Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the southern pole of Nic Sheff’s divided childhood and, much later, a place where he assembles a substantial network of support in recovery. The city first stands for distance: after Vicki moves there and remarries, the informal arrangement in which Nic moves between his parents’ homes can no longer continue. Years afterward, when he fears that the Bay Area is too closely associated with methamphetamine, Los Angeles offers proximity to his mother and a fresh setting for sober living. It becomes neither a simple refuge nor a guaranteed solution, but a recurring place in the family’s effort to sustain connection without mistaking hope for certainty.

A City Divided Between Two Homes

Vicki’s move to Los Angeles puts roughly five hundred miles between the parents. Both she and Nic’s father want Nic to live with them, and both believe he would be better off with them than with the other parent. They turn to lawyers, then agree to abide by the decision of Nic’s therapist, whom they hire to assess the custody question. After a three-month investigation, the therapist recommends that Nic spend the school year with his father in San Francisco and holidays and summers with Vicki in Southern California. Los Angeles thus becomes not merely where one parent lives, but the destination built into the schedule that divides Nic’s time.

The arrangement gives the school year and the vacations different emotional weights. Nic’s father describes the anticipated absence at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and summer as a loss even though he will have Nic with him for the ordinary days of the school year. For Nic, the transfers require packing and leaving one home for another. Before flights, he puts toys and clothes into a small Hello Kitty suitcase; by age five, he travels alone, carrying a backpack stocked with books and journals, Star Trek Micro Machines, plastic vampire teeth, a Discman and CDs, and a stuffed crab. His parents’ phrase of farewell gathers love, longing, and apology into a ritual, but the ritual does not make the separation easy.

Los Angeles is also the setting for the summer half of that childhood. Nic’s father speaks with him regularly by telephone while he is away, hearing about movies, ball games, a playground bully, a new friend, and books. The family at home in Inverness tries to fill its limited time with Nic when he visits for two weeks, while his father also makes scheduled trips to see him in Los Angeles. They collect him and drive north toward Santa Barbara or south toward San Diego; after those weekends, they return him to Vicki and his stepfather in Pacific Palisades. The repeated departure gives the visits a temporary quality: time together is actively made, then ends with another handoff.

Childhood Visits and the Cost of Distance

The book presents the distance not as a neutral travel arrangement but as a continuing strain on family life. Summer, conventionally a break from school and a chance to be together, becomes a period Nic’s father wants to get through quickly. Telephone calls keep the relationship active, and visits bring shared outings and evenings together, but neither substitutes for everyday presence. Even the pleasures of the household’s new baby are shadowed by the sadness of Nic’s absence. His family does not grow accustomed to the change simply because the custody calendar repeats it.

Travel itself marks Nic’s position between homes. At first a parent accompanies him; later an airline attendant escorts him as an unaccompanied minor. On one return flight to his father, he recounts how a woman seated beside him plays religious music through oversized headphones and presses the headphones on him without asking. His story becomes family entertainment on the drive home, but the episode also locates him in the particular vulnerability of traveling alone: he must navigate the attention of strangers while moving between the adults who have arranged his life. The flights offer small freedoms, such as ordering Coca-Cola despite the household rules, yet those perks are minor beside his fear of a plane crash.

The family’s experience of Los Angeles therefore remains relational rather than scenic. It is where Nic spends holidays and summers with Vicki, where his father’s visits begin and end, and where the child has to leave one parent in order to be with the other. The repeated journeys connect the two households while making their separation visible. Los Angeles is not simply the place far from San Francisco; it is a destination that determines when Nic can be with each side of his family and makes every reunion temporary.

A Recovery Network in Los Angeles

Much later, Los Angeles takes on a different function. In December, Hazelden’s New York inpatient program closes because it cannot fill its three dozen beds with paying patients, though the organization continues to operate an outpatient program in Manhattan. Nic is wary of returning to the Bay Area, which he associates with meth, and, with help from his counselor, chooses Los Angeles so he can live near Vicki. The decision makes geography part of his recovery plan: he is not only leaving one program, but selecting a place he believes he can inhabit without the same immediate association with drugs.

Nic settles into Herbert House, a sober-living program in Culver City. Its setting consists of whitewashed bungalows draped with bougainvillea and roses, with small porches facing a shared brick courtyard furnished with palms, picnic tables, and garden furniture. The peaceful residential arrangement operates alongside firm requirements: residents do chores, follow strict rules, and attend meetings each night. Nic likes the house and forms friendships with other residents. He becomes especially close to Jace, the compassionate director, while also attending a nearby outpatient program and meeting with a new psychiatrist.

Recovery in Los Angeles is supported by relationships and routines beyond the residence. Nic works with a new AA sponsor, Randy, whose more than fifteen years of sobriety make him an example Nic finds inspiring. The two take long bicycle rides along the Pacific Coast Highway. Nic’s father hears him on the phone sounding like the person he remembers from before the drugs, and understands the improvement as the product of several supports working together: treatment, the sober house, outpatient sessions, AA, Randy, and Nic’s friends in recovery. The city provides a setting in which those parts of a program can coexist; the narrative does not present the location alone as the cause of Nic’s progress.

Work, Family, and Departure

Nic’s recovery community also helps him find a technician job at Promises, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program based in Malibu. He drives patients to meetings and doctors’ appointments, dispenses medication, and assists counselors with other duties. The work gives him a role in other people’s treatment as well as practical responsibilities of his own. His father describes it as fulfilling because Nic has something to offer and can help others while the work helps him.

When Nic turns twenty-one in July, his father visits him in Los Angeles and picks him up outside Herbert House. Nic leaps into the car, and his father sees him as whole again. The milestone brings hope, but the family’s welcome remains cautious. Karen is not yet ready to see him, and Nic has not been allowed to see Daisy and Jasper because the adults fear that the younger children could be hurt again. Their love for Nic and their wish to protect the children remain in conflict; the apparent stability of his life in Los Angeles does not immediately restore trust.

Los Angeles later becomes the place Nic returns to after a severe crisis. After agreeing to go back to the program and to Randy, he uses his remaining money for a taxi to the airport and a plane ticket. Vicki collects him and takes him to his apartment, where his roommate welcomes him; Nic then retreats to his bedroom and sleeps as he begins detoxing. The return brings him back toward familiar support, but it follows a dangerous episode and is presented as precarious rather than as a resolution.

Eventually Nic leaves Los Angeles. He catches a bus east and, after a period in which he and his father do not speak, they resume regular contact. Nic has found a friend from the program, shares a home with a new partner who is an art student, works in a café, and is writing his book again. His father calculates that about a year has passed since Nic left Los Angeles and believes, as far as he knows, that Nic has been sober for that year. The city’s significance is therefore neither an ending nor a cure: it is one stage in a longer, uneven effort to find treatment, community, work, and a life that can continue beyond the structures that first helped sustain him.