Beautiful Boy

Nic shares an entry from his journal asking, “How the hell did I get here? It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was on the goddamn water-polo team. I was an editor of the school newspaper, acting in the spring play” (186). He concludes that, “This isn’t so much sad as baffling. At the time it all seemed so positive and harmless” (186). After the group session, Nic has a pass to visit the family at the inn where they are staying. He is “open and emotional, even expressing his gratitude for the chance to go through this program” (186). 

Nic also wants to return to college, promising to stay in a substance-free dorm and attend regular AA meetings. A fellow patient changed Nic’s mind by saying, “‘You have parents? They love you? They are still willing to send you to college? Go to college. Don’t be a fucking idiot’” (187). Sheff acknowledges that “I still fantasize that everything can be fine” (187). 

A week later, Sheff picks Nic up from rehab. He seems better and his “optimism comes through not only in his lucidity, but in the way he holds his body, confident and strong, and in his eyes” (189). Sheff “share[s] his hopefulness” but it “is a tentative hope” (189). He is nervous whenever Nic “seems distracted or down” (189) and even more so when Nic leaves for Hampshire College, three thousand miles away. 

Sheff continues to hold his “academic fantasy” (190) but a couple of months later, Nic relapses. Sheff prepares to “follow through on my threat and withdraw support” but the Hampshire health counselor “advises patience, saying that often ‘relapse is part of recovery’” (191). Sheff acknowledges that this is a “counterintuitive concept” (190) but recognizes that “if treatment is conceived of as an ongoing process rather than a cure, a different, more optimistic—and far more realistic—notion of success emerges” (192). However, he still knows that “[e]very relapse is potentially lethal” (192). 

Nic calls and “admits that he ‘fucked up’ and promises he will stop using” (193). He keeps in contact and when he returns for winter break, he “seems to be doing much, much better” (193). A “noted author and admired teacher” (193) offers to allow him in his writing class “‘[i]f you stay sober’” (194) and Nic agrees. He is in a new relationship with Julia, who supports him with his recovery. A family friend helps them set up a summer trip to China together. 

Sheff is delighted that “Nic is moving on with his life. He has put his drug problem behind him” (195). Nic returns home briefly before the scheduled trip to China and “seems thrilled” to see Jasper and Daisy, who are “overjoyed” (195) to have him back. This makes it even more “devastating when Nic confesses the truth: that he has been using the entire time he has been home, using throughout the entire semester” (195). He leaves and Sheff again “sink[s] into a wretched and sickeningly familiar malaise, alternating with a debilitating panic” (195). This is worsened when Jasper announces, “‘I think Nic took my money’” (195).

Sheff and Karen attend an Al-Anon meeting for families of addicts. He acknowledges that he “kept our family’s problem a secret for a long time” because he “wanted to protect Nic—to preserve our friends’ and others’ good impressions of him” (199). However, he has “learned that the AA adage is true: you’re as sick as your secrets” and that “it helps to talk about my son’s addiction and reflect on it and hear and read others’ stories” (199).   

In the meeting, Sheff cannot shift the idea that it is his fault, “[n]o matter what they say” (200). He acknowledges that “[P]eople outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. ‘You didn’t cause it.’ I do not believe it” (200). Although he does not plan to, he speaks in the meeting and cries. He is “mortified by my public display, but I am also hugely relieved” (200).

Sheff comes to many more meetings and finds that “[e]verywhere I go now there are tears” (202). He tries “to ‘detach’—to let go and let God. How does any parent let go? I can’t. I don’t know how” (203). He wonders how he “failed to know that Nic was using throughout these past months, even when he was in our home?” and concludes that “I can’t distinguish the normal from the outrageous anymore. I am so good at rationalizing and denying that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins” (203). 

Sheff continues to struggle with self-blame and with accepting the disease model of addiction. Sometimes, he accepts that “Nic has a terrible disease” (204) but other times he wonders “if his recidivism is a moral failing or a character flaw” (205). He concludes that it “is not Nic’s fault that he has a disease, but it is his fault that he relapses, since he is the only one who can do the work necessary to prevent relapse” and that “[w]hether or not it’s his fault, he must be held accountable” (206).

Karen’s mother finds Nic sleeping in the spare bedroom in her basement. He “grabs his bag, stammers, apologizes” (213) and, despite her attempts to get him to stay, leaves. She calls Sheff and, while she “has every right to be furious, […] she apologizes to me” (213-14). They hear nothing for another week until Nic calls his godfather who invites him over for food. He “begs Nic to get help” but Nic lies and claims, “‘I’ve stopped using’” (214). Two more weeks pass and “Karen’s brother sees him, or thinks he sees him, on Haight Street, huddling on a street corner, shifty, jittery, and suspicious-looking” (215). 

Karen shows Sheff a canceled check made out to Nic, the “shaky signature” (215) obviously forged by Nic himself. She “dearly loves Nic, and she is stunned and wounded and fuming” (215). Sheff says “‘Poor Nic […] He wouldn’t do this if he was in his right mind’” (216). Karen shakes her head and Sheff acknowledges that she “doesn’t want to hear it. I can’t make excuses for him much longer” (216). A few nights later, Nic appears at the house and heads for his bedroom, “obviously searching for something—I assume money, drugs” (216). He refuses to consider rehab and leaves again. 

In an aquarium with Jasper and Daisy, Sheff watches a film of cormorants feeding in the surf. Suddenly, from “out of nowhere, the water erupts with evil gray, a mouthful of teeth, a great white shark, and a cormorant is swallowed whole. The shark’s tail whips around like a snapping rope and disappears” (219). Sheff reflects, “I feel like the cormorant. A shark has appeared from the depths. I stare at it and helplessly see the approach—and with it the precariousness of Nic’s life—see how close he is to dying” (219). 

After another fortnight, Nic sends Sheff an email, asking for “money so he doesn’t have to live on the streets” (221). Sheff says that he “will help him return to treatment, but that is all” (221). He is not simply “parroting any Al-Anon tough-love script” but rather he has “been defeated by meth and [has] given up. Bailing him out, paying his debts, dragging him to shrinks, counselors, and scraping him off the street—it has been futile; meth is impervious” (221). 

A week later, Nic calls and Sheff persuades him to meet “‘[j]ust for lunch’” (222). Nic arrives late and “rocks anxiously in his chair” (223), unable to meet Sheff’s eyes. He claims to be “‘doing—great’” (223). Sheff reflects, “I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable” (224). He also observes that “parents are more flexible with our hopes and dreams for our children than we ever imagined” (224) but that he lives “with the knowledge that, never mind the most modest definition of a normal or healthy life, my son may not make it to twenty-one” (225). 

Nic emails Vicki asking for help but the email is rambling and unfinished. In another email to her, he admits that he “has stolen some checks from the mother of a friend” and “may have a warrant out for me” (227). Sheff and Vicki “disagree about the best way to proceed” (227) and Sheff is “disconcerted when she helps pay his debt” (228). 

Vicki convinces Nic to meet “old family friends from New York who happen to be visiting San Francisco” (228). When Nic, “an ashen skeleton, twitchy and rambling, wobbles unsteadily into their room, they are horrified both by his debilitated condition and the track marks on his arms” (228). They persuade him to come to New York with them to detox. There he sees a specialist and is prescribed sleeping tablets and “sleeps for most of a week” (229). 

A week later, Sheff receives a call from a bank reporting that “someone wrote a check for five hundred dollars on [his] closed account” (229). Vicki helps Nic get an apartment in Brooklyn and he gets a new job. He plans to return to school but intends to “do it on my own” (229) this time. He says he will not blow another chance, but Sheff is not convinced. Sheff is also not prepared for the reality of the phone call at five o’clock in the morning from Vicki’s husband: Nic “is in a hospital emergency room after an overdose […] in critical condition and on life support” (230). 

Nic manages to pull through and, when Sheff speaks to him on the phone, he “asks to go into another program, says it is his only chance. I tell him that I’m on my way to New York” (231). However, when Sheff calls an hour later, on his way to the airport, he learns that Nic has “‘checked out against doctor’s orders’” (231). Sheff reflects that “if this overdose isn’t enough to stop him, nothing will” (231). However, Nic calls the next day from his flat and “chooses to return to rehab. He begs” (232). Sheff meets him and takes him to the new rehab, “an ongoing program of six months, perhaps longer” during which “patients are required to work or attend school” so that they can “integrate recovery into their lives” (234).