Literature Question

Beautiful Boy A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction David Sheff HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston · New York 2008 Copyright © 2008 by David Sheff ALL RIGHTS RESERVED For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sheff, David. Beautiful boy : a father’s journey through his son’s addiction / David Sheff. p. cm. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68335-2 ISBN-10: 0-618-68335-6 1. Drug abuse—Treatment—California. 2. Methamphetamine abuse—Treatment —California. 3. Children of divorced parents—California. I. Title. HV5831.C2S54 2006 362.29’9—dc22 [B] 2006026981 Book design by Melissa Lotfy Printed in the United States of America MP 10 987654 321 This book is for the women and men who have dedicated their lives to understanding and combating addiction at rehabs, hospitals, research centers, sober-living and halfway houses, and organizations devoted to education about drug abuse, as well as the anonymous— the brave ones who keep coming back—at countless twelve-step meetings every day and night throughout the world—to them and their families: the people who understand my family’s story because they have lived and are living it, the families of the addicted—their children, brothers and sisters, friends, partners, husbands and wives, and parents like me. “It’s just that you can’t help them and it’s all so discouraging,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the truth is, you do help them, and you help one another. You helped me. Along with them, this book is dedicated to my wife, Karen Barbour, and my children, Nic, Jasper, and Daisy Sheff. Contents introduction 1 PART 1 stay up late 17 PART II his drug of choice 105 PART III whatever 123 PART IV if only 171 PART V never any knowing 235 epilogue 307 Acknowledgments 319 Resources 321 Credits 325 When you cross the street, Take my hand. —JOHN LENNON, “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” Introduction It hurts so bad that I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm’s way, shield him from pain. What good are fathers if not for these things? —THOMAS LYNCH, “The Way We Are” “Howdy Pop, God, I miss you guys so much. I can’t wait to see you all. Only one more day!!! Woo-hoo.” Nic is emailing from college on the evening before he arrives home for summer vacation. Jasper and Daisy, our eight- and fiveyear-olds, are sitting at the kitchen table cutting, pasting, and coloring notes and welcome-home banners for his homecoming. They have not seen their big brother in six months. In the morning, when it’s time to leave for the airport, I go outside to round them up. Daisy, wet and muddy, is perched on a branch high up in a maple tree. Jasper stands below her. “You give me that back or else!” he warns. “No,” she responds. “It’s mine?” There is bold defiance in her eyes, but then, when he starts to climb up the tree, she throws down the Gandalf doll he’s after. “It’s time to go get Nic,” I say, and they dash past me into the house, chanting, “Nicky Nicky Nicky.” We drive the hour and a half to the airport. When we reach the terminal, Jasper yells, “There’s Nic.” He points. “There!” Nic, an army-green duffel bag slung over his shoulder, leans against a NO PARKING sign on the curb outside United baggage claim. Lanky thin in a faded red T-shirt and his girlfriend’s cardigan, sagging jeans that ride below his bony hips, and red Converse All-Stars, when he sees us, his face brightens and he waves. The kids both want to sit next to him, and so, after throwing his bags into the way back, he climbs over Jasper and buckles in between them. In turn he clasps each of their heads between the palms of his hands and kisses their cheeks. “It’s so good to see you,” he says. “I missed you little boinkers. Like crazy.” To us up front, he adds, “You, too, Pops and Mama.” As I drive away from the airport, Nic describes his flight. “It was the worst,” he says. “I was stuck next to a lady who wouldn’t stop talking. She had platinum hair with peaks like on lemon meringue pie. Cruella De Vil horn-rimmed eyeglasses and prune lips and thick pink face powder.” “Cruella De Vil?” Jasper asks. He is wide-eyed. Nic nods. “Just like her. Her eyelashes were long and false— purple, and she wore this perfume: Eau de Stinky.” He holds his nose. “Yech.” The kids are rapt. We drive across the Golden Gate Bridge. A river of thick fog pours below us and wraps around the Marin Headlands. Jasper asks, “Nic, are you coming to Step-Up?” referring to his and Daisy’s upcoming graduation celebration. The kids are stepping up from second grade to third and kindergarten to first grade. “Wouldn’t miss it for all the tea in China,” Nic responds. Daisy asks, “Nic, do you remember that girl Daniela? She fell off the climbing structure and broke her toe.” “Ouch.” “She has a cast,” Jasper adds. “A cast on her toe?” Nic asks. “It must be teeny.” Jasper gravely reports, “They’ll cut it off with a hacksaw.” “Her toe?” They all giggle. After a while, Nic tells them, “I have something for you kiddos. In my suitcase.” “Presents!” “When we get home,” he says. They beg him to tell them what, but he shakes his head. “No way, José. It’s a surprise.” I can see the three of them in the rearview mirror. Jasper and Daisy have smooth olive complexions. Nic’s was, too, but now it’s gaunt and rice-papery. Their eyes are brown and clear, whereas his are dark globes. Their hair is dark brown, but Nic’s, long and blond when he was a child, is faded like a field in late summer, with smasheddown sienna patches and sticking-up yellowed clumps—a result of his unfortunate attempt to bleach it with Clorox. “Nic, will you tell us a PJ story?” Jasper begs. For years Nic has entertained the kids with the Adventures of PJ Fumblebumble, a British detective of his invention. “Later, mister, I promise.” We head north on the freeway, exiting and turning west, meandering through a series of small towns, a wooded state park, and then hilly pastureland. We stop in Point Reyes Station to retrieve the mail. It’s impossible to be in town without running into a dozen friends, all of whom are pleased to see Nic, bombarding him with questions about school and his summer plans. Finally we drive off and follow the road along Papermill Creek to our left turn, where I head up the hill and pull into our driveway. “We have a surprise, too, Nicky,” says Daisy. Jasper looks sternly at her. “Don’t you tell him!” “It’s signs. We made them.” “Dai-sy…” Lugging his bags, Nic follows the kids into the house. The dogs charge him, barking and howling. At the top of the stairs, Nic is greeted by the kids’ banners and drawings, including a hedgehog, captioned, “I miss Nic, boo hoo,” drawn by Jasper. Nic praises their artistry and then trudges into his bedroom to unpack. Since he left for college, his room, a Pompeian red chamber at the far end of the house, has become an adjunct playroom with a display of Jasper’s Lego creations, including a maharaja’s castle and motorized R2-D2. Preparing for his return, Karen cleared off Daisy’s menagerie of stuffed animals and made up the bed with a comforter and fresh pillows. When Nic emerges, his arms are loaded with gifts. For Daisy, there are Josefina and Kirsten, American Girl dolls, hand-me-downs from his girlfriend. They are prettily dressed in, respectively, an embroidered peasant blouse and serape and a green velvet jumper. Jasper gets a pair of cannon-sized Super Soakers. “After dinner,” Nic warns Jasper, “you will be so wet that you’ll have to swim back into the house.” “You’ll be so wet you’ll need a boat.” “You’ll be wetter than a wet noodle.” “You’ll be so wet that you won’t need a shower for a year.” Nic laughs. “That’s fine with me,” he says. “It’ll save me a lot of time.” We eat and then the boys fill up the squirt guns and hasten outside into the windy evening, running in opposite directions. Karen and I watch from the living room. Stalking each other, the boys lurk among the Italian cypress and oaks, duck under garden furniture, and creep behind hedges. When they get a clean shot, they squirt each other with thin streams of water. Hidden behind some potted hydrangeas, Daisy watches from near the house. When the boys race past her, she twirls a spigot she’s grasping with one hand and takes aim with a garden hose she’s holding in the other. She drenches them. I stop the boys just as they’re about to catch her. “You don’t deserve to be rescued,” I tell her, “but it’s bedtime.” Jasper and Daisy take baths and put on their pajamas and then ask Nic to read to them. He sits on a miniature couch between their twin beds, his long legs stretched out on the floor. He reads from The Witches, by Roald Dahl. We hear his voice—voices—from the next room: the boy narrator, all wonder and earnestness; wry and creaky Grandma; and the shrieking, haggy Grand High Witch. “Children are foul and filthy!… Children are dirty and stinky!… Children are smelling of dogs’ drrrroppings!… They are vurse than dogs’ drrroppings! Dogs’ drrroppings is smelling like violets and prrrimroses compared with children!” Nic’s performance is irresistible, and the children, as always, are riveted by him. At midnight, the storm that has been building finally hits. There’s a hard rain, and intermittent volleys of hailstones pelt down like machine-gun fire on the copper roof tiles. We rarely have electrical storms, but tonight the sky lights up like popping flashbulbs. Between thunderclaps, I hear the creaking of tree branches. I also hear Nic padding along the hallway, making tea in the kitchen, quietly strumming his guitar and playing Björk, Bollywood soundtracks, and Tom Waits, who sings his sensible advice: “Never drive a car when you’re dead.” I worry about Nic’s insomnia but push away my suspicions, reminding myself how far he has come since the previous school year, when he dropped out of Berkeley. This time, he went east to college and completed his freshman year. Given what we have been through, this feels miraculous. By my count, he is coming up on his one hundred and fiftieth day without methamphetamine. In the morning the storm has passed, and the sun shimmers on the wet maple leaves. I dress and join Karen and the little kids in the kitchen. Nic, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a fraying wool sweater, and x-ray specs, shuffles in. He hovers over the kitchen counter, fussing with the espresso maker, filling it with water and coffee and setting it on a flame, and then sits down to a bowl of cereal with Jasper and Daisy. “Daisy,” he says. “Your hose attack was brilliant, but I’m going to get you for it. Watch your back.” She cranes her neck. “I can’t see it.” Nic says, “I love you, you wacko.” Soon after Daisy and Jasper leave for school, a half-dozen women arrive to help Karen make a going-away gift for a beloved teacher. They bejewel a concrete birdbath with seashells, polished stones, and handmade (by students) tiles. As they work, they chat and sip tea. I hide in my office. The women are taking a lunch break in the open kitchen. One of the mothers has brought Chinese chicken salad. Nic, who had gone back to sleep, emerges from his bedroom, shaking of his grogginess and greeting the women. He politely answers their questions—once again, about college and his summer plans—and then excuses himself, saying that he’s off to a job interview. After he leaves, I hear the mothers talking about him. “What a lovely boy.” “He’s delightful.” One comments on his good manners. “You’re very lucky,” she tells Karen. “Our teenage son sort of grunts. Otherwise he never gives us the time of day.” In a couple hours, Nic returns to a quiet house—the mosaicing mothers have gone home. He got the job. Tomorrow he goes in for training as a waiter at an Italian restaurant. Though he is aghast at the required uniform, including stiff black shoes and a burgundy vest, he was told that he will make piles of money in tips. The following afternoon, after the training session, Nic practices on us, drawing his character from the waiter in one of his memorized videos, Lady and the Tramp. We are sitting down for dinner. With one hand aloft, balancing an imaginary tray, he enters, singing in a lilting Italian accent, “Oh, this is the night, it’s a beautiful night, and we call it bella notte.” After dinner, Nic asks if he can borrow the car to go to an AA meeting. After missed curfews and assorted other infractions, including banging up both of our cars (efficiently doing it in one accident, driving one into the other), by last summer he had lost driving privileges, but this request seems reasonable—AA meetings are an essential component of his continued recovery—and so we agree. He heads out in the station wagon, still dented from the earlier mishap. Then he dutifully returns home after the meeting, telling us that he asked someone he met to be his sponsor while he’s in town. The next day he requests the car again, this time so he can meet the sponsor for lunch. Of course I let him. I am impressed by his assiduousness and his adherence to the rules we have set down. He lets us know where he’s going and when he will be home. He arrives when he promises he will. Once again, he is gone for a brief couple hours. The following late afternoon a fire burns in the living room fireplace. Sitting on the twin couches, Karen, Nic, and I read while nearby, on the faded rug, Jasper and Daisy play with Lego people. Looking up from a gnome, Daisy tells Nic about a “meany potato head” boy who pushed her friend Alana. Nic says that he will come to school and make him a “mashed meany potatohead.” I am surprised to hear Nic quietly snoring a while later, but at a quarter to seven, he awakens with a start. Checking his watch, he jumps up and says, “I almost missed the meeting,” and once again asks if he can borrow the car. I am pleased that though he’s exhausted and would have been content to sleep for the night, he is committed to the work of recovery, committed enough to rouse himself, splash his face with water in the bathroom sink, brush his hair out of his eyes with his fingers, throw on a clean T-shirt, and race out of the house so that he will be on time. It’s after eleven and Nic isn’t home. I had been so tired, but now I’m wide awake in bed, feeling more and more uneasy. There are a million harmless explanations. Often, groups of people at AA meetings go out afterward for coffee. Or he could be talking with his new sponsor. I contend with two simultaneous, opposing monologues, one reassuring me that I’m foolish and paranoid, the other certain that something is dreadfully wrong. By now I know that worry is useless, but it shoots in and takes over my body at the touch of a hair trigger. I don’t want to assume the worst, but some of the times Nic ignored his curfew, it presaged disaster. I stare into the dark, my anxiety mounting. It is a pathetically familiar state. I have been waiting for Nic for years. At night, past his curfew, I would wait for the car’s grinding engine, when it pulled into the driveway and then went silent. At last—Nic. The shutting car door, footsteps, the front door opening with a click. Despite Nic’s attempt at stealth, Brutus, our chocolate Lab, usually yelped a halfhearted bark. Or I would wait for the telephone to ring, never certain if it would be him (“Hey, Pop, how’re ya doin’?”) or the police (“Mr. Sheff, we have your son”). Whenever he was late or failed to call, I assumed catastrophe. He was dead. Always dead. But then Nic would arrive home, creeping up the hallway stairs, his hand sliding along the banister. Or the telephone would ring. “Sorry, Pop, I’m at Richard’s house. I fell asleep. I think I’ll just crash here rather than drive at this hour. I’ll see you in the morning. I love you.” I would be furious and relieved, both, because I had already buried him. Late this night, with no sign of him, I finally fall into a miserable half-sleep. Just after one, Karen wakes me. She hears him sneaking in. A garden light, equipped with a motion detector, flashes on, casting its white beam across the backyard. Clad in my pajamas, I slip on a pair of shoes and go out the back door to catch him. The night air is chilly. I hear crunching brush. I turn the corner and come head-to-head with an enormous startled buck, who quickly lopes away up into the garden, effortlessly leaping over the deer fence. Back in bed, Karen and I are wide awake. It’s one-thirty. Now two. I double check his room. It is two-thirty. At last, the sound of the car. I confront Nic in the kitchen and he mumbles an excuse. I tell him that he can no longer use the car. “Whatever.” “Are you high? Tell me.” “Jesus. No.” “Nic, we had an agreement. Where were you?” “What the fuck?” He looks down. “A bunch of people at the meeting went back to a girl’s house to talk and then we watched a video.” “There was no phone?” “I know,” he says, his anger flaring. “I said I’m sorry.” I snap back, “We’ll talk about this in the morning,” as he escapes into his room, shutting his door and locking it. At breakfast, I stare hard at Nic. The giveaway is his body, vibrating like an idling car. His jaw gyrates and his eyes are darting opals. He makes plans with Jasper and Daisy for after school and gives them gentle hugs, but his voice has a prickly edge. When Karen and the kids are gone, I say, “Nic, we have to talk.” He eyes me warily. “About?” “I know you’re using again. I can tell.” He glares at me. “What are you talking about? I’m not.” His eyes lock onto the floor. “Then you won’t mind being drug-tested.” “Whatever. Fine.” “OK. I want to do it now.” “All right!” “Get dressed.” “I know I should have called. I’m not using.” He almost growls it. “Let’s go.” He hurries to his bedroom. Closes the door. He comes out wearing a Sonic Youth T-shirt and black jeans. One hand is thrust in his pocket, his head is down, his backpack is slung on one shoulder. In his other hand he holds his electric guitar by the neck. “You’re right,” he says. He pushes past me. “I’ve been using since I came home. I was using the whole semester.” He leaves the house, slamming the door behind him. I run outside and call after him, but he is gone. After a few stunned moments, I go inside again and enter his bedroom, sitting on his unmade bed. I retrieve a crumpled-up piece of paper under the desk. Nic wrote: I’m so thin and frail Don’t care, want another rail. Late that afternoon, Jasper and Daisy burst in, dashing from room to room, before finally stopping and, looking up at me, asking, “Where’s Nic?” I tried everything I could to prevent my son’s fall into meth addiction. It would have been no easier to have seen him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a meth addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in Third Eye Blind, said that meth makes you feel “bright and shiny.” It also makes you paranoid, delusional, destructive, and selfdestructive. Then you will do unconscionable things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nic had been a sensitive, sagacious, exceptionally smart and joyful child, but on meth he became unrecognizable. Nic always was on the cutting edge of popular trends—in their time, Care Bears, My Little Pony, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, Nintendo, Guns N’ Roses, grunge, Beck, and many others. He was a trailblazer with meth, too, addicted years before politicians denounced the drug as the worst yet to hit the nation. In the United States, at least twelve million people have tried meth, and it is estimated that more than one and a half million are addicted to it. Worldwide, there are more than thirty-five million users; it is the most abused hard drug, more than heroin and cocaine combined. Nic claimed that he was searching for meth his entire life. “When I tried it for the first time,” he said, “that was that.” Our family’s story is unique, of course, but it is universal, too, in the way that every tale of addiction resonates with every other one. I learned how similar we all are when I first went to Al-Anon meetings. I resisted going for a long time, but these gatherings, though they often made me weep, strengthened me and assuaged my sense of isolation. I felt slightly less beleaguered. In addition, others’ stories prepared me for challenges that would have otherwise blindsided me. They were no panacea, but I was grateful for even the most modest relief and any guidance whatsoever. I was frantic to try to help Nic, to stop his descent, to save my son. This, mixed with my guilt and worry, consumed me. Since I am a writer, it’s probably no surprise that I wrote to try to make some sense of what was happening to me and to Nic, and also to discover a solution, a cure that had eluded me. I obsessively researched this drug, addiction, and treatments. I am not the first writer for whom this work became a bludgeon with which to battle a terrible enemy, as well as an expurgation, a grasping for something (anything) fathomable amid calamity, and an agonizing process by which the brain organizes and regulates experience and emotion that overwhelms it. In the end, my efforts could not rescue Nic. Nor could writing heal me, though it helped. Other writers’ work helped, too. Whenever I pulled it of the shelf, Thomas Lynch’s book Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality opened by itself to page 95, the essay “The Way We Are.” I read it dozens of times, each time crying a little. With his child passed out on the couch, after arrests and drunk tanks and hospitalizations, Lynch, the undertaker and poet and es sayist, looked at his dear addicted son with sad but lucid resignation, and he wrote: “I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.” Why does it help to read others’ stories? It’s not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others’ experiences did help with my emotional struggle; reading, I felt a little less crazy. And, like the stories I heard at Al-Anon meetings, others’ writing served as guides in uncharted waters. Thomas Lynch showed me that it is possible to love a child who is lost, possibly forever. My writing culminated in an article about our family’s experience that I submitted to the New York Times Magazine. I was terrified to invite people into our nightmare, but was compelled to do so. I felt that telling our story would be worthwhile if I could help anyone in the way that Lynch and other writers helped me. I discussed it with Nic and the rest of our family. Though encouraged by them, I was nonetheless nervous about exposing our family to public scrutiny and judgment. But the reaction to the article heartened me and, according to Nic, emboldened him. A book editor contacted him and asked if he was interested in writing a memoir about his experience, one that might inspire other young people struggling with addiction. Nic was eager to tell his story. More significantly, he said that he walked into AA meetings and when friends—or even strangers—made the connection between him and the boy in the article, they offered warm embraces and told him how proud they were of him. He said that it was a powerful affirmation of his hard work in recovery. I also heard from addicts and their families—their brothers and sisters, children, and other relatives, and, most of all, parents— hundreds of them. A few respondents were critical. One accused me of exploiting Nic for my own purposes. Another, outraged at my description of a period when Nic briefly wore his clothes backward, attacked, “You let him wear backward clothes? No wonder he became an addict.” But the great majority of letters were outpourings of compassion, consolation, counsel, and shared grief. Many people seemed to feel that finally someone understood what they were going through. This is the way that misery does love company: People are relieved to learn that they are not alone in their suffering, that they are part of something larger, in this case, a societal plague—an epidemic of children, an epidemic of families. For whatever reason, a stranger’s story seemed to give them permission to tell theirs. They felt that I would understand, and I did. “I am sitting here crying with shaking hands,” a man wrote. “Your article was handed to me yesterday at my weekly breakfast of fathers who have lost their children. The man who handed it to me lost his sixteen-year-old son to drugs three years ago.” “Our story is your story,” wrote another father. “Different drugs, different cities, different rehabs, but the same story.” And another: “At first, I was simply startled that someone had written my story about my child without my permission. Halfway through the emotional text of very familiar events and manifest conclusions, I realized that the dates of significant incidents were wrong, and thereby had to conclude that other parents may be experiencing the same unimaginable tragedies and loss that I have… “Insight acquired over a quarter of a century forces me to rewrite the last paragraph: Escaping from his latest drug rehab, my son overdosed and nearly died. Sent to a very special program in another city, he stayed sober for almost two years, then began disappearing again, sometimes for months, sometimes years. Having been one of the most brilliant students in the country’s highest ranking high school, it took him twenty years to graduate from a mediocre college. And it has taken me just as long to discard my veil of impossible hope and admit that my son either cannot or will not ever stop using drugs. He is now forty years old, on welfare, and resides in a home for adult addicts.” There were so many more, many with unfathomably tragic conclusions. “But the ending of my story is different. My son died last year of an overdose. He was seventeen.” Another: “My beautiful daughter is dead. She was fifteen when she overdosed.” Another: “My daughter died.” Another: “My son is dead.” Letters and emails still interrupt my days with haunting reminders of the toll of addiction. My heart tears anew with each of them. I kept writing and, through the painstaking process, had some success viewing our experience in a way that made sense to me—as much sense as is possible to make of addiction. It led to this book. When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity. As with the Times article, it scares me to publish our story. But with the continued encouragement of the principals, I go forward. There’s no shortage of compelling memoirs by addicts, and the best of them offer revelations for anybody who loves one. I hope Nic’s book will become a compelling addition. And yet—with rare exceptions, such as Lynch’s essay—we have not heard from those who love them. Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself. At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them. Nic used drugs on and off for more than a decade, and in that time I think I have felt and thought and done almost everything an addict’s parent can feel and think and do. Even now, I know that there’s no single right answer, nor even a clear road map, for families of the addicted. However, in our story, I hope that there may be some solace, some guidance, and, if nothing else, some company. I also hope that people can catch a glimpse of something that seems impossible during many stages of a loved one’s addiction. Nietzsche is often quoted for having said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This is absolutely true for family members of an addict. Not only am I still standing, but I know more and feel more than I once thought was possible. In telling our story, I resisted the temptation to foreshadow, because it would be disingenuous—and a disservice to anyone going through this—to suggest that one can anticipate how things will unfold. I never knew what the next day would bring. I’ve strived to honestly include the major events that shaped Nic and our family—the good and the appalling. Much of it makes me cringe. I am aghast at so much of what I did and, equally, what I did not do. Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, “You didn’t cause it,” I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this. Someone who heard my story expressed bafflement that Nic would become addicted, saying, “But your family doesn’t seem dysfunctional.” We are dysfunctional—as dysfunctional as every other family I know. Sometimes more so, sometimes less so. I’m not sure if I know any “functional” families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don’t have a full range of problems. Like addicts themselves, the families of addicts are everything you would expect and everything you wouldn’t. Addicts come from broken and intact homes. They are longtime losers and great successes. We often heard in lectures or Al-Anon meetings or AA meetings of the intelligent and charming men and women who bewilder those around them when they wind up in the gutter. “You’re too good a man to do this to yourself,” a doctor tells an alcoholic in a Fitzgerald story. Many, many people who have known Nic well have expressed similar sentiments. One said, “He is the last person I could picture this happening to. Not Nic. He’s too solid and too smart.” I also know that parents have discretionary recall, blocking out everything that contradicts our carefully edited recollections—an understandable attempt to dodge blame. Conversely, children often fixate on the indelibly painful memories, because they have made stronger impressions. I hope that I am not indulging in parental revisionism when I say that in spite of my divorce from Nic’s mother, in spite of our draconian long-distance custody arrangement, and in spite of all of my shortcomings and mistakes, much of Nic’s early years was charmed. Nic confirms this, but maybe he is just being kind. This rehashing in order to make sense of something that cannot be made sense of is common in the families of addicts, but it’s not all we do. We deny the severity of our loved one’s problem, not because we are naive, but because we can’t know. Even for those who, unlike me, never used drugs, it’s an incontrovertible fact that many—more than half of all children—will try them. For some of those, drugs will have no major negative impact on their lives. For others, however, the outcome will be catastrophic. We parents do everything we can and consult every expert and sometimes it’s not enough. Only after the fact do we know that we didn’t do enough or what we did do was wrong. Addicts are in denial and their families are in it with them because often the truth is too inconceivable, too painful, and too terrifying. But denial, however common, is dangerous. I wish someone had shaken me and said, “Intervene while you can before it’s too late.” It may not have made a difference, but I don’t know. No one shook me and said it. Even if someone had, I may not have been able to hear it. Maybe I had to learn the hard way. Like many in my straits, I became addicted to my child’s addiction. When it preoccupied me, even at the expense of my responsibilities to my wife and other children, I justified it. I thought, How can a parent not be consumed by his child’s life-or-death struggle? But I learned that my preoccupation with Nic didn’t help him and may have harmed him. Or maybe it was irrelevant to him. However, it surely harmed the rest of my family—and me. Along with this, I learned another lesson, a soul-shaking one: our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself. I chose the perilous but essential path that allows me to accept that Nic will decide for himself how—and whether—he will live his life. As I said, I don’t absolve myself, and meanwhile, I still struggle with how much I can absolve Nic. He is brilliant and wonderful and charismatic and loving when he’s not using, but like every addict I have ever heard of, he becomes a stranger when he is, distant and foolish and self-destructive and broken and dangerous. I have struggled to reconcile these two people. Whatever the cause—a genetic predisposition, the divorce, my drug history, my overprotectiveness, my failure to protect him, my leniency, my harshness, my immaturity, all of these—Nic’s addiction seemed to have had a life of its own. I have tried to reveal how insidiously addiction creeps into a family and takes over. So many times in the past decade I made mistakes out of ignorance, hope, or fear. I’ve tried to recount them all as and when they happened, in the hope that readers will recognize a wrong path before they take it. If they don’t, however, I hope they may realize that it is a path they can’t blame themselves for having taken. When my child was born, it was impossible to imagine that he would suffer in the ways that Nic has suffered. Parents want only good things for their children. I was a typical parent who felt that this could not happen to us—not to my son. But though Nic is unique, he is every child. He could be yours. The reader should know that I have changed a few names and details in the book to obscure the identities of some of the people herein. I begin when Nic was born. The birth of a child is, for many if not every family, a transformative event of joy and optimism. It was for us. PART I Stay up late I have a daughter who reminds me too much of what I used to be, full of love and joy, kissing every person she meets because everyone is good and will do her no harm. And that terrifies me to the point to where I can barely function. —KURT COBAIN, in his suicide note 1 My wife, Vicki, and I live in Berkeley in a whitewashed clapboard bungalow built in the 1920s, hidden from the street behind a wall of black bamboo. It is 1982, a summer of waiting. Everything else— work, social engagements—is biding time. Our baby is due in July. An ultrasound identifies him as a him. We prepare for his arrival. We paint and decorate a nursery, furnishing it with a white crib, lightblue dresser, bookshelves stocked with Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, and, sitting sentinel on either side of the doorway, a pair of enormous stuffed panda bears, early baby gifts from a friend. Another friend has loaned us a family heirloom, a buttery yellow cradle in the shape of a new moon. It hangs from a chain in the corner of the living room, appearing to float above San Francisco, which glitters in the distance. Vicki’s contractions begin after midnight on the morning of July 20. As we have been instructed to do in our Lamaze class, we clock the intervals between them. It is time. We drive to the hospital. Nic is born at dawn—our beautiful boy. We are enraptured by our child. We willingly forsake sleep. We soothe his crying. We sing him lullabies. We fall into a languorous altered state, a dreamy contentment that would have appalled us had it befallen any of our friends. (Indeed, many of our friends are appalled.) Life is accompanied by a soundtrack of Pete Seeger, the Limelighters, and Raffi, whose songs, played over and over and over and over and over and over and over, would crack any criminal into confessing after other forms of torture fail. Sometimes we just stare at the baby’s tiny grasping hands and luminous, exuberant eyes. We are among the first generation of self-conscious parents. Before us, people had kids. We parent. We seek out the best for our children—the best stroller and car seat recommended by Consumer Reports—and fret over every decision about their toys, diapers, clothes, meals, medicine, teething rings, inoculations, and just about everything else. Before long the crib is replaced by a single bed with zebra sheets. We take walks in the stroller and a Snugli, play in Berkeley parks and baby gyms, and visit the San Francisco Zoo. Nic’s library overflows. Goodnight Moon, Pat the Bunny, Where the Wild Things Are, A Hole Is to Dig. I read them so often I know them by heart. “Milk, Milk, Milk for the Morning Cake.” “From here to there and there to here, funny things are everywhere.” “Dogs are to kiss people. Snow is to roll in. Buttons are to keep people warm. Boodly boodly boodly.” At three, Nic spends a few mornings a week at a pastel-colored preschool a short walk from home. His day includes circle time; games like duck, duck, goose; painting and clay; and songs. “Pulling weeds, picking stones,” Nic sings, “we are made of dreams and bones.” There is outside time on the climbing structure and swing-set. He ventures out on his first playdates, formerly known as going over to some kid’s house. Sometimes we meet other families at a park with a concrete slide that follows a hillside down under a canopy of oaks. Nic spins on a whirling merry-go-round. Nic is a natural architect and builder, constructing sprawling block, Duplo, and Lego Lilliputs. He loves Teddy Ruxpin, Pound Puppies, and the twin pandas. He scoots around the house on a bigwheeled tricycle and, on the red-brick front patio, in a plastic skyblue convertible, a gift from my parents, which he powers like a Flintstones car with high-top-sneakered feet. We visit Train Town in nearby Sonoma, where Nic conducts a steam locomotive past miniature barns and windmills. We travel to Yosemite National Park—in spring, with wildflowers abloom, we hike to the waterfalls; in wintertime, we play in the snow in the valley watched over by Half Dome—and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where Nic is mesmerized by fluorescent jellies and circling sharks. There are puppet shows and board games and singing along with the bashing of a tambourine. Wearing a kimono and flannel pajama bottoms and holding a plastic guitar, Nic sings at the top of his lungs: Tingalayo, run my little donkey run Tingalayo, run my little donkey run Me donkey walk, me donkey talk Me donkey eat with a knife and fork Me donkey walk, me donkey talk Me donkey eat with a knife and fork Then he peels off the kimono and he’s in his clown pajama top with polka dots, lime green and sky blue and cherry red. He’s wearing fluorescent, swirly blue-green-pink rain boots. We walk down the sidewalk, him shuffling in the too-large boots, my big hand enveloping his tiny one, his plastic guitar slung over his shoulder. He stomps in every puddle. His eyes are thoughtful and the bronze sometimes melts into greenness, alive like the sea. He dances a funny little dance as he walks along, holding a yellow umbrella over his head. “Tut, tut, it looks like rain.” This apparent idyll distracts us from a looming catastrophe. Vicki and I have spent Nic’s first three years in the tired but blissful half-sleep of new parenthood and then wake up in the harsh light and oppressive chill of a shattering marriage. I maturely address our disagreements by falling in love with a family friend. Her son and Nic are playmates. Vicki and I share a devotion to Nic, but I am ill-equipped to deal with our escalating problems. When we visit a couples therapist, I announce that it is too late. My marriage is over. Vicki is caught off guard. It is not the first relationship that I have sabotaged, but now there is a child. Nic. At home when his mother and I argue, Nic finds refuge in the laps of the pandas. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours. Like fallout from a dirty bomb, the collateral damage is widespread and enduring. Nick is hit hard. We divide the china and the art and our young son. It seems obvious that joint custody is the best approach; Vicki and I both want him with us and have no reason to doubt the prevailing wisdom, that it will be best for him to continue to be raised by both parents. Soon Nic has two homes. On the days I drop him off at his mother’s, we hug and I say goodbye at the white picket gate and watch him march inside. Vicki moves to Los Angeles, where she remarries. We still both want Nic with us, but now that five hundred miles separate us, the informal yo-yo joint-custody arrangement is no longer tenable. Each of us believes with sincerity and vengeance that it is in Nic’s best interest to be with us, not his other parent, and so we hire divorce lawyers. Some attorneys successfully mediate agreements, but many custody battles wind up in court. Usually it’s traumatic and expensive. Our lawyers charge more than two hundred dollars an hour and require five- to ten-thousand-dollar retainers. When we learn that judges often follow the arrangement recommended by a courtappointed child psychologist after he or she conducts a thorough assessment, our wiser selves and drained bank accounts prevail. Nic has been seeing a therapist since soon after we separated, and we hire her to conduct an evaluation. We agree to abide by her decision. The doctor launches a three-month investigation that feels like an inquisition. She interviews us, our friends, and our families, visits our respective homes in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and spends long therapy sessions in her office playing checkers, cards, and blocks with Nic. He calls her his worry doctor. One day, while playing with a dollhouse in her office, he shows her the mother’s room on one side and the father’s room on the other. When she asks him about the little boy’s room, he says, “He doesn’t know where he will sleep.” We meet in her office, among the toys and modern furniture and framed prints of paintings by Gottlieb and Rothko, and she hands down her verdict. Vicki and I sit in matching leather armchairs facing the doctor, an imposing woman in a flowered dress, iron-black curls, and penetrating eyes behind bottle-thick glasses. She folds her hands on her lap and speaks. “You are both loving parents who want the best for your son. Here are some of the things I have learned about Nic over the course of this evaluation. I don’t have to tell you that he is an exceptional child. He is resourceful, sensitive, expressive, and highly intelligent. I think you also know that he is suffering from the divorce and the uncertainty about his future. In coming to my very difficult decision, I have attempted to weigh every factor and devise a plan that is the best for Nic—the best in a situation where there is no ideal choice. We want to minimize the stress in Nic’s life and to keep things as consistent as possible.” She looks at each of us in turn and then shuffles through a sheaf of papers. She exhales heavily and says that Nic will spend the school year with me in San Francisco and holidays and summers with Vicki in Southern California. I try to comprehend exactly what she has said. I won. No, I lost. So did Vicki. I will have him with me for the day-to-day of the school year, but what will Christmas be without him? Thanksgiving? Summertime? The doctor hands us copies of the document that outlines her decision. Using her desk to write on, we sign them. Inconceivably, in an instant marked by the scratching of a pen on coarse paper, I sign away half of my son’s childhood. As bad as it is for Vicki and me, it is worse for Nic. Preparing for the handoffs, he packs his toys and clothes in a Hello Kitty suitcase with a pretend lock and key. I drive him to the airport. He says that he has a pit in his stomach, not because he doesn’t want to see his mother and stepfather—he does—but because he doesn’t want to leave. At first one of us always flies with him, but at five, he begins traveling on his own. He graduates from the tiny suitcase to a canvas backpack filled with a revolving arsenal of essential stuff (books and journals, Star Trek Micro Machines, plastic vampire teeth, a Discman and CDs, a stuffed crab). A flight attendant leads him onto the plane. We say “everything” to each other. It is our way of saying I love you, I will miss you so much, I am sorry—the jumble of feelings when he comes and goes. The flights between San Francisco and Los Angeles are the only times a parent isn’t lording over him, so he orders Coca-Cola, verboten at home; flight attendants don’t care about cavities. But such benefits are insignificant when contrasted with his fear of a plane crash. At five, Nic begins kindergarten at a progressive San Francisco school in a hundred-year-old redwood-shingled building, where you can wander in at snack time and parents are, for example, grilling quesadillas with the children. The school has stone steps and old barnlike doors that open onto a play yard with a bouncy, rubberized ground made from shredded recycled tires. There is tetherball, a redwood climbing structure, and basketball. The school is staffed by teachers dedicated to “the whole child,” so the three Rs are integrated with an impressive music program; plays that the children write (during his first of many annual follies performances, Nic, cast as a mosquito, falls asleep onstage); art; noncompetitive sports such as freeze tag and broom hockey; inventive spelling; and the celebration of secular and religious holidays, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Chinese New Year, and Kwanza. It seems ideal for Nic, who, in kindergarten, displays his creativity in clay, finger-paint, and an inimitable wardrobe. A typical costume is a huge out-of-shape cowboy hat pulled so low that only his owl eyes can be seen peering out from beneath, a Keith Haring T-shirt under a fringed leather vest, blue tights under a pair of underpants, and sneakers with Velcro fasteners in the shape of elephants’ ears. When the other children tease him—”Only girls wear tights”—Nic responds, “Uh-uh. Superman wears tights.” I am proud of his confidence and individuality. Nic has an eclectic group of friends. He plays regularly in Golden Gate Park with a boy who has secret-agent aspirations. He and Nic slink soundlessly on their bellies, sneaking up on unsuspecting parents gossiping on park benches. They also play tag in the labyrinthine play structure, a series of interconnecting passageways inside geodesic domes. With another close friend, a boy with a rooster’s crown of dark hair and piercing emerald eyes, Nic builds Lego cities and wood-block tracks on which they race Hot Wheels. Nic loves movies. Impressed and amused by Nic’s taste in them, a friend who edits a regional magazine asks Nic to write an article titled “Nic Picks Flicks.” Nic dictates his comments. “Sometimes kids have to choose a video, you know, and can’t make up their mind which one to get but they have to make up their mind fast because the grown-ups have to go to the barbershop in ten minutes,” he begins. He reviews Lady and the Tramp and Winnie the Pooh. “Dumbo is great,” he says. “Great songs. Great crows.” Of The Neverending Story, he says, “The story really does end.” When I turned six, my mother baked a coconut-and-white-frosted giraffe-shaped cake, and my friends and I played pin the tail on the donkey. Nic goes to birthday parties at stables, Great America, Raging Waters, and the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum. Tea sandwiches or sushi, unfiltered apple juice, and wheat-free cupcakes are served. One afternoon, Nic announces that he wants to make a donation to the school’s Toys for Tots Christmas program, and so he goes through his bedroom, weeding out most of his stuffed animals, games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders, his trolls, and over-the-hill action figures. The bookshelves are stripped of many of the picture books to make way for the Narnia and Redwall series and E. B. White. Nic is trying hard to grow up, although selectively. He keeps the pandas and Sebastian, the stuffed Little Mermaid crab. Nic has antennae that detect, before most kids, upcoming waves of popular culture, ranging from My Little Pony to Masters of the Universe. Disney—101 Dalmatians and Mary Poppins—makes way for Star Wars. Nic and his friends discover Nintendo and begin speaking its impenetrable (for adults) language about minibosses, warp zones, secret levels, and pumpkins that give one-ups. One Halloween Nic is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (Michelangelo to his friend’s Donatello). Another time he is Indiana Jones. Nic gets in mild trouble on occasion. When he spends the night at a friend’s house, the two are caught making prank calls they learned about while watching The Simpsons. They call bars listed in the yellow pages. “Hello, may I please speak to Mr. Kaholic, first name Al?” “Sure, kid.” To the crowd: “Is there an Al Kaholic here?” They break up laughing and slam down the phone. Next they dial random numbers from the telephone book. “Is there a John there?” After a beat: “No? Then where do you go to the bathroom?” Mostly, though, Nic is well behaved. One time in the comments section of his report card, a teacher writes that Nic sometimes seems a little depressed, which I share with his new therapist, with whom he meets one afternoon each week. “But,” she continues, “he pulls himself out of it and is energetic, involved, fun—a leader in class.” Other comments from his teachers are effusive praise of his creativity, sense of humor, compassion, participation, and stellar work. I keep a box in which I store his artwork and writings, like his response to an assignment in which he has been asked if you should always try your best. “I don’t think you should always try your best all the time,” he writes, “because, let’s say a drug atick asks you for drugs you should not try your best to find him some drugs.” Another assignment that goes into the box is a persuasive letter he writes to me when the students are asked to argue for or against whatever they choose. The note ends, “So in conclusion, I think I should be allowed to eat more snacks.” Occasionally Nic has nightmares. In one, he arrives at school and he and his classmates have to submit to vampire checks. They are similar to the lice checks they have during an infestation. For lice checks, teachers, their hands protected in surgical gloves, move their fingers through each student’s hair like a mother monkey, inspecting each follicle. With the discovery of a single nit, the infected child is sent home for delousing with Kwell and a meticulous raking with a fine-toothed comb. It hurts, bringing on the type of screams that can cause well-meaning neighbors to call Child Protective Services. In Nic’s dream, he and his friends line up for the morning vampire check. Gloved teachers lift the sides of their lips to see if fangs have replaced their eyeteeth. The children who are vampires are instantly struck dead with a stake through the heart. Nic, recounting the dream in the car one morning, says it is unfair to the vampires, because they can’t help themselves. I don’t know if it is our constant watchfulness, the faces of missing children on milk cartons, or terrifying stories they overhear, but Nic and his friends seem unduly afraid. There is a small yard behind our apartment, but they won’t play outside unless I come along. I hear other parents fret that their children are scared of the dark, cry at night, will not sleep alone, or fear sleeping over at friends’ houses. After a story, before Nic goes to sleep, he asks me to check on him every fifteen minutes. I sing to him. Close your eyes Have no fears The monster’s gone He’s on the run and your daddy’s here 2 Waaaake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Up y a wake! Up ya wake! Up ya wake! This is Mister Señor Love Daddy. Your voice of choice. The world’s only twelve-hour strongman, here on WE LOVE radio, 108 FM. The last on your dial, but the first in ya hearts. And that’s the truth, Ruth. The crisp fall morning begins with Nic’s recitation of the opening soliloquy from Do the Right Thing, one of his favorite movies. We dress and go for a walk in Golden Gate Park. “Look at those orangies,” Nic says as we walk by the conservatory of flowers. “And, oh, the greenies and reddies and goldies! It’s like last night the world was finger-painted by giants.” Back home, Nic helps make pancake batter. He does everything but crack the eggs—he doesn’t want to get “gunky” stuff on his hands. He says that the pancakes should be Uncle Buck-sized. In the movie of the same name, they are so large that Uncle Buck uses a snow shovel in place of a spatula. Our apartment is a child’s domain, no matter how much I try to isolate Nic’s influence to his room. The place may have been cleaned the day before, but kid-sized clothes are scattered everywhere. There are board games (he trounced me last night in Stratego) and video games (we are on the penultimate level of the Legend of Zelda) and a multicolored sea of Lego in the center of the living room. In fact, Legos are everywhere—in the silverware drawer, under couch cushions, hidden among the roots of potted plants. Once, when my printer didn’t work, a serviceman determined that the problem was a Lego cog jammed behind the daisy wheel. Awaiting the pancakes under a gallery of his paintings taped to the walls, Nic sits at the breakfast table, where he writes on lined paper with a fat red pencil. “We got to make our own pizza at school yesterday,” he says. “We could choose cheddar cheese or modern jack. Hey, do you know how to spell the ooo word? They said that Jake kissed Elena and all the kids said, ‘Oooooo.’ Did you know that owls can turn their heads all the way around?” I place a pancake, disappointingly average-sized, in front of him. He pours on maple syrup, making sound effects—”eeeyaaa! hot lava!”—as I fix him a bag lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, carrot sticks, an apple, a cookie, and a juice box. He dresses for school. While tying his shoes, he hums “Eensy Weensy Spider.” We’re running late, so I hurry him along, and he’s soon in the backseat of the car, spitting on his Papa Bear doll. “What are you doing?” “He’s in the slime pit. Would you tickle my knee?” I reach back and dig my fingers into the sides of his knee, which causes hysterics. “OK, OK, stop. I just wanted to remember what it feels like when you’re tickled.” Changing the subject, Nic asks if he can take Klingon instead of Spanish in school. “Why Klingon?” “So I won’t have to read the subtitles in Star Trek movies.” When I park in front of the school, there are still a few minutes to go before the cowbell will be rung. My greatest accomplishment of any day is getting him to school on time, but today something is wrong. Where are the other cars, the busy crowd of arriving children and the teacher who greets them? It dawns on me. It is Saturday. *** I do not subscribe to the concept of karma, but I have come to believe in instant karma, as it was defined by John Lennon in his song of that name. It means, in essence, that we reap what we sow in this lifetime —and explains my comeuppance when my girlfriend does to me what I did to my wife. (It actually isn’t quite as reprehensible; when she runs off to South America, it is with a relative stranger.) Of course I am distraught, and Nic has to contend with not only my despair, but, upon my recovery after many pathetic months, my subsequent girlfriends, gifted at some things but not substitute motherhood. It is like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, but Eddie never went in for breakfast to encounter a lady in a kimono eating his Lucky Charms. “Who are you?” Nic asks. He shambles into the kitchen, a jarringly lit room with a black-and-white-checked linoleum floor. He’s wearing his pajamas and Oscar the Grouch slippers. The object of the question is a woman with a volcano of dreadlocked hair. An artist, her recent exhibition included hand-tinted photocopies of intimate parts of her body. The woman introduces herself and says, “I know who you are. You’re Nic. I’ve heard a lot about you.” “I haven’t heard about you,” Nic responds. One evening, Nic and I have dinner at a Chestnut Street Italian restaurant with another woman, this one with blond curls and bottlegreen eyes. Our dates so far have included Frisbee with Nic on the Marina green and, one Sunday, a San Francisco Giants game, where Nic snagged a foul ball. Back at the flat after dinner, the three of us watch The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. She flips through magazines in the living room while I read to Nic in his bedroom until he falls asleep. Usually, I am careful to lock the door to my bedroom, but this time I forget. In the morning, Nic crawls into my bed. When he notices the woman, who awakens, meeting his eyes, he asks, “What are you doing here?” She responds brilliantly. “I spent the night.” “Oh,” Nic says. “Like a sleepover.” “Oh,” Nic says again. I send Nic to his room to get dressed. Later I try to explain it to him, but I know I have made a ghastly mistake. It doesn’t take much longer for me to realize that my bachelor-father lifestyle probably isn’t great for Nic, and so I take a break from dating. Determined to stop repeating the embarrassing and enormously painful mistakes that led to my divorce and other failed relationships, I enter a period of singlehood, self-reflection, and therapy. Our lives are quieter. On weekends, we take walks around the Embarcadero and up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower; ride the cable car to Chinatown for dim sum and firecrackers; with our neighbors, Nic’s unofficial godfathers, go to movies at the Castro Theatre, where an organist plays “Whistle While You Work” and “San Francisco” on a gilded Wurlitzer before the shows. We ride BART to Berkeley and walk down Telegraph Avenue, watching out for such regulars as the woman with dozens of slices of toast pinned onto her clothing and the Sensitive Naked Man who nonchalantly strolls by. On weekday evenings, after Nic does his homework, we play games. We often cook together. And read. Nic loves books: A Wrinkle in Time, Roald Dahl, The Outsiders, The Hobbit. One night, on the occasion of one of Nic’s many unbirthday parties—these are popular after we read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass— we set the table formally, placing stuffed animals at each setting. We dine with the stuffed animals, sitting like sultans on pillows. One summer evening in 1989, I am at a friend’s dinner party, seated opposite a woman from Manhattan who is visiting her parents in Marin County. Karen, with dark brown hair and wearing a plain black dress, is a painter. She also writes and illustrates children’s books. Karen says she is flying back to New York tomorrow, and I mention that I am going there next week to conduct an interview. There is awkward silence. My friend sitting near me hands me a slip of paper and a pen, whispering in my ear, “Get her phone number.” I do. The next day I call her at her parents’ house. I hear her tell her mother to say that she isn’t home, but her mother ignores her, handing over the telephone. Yes, she says, she will meet me when I come to New York. Our first cautious date is at a friend’s party on the Upper East Side. The Fine Young Cannibals play on the music system, waiters circulate with trays of Champagne and canapés, and then, though it is a sweltering night, I walk her the length of Manhattan to her downtown loft. It takes a couple hours, during which time we do not stop talking. Whenever we come upon an all-night grocery, we get Popsicles. It’s dawn when we say good night at her front door. Karen and I keep in touch by telephone and letters. We see each other when she comes out to visit her parents and when I travel to New York on business. After six or so months, during one of her trips to San Francisco, I introduce Karen to Nic. She shows him her art books and they spend hours drawing cartoons. They work for days on long strips of butcher paper, creating an elaborately decorated scene of a park populated by Mr. Grouch, a rotund man sitting on a bench eating a tuna-fish sandwich; skinny Mr. Noodle and his noodle baby; Mr. Fake Hair; and Mr. and Mrs. No Body. (They have no bodies.) After living on the fifth floor of a walk-up in the shadow of the World Trade Center for six years, Karen moves in with us in San Francisco. Maybe Nic is just trying to ingratiate himself with this new force in his life, now that it is clear that she’s sticking around, but he writes a report about her for school, in which he explains, “She lived in a big loft on top of a restaurant called Ham Heaven. Her loft was a cool place and you could light firecrackers on the roof … She decided to come back to San Francisco to be with her new family, which is my dad and me and her.” Soon after, we rent a place across the bridge in Sausalito so we can have a backyard. Our house is reputed to be one of the oldest in town. A rickety, leaky Victorian, it is slightly warmer inside than out, but not much. To compensate, fires roar in the fireplace and at night we pile on heavy quilts. Bundled up in down jackets, the three of us go tide-pooling along the seashore and ride the ferry across the bay, past Alcatraz Island, to San Francisco. We carpool with another family to Nic’s school in the city. Nic, who is now a fourth grader, plays on the local Little League team. Karen and I cheer him on. In his green Braves baseball jersey and ball cap, he is a focused and poised second baseman. The other boys joke around, but Nic is solemn. His coach tells us that Nic is a leader; the other children look to him for guidance. Parents often gush about their children, but ask people who know Nic and they will describe his humor, creativity, and infectious joie de vivre. Nic is often the unwitting center of attention, whether in school plays or at dinner parties. One day a casting director comes to his school and watches the children on the playground and then interviews some of them. In the evening, she calls our house to ask if I will consider allowing Nic to be in a television commercial. I discuss it with him and Nic says it sounds fun, so I agree. He gets to spend ten dollars, but with the rest of the hundred-dollar fee, we open a college account in his name. The commercial, for a car company, opens with a group of children sitting in a semicircle on the floor of a kindergarten classroom. Their teacher, seated in a child’s chair, reads to them and then closes the book, setting it on her lap. “So, class,” she says, “what does the Dick and Jane story mean to you?” A little girl with plaited hair and large blue eyes says, “The house is the mother.” After a series of similar comments, a serious, dark-haired boy asks, “But what about Spot?” Nic raises his hand and the teacher calls on him. “Nicolas?” “Spot’s the id, the animal force, searching for release.” A girl with big brown eyes, her hair in a bouncy ponytail, rolls her eyes and shrugs. “Leave it to Nicolas to invoke Freud,” she says, grumpily placing her chin on her fist. The final scene shows the kids at the end of the school day. They run out of the building to their parents’ cars, lined up out front. Nic leaps into the backseat of a Honda and his mother asks, “What did you do at school today, Nicolas?” He answers, “Oh, same old stuff.” A month or two after the commercial begins airing, we are at the movies. A man wearing a studded leather jacket and pants and black motorcycle boots recognizes Nic. “Oh, my God,” he squeals, pointing. “It’s Nicolas!” In May, Karen and I are married under roses and bougainvillea on the deck of her parents’ house. With his skinny arms and neck jutting out of a short-sleeved oxford shirt, Nic, now nine, is nervous, though we try to reassure him. In the morning, however, he seems hugely relieved. “Everything’s the same,” he says, looking from me to Karen, around the house, and back to me again. “That’s so weird.” “Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Stepmothers always were.” Truman Capote summed up the popular view of stepmotherhood. It’s not a new sentiment. Euripides wrote, “Better a servant than a stepmother.” And yet Karen and Nic grow closer. Am I seeing only what I want to see? I hope not; I don’t think so. They continue to paint and draw together. They are always doing “together drawings,” where one adds something and then the other, back and forth. They look at art books and discuss artists. Karen takes him to museums, where Nic sits on gallery floors with his pad on his lap. He makes feverish notes and sketches inspired by Picasso, Elmer Bischoff, and Sigmar Polke. She teaches him French—grilling him on his vocabulary as they drive in the car—and they are very funny carrying on conversations about their shared favorite books, the kids in his class, and movies, especially ones starring Peter Sellers and Leslie Nielsen, the Inspector Clouseau movies, Airplane, Naked Gun, and its sequels. For some reason, for four consecutive evenings they watch Pollyanna, trying to get through it, but each time they get too sleepy and shut it off. On the fifth night, however, they finish it. After that, the movie is a shared language they speak together. “Karen, you have a stuffy little nose,” Nic will say, imitating Agnes Moorehead. Nic tries to get me to play a video game called Streetfighter 2, but I quickly tire of the bashing, head-butting, and biting. Karen, however, not only enjoys it but is good at it, beating Nic. She also loves Nic’s music and, unlike me, never tells him to turn it down. Karen and Nic tease each other. Relentlessly. Sometimes she teases him too much and he gets mad. When we go out to eat, they always order milkshakes. He slowly savors his, but Karen drinks hers down quickly and then tries to steal Nic’s. They play a word game and laugh their heads off. Karen says “Dave.” Nic says “has.” Karen says “a.” Nic: monkey Karen: butt. I look up from my magazine. “Very funny,” I say. Nic says, “Sorry. There.” Karen: was Nic: a Karen: man Nic: who Karen: said Nic: that Karen: Dave Nic: has Karen: a Nic: monkey Karen: butt. They play it, and variations, over and over. I roll my eyes. Karen works a lot and resists doing motherly duties, but she starts driving carpool sometimes and, one evening, makes a meat-loaf for dinner. It’s terrible and Nic refuses to eat it. Karen starts telling Nic to put his napkin on his lap, which makes him furious. She enlists him to help around the house, hiring him to kill slugs in the garden. He’s paid ten cents a slug. Nic puts them on a shovel and flings them over the fence into the woods. Karen, whom Nic calls Mama or Mamacita or KB (she calls him Sputnik), admits that it is not a natural relationship for her. Once, in the car with Nic and Nancy, Karen’s mother, Nic, tired and frustrated over nothing in particular, starts crying. Karen is amazed and asks Nancy, “What’s wrong with him?” She responds, “He’s a little boy. Little boys cry.” Another evening, they are together at her parents’, and Karen notices that as they sit around the television, Nancy pulls Nic close to her and rubs his back. He seems completely contented. Karen tells me about it as if it’s a revelation. She says that at first Nic seemed foreign to her; she had not been around children since she was a kid. “I never expected this,” she says. “I had no idea. I didn’t know what I was missing.” She doesn’t always feel this way. On occasion Nic is churlish— toward me, too, for that matter—but the larger problem is inherent to the position of stepparent. Sometimes Karen says that she wishes she were Nic’s real mother, but she is realistic about the fact that she isn’t. He has a mother whom he adores and to whom he is devoted. Karen is frequently reminded that a stepmother is not a mother. She has much of the responsibility but not the authority of a parent. Sometimes I’m quiet when she gets on his case about having his elbows on the table, but though I always encourage her to say what is on her mind, I often rescue him. “His manners are fine,” I insist, before I realize that I’ve undermined her again. The worst for Nic may be that he feels guilty about a close relationship with someone who is not his mother, which is typical, according to one of the many how-to-stepparent books Karen keeps on her bedside table. Sometimes we all acutely feel Vicki’s absence. When Nic misses her, the telephone helps, though after hearing her voice he can be sadder. We encourage him to visit her whenever possible and to call her as often as he wants. We try to get him to talk about it. It’s all we know to do. I sense that Nic is undergoing a fitful transformation, as if a tug of war is being waged inside him. He holds on to his stuffed crab and the pandas, but he has taped a Nirvana poster on his bedroom wall. Though he still often rebels against conventional habit and taste, more and more he succumbs to peer pressure. He is trying on an awkward preteen skulk, and he often wears grungy flannel and shuffles around in a pair of clunky Doc Martens. His bangs hang Cobainlike over his eyes, and he hennas his hair. I allow it, but not without considering whether I should, and meanwhile I force haircuts, even though he becomes furious with me. In choosing my battles, I weigh the relevant factors. Nic is occasionally moody, but not more than other children we know. There are minor reprimands—for writing “Sofia sucks” on a notebook, for example. (Sofia is a headstrong girl in his class.) Once he has to write a note of apology for interrupting Spanish class. For the most part, however, Nic continues to do well in school. In a report card, a teacher writes about his “burgeoning sense of kindness and generosity” and concludes, “I wonder at the gifts he will undoubtedly bring to the world.” 3 What is now the town of Inverness on the Point Reyes Peninsula, an hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was, a few million years ago, in Southern California. The arrow-shaped landmass still creeps northward at the unhurried pace of an inch or so a year. Inverness and the surrounding ridges, hillsides, and valleys, and miles of ranch-land and shoreline, will, in another million years, be an island floating off the coast of Washington. Inverness is separated from the rest of the continent by the twelvemile-long Tomales Bay, which cuts a jagged line to the ocean directly over the San Andreas Fault. The submerged border may account for the looming sense of transience and fragility—and an ethereal grace. The town of Point Reyes Station is on the mainland side. It has a grocery store, an automobile repair shop, two bookstores, and restaurants that specialize in local foods—organic, free-range, and grass-fed. At Cowgirl Creamery, rounds of cheese are made from milk from the nearby Straus Family Dairy. Toby’s Feed Barn carries a range of goods that sum up the local community: hay, lavender bath salts, fresh-pressed olive oil, dried pigs’ ears, the Strauses’ crème fraîche, and puppy dewormer. Down the street, there’s a barbershop, a deli, real-estate offices, a hardware store, and a post office. The area has a diverse population. There are many firstandsecond-generation immigrant families who hail from Latin America and Mexico; Hollywood refugees; fine craftsmen, homebuilders, cabinetmakers, and stonemasons; fishermen and oystermen; and aged hippies (the town supports a tie-dye shop). There are former high-tech executives, teachers, artists, ranchers and farmhands, summer people, weekenders, horse people, masseuses, therapists of every persuasion, environmentalists, and a medical clinic that does not turn anyone away. There are a few old curmudgeons and a new generation of them. Indeed, some of the locals embrace differences but will avoid you after you show up at a community potluck barbecue with Ball Park—not tofu—hot dogs. On the one hand, there is an ardent social conscience—women who strip for peace. On the other, some locals will verbally assault you if you tread on a blackberry patch they have claimed as their own. Still, Point Reyes is mostly a place overflowing with generosity and magnanimity. Karen has a small cabin in a garden in Inverness, not far from town. We spend as much time as possible there these days, and the more time we spend, the more we appreciate the anachronistic sense of community and spectacular natural beauty. We regularly drag our old canoe down to Papermill Creek, draped over pasture-land like a silver ribbon. We paddle among river otters and, at high tide, set a course for a secluded inlet up the bay, where we go ashore for a picnic and uncover Miwok arrowheads on the rocky beach. We hike trails that crisscross national seashore and state parkland, where a billion wildflowers blossom in spring. The fields are parched gold by midsummer, when the blackberries ripen and blue irises come into breathtaking bloom. In winter, drenched, we bundle up and hike through the state park or along North and South Beach, where the Pacific Ocean waves reach more than twenty feet high, and watch the migrating gray whales. Indeed, the peninsula is surrounded on three sides by some of the wildest, most magnificent coastline anywhere. Until now, Nic rarely chose to go to the beach—he didn’t like getting sandy—but soon he spends every possible moment near and in the water. We drive out to McClure’s Beach, past sweeping arcs of yellow mustard flowers, to catch a minus tide. We walk along the shore to the outcroppings and balance on slippery rock, watching the crashing waves, while searching tide pools for mussels, sea stars, anemones, and octopi. Nic watches Karen dive into the cold ocean in the middle of December at Limantour Beach. He jumps in, too. They whip each other with long strands of seaweed. When he gets out, he can’t stop shivering. The Tomales Bay is warmer. When they swim there, Karen and Nic play a game in which she tries to buck him off her back. On the sandy beaches at Drakes, Stinson, and Bolinas, Nic skim-boards. He tries boogie-boarding and then surfing. He looks natural and elegant on a board. The better he gets at surfing, the more he wants to do it. We spend sublime hours together in the ocean. We pore over buoy and weather reports and head to the beach when the swell is up and the wind is offshore. Waxing his board on the beach, Nic is slender and strong, bronzed from the sun. He wears orange beads around his neck. He has long bending limbs, brown hands with dirty fingernails, and narrow brown feet. His light eyes with coarse black eyelashes slant down. When he pulls on his black wetsuit, he has the skin of a seal. Enticed by West Marin, we build a house and painting studio in the Inverness hillside garden, moving in before fall, when Nic begins sixth grade at a new school—with trepidation. After his first day, we sit in the high-backed dining chairs around a square purple table. Nic tells us that he thinks he is going to like this school after all. “My teacher asked, ‘How many of you hate math?’ ” Nic says. “Almost everyone raised their hands. I did. She said, ‘I hated math, too.’ Then she gave this smile and said, ‘You won’t hate it when I’m finished with you.’ ” He goes on to say that lots of the kids seem nice. He reports that after we dropped him off, he was walking through the corridor when he heard a boy call out to him: “Nic!” He looks up. “I was pretty excited, but then I thought maybe he was yelling to someone else and I was acting like a complete idiot, waving at him. But no, it was me. He remembered me from when I visited the school.” After the second day, Nic reports that another boy called him his friend. “This red-haired boy handed me a hockey stick in PE, and when this other kid said, ‘No, that’s my stick, I had it first,’ the redhaired kid said, ‘It’s for my friend Nic.’ ” Nic looks cool these days in pants that ride low on his hips, a Primus or Nirvana T-shirt, a slumped adolescent posture, and his redorange-tinged hair. And yet he has essentially one ambition: coming home and being able to say, “Dad, I made two new friends today.” On a Friday, some of the children come over for a party. We drive to Stinson Beach, where they play sand tag and kickball and Nic teaches them to skim-board. Their preteen awkwardness dissolves as they play like much younger children, laughing without selfconsciousness, tumbling and wrestling in the sand. Before dark, we drive back home, where they play Twister and Truth or Dare, with risqué questions like, “Do you think Skye is cute?” (Nic does: She’s the big-eyed, brown-haired girl whose name, when he mentions it, makes him blush. He talks to her on the phone at night, sometimes for an hour or more at a time.) And, “In a fight to the death between Batman and the Hulk, who would win?” Dares include biting into a jalapeño pepper and kissing a Barbie doll. They eat pizza and popcorn, and their parents pick them up at ten. Karen and I attend the school’s art shows and plays. Nic is Viola in a production of Twelfth Night and George Gibbs in Our Town. Parents are invited to hear their oral reports on foreign countries. Nic, assigned Bolivia, after showing the country on a homemade posterboard map and describing its history, topography, agriculture, and gross national product, performs a song he wrote. “Olivia, oh, Olivia,” he sings, “down in La Paz, Bolivia. My Olivia.” He accompanies himself on guitar. He cartoons a series of panels featuring a character called Super Cow the Avenger, who imparts lessons about nutrition. For a science assignment, he rigs our bathtub and shower stalls with buckets and rulers, measuring the amount of water used in each. (Showers are far more ecofriendly.) For another science project, Nic tests household cleaners and solvents on oil-drenched feathers to see what would work best to clean birds after an oil spill. Dove, the dishwashing liquid, wins. He bakes an apple in the oven and through the oven window tracks its disintegration, reporting the result in a paper written from the perspective of the apple. “I am becoming dehydrated. I sigh, ‘Hello? Out there? Can anyone hear me? It’s getting hot in here…’ ” Every morning and afternoon there are carpools between school and Point Reyes Station. When I drive, I sometimes educate Nic and his friends in the oeuvre of Van Morrison and the Kinks and guitar solos by Jorma Kaukonen, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Robin Trower, Duane Allman, and Ronnie Van Zant. (Air guitar is encouraged.) Nic and his friends often play the complaining game, Karen’s invention. Nic, imitating the Newlywed Game’s Bob Eubanks, is the announcer, explicating the rules. Contestants are awarded points on a scale of one to ten for unburdening themselves. The kids generally rail about their annoying siblings, jerks at school, unsympathetic teachers, and ogreish parents. Prosaic complaints receive middling scores. Admitting that you have had nightmares ever since you watched a horror movie in which teenage girls were stabbed and a man was buried alive wins eight points. When a girl tells about the time she was kidnapped by her father, she is applauded and awarded a ten. A boy also receives a ten for a fuming denunciation of his mother, who, he says, has dragged him to eight cities with four successive husbands. After months of hearing stories such as these, one girl uses her turn to complain, “I’m too normal. My parents have never been divorced and I have always lived in the same house.” The other children sympathetically award her a ten. Looking for a puppy at the Humane Society, Karen falls in love with a smelly, sad-eyed, near-starved hound sitting with its paws crossed on the cement floor of its kennel. She brings Moon-dog home, and also a ball of fur, a chocolate Labrador puppy we call Brutus. Moondog, who had never been inside a house before, lifts his leg on the floor and chews the wooden furniture. He tears through the house, baying and barking whenever a car drives by or when someone comes to the front door. He howls at the vacuum cleaner. Brutus hops in the grass like a bunny. Every Wednesday we take the dogs and ourselves over to dinner at Karen’s parents’ house. Nancy and Don live in a barnlike board-andbatten home tucked into the side of a wooded canyon a half-hour from Inverness. The main room is cavernous and airy, with a twenty-fourfoot-high single-pane plate glass door that slides open. Floor-toceiling shelves, lining two walls, are filled with books about shells and rocks and trees and birds. There are also portraits of their three children (Karen, at five or so, has large brown eyes and pinned-back dark hair) and sand dollars and pewter plates and a painting of a marmot. Don is a retired doctor. Karen grew up waiting in the car while he made house calls. Don grows tomatoes and squash in a terraced garden, but he spends most of his time in his second-story office doing his current job, evaluating studies designed to assess the effectiveness of new medicines. Nancy, his wife of more than fifty years, works every day in the garden. She has gray eyes and silver hair cut in a pageboy. She is vivacious, handsome, gentle, and imposing. None of Nancy and Don’s children lives farther than San Francisco, and on any given afternoon it’s not uncommon to find one or more of them sitting at the kitchen table in front of cups of reheated coffee and a plate of cookies, chatting with their mother. The weekly Wednesday night dinners are raucous and memorable evenings with Nancy and Don and their three children and their families, plus occasional guests and a revolving pack of our various unmannered dogs, which hog the best couches and steal unguarded food off the dining table. At these dinners, Nancy recounts every newspaper or TV news story of toxic mattresses, molested children, teen suicide, poisoning, shopping-cart handles infested with bacteria, shark attack, car crash, electrocution—mostly endless tales about the hideous deaths of children. She tells us about a swimmer who drowned because she held her breath too long. She says that someone was killed in Mill Valley when a tree fell on his car, completely squishing him. She reports news about skyrocketing rates of childhood depression, eating disorders, and drug abuse. “A girl drowned after getting her hair caught in a hot-tub drain,” she says one day. “I just want you to know so you’ll be careful.” These warnings are meant to increase our vigilance, but it’s impossible to prepare for every possible calamity. It’s one thing to be safe, but panic is useless and too much caution can be stifling. No matter. The bad news pours forth along with the rosemary au jus. At one Wednesday dinner in October 1993, Karen, who is seven months pregnant, and I are sitting around the kitchen table with her parents and brother and sister. Nic is playing outside with Brutus when Nancy imparts the latest terrible news. The setting is Petaluma, a half-hour drive east of Inverness. A twelve-year-old girl was abducted from her bedroom. She was having a slumber party. Her mother was home at the time. Within a day, pictures of Polly Klaas with her long brown hair and gentle eyes are plastered on every store window and telephone pole in town. Soon a psychopath is arrested; he leads police to Polly’s body. Every parent I know mourns Polly’s death, and we hold tighter to our children. Kids in Nic’s carpool are obsessed with the murder. One girl says that she would have screamed and run. Another says there is no way she could have. “The guy was a giant, over seven feet.” Nic is silent for a while and then says, “You have to scream and run anyway. You have to try to get away.” A boy says there was an accomplice. “The guy who kidnapped her stole her for a child prostitute ring.” Then no one talks until Nic asks if the killer was really seven feet tall. The girl says, “Seven feet eight.” We parents talk about our children’s fitful sleep and nightmares, and the kids respond with jokes they overhear at school. The ones they repeat in carpool aren’t always about Polly Klaas. “Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother says, ‘Jeffrey, I really don’t like your friends,’ and so he tells her, ‘That’s okay. Just eat the vegetables.’ ” Nic never reads newspapers or watches the news, but there is no filtering out these disturbing events, because the kids—in car-pool, on the playground—become preoccupied by them. Jasper is born in early December. Nancy and Don bring Nic to the hospital to see the baby when he is a few hours old. Jasper has swollen eyes because of some drops they put in them. Nic, sitting in a pink upholstered chair next to Karen’s hospital bed, holds the baby, who is wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. He stares for a long time. One can easily forget how tiny and delicate they are when they are just born. Back home in Inverness, when Jasper is sleeping, we check him to make certain that he is breathing. His presence with us seems tentative, and we worry that he could slip away. We try our best to make the transition easy for Nic, who seems to like playing with Jasper, seems enchanted by him. Am I sugar-coating it? Maybe. I do know that it is complicated for him. In the best circumstances, second families must always be at least a little bit terrifying for the children from an earlier marriage. We reassure Nic, but he must wonder exactly where this new baby fits into our lives. Karen and I are more tired. Jasper fights sleeping but passes out whenever he’s in the car, so we drive him for long meandering rides to induce naps. Otherwise, not much has changed. Nic and I, often with his friends, surf whenever we can find the time. We play guitars together and listen to music. For New Year’s Eve 1993, when I score tickets for the Nirvana concert at the Oakland Coliseum, I arrange for Nic to fly up from LA. It’s an unforgettable evening. Kurt Cobain’s performance is riveting, brilliant, and haunted. He sings: I’m not like them But I can pretend The sun is gone But I have a light The day is done But I’m having fun My heart is broke But I have some glue Help me inhale And mend it with you We’ll float around And hang out on clouds Then we’ll come down And I’ll have a hangover Three months later, Nic, Karen, and I are sitting in the living room, with its cerulean wall panels framed in oiled redwood. The room is furnished sparsely with twin couches, covered with strips of red silk fabric from China that Karen found at a thrift store, and mismatched throw pillows. We watch Jasper, who is on a baby blanket. He starts to roll over onto his back and tries to crawl but doesn’t go anywhere. Eventually, Jas gets in the right position, on all fours, and he huffs and puffs, rocks forward, and then begins crying. When he finally starts crawling, he goes sideways like a crab. In the morning, Nic goes off to school as usual. But when he comes home, from his face I can tell that he is distressed. He drops his backpack on the floor, looks up, and tells me that Kurt Cobain shot himself in the head. From Nic’s room I hear Cobain’s voice. I found it hard, it was hard to find. Oh well, whatever, nevermind. After summer, Nic begins seventh grade. In her book Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott wrote, “The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit … It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn’t. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, in Germany.” These days there are reasons more troubling than preteen awkwardness and cruelty for parents to worry. A junior high school principal I know told me that she doesn’t understand what it is, but things are worse for her students than ever before. “I can’t believe the things they do to themselves and to each other,” she says. In a survey of public-school teachers in 1940, the top disciplinary problems listed included talking out of turn, chewing gum, running in the halls, dress-code violations, and littering. More than fifty years later, they are drug and alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. When Nic enters seventh grade, he still seems to enjoy playing with Jasper, whose first word is duck, followed by up, banana, doggie, and Nicky. Nic meanwhile has discovered an unanticipated benefit of a baby in the family. The girls in his grade flock to Jasper. They come over to play with him—to bounce him around and dress him up. Nic is delighted with his expanding harem. But Nic is also increasingly less interested in the carpool kids and instead spends most of his free time with a group of boys with buzzed hair who skateboard, talk about, but do nothing about, girls, and listen to music: Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Primus, and Jimi Hendrix. As always, Nic has eclectic and hip—and often fickle—taste. He does not seem to tire of some discoveries—Björk, Tom Waits, Bowie—but otherwise he is into the edgiest music and then grows bored with it. By the time a band, from Weezer to Blind Melon to Offspring to Green Day, has a hit record, he has discarded it in favor of the retro, the obscure, the ultracontemporary, or the plain bizarre, a list that includes Coltrane, polka collections, the soundtrack from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, John Zorn, M. C. Solar, Jacques Brel, or, these days, samba, to which he cha-chas through the living room. He discovers Pearl Jam, a song called “Jeremy,” about a teenage boy in Texas who shot himself in front of his English class. Jeremy’s teacher asked him to go to the office to get a late slip. He returned and told her, “Miss, this is what I actually went for,” before turning the gun on himself. But most of all Nic listens to Nirvana. The music blasts like mortar fire from his room. I feel stupid and contagious Here we are now entertain us In early May, I pick Nic up after school one day to drive him to a dinner at Nancy and Don’s. When he climbs into the car I smell cigarette smoke. At first, he denies that he has smoked. He says that he was hanging out with some kids who were smoking. When I press him, however, he admits that he had a few puffs with a group of boys who were smoking behind the gymnasium. I lecture him and he promises not to do it again. The next Friday after school, he and a friend, with whom Nic is spending the night, are tossing a football in the garden in Inverness. I am packing an overnight bag for him and look for a sweater in his backpack. I do not find the sweater, but instead discover a small bag of marijuana. 4 When I was a young child, my family lived near Walden Pond, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Our home was next to a farm with apple trees, corn and tomatoes, and a row of stacked beehives. My father was a chemical engineer. He watched a television commercial that said to take your sinuses to Arizona. He had hay fever, so he did. He secured a job at a semiconductor plant in Phoenix. We drove west in our pea-green Studebaker, staying overnight along the way at Motel 6s and eating at Denny’s and Sambo’s. We settled in Scottsdale, living in a motel until our tract house was built. My father’s new job at Motorola was to grow, slice, and etch silicon wafers for transistors and microprocessors. My mother wrote a column about our school and neighborhood—science fair winners and Little League results—for the Scottsdale Daily Progress. My friends and I often reminisce about our childhoods, when things were different. It was a far more innocent world and a safer one. My sister, brother, and I, along with the rest of the kids on our block, played on the street until twilight, when our mothers called us in for dinner. We played ring and run, tag, and boys chase the girls. TV dinners—fried chicken, mashed potatoes with a pat of butter, apple cobbler, each isolated in its own compartment—set on folding trays, we watched Bonanza, Wonderful World of Disney, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We were Cub Scouts and Brownies. We had barbecues, built go-carts, made cakes in my sister’s EasyBake Oven, and rode inner tubes down the Salt and Verde rivers. But I’m not certain if the wistful recollections of those times are justified. The news in our neighborhood traveled by way of our mothers’ hushed voices. Charles Manson and 50-percent-off sales and fad diets were favorite topics on the sidewalk, at Tupperware parties and mahjong games, and in the beauty shop where my mother got her hair frosted. They whispered when a ten-year-old child who lived on our block hanged himself. Then a girl who lived two doors down was killed in a car accident. The driver, an older boy, was high on drugs. The proximity to Mexico meant that drugs were abundant and cheap. Geography, however, probably didn’t make a lot of difference. A smorgasbord of previously unknown or unavailable drugs flooded our school and our neighborhood, as they have flooded America since the mid-1960s. Marijuana was most prevalent. Kids hung out by the bike rack after school selling single joints for fifty cents and ounce bags for ten dollars. They offered hits of their joints in the bathroom and while walking to and from our high school. One of my friends sought it out and, after smoking it, told a group of us about it. He said that he asked a boy we all knew was a stoner for marijuana and smoked the joint in the backyard of his parents’ house, coughed a lot, felt nothing, and then went inside and ate a box of Chips Ahoy cookies. He began smoking almost every day. A year or so later a boy on our block asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. It was 1968 and I was a high school freshman. It didn’t do much for me, but neither did it cause me to hallucinate or to try to fly off the roof of our house, like Art Linkletter’s daughter supposedly did when she tried LSD. That is, it seemed harmless, and so I didn’t think twice about trying it again when I walked into another boy’s house and his older brother passed me a glowing roach held by an alligator clip. Of course it wasn’t articulated, but pot, with its outlaw cachet, was a passkey into a loosely defined social circle. To be inside was a relief after my lonely geekiness in junior high. I laughed easier and felt funnier with a stoned—that is, less discerning—audience. Here was a palliative for raging insecurity. I experienced every thing—music, nature—in a heightened, far more intense way, and was less shy around girls, a benefit that cannot be overstated for a boy of fourteen or fifteen. The world seemed at once obscured and more vivid. But even these probably weren’t the main reasons I continued smoking. On top of the continuous peer pressure and the high, plus the sense of rebellion in lighting a joint, plus the camaraderie, and besides the ways that pot helped assuage my awkwardness and insecurity … besides all this, marijuana helped me feel something when I felt almost nothing, helped me block out feelings when I felt too much. In precisely the way that pot made things both blurrier and more vibrant, it allowed me to feel more and to feel less. Nowadays people of my age often say that drugs were different then —less potent pot and purer psychedelics. This is true. Tests of marijuana have shown that there is twice as much THC, the active ingredient, in the average joint or pipeful today than in the weed of a decade ago, which itself was stronger than in the 1960s and 70s. There are frequent reports that psychedelics and ecstasy are laced with or even substituted by meth and other drugs or impurities, though back then we heard of kids snorting Drano in place of cocaine. One thing is undeniably different. A body of research has unequivocally shown a wide range of dangerous physical and psychological effects of drugs, including marijuana. We thought they were safe. They weren’t. I know that some people look back on what they consider the good old days of “harmless” drug use. They survived intact, but many people did not. There were accidents, suicides, and overdoses. I still run into a shocking number of drug casualties from the 1960s and 70s who wander the streets, some of them homeless. Some rant about conspiracies. Apparently it’s a trait common in drug addicts and alcoholics. “Whenever his liquor began to work he most always went for the government,” said Huck Finn about his drunkard father. And so throughout Nic’s childhood, ever since he was seven or eight, I talked to him about drugs. We spoke about them “early and often” in ways prescribed by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. I told him about people who were harmed or killed. I told him about my mistakes. I watched for the early warning signs of teenage alcoholism and drug abuse. (Number fifteen on one organization’s list: “Is your child suddenly volunteering to clean up after cocktail parties, but forgetting his other chores?”) When I was a child, my parents implored me to stay away from drugs. I dismissed them, because they didn’t know what they were talking about. They were—still are—teetotalers. I, however, knew about drugs from first-hand experience. So when I warned Nic, I thought I might have some credibility. Many drug counselors tell parents of my generation to lie to our children about our past drug use. It’s the same reason that it may backfire when famous athletes show up at school assemblies or on television and tell kids, “Man, don’t do this shit, I almost died,” and yet there they stand, diamonds, gold, multimillion-dollar salaries and cereal-box fame. The words: I barely survived. The message: I survived, thrived, and you can, too. Kids see that their parents turned out all right in spite of the drugs. So maybe I should have lied to Nic and kept my drug use hidden, but I didn’t. He knew the truth. Meanwhile, our close relationship made me feel certain that I would know if he were exposed to them. I naively believed that if Nic were tempted to try them, he would tell me. I was wrong. We are still nearer the winter edge of spring on this cool and misty May afternoon, the scent of wood smoke in the air—a remnant of the afternoon fire. This time of year the sun falls early behind the ridge and poplars, and so, though it is only four o’clock, the yard is shrouded in shadow. Fog swirls at the boys’ feet as they toss the ball back and forth. It is a desultory game; they appear to be more interested in their conversation, maybe about girls or bands or the rancher who shot a rabid dog in Point Reyes Station yesterday. The boy with Nic is muscular, a weightlifter who shows off his pumped-up chest and biceps in a tight T-shirt. Nic wears an overlarge gray cardigan—mine. With his stringy hair and world-weary visage and languor, anyone else would guess he’d go on to smoke pot, at least. Yet in spite of his costume, and in spite of his variable moods �…

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