Eventually it became too much for me to even pour a drink. I’d use a kitchen knife to remove the plastic nub that controls the pour on a handle of vodka, then drink straight from the bottle. Given my weakened state, even that required some finesse: I learned to twist and contort my body in such a way as to lessen the weight of the bottle, to make it more manageable. I must have looked like a cartoon moonshiner throwing back gulps from a jug.
Alcohol is a harrowing drug to be terrorized by. You really do need to keep drinking to stay alive, not just to get drunk, at least if you’re drinking at the preposterous level I was. The only way to stop safely is to clinically detox, meaning to do it while in the hands of professionals. Otherwise, it was clear to me, you could die.
I stopped answering the phone altogether, not picking up for my dad, for my daughters, for anybody. My yoga instructor called once from outside my front door. I let it go. While I put work on pause, not pursuing new business, I paid bills with the legacy pieces of contracts I still had, with clients like HNTB, a global infrastructure design company, and several private equity firms. By then I was also receiving a substantial monthly fee from Burisma, the energy company in Ukraine whose board I’d joined in early 2014.
The last thing I wanted was Dad showing up in front of my apartment building with his massive security detail. But almost a month in, he’d had enough. He reduced his security to a minimum and knocked on my door. I let him in. He looked aghast at what he saw. He asked if I was okay and I told him, sure, I was fine.
“I know you’re not fine, Hunter,” he said, studying me, scanning the apartment. “You need help.”
I looked into my dad’s eyes and saw an expression of despair, an expression of fear, even—fear that I wasn’t going to be able to save myself. I knew he wouldn’t leave until I agreed to do something—that at this point he’d take control physically in some way if he had to. I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I was in no shape to have an emotional discussion about Beau or my pain or his pain or the utter depression and hopelessness I felt. I knew he was right—I was anything but fucking okay. I was locked in an unrelenting drinking binge that was not in any way sustainable.
I finally told him I knew of a program out west where I could get sober and heal. He made me promise to follow through, said that he’d be back to make sure. He hugged me tight, and I walked him to the door.
There was no drama, no fireworks. Two days later, I flew to the Esalen Institute retreat center in Big Sur, California, where I’d previously gone through a twelve-step yoga retreat that had helped me for a while. This time I essentially detoxed myself while I was around others participating in various programs. I got better and left there to ski alone for a week at Lake Tahoe, retracing the same runs Beau, Dad, and I covered years ago. I returned home clean, healthy—and alive.
Dad saved me. When he knocked on my door, he jolted me out of whatever state I was in and saved me by making me want to save myself. Left on my own, I’m certain I would not have survived.
That was Dad. He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got—and, believe me, from here on they would get much, much worse. There’s a popular theory that an addict needs to hit bottom before he or she can be helped. The addicts I know who hit bottom are dead. So as busy as Dad always was, he never, ever gave up on me.
I believe it’s because Dad needed me. And by me, I don’t mean me. In many ways, the greatest expression of his love was the love he had for me and Beau. I was now what remained of that. This isn’t to say he doesn’t love my sister just as much or love my mother most of all. But Beau and I always believed that Dad truly thought, as we both did, there was something singular the three of us shared. As a consequence, he never allowed me to fade away, never let me escape, no matter how often during the next three and a half years I tried. There were times when his persistence infuriated me—I’d attempt to fade to black through alcoholism or drug addiction, and then there he was, barging in again with his lantern, shining a light, disrupting my plans to disappear.
Disappearing was the most profound betrayal of the love that existed between us. It’s what I tried instead of suicide.
CHAPTER SIX
BURISMA
The episode that led to the impeachment of a president and landed me in the heart of the decade’s biggest political fable is most remarkable for its epic banality.
It contains no clandestine, cloak-and-dagger, international hocus-pocus. There’s no criminal sexiness, no corrupt moral bottom to make other bad actors feel better about themselves.
There is, in short, no there here—except in the up-is-down, self-dealing universe cooked up for political and personal gain by Trump and Giuliani and their circle of bandits.
My five-year involvement on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, ultimately has its roots, as does so much else in my life at the time, in the circumstances surrounding my brother’s grave illness.
I want to be clear: Beau’s health problems didn’t prompt me to do something
