Death Grip (18 page)

In time, there was nothing to do but release me. A social worker sat with me in the discharge room, reviewing my file.

“Look, Matt, you're clearly a sharp guy,” he said. He spoke plainly and openly, unlike the cold, arrogant Dr. Whateverthehell who'd vetted me a half-hour earlier with his “Um-hmms” and “I sees” and his fancy pen and reductive symptomology checklist.

“CU student, As and Bs, journalism major, Italian girlfriend, a climber. You've got lots of good stuff going on,” the social worker continued.

“I guess.”

I held a slim book in my hand, Camus' ruminations on the absurdity of life and its connection to suicide,
The Myth of Sisyphus.
I'd been struggling to read the book on the ward, my concentration diffracted by withdrawal. I'd reached the part where Camus dismisses suicide as an option, and then given up.

“Good book,” he said. “I read it a long time ago.”

“Yeah, I—”

“You're not thinking of killing yourself, are you?”

“No, no. Not at all.”

“Okay, good. We just need to make sure of that. But with these drugs, with this Valium, you know you were doing exactly that, don't you?”

I considered this, said nothing.

“It says here on your chart that you've had some problems with prostatitis this spring—why do you think that is?” he asked.

“I dunno. Drug stress, maybe. The Valium.” I'd gone through a period of burning, syrupy micturition—I was practically urinating salt crystals, the pain so sharp it made my eyes tear up as I swayed over the toilet. Antibiotics had followed, coupled with more self-prescribed Valium.

“I would say so. Think of what those things are doing to your body. All that partying, all those pills. You were killing yourself slowly, man, whether you admit it or not.”

“To be honest, I never really saw it that way,” I said. “I didn't know you could get addicted. I was just taking them because it was fun, because they killed my anxiety for a while.”

“Until you're hooked,” he said.

“Until you're hooked…” I agreed.

“Look, Matt. I'd like you to go to NA—Narcotics Anonymous. If you don't, I promise you I'll be seeing you back here in five years. And neither of us wants that.”

“No, no. We don't.”

“I mean it.”

“I know. I don't want to come back either.”

“Will you sign this paper agreeing to go to a meeting, and then we'll let you go?”

“Okay. Fair enough.”

I signed; I complied. Then I packed my overnight bag and had them buzz me out of the ward. I bounded down the stairs and out onto Mapleton Avenue, into a gauzy spring afternoon with cotton-candy clouds and Cezanne blue skies. So enamored was I with my newfound freedom that I walked the entire three miles through town and surprised Luisa back at the condo with a big, wet kiss. And I did, as promised, attend that NA meeting. But despite showing up at the time and place listed in the newspaper, I found myself sitting in an empty room up at Wardenburg Health Center on campus. “Hi, my name's Matt and I'm an addict,” just doesn't have the same ring when there's no one to hear you. I'd been in this room before, two years earlier, in my hopeless-virgin period for a “Meeting and Dating on Campus” seminar in which, save the instructor, I'd been the only attendee. I hated this room. Fuck this room. I could see the Flatirons outside tilting above Boulder, calling me to climb. I sat there for fifteen minutes and then got up and left.

Fuck this shit and fuck NA
, I thought.
I'm going home.

 

CHAPTER 8

Thudd-idd-bupp.

 

Luisa can't sit still either. It's late March 1996, spring break, two weeks after the Mapleton Center and we're at the City of Rocks, a backwater state park near Silver City, New Mexico. She's agitated, biting her fingernails, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the Golf's passenger seat beside me. Luisa is anxious, she tells me, nearly as anxious as myself, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. We have a CD in, the Jesus and Mary Chain, unfurling slow and electric into the cool desert night. We've come here via Albuquerque, where we stopped for my father's fiftieth birthday party. When he began to mention me in a toast, I frowned and waved at him to stop:
No one needs to hear about your druggie asshole son.
Luisa and I headed south, spent two days climbing outside Socorro on the dark andesite of the Box Canyon. When I pushed myself on a 5.12
+
top rope, I felt a sharp ache radiating from my weary prostate, a watery acid-flashback feeling, leaping jitters, spastic muscles that made my movements staccato and chaotic. This will go on for months, almost every time I touch the rock; calm remains elusive. GABA receptors de-invert but slowly.

A full moon rises to paint liquid chrome over the stone gargoyles that surround our campsite, welded-tuff penitentes beetling from the desert like fern buds, a rock “city” replete with corridors and plazas and boroughs and suburbs, a maze with its thousands of boulder problems. The problems have neither names nor ratings, chalk from the few passing climbers carried off by the winds that have sculpted the blobs. I took magic mushrooms here once when I was nineteen; a buddy and I wandered around giggling and bouldering. As the psilocybin reached its peak, I'd been trying to summit a freestanding globe of rock. I had my hands on razor crimps in the Northwest Territories, but couldn't elevate my hips past the equator—I had no idea what my feet were doing down in Patagonia. I fell and fell again until I found a tiny sliver of rock to paste my right foot on out near the Cape Verde Islands. My spine and knees were young then, malleable and strong. My friend spotted distractedly, laughing away at God-only-knows-what. There were other times like this, other drugs, other rocks. It was all part of the culture.

“I never told you this,” Luisa says, “but I didn't flush away that Valium like you asked me to from the hospital.”

“What?”

“I just couldn't, you know?” She lights another Marlboro.

“You couldn't? I told you to, baby.” I didn't want the temptation when I returned home, and furthermore had grown paranoid about having illegally obtained drugs in the house. Too many people, from my therapist on down, knew. Luisa would take a Valium here and there, and she knew which dresser drawer I'd hidden the pills in. But had she really…?

“Look, amore, I was taking more than you thought.”

“Why, Luisa? Why? You saw what I was going through. Why would you do that?”

“
Non lo so.
It was just so awful having you in the hospital with those stupid people locking you up, and I couldn't sleep. I was all alone in this
fottuto
condominium in
fottuto
boring Boulder…” One evening when Luisa had visited the ward, fellow CU student C was bantering with a psych nurse, trying to explain to her who Vladimir Lenin was apropos of some political rant. The nurse, a ruddy, dead-behind-the-eyes blonde, just kept repeating, “I've never heard of that one, but I know John from the Beatles!” Luisa's face fell as she overheard this tableau, as she turned to me and whispered, “We need to get you away from these people. They're crazy—the staff, I mean.”

“How many?”

“Two or three a night.”

“For how long?”

“At least that whole week. Okay, two weeks,
magari tre
…”

“Jesus, Luisa. I wish you hadn't.” I take her hand; I know exactly what she's feeling.

In time we go to the tent. I'd like to think it's the full moon that keeps us up that night, but the following evening—the new moon, under the Milky Way and a brilliant glaze of stars—we're no less wired, even after a long day wrestling gargoyles.

Thudd-idd-bupp.

“Matt, Luisa viene su a Torino con Sandrina. Arrivano fra poco.”

It's Luisa's father, Luigi, calling from their country home outside Bagnolo Piemonte, a mountain hamlet southwest of Torino. His baritone booms across the line. Luigi is six foot five, 300 pounds, a man to be taken seriously. I'm living in a working-class slum on Torino's western edge, renting a one-room apartment up four flights of marble-gloss stairs. I've come here after graduation to be with Luisa, to make a go of living in Italy; Luigi has given me a job translating his magazine's Web site into English. It's June 1996, and the Web is taking off. I commute to work on a bright-orange mountain bike, dodging Fiats, Lanzas, Mercedes sedans, trolley cars, Moroccan windshield-washer kids with squeegees and buckets, the deep-ebony African women, prostituted by the mafia, who haunt the paths of vast Parco Pellerina; inhaling clouds of diesel exhaust; getting drenched by Italy's frequent downpours; showing up to work sweaty and disheveled, so unlike my fashionista coworkers. On the nights I can't sleep—and there are many—I stand on my front balcony overlooking my street. The block across the way is prewar construction, two-story villas with classical red tile roofs in stark juxtaposition to the nondescript box in which I'm living.

“Tutto bene, Luigi? Non c'é problema?”

He pauses, sighs. I don't like this.

“Si, si. Tutto bene, Matt.”

“Luisa sta bene? Cos'é successo?” Luisa's okay? What's happened?

“Ti spiega tutto appena arriva.”

“Okay.”
She will explain everything once she arrives.
Some minutes later Luisa sounds the buzzer.

“It's me,” Luisa says, just those two words, flat and emotionless.

I buzz her in and unlock the apartment door. Footfalls echo up the stairs and then she stands before me in well-worn jeans and her favorite white blouse, proffering a red leather puppy's collar and a matching leash, tears sliding down her cheeks. That collar shouldn't be empty—there should be a wee, wiry-haired black Spinone in it.

“Lolita died,” Luisa says, and just like that I take her in my arms and we're sobbing into each other. At some point I'm on the bed, punching the wall, screaming,
“No No No No NO!”

Lolita is a pound dog only two months old, a squeaky ball of unadulterated sweetness. We've had her two weeks, brought her home and washed the pound funk off her in the kitchen sink, had our happiest day in months with her at a cliff near Bagnolo. As we climbed on rough gray gneiss above a roaring streamlet, Lolita wandered about sniffing wildflowers, recoiling as honeybees buzz-bombed her black gorilla nose.
“Le api, Lolita! Le api!”
Luisa said.
“Stai attenta a le api!”
and Lolita looked up, her brown eyes bright. She knew her name after only two days. I climbed a 5.12d onsight that afternoon, moving well for the first time in the post-Valium washout, and Luisa fared nicely on an overhanging 5.11. I felt poised, able to puzzle through sequences before my fingers gave out, moving smoothly from hold to hold as if I'd grabbed them all my life. Gilt late-afternoon sun sliced in across the Alps, and you could taste honeysuckle on the air. I'd shaken all my psychiatric meds, including the Serzone and BuSpar the shrink had tried me on after the Valium debacle. The former, an antidepressant, made me spacey and “Ser-zoned”; it has been pulled from various international markets amid allegations of liver damage that included deaths. The latter, a non-benzo anxiety drug, did precisely nothing; warm milk would have been more effective. I'd been glad to leave the orange bottles behind when I left the United States. It felt like starting a whole new life, one free of chemicals.

Lolita was not so lucky. In Bagnolo that evening, as Luisa prepared to empty a can of wet dog food into a bowl, Lolita sniffed out a similar bowl of insecticide gel on the kitchen floor and mistook it for her meal. By the time Luisa noticed what was happening, Lolita had taken a few bites.

“It was so bad, amore, so so so so bad,” Luisa is telling me. “Papá and I loaded her on the moped and rushed down to the veterinarian. Her eyes had rolled up and she was shitting everywhere and foam was coming from her mouth, and it was so bad oh so b-b-b-.…” Luisa is sobbing again; so am I. Nothing will fix this.

“The vet got her on the table and she was still alive, still breathing.…”

I can picture little Lolita on the steel examination table, her chest madly inflating and deflating like a bellows, her pink cow belly rising and falling too quickly, and then not at all.

“But it was too late,” Luisa says. “It was too late to save her. She'd eaten too much poison.”

Thudd-idd-bupp.

W
e're in downtown
Ljubljana
,
S
lovenia's
green, charming, hilly capital, and the camper van—Luisa's grandfather's diesel Ford
furgone
—is parked somewhere far away. We're walking along the emerald curl of the Ljubljanica River, looking for video-game stores. I'm obsessed with finding Doom II for my laptop. “It” is on me again, a terrorized searing, an interior chemical simmering that has spread to without, and I'm hoping the distraction of the game will help. I don't say anything to Luisa other than that I'm feeling woozy from the heat, from low blood sugar, from the previous week's climbing frenzy at the limestone horseshoe of Misja Pec near the Croatian border. We've come to Slovenia to escape Torino at peak summer heat and to forget the pain of losing Lolita. On a rest day from climbing we ventured to the coast in Croatia, fresh off the Balkan War. We found a rock beach with shelves of black limestone stair-stepping down to the Adriatic, its flat slate-blue plain spreading to the horizon. Fences warning of land mines and unexploded artillery beyond enclosed us on either side:
SWIM ONLY HERE.
The Croatians seemed jumpy, their pain like the raw nerves of an exposed tooth. We passed bombed-out skeleton towns en route to the sea, the rubble heaped in barrows beside the road.