At Home In Hell
San Francisco Magazine, October 2003

"The names of all family members and some identifying details have been changed."

Tristan heard his mom's footsteps stomping down the stairs to his room. "Shit!" he muttered. He rolled over in the tousled twin bed that no longer fit him and cranked up the boom box perched on the pile of blankets, dirty jeans, and CDs on the floor beside him.

"Can you turn that off? Please?" Tristan's mom shouted over the blast of Bob Marley. Tristan ignored her, bobbing his head to the reggae beat. Then he sneaked a peek. Sure enough, beneath her fringe of graying blond bangs, Marian's eyes were red and swollen. "All this drama, just 'cause I snorted a little coke," he thought. Sighing loudly, he switched off the music and stared out the window at Mount Tam, wishing his mom would just give it up already.

Marian gazed at her son, remembering him as her sweet little redheaded boy, chattering away in his singsong soprano. Now his curls had been shaved to stubble, and his voice was low and surly. Now she lived in fear that their constant fighting would snap the thread that bound them, that one day he'd simply walk out the door and never come back. The only thing Marian worried about more than losing Tristan to their arguing was losing him to drugs. And so she took a quavering breath and did what her husband had sent her down here to do: deliver the latest in a seemingly endless series of threats.

"Rob says if you use drugs again," she told her son, "we're going to send you away to rehab. For a year."

Marian braced herself for the explosion that usually ended these "discussions." But when Tristan spoke, his voice was barely audible. "Leave. Me. Alone," he snarled.

When other parents complained about their problem teens, Marian often wished that she had their problems-or their teenagers. Her friends grumbled about their kids' moodiness, their too-tight tank tops or too-baggy jeans. They swapped the latest theories about why teenagers act the way they do-hormone surges, peer pressure, ADD-reassuring each other that their kids would grow out of it, get into college, live fulfilling lives. Being Tristan's mom had left Marian with bigger worries and lesser hopes. She couldn't tell herself that his adolescent exploits-stealing cars and money from his siblings, flunking school, lying every time he opened his mouth, doing any drug he could get his hands on-were signs of "normal" teenage acting out.

Neither Marion nor Tristan could even dream of how they might ESCAPE their chronic conflict. So Marian did the same thing she always did. Eyes welling with tears, she backed out of Tristan's room, closed his door, and fled upstairs.

"All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way," Tolstoy famously wrote, long before children were doing drugs to express their unhappiness, and parents were feeding their kids Ritalin in an effort to make them (and themselves) less unhappy. Whether or not Tolstoy was right, this much I know is true: It's difficult for a family with an unhappy teenager to be anything but unhappy-day after terrifying day, year after grueling year. I know this because I lived through that particular hell with my younger son, Jesse. And I know this because, once Jesse had stopped doing drugs and getting arrested, I spent two years "embedded" in the families of three kids in rehab, writing a book about teenagers on drugs. I was trying to understand how America has gone so wrong with its children, and how I'd gone so wrong with mine.

I thought I'd become unshockable after living through Jesse's adolescence. But in researching my book I found much that shocked me. For one thing, drugs are harder, and many experts believe that kids are doing them at younger ages. Almost one in six of the thirty million teenagers in this country is diagnosed with substance (drug or alcohol) abuse-meaning, they use drugs in ways that harm them-or drug dependency, which means they're physically and/or psychologically addicted. One-third of all high school seniors have binged on alcohol. More than four out of ten admit to having smoked pot. About one in ten has taken tranquilizers, barbiturates, Ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine, or inhalants. Four percent have smoked crack. The numbers for Bay Area teens approximate the national statistics.

"I've been treating Bay Area teenagers for 25 years," says Lynn Ponton, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at UCSF and author of The Romance of Risk and The Sex Lives of Teenagers. "And I've seen some significant changes. There's more THC in marijuana than there was when we were young, and the various forms of Ôspeed' are more potent than ever. Teenagers are more knowledgeable about drugs than they used to be, which strains our credibility when we try to warn them about drug abuse. And budget cutbacks have reduced the number and the quality of public treatment and prevention programs available to adolescents who need them. It's a dangerous combination."

Although drug abuse is remarkably democratic-no race, class, gender, or age group is immune-the treatment available depends largely on class and race. Affluent white kids like Tristan who use or sell drugs are likely to get consequences from their parents, not the police. When Tristan was caught stealing cigarettes from the San Anselmo 7-11, the cops didn't handcuff him and take him to Juvie. They drove him home and told Marian to keep an eye on him. When Tristan's best friend, Corbin, got arrested-for passing 20-dollar bills he'd printed on his own high-resolution printer-Corbin's parents, both attorneys, got him off with a "sentence" of informal probation and weekly therapy.

A decade ago, there were about two dozen "emotional growth" schools in the country; today, there are more than 350. Between 1992 and 1998, the number of American teenagers in publicly funded drug-treatment programs alone-that's not including the uncounted thousands of others in private therapy or rehab-jumped 53 percent, to 150,000.

As kids have always known and recent studies have proved, school-based drug prevention programs like "dare" don't, for the most part, work. And once kids are abusing drugs, schools are ill-equipped to handle the crisis. So parents of kids like tristan or jesse must manage the ordeal ourselves. In previous generations, family crises had supporting casts of grandparents, siblings, neighbors. But we live more isolated lives now, with Ôthe whole village' scattered across the country, if in fact our village exists at all. So those who can afford it resort to paying trained professionals to help save our children-therapists, special boarding schools, wilderness programs. Despite its dismal success rate, adolescent drug treatment-itself less than 20 years old, still highly experimental-is a growth industry.

Most of today's adolescent treatment models were originally designed for adults. Not surprisngly, the failure rate among adolescent drug-treatment programs overall is about the same as adult treatment failure rates. Up to 85 percent of kids who go through the program fail to get sober and stay sober for a meaningful length of time.

Yet what choice does a well-intentioned parent have, except to try whatever programs she can find until, finally, something works and the nightmare ends-or the unthinkable happens and her child is lost to her forever?

As a baby, Tristan was strong, alert, and needy. "He wanted to be nursed ten times a night," Marian says. He cried all day if she left him with a baby-sitter, so she often took him with her to her bookkeeping job. "I was one of those Berkeley moms, carrying my baby in a backpack everywhere I went. Right from the start," she adds wryly, "I got used to having Tristan on my back."

When Tristan was three and his brother, Luc, was eight, their parents went through an acrimonious divorce. A few months later, their dad, Bruce, moved from Berkeley to a small town in the Sierras, and Marian's new husband, Rob, and his two kids, three-year-old Max and nine-year-old Sam, moved in. Tristan and Luc got along fine with their stepbrothers, but they couldn't stand Rob. Bruce was an eccentric sculptor. Marian was a poet who'd taught for years at a Montessori nursery school. Rob went to work in a suit and tie, believed in chores and rules and discipline. Marian was drawn to Rob's solidity, but Tristan, especially, didn't take well to the new regime. "I hated him," Tristan says flatly. "When he moved in, our house stopped feeling like home."

In their new, not-so-blended family, Max and Sam obeyed Rob; Tristan and Luc listened only to Marian. When Rob had something to say to his stepsons, he had Marian say it for him. And on their infrequent visits with their dad, Tristan and Luc heard "nothing but evil" about Marian, says Tristan, while at home, they heard "nothing but evil" from Marian about him. "After the divorce, we weren't a family. We were teams in a war."

Childrearing habits are established early, and are difficult to break. I found it hard to say Ôno' to jesse as a three-year-old; by the time he was in trouble, i found it nearly impossible. For marian, too, it was hard to change gears. When he started kindergarten, tristan started throwing tantrums and complaining of stomachaches. Rob insisted that marian "be a parent," stop letting tristan run the show. Sometimes marian dragged her screaming son to school, but, just as she'd brought him to work with her as an infant, "i let him stay home from school much too much," she realizes now. "his desperation made me feel desperate."

Marian enrolled Tristan in different schools, special programs. By third grade, he still couldn't read. She took him to see a San Francisco educational consultant who classified him as learning disabled. Tristan was placed in a special-education class. "The dumb class," he called it. Every time he passed Max in the "smart classroom," Tristan felt ashamed, and stupid, and mad.

He felt even stupider and madder when the family moved to Marin and he entered fifth grade in the local public school. "The kids there were hella rich, and hella snobby," says Tristan. He got into fights with the boys who teased him for being chubby. He talked back to the teachers, ran away from school. "It's easy to make excuses when you have a child who's learning disabled," Marion says, "and I did that for a million years." When the school counselor called and "strongly suggested" therapy, Marion's excuses dried up.

The first of the many therapists they went to told Tristan to "empower himself." So Tristan took Rob's antique sword to school and shook it at the boys who'd been bullying him. That night Rob and Marian had the worst fight they'd ever had. Rob thought Tristan should be punished. Marian thought he should see a different therapist.

At 12, Tristan discovered alcohol. By 13, he was smoking pot daily. At 14, he was stealing pills from his friends' parents' medicine cabinets. For the first time, he felt like one of the cool kids, not the loser he'd always been: "Being high felt almost like being happy. I'd been looking for that feeling all my life." But Tristan's grades, always marginal, plummeted.

"I knew he was smoking pot, but so were all our kids," Marion says. "It took me a long time to realize that even though they could handle it, Tristan couldn't. He was ripe for addiction. Once he started, he couldn't stop."

Again, Rob pushed for discipline. Again, Marian insisted that Tristan needed help. Again, Marian and Rob fought in their bedroom while their kids fixed themselves makeshift meals, did their homework, snuck outside to smoke a bowl of pot. No longer was the family cooking meals together, hiking on Mount Tam, taking day trips to the Wine Country. Gradually but thoroughly, the fights about Tristan had taken over their lives.

Who can say why Tristan needed to be fed and held constantly as a baby, why Marian had to drag him kicking and screaming to school, why the same family dynamics and the same drugs that were mildly problematic for his siblings proved catastrophic for him? Whether it was his DNA, his birth order, his sensitivity, or his astrological sign, by the time he turned 15, Tristan's drug use had expanded to a steady diet of Ecstasy, mushrooms, Vicodin, Xanax, Valium, codeine, pot, and alcohol, which he bought, shared, or stole from his friends and his friends' parents. Even his brothers were worried about him. After Tristan stole and wrecked his car, Sam went to Rob and Marian and begged them to do something.

Desperate and terrified, Marian took Tristan to yet another San Francisco therapist, who recommended a $200-an-hour San Francisco educational consultant, who recommended Cragmont, a $30,000-per-year Montana boarding school that specialized in emotionally troubled teens. Sending Tristan away, once Marian's greatest fear, had become her only hope. She borrowed the money from her parents and sent him to Cragmont.

The other boys teased Tristan about his weight so viciously he stayed in his room for a week, eating only when a teacher brought him meals. Then he got a roommate, Alex, who was even heavier and dorkier than he was. Once he joined the boys who were making fun of Alex, Tristan was invited to smoke pot and drink beer with the cool kids. Two months later, he was caught drunk and high. The school shipped him home. The next day Marian borrowed $16,000 more and told Tristan she was sending him to Journeys, one of many teen wilderness programs in the Oregon desert.

Several of his friends had been to boot camps like Journeys; they'd all said it was pure hell. "I'll do better, I promise," Tristan begged. "Please don't make me go." "You'll come back a better person," Rob told Tristan. "Don't be such a wimp," Luc scoffed. Marian cried all the way to the airport. "I can't back down this time," she told Tristan. "Rob won't let me."

Journeys was even worse than Tristan had imagined. The barracks were one room in the middle of nowhere, with a pump for water, a wood stove for heat, and an outhouse in the snow. The counselors slept in the barracks. The boys slept in a tent outside. "Forget running away," a boy who'd been to Journeys three times advised Tristan. "We've all tried it. They'll send the cops after you."

On his third day Tristan wrote in his journal, "I'm very clueless of the reason why mom and Rob sent me here, compared to everyone else here I feel like a goodie goodie who never does nothing wrong. I could have went to intencive therapy and easily passed it and went back to [boarding school] without problem. Now I have risked every chance of me succeeding and being happyÉ"

Halfway through his eight-week stay, during Marian's mandatory visit, Tristan regaled her with horror stories, some true: The kids were driven at 80 miles an hour without seat belts, he said, forced to rappel down steep cliffs without supervision, left alone in the freezing desert for days at a time. Marian packed Tristan's things and called Rob while they were waiting for their flight. Hearing his response, her heart froze in her chest: "He said if I brought Tristan home, it would be the end of our family. He said if I couldn't stick to our plan, I'd have to go live with my mom and dad."

She still didn't know what was best for Tristan, but Marian wasn't willing to risk her marriage to find out. She told her son that he couldn't come home. The two sat together in the airport and cried. Then Tristan went back to Journeys, and Marian went home and found a therapist-for herself. "My emotions were controlling me," she says. "Sending Tristan back to Journeys was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do. But parents have to grow up, too."

In the next year, Tristan was shipped from Journeys back to Cragmont, from Cragmont back to Journeys, from Journeys to live with his dad. He was homesick and lonely at Cragmont and Journeys, bored and lonely stuck in the boonies with Bruce. If he could just live at home with his brothers, Tristan thought, and go to school with his friends, the loneliness, the sadness, the anger he'd felt all his life would finally go away. But when he begged his mom to let him come back, she turned him down. "I had three other kids to take care of," says Marian. "I was so worn out, dealing with Tristan, that I was on the verge of losing my job-it was corporate; I hated it, but I couldn't afford to lose it-and my family."

So Tristan stayed at his dad's-still smoking pot and drinking vodka, still lying, stealing, and cutting school. When he toppled into a grocery-store display, so stoned he couldn't get up, Bruce took him to a Sacramento psychiatrist. "I didn't want to go," Tristan says, "but once I got there, it felt really good to have someone to talk to. I'd been smoking for five years. I hadn't learned a thing in academics. I was totally depressed about what I was gonna do with my life. The shrink said, ÔYou don't have to deal with everything at once. Just deal with your feelings one by one.' Getting his guidance and wisdom, I felt like something lifted from me. I got up with a smile on my face."

Maybe it was the therapy; maybe it was the passage of time-he doesn't know, and who else could?-but Tristan's depression eased. He even began to experience moments of joy. On a trip to the Bay Area several weeks later, Tristan went to the Berkeley Earth Day festival with some friends. That was the day, he says, the evil left him. "The last song was about love," he remembers. "Everyone sang along. All of a sudden, everything felt different. I realized that I used to be filled with hatred, but now I wasn't anymore. I started hugging people, meeting people, dancing. It was amazing."

That night, Tristan and his mom stayed up talking till 4 a.m. Tristan told Marian about his sessions with the psychiatrist, about what had happened on Earth Day. Marian told Tristan about a school she'd heard about from the special-ed teacher at Marin Pacific High: a small, public "sober high school" in San Rafael where kids with drug problems get addiction treatment along with academics. She and Rob would take him back on one condition, Marion said: He had to enroll at Phoenix Academy and abide by the school's rules.

The modest, oak-studded Phoenix campus is just east of Highway 101, a stoner's throw from the Marin County courthouse. The school is an offshoot of the county's first adolescent drug-treatment program, which began at Marin General Hospital in 1981. Six years later, the program's one teacher, Clara MacNamee, went to the Marin superintendent of schools with a new idea: She wanted to create a "sober" classroom within a public high school. "Isn't every classroom sober?" the superintendent asked.

No one would ask that question today. Even so, there are only about 20 public and private "recovery high schools" in the United States-two of them in California-serving just a thousand teenagers. Far less expensive than residential programs, these schools keep students in their own families and communities. And while they, too, require students to aspire to sobriety, they recognize that periodic relapse is a nearly unavoidable step along that road.

Most recovery high schools have fewer than 40 students, and not more than 15 per class. Family involvement is mandatory-at Phoenix, that means weekly family-therapy sessions and weekly multifamily support groups-so the teachers and counselors get to know every student and each student's family, and the families get to know each other. It's ironic, but true: By screwing up their lives, "recovery high" kids get the kind of attention that every high school student needs.

Of the 380 students who have been through Phoenix Academy since 1991-many staying just ONE semester-about 75 percent have either returned to mainstream high school or graduated. This success is achieved at the bargain rate of $10,500 per student per year for the counseling component, which is covered by hard-won grants from government agencies and private foundations, plus the academic tab, which is covered by the school district.

What the school lacks are the amenities of a "regular" high school: no football field, no cafeteria, no library, no gym. That wasn't a problem for Tristan, unlike the program itself. "They kept talking about the 12 steps and a higher power," he says. "I was like, There is no God, you can't push this on me." He hated the daily group-therapy sessions, where it seemed the kids said whatever the counselors wanted to hear, and the constant drug tests, which the kids used endless tricks to beat, and the 12-step meetings, which the kids were required to attend three times a week.

But over time, he came to like a lot of things about Phoenix, too. The students ate lunch together, went to AA and NA meetings together, and hung out together on weekends, so making friends wasn't as hard as it had been at other schools. He liked the small classes of eight or ten kids. (There were only 20 students at Phoenix that year; enrollment has doubled each year since then. He liked the teachers, especially Clara MacNamee, his math and science teacher. "At night I'd think, I did the three AA meetings. I did the homework. I can sleep with a content feeling. I'm part of the world, not just floating through my days."

Most of all, Tristan came to like-love, really-his counselor. Thirty years old, clean-shaven, athletic, and fit, Eric Olson wasn't a macho bully like the counselors at Journeys, or distant like the counselors at boarding school. He didn't try to lay some generic, one-size-fits-none "recovery plan" on Tristan. Eric listened. He understood. He cared. In their weekly (and as needed) sessions, Tristan shared his mixed-up feelings about his parents, his future, girls, school, drugs. He and Eric laughed a lot. Often, talking about his dad, his childhood, his despair, Tristan cried.

At parties and concerts and on weekend camping trips with his friends, Tristan would put a pipe or a bottle to his mouth, then picture Eric's face and put it down. He actually looked forward to school on Mondays, so that he could tell Eric about it. Eric was the first man he had ever trusted, he says, the first man who had ever trusted him. Tristan never lied to Eric. It felt so good that he vowed not to lie to anyone ever again. When he got pneumonia, Eric came to see him in the hospital. When he cut school, Eric called him at home to ask why.

"Tristan's getting better," Marian told me halfway through the school year. "The demons in his head are going away." His family started changing, too. They began eating dinner together again. They got a puppy from the pound and trained him together. Rob and Marian argued less, went out to dinner and the movies more. They rented a beach house in Bolinas for Christmas week. With her energy (and bank account) freed up, Marian quit the corporate job she hated and went back to working with children.

At Tristan's quarterly review, Clara spoke glowingly of his improved attention, attendance, and grades. Eric complimented Tristan's honesty and determination. "That was the best school meeting I've ever had," Tristan told me afterward. "I've never heard any teacher say good things about me before." But Tristan also complained, more than once that year, that the program's emphasis on sobriety was narrow and shortsighted; that he was recovering from more than drug abuse, and needed more than addiction treatment to build a healthy, happy life. "You can't just take a shoe away from a puppy," he said. "You have to give the puppy something better to chew on." He resisted the label of addict, but, as Eric noted, he resisted sobriety, too.

As June approached and Tristan was about to get what he'd always wanted-transfer to a "regular" high school-his recovery hit a snag. He started oversleeping, cutting class, going out before his mom got home from work and coming home late or not at all. No one needed a drug test to prove the obvious. "I can touch my hand on the burner, feel that it's hot, burn myself, and not do it again," he told me. "But with drugs I keep on doing it, 'cause my mind keeps building up this story that the burner's not gonna be hot anymore."

What had happened to the Tristan who enjoyed not floating through his days? "I didn't feel comfortable being looked at as the perfect student. Now I'm the exact opposite, and it's just as uncomfortable. That's why I wanna get out of Phoenix. All we talk about is sobriety. There's more to me than that. There's more to life than that." Tristan assumed there'd be a huge scene with Eric. "But he was like, ÔI'm not mad at you or anything, sounds like you got a lot out of it, let's talk about how you can stay sober from now on.' " Instead of lecturing, Eric had Tristan sign a "relapse contract," a 12-item list of specific commitments that Tristan had to make and keep in order to stay at Phoenix.

Marian's response was surprising, too, even to her. She didn't panic. She didn't cry. She didn't start researching treatment programs or therapists, and she didn't play good cop to Rob's bad. She bought a box of drug tests and told Tristan she'd be testing him randomly and often. She told him she'd ground him indefinitely if that's what it took to keep him clean, and that if he didn't obey her, he couldn't live there anymore. "At work I'm seeing that being strict really works with some kids," she told me. "Especially the creative kids like Tristan. I'm sure he'll keep smoking pot and having setbacks, but I'm not as worried about him as I was. I think he has a foundation now that he didn't have before."

Tristan spent his junior year at Marin Pacific, a "regular" Marin high school. Although he wasn't seeing Eric or any other therapist, he kept plugging away at the issues that have plagued him all his life. He started spending weekends with his dad, bringing him homegrown basil from which they made pesto together. He looked for common ground with Rob: bought him a book of Mary Oliver poems, engaged him in debate about the war on Iraq. Determined to focus on what he could do, not on what he shouldn't, Tristan pursued his interest in theater, doing an internship with a local performance troupe, making videos as class assignments. Academics remained a struggle for him, but in another small classroom with another set of caring teachers, Tristan kept his grades high enough to earn a summer trip to Greece last summer, the reward Marian had offered if he maintained a C average. And he got involved with his first real girlfriend, a devout member of AA.

Now in his final year of high school, Tristan is happier, less self-doubting, more focused on his future. His drug use hasn't stopped, but it's changed. He still drinks and smokes pot and occasionally does other drugs, but less often and less destructively. Some would say that's not good enough; that tristan is an addict who can never use drugs or alcohol without setting a life-threatening scenario in motion. Others, like the phoenix counselors, take a more patient, long-term approach. His mom falls somewhere in between, focusing not on labels or predictions, but on immediate cause and effect. "when he smokes, he's spacey, obnoxious, and irresponsible," she says. "for me that's a good enough reason for him to stop."

But the lying, the stealing, the week-long drug binges, the screaming fights with his mom don't happen anymore, even though Marian grounds him often for his pot smoking, and remains the stricter, firmer parent she wishes she'd always been. "Tristan had to earn his Boy Scout badges from the dark side. He did that," she says, adding, "The less slack I cut him, the better he does."

Why does one child turn toward the dark side while his siblings turn toward the light? Why did Tristan do some of the same things that Luc, Max, and Sam did, but with disastrous results?

Raising two very different sons with two very different outcomes, I learned the hard way that the parenting style, the schools, the neighborhood that worked well for one son didn't work for the other at all. Spending a few years with teenagers and their families, I learned, too, how unpredictable parenting is. You can do everything just right with your child and have him grow up terribly wrong. You can make terrible mistakes with your child and have her grow up exactly as you'd hoped.

As parents, we plug away earnestly at our task, imagining that each kiss we plant, each school we choose, each punishment we impose is as precise as a sculptor's knife. We slice away a bit of aggression here; dab on a dollop of self-esteem there, and voilˆ! Surely this careful artistry, these years of hard labor, will produce the progeny of our dreams.

It doesn't work like that, as Jesse taught me and Tristan has taught Marian. Still, Marian believes, as I do, that each time she has managed to do for her so what she believed, not necessarily what he wanted-especially sending him to Phoenix Academy-she has contributed to his slow but steady path toward the strong, healthy adult he is becoming. All the rest of it-how he will stop or control his drug intake, how he'll acquire the skills he needs to live-is up to Tristan, beyond his mother's control. If there's one teenage imperative, it's to show their parents, in every wonderful and terrifying thing they do, that it's not our dreams they're here to live. It's their own.