Death Grip (2 page)

As a teenager I'd seen some poor, deranged sod do this down in Albuquerque. He'd opened his wrists in Summit Park, a shady square of grass near my mother's home by the University of New Mexico. Three friends and I were skateboarding around a concrete loop that encircled the park's central playground, and I'd noticed the man, raccoon-eyed and wild-haired, slumped against a cottonwood eating watermelon. We looped around again, paddling under a hot dappling of July sun, avoiding alluvia of gravel. We passed the man a second time, but now I noticed something off about his “watermelon.” I looked closer, saw how the watermelon was in fact the man's two forearms wet with blood. He held them and a gleaming blade before him, alternately slashing at each like a fisherman cleaning carp.

“Hey, man,” one of us said, as our little band stopped by his tree. “You need some help?”

The man stared at us blankly, said nothing, and then stood up unsteadily and ran off into the neighborhood. The cops came and we helped them search, following the man's gore trail along the sidewalk until we found him cowering behind a hedgerow. I remember wondering what would drive someone to such a ghastly and public act—how could life become so unbearable? Only thirteen then, the worst of the anxiety storm still before me, I vowed never to be “that guy”—to force some unsuspecting other to witness my self-murder.

As I now did to Andrew.

I'd pulled the bottle from a crease off the shoulder, where we'd screeched to a halt in a pullout along Rifle Creek only thirty seconds earlier. (Much of this is reconstructed from Andrew's memory, for the obvious reason that my own was compromised.) We were: me; my brindled, Bengali-striped, eighty-pound Plott hound, Clyde; and Andrew. We'd driven out from our homes in the mountain hamlet of Carbondale, an hour away, in my silver VW Golf, a climber car in stage 4 disrepair. I'd first met Andrew in 2005 when he was an intern at
Rock and Ice
, where he stayed on as associate editor. Andrew is tall, thin, dark-skinned, half-Arab, with a strong wit and iron fingers to match. I shouldn't have come with him to Rifle that day. I should have been home in bed, rigid atop the sheets, vibrating, staring at the ceiling, sweating, “resting,” waiting for the seconds to congeal into minutes to congeal into hours until I could steal a few hours of nightmare-haunted sleep. But a coworker at
Climbing
,
Rock and Ice
's main competitor but a block away in Carbondale and where I now—somehow, barely—held an editorial job, had shanghaied me into replacing old protection bolts during a
Climbing
-sponsored event. And so I'd come out, fearing all the while that being back in my old stomping grounds thusly compromised might trigger an epic blowout.

And now I ate my “watermelon” and forced Andrew to watch.

I'd called Andrew and asked him to come in part because I thought having a friend there might anchor me. The last time I'd visited Rifle, that spring of 2006, I'd been in the grips of a similarly stark terror. Only four months out from my last dose of benzodiazepine after seven continuous years on the drugs, I was so dizzy, fearful, and winded (among dozens of other troubling symptoms) that I'd not made it more than halfway up the warm-up, a climb I'd done hundreds of times before. I was so weak I could barely shuffle
down
the canyon road without wheezing, as a friend, Derek, and I walked from one wall to the next. It had been a horror, a disaster, a demoralizing failure. The climb whose protection bolts I was supposed to update this day was called
Sprayathon
, a severely overhanging 5.13c. (Fifth-class, or roped, technical rock climbing, is subdivided by the Yosemite Decimal System, originally designed to be a close-ended scale from 5.0 to 5.9 but that now goes to the mathematically improbable 5.15. At 5.10 and above, the YDS further subdivides into the letter grades “a” through “d”—5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d, 5.11a, etc.) Andrew would go first and get the rope up, and then I would use mechanical ascenders called Jumars to reach the old bolts and, with a cordless hammer drill, replace them. The reality, however, was that I had to
crawl
up the stairs to reach my bedroom, rented from friends back in Carbondale. If stairs were too much, hoisting my fat carcass up a taut, free-hanging 10-millimeter rope was going to be impossible. At my physical peak in the nineties and early aughts, I could run laps on
Sprayathon
, and even used it as a warm-up when I was trying a 5.14,
Zulu
, down the road.
Sprayathon
had always been a handy benchmark of personal fitness, and for a time I'd been one of the stronger climbers in the canyon.

Now, however, I couldn't get up
Sprayathon
on Jumars, and I'd tried to tell that to my coworker at
Climbing
. But like most everyone around me he just could not or would not believe me.

“Don't worry about it, Matt,” he'd told me. “I know how hard you climb.”

I didn't bother mentioning that he'd described another person: the Matt before benzodiazepine withdrawal.

By all outward appearances, I looked normal … enough. Overweight from inactivity, sure, with a comically “pregnant” stress belly; and downtrodden, my eyes perpetually glued to the floor. But not nearly as sick as I felt. It would have been better had I had a compound fracture: splintered bone poking through the skin. A
tangible, relatable
malady that elicited sympathy and didn't require so much by way of explanation that I eventually gave up and just told people, “Well, I have chronic fatigue.”

I'd barely climbed over the last year, and not at all in the month prior. I'd done a disappearing act that began in summer 2005 as I struggled to taper off benzos. Since then, I'd been hospitalized thrice, labeled “bipolar” and “majorly depressed,” chemically lobotomized by antipsychotic major tranquilizers and epilepsy-drug mood stabilizers, held in locked wards, recommended electroshock, and then ultimately tapered off the benzos at a big East Coast hospital, the Johns Hopkins Institute, only to be “snowed under” by further meds and released into the world sicker than ever. The root problem had for years been benzo addiction—tolerance and then withdrawal—but the doctors and therapists, the so-called experts, refused to acknowledge this. Instead, I'd been told repeatedly that my anguish was endogenous, the result of a permanent, lifelong panic disorder, and that I would always need to be medicated. And I'd been blamed as an addict—for recreational abuse of marijuana, painkillers, alcohol, and benzos. This addiction, I'd been led to believe, might even have given me a sort of incurable “superanxiety.”

It was only after my final hospitalization, at Hopkins, that I realized through my own research, meeting a benzo survivor in Boulder who would become a good friend and advisor, and connecting with online support groups that I needed to be rid of psychiatric medicine or I would never get better.

Which had brought me to this impasse: only one week free from
all
chemicals for the first time in years, I'd rekindled the most acute benzo-withdrawal symptoms and unstoppered the toxic backlog that infused my brain and nervous system, leaving me enraged, delusional, hallucinating, rudderless, and floppy-infant weak, awash in a confused depression, prone to internal psychotic meanderings, and filled with self-animus so paranoid and acid that I kept hearing sirens (“They're coming for me”) when I lay my head on the pillow each night. I brimmed with burning, unremitting muscular pain from head to toe and an impulse to self-annihilate so strong that I had to start each morning by looking in the mirror and saying, “I promise not to kill you today,” keeping knives and ropes and other potential implements of death as far from my person as possible.

I had never been so terrified. The final medicine I'd stopped had been a powerful tricyclic antidepressant, nortriptyline. Nortriptyline is a chemical descendant of Thorazine, the notorious antipsychotic originally applied as a surgical antihistamine, to prevent a sudden drop in blood pressure called surgical shock.
1
You'd not be reading this book if it weren't for Thorazine, for it was this drug that in 1954 launched the modern era of psychopharmacology—psychiatry's medication of mental illness through chemical agents touted as “specific antidotes to mental disorders,” e.g., antipsychotics, antidepressants, and antianxiety pills.
2
Until then psychiatrists had had their Freudian therapy, straitjackets, ice-water baths, padded rooms, ice-pick lobotomies, insulin comas, electroshock, and even tooth- and organ-removal,
3
but with Thorazine they latched onto something more legitimizing: a pill, a specific pharmaceutical “cure” much like the penicillin discovered decades earlier that revolutionized modern medicine. As my “cure,” nortriptyline, wore off, I began to feel that a dark shadow stood in the corner of my room each night, silently observing, sucking away sleep, encouraging my death. All the fine hairs on my body would stand up with gooseflesh as I willed it to disappear.

It was as if, as William Styron wrote in his masterpiece memoir of depression,
Darkness Visible
, “many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries.”
4
I'd visited Bureau of Land Management open space in the foothills west of Carbondale the previous weekend with my two roommates, waiting at their truck with Clyde while they finished a trail run, shivering with despair. I had the hound on a twenty-foot length of climbing rope, and headed into a fairy ring of oaks near the parking lot to hang myself. I needed to do it quickly, before my friends returned. I had the noose tied, Clyde's leash-rope over a stout limb biting into my neck as I leaned into it and began to see stars. Then I realized that without his leash Clyde would run off. We were in rocky, scrubby, ridgy terrain home to bears and mountain lions, and cattle ranchers who shoot nuisance dogs. Clyde whined beneath the trees as he tracked my every move, his big brown eyes liquid with confusion. He deserved better than this. I undid the noose and headed back to the truck in tears, rubbing Clyde behind his lop ears, sobbing as I gushed apologies: the horror of doing this to him, an abandoned puppy whom I'd adopted from the shelter. The horror of being left alone that way. Yet, I wanted to die; I fixated on this one idea as a solution to end my pain.

The next day I took four carloads of belongings to a thrift store in nearby Glenwood Springs, giving my possessions away so that my friends and parents didn't have to dispose of them later. I considered hanging myself from a bridge over the Crystal River near our home, but dismissed the idea because, on the level of pure vanity, I didn't want my fat, bloated corpse swinging there for everyone to see. Neither did I want my bad juju haunting this singular spot over the river's unsullied wavelets, the twin-summited Mount Sopris framing the southern horizon beyond—a summit I'd not stood on in two years.

Andrew had stepped into the car that morning not knowing any of this.

The first stirrings had begun when I picked him up where he lived, at the efficiency apartment I'd once rented in Carbondale. It was a bright, woody, ell-shaped add-on that my friend Lee, a climbing buddy I'd known since New Mexico, had originally built for his aging mother. Inside, I'd seen my old desk jammed under a window in the northwest corner beneath the windows. I'd left the desk for Andrew when I moved back to Boulder in 2005. (I've lived in Boulder most of my adult life, and hold two degrees from its university.) From 2003 until leaving Carbondale, I'd entertained grand notions of writing a novel at that desk. The truth, however, was that I'd come home from work, chew Vicodin ordered off the Internet (opiates had inspired the great poets, had they not?), sit at the computer trolling climbing forums and doing zero writing, and then pop one of my various daily benzo doses, guzzle red wine, and play Halo 2 until I nodded into narcotized sleep, too pasted to fold out my futon. Spike, my black Maine coon cat, would crawl atop my belly and we'd both awaken with the night terrors and screaming fits I had around 2:00
A.M.
as the benzos wore off, as I leapt up choking and bellowing, wondering who'd left the lights on. The desk, so cheap, so nondescript with its flimsy black metal and crappy wood laminate, reified those wasted hours. It brought home how little I'd cared for myself.

And so, I'd fixated on the desk. And begun to resent Andrew for having it: that sonofabitch—he had “my” desk. Never mind that I had a perfectly serviceable look-alike from Target, the writing station at which I now sit. Andrew's desk had a sliding keyboard rack—I needed it! Everyone needed it! Shit, famine babies in Africa needed it! My mind was so fragile, so Byzantine in its psycho logic; no other path threaded the rat maze. I'd have to go buy another desk
exactly
like this one if I were to fix the world again. But I was too brittle even to conceptualize driving, solo, the fifteen miles to the Glenwood Springs Walmart to buy a replacement. I could barely go to Carbondale's grocery store without breaking down, sweating and shaking and sprinting for the exit. No way then could I venture into Walmart's vast, booming warehouse space under those white fluorescents, which worsened the ongoing “nothing is real” symptom of derealization, flattening the world into two dimensions. And my voice was a hyperventilated wheeze: How even to inquire where the office furniture was? And how to comprehend a two-page assembly printout well enough to put a desk together? At that point, I could barely get through the jokes page in
Maxim
.

When, a few days earlier, I'd told my mother how poorly I felt post-nortriptyline, she'd e-mailed back that “it was too early after benzos to stop the final medicine,” meaning she felt that I was still too fragile. (I still deal with a protracted post-benzo-withdrawal syndrome that ameliorates in barely perceptible increments; more on that later.) By way of a response, I'd plunged my right fist through my iMac, shattering the screen with one punch. I was at my office at
Climbing
, fumbling through the days, shying away from coworkers, doing line-editing work while lying flat on the floor because a therapist had told me it was impossible to hyperventilate in this position. (She was wrong.) I wanted nothing more than to be free of all medications—
now
—and my mother's response had enraged me beyond all logic. My boss and I, to explain the spider-webbed computer screen to our IT department, had to dissemble my knocking over the computer while reaching for a mug of coffee. I remember the texture, a garish slab of high-September sun invading my office's east-facing windowpanes and how easily my hand breached the glass; the lack of pain; how easy it was to destroy.