Beautiful Boy (24 page)

"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.

I am back in Novato for another meeting in the church. I recognize many of the people here now. We hug one another. Elsewhere, everyone asks how I'm doing. Here, they know.

A mother rocks lightly as she speaks. I stare at the white tiled floor, sitting hunched in the gray metal chair with my hands folded on my lap. The woman, in a plain business suit, sips coffee from a paper cup. Her long hair is plaited, and she wears a touch of peach rouge and black eyeliner. In a shaky voice, she tells us that her daughter is in jail for up to two years after a drug bust. 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."

A white-haired mother jumps in to say that she knows how the other woman feels. "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.

I don't hear from Nic, and each hour and each day and each week is quiet torture like a physical pain. Much of the time I feel as if I am on fire. It may be true that suffering builds character, but it also damages people. 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.

As they counsel in Al-Anon, I try to "detach"—to let go and let God. How does any parent let go? I can't. I don't know how.

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.

I know that the divorce and custody arrangement were the most difficult aspects of his childhood. Children of divorce use drugs and alcohol before the age of fourteen more often than the children of intact families. In one study, 85 percent of children of divorce were heavy drug users in high school compared to 24 percent of those from intact families. Girls whose parents have divorced have earlier sexual experiences, and kids of both sexes suffer a higher rate of depression. Since more than half of first marriages and 65 percent of second marriages end in divorce, few of us want to face the fact that divorce is often a disaster for children and may lead to drug abuse and other serious problems. But maybe it's ludicrous to speculate, since many kids who go through divorces—some far more contentious than mine—don't resort to drugs. And many drug addicts I meet are from intact families. There's no way to know definitively. Were we crazier than most families? Not by a long shot. Maybe.

What else can I blame? Sometimes I think privileged kids are prime candidates for drug addiction for many obvious reasons, but what about the legions of addicts who grew up in dire poverty? It would be easy to blame their poverty, if it were not the case that we encountered children from every socioeconomic class in rehabs and AA meetings. I would blame private schools if public school kids
had fewer drug problems. Instead, the research confirms it. 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.

I still have a difficult time accepting it. I replay the arguments on both sides. People with cancer or emphysema or heart disease don't lie and steal. Someone dying of those diseases would do anything in their power to live. But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution—don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life.

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."

There's a practical reason for people to understand that addiction is a disease—insurance companies cover diseases and pay for treatment. It's good they do, because if you wait until the disease progresses, and it will, you end up paying for replaced livers and hearts and kidneys, never mind the mental illnesses of addicts who descend into psychosis and dementia, and never mind the costs of destroyed families who cannot work, and never mind the costs of addiction-related crime.

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. I sometimes also blame the treatment programs. And then I blame myself. I go back and forth. But I always come back to this:

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. And yet cancer patients, for example, would be justifiably disgusted by this. All an addict or alcoholic has to do is stop drinking, stop using! There's no similar option for cancer.

Parents of addicts have the same problem as their children: we must come to terms with the irrationality of this disease. No one who has not confronted it can completely understand the paradoxes. Since most people cannot fathom it, there's no true understanding, just pity that may come with thinly veiled condescension. Outside Al-Anon meetings, or apart from the parents who heard what we were going through and called to commiserate, 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.

Still, believing that addiction is a disease helps. Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has
said: "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."

Nic's grandfather once came to visit us—years ago when Vicki and I lived for a year in Los Angeles. On the way to our apartment from the airport, he asked us to stop at a store so he could buy cigarettes. He tried to sneak it, but we saw that he had a bottle of bourbon in the paper sack. By the end of dinner, the bottle was drained. Within two years, he was dead. He had been a kind, loving, and hard-working family man, a farmer, whose life had tragically deteriorated. But because it was alcohol, rather than speed or heroin, his debilitation took decades. He was in his sixties when he died. "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."

Other than the potency and toxicity of their drugs of choice, ultimately the differences between using addicts and alcoholics become moot; they end up in the same place, similarly debilitated, similarly alone—similarly dead.

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."

After you spend some time in recovery programs, you never look the same way at a drunk
or
a stoner, whether at a party or in books or movies. Hunter Thompson's accounts of his gluttonous
drugging and drinking are no longer funny to me. They are pathetic. There is nothing amusing about Nick Charles quaffing martinis—swallowing them at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner; between, before, and after every meal—in the
Thin Man
movies. ("Come on, dear, let's get something to eat," Nick says. "I'm thirsty.") In one of these films, Nora jokes that her husband is a dipsomaniac. He is. Many people were charmed by the 2005 movie
Sideways,
about a wine enthusiast, but I was repulsed. To me, it was the story of a wretched alcoholic.

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.

Some people maintain that designating addiction as a brain disease rather than a behavioral disorder gives addicts, whether they are using alcohol, crack, heroin, meth, or prescription drugs, an excuse to relapse. Alan I. Leshner, former director of NIDA who is now the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, agrees that addicts should not be let off the hook. "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."

Dr. Volkow disagrees. "If we say a person has heart disease, are we eliminating their responsibility? No. We're having them exercise. We want them to eat less, stop smoking. The fact that they have a disease recognizes that there are changes, in this case, in the brain. Just like any other disease, you have to participate in your own treatment and recovery. What about people with high cholesterol who keep eating French fries? Do we say a disease is not biological because it's influenced by behavior? 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.

The head of their school, in a camel-colored sports jacket and bright necktie, has a warm smile, eyes that betray his boundless affection for his charges, and a voice that soothes. He beams along with the children and their parents. Standing behind a microphone, he conducts the ceremony, calling them grade by grade. At his instruction, they stand and then move en masse from the step they're sitting on to the next higher row. Jasper, in a collared white shirt, his brown hair combed down on his forehead, radiates up there among his friends. He is now a third grader.