride to a hitchhiker. When we arrived at
her destination, a skydiving school in the middle-of-nowhere desert town of Casa Grande, our rider convinced us to try her favorite sport. The instructional session took place in front of a wall on which someone had painted, "Everything you do on the ground is irrelevant." Our lecturer said, "Your most important job is to enjoy the ride." When he arrived at the finale of his speech, he burst into a cackle and said, "Fuck it. Let's fly."

My parachute didn't open. I was saved at the last possible second when my reserve chute slowed me down. I hit hard but was all right. Charles came running up to me. "Far-fucking out!"

Drug stories are sinister. Like some war stories, they focus on adventure and escape. In the tradition of a long line of famous and infamous carousers and their chroniclers, even hangovers and near-death experiences and visits to the emergency room can be made to seem glamorous. But often the storytellers omit the slow degeneration, psychic trauma, and, finally, the casualties.

One night, after Charles returned from a two-day bender, I became worried because he was in the bathroom for so long. When he didn't respond to my calls, I broke the lock and pushed open the door. He had passed out, cracking his skull on the tile floor, which was smeared with blood. I called an ambulance. At the hospital, the doctor warned Charles about his drinking, and he promised to stop, but of course he didn't.

Later in the year, another of our Hunter Thompson-inspired road trips brought us to San Francisco, where we arrived on a pristine early evening. I had never been there before. We stopped the car atop the city's highest hill. The invigorating wind blew. After a childhood in Arizona, I felt as if I could breathe for the first time in my life.

I applied for a transfer to the University of California at Berkeley. I hadn't yet damaged my transcript and so I was accepted, enrolling for the fall. It was a time when it was not unusual for a student at the university to construct an individual social science field major. My focus was death and human consciousness.

I embraced my studies at Berkeley, but drugs were plentiful there, too. Cocaine and pot were the mainstays of many of our weekends. A friend's father, a doctor, prescribed bottles of Quaaludes because he didn't want his son taking street drugs. I did many drugs, but no more than most of those around me. Somehow we have evolved so that higher education and drunkenness and drugs are, for many students, inextricably tied.

I kept in touch with Charles, whose drinking and drugging escalated in a way that, all these years later, makes me worry about Nic. My drug use was excessive, but I was never like Charles. At one or two in the morning, I would call it a night because I had to get up for class. Charles would look at me as if I were out of my mind. He was just getting started.

After his summer in France, Nic is back in school. The ulcer has healed, but he is different. He still does well in most of his classes, maintaining a high grade-point average, as if that makes his descent more tragic than if he had become a fuckup. However, he quits the swimming and water-polo teams and, eventually, the newspaper. He begins cutting classes, insisting that he knows exactly what he can and cannot get away with. He comes home late, pushing the limits of his curfew. Our concern mounting, Karen and I meet with the school counselor, who says, "Nic's candor, unusual especially in boys, is a good sign. Keep talking it out with him and he'll get through this."

I will try.

It is as if Nic is being pulled by two countervailing forces. Nic's teachers and counselors—and his parents—work to hold him up and keep him from succumbing to another force, one inside him.

After twenty-five years at this school, Don accepts a position elsewhere. No one has the kind of influence he had on Nic, not that Don—or anyone—could do anything to affect the course Nic is on. Some teachers are still impressed by Nic's acumen and writing and painting talent, including a piece for a student art exhibition, gouache on the inside of a Clue Jr. game, depicting a screaming boy with writing over his face. But other teachers are concerned. A former history teacher Nic adored calls to say, "He's just not interested in talking about whatever is going on." Senioritis is common, but one day his class dean tells me that Nic has broken a school record for most missed classes of any senior—even as we hear from
the colleges to which Nic applied. He has been accepted to most of them.