Once in a great while, some tender, desperate soul would float into the room who still seemed to possess a trace of kindness or concern. I’d wake up and find all my clothes folded and put back in the chest of drawers. I’d think, “Wow, she really is sweet.” Then I’d find out she folded my clothes after going through all my pockets, taking everything and anything she could find. Others did the same thing with my bags or my car—just cleaned them out.
I lost count of the stolen wallets and credit cards. Charges rolled in: Gucci loafers, an $800 sport coat, Rimowa luggage. I’d trudge down to the Wells Fargo branch on Sunset to talk with one of the tellers about getting a replacement. They all knew me. They’d smile and send me to the same patient Armenian bank manager. Her usual first response: “We can’t give you a new card without any ID.”
But the more I came in, the more she took pity on me.
“Hunter,” she would say with a sigh, “how can you keep losing your card all the time?”
The incongruity between the beauty I saw during my drives through the hills and the scummy subculture I willingly tapped into was demoralizing, depressing, defeating. It was so damn dark. I still feel a pit in my stomach when I think of how much money I dropped, how I allowed myself to think of any of those people as my friends. There wasn’t a conversation that took place inside one of those hotel rooms in which anything genuine or enlightening was ever spoken. Not once. I wouldn’t recognize 90 percent of them if we ran into each other again.
Yet I was so lost in my addiction that I watched the crowd rob me blind and didn’t care enough to stop them—not as long as the cycle of drugs, sex, exhaustion, and exhilaration repeated itself over and over. It was nonstop depravity. I was living in some composite scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Permanent Midnight, the adaptation of a TV writer’s autobiography about his $6,000-a-week heroin habit, a movie that to this day makes me sick to watch because of its ugly parallels to my worst moments.
The self-loathing of that world only perpetuates itself. I wasn’t without an understanding of the depravity of it. I was sickened by myself. It just kept going and going and going, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it. I was trapped in an endless loop and couldn’t find my way out. I had removed myself from family, friends—everyone, really. I had removed myself from any restrictions.
It makes you hard in a way that’s difficult to come back from. You’re basically banishing your better self. Once you decide that you’re the bad person everyone thinks you’ve become, it’s hard to find the good guy you once were. Eventually, I quit looking for him: I decided I wasn’t the person everybody who loved me thought I was anymore. So why continue to disappoint yourself? Why continue to disappoint them? Why not just disappear?
It’s easier than you think.
I still held to my connection with Beau. Yet I felt even that slipping. As the summer wore on, the letters I wrote him in my journals began to sound more futile, more apologetic, less trusting in the notion that I’d ever find my way out.
Dear Beau,
Where are you? I’m here and you don’t understand how bad it is. I know you’re there but I need you. I know Dad is sick with worry about me but I don’t know what to do about it. I’ll figure this out, but I still need you. I can’t stand that I can’t touch you.
Love,
Hunter
And:
Dear Beau,
I promise you I’m trying with Natalie and Hunter. I probably screwed this all up but I don’t know how to be here for them when I’m clearly not even here for myself. I feel like I’ve betrayed the one thing we never had to promise each other: to take care of each other’s kids.
Love…
I never considered suicide, not seriously. But I did crave an escape, a reconnection—anything that wasn’t this.
Dear Beau,
How do you expect me to be the one who’s left behind? I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do it. I don’t seem to be doing anything but causing more pain by sticking around. What would be so bad about us being together?
Love…
I told family back in Delaware I was working on my sobriety—whatever the hell that meant at that point. Here’s what it meant: nothing. I’d gotten good at telling stories like that.
It worked for a while. My girls would call; I’d tell them how much I missed them, that I’d see them soon, then hang up and cry for an hour. I’d do the same with Natalie and little Hunter. I’d end those calls feeling more alone and despondent and addicted than ever, with nowhere to turn and so turning away from everything, filling with self-pity—the addict’s go-to reflex—and believing that they’d all be better off without me. How very fucking convenient.
Dad called, too, of course. I’d tell him everything was fine, all was well. But after a while, he wasn’t buying it. My responses grew increasingly terse and intermittent. When I finally quit answering his calls altogether, along with my daughters’, which only happened in the most extreme circumstances, he sent in the cavalry: my uncle Jim.
Uncle Jimmy is my best friend in the world and Dad knew that if his younger brother asked me to do something, I’d do it. Uncle Jim has his own superpower: he gets things done. So he jumped on a plane to Los Angeles, pulled me out of a room in the Hollywood Roosevelt, and said, “I found a place.
