David Sheff and his 25-year-old son, Nic, are so close these days, so much on the same wavelength, that they sometimes finish each other’s sentences. There was a time when they weren’t even speaking.
Both Sheffs have books just out — each, coincidentally, beginning with an epigram from John Lennon — and over breakfast in New York recently they described in almost exactly the same terms the experience of reading the other’s work.
“It was very, very painful,” Nic Sheff said.
“It was excruciating,” his father said.
Nic’s book, “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines,” is a first-person account of his drug addiction, which began while he was still in high school (where he learned to shoot up from studying a diagram on the Internet) and lasted for more than a decade. For much of that time he was living on the street, prostituting himself, selling drugs occasionally (though he was never very good at it) and eating food salvaged from Dumpsters; he would turn up in his parents’ lives occasionally, sometimes to steal from them. (David Sheff and Nic’s mother divorced when Nic was 4; she moved to Los Angeles, and Nic grew up with his father in Northern California.)
In and out of treatment numerous times, Nic had several brushes with the law and once nearly died of an overdose. Another time he almost lost an arm when an infected needle puncture grew to the size of a baseball. In the first half of the book, especially, he writes about these experiences with harrowing vividness and detachment, as if he were watching someone else. He says that the first time he took meth, it felt like a gift, and he thought, “My God, this is what I’ve been missing my entire life.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/books/26meth.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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