Beautiful Boy (26 page)

I feel like the cormorant. A shark has appeared from the depths. I stare at it and helplessly see the approach—and with it the precariousness of Nic's life—see how close he is to dying. As physically sick as the image makes me, I cannot fend it off.

After the aquarium, we drive south on Highway 1 to Carmel, where the kids play on the beach and then, in a park, climb on an ancient madrone with bark peeling off like an old sunburn. Watching them, I relax for a moment, but anxiety has taken up permanent residence in my body.

We are driving home. We do not talk about Nic. It's not that we're not thinking about him. His addiction and its twin, the specter of his death, permeate the air we breathe. Karen and I try to gird ourselves in case the next telephone call brings with it the worst possible news.

Nic is still gone. Life does not stop.

Karen is working late in her studio, and I take Jasper and Daisy into town for dinner at the Pine Cone Diner. Afterward, we walk to the grocery store. The Palace Market is nearly deserted. I wheel a cart up and down the aisles. Jasper and Daisy keep tossing Cocoa Puffs and Oreos into the cart and I keep removing them, until finally I snap at them to stop. I send them off in different direc
tions for things we actually need, milk, butter, bread. I'm in an aisle vaguely scanning a wall of dried pasta when the Muzak system plays Eric Clapton's song about the death of his son.

"Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?"

It's more than I can tolerate. I break down in the middle of the market. Jasper and Daisy, their arms loaded with the items on their lists, both race around the corner at the same time and catch my tears. They are appalled and afraid.

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully. Avoid Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," from the Polaroid or Kodak or whichever commercial, and the songs "Turn Around" and "Sunrise, Sunset" and—there are thousands more. Avoid Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," and this one, Eric Clapton's song about his son. Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sneaked up on me one time. The music doesn't have to be sentimental. Springsteen can be dangerous. John and Yoko. Björk. Dylan. I become overwhelmed when I hear Nirvana. I want to scream like Kurt Cobain. I want to scream
at
him. Music isn't all that does it. There are millions of treacherous moments. Driving along Highway 1, I will see a peeling wave. Or I reach the fork where two roads meet near Rancho Nicasio, where we veered to the left in carpool. A shooting star on a still night at the crest of Olema Hill. With friends, I hear a good joke—one that Nic would appreciate. The kids do something funny or endearing. A story. A worn sweater. A movie. Feeling wind and looking up, riding my bike. A million moments.

We hear nothing more for another fortnight, then he sends me an email. My initial reaction is relief—he is alive, at least semicoherent, and mobile, if only enough to get to a public library to use a computer. He asks for help, some money, so he doesn't have to live on the streets. I write back that I will help him return to treatment, but that is all. I am not parroting any Al-Anon tough-love script, nor have I become callous. I have been defeated by meth and have given up. Bailing him out, paying his debts, dragging him to shrinks, counselors, and scraping him off the street—it has been futile; meth is impervious. I have always assumed that vigilance
and love would guarantee a decent life for my children, but I have learned that they aren't enough.

He declines my offer.

Nic's writing teacher at Hampshire, the one who accepted Nic into his class after they shook hands, hears that he relapsed and writes to me: "Sober Nic sparkles. I've buried too many people over the years not to be sick about this news."

After another anguished week, Nic calls, collect:

"Hey, Pop, it's me."

"Nic."

"How're you doing?"

"That's not the question. What about you?"

"I'm all right."

"Where are you?"

"The city."

"Do you have a place to stay? Where are you staying?"

"I'm fine."

"Listen, Nic, do you want to meet?"

"I don't think it's a good idea."

"Just to meet. I won't lay any trips on you. Just for lunch."

"I guess."

"Please."

"All right."

Why do I want to meet him? No matter how unrealistic, I retain a sliver of hope that I can get through to him. That's not quite accurate. I know I can't, but at least I can put my fingertips on his cheek.

For our meeting, Nic chooses Steps of Rome, a café on Columbus Avenue, in North Beach, the neighborhood where I raised him. Nic played in Washington Square opposite Saints Peter and Paul Church. We would browse City Lights, the bookstore, and walk backward down the nearly vertical streets to the wharf, where we sat on the curb and watched the Human Jukebox play his trumpet and then ate banana splits at the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory. Across Broadway in Chinatown, we picked up bok choy and melons, and on our way home stopped at Caffe Trieste for coffee and hot chocolate. Sometimes we ate an early dinner at a sushi bar, where Nic
ordered customized tempura with only orange vegetables (carrots and yams). Or we went to Vanessi's, the Italian restaurant where the waiters, in burgundy coats and creased black pants, lifted Nic and set him, tow-headed and a gap between his front teeth, on a stool at the counter stacked with telephone books. Nic's eyes would grow round while watching the pyrotechnics of the line cooks splashing brandy into saucepans. The liquor ignited, and Nic was thrilled. The cooks had his order memorized: kid-sized caesar salad, ravioli triangolo, and zabaglione whisked in a banged-up copper bowl. Walking home, we passed the girls who hung out in front of the Broadway strip clubs, whom he knew by their costumes, Wonder Woman, She-Ra, Cat Woman, et al. He was convinced they were superheroes patrolling North Beach. When he got sleepy, I carried him home, his tiny arms wrapped around my neck.

At Steps of Rome, I sit at a corner table, nervously waiting for him. Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on in my life, have betrayed me, I am in unknown terrain. Steps of Rome is deserted except for two waiters folding napkins at the bar. I order coffee while racking my brain for the one thing I haven't thought of that might reach him.

I wait until it is more than a half-hour past our meeting time, recognizing the suffocating worry, and also the bitterness and rage.

After forty-five minutes, I decide that he isn't coming—what had I expected?—and leave. I am unwilling to give up, however, and so I walk around the block, return, peer into the café, and then trudge around the block again. Another half-hour later, I am ready to go home, really, maybe, when I see him. Walking toward me, but looking down, his gangly arms limp at his sides, he looks more than ever like a ghostly Egon Schiele self-portrait, debauched and wasted.

He sees me and stops, then cautiously approaches. We tentatively hug, my arms wrapping around his vaporous spine, and I kiss his cheek. He's chalk-white. We embrace like that, and then sit down at a table by the window. He can't look me in the eyes. No apologies for being late. He folds and unfolds a soda straw, rocks anxiously in his chair, his fingers tremble, his jaw gyrates, and he grinds his teeth. We order. He preempts any questions, saying,
"I'm doing—great. I'm doing what I need to be doing, being responsible for myself for the first time in my life."

"I'm so worried about you."

Silence. Then:

"How are Karen and the kids?"

"They're OK, but we're all worried about you."

"Yeah, well."

"Nic, are you ready to stop? To return to the living?"

"Don't start."

"Jasper and Daisy miss you. They don't—"

He cuts me off. "I can't deal with that. Don't guilt-trip me."

Nic scrapes his plate clean with the side of his fork, drinks down his coffee. When he brushes back his bangs, I notice a welt, which he touches with his fingers, but I don't bother asking.

After we say goodbye, I watch him rise and leave. He's shaking and holding on to his stomach. Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything. Every time we reach a point where we feel we can't bear any more, we do. I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate. He's just experimenting. Going through a stage. It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs. At least it's not heroin. He would never resort to needles. At least he's alive. I have also learned (the hard way because, as it turns out, there's no other way to learn such lessons) that parents are more flexible with our hopes and dreams for our children than we ever imagined. When Nic was growing up, I thought I would be content with whatever choices he made in his life. But the truth was that I fully expected he would go to college. Of course he would. It was never questioned. I pictured him in a satisfying job, with a loving relationship, and eventually with children of his own. However, with his escalating drug use I have revised my hopes and expectations. When college seemed unlikely, I learned to live with the idea that he would skip college and go right to work. After all, many kids take a circuitous route to find themselves. But that began to seem unrealistic, and so I concluded that I would be content if he found a sense of peace. Now I live with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest
definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one.

Summer ends.

Every time the telephone rings, my stomach constricts. Long after the euphoria from meth is no longer attainable—Tennessee Williams described the equivalent with alcohol in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:
"I never again could get the click"—addicts are agitated and confused, and most stop eating and sleeping. Parents of addicts don't sleep, either.

In some towns, noon is marked by ringing church bells or I chiming clock towers. In Point Reyes, it is announced by a rooster's crow followed by the harmony of mooing cows from a public address system atop the Western Saloon.

The crowing and moos stop us for a moment.

I'm at the farmers' market at Toby's Feed Barn with Daisy and Jasper, and it's like a scene in
Oklahoma!
Our neighbors and friends are buying tomatoes, cucumbers, salad greens, and Cowgirl Creamery cheeses.

We run into my brother and sister-in-law and their children next to baskets of Early Girls and basil and other herbs ready for planting, lined up along a mural that depicts a scene of locals, including Toby in his knit cap and, when she was a baby, my niece.

By now pretty much everyone we know in town has heard about Nic, so people ask about him with no small amount of nervousness. Laurel, a mother who is also going through this—her daughter, a heroin addict, was in a near-fatal car crash—hugs me and starts crying. I'm glad that Jasper and Daisy are off with their cousins, listening to the fiddle-and-bass combo playing bluegrass.

My cell phone rings, and I know that Nic is calling. I search for a quiet place away from the crowd and find one near the brooding chicks in a cage inside Toby's barn.

I answer the phone, but no one is there.

I check for messages. There's one—from Nic. His voice is cocky, slurred.

"OK, OK ... sorry. Jesus, this is really hard. Sorry. I'm stopping. But part of crashing out, or whatever, and trying to get focused for work ... I've had to sleep a lot 'cause my body ain't that happy with me. I slept through Friday ... waking up on Saturday, not realizing I'd missed a whole day. So in regards to the rest, I don't know. I'm confused."

Then nothing.

Jasper, in a T-shirt and khaki shorts, runs up. "Can we buy some ginger cookies?"

He notices something and stops short.

"What?"

He looks at the phone in my hand with worried eyes and asks, "Is it Nic?"

A week or so later, Nic contacts his mother, asking for help. "Honestly you would be quite appalled at my lifestyle and I've got enough negative shit coming my way as it is," he writes in an email. "I'm in trouble. It has been a crazy couple months, ultimately resulting in my getting kicked out of the house. I had no money, nothing ... I'm banned unless I go back to rehab. This is not an option. I have that education already ... aa and a higher power don't work for me. They leave me just as horribly empty as ever—"

It cuts off, ends there.

Another email to Vicki. "I'm pretty screwed up physically and mentally, so forgive me if I'm less than perfectly eloquent," he writes. "I'm going to call you once it's late enough, but I wanted to get a few things down on paper just to lay it all out." He explains that he has stolen some checks from the mother of a friend. "I may have a warrant out for me and I need to pay them back or I'm just going to have to remain in hiding."

Vicki and I disagree about the best way to proceed. I understand her fright, but I'm disconcerted when she helps pay his debt. It's a natural and even laudable instinct, but I fear that her support while he's using will simply postpone the inevitable, allowing him to continue on his hazardous course. At least she has said that paying his debt is one thing, but she won't give him cash. Giving cash to a using addict is like handing a loaded gun to someone on the verge of suicide.

When I tell Karen about the emails and how incomprehensible
it is for me that Nic would do something so abhorrent—so self-destructive—she reacts with anger.

"I'm so sick of all this."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"I'm just sick of it." She walks out of the room.

Nic disappears again, reappears again, keeping sporadic touch with his mother, not with me.

When old family friends from New York happen to be visiting San Francisco, Vicki arranges for Nic to meet them. She pleads with him to go to their hotel.

He does. Disheveled and obviously high, he's not allowed into the lobby until he persuades a security guard to call our friends.

When he, an ashen skeleton, twitchy and rambling, wobbles unsteadily into their room, they are horrified both by his debilitated condition and the track marks on his arms. They beg him to come to New York, where he can stay with them and detox.