Yet when school started that fall, something changed. We drifted apart. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but I’m sure it was because I had seen my friend all summer at his most exposed and unguarded—a horribly vulnerable place for a teenager to be. He’d shared so much pain that I think my presence was a constant reminder of it as he reentered the larger world. I’m sure he resented it as he tried to toggle between dealing with that tragedy and wanting to move on.
My freshman year was awful. I stayed at Wilmington Friends, even though Beau had gone on to Archmere, and everything felt off and awkward, including having someone I thought was a close friend turn on me. I was four feet eleven inches tall and weighed 90 pounds—I’d sprout to six feet one inch, 175 pounds less than three years later—and played on the football team. The school was small enough that almost everyone played, even if only on the varsity practice squad. I loved football—the team won state that year—but I was so undersized that I sustained concussions and broke what seemed like every bone in my body: my arm twice, my fingers, a wrist, an ankle. Older guys picked on me because I got injured so often. That hurt more than the actual injuries.
I must’ve been a sight. Even Beau later jokingly nicknamed me “Lucas,” after the title character in the movie starring Corey Haim as a scrawny, socially inept high school freshman who wants to play football.
I was also becoming obsessed with girls, even though I hadn’t hit puberty—another source of ribbing by the older players. That spring, I went with a bunch of guys to a senior party and got really wasted. All of a sudden, I felt comfortable in a crowd filled with the same kids who’d made me feel uncomfortable all year. I went up to the prettiest girl in school, a five-foot-ten-inch senior, and asked her to the prom. She basically ignored me, God bless her, and I got hazed about it later, including by my former friend.
Still, the drinking was a revelation. It seemed to solve every unanswered question about why I felt the way I felt. It took away my inhibitions, my insecurities, and often my judgment. It made me feel complete, filling a hole I didn’t even realize was there—a feeling of loss and my sense of not being understood or fitting in.
I transferred to Archmere for my sophomore year. I drank in earnest in high school—mostly beer or on occasion a bottle of whatever someone had stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinet—though I didn’t drink during football season, and no one drank during the school week. But there were all of these old du Pont estates in our area, so we’d have house parties inside these aging, eclectic mansions. Beau was concerned about me drinking, but he never demanded that I stop. He wasn’t a scold. We never lectured each other about anything. Besides, I wasn’t out of control. I wasn’t driving drunk. Beau was usually driving me.
My senior year was the roughest, from beginning to end. Beau had left for Penn, and even though he was only forty minutes away, his not being home was a big change for me. The dynamics were all off.
Dad had dropped out of the Democratic primary for president a few weeks after school began. It was a confusing, angering disappointment for us all. Dad exited the campaign trail to preside as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee over the contentious and historically consequential U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, one of the tensest and most consuming periods of Dad’s Senate career.
All of that paled compared to Dad’s life-threatening aneurysm, which knocked him down in February 1988, less than four months after Bork’s nomination was rejected by the full Senate. He was rushed to Walter Reed Medical Center, where he was given last rites before surgery. My worst fear—losing Dad or Beau—seemed on the brink of coming true. He’d barely recuperated when he suffered a pulmonary embolism, and then he had surgery for another aneurysm—all within four months.
I visited him at Walter Reed almost every weekend. He was barely recognizable: tubes everywhere, head shaved, staples across his skull. Severed nerves caused the left side of his face to droop. I had no idea how things would end up—from my perspective, none of it looked hopeful—and indeed he didn’t return to the Senate for seven months.
When I wasn’t at Walter Reed I was mostly alone, with Beau away at school and Mom spending so much time at the hospital. I did fine in school, but honestly, I don’t have many good memories from that year at all.
Then, in June, I did absolutely the last thing anybody else needed to deal with: I got busted for cocaine possession. It happened right after graduation, during Beach Week in Stone Harbor, New Jersey, an annual gathering of young knuckleheads. I’d done coke maybe three or four times before; there was a period in the spring, following football season, when guys started to use, though I wasn’t one of the regulars. But on the second night of partying I was doing it with a friend and a girl from our class in a car parked outside a house party. The police came to break things up, and someone inside must have told them what we were up to. Cops knocked on our window, found the drugs, and cuffed us.
I was eighteen. I ended up doing a pretrial intervention with six months of probation, after which the arrest was expunged from my record. (I disclosed it voluntarily during a 2006 Senate committee hearing as part of my nomination to the Amtrak board of directors.)
It scared me straight—for a
