Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines Read online

  NIC SHEFF was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he would smoke pot regularly, do cocaine and Ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he had always felt like he could quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer to convince him otherwise.

  In a voice that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling the compelling, heartbreaking, and true story of his relapse and his journey toward recovery.

  MORE PRAISE FOR TWEAK

  “The harrowing story of a decade of youthful drug abuse.”

  —The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Riveting.”

  —Playboy

  “Sheff details his downward spiral, and the reader feels his desperation….

  —VOYA

  “Graphic and detailed memoir [that] painfully depicts the author’s addiction to methamphetamines and his tortuous, tentative journey to health.”

  —School Library Journal

  “You begin to understand how love can miss its mark and spiral toward tragedy.”

  —Reading Room

  “Searingly honest.”

  —Booklist

  TWEAK

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Sheff

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 2008923615

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0333-3

  ISBN-10: 1-4391-0333-X

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonandSchuster.com

  For Lee and my friend in New York

  who took me in. You are both

  beautiful, inspiring, powerful women.

  You are the two people I respect

  and admire most in the world.

  Thank you.

  How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing?

  —John Lennon

  NOTE TO READERS:

  This work is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Certain names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed, and certain individuals are composites. Dialogue and events have been recreated from memory and, in some cases, have been compressed to convey the substance of what was said or what occurred.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AFTERWORD

  PART ONE

  DAY 1

  I’d heard rumors about what happened to Lauren. I mean, I never even knew her that well but we’d sort of hung out a few times in high school. Actually, I was sleeping with her for about two weeks. She had moved to San Francisco when I was a senior and we met somehow—at a party or something. Back in high school it was just pot, maybe I’d do some acid and mushrooms on the weekend.

  But I smoked pot every day. I was seventeen and had been accepted at prestigious universities across the country and I figured a little partying was due me. I’d worked hard those last three and a half years. Sure I’d had some problems smoking weed and drinking too much when I was younger, but that was all behind me. I was smart. I was on the swim team. My writing had been published in Newsweek. I was a great big brother. I got along with my dad and stepmom. I loved them. They were some of my best friends. So I just started smoking some pot and what harm could that do me anyway? Hell, my dad used to smoke pot. Most everyone in my family did. Our friends did—it was totally accepted.

  But with me things were different. In high school I was rolling blunts and smoking them in the car as I drove to school. Every break in classes had me driving off to get high. We’d go into the hills of Marin County, dropping acid or eating mushrooms—walking through the dry grass and overgrown cypress trees, giggling and babbling incoherently. Plus I was drinking more and more, sometimes during the day. I almost always blacked out, so I could remember little to nothing of what’d happened. It just affected me in a way that didn’t seem normal.

  When I was eleven my family went snowboarding up in Tahoe, and a friend and I snuck into the liquor cabinet after dinner. We poured a little bit from each bottle into a glass, filling it almost three-quarters of the way with the different-colored, sweet-smelling liquid. I was curious to know what it felt like to get good and proper drunk. The taste was awful. My friend drank a little bit and stopped, unable to take anymore. The thing was, I couldn’t stop.

  I drank some and then I just had to drink more until the whole glass was drained empty. I’m not sure why. Something was driving me that I couldn’t identify and still don’t comprehend. Some say it’s in the genes. My grandfather drank himself to death before I was born. I’m told I resemble him more than anyone else—a long face, with eyes like drops of water running down. Anyway, that night I threw up for probably an hour straight and then passed out on the bathroom floor.

  I woke up with almost no memory of what I’d done. My excuse for the vomit everywhere was food poisoning. It scared me, honestly, and I didn’t drink again like that for a long time.

  Instead I started smoking pot. When I was twelve I was smoking pot every day—sneaking off into the bushes during recess. And that pretty much continued through high school.

  Lauren and I really never got very close back then. When I heard later that she’d been put in rehab for cocaine abuse and severe bulimia, I guess it wasn’t that surprising. We’d both been really screwed up all the time and I had a history of dating, well, not the most balanced girls. I remember being ashamed to bring her to my house. I remember not wanting my parents to meet her. We’d come in late, late and leave early in the morning—whispering so as not to wake up my little brother and sister. Maybe it was them I wanted to shield from Lauren the most. Or, not from Lauren so much as, well, the person I was becoming. I was ashamed of my behavior, but still I kept going forward. It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. But control was something I’d lost a long time ago.

  Anyway, Lauren was not someone I thought about a whole lot. When she approaches me, I don’t even recognize her at first. It’s been five years. She yells my name:

  “Nic Sheff.”

  I jump, turning around to look at her.

  She is wearing big Jackie O sunglasses and her dyed black hair is pulled back tight. Her skin is pale, pale white and her features are petite and delicately carved. The San Francisco air is cold, even though the sun has broken through the fog, and she has a long black coat pulled around her.

  So I think…think, think. Then I remember.

  “L-Lauren, right?”

  “Yeah, don’t pretend like you don’t remember me.”

  “No, I…”

  “Whatever. What’re you doing here?”

  It’s a good question.

  I’d been sober exactly eighteen months on April 1st, just two days ago. I’d made so much progress. My life was suddenly working, you know? I had a steady job at a rehab in Malibu. I’d gotten back all these things I’d lost—car, apartment, my relationship with my family. It’d seemed like, after countless rehabs and sober livings, I had finally beaten my drug problem. And yet there I was, standing on Haight Street, drunk on Stoli and stoned out on Ambien, which I’d stolen from the med room at that rehab.

  Honestly, I was as surprised by my own actions as anyone else. The morning of my relapse, I had no idea I was actual
ly going to do it. Not that there weren’t ominous signs. In the twelve-step program they tell you to get a sponsor. Mine was a man named Spencer. He was around forty, strong, with a square face and hair that stood on end. He had a wife and a three-year-old daughter. He spent hours talking with me about recovery. He helped me get into cycling and walked me through the twelve steps. We’d ride our bikes together along the Pacific Coast Highway, up Latigo Canyon, or wherever. He’d relate his own experience getting sober from chronic cocaine addiction. But I stopped calling him as often. Maybe I felt like I didn’t need his help anymore. I seldom went to meetings, and when I did, my mind would talk to me the whole time about how much better I was than everyone else—or how much worse I was, depending on the day. I’d stopped exercising as frequently. I’d stopped taking the psych meds they had me on—a mixture of mood stabilizers and antidepressants. I’d started smoking again. Plus there was Zelda.

  Zelda was a woman I thought I was madly in love with. She was fourteen years older than I was and, well, she was also engaged to marry another guy, a wealthy real-estate broker named Mike. When I started sleeping with her, I tried to justify it to myself. I figured it was her decision and I wasn’t really doing anything wrong and it was just for fun and blah, blah, blah. Basically, I thought I could get away with it. I mean, I thought I could stay detached emotionally.

  I couldn’t.

  She came to represent for me everything I thought would make my life perfect. After all, she’d been married to this famous actor and was an actress and grew up in Los Angeles, raised by her famous uncle who was also in the movie business. Everyone seems to know her in L.A. She’s sort of a celebrity, you know? Being with her became my obsession.

  Ultimately, however, she wouldn’t leave her boyfriend for me and got pregnant with his child. I was crushed. I mean, I just couldn’t handle it. So yesterday I relapsed, driving up the 5, drinking from a bottle of Jäger.

  So now I’m standing on Haight Street and Lauren, this girl I haven’t seen or thought about in five years, is here, in her long black coat, asking me what I’m doing.

  I’d driven up from L.A. the night before and slept in my old, falling-apart Mazda, parked in a lot on the edge of the Presidio—a great expanse of forest and abandoned army housing that stretches out to the cliffs overlooking the Pacific and the San Francisco Bay. A friend of mine, Akira, had once lived there. He occupied a basement apartment on the edge of the Presidio. I’d hoped to find him still living there, but after I wandered around the house some—looking into the dust-smeared windows—it was clear that the place was deserted. It was Akira who’d actually introduced me to crystal meth when I was eighteen. He was a friend of a friend. He did a lot of drugs and we immediately gravitated toward each other. Somehow that always seemed to happen—we addicts can always find one another. There must be some strange addict radar or something.

  Akira was like me, but more strung out at the time. He had dyed red, curling hair and dark, dark eyes. He was thin, emaciated, with hollowed-out features and narrow, dirty fingers. When he offered me that first line of meth, I didn’t hesitate. Growing up I’d heard, you know, never to do heroin. Like, the warnings were everywhere and I was scared—do heroin, get hooked. No one ever mentioned crystal to me. I’d done a little coke, Ecstasy, whatever—I could take it or leave it. But early that morning, when I took those off-white crushed shards up that blue, cut plastic straw—well, my whole world pretty much changed after that. There was a feeling like—my God, this is what I’ve been missing my entire life. It completed me. I felt whole for the first time.

  I guess I’ve pretty much spent the last four years chasing that first high. I wanted desperately to feel that wholeness again. It was like, I don’t know, like everything else faded out. All my dreams, my hopes, ambitions, relationships—they all fell away as I took more and more crystal up my nose. I dropped out of college twice, my parents kicked me out, and, basically, my life unraveled. I broke into their house—I would steal checks from my father and write them out to myself to pay for my habit. When I had a job at a coffee shop, I stole hundreds of dollars from the register. Eventually I got arrested for a possession charge. My little brother and sister watched me get carted away in handcuffs. When my then seven-year-old brother tried to protect me, running to grab me from the armed policemen, they screamed for him to “get back.” His small body crumpled on the asphalt and he burst into body-shaking tears, sobbing and gasping for breath.

  Then there were the treatment centers, two in northern California, one in Manhattan, and one in Los Angeles. I’ve spent the last three years in and out of twelve-step programs. Throughout all of it, the underlying craving never really left me. And that was accompanied by the illusion that, the next time, things would be different—I’d be able to handle it better. I didn’t want to keep hurting people. I didn’t want to keep hurting myself. A girlfriend of mine once said to me, “I don’t understand, why don’t you just stop?”

  I couldn’t think of an answer. The fact was, I couldn’t just stop. That sounds like a cop-out, but it’s the truth. It’s like I’m being held captive by some insatiable monster that will not let me stop. All my values, all my beliefs, everything I care about, they all go away the moment I get high. There is a sort of insanity that takes over. I convince myself and believe very strongly that this time, this time, it will be different. I tell myself that, after such a long time clean, these last eighteen months, I can go back to casual use. So I walk down to the Haight and start talking to the first street kid who asks me for a cigarette.

  This turns out to be Destiny. He is a boy around my age, twenty or twenty-one, with snarled dreads and striking blue eyes. He has the narrow face of a fox or coyote and he’s hiding a can of beer indiscreetly in the sleeve of his oversize jacket. He is distracted and out of it as I’m talking to him. I keep trying to get him to focus on what I’m saying. Eventually, he agrees to introduce me to a friend of his who deals speed, so long as I buy him another beer.

  “Dude,” he says, his voice thick and strained, “I’m gonna tell you straight, man, I’m fo’realze. My boy’s gonna hook you up fat, that’s no joke. You ask anybody, homes, they’ll tell you, Destiny is all right. Everyone’s cool with me ’cause I be cool with everyone.”

  He rambles on like that, pausing only to high-five pretty girls as they pass. As for me, the vodka and sleeping pills have calmed me down enough to keep me breathing through all this—though the blind hungering for the high that only meth can bring has me pretty anxious. There’d been times, in the past, where I got burned copping drugs on the street. On Mission Street I tried to buy some heroin once and came away with a balloon filled with a chunk of black soap.

  I smoke cigarettes, one after the other, trying to keep Destiny on point—getting the phone number of his connection. It was right before Lauren stopped me that Destiny told me to wait while he went and got his “boy’s” number from a friend. He walked off down the street and then Lauren is standing there, asking me what I’m doing.

  My first instinct, of course, is to lie. The wind is blowing the street clear and Lauren takes off her sunglasses, revealing those transparent green eyes of hers. What I say is, “Actually, I just moved back here from L.A. where I’d been sober over a year, but now I’m doing the whole relapse thing and I’m just waiting to hook up some meth. I heard you had some trouble like that too. Is that true?”

  If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it.

  “Yeah,” she says, her voice light and soft. “How much are you getting?”

  “A gram, I hope. What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to get my tattoo filled in. But, well, now I guess I’m going with you, aren’t I? You need any money?”

  “Uh, no.”

  She puts her glasses back on. “What about a car?”

  “Uh, yeah, we could use your car. Mine’s over on Lake Street.”

  “All right, then.”

  What I said about the money is sort of true. I ha
ve three thousand dollars saved up and, for me, that is a lot of money. I’m sure that it’ll be enough to get me started on a life working and using in San Francisco. The rehab I’d worked at in Malibu catered to wealthy, often celebrity, clients. They paid well and, sober, I had few expenses. I can afford a sixty-dollar gram. In the next couple days, I’ll start looking for work. I mean, I’ve got it all figured out. Really.

  We stand watching the people on the street, walking from shop to shop.

  “What’ve you been doing?” I ask. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Five years. But, like you said, I had some trouble. I’m working now, though—for my mom. I have about four months clean.”

  “But you’re over it.”

  “Hell, I’ve just been waiting for the right person to go out with.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look good.”

  “Thank you. It’s nice to see you, too.”

  “Yeah.” I put a hand on her shoulder, feeling her body tense up. “Here he comes.”

  Destiny is sort of strutting or limping or something down the street. I introduce him to Lauren.

  “Rockin’,” he says. “We can go meet him in, like, half an hour. Here’s his number.” He hands me a crumpled piece of paper. “You gonna get me that beer, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll go get my car,” says Lauren.

  I walk into the liquor store on the corner and buy two 40s of Olde E and another pack of Export As. Lauren pulls her green Nissan around and we pile in—me in front, Destiny in back. I pass him one of the 40s and drink a bunch of mine down. Lauren refuses to take it when I offer her some, but she pops a few Klonopins ’cause she says she’s gonna freak out if she doesn’t. She gives me one and I figure it won’t do anything since I used to take so much of it, but I chew it up anyway, hoping it might take the edge off or something.