Everything-and Nothing-to Live For

The Son's Story:

New York Times Service

NEW YORK-The loneliness started early. There was not only the physical absence of Alan King, his father. but increasingly strong self-doubt, a belief that he was "peculiar."

"I went berserk. In my own neurotic way, I acted out. I couldn't lean in a positive direction, so I leaned in the negative even to the point of sticking needles in my arm.

**

Robert (Bob) King, a 20-year-old who spent five years popping pills, snorting and shooting drugs, who was expelled from one school after another, was talking, describing how he became a dealer and started friends, even his own younger brother. experimenting with drugs.

I DIDN'T feel acceptance by anybody; I tried to get the attention I didn't get at home."

The lean figure in the

flared corduroy hip-huggers sat at the table in the dining alcove of his New York apartment and shoveled sugar into his coffee.

"Inside I was looking for a way out. I wanted a relationship-I wanted to enjoy my father and have him enjoy me.

"I didn't know how to do it-and there was a tremendous thing I went through about sexuality."

Superficially, Bob King, a child of fame and affluence, had everything, everything but a sense of love, affection, concern, identity and manhood.

"MY FATHER was always gone, and I think my mother expected too much of me. he said. She couldn't understand, and I couldn't explain.'

"

To Bob, who completed AREBA's rehabilitation program more than a year ago, drugs were the way out a subconscious attempt to kill myself every junkie is looking to kill himself.

(AREBA. which stands for Accelerated Re-Education of Emotions. Behavior and Attitudes, is a privately run program here to rehabilitate drug addicts.)

"Society today is dehumanizing." Bob went on. "People, including parents, are very insensitive to each other. They force you to withdraw into yourself, you walk around with suppressed emotions and you've got to get them out.

"THAT'S the fascination of drugs: they get you out of yourself. Then there's the whole exciting intrigue of being a member of a drug

cult, of acceptance in it. If you're lonely and frightened, you want to be accepted by any group.'

""

For years, Bob's indifference to the "manly" games of baseball and football

bothered him.

""

I always liked things like badminton and catch ing butterflies. and bees,' he recalled. "My father would jokingly say, "You like all the sissy things,' and that starts getting you scared and no one explains things.

"I thought I was different, preculiar, that no one was like me.

"YEAH, I began thinking that maybe I was a homosexual."

He outlined the problems he once believed unique and

recently discovered were not.

""

"In a lot of ways, women frightened me, going out, me. going out, Bob dating and all that,' said. "I found out that it's natural, but at the time I was really frightened about go-out-and-get-'em person being funny. I'm not a hard anyway."

""

As a youngster, proving himself was wearing a pompadour hairstyle and black "muscle" shirts, getting "incoherent" on liquor stolen from his father's bar. ("I can remember crawling on my hands and knees from my room to the bathroom"), making friends with school dropouts and bums, and using LSD. (“I'd be completely whacked out of my mind for days.")

PILLS,

stimulants,

de-

pressants and drugs of all descriptions followed, paid for initially by stealing from his father, later by dealing -"I never had any trouble getting supplies,” he said.

"I turned quite a few other people on to drugs. I'd sit down and talk to them and turn them on. I knew there was something wrong in what I was doing, but I wouldn't let myself think about it.

"My mother and father had to know I was doing

drugs," he continued. "They could smell it in my room. And when they were gone, the maid couldn't help, but see us stumble aroundat parties. They just didn't know how to cope with it."