Beautiful Boy (21 page)

Hanging in the center is a paper-doll figure, which represents the addict. Smaller dolls float around the central figure. The figures dangling off to the side represent the kids and Karen, on the periphery, helpless, but inextricably tied to the moods and whims and drug-taking of the central figure. Another figure hangs somewhat precariously between them—me. I am an enabler, propping Nic up; making excuses for him; bending over backward to care for him; trying to protect Karen and Jasper and Daisy from him, and yet also trying to keep them all connected to one another.

"It's not your fault," says the speaker. "That's the first thing to
understand. There are addicts who were abused and addicts who from all accounts had ideal childhoods. Yet still many family members blame themselves. Another thing they do is try to solve it. They hide liquor bottles and medication and search for drugs in their loved one's clothes and bedrooms, and they drive the addict to AA or NA meetings. They try to control where the addict goes and what they do and who they hang out with. It's understandable, but it's futile. You cannot control an addict."

Later, the speaker says, "An addict can take over the family—take all of a parent's attention, even at the expense of other children and of one's spouse. Family members' moods become dependent on how the addict is doing. People become obsessed. It's understandable, but it's harmful. They become controlling in ways that they never were before, because they are so afraid. People lose their identity because nothing matters except their addicted spouse or child or parent or whoever it is. There is no joy left in their life."

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. Nonetheless, he hunches over and seems dejected.

We talk while sitting in chairs on the balcony of his room. "I don't think this is going to work for me any better than last time," he says. "All the talk about God..."

He is quiet.

"All the God talk. I can't get past it."

I respond, "They say 'higher power,' not God. There's a difference."

" 'Higher power' is another way of saying God. You have to believe, and I don't. You can't get over this unless you believe."

Nic explains his conundrum. "I have no problem with the first step of the twelve steps," he says. "Well, sometimes I do, but I guess it's obvious that I am powerless over drugs and alcohol and my life has become unmanageable. But after that, it's bullshit."

He reads steps two and three from a bookmark.

" 'Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Three: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.' "

I point out, "There's a lot of room in 'as we understood Him.' "

"I don't understand Him to be anything."

For some people, this—his atheism, a gift from his parents, at least me—is enough to explain Nic's problem. I don't believe that any single factor could have changed his fate, but who knows? If a belief in God or a religious upbringing precludes addiction, though, how does one explain all of the people with religious backgrounds and beliefs who have become addicted? The devout are not spared.

Without being solicitous or disingenuous, I try to offer a way that he can conceive of a higher power. Though I raised him without religion, his upbringing was not devoid of a set of moral values. I tried to instill the idea that morality is right for its own sake. The Dalai Lama, writing in the
New York Times,
recently explained this in a way that reflects my thinking: "key ethical principles we all share as human beings, such as compassion, tolerance, a sense of caring, consideration of others, and the responsible use of knowledge and power—principles that transcend the barriers between religious believers and non-believers, and followers of this religion or that religion." To me, those principles are a higher power, one accessible to each of us. My father once explained his concept of God: the "still small voice" inside us—our consciences. I don't call it God, but I too believe in our consciences. When we listen to that voice, we do the right thing. When we don't, we fail to. In my life I haven't paid close enough attention to it—I didn't know how—but I try to now. When I listen to it and act on it, I am more compassionate, less self-obsessed, and more loving. That, I tell Nic, is my higher power.

He is unimpressed. "Rationalizations," he says, "more bullshit. It's a big lie."

Counselors at Ohlhoff, people he has met at meetings, and now the staff at St. Helena have tried to convince him that one's higher power can be anything one imagines it to be—a source of guidance that comes from outside of oneself when it's dangerous to rely on the warped, drug-influenced guidance that comes from one's own brain, the addict brain. "For some, it takes a leap of faith," a counselor told Nic. "You have to trust that there is something bigger than us out there—something that can show us the path that will
save our lives. The first step is honesty: my life is out of control. So what are your choices? Continue or submit to a higher power. You have to risk it—to be courageous enough to take a leap of faith and trust that there is something bigger than us that can help."

We once again eat on the deck outside the cafeteria, where Nic introduces us to two friends he has made here. We feel as if we already know them because by now we have been in group sessions with their wives. James is an amiable businessman, handsome, with red hair and freckles and the reassuring manner of one of Jimmy Stewart's wholesome characters. He is a Vicodin addict. The drug was prescribed after back surgery. Before checking himself into St. Helena, he was swallowing as many as forty pills a day. Nic's other friend is his roommate, the chef, Stephen, who has apprenticed in some of the Bay Area's most renowned kitchens. According to Nic, the sandy-haired, athletic man with sloping blue eyes abused a variety of drugs, but his primary addiction is alcohol, which has nearly destroyed his marriage and has nearly killed him at least twice. In his early thirties, he has already undergone surgery on his liver and pancreas due to alcohol poisoning. It is shocking to hear his age. He looks fifty.

We sit at long tables with them and their wives, both of whom seem kind-hearted, loving, and exceedingly tired. Nic, James, and Stephen share the same sense of humor and something else: the type of intimacy and affection that normally builds over months or years but is hastened in rehab, where people's souls are exposed. Indeed, afterward, Nic tells us how much it means to have connected with James and Stephen. "Late at night, when everyone else is asleep, we sneak into the hospital kitchen," he says.

"Is that allowed?" asks Karen.

"No one cares," Nic says, speaking quietly. "The other night Stephen made an artichoke soufflé and leek soup. Last night we had chicken cordon bleu. I was sous chef."

We talk to Nic about the morning's and last week's lectures, and I ask if he agrees that addiction is a disease—and he has it. He shrugs. "I go back and forth."

"If a switch was thrown, when did it happen?" I ask. "At Berkeley?"

"God, no," he says. "Earlier. Much."

"How much earlier? When you got drunk in Lake Tahoe? When you first smoked pot?"

After a minute, he says, "Maybe Paris."

I nod, remembering the ulcer, and ask, "What happened in Paris?"

He admits that his language classes at the university couldn't compete with the city's other draws, including an abundance of easily accessible alcohol; French waiters thought nothing of serving wine to a sixteen-year-old. As a result, Nic spent much of his time there emulating his drunken heroes—but he forgot the writing and painting part. "One night," he says, "I was so drunk that I crawled into a boat tied to the shore of the Seine and passed out. I slept there, woke up the next day."

"You could have been murdered."

His eyes take me in. "I know," he says darkly. "When I flew home, I snuck some bottles of wine in my suitcase, but they only lasted a few days. I was fucked. In Paris, I'd been going out to bars and clubs every night, drinking a fucking shitload, but when I got home, I was sixteen, a high school student, living with you guys." He looks down. "It was too bizarre. I couldn't get alcohol, so I started smoking pot every day. It wasn't the same, but it was easier to get."

"What about hard drugs?" I ask, not sure I want to hear the answer. "When did you start?"

"Remember when [he names the boys and his girlfriend] and I left after the barbecue the night I graduated from high school?" He is sitting with his elbows on the table. "There was ecstasy at the party we went to. I took some. I was flying. I felt so close to everyone, going through these long, meaningful goodbyes. After that I took whatever I could find—E, LSD, mushrooms, and then..." He looks up. "Then crystal. When I tried it, I felt—I felt better than ever before in my life."

Once again, we gather in the large conference room, patients and family members, for the afternoon group session. More chairs are brought out from a closet to accommodate fifty or so people; the circle stretches into a long, meandering oval that touches the walls.
A counselor leads the session, which starts, as usual, with introductions around the room—a room full of resentment and sadness and rage.

"I cannot think of anything other than my daughter. I cannot let go of it. I dream about it. What can I do? This has taken over my life. People tell me to let it go, but how does one let go of their daughter?" The speaker cries and cries. Her daughter sits next to her, stone-faced.

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.

Compared to those who gathered at the old Victorian in San Francisco, the crowd at St. Helena is better dressed, though an aged woman appears as if she could have been, hours ago, a derelict on the street. The group therapy begins with patients and their families sharing stories, sometimes commenting on one another's progress. The aged woman shocks me. In a gravelly voice, she explains, "I have a master's degree. I'm a teacher. A good one, I think." She stops and stares vacantly ahead for a moment. "I was a good one. Before speed."

Like me, the addicts' relatives all seem simultaneously hopeless and hopeful.

Sometimes the pain in the room is nearly unbearable. Without respite, we hear, see, and most of all feel with heart-tearing jabs the bleakness of the lives of people whose loved ones have become addicted to meth, though the "drug of choice" hardly matters. Meth, heroin, morphine, Klonopin, cocaine, crack, Valium, Vicodin, alcohol, and, for most, combinations of all of these. The people in the circle are different, yet we are all the same. We all have gaping wounds.

Nic's friend Stephen speaks. He describes his lifelong "dance" with alcohol—he was ten when he got drunk for the first time. His wife cries continuously.

"We love you so much," she says to Stephen when it is her turn,
"but I have heard your remorse before. I have heard your promises. I can't live this way."

James's wife speaks about how he has plummeted from "the person I respected most in the entire world, my soul mate," to someone consumed with pills at the expense of everything else. "He went from being the kindest, gentlest—"

The counselor, in a quiet, even voice, interrupts. "Try addressing him directly," she says. "Talk to your husband."

Looking into James's eyes, trembling, she continues: "You went from being the kindest, gentlest man I had ever known in my life to a stranger, yelling at me, listless, depressed, unkind, and unable to share any kind of openness and intimacy. I keep asking myself..."

She begins to cry.

And then another, and another. They tell their stories, address their loved ones, apologize, rail at them, and weep. Our similarities are profound. To varying degrees, we have spent years accepting and rationalizing behavior in our loved ones that we would never tolerate in anyone else. We have protected them and hidden their addiction. We resented them and felt guilty for it. We have been furious and have felt guilty for it. We vowed not to take their cruelty or deceitfulness or selfishness or irresponsibility any longer and then we forgave them. We raged at them, often inwardly. We blamed ourselves. We worried—worried incessantly—that they would kill themselves.

Every addict's story has similar themes, too—remorse, out-of-control fury, directed most often at themselves—and a sense of helplessness. "Do you think I want to be this way?" a man screams into the face of his shaking wife. "Do you? Do you? I HATE MYSELF." Both of them cry and cry and cry.

"I'm so proud of him for being here," a woman says of her heroin-addicted husband. "But what happens next? I am terrified." An elderly woman whose sister, a lawyer, is addicted to meth, says, "I no longer give her money, but I buy her food and drive her to the doctor and pay for her medications." She adds, "She is incapable of making it across the apartment to the refrigerator." The therapist gently prods her. "She is capable of scoring drugs but she can't make it to the refrigerator?"

Then another parent interrupts. "I felt the same way about my son until I realized that he couldn't get to school or work or a therapy appointment but he could get to pawn shops, get to his dealers, get whatever drug he wanted, get alcohol, break into houses, get needles—whatever was required. It's a fairly sophisticated process to cook a batch of methamphetamine, but I felt so sorry for him, thinking, He's depressed. He's fragile. He's incapable. Of course I should pay his bill if he winds up in the hospital. Of course I should pay his rent or he'll be on the streets. So for about a year I paid for a comfortable place for him to get high."

A handsome woman with auburn hair cut short, wearing a silk blouse, cardigan, and wool pants, says that she is a doctor. Deeply sad, she admits that for more than a year she conducted surgeries while high on meth. She initially tried it at a party. "I felt better than I had ever felt before in my life," she says. "I felt as if I could do anything. I never ever wanted to lose that feeling."