Death Grip (6 page)

“When will they let her out, dad?” I'd ask.

“When she gets better,” he'd say.

“And when will that be?”

“I don't know. Soon…”

My father's answer, with all its open-ended hopelessness, put me on tenterhooks. His answer made me
anxious
.

Three decades along, I can still invoke the texture of the night my mom disappeared, the uncertainty, the knowledge that some calamity was about to happen or already had beyond eye- and earshot, its soundless echoes rippling through the darkness. When my parents separated, I'd become prone to night terrors and would often awaken feverish, disoriented, and in tears, padding down to my father's room clenching and unclenching my hands. I'd stand at the foot of his bed moaning until he awoke and took my head in his lap, stroking the soft skin between my eyebrows. The dream-sensation was of the most terrible thing in existence. Me, a me/not-me atom trapped in meat-red organspace at once infinitesimal and infinite, an isolating vastness birthed from my forehead outward and saturated with atonal buzzing, heaving ebony flashes, and unboundaried shock. Red-black masses roiling like I was locked, an enzyme-slimed ort, within some titan's spasticated colon; a fearsome parade of impossible addends all amounting to the number one, which was me, a singularity-weight supermass beyond all calculus. I would try to convey this ancient abomination and found the words only once, in metaphor: “A dark cloud coming over the mountains, Dad, and bad things falling out of the sky to kill you and me…”

“A dark cloud coming over the mountains”—what I felt the night my mother tried to take her life. “Bad things falling out of the sky to kill you and me,” like the rocks on Mount Rainier.

*   *   *

Anxiety:
H
eart
bit-bit-bitting
and painfully
squeeze-clenching, a desperate mouse fluttering against a rib cage hull; cotton mouth, gumming lips around questions I was too timorous to ask; nausea, the green chili from dinner shooting hot acid back up my throat; hyperacuity of vision and hearing, the way the lamp bulb seemed to recede like an imploding sun and how my father's voice growled in the baritone range, the vibrating of his Adam's Apple as he said, “She has to be
somewhere,
Matthew.” At 1:00
A.M.
, on my father's orders, I slunk off to my room to stare at the ceiling above my upper bunk and hug my arms to my chest.
Anxiety:
I wanted my mother gone so I wouldn't have to abide this terror. I wanted her to disappear forever because that seemed the quickest way to end the anxiety.

Surely I was a bad son for thinking these things. The guilt was tremendous.

Six years later, in 1988, my mom felt recovered enough to share the suicide note she'd left at Aspen Plaza before her second attempt. Starting in 1983 she'd gotten better, mostly through an eating-disorder group and a caring therapist but also through cultivating a more balanced relationship to exercise. Most of her note addressed how much she loved me and how much she didn't want to do this, but that her anguish left her no choice. As I listened to her read the missive, even with its loopholes and rationalizations, I realized I never had wanted her dead; I just wanted an end to
my
pain and could think of no solution other than to end hers, by ending
her.
That's how anxiety works: When you're in the throes of it, you'd give almost anything to escape its clutches. Kathleen, my mother, the woman who gave birth to me, stood by the mirror above the fireplace mantel in the home she shared with a good man, Bo. She would marry Bo the next year when I gave her away at an outdoor ceremony beneath the Sandia Mountains, on a perfect bluebird summer evening. My mother: reading from that yellow legal paper but not allowing me to hold the note, her straight brown hair reflected in the glass. I thanked her. I didn't need to see the words to believe them anyway. A brightness had returned to my mother's eyes and she ate normally now, three meals a day, no bingeing. Her lean runner's legs, worried frown of Irish-Catholic sorrow, freckles and moles from years of backyard tanning: my mother, whom I'd wanted to lose forever.

I love her and I'd wanted her dead. As she'd healed, my anxiety evaporated like autumn mist in a high-desert draw. Nearly a quarter century after she tried to commit suicide, the roles would reverse, my mother sitting beside me at Boulder Community Hospital after I'd gilled my thumbs with a steak knife and, with querulous voice, announced to my girlfriend plans to jettison myself from the cliffs of Boulder's Mount Sanitas. This came as I reached my last milligram of Klonopin during the final 2005 taper. It came after six endless days and nights without sleep. The fear avalanche triggered nearly a quarter-century earlier would sweep me into a gaping, blue-walled crevasse, ice crowding over to seal out the sun.

 

CHAPTER 3

One bright, hot summer day in the early 1980s, a teenage girl held a younger girl under at Albuquerque's Los Altos Pool, pinning her in a corner and drowning the life out of her. The pool, built in the 1950s and twenty-five meters long, has since been converted to an indoor pool,
1
but at the time it was a Mediterranean-blue rectangle filled with summer hellions and exposed to a harsh glaze of sun. Lifeguards noticed the victim only after she floated to the surface, bobbing facedown amidst throngs of screaming, thrashing death-monkeys. The murderess was remanded to a psychiatrist for pretrial evaluation.

This heinous crime is important only insofar as the murderess also saw the same psychiatrist I first saw, “Dr. Salami” we might call him, a child specialist one building over from my father at UNM's medical center. I read about her in the paper, recognized my doctor's name, and asked him during session about the pretrial evaluation, but he couldn't tell me much. I saw the shrink at least once a week, at my father's insistence. After elementary school, I'd skip latchkey camp at the YMCA to accompany my dad to his basement office in the Tumor Registry, and then hasten through a creepy, echoing concrete underpassage that linked the two buildings. Ducts, water pipes, and spindles of wire ran in great cablings along the walls, hissing, thrumming, seeping clear liquors—alive and tactile like the set pieces in
Alien
or
Eraserhead
. In there alone or hearing foreign footfalls resound through the gloom, from around the hall's single corner, I'd feel nervous electricity in my gut. I'd dare myself not to run, but it was rare that I didn't at least break into a canter. I dreaded the visits, loathed talking about myself and about how my parents' breakup made me feel (quite obviously, rotten), but I ran toward the sessions nevertheless just to flee that hallway. After my behavior mark at school had fallen from a “plus” to a “check minus,” my father left me little choice. If I agreed to see the doctor regularly and earned at least a “check plus” two quarters in a row, my dad would buy me the video-game system I'd been lusting after. It was for a $299 Intellivision, then, that ten-year-old me sold my soul to psychiatry. I'd wait in Dr. Salami's antechamber, and then he'd come out with his beetling white eyebrows and lead me to an interior therapy room; the room had one-way glass so parents could observe the sessions, though I'm not sure my father ever came.

I can't recall the specifics of our conversations other than the pageantry of the dialogue, a superficial level I fought hard to maintain. An only child, a lifelong introvert, I like keeping my thoughts for me. With the doctor, I'd playact interactions amongst a family of interracial dolls who cohabitated in a dollhouse and who, when I handled them, would turn on each other with feral alacrity. I'd open the house on its central hinge, the doll children would swarm from their rooms to exchange fisticuffs in the kitchen, and the two parent dolls would decamp behind a locked bedroom door to shout at each other. The doctor would watch the fracas without comment, jotting his notes. Then I would pummel a giant foam Weeble in the corner, something I could have done at home for free with a pillow. Later, the doctor would report my progress back to my father.

It was a charade—a sick, expensive charade. I know my father only wanted to help and that, being a doctor himself, it was natural to refer me to the appropriate specialist. But I see these visits as the touchstone, the early conditioning that led me to seek out, blindly trust, and believe the therapists and psychiatrists who would come to oversee my near undoing. In time, in any case, my behavior grades improved and my father, as promised, bought the Intellivision. The video games kept me out of trouble for a few years, until I turned thirteen.

Every teenage boy needs his thing, and mine was skateboarding. Other than earning A's, I had never been good at anything until I found skating. Actually, I was no good at skating either; I just liked it. At the peak of my powers, the best trick I managed was the infamous seven-foot acid drop off the bell tower on the UNM campus. I'd skate along the stucco rampart that housed the bell, fall through the ether, and then land on a riser, my knees jarring with the impact. I never progressed beyond acid drops, concrete ditches, parking garages, or streets to half-pipes or swimming pools, but it didn't really matter: Skateboarding meant freedom. Had there been climbing gyms back then, I'm sure I would have found my true calling earlier in life.

As an early teenager, being a skatepunk was all the identity I had, and I ran with a crew of likeminded friends. I'd tried my hand at team sports, but could never align with the competitiveness, the players' egos, and the rabid, frothing, win-at-all-costs coaches. I just don't care about winning. You win one game, and then it's back to square one with the next—and what difference does it make anyway? Soccer I quit after transferring from the fun, recreational American Youth Soccer Organization to a team in the more martial Duke City Soccer League, where the coach, a porcine, buzz-cutted ex-Marine, nicknamed me “Ernie” and kept me perpetually benched. Basketball I bailed on after only three practices, terrified of the nutso coach who kept spittling, “Are we having
fun, everybody
?” in our faces during huddles. Wrestling I was miserable at, winning two matches in sixth grade but just barely, and another in eighth grade against a developmentally disabled kid who would have made mincemeat of me had his reaction time matched my own. I also tried track—the 600-meter—and won a few, sad white fourth-place ribbons. Later I went out for cross-country, at the private school I attended, Albuquerque Academy, but my knees filled with fluid—the painful Osgood-Schlatter syndrome—from pounding the dirt trails. I even tried playing the guitar, and would spend summers at Hummingbird music camp in the Jemez Mountains. That didn't take either: I have no rhythm, talent, nor a willingness to perform. I hate reading music and I have sausage fingers that are better suited to rock climbing.

I'd become a bit of a rebel, perhaps because of the stuffiness of the Albuquerque Academy where I attended grades six through nine. I'd left public school after fifth grade for this elite institution two long city-bus rides across town, in the wealthy Northeast Heights. The Academy was a landed, quiet, serious space with vast soccer fields, tennis courts, grassy quads, and porticoed walkways. It was a school at which our exuberant sixth-grade English teacher leapt up onto his desk mid-soliloquy, like Robin Williams in
Dead Poets Society
, and where a prim system of lights—green, amber, and red—mounted on the walls let you know how much time remained per period. It was a place of privilege and of classical education for the city's wealthiest children; a preparatory school for future Ivy Leaguers. It was a separate reality, a mini-university with buildings that smelled of book-binding glue, tweed, floor wax, and notebook paper, and where docksiders and Izod Lacoste alligator shirts were worn without irony.

I spent three years there as “class scholar,” banging out the highest grades by the one-tenth of a decimal point that separated me from the pack, though my efforts soon left me weary, burned out, and tired of all the studying and myriad rules and contrived, faux–East Coast pomp and ritual. My three closest friends and I (all children of divorce, it turned out) took to skateboarding in eighth grade, started listening to new wave and punk rock, wore loud-patterned board shorts, and had our ears pierced. The teachers despised our otherness—we stood out, sassed off, but still earned top marks. One day a math teacher, a fading Southern belle, passed us loitering in the hall and said, apropos of nothing, “You boys will never amount to anything.” Maybe not, but how I chose to look had nothing to do with it: I'd become a skatepunk not because I fancied myself as
opposed
to anyone else, but because that's simply one place where outliers end up. As a teenager, then, at an age where physical appearance is
everything
, I expressed my outlander status by sticking out, not disappearing as I tend to do now. However, sporting a Mohawk haircut, safety-pin earrings, leather combat boots, a trench coat, and torn punk-band T-shirts makes you an easy target, whether that's your goal or not.

It all began to unravel at the Academy in autumn of eighth grade, when, in the heedless, destructive way in which teenage boys undo things, a skater friend, Sergio, and I took a purple El Marko marker to the yellow locker bays in our building. The facility was pristine, still smelling of fresh paint and virgin carpet, only in its second cycle on the campus' new middle school. We didn't write “suck me” or “dog balls” on the lockers; no, we wrote people's names, thinking ourselves clever and not realizing that the El Marko was permanent. This the middle-school disciplinarian, also our math teacher, took as a personal affront. The crew-cutted and wattle-necked Mr. Sandwich turned stoplight red and screamed in our faces as Sergio and I sat in his classroom after school, spittle flying, eyes bugging, forehead veins popping as he hollered about “vandalism” and “hooliganism” and “disrespect.” By way of punishment, he took us out to the track, plunked down on the bleachers, lit a cigarette, primed his stopwatch, and put Sergio and me through windsprints.