His Bright Light Page 6

  A brother, Maxx, was born when Nick was eight and a half, and this time Nick seemed sometimes pleased, and at other times threatened and jealous. He had a rival, a younger brother, although later, he was immensely proud of him.

  Nick’s passion by then was baseball. He played it, he watched it, he lived and breathed it, and began obsessively keeping ledgers where he invented imaginary baseball games, with each play written down in elaborate detail, listing every player and all their vital statistics. He even wrote up imaginary World Series. The ledgers, which I still have, are quite remarkable and brilliant, there are stacks of them.

  Nick at about eight (photo credit 1.12)

  Nick at eight years, Maxx at eight months (photo credit 1.13)

  Nick at about nine (photo credit 1.14)

  Nick at ten or eleven (photo credit 1.15)

  He was also passionate about music by then, and had been since he was about five. He listened to the same music and loved the same groups as his teenage older siblings did, and would often saunter up to their friends and inquire about the groups they listened to. At first, they thought he was being funny, and then realized that he meant it, and knew what he was talking about. He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about their music. It was a lifelong passion for him, and one that never dimmed or diminished. It was what he loved most, and what he was best at, although he was also a gifted writer, and I often said in later years that he wrote better than I do. His sense of pace and timing, and way of unraveling a story, were exquisite.

  And when break-dancing became the craze, he somewhat horrified his older siblings by dancing quite expertly in front of their friends. He was six then. And stole the show at Trevor’s sixteenth birthday. He also loved to flirt with their girlfriends, who found him adorable and amusing, which understandably often irritated his brothers.

  The last baby, Zara, came when Nick was eleven, and this time Nick was enchanted. He was old enough to enjoy her and not be threatened by her (and at that time, he was still tormenting Samantha).

  But Nick was beginning to unravel by then. The pain that had driven him from deep within for years was beginning to become more obvious. He was harder still to control, harder to handle. He was destructive of things in his room, yet he never hurt anyone intentionally. He would play with the younger children too roughly at times, but never physically attacked or injured them. But what I was seeing more and more in him worried me constantly. Being with him was like trying to harness a tornado. One moment he would be impossible, the next gentle and loving. And despite the fact that he took more energy and care than all the other eight children put together, I felt an unseverable bond to him, and a constant need to protect him. I knew instinctively that no one else understood him as I did, or knew how much pain he was in. It was like a seed that I knew had grown to frightening proportions, and was continuing to grow, unseen, unchecked, unattended, and there was nothing to stop it. It was like a dragon raging inside him, and my greatest fear was that it would devour him.

  And still everyone apparently failed to see it. He continued to make the honor roll at school, despite learning disabilities no one had become aware of yet, and that passed unnoticed. His IQ was so high that it carried him well beyond his limitations, and he was able to compensate as few others could have.

  We all had a challenge that year when John had a near fatal accident in the house, a fall that almost killed him. All of the children were frightened and upset by it, as I was. But Nicky was particularly shaken by it, and afraid that he would die, and began wetting the bed again, and defecating in the bathtub, although only for a brief time. But his disturbance got somewhat lost in the crowd, because the others were upset by it too, even the oldest ones who were in their late teens and early twenties. But Nick seemed gripped by real panic. And then he calmed down again as John got better. But at eleven, he was acting out more than he ever had before, and always marching to a different drummer.

  When he had been told to wear dark pants and a light shirt to the Christmas show at school, he wore pale chino pants and a black turtleneck instead, and I made him get off the stage and change. Other people found his “independent ideas” amusing, but I didn’t. I knew they were a sign of something much deeper and far more disturbing. And to this day, I do not understand why other people didn’t see it. It is hard to fathom why they didn’t. Perhaps they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, or were too frightened by it. But I knew … oh, God how I knew … and how frightened I was for him. Even then, in my heart, despite all the other children I had, he was my baby … the one I knew was wounded … and who needed me differently than the others. I would have done anything to protect him, to change it, to will the pain and the dragon away for him, with love if nothing else … but even then, I couldn’t. And the dragon that was slowly devouring him just got bigger.

  5

  Sixth Grade:

  The demons begin

  to let us see them

  Nick was eleven, and he had a new passion: his skateboard, although the primary passion in his life, his real love, was always music. He seemed to know every group and song and musician on the planet, and impressed everyone, most of all his older siblings’ friends, with his knowledge of them. And for a kid his age, he had fairly sophisticated taste about the rock scene. He was familiar with all the new, upcoming groups along with the obvious, well-known ones. And at first when people in the know talked to him, they always thought he was just “faking it.” But of course he wasn’t. He knew his stuff, usually much better than they did.

  At eleven, he had long since been crazy about a good friend of mine, Jo Schuman, who was equally enamored of him. She was one of the few people, and certainly the only one in my world, who knew as much about the music scene as he did, as her cousin was the founder and head of a major record company. And as a special treat, Jo would take him to the big, important concerts, and of course always took him backstage with her. Jo was one of the brightest stars in Nick’s Heaven, and they adored each other from the moment they met until he left us.

  But along with his true love, music, there was always an additional compulsion. His imaginary (and real) baseball games. He played, and was very good at it. He also collected baseball memorabilia then, and like everything else he loved, it became an obsession. He collected some great stuff, and as always had very adult, sophisticated knowledge, and eventually a fairly important collection of cards, and signed bats and baseballs. And of course earlier, there had been Spider-Man and Star Wars. Now there were skateboards. He would skate for hours and hours and hours, and was constantly perfecting his skateboard, buying new parts for it, and changing things on it. At our country house in Napa, he built a huge skateboard ramp himself, and placed it as inconveniently as possible in the driveway. Nicky’s world revolved mostly around himself, and by sixth grade, he had become singularly self-involved, and appeared to have no particular interest in other people’s needs or problems. Nicky’s world revolved exclusively around Nicky. It was not an endearing trait, and did not help him get along with other people. And in the family, he appeared to walk right over everyone to get where and what he wanted. He was singularly obsessive.

  At eleven, when Nick was in sixth grade, I had a harder time than ever getting along with him, and worried about him constantly. There was always a gnawing concern for him. He just wasn’t like other kids his age, no matter how many excuses I made for him. He was brighter, faster, harder, louder, meaner when he chose, and at other times sweeter. Everything about Nick was more extreme, as though the colors he painted his life with were brighter and sharper than everyone else’s. He was relentless when he wanted to do something, or have something, and merciless in his attempts to get it.

  And I cannot pretend now to any kind of magic insight or omniscience. All I knew was that Nicky had problems, and I had a constant gnawing in my gut, like some kind of radar or sonar device that told me he was out of kilter. But I had no real words to put to it. I was still inquiring discreetly at his school at re
gular intervals if they thought he was okay. He was still doing well, and whenever I suggested that something was wrong with him, I felt that they looked at me like I was crazy. Nicky? Of course not. But they didn’t live with him. They didn’t see the things he broke, the rages that seemed to be getting slightly worse, or have to deal with his frequently obsessive behavior.

  I cannot say now that I knew all along what was happening. I didn’t. I didn’t wake up one day, slap my hand to my head, and say, “Oh, my God, of course, my baby is manic-depressive.” At that point in time, I knew nothing. What I sensed was that something was wrong with him, but I couldn’t have told you what if my life depended on it, and what I hoped more than anything was that he’d outgrow it. I think, in my heart of hearts, I also hoped that no one else would ever really notice. Since everyone always insisted that he was just brilliant and difficult, I prayed that people would continue to perceive him that way forever. I didn’t want people to think something was seriously wrong with him, although privately I thought so. I didn’t even say as much to my husband. I told no one. It became my own dark secret, and whenever necessary, I made endless excuses for him. “He’s tired, he has a cold, this is hard for him, his sisters annoy him, the older kids are jealous of him and don’t understand him, his teachers didn’t know what they were doing.” There were a lot of ways to account for his behavior, but only one that would have been accurate, but it was obscured by all of our ignorance, my prayers not to see, and what I believed to be the continuing blindness of the professionals who might have seen it.

  Neither my pediatrician nor his school told me that they saw anything unusual about Nicky, and later, for a long time, I resented his school for it. I have since forgiven them, because even if we had known then, I don’t think we could have changed it. All we could have done was offer him medication, which might have blunted his sharp edges a little, and made him easier to get along with, but it wouldn’t have cured him.

  One of the big excitements for Nick in those days was a lip-sync contest they held at his school each year, in February. It was a big event for all the kids, but most of them shuffled into the tryouts for it, grabbed a few friends along the way, and argued for half an hour about what song they would pretend to sing. And when the actual contest came, they would awkwardly get up onstage, scramble around, muff it most of the time, but look sweet and childlike while they did. But not Nicky.

  For Nick, this was his moment to shine, his hour of glory, his shot at the gold at the Olympics. He began preparing for it months before, every year, carefully selecting his “band,” choosing the songs, forcing them to rehearse regularly, and eventually diving into my closets and coming out with wigs and costumes. My favorite cowboy boots disappeared, my sequined T-shirts that I never wore but hung on to anyway, an old disco jacket he had also worn when he dressed up as Prince once on Halloween (Prince was another of his many obsessions, as was Michael Jackson early on, The Police, Sting, Nirvana, Guns and Roses and countless others). For the lip-sync contest, he doled out the wigs I owned but never wore, and of course when I got them back they were beyond recognition. I used to grumble, “Why do you have to supply the wardrobe and wigs for half of the sixth grade?” But the lip-sync contest was what Nicky lived for. It was his opportunity to be a “real” rock star for a few hours. And when he did, he dazzled everyone who saw him.

  He used strobe lights, real instruments, and by the time his “group” slid past the tryouts into the real thing, it was like watching a real rock band perform in a real concert. He took everyone’s breath away, and of course after months of hard work, he usually won it. It was an early glimpse into who he would be later on, in the music scene, how hard he would work, how creative he would be, and how hard he would drive the other musicians (however young and inexperienced they were) that he worked with. Nicky was brilliant at it, and those lip-sync contests were just a tiny glimpse into the future, as he writhed and rocked and rolled and mesmerized his audience, stage-diving into the crowd, leaping through the air, and imitating every tiny quirk of the band he was emulating. It used to make my heart sing to see him. However much I complained about what he did to my wigs and my favorite cowboy boots, even I knew way back then that it was worth it. I loved it. And it always amused me when I saw him in one of my wigs, to realize that, with the right hairdo, he actually looked a lot like me. Most of the time, I thought he looked like his father. The truth was he looked like neither and both of us, he looked like himself. He was an incredibly handsome boy, even as a child. And his appeal to women only grew over the years, and never diminished. They loved him!

  Nick as Prince on Halloween (photo credit 1.16)

  Nick as “Rock Star” at his school lip-sync talent show

  He was still fairly athletic then, although sixth grade may have been the last of it, or the beginning of the end. He was great at baseball and tennis, a powerful and graceful swimmer, but he began to think that outdoor pursuits weren’t “cool,” and preferred to sit in his room, both in the country on weekends and at home, and listen to music. In truth, I realized later, this wasn’t about being “cool,” he was becoming isolated.

  He wrote a lot in those days, scarily sophisticated short stories that always showed an adult perception about subtle things. He had an elegant writing style, a sharp command of the language, and an extraordinary sense of timing. I used to read what he wrote, listen to the cadence of it, feel the sharp jolt of the power of his prose, and feel him reel me in and out as he chose. He had a natural, innate, powerful style and a gift that was so natural to him, he never noticed. He loved to write, but preferred his music, and never thought much about his writing. His stories were often violent, and always had a dark twist to them.

  And later, when his demons began to get the better of him, he explained to me very simply one day that he couldn’t concentrate anymore on long blocks of writing, (his early short stories were pretty long), and it worked better for him to keep it short and write lyrics. They were the extent of his ability to concentrate on writing by then, and served his purpose anyway. And like his early short stories, some of his lyrics were brilliant, wise and perceptive and clever. I ran across some of his short stories the other day, while looking through his room, and I was startled again by how good they are. And along with the short stories, he kept endless diaries and journals. I never invaded them, never read them, until now, save one which I “borrowed” from him when he was fourteen and I was so deeply concerned about him, and wanted a glimpse into just how serious the problem was that he was facing. The answers I found there were deeply disturbing.

  At eleven, as I read through his journals now, he was still in fairly good shape, though angry a lot of the time. But in sixth grade, you could blame his complaints and quirks on the beginning of raging hormones. You could blame it on a lot of things, sunspots, TV, bad parenting, annoying siblings. If you want to find excuses for unusual behavior, if you try hard enough, you can always find them.

  There was one very odd thing about his behavior then. Our Tylenol stock in the house began to decline rapidly. I would find empty bottles everywhere, or a few broken tablets left around, and more often than not, the empty Tylenol bottles turned up in his room. He always feigned surprise and innocence when I found them, and even when he was grown up and we talked openly about these things, he denied the Tylenol “habit” I thought he had developed. Nick was almost always honest about things, astonishingly so, and even as a kid he would admit to things others wouldn’t. And later on, he never shied away from the truth, and told me some things with complete candor that made me shudder. But he never admitted to the Tylenol, although I feel sure that he was taking it. I think he was beginning to feel seriously uncomfortable in his own skin by then, and he was seeking relief, anywhere he could find it. It wasn’t a dangerous substance, so although I worried about it, and constantly questioned him about the evidence I found, I didn’t panic. But we locked up the Tylenol and all our medicines, so he couldn’t get to them.

>   His next step to self-medication was Sudafed. My husband took it for sinus headaches. We kept most medicines locked up, because of the younger children, but if nothing else, John always had a few Sudafed in his pockets. And I would find the little foil wrappers strewn around Nick’s bedroom. When I asked him about it, he just said he was getting a cold or had a headache, he didn’t deny it. I myself am allergic to it, and along with an adverse reaction, it nearly makes me jump out of my skin. Most people will say that the medication speeds them up, but of course Nick still had his paradoxical reactions to medication, so what would speed up most people would calm him down. I think Sudafed did exactly that for him, and it was his awkward first attempt to buffer, if not still, the demons. Even then, they could not have been easy to silence, judging from the disturbing entries in his journal.

  As always, I was worried about him, and the Tylenol and Sudafed he was obviously taking in fairly noticeable quantities set my alarms off. I was seeing a therapist myself then, and I asked him to see Nicky. Nick thought that was a dumb idea, and balked at it at first, but eventually he agreed to talk to him, and would go over once or twice a week to do so. Nicky thought he was cool because he liked baseball. I’m sure they talked about more than that, and although my therapist did not quell all my fears, he said he didn’t see anything direly wrong with Nicky. He was an unusual boy with startlingly clear perceptions about adults and the people around him, albeit not very charitable views at times, but he was brilliant and perceptive. He was still deeply jealous of Samantha, and we put down some of his acting out to sibling rivalry, and the fact that he was nearly, or perhaps truly, a genius. Nicky was just Nicky. How else could one describe him? There was certainly no one else like him. Not in my world anyway, or many others.