The father’s search for Nic in San Francisco

David Sheff’s search for Nic through San Francisco’s streets turns a desperate attempt to locate his missing son into an encounter with another young person living with addiction. The search yields no news of Nic: instead, the story brings the father face to face with a nineteen-year-old runaway, her history of repeated flight and treatment, and the parents left wondering whether their child is alive. He drives home without Nic, carrying those questions back into his own family life.

Anxiety and the decision to search

Nic’s absence has made the family’s days revolve around uncertainty. David Sheff tries to keep his worries from spilling over onto the younger children, but he snaps at Karen, who usually bears his anger and frustration even as his preoccupation strains their household. His sleeplessness gives that anxiety a recurring image: Karen finds him sitting in the living room, watching the dim fire, while he explains that thoughts of Nic on San Francisco’s streets keep him awake. He imagines his son hurt, in trouble, or dying. Karen tells him that she shares the fear, and the two cry together for the first time.

That shared grief does not answer the question that drives him out the door: whether Nic is all right. On a cool, overcast morning, David crosses the Golden Gate Bridge knowing that the plan is a fool’s errand, but unable to remain at home. He intends to search the Haight and the Mission District, places where he suspects Nic might appear. The trip is not guided by a confirmed sighting or a reliable lead; it is an effort to turn fear into movement, and the possibility of finding Nic into a route through the city.

Through the Haight and Golden Gate Park

David first drives aimlessly through the Mission District, then crosses town, parks on Ashbury, and walks down Haight Street. He checks Amoeba, Nic’s preferred record store, and looks into cafés and bookstores. The search passes through a neighborhood marked by both its 1960s-era countercultural identity and its present-day drug use. Runaways gather in doorways; some have dyed hair and tattoos, while others appear stoned or visibly unwell. David recalls Nic’s earlier observation that the street scene is no longer chiefly about peace and love, but about punk music, idleness, and drugs.

The sight of young people living in these conditions widens the search’s meaning without bringing David closer to Nic. He sees people he understands as seriously ill and slowly deteriorating, yet they remain on the street rather than in a hospital. He asks several of them whether they know his son. They ignore him or glare at him. As he steps past, looking into their faces, he finds himself wondering not only who they are but also what their parents might be doing and feeling.

At Stanyan, he crosses into Golden Gate Park and walks through a small wooded area, passing rollerbladers and cyclists. Near the merry-go-round, he tells a police officer that he is looking for his son, a meth addict. The officer says that people using meth are easy to spot and leads David along a path toward a grassy rise beneath a magnolia tree, where about a dozen people have gathered. The search has moved from familiar places associated with Nic to a group identified by the officer as a possible concentration of meth users.

The young woman on the bench

Apart from the group, a thin, pale girl sits on a bench in a dirty French sailor’s sweater. As David approaches, he notices the tense jaw and restless, pulsing body he associates with meth. She recoils when he introduces himself, then seems to relax after he tells her that the officer pointed her out. She explains that the officer leaves people alone unless they cause trouble or use drugs near the children’s playground. The playground is familiar to David: Nic once played secret agent there.

After some conversation, David describes Nic and asks whether she knows him. She asks what he looks like, but when David answers, she says that the description fits many of the men she knows. Her practical warning is that Nic cannot be found if he does not want to be found. The search’s central obstacle is thus stated by someone who knows the street environment from within: David can walk through likely places and ask faces for recognition, but he cannot make his son appear.

David asks whether she is hungry and offers to get food. She agrees, and they walk to McDonald’s, where she devours a cheeseburger. Over the meal she recounts a life sharply at odds with the image of a permanently lost street kid. As a child, she played with dolls, marched in her high-school band, liked history, and excelled in French. She read widely and names authors including Harper Lee, Tolkien, Dickens, E. B. White, Hemingway, Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Dostoyevsky. She remembers being a pompom girl and not making it to prom. The details register a former school life and literary interests, but she also says that she no longer reads.

She says that a boy gave her meth when she was fourteen, five years earlier. She knows how damaging it is, yet says she would choose it again if she could start over: she cannot imagine living without the drug and wants the pleasure it can bring. Her account makes addiction neither an abstract danger nor a simple failure of knowledge. She understands that meth has harmed her and still describes needing it in her life.

A history of flight and an unresolved return

The girl’s parents live in Ohio, in the house where she grew up; her father is a banker and her mother a real-estate agent. After she first ran away to San Francisco with a friend, they hired a private detective, who traced her to a homeless shelter and persuaded her to return. They then took her to a hospital for crystal detox. She says the experience was hell and that she wanted to die. On the day she was discharged, she overdosed on a jar of Valium she had stolen.

After she recovered, her parents sent her to Hazelden, but she ran away from that facility as well. They found her again and brought her to another rehabilitation center. She rejected the programs as cult-like and objected to their religious emphasis. After fleeing again, she obtained crank from an old boyfriend and hitchhiked back to San Francisco, riding much of the way with a truck driver who smoked meth. In the Haight, she began dealing and injecting crystal. She now says she lives in a garage with a space heater, no running water, and an old mattress. David urges her to call her parents because they would want to know she is alive; she does not respond.

David’s search ends without Nic. On the drive home, he wonders about the girl’s parents and imagines them, like him, moving through ordinary tasks with only part of their attention present, never free of worry, asking what went wrong, whether their daughter is alive, and whether the fault is theirs. He then turns those questions on himself, tormenting himself with the possibility that he spoiled Nic. The encounter has not supplied the news he sought, but it has placed another family’s uncertainty beside his own. The search becomes a movement through streets and a return to the questions that the streets cannot settle.