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 meth.

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 methamphetamine
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 publications like
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 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. He'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."

For information about methamphetamine use, visit the Web site of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse at www.nida.nih.gov.

For times and locations of local Crystal Meth Anonymous meetings,
call (415) 835-4747, visit norcalcma.org or e-mail info@norcalcma.org.

For times and locations of local Al-Anon and Alateen meetings, call
(415) 626-5633.