I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (33 page)

“So what race are we doing next?”

I whooped, and we high-fived. Luis howled and pounded on his chest like a great ape.

“You got me fired up, man! I'm ready to run
now
,” he said.

“Have a blast. I'll keep the fire going till you get back.”

Driving home the next day, the words I had heard myself say echoed in my head. I talked a good game. Did I believe any of it? My mantra at the end of my drinking career had been simple:
fuck it
. It had been brutally difficult to overcome that nihilist bent. If I wanted to erase it fully, I needed to overwrite it. I needed a new code to live by, but in early sobriety I'd had nothing to write in its place.

I had read through the Twelve Steps several times and figured out quickly that they weren't going to work for me. But after eighteen months of sobriety, I'd accrued some wisdom on my own:

Alcohol can't make it better; it can only make it worse
. As bad as I felt, as sad, lonely, depressed, or angry as I got, drinking was only a palliative that would magnify the problem down the line. I had done exhaustive field research on that subject. I could not let myself forget it.

Make it watertight
. Addiction was like water—it would find any hole, any crack, a pinprick even—and it would get through. If I wasn't going to drink unless I saw a bald eagle, I would convince myself at happy hour that the sparrow I'd seen at fifty yards was a bald eagle at two hundred, and then, “Bartender! Let me get one of everything!” “I will try not to drink today” had failure written into it. Nothing but
nothing
could make me drink.

Make a list
. It was impossible for me to even take a shower without writing it on a list. Each morning, the things I had to get done swarmed like a cloud of gnats around my head. When I wrote them down, the cloud disappeared. Even if I had more to do than I could get done that day, the tasks appeared manageable. And at the end of the day, crossing items off the list? That was a powerful high.

Do the worst thing first
. Every year, I worried about doing my taxes from January 1 to midnight on April 15, when I finally mailed them off. It never took me more than forty minutes. Go through the list you've made, pick the thing you dread the most, then bite the fucking bullet and get it done. Putting it off and living in dread always takes more energy than cleaning the damn cat litter or whatever it is you have to do.

Harness the wolves
. Avoiding temptation was a farce. There was beer in the deli downstairs, a liquor store across the street, and rubbing alcohol in the bathroom. Hiding from the wolves only showed them—and me—that I feared them. Alcoholism didn't have me, I had it, and I was the boss. When the wolves approached, stiff-legged and snarling, I held my fucking ground. When I yearned for a drink I had loved, I called to mind a brutal hangover and the consequences my days-long drunks had brought on. Then I showed the wolves I wasn't afraid: I poured drinks at the bar, counting out the liquor glugging into the glass, and I poured beers, the foam frothing over the backs of my hands. And then I slipped cords around the wolves' necks: alcohol had made me weak, but alcoholism had made me strong. Wolves were wild animals, and they could never be trusted, but if I was vigilant, I could harness their strength, make them serve me instead of destroying me.

Escape is no escape
. Some nights, trucks would grumble by on the BQE, the apartment would tremble, the closet door would swing open, and I'd turn back into a little kid, hiding under my blankets, heart racing, terrified something was coming to get me. Controlling my breathing did nothing. Trying to steer my mind elsewhere just spurred on the most horrific visions—flayed bodies crawling up my comforter, children with gnashing mouths instead of eyes. Finally, one night, I dragged myself out of bed, shaking with fear and anger at myself, pulled the closet door open, stepped inside, then closed it behind me. “Let's do this, then,” I said. Nothing happened. Then my heart slowed. Then I got bored, climbed back into my bed, and slept. Escape only bred a need to escape. When you felt bad, you didn't try to evade it—you went as deep into it as you could. And then you came out the other side.

Try every day
. Staying sober alone wouldn't cure me. It wouldn't fix the eyes that saw only ways for things to go bad, wouldn't correct the mind that sought out negatives and magnified them, wouldn't cut the endless loop of death-and-failure pornography churning round in my head. Just staying sober wouldn't give me the big life I had dreamed of as a kid. Bukowski had “DON'T TRY” engraved on his tombstone. Well, fuck you, Chuck. I would try every day. It didn't matter at what. Try at everything, try at anything. I had let that little muscle atrophy, the trying muscle, and I needed to build it back up. Little things, like not jerking off for a day or doing more than fifty push-ups in a row, and bigger things, like trying as hard as I had to make my relationship with Izgi succeed, and even bigger things, the biggest.

That last one, that was it. It was true, what I had told Luis. You had to dream big. You had to try. Luis and I signed up for our
first fifty-mile race together, only four weeks away: Virgil Crest, a rugged ramble over hilly, single-track trail, with over ten thousand feet of elevation change, including up and down a ski hill twice. We talked to other runners who had done it, picked their brains about the course, and compared training strategies. It wouldn't be easy, but it wasn't impossible. My father had never run fifty miles. I would.

I'd had some pain on the side of my left knee running down the hills at Green Lakes, but it went away after a couple of days. Two weeks later, at the Groundhog Fall 50K in Pennsylvania, my knee got so bad that I had to walk the last five miles. It was bizarre. I could charge up the hills, but the minute I tried to descend, I felt stabbing pain about an inch to the left of my knee, like someone was knifing the air next to my leg. That couldn't be good. Nerve damage? The phantom pain throbbed through the night. The next day, I couldn't put any weight on my left knee without it buckling. I picked up a brace at Duane Reade and forced myself to rest.

Two days before the Virgil Crest fifty-miler, I got jumped by three guys at Beauty Bar. I managed to land correctly when we hit the concrete—on top of them—and didn't further injure my knee. Still, two miles into Virgil Crest, I could no longer run. Luis stuck with me, determined not to leave me behind.

Fifteen miles into the race, I couldn't walk. Luis hadn't dressed for the weather so I handed him my black long-sleeve shirt, one that Izgi had given me. I dropped out, the first time I'd had to do so. My first DNF ever. I was crushed. It was clear that I wouldn't be running again for a while. I had the cold, shitty winter ahead of me. It felt like alcohol was tenting its fingers in anticipation, waiting for me to come crawling back.

For a few days after the race, it was hard to walk. There was no question: I had to stop running completely. I missed several expensive races I'd signed up for. With running, my anti-alcohol, out of
my life, I had lots of time to reflect on why I had found a home in alcohol. Closing down the back bar by myself one night, I caught a whiff of Jameson as I was wiping down the necks of the bottles. It was more than some exotic perfume; it was like the scent of a girl's hair mixed with her sweat, like a rabbit's trail to a hound, like blood to a shark. I could pop the speed pourer out of the top and take one huge, incandescent swallow from the bottle. Who would know? It's not like I had to worry about Izgi leaving me now. I was alone and angry. If I couldn't run, why not drink?

My cravings for alcohol were unexpected and intense, like a visit from a succubus. Different drinks appeared before me in succulent, pornographic detail. A frosty Sol longneck, a voluptuous lime crammed rudely into its top; a salty dog, grapefruit juice gaily pink like a child's dress, salt on the rim sparkling like rock candy; an unadorned measure of scotch in a highball, honey from enchanted bees swirling around a single ice cube.

As I'd promised myself I would, for every drink I conjured, I recalled an equal and opposite hangover. There was a direct line between that alluring first drink, the retching hell the next morning, and the half life I'd lived. I could not let myself forget vomiting off the side of an escalator in the DC train station, the spatter getting louder and louder as the escalator carried me higher and higher; laying on the bathroom tiles in Allison's apartment, freezing and sweating, then frantically pulling my boxers down and sitting on the toilet, liquid shit splattering the bowl and my bare ass, then, as the smell hit me, vomiting onto my belly and crotch; hunching over a stranger's toilet, expelling undigested alcohol, then chewed-up food, then bile as my stomach, my esophagus, and my throat convulsed in staccato rhythm like some terrible engine run dry of lubricants and tearing itself apart. What would come up next? A kidney? My testicles? Little bits of my soul? An old rubber boot?

When I slept, I was plagued by dreams of the drughole. There was a space between the pipe that heated my room and the plywood loft I'd built for my bed. Whenever I'd gotten too fond of
a drug, I threw it down this hole—the drughole—so it was no longer accessible, though not lost forever. The thought of digging through the dust- and lint-covered cardboard boxes—one actually labeled “DEPRESSING EX-GIRLFRIEND HELL”—under my loft was enough of a deterrent that I wasn't about to go in there after them. (Eventually, of course, I had moved the dead amps and broken guitars and boxes of unlabeled crap and, yes, snorted the contents of every baggie, vial, or little twist of plastic I found under there.)

Now that I couldn't run, the drughole occupied increasing psychic space in my idle, depressed dreams. One night, I dreamed I stretched its narrow, splintery plywood opening like taffy and crawled into that rabbit hole, which was, of course, cavernous and filled with many wonders. There were Vicodin the size of cheeseburgers, Opana the size of ottomans . . . it was heaven. One rolled toward me, and I tackled it, then fell to the ground with it, gnawing on the corner like a rat.

I awoke with a lingering, mournful sadness, as if I'd been dreaming about the first girl I'd ever loved. I knew I was slipping.

For those who suffer from it, “depression” has ceased to be an accurate word for the malaise. It calls to mind the unhappy-faced blob with a dark cloud over it from that Zoloft commercial, which is distant in essence from the quietly writhing despondency I know. David Foster Wallace, who in the end learned more about depression than he could bear, called it “a black hole with teeth.” That's pretty dead-on. But this concept—an absence so severe it manifests as a malign presence—is hardly new or limited to Wallace. It appears in
The Neverending Story
as “The Nothing,” an all-consuming void of darkness. And in
Spirited Away
, it's No Face, a monstrous shadow that, once invited into a home, devours everything it encounters. Falling into this hole is not just feeling blue or bummed out. It's nihil and nadir. It's acedia.

Searching for the perfect word for this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it's an antecedent
to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don't just turn your back on the world; you turn your back on God. You don't care, and you don't care that you don't care.

Still, there was one more layer to this black hole in my head. It's a French word, originating from
oublier
—to forget—and literally meaning “the forgotten place”: the oubliette. The oubliette was a specific kind of dungeon created in the Middle Ages, one where the only entrance was a hole high in the ceiling. There was no way out. The hapless captive was tossed in, the door was closed, and the prisoner was left, alone with his sin or perceived sin, to go insane and slowly wither away and die. It was a life sentence, solitary confinement,
and
a death sentence. The oubliette was called “the forgotten place” because it was reserved for prisoners so low that their captors wished to forget them. That for me was the final element: it's a man- and God-forsaken black hole with teeth where not only are you staring into nothingness, not only is it slowly consuming you, not only does no one seem to know or care, but if they ever did find out,
they would try with all their might to forget you
.