Beautiful Things, Hunter Biden [good book recommendations .txt] 📗

our room, Beau would call out to me from his bed, “Good night, bud. See you in the morning,” and I’d have to call back, “Okay.” If I called out anything else, or if I just kept quiet—which I sometimes did, just to mess with him in a little-brother sort of way—Beau would stay up and pester me until I said it. For Beau, it was an obsessive, superstitious ritual: as long as he said, “Good night, bud,” and I answered, “Okay,” he believed that nothing could stop us from waking up to each other in the morning.

I reenacted that send-off with myself many nights inside those sad little motel rooms dotted along I-95. With the muted rumble of semis barreling down the nearby highway and the inane chatter and cackles of other residents drifting through my door from the parking lot, I’d call out aloud, in the dark, “Good night, buddy. See you in the morning.”

There was no response, of course, which only made Beau’s absence more acute. Sometimes I woke in a panic because the nightmare my brother worried so much about had come true: nobody had responded “okay,” and now Beau really, truly, undeniably wasn’t there.

So I’d chant the Hail Mary, like a mantra, like a hymn. Sometimes I went on for what seemed like hours. I couldn’t fall asleep, and I couldn’t stop repeating it. If I did, the pain of Beau’s distance came flooding back.

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord is with thee…

One day, out of the blue, three or four weeks into this madness, my mother called.

She said that she was having a family dinner at the house, that I should come, even stay in Delaware for a few days. It would be great; we hadn’t had everyone together in ages. I was in lousy shape but it sounded appealing. I pulled out of a motel parking lot, said goodbye to all that, and headed to Wilmington.

I believe I arrived on a Friday night. I walked into the house, bright and homey as always, and immediately saw my three daughters. I knew then that something was up: Naomi had come in from New York, where she was in law school at Columbia; Finnegan came in from Philadelphia, where she was at Penn; and Maisy, then a high school senior, had come over from Kathleen’s house, in Washington. I then saw my mom and dad, smiling awkwardly, looking pained.

A moment later, I spotted two counselors from a rehab center that I’d once gone to in Pennsylvania. That was it.

“Not a chance,” I said.

My dad suddenly looked terrified.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he cried out. “I’m so scared. Tell me what to do.”

My flat reply:

“Not fucking this.”

It was awful.

I was awful.

It devolved from there into a charged, agonized debacle. I refused to sit down with the counselors, refused to sit with my dad. Everybody was crying, which only made me angrier.

“Don’t ever ambush me like this again,” I told my dad, and bolted out of the house.

He chased me down the driveway. He grabbed me, swung me around, and hugged me. He held me tight in the dark and cried for the longest time. Everybody was outside now. When I tried to get in my car, one of my girls took the keys and screamed, “Dad, you can’t go!” I shouted back at her, “You’re not doing this!” I lashed out at my mother for deceiving me. I lashed out at I don’t know who else. It was a raw, appalling experience for all of them.

To end it, I agreed to check into a rehab center, though not the one that the two counselors there had come from. I made up some excuse. It was nonsense; I always had a million excuses. Dad pleaded with me, “Anything. Please!” I could be suitably functional in high-pressure situations like that. I finally said I would go to another center nearby, in Maryland. Somebody immediately called to make arrangements.

Hallie picked me up late that night and drove me the thirty miles to the center. We were done, but I guess we had that much left. We argued the whole way until we fell silent. When we got to the rehab center, I had her drop me off at the front gate. I walked through the lobby doors and, as soon as I saw her drive off, called an Uber. I told the staff there that I’d return in the morning, then caught my ride and checked into a hotel in Beltsville, Maryland, near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

For the next two days, while everybody who’d been at my parents’ house thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag.

I then boarded a plane for California and ran and ran and ran.

Until I met Melissa.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SAVED

By the time my plane touched down in Los Angeles in March 2019, I had no plan beyond the moment-to-moment demands of the crack pipe.

I was committed to one thing: vanishing for good. That was my lone, next-level goal. No matter how low I’d been before, a voice deep inside had always fought to pull me out of my nosedive. It’s why I’d allowed my uncle Jimmy to haul me from a West Hollywood hotel room months earlier and escort me to a rehab center. That turned out to be an unsuccessful three-week stab at sobriety, but it still left me with a glimmer of hope and striving to climb out of my ditch. It’s why I sought out something as fraught and audacious as ketamine therapy when I drove up to cold, gray Massachusetts that winter, as botched and pathetic as the attempt turned out to be.

I would take one step forward and ten steps back—but I was still taking steps. I didn’t want to drown in addiction’s quicksand. I did not want those attempts to fail.

I just couldn’t