You know The Monster at the End of the Book? It stars Grover, one of the few Sesame Street characters of my childhood to survive Elmo and the onslaught of his insipid baby talk. Aware that a monster lurks at the end of the story, Grover tries using ropes and bricks and all kinds of one-dimensional heroics to keep the reader from turning the page. Finally, though, we come face-to-face with the monster: Grover, giggling in all his fuzzy blue glory.
As the denouement to a yarn aimed at toddlers, it’s meant to be reassuring. See? No monsters under the bed — just you and me, sweetums. I don’t know about you, but as an adult with a psyche crawling with gremlins, I have a hard time getting to the surprise resolution without flashing on the immortal words of Grover’s grownup compadre, Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
They’re both right, Grover and Pogo, the enemy at the end of every decent fable is indeed the storyteller him or herself. And this is equal parts good news and bad.
I don’t know about you, but becoming a parent brought me a new, terrifying awareness of the implications of this. When my babies were tiny, really tiny, I’d listen to them snuffle and gurgle and take those impossibly long and irregular pauses between breaths and wonder whether their tissuey lungs would start to function in a way that was steady and predictable. They did, of course, but by then I was on to worrying about SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).
After that, I woke sweaty from nightmares where one had toddled into the street or, when we hit tricycle territory, shot out in front of a car. (Okay, so in my broken sleep it was actually a produce wholesaler’s truck — which might have had to do with the early-morning deliveries to a health-food restaurant across the street.)
As nightmares tend to do, these dreams would tumble from one bone-baring horror to another seamlessly and nonsensically. It didn’t matter that I understood the odds against any of these freak accidents befalling my babies. Until I developed some parental calluses, there were moments when I couldn’t gaze upon either of them without feeling both rapture and dread.
“Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability,” is how author David Sheff puts it. “It is at once sublime and terrifying.” This emotional tug-of-war is visible on every page of Sheff’s new memoir about his son’s addiction to methamphetamine, Beautiful Boy.
The name alone tells you where we’re going, doesn’t it: One absorbing, riveting page after another, inexorably right toward the monster.
The cover is spare, the title tentatively etched on a field of white. To its right is a photo of a child captured in a moment of joy; he’s little more than a tangle of hair, airborne with limbs extended, soaring out of the frame and, you understand intuitively, out of his father’s embrace. Before you so much as crack the book’s spine, you know it will break your heart.
Sheff is a storied writer with credits including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, and Fortune, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when, already in the book’s thrall in its early pages, I found myself besotted with his beautiful boy. Of course, this only rendered the losses that followed all the more soul-stealing.
Despite what seems a mostly promising and idyllic Marin County childhood, Sheff’s son Nic tumbles out of control. He gets drunk at 11, starts doing drugs at 14, and succumbs to meth at 17. He sobers up and relapses, time and again.
It’s a compelling read, tracing Nic’s descent and the roller coaster on which it placed the entire family. It’s unflinchingly honest, I’m convinced, and yet you get to the end of the book without really understanding why — why this child, this family, and not some other? David Sheff owns some tough truths about his contributions to his son’s behavior, but none so harsh as to easily explain the devastation.
This is, in many ways, the point. Ever since I became a parent I’ve read the headlines with a deluded eye on constant patrol for differences between me and the unlucky. I don’t keep pit bulls/deal crack/store semi-automatic weapons in the hall closet; that won’t happen to us. It’s magical thinking, I know, but it allows me to put my kids on the school bus every day.
As his addiction wrests him from his family, Nic commits one betrayal after another. He steals $8 from his 8-year-old brother. He breaks into his grandmother’s house and crashes on the floor of her laundry room. He cons his father, again and again, into thinking that this time he’s ready to get clean. It’s heartbreaking, but no more than Sheff’s description of wanting it to be true so badly he allows himself to believe it.
Addicts’ loved ones are counseled to look after themselves first and foremost. And yet who can do that when his or her child’s life is at stake? Repeatedly, Nic’s parents crisscross the country, retrieving him when he crashes, emaciated, injured, and occasionally psychotic. They keep trying despite dismal statistics forecasting failure. They talk his way into treatment programs when he reaches out, and summon the resolve to cut him off when he’s using. Sheff wants the beautiful boy back but admits that he’d settle for his evil twin’s disappearance.
“Is he in mortal peril? His beautiful brain, poisoned, possessed, on methamphetamine,” Sheff writes. “I wanted to remove him erase him elide him from my brain, but he is there. We are connected to our children no matter what. They are interwoven into each cell and inseparable from every neuron; they supersede our consciousness, dwell in our every hollow and cavity and recess with our most primitive instincts, deeper even than our identities, deeper even than our selves.”
Nic Sheff has written a companion memoir, Tweak. Not many 25-year-olds are capable of such difficult self-revelation, and there is much to applaud in the son’s account. Yet this is the tougher of the two books to get through; not because of the depravity but because it drags with its succession of drug-binge scenes. Have you ever watched, stone cold sober, while a bunch of people get high and watch cartoons? Yeah….
(An aside: Tweak is marketed as a young adult book, and when I asked for it at a local superstore, I found it alongside far more innocent materials. Never mind that Nic Sheff tells all: rough, meth-fueled sex, his forays into prostitution, and other unsavory stuff. As a teen, I feasted on Go Ask Alice and other dark volumes, and I ended up too terrified to stray far into Narcoticville. Still, I’m just sayin’.)
But most problematic — and perhaps I’m being unfair here — Tweak left me with the nagging sense that Nic Sheff hadn’t quite come clean. Near the end, he alludes to factors he feels played a role in his addiction. He hints that he competed with both parents, journalists with constant exposure to the glitterati. And he professes absorption with the hip and famous, and a fascination with the romance of drug culture.
But he never sold me. And as I wondered what, if anything, he was leaving out, I suspect this was a small taste of what it was like to be his parent while he was using. To live, as his father so eloquently describes, in denial, wanting to believe your child’s reassurances, yet knowing he is slipping ever further from you.
“I have been terrorized by the fear that he would die,” the elder Sheff writes. “If he did, it would leave a permanent crack in my soul. I would never fully recover. But I also know that if he were to die, or for that matter, if he stays high, I would live on — with that crack. I would grieve. I would grieve forever. But I have been grieving for him since the drugs took over — grieving for the part of him that is missing.”
The monster at the end of each book, father’s and son’s, does indeed have a familiar face. And neither is willing to hand his readers the kind of tidy explanation that would allow us to rationalize that, for us, things will certainly work out differently.
If it sounds awful, it is. Yet it’s also a compelling story about the singular strength of a love that allows one to see, simultaneously, tragedy and promise. It’s not so much a story of redemption as it is of acceptance. And by the end, each man manages to forgive the other and, more miraculous, himself.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction
By David Sheff, Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24
Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines
By Nic Sheff, Atheneum, 2007, $16.99
