I got up to pee and looked out the bathroom window to see my heirs standing with their dog beneath the motion-detection light, talking and laughing—and smoking a bowl. It would’ve been cute if not for the drugs. I reached toward the window to bang, to bark out a “Knock it off!” But it was late, I was tired, and I didn’t want another scuffle.
Back in bed I couldn’t sleep, so I tiptoed down to the basement and found them sitting at Sean’s desk, a huge bag of bud before them, refilling another bowl. When they saw me, their giggles stopped. I stood staring at them, hands and jaw clenched, unable to say a word. If I started to speak I knew I’d start screaming or throwing things or swinging.
So many times I’d walked away from my sons, pissed and ineffectual, hoping that my grim disappointment might have an impact, hoping they’d learn something from the hands-off freedom we gave them. But I’d built a head of steam, and felt fury and frustration shooting through my limbs. I took a step back and kicked at Sean’s graffiti-covered bedroom door—harder than I meant to. My foot plunged through the cheap panel door and sent shards of graffiti’ed wood flying. I was stuck, hopping on one foot . . .
“What the hell are you two doing?!” I yelled like a nut. “It’s a school night, you . . . you stoners!”
I wrenched my foot free, slammed the basement door, and let loose a straitjacket-worthy howl—“Fuuuuuuck!”—then popped half a Mr. X and slumped into a shitty sleep.
The next morning, I found a note Leo had slipped under our bedroom door, penned in red ink: “When a person does something wrong, pushing them away should not always be the solution . . . Resentment and getting angry will only turn our house into a stress-filled hell hole.”
Downstairs on the kitchen table was a note from Sean, who said he needed to get his head together but was “someplace safe.” I went to his room, but he was gone. I sat on his bed and read: “I love you so much, so, so, so MUCH! I’ve made my life way too difficult for myself and I’m not OK . . . I’m in pain in a lot of ways. I don’t want you guys to hate me.”
Anticipating the worst, I called in sick. Then I shakily texted and called Sean, texted and called his friends, as did Mary and Leo, but no one had seen him.
Finally, just before noon, Sean texted back. He’d slept in his car in a marina parking lot. He was safe. He was sorry.
I sat staring at my phone, trembly, relieved, sad. At that precise moment a calendar reminder popped onto the screen: “Maura B-day.”
It was my sister’s birthday. She would’ve been fifty-two. My anger melted away, but not my sorrow. I missed my sister. I missed my mother. And the distance between me and my brother and my father now felt every inch of the two thousand miles that divided us. Is that where my sons and I were headed, someday soon to be separated by the USA?
As we began muscling through another school year—Sean a junior, Leo a sophomore; ages sixteen and fifteen—I felt time accelerating. Sean had gotten his driver’s license and Leo started driver’s ed and I felt them both speeding toward a premature adulthood, hurtling away from me.
As a toddler, Leo had hated sleeping in his bed. He’d get up in the middle of the night and crawl onto the foot of our bed like a puppy. “I just want to be with Mommy and Daddy,” he’d cry as we carried him back to his room. Being with Mommy and Daddy was no longer necessary. I’d get home from work and find him and/or Sean and some friends playing Xbox, sitting around someone’s portable speaker listening to iPhone-propelled rap, munchies detritus everywhere, emptied chip bags, plates of panini crusts.
They’d see me and immediately grab their boards and flee. “Oh, hey, we were just heading out,” they’d say, practically trailing cartoony curls of smoke, à la Pepé Le Pew.
In response to what seemed like an escalation in cannabis appreciation, I started stalking them online and one day found a music video on YouTube that Nate had made for a local rapper. I was impressed at what a great shooter/editor he’d become, graduating from his preteen skate videos to this professional-looking montage of a rapper and his posse, singing their praises to skating, bitches, ganja, and a Chevy El Camino.
All I ever wanted was shoes on the Chevy . . . skatin’ through the ’hood
Suddenly, Leo appeared on-screen, swimming inside a Seahawks sweatshirt, a slo-mo shot of him toking a blunt the size and color of a small dog turd, exhaling a gray plume. Later: Leo inside a skate shop, a small white kid swaying behind five older black kids rapping about life in the ’hood.
I grew up . . . right place wrong time
I showed the video to Mary, who called Nate’s mom to ask Nate to delete the Leo scenes. Leo was furious: “What’s the big friggin’ deal?”
Curious about what else Leo was up to on the Internet, I found his Twitter feed. This was before he and his friends migrated to Snapchat. On Twitter—a private account that I spied on with a stolen password, since he ignored my follow request—I discovered yet another version of my son.
A writer friend (and former skater) once told me she viewed her own high school skating-and-smoking years as a “nihilistic exploration of my self annihilation.”
Though Leo’s tweets showed signs of nihilism—“I want to be out in the sun, so fuck your test mr smith”—I’d never considered street skating, cop conflicts, and a fondness for pot as flirtations with death. Risky, dangerous, self-destructive, and unproductive, for sure. But self-annihilation? Even after Michael’s death, I just didn’t see it.
Not until heroin became part of the equation.
Over the years I’d developed intermittent friendships with a few other skate dads. At holiday parties or an occasional happy hour or the rare school event, we’d share our latest stories, little Skate Dads Anonymous episodes of commiseration and confession. We were all frustrated by the constant smoking and drinking, each of us experimenting with different carrots and sticks, trying to find a balance between tolerance and obedience. But I don’t think any of us imagined our boys would cross into opiate territory.
Then one of the dads, Robert, mentioned the house of another skater who had graduated from weed to cocaine to heroin. “That place is bad news,” he told me, describing a scene of limited parental oversight and nightly parties. “You need to keep your boys away from there.”
Months later I discovered why Robert had been so worried about that flop house: His son, Jack, had been hanging around there and one night was peer-pressured into putting a heroin-laced joint to his lips. A feeling he’d never known suddenly became the most important feeling of all.
Jack had been studious and athletic, a lanky-shy kid who played baseball and basketball, played drums in a band, got straight As. In high school he’d decided that none of that made sense, that he’d been faking it, playing someone else’s games. When he discovered skating, he found his tribe, kids who spoke his language. Like my sons, Jack progressed through all the stages, from skate shoes to security guards to smoking. Then Jack delved one level deeper, and his parents were now frantically trying to pull him back.
They sent Jack to a wilderness rehab camp, but he escaped and hitchhiked back to Seattle, then moved out to live on a skate friend’s couch. That night, Robert left us a message . . .
“Jack’s really vulnerable right now,” he said. “This could end badly.”
Commiserating much later over burgers and beers, Robert recalled his terrors, using words that sounded familiar: “It was the most important job I’d ever had, and I was fucking it up.” While he mostly flogged himself, he knew (as did I) that the disconnect between skate life and life life was to blame: “The real world isn’t working for these boys.”
Evidence of which stalked our family and now littered Leo’s Twitter feed:
More than a handful of the boys’ friends grappled with addiction, quitting high school, and WTF thoughts. I’d learn, in trickles of truth telling, that Michael hadn’t been the only friend playing dangerously with Prozac, Ambien, Molly, and Xanax, which Leo later told me had become “the new heroin” among Seattle teens (prompting us to start hiding our “Mr. X”). “They already saw one friend die,” Robert told me one night. “They think they’re invincible.”
The boys and their friends continued to think about, talk about, and remind one another about Michael. “RIP MAC”–decorated skateboards continued to tell a story of teen rebellion gone wrong, and my Internet stalking found a stream of fresh posts on Michael’s Facebook page: “I love you, Michael,” “I miss u so much,” “I will always have a place in my heart for you.” Nate’s “RIP” video, dedicated to “a good friend and a talented skateboarder,” kept racking up YouTube views, backed by Billy Joel’s crooning.
Slow down, you crazy child / You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart / tell me why are you still so afraid
On the anniversary of Michael’s death, Leo tweeted: “I’ll never forget when you taught me to kickflip homie. Cant believe its already been a year. Love you Michael. Rest easy.”
With other friends teetering on the edge, with Robert’s fears playing in my head, I started wondering if I’d recognize the danger signs, the subtle tilt when teen experimentation veered toward opiate-fueled doom. Was there a point when Michael could’ve been saved? If only someone had stepped in right then and there? How would I know if and when that moment arrived? Skating had been the thing that joined us as a family. Now it had introduced us to heroin, to rehab, to death. Skating contained the power to rip us to shreds.
Sean once told Mary: “I keep thinking the world is against me. But maybe it’s me who’s against the world.” What saddened me was knowing that Mary and I represented the opposition, the other side. We were the world.
We’d never been big television watchers, although Mary had recently started binge-streaming The Good Wife, yelling at the screen like it was a football game: “Don’t do it!” and “Yeah, baby, give it to him!” But lately we’d searched for a show that might provide some all-family entertainment, an effort to wrest the basement teen playhouse back to its intended purpose as family room. One night we all started watching Game of Thrones, but the boys eventually got bored and left, one and then the other.
My Spidey senses tingled, so I came upstairs and followed the spunk of weed wafting from our bathroom. I barged in as the boys tried to block me. “Wait! I’m taking a shower!” Sean yelled. Shoving my way inside, I found a bong-like contraption on the counter, a phallic fuck-you to our house rules and to our attempt at a family TV night.
In need of backup, I yelled to Mary, who came upstairs, furious at the intrusion to an otherwise mellow Sunday night.
“Right under our noses, really?” she yelled.
Leo launched into his now-familiar “what’s the big deal” argument. Pot is legal in Washington. It’s medicine.
“Not for you it’s not,” Mary countered.
Then Leo made the mistake of smirking. Mary wheeled on him, swatted him on top of the head—“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”—as Leo covered his head and yelled back, “What’s wrong with me? Are you joking?” Mary charged and Leo curled into a ball. When Sean tried to intervene, Mary took a swing at him, too.
“Are you two crazy? What are you doing?” On the verge of losing her mind, she stomped off, back to the basement and the medieval TV lands of fire and ice.
I tried to calm things down, telling Leo that the correct response when you’re busted smoking pot in your parents’ bathroom is to apologize and beg forgiveness.
“Dad, I wasn’t even smoking,” he said.
I’d heard this inane argument before and would hear it in the months to come: “dabbing” involved the inhalation of heated-up hash oil vapors, so the boys felt justified in claiming they were vaping but not technically smoking.
Leo then dialed up some melodrama and woefully told me how he was stressed-out all the time, that his feet hurt, that he couldn’t skate like he used to, that he was always being told what to do, at home and at school, that pot was the only thing that eased the stress.
While I wrestled with Leo’s ridiculous rationalizations, Sean snagged the bong-like dabbing rig and fled.
For months Leo had been complaining about foot and ankle pain, which had been making it difficult to skate—something he’d been doing less, and feeling bad about it.
“You don’t understand,” he’d tell us. “It really hurts.”
At one point we asked our family doctor to take a look, and at the same time to counsel Leo on the pot smoking. Our doctor, who had an admirable distaste for prescription drugs and an appreciation for patience and natural healing, gave Leo an exam, asked him what was happening in his life, and (at my sidebar request) talked to him about the pot.
He told Leo he had friends in their fifties who still smoked, some who grew and sold pot for a living and “make more than I do—so, you know, no judgment.” But he’d also seen plenty of stoners who were sluggish and unmotivated, who didn’t take care of their families. “They’re unhappy, so they smoke more,” he said.
Regarding Leo’s feet, the doctor told us, “He’s still growing, so it could be growing pains. I think he’ll be fine. He should stretch, maybe run or swim. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
Leo fidgeted but said all the right things, then on the drive home he grew agitated.
Among Mary’s skills as a parent was getting the boys to talk by just being available. She knew face-to-face wasn’t as effective as a slant approach, like a walk or a drive. On a recent drive, Leo had shared with her his thoughts on college, on studying graphic design, or maybe business or fashion, maybe designing skate shoes and clothes. But on my drive, instead of letting him open up at his own pace, I forced it, asking Leo about the doctor’s pot discussion, which only ticked him off and shut him down.
“I know the repercussions, y’know. I’ve done the research and I’m aware of the consequences of my actions,” he said. “I wouldn’t do anything to my body that I hadn’t fully researched.”
He then went on about THC levels and parts per million and high-tech grow operations and rising standards, until I told him, “Okay, okay, I get it . . . No need to filibuster.”
“That’s not filibustering, Dad. Talking fast is a way to get my point across. I’m making a persuasive argument. It’s a form of communication.”
Finally, he calmed down and said he was more worried about his sore feet than about a doctor’s advice on pot.
He did try stretching and running, but anytime he skated he’d come home in pain, his heels and ankles aching. He’d ice and soak them and even tried our doctor’s home remedy: a salve of mashed garlic and petroleum jelly, smeared on his feet and wrapped in plastic. But the pain continued, and Leo eventually stopped skating altogether.
On Twitter: “I’v lost so much touch with the skate community.”
We finally took him to a podiatrist, whose X-rays showed early signs of a condition called “tarsal coalition,” in which small foot bones begin fusing together. He suggested a specialist, whose CT scans confirmed what the first doctor suspected. The specialist walked into the exam room and his face said it all . . . “What’s wrong?” Mary asked.
He explained the options, including a series of surgeries, two on each foot, to separate the fused bones and to repair Leo’s flat feet, which had possibly been worsened by the bone fusions. As the doctor talked—and suggested starting with an orthopedic boot, immediately—Leo stared at the wall, lip shaking. On that drive home, Leo was crushed, scared, and mad. He faced spending all summer and half his junior year in and out of the hospital, in physical therapy, hobbling on crutches—and, unable to skate for as long as a year.
“Why?” he quietly asked from the backseat. “Why me?”