Pubdate: Sun, 23 Oct 2005
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Section: Sunday Magazine
Copyright: 2005 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: David Sheff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

MY SON THE ADDICT

He Was Bright and Charming, With a Gift for Writing and a Talent For 
Water Polo. but Then He Found a New Interest - Crystal Meth. in This 
Heartbreakingly Frank Account, David Sheff Recounts the Horror And 
Helplessness of Watching His Teenage Boy Destroy Himself - and The 
Sense of Hope a Parent Never Loses

One windy day in May 2002, my children, Jasper and Daisy, who were 
eight and five, spent the morning cutting, pasting and colouring 
notes and welcome banners for their brother's homecoming. They had 
not seen Nick, who was arriving from college for the summer, for six 
months. In the afternoon, we drove to the airport to pick him up.

At home in Inverness, north of San Francisco, Nick, who was then 19, 
lugged his duffel bag and backpack into his old bedroom. He unpacked 
and emerged with his arms loaded with gifts. After dinner, he put the 
kids to bed, reading to them from The Witches by Roald Dahl. We heard 
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. The performance was irresistible and the children 
were riveted. Nick was a playful and affectionate big brother to 
Jasper and Daisy - when he wasn't robbing them.

Late that night, I heard the creaking of bending tree branches. I 
also heard Nick padding along the hallway, making tea in the kitchen, 
quietly strumming his guitar and playing Tom Waits, Bjork and 
Bollywood soundtracks. I worried about his insomnia, but pushed away 
my suspicions, instead reminding myself how far he had come since the 
previous school year, when he dropped out of Berkeley. This time, he 
had gone east to college and had made it through his freshman year. 
Given what we had been through, this felt miraculous. As far as we 
knew, he was coming up to his 150th day without methamphetamine.

In the morning, Nick, in flannel pyjama bottoms and a fraying woollen 
sweater, shuffled into the kitchen. His skin was rice-papery and 
gaunt, and his hair was like a field, with smashed-down sienna 
patches and sticking-up yellowed clumps, a disaster left over from 
when he tried to bleach it. Lacking the funds for Lady Clairol, his 
brilliant idea was to soak his head in a bowl of bleach.

Nick hovered over the kitchen counter, fussing with the stove-top 
espresso maker, filling it with water and coffee and setting it on a 
flame, and then sat down to a bowl of cereal with Jasper and Daisy. I 
stared hard at him. The giveaway was his body, vibrating like an 
idling car. His jaw gyrated and his eyes were darting opals. He made 
plans with the kids for after school and gave them hugs. When they 
were gone, I said, 'I know you're using again.' He glared at me: 
'What are you talking about? I'm not.' His eyes fixed on to the floor.

'Then you won't mind being drug-tested.'

'Whatever.'

When Nick next emerged from his bedroom, head down, his backpack was 
slung over his back, and he held his electric guitar by the neck. He 
left the house, slamming the door behind him. Late that afternoon, 
Jasper and Daisy burst in, dashing from room to room, before finally 
stopping and, looking up at me, asking, 'Where's Nick?'

Nick now claims that he was searching for methamphetamine for his 
entire life and when he tried it for the first time, as he says, 
'That was that.' It would have been no easier to see him strung out 
on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a methamphetamine addict 
comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality. In an 
interview, Stephan Jenkins, the singer in the band Third Eye Blind, 
said that methamphetamine makes you feel 'bright and shiny'. It also 
makes you paranoid, incoherent and both destructive and pathetically 
and relentlessly self-destructive. Then you will do unconscionable 
things in order to feel bright and shiny again. Nick had always been 
a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child, but on 
meth he became unrecognisable.

Nick's mother and I were attentive, probably overly attentive - part 
of the first wave of parents obsessed with our children in a 
self-conscious way. (Before us, people had kids. We parented.) Nick 
spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in 
Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums.

His mother and I divorced when he was four. 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 
was hit hard. The effects lingered well after his mother and I 
settled on a joint-custody arrangement and, later, after we both remarried.

As a kindergartner, when he wore tights, the other school children 
teased him: 'Only girls wear tights.' Nick responded: 'Uh, uh, 
Superman wears tights.' I was proud of his self-assuredness and 
individuality. Nick readily rebelled against conventional habits, 
mores and taste. Still, he could be susceptible to peer pressure. At 
11, he was hidden inside grungy flannel, shuffling around in Doc 
Martens. Hennaed hair hung Cobain-like over his eyes.

Throughout his youth, I talked to Nick 'early and often' about drugs. 
I watched for one organisation's early warning signs of teenage 
alcoholism and drug abuse. (No 15: 'Does your child volunteer to 
clean up after adult cocktail parties, but neglect other chores?') 
Indeed, when he was 12, I discovered a vial of marijuana in his 
backpack. I met with his teacher, who said: 'It's normal. Most kids 
try it.' Nick said that it was a mistake and he promised he would not 
use it again.

In his early teens, Nick was into the hippest music and then grew 
bored with it. By the time his favourite artists, from Guns N' Roses 
to Beck to Eminem, had a hit record, Nick had discarded them in 
favour of the retro, the obscure, the ultracontemporary or plain 
bizarre - an eclectic list that included Coltrane, polka and, for a 
memorable period, samba, to which he would cha-cha through the living 
room. His heroes, including Holden Caulfield and Atticus Finch, were 
replaced by an assortment of misanthropes, addicts, drunks, 
depressives and suicides, role models like Burroughs, Bukowski, 
Cobain, Hemingway and Basquiat. Other children watched Disney and 
Star Wars, but Nick preferred Scorsese, David Lynch and Godard.

At 14, when he was suspended from high school for a day for buying 
pot on campus, Nick and my wife and I met with the freshman dean. 'We 
view this as a mistake and an opportunity,' he explained. Nick was 
forced to undergo a day at a drug-and-alcohol programme, but was 
given a second chance. A teacher took Nick under his wing, 
encouraging his interest in marine biology. He surfed with him and 
persuaded him to join the swimming and water-polo teams. Nick had two 
productive and, as far as I know, drug-free years. He showed promise 
as a student actor, artist and writer. For a series of columns in the 
school newspaper, he won the Ernest Hemingway Writing Award for 
high-school journalists, and he published a column in Newsweek.

After his junior year, Nick attended a summer programme in French at 
the American University of Paris. I now know that he spent most of 
his time emulating some of his drunken heroes, though he forgot the 
writing and painting part. His souvenir of his Parisian summer was an 
ulcer. What child has an ulcer at 16?

Back at high school for his senior year, he was still an honours 
student, with a nearly perfect grade-point average. Even as he 
applied to and was accepted at a long list of colleges, one 
senior-class dean told me, half in jest, that Nick set a school 
record for tardiness and cutting classes. My wife and I consulted a 
therapist, and a school counsellor reassured us: 'You're describing 
an adolescent. Nick's candour, unusual especially in boys, is a good 
sign. Keep talking it out with him, and he will get through this.'

His high-school graduation ceremony was held outdoors on the athletic 
field. With his hair freshly buzzed, Nick marched forward and 
accepted his diploma from the school head, kissing her cheek. He 
seemed elated. Maybe everything would be all right after all. 
Afterwards, we invited his friends over for a barbecue. Later we 
learned that one of them had scored some celebratory sensimilla. Nick 
and his friends left our house for a grad-night bash that was held at 
a local recreation centre, where he tried ecstasy for the first time.

A few weeks later, my wife planned to take the kids to the beach. The 
fog had lifted and I was with them in the driveway, helping to pack 
the car. Two county sheriff patrol cars pulled up. When a pair of 
uniformed officers approached, I thought they needed directions, but 
they walked past me and headed for Nick. They handcuffed his wrists 
behind his back, pushed him into the back seat of one of the squad 
cars and drove away. Jasper, then seven, was the only one of us who 
responded appropriately. He wailed, inconsolable for an hour. The 
arrest was a result of Nick's failure to appear in court after being 
cited for marijuana possession, an infraction he 'forgot' to tell me 
about. Still, I bailed him out, confident that the arrest would teach 
him a lesson. Any fear or remorse that he might have felt was 
short-lived, however, blotted out by a new drug - crystal methamphetamine.

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 - teetotallers. I, on the other hand, 
knew about drugs, including methamphetamine. On a Berkeley evening in 
the early Seventies, my college roommate arrived home, yanked the 
thriftshop mirror off the wall and set it upon a coffee table. He 
unfolded an origami packet and poured out its contents on to the 
mirror - a mound of crystalline powder. From his wallet he produced a 
single-edge razor, with which he chipped at the crystals, the steel 
tapping rhythmically on the glass. While arranging the powder in four 
parallel rails, he explained that Michael the Mechanic, our drug 
dealer, had been out of cocaine. In its place, he purchased crystal 
methamphetamine.

I snorted the lines through a rolled-up dollar bill. The chemical 
burned my nasal passages and my eyes watered. Whether the drug is 
sniffed, smoked, swallowed or injected, the body quickly absorbs 
methamphetamine. Once it reaches the circulatory system, it's a 
near-instant flume ride to the central nervous system. When it 
reached mine, I heard cacophonous music like a calliope and felt as 
if Roman candles had been lighted inside my skull. Methamphetamine 
triggers the brain's neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine, which 
spray like bullets from a gangster's tommy gun. The drug destroys the 
receptors and as a result may, over time, permanently reduce dopamine 
levels, sometimes leading to symptoms normally associated with 
Parkinson's disease, such as tremours and muscle twitches. Meth 
increases the heart rate and blood pressure and can cause 
irreversible damage to blood vessels in the brain, which can lead to 
strokes. It can also cause arrhythmia and cardiovascular collapse, 
possibly leading to death. But I felt fantastic - supremely 
confident, euphoric.

After methamphetamine triggers the release of neurotransmitters, it 
blocks their reuptake back into their storage pouches, much as 
cocaine and other stimulants do. Unlike cocaine, however, meth also 
blocks the enzymes that help to break down invasive drugs, so the 
released chemicals float freely until they wear off. Methamphetamine 
remains active for 10 to 12 hours, compared with 45 minutes for 
cocaine. When the dawn began to seep through the cracked window 
blinds, I felt bleak, depleted and agitated. I went to bed and 
eventually slept for a full day, blowing off school.

I never touched methamphetamine again, but my room-mate returned 
again and again to Michael the Mechanic's, and his meth run lasted 
for two weeks. Not long afterwards, he moved away and I lost touch 
with him. I later learned that after college, his life was defined by 
his drug abuse. There were voluntary and court-ordered rehabs, car 
crashes, a house that went up in flames when he fell asleep with a 
burning cigarette in his mouth, ambulance rides to emergency rooms 
after overdoses and accidents and incarcerations, both in hospitals 
and jails. He died on the eve of his 40th birthday.

When I told Nick cautionary stories like this and warned him about 
crystal, I thought that I might have some credibility. I have heard 
drug counsellors tell parents of my generation to lie to our children 
about our past drug use. Famous athletes show up at school assemblies 
or on television and tell kids, 'Man, don't do this stuff, I almost 
died,' and yet there they stand, diamonds, gold, multimillion-dollar 
salaries and 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, and maybe I'll try lying to Daisy and Jasper. Nick, however, 
knew the truth. I don't know how much it mattered. Part of me feels 
solely responsible - if only his mother and I had stayed together; if 
only she and I had lived in the same city after the divorce and had a 
joint-custody arrangement that was easier on him; if only I had set 
stricter limits; if only I had been more consistent. And yet I also 
sense that Nick's course was determined by his first puff of pot and 
sip of wine and sealed with the first hit of speed the summer before 
he began college.

When Nick's therapist said that college would straighten him out, I 
wanted to believe him. When change takes place gradually, it's 
difficult to comprehend its meaning. At what point is a child no 
longer experimenting, no longer a typical teenager, no longer going 
through a phase or a rite of passage? I am astounded - no, appalled - 
by my ability to deceive myself into believing that everything would 
turn out all right in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary.

At the University of California at Berkeley, Nick almost immediately 
began dealing to pay for his escalating meth habit. After three 
months, he dropped out, claiming that he had to pull himself 
together. I encouraged him to check into a drug rehabilitation 
facility, but he refused. (He was over 18, and I could not commit 
him.) He disappeared. When he finally called after a week, his voice 
trembled. It nonetheless brought a wave of relief - he was alive. I 
drove to meet him in a weedy and garbage-strewn alleyway in San 
Rafael. My son, the svelte and muscular swimmer, water-polo player 
and surfer with an ebullient smile, was bruised, sallow, skin and 
bone, and his eyes were vacant black holes. Ill and rambling, he 
spent the next three days curled up in bed.

I was bombarded with advice, much of it contradictory. I was advised 
to kick him out. I was advised not to let him out of my sight. One 
counsellor warned: 'Don't come down too hard on him or his drug use 
will just go underground.' One mother recommended a lock-up school in 
Mexico, where she sent her daughter to live for two years. A police 
officer told me that I should send Nick to a boot camp where 
children, roused and shackled in the middle of the night, are taken by force.

His mother and I decided that we had to do everything possible to get 
Nick into a drug-rehabilitation programme, so we researched them, 
calling recommended facilities, inquiring about their success rates 
for treating meth addicts. These conversations provided my initial 
glimpse into what must be the most chaotic, flailing field of health 
care in America. I was quoted success rates in a range from 20 to 85 
per cent. An admitting nurse at a Northern California hospital 
insisted: 'The true number for meth addicts is in the single digits. 
Anyone who promises more is lying.' But what else could we try? I 
used what was left of my waning influence - the threat of kicking him 
out of the house and withdrawing all of my financial support - to get 
him to commit himself into the Ohlhoff Recovery Program in San 
Francisco. It is a wellrespected programme, recommended by many of 
the experts in the Bay Area. A friend of a friend told me that the 
programme turned around the life of her heroin-addicted son.

Nick trembled when I dropped him off. Driving home afterwards, I felt 
as if I would collapse from more emotion than I could handle. 
Incongruously, I felt I had betrayed him, though I did take some 
small consolation in the fact that I knew where he was; for the first 
time in a while, I slept through the night.

For their initial week, patients were forbidden to use the telephone, 
but Nick managed to call, begging to come home. When I refused, he 
slammed down the receiver. His counsellor reported that he was surly, 
depressed and belligerent, threatening to run away. But he made it 
through the first week, which consisted of morning walks, lectures, 
individual and group sessions with counsellors, 12-step-programme 
meetings and meditation and acupuncture. Family groups were added in 
the second week. My wife and I, other visiting parents and spouses or 
partners, along with our addicts, sat in worn couches and folding 
chairs, and a grandmotherly, whiskyvoiced (though sober for 20 years) 
counsellor led us in conversation.

'Tell your parents what it means that they're here with you, Nick,' she said.

'Whatever. It's fine.'

By the fourth and final week, he seemed open and apologetic, claiming 
to be determined to take responsibility for the mess he'd made of his 
life. He said that he knew that he needed more time in treatment, so 
we agreed to his request to move into the transitional residential 
programme. He did, and then three days later he bolted. At some 
point, parents may become inured to a child's self-destruction, but I 
never did. I called the police and hospital emergency rooms. I didn't 
hear anything for a week. When he finally called, I told him that he 
had two choices as far as I was concerned: another try at rehab, or 
the streets. He maintained that it was unnecessary - he would stop on 
his own - but I told him that it wasn't negotiable. He listlessly 
agreed to try again.

I called another recommended programme, this one at the St Helena 
Hospital Center for Behavioural Health, improbably located in the 
Napa Valley wine country. Many families drain every penny, mortgaging 
their homes and bankrupting their college funds and retirement 
accounts, trying successive drug-rehab programmes. My insurance and 
his mother's paid most of the costs of these programmes. Without this 
coverage, I'm not sure what we would have done. By then I was no 
longer sanguine about rehabilitation, but in spite of our experience 
and the questionable success rates, there seemed to be nothing more 
effective for meth addiction.

Patients in the St Helena programme keep journals. In Nick's, he 
wrote one day: 'How the hell did I get here? It doesn't seem that 
long ago that I was on the water-polo team. I was an editor of the 
school newspaper, acting in the spring play, obsessing about which 
girls I liked, talking Marx and Dostoevsky with my classmates. The 
kids in my class will be starting their junior years of college. This 
isn't so much sad as baffling. It all seemed so positive and 
harmless, until it wasn't.'

By the time he completed the fourth week, Nick once again seemed 
determined to stay away from drugs. He applied to a number of small 
liberalarts schools on the East Coast. His transcripts were still 
good enough for him to be accepted at the colleges to which he 
applied, and he selected Hampshire, located in a former apple orchard 
in Western Massachusetts.

In August, my wife and I flew east with him for freshman orientation. 
At the welcoming picnic, Karen and I surveyed the incoming freshmen 
for potential drug dealers. We probably would have seen this on most 
campuses, but we were not reassured when we noticed a number of 
students wearing T-shirts decorated with marijuana leaves, portraits 
of Bob Marley smoking a spliff and logos for the Church of LSD.

In spite of his protestations and maybe (though I'm not sure) his 
good intentions, and in spite of his room in substance-free housing, 
Nick didn't stand a chance. He tried for a few weeks. When he stopped 
returning my phone calls, I assumed that he had relapsed. I asked a 
friend, who was visiting Amherst, to stop by to check on him. He 
found Nick holed up in his room. He was obviously high. I later 
learned that not only had Nick relapsed, but he had supplemented 
methamphetamine with heroin and morphine, because, he explained, at 
the time, meth was scarce in Western Massachusetts. 'Everyone told me 
not to try it, you know?' Nick later said about heroin. 'They were 
like, "Whatever you do, stay away from dope." I wish I'd got the same 
warning about meth. By the time I got around to doing heroin, I 
really didn't see what the big deal was.'

I prepared to follow through on my threat and stop paying his tuition 
unless he returned to rehab, but I called a health counsellor, who 
advised patience, saying that often 'relapse is part of recovery'. A 
few days later, Nick called and told me that he would stop using. He 
went to 12-step programme meetings and, he claimed, suffered the 
detox and early meth withdrawal that is characterised by insuperable 
depression and acute anxiety - a drawn-out agony. He kept in close 
touch and got through the year, doing well in some writing and 
history classes, newly in love with a girl who drove him to Narcotics 
Anonymous meetings and eager to see Jasper and Daisy. His homecoming 
was marked by trepidation, but also promise, which is why it was so 
devastating when we discovered the truth.

When Nick left, I sunk into a wretched and sickeningly familiar 
malaise, alternating with a debilitating panic. One morning, Jasper 
came into the kitchen, holding a satin box, a gift from a friend upon 
his return from China, in which he kept his savings of $8. Jasper 
looked perplexed. 'I think Nick took my money,' he said. How do you 
explain to an eight-year-old why his beloved big brother steals from him?

After a week, I succumbed to my desperation and went to try to find 
him. I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin County to San 
Francisco, to the Haight, where I knew he often hung out. The 
neighbourhood, in spite of some gentrification, retains its 
Sixties-era funkiness. Kids - tattooed, pierced, track-marked, stoned 
- - loiter in doorways. Of course I didn't find him.

After another few weeks, he called, collect: 'Hey, Pop, it's me.' I 
asked if he would meet me. No matter how unrealistic, I retained a 
sliver of hope that I could get through to him. That's not quite 
accurate. I knew I couldn't, but at least I could put my fingertips 
on his cheek.

For our meeting, Nick chose Steps of Rome, a cafe on Columbus Avenue 
in North Beach, our neighbourhood after his mother and I divorced. In 
those days, Nick played in Washington Square Park opposite the 
Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, down the hill from our Russian 
Hill flat. We would eat early dinner at Vanessi's, an Italian 
restaurant now gone. The waiters, when they saw Nick, then towheaded, 
with a gap between his front teeth, would lift him up and set him on 
telephone books stacked on a stool at the counter. Nick was little 
enough so that after dinner, when he got sleepy, I could carry him 
home, his tiny arms wrapped around my neck.

Since reason and love, the forces I had come to rely on, had betrayed 
me, I was in uncharted territory as I sat at a corner table nervously 
waiting for him. Steps of Rome was deserted, other than a couple of 
waiters folding napkins at the bar. I ordered coffee, racking my 
brain for the one thing I could say that I hadn't thought of that 
could get through to him. Drug-and-alcohol counsellors, most of them 
former addicts, tell fathers like me it's not your fault. They preach 
the Three Cs: 'You didn't cause it, you can't control it, and you 
can't cure it.' But who among us doesn't believe that we could have 
done something differently that would have helped? 'It hurts so bad 
to think I cannot save him, protect him, keep him out of harm's way, 
shield him from pain,' wrote Thomas Lynch, the undertaker, poet and 
essayist, about his son, a drug addict and alcoholic. 'What good are 
fathers if not for these things?' I waited until it was more than 
half an hour past our meeting time, recognising the mounting, 
suffocating worry and also the bitterness and anger. I had been 
waiting for Nick for years. At night, past his curfew, I waited for 
the car's grinding engine when it pulled into the driveway and went 
silent, the slamming door, footsteps and the front door opening with 
a click, despite his attempt at stealth. Our dog would yelp a 
half-hearted bark. When Nick was late, I always assumed catastrophe.

After 45 minutes' waiting at Steps of Rome, I decided that he wasn't 
coming - what had I expected? - and left the cafe. Still, I walked 
around the block, returned again, peered into the cafe and then 
trudged around the block again. Another half-hour later, I was ready 
to go home - really, maybe - when I saw him. Walking down the street, 
looking down, his gangly arms limp at his sides, he looked more than 
ever like a ghostly, hollow Egon Schiele self-portrait, debauched and 
emaciated. I returned his hug, my arms wrapping around his vapourous 
spine, and kissed his cheek. We embraced like that and sat down at a 
table by the window. He couldn't look me in the eye. No apologies for 
being late. He asked how I was, how were the little kids? He folded 
and unfolded a soda straw and rocked anxiously in his chair; his 
fingers trembled, and he clenched his jaw and ground his teeth. He 
pre-empted any questions, saying: 'I'm doing. Great. I'm doing what I 
need to be doing, being responsible for myself for the first time in 
my life.' I asked if he was ready to kick, to return to the living, 
to which he said, 'Don't start.' When I said that Jasper and Daisy 
missed him, he cut me off. 'I can't deal with that. Don't guilt-trip 
me.' Nick drank down his coffee, held on to his stomach. I watched 
him rise and leave.

Through Nick's drug addiction, I learned that parents can bear almost 
anything. Every time we reach a point where we feel as if we can't 
bear any more, we do. Things had descended in a way that I never 
could have imagined, and I shocked myself with my ability to 
rationalise and tolerate things that were once unthinkable. He's just 
experimenting. Going through a stage. It's only marijuana. He gets 
high only on weekends. At least he's not using heroin. He would never 
resort to needles. At least he's alive.

A fortnight later, Nick wrote an email message to his mother and 
asked for help. After they talked, he agreed to meet with a friend of 
our family who took him to her home in upstate New York, where he 
could detox. He slept for 20 or more hours a day for a week and began 
to work with a therapist who specialised in drug addiction. After six 
or so weeks, he seemed stronger and somewhat less desolate. His 
mother helped him move into an apartment in Brooklyn, and he got a 
job. When he finally called, he told me that he would never again use 
methamphetamine, though he made no such vows about marijuana and 
alcohol. With this news, I braced myself for the next disaster. A new 
UCLA study confirms that I had reason to expect one: recovering meth 
addicts who stay off alcohol and marijuana are significantly less 
likely to relapse.

Two or so months later, the phone rang at five on a Sunday morning. 
Every parent of a drugaddicted child recoils at a ringing telephone 
at that hour. I was informed that Nick was in a hospital emergency 
room in Brooklyn after an overdose. He was in critical condition and 
on life support.

After two hours, the doctor called to tell me that his vital signs 
had levelled off. Still later, he called to say that Nick was no 
longer on the critical list. From his hospital bed, when he was 
coherent enough to talk, Nick sounded desperate. He asked to go into 
another programme, said it was his only chance.

So, without reluctance this time, Nick returned to rehab. After six 
or so months, he moved to Santa Monica, near his mother. He lived in 
a sober-living home, attended meetings regularly and began working 
with a sponsor. He had several jobs, including one at a 
drug-and-alcohol rehabilitation programme in Malibu. Last April, 
after celebrating his second year sober, he relapsed again, 
disappearing for two weeks. His sponsor, who had become a close 
friend of Nick's, assured me: 'Nick won't stay out long. He's not 
having any fun.' Of course I hoped that he was right, but I was no 
less worried than I was other times he had disappeared worried that 
he could overdose or otherwise cause irreparable damage.

But he didn't. He returned and withdrew on his own, helped by his 
sponsor and other friends. He was ashamed - mortified - that he 
slipped. He redoubled his efforts. Ten months later, of course, I am 
relieved (once again) and hopeful (once again). Nick is working and 
writing a children's book and articles and movie reviews for an 
online magazine. He is biking and swimming. He seems emphatically 
committed to his sobriety, but I have learned to check my optimism.

We recently visited Nick. His eyes were clear, his body strong and 
his laugh easy and honest. At night, he read to Jasper and Daisy, 
picking up The Witches where he left off nearly three years before. 
Soon thereafter, a letter arrived for Jasper, who is now 11. Nick 
wrote: 'I'm looking for a way to say I'm sorry more than with just 
the meaninglessness of those two words. I also know that this money 
can never replace all that I stole from you in terms of the fear and 
worry and craziness that I brought to your young life. The truth is, 
I don't know how to say I'm sorry. I love you, but that has never 
changed. I care about you, but I always have. I'm proud of you, but 
none of that makes it any better. I guess what I can offer you is 
this: as you're growing up, whenever you need me - to talk or just 
whatever - I'll be able to be there for you now. That is something 
that I could never promise you before. I will be here for you. I will 
live, and build a life, and be someone that you can depend on. I hope 
that means more than this stupid note and these eight dollar bills.' 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake