Addiction - a father-son story

One of the unsettling themes in David Sheff's memoir, "Beautiful Boy," a wrenching tale about his son's drug addiction, is that even though Sheff was among what he calls the "first wave" of self-conscious parents who were hip enough to forge honest relationships with their kids, he was woefully unprepared for the vagaries of methamphetamine.

Sheff, 52, who lives in Inverness, and his ex-wife, Vicki, were decidedly attentive parents - "probably over attentive" as Sheff writes - and their well-adjusted children were supposed to glide into adulthood.

But David's then-teenage son Nic took a detour. Despite his cultured, well-to-do Marin County upbringing, during which he shared dinners with writers like Armistead Maupin, Nic developed a meth addiction that led to heroin use. By 22, he was emaciated and roaming the Tenderloin in search of a fix.

"I was blindsided," Sheff said at his home recently. "I thought I'd protected Nic with the openness. I thought I'd know if there was something going on with him, and I didn't. Everyone's generation probably feels like they're parenting in a better way. But this is definitely not what we expected."

The latest unexpected turn: Last week, Sheff embarked on a national book tour with Nic, now 25, who's been sober for two years and lives in Savannah, Ga. The younger Sheff has his own memoir to promote, "Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines." After the father wrote about his son's slide in a November 2005 New York Times Magazine article, an editor from Simon & Schuster contacted Nic, who was then freelancing for the online magazine Nerve.

"They thought it'd be interesting if I told my side of the story," Nic said, while on a visit to his father's home. "So I just kept writing chapters and submitting them and they kept liking them. Then they offered me the book deal."

The result is a sign of our confessional times: father-and-son memoirs, mutually promoted and both written to give hope to individuals and families who suffer the same lot. ("Beautiful Boy" will see an extra marketing push, as it has been selected by Starbucks as part of its book retail program.)

"The books have allowed us to continue the conversation," David Sheff said, as he looked across the kitchen table at his son. "These books make it pretty hard to pretend this never happened, that it wasn't as horrible and destructive as it was."

Nic Sheff snuck his first drink during a family snowboarding trip to Lake Tahoe when he was 11. But, unlike the other kids who squirmed at the taste of the hard liquor, Nic felt compelled to finish the glass until he passed out. It was a compulsive streak that followed him through high school, when he started smoking pot and got his first taste of meth. When he learned the rush was more powerful when he injected it, "that was that," he said. And in college when friends were calling it quits at 2 a.m., Nic was just getting started.

"It's like this hunger," Nic said. "It's this emptiness inside me that just opens up so wide. It feels very chemical. It feels like something in my brain has opened up and sort of needs to be fed."

Although there's no current data on the number of meth addicts in the United States, counselors have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of addicts seeking help, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. From 1995-2005, the number of addicts seeking admissions for meth treatment increased three-fold, from 47,695 to 152,368. In 2004, an estimated 12 million people older than 12 had used meth at least once in their lifetime, and 1.4 million people had used meth during the past year.

The drug's popularity, the elder Sheff writes, had coincided with Nic's coming of age. Once reserved for biker gangs and truckers, meth has become ultra-potent and, according to law enforcement officers Sheff interviewed, has spread across the country and "marched up the socioeconomic ladder."

"When I told Nic about my own drug use, I thought I had some credibility," said the elder Sheff, who writes for such publications as Rolling Stone and Playboy. In 1980, he interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Raising Nic, he openly discussed his own dabbling with pot and cocaine and even a try of crystal meth, hoping those stories of experimentation (and moderation) would be instructive. He divorced Nic's mother when the boy was 5. The two shared a love for writing, movies and art. On a visit to David's parents' home in Arizona, the teenage son felt comfortable enough to light a joint in front of his father.

"I accept the joint," David writes, "thinking - rationalizing - that it's not unlike a father in a previous generation sharing a beer with his seventeen-year-old son, a harmless bonding moment. ... We talk and laugh and the tension between us melts."

"I totally believe parents should talk to their kids about drugs," David said. "I totally believe that educating them in every way is really important. But on the other hand, I've learned it's not as simple as that. Things that enter into kids' decisions (to take drugs) are so much more complicated."

"It is complex," Nic added. "When I was little, we were so close and spent so much time together and had common interests. ... When I did start using hard drugs I was still talking to (my dad) about it, and who knows, maybe that little piece (of communication) could have saved my life. It probably helped me get into treatment a little faster."

When the book agent called Nic, he'd been clean for 10 months. Not long after the advance arrived, he was using meth, coke and heroin again. And again, he went into rehab. He says therapy and books by authors who were "willing to expose their inner worlds," such as William S. Burroughs and Dennis Cooper, have helped him get through his troubles.

Nic describes the rush that meth gave him as a feeling of supreme confidence, an hourslong state of achieved bliss. Yet when the drug evaporated from his system, and the money had run out, he felt an aching low. To rid himself of the habit, he went through weeks of detox, waiting for his body to return to a state of normalcy.

David said he began writing about Nic's dependence "just to get my head around it and wrestle with it." Yet he approached writing about his son with "a lot of trepidation and only after a lot of conversations" with his ex-wife and Nic.

When the New York Times article appeared, there were many friends and relatives who knew and adored Nic but were unaware of the depths to which he'd sunk: He stole money from his kid brother, broke into his mother's home and got arrested for failing to appear in court for a marijuana possession charge.

"I had many sleepless nights, wondering if this was the thing to do," David said. "But each time I thought it through, I came down on the side of being open and honest. There's a cliche: You're only as sick as your secrets." Reading both books is a reminder of how memory can serve its master. In David's book, it's a devastating moment when he realizes Nic stole $8 from his younger brother's piggy bank to buy drugs. The dramatic scene is artfully teased out for all that it symbolizes: The reality that his son's behavior had reached a pathetic low, and the ease with which Nic can inflict pain on his family.

In Nic's book, a raw, almost stream-of-consciousness journal that includes scenes of shooting dope in a high school friend's Sea Cliff mansion, the money incident gets a two-sentence mention. He awakes to the sound of his brother's tears, and recalls the theft as $5. "I got out of bed and started to pack," he writes. "I didn't remember taking the money, but I knew I had."

Still, the memoirs are undeniably related. Both men use Lennon's lyrics in the preface: The elder Sheff quotes the songwriter's "Beautiful Boy." "When you cross the street/ Take my hand"; and the son chooses from "How?" "How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?"

After the tour, Nic will return to Savannah to finish a semi-autobiographical novel about a kid from Los Angeles who cleans up his life after he moves to the Deep South.

"Writing 'Tweak,' I wanted to show that this is where the power lies," he said. "Drugs are only a byproduct of that struggle to accept yourself for who you are, and not try and hide all the time."

David Sheff is relieved his family is no longer seized with worry about Nic's well-being. David's currently working on a book that approaches addiction from a government-policy angle. He's already received hundreds of letters from parents who have also spent sleepless nights waiting for the car to pull up in the driveway. Or for the 5 a.m. phone call.

"We remember the traumas of that time, but not just the traumas, also the lovely moments, too," he said, looking at his son. "Nic's been sober for more than two years, so we've had all this time to evolve. It's sort of like back to normal. Maybe a new normal."