Death Grip (16 page)

When the semester ended so, too, did the Ativan, but I didn't think much of it. I'd never felt any cravings back in Boulder, but then again, I'd never had 120 milligrams of Ativan on hand either, nor taken the pills so regularly. Luisa had final examinations at
liceo
(preparatory school), so I booked a two-week solo trip to the Greek island of Corfu to give her space. I left Torino that night by train, in a sleeping car on the fourteen-hour voyage south to Brindisi, from where I'd ferry across to Greece. I hadn't taken an Ativan in a few days, but brought along a final pill I'd set aside “just in case.” (This straggler had turned to dust by the time I left Europe a month later, bounced around by my travels.) Growing ever more “off” as the train jostled south, I felt a febrile and altogether foreign agitation peak somewhere around the middle of the Boot. It was an acute restlessness, my toes clenching and legs twitchy, thoughts racing, a tight band across my forehead and itchiness over my skin, and a close, sweaty feeling of doom: a longing for something lost that I'd not known I had—GABA-ergic dampening of the brain's excitatory neurotransmitters. I couldn't place my anguish; it was something new to me. I'd chain-smoked Marlboro Reds my first two months in Italy, trying to fit in with Luisa and her hipster friends, but found that they made it hard to breathe while climbing. However, twenty cigarettes a day don't just let go of you, and I'd gone through a week of spacey, light-headed, dissociated nicotine withdrawal, which had felt physically similar—yet less calamitous. When the train pulled in, I stumbled around Brindisi in a fog, killing time, waiting for the overnight ferry to Greece, wary of the street thieves said to haunt the port alleyways.

On Corfu during the next two weeks, I'd return from snorkeling in the Ionian and lie on the sand, feeling surges of palpitations and a heavy fatigue I chalked up to too much sun. But this didn't explain why I felt so edgy in a place that was tranquility itself, or kept having nightmares haunted by gray, gnashing-mouthed ghosts—if I slept at all. Only the cider I swilled each night with a group of traveling Texans brought fleeting calm: alcohol, the cross-tolerant downer, affording temporary relief to down-regulated GABA receptors. Random clouds of depression darkened my days. One evening, I'd become stranded far south of my hotel when my moped went kaput on a rough dirt track. I wheeled it to a
taverna
and asked the owner for assistance, and then ordered a Greek salad while I waited. I sat alone at an outdoor table under a trellis cloaked in grape vines, bathed in golden Mediterranean light, eating fresh, homegrown vegetables and feta cheese, pouring olive oil harvested from the surrounding grove onto dark artisanal bread, listening as the
taverna
owner made phone calls to track down the moped-rental guy to come make the necessary repairs. I'd just spent the day on a pristine, empty beach under gauzy June skies, reading trash fiction and snorkeling. Nothing should have been the matter; I should have been perfectly content, taking a pensive island repast like some character in a Henry James novel. But instead I felt a vast emptiness, as if everyone I loved had just been machine-gunned in front of me. Off under an olive tree, ducks milled about in a wire cage. A Greek family stood over them as their toddler son fed bread crumbs through the holes. The ducks darted about pecking at the crumbs, trapped in their cage going nowhere while the kid giggled and pointed and his parents applauded the spectacle.

The dumb, stupid, useless ducks,
I thought, taking another bite of cucumber.
That goddamned idiot kid and his asshole peasant parents.

We're all doomed.

It felt like some dark, hope-gobbling demon had taken up residence in my skull. The ducks were trapped in their cage, the kid was trapped in his infantile ignorance, his parents were trapped in blind love for their idiot child, and only I could see the truth of these matters. Unbeknownst to me, I was in the throes of classic benzo withdrawal, with all the symptoms: anxiety, tremors, sleeplessness, nightmares, agitation, hypersensitivity, depression. The darkness was not my own—normally, I'd be happy to watch a kid feeding ducks; I used to do the same at a pond with my grandparents in Virginia. And likewise unknown to me, by getting hooked and stopping abruptly—a cold turkey that jacked with my GABA receptors—I'd set the stage for potentially more severe withdrawals down the road. It was like the first ripple above a suboceanic earthquake: at first glance a nonentity, but as other ripples press behind it and the wavelets speed toward shore, they merge to form a dark, killing water wall, the sum having become more than its parts. That June in Corfu, I was coming off five months of semi-nightly Ativan use, and the symptoms did not improve for weeks.

I should have stayed away, but I didn't. That's the thing with drugs: You know that they're bad, you know that you shouldn't get in too deep and that they never, over the long run, make your life better, but you can't overcome your urges with reason. The pills and I, we came to love each other too much. It would be this way for years, getting worse and worse and worse. During my senior year in college, a climbing buddy brought me in on a “thing”: A guy he knew was getting blue ten-milligram Roche Valium brought up from Mexico by the trash bag. Only $2 a pill. The first time I bought ten, mostly out of curiosity. I knew Valium by reputation only, and decided to give it a try. The Valium was sludgier than Ativan in that I couldn't do much more than veg in front of the TV after taking one; however, on those nights I fell asleep without a lick of anxious preoccupation, climbing muscles taut and tired turned to carefree jelly. Then I bought twenty, or maybe it was fifty, or perhaps one hundred, or perhaps twenty then fifty then one hundred. With the backward thinking that ensnares so many pillheads, I rationalized that a medically sanctioned, FDA-approved, factory-produced chemical had to be much less dangerous than street drugs like cocaine and ecstasy, which I'd always been too timid to try. Hell, you could even see the milligram count printed on the pill, and meter your dose accordingly. I'd found the secret loophole! I had the golden ticket! These pills were fun! As fall semester wound down, I noticed that one pill no longer cut it, so I'd take two or three or four on weekend nights, usually alone. Pill abuse is funny that way—it's much more antisocial than other drugs. There is no tribal ritual, no sneaking off to do rails in a bathroom stall with your buddies or passing the communal bong. It's just you and your vial and a glass of water, and whatever hermetic stupor that follows. I liked to slide Vivaldi's
The Four Seasons
into my Walkman, stretch back on my futon, wash down the Valium with white wine, and drift into dreamless sleep as the concertos rolled over me. I'd skitch through the week taking just one or one-half pill every night, to round the edges off. A few other climber friends got in on it, and we took to calling the pills “Blue Notes.” One buddy kept them in a wooden bowl like Halloween candy, up on his countertop for anyone to sample.

It didn't seem like a big deal.

I visited Luisa in Italy over Christmas break 1995, smuggling thirty Valium in an Ativan bottle. By the end of the first week, I was down to ten pills, wondering just where they'd gotten to. Meanwhile, the Valium had begun to have a curious, unpredictable, paradoxical effect: The more I took, the more crazed I'd sometimes feel, spiked by an uncomfortable mania and then creeping dread as the Valium ebbed away. Benzos can have this so-called paradoxical stimulant effect, which includes symptoms like hallucinations, nightmares, insomnia, irritability, and aggression. Attacks, including assault and even homicide, have been documented, perhaps due to the “release or inhibition of behavioural tendencies normally suppressed by social restraints,” theorizes Dr. Ashton.
1
That is, you're both disinhibited by the pills, like an alcoholic after his tenth shot of Jack, and pressurized by the adverse reaction. One morning amidst this chemical typhoon, Luisa dragged me to Balôn, a gritty bazaar near Porta Palazzo in Torino's baroque city center. I loathe crowds, so dropped four Valium before we went, thinking it would help. A half-hour in, moving from stall to stall as Luisa hunted for the secondhand clothing she and another friend would resell, I began to shudder. Tics and spasms coursed along my neck and shoulders. Our breath steamed into the smog, thick with the aroma of roasted chestnuts from the many street vendors.

“What's the matter with you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

“You're shaking all over. Are you cold,
amore
?”

“I … I think it's this Valium,” I said. Luisa knew what I was into—I'd slip her a pill here and there if she asked—but she didn't know how deep. I had thought these frissons somewhat chic back in Boulder, almost a druggie merit badge (Valium has myorelaxant properties, so it's not surprising that its withdrawal creates these tics), but now in front of my Italian girlfriend I realized I look like a sad, creepy spastic.

“Well, you need to stop,” she said. “I know people here. You're acting very weird, Matt.”

“I know. I—I'm just so fucking anxious. Hold on…”

I excused myself to find a restroom, ducking into a café in the Moroccan quarter at the edge of the market. Inside, amongst men in fezzes clustered around little granite tables sipping
tazze
of black espresso, I ordered a tea, thinking it might calm me. The barista asked if I wanted milk or lemon.

“
Si-si-si-si-si!
” I said distractedly.
Yes-yes-yes, whatever.

“
Tutte e due
?” she asked.
You want both?

“Si-si-si-si-si!”

“Va bene. Come vuole.”
She gave me a look, just as my arms flapped upward in a breakdancer wave and my head gave a quivering wobble. Standing at the counter, I poured the milk into the tea and squeezed the lemon over it. As the citrus hit the liquid, the milk curdled into unappetizing globules: a bad chemical reaction. I looked down, saw the barista watching me with her eyebrows raised, and then drank the tea down in a single slurp. I paid up and left. I rejoined Luisa on the cobblestones and didn't take another pill for the rest of that day.

The Valium ran out midway through the third week, at a snowbound
rifugio
high in the Dolomites. Luisa and I would snowboard all day, take a SnoCat back to the
rifugio
at night, eat a gourmet dinner, and then collapse into bed, warm beneath a heavy duvet. Then suddenly, one evening I wasn't sleeping. I rolled over in bed and looked out the window. An ancient fear emanated from the limestone spires that towered in the night, black daggers etched against the starry firmament. The next day I told Luisa I felt like “everything was all wrong” but I could not for the life of me figure out why.

“Maybe we haven't had enough fruit or vegetables,” she said. “Vitamins or something. We've been eating only pasta and cheese.…”

It was possible. I ordered extra orange juice with breakfast, but up on the slopes the doom sensation came right back. We ducked into a lodge—another orange juice—but the world still shimmered with menace. The fear felt externalized, cosmic, alien—a sinister cloud that both surrounded and targeted
only me,
that no one else could see or appreciate. The other skiers looked pinch-faced and hostile, their polyglot chatter too harsh and brittle, the sun too bright, the slopes too steep, too blindingly white, the air too thin. By the time we drove back to Torino a day later, I had to keep the car window open on the
autostrada
to let in fresh air despite Luisa's protestations. The next day I was so visibly anxious at the Milan airport, making frequent trips to the bathroom, that an undercover security specialist pulled me aside for questioning. I took my final half-pill on the flight back to America, tumbling in and out of troubled mini-naps as the plane bopped over the Atlantic. I'd cached fifty “welcome home” Valium under my bathroom sink back in Boulder. If I could just make it there, everything would be alright again. That night at the condo, I gobbled five pills, drew a bath, and dove back into the sewer. Vivaldi's
The Four Seasons
sounded even sweeter for my reunion with the Blue Notes.

A month later I'd reached nine pills (ninety milligrams) a night on weekends, with maintenance doses in the twenty- or thirty-milligram range during the week. A few close friends were into clubbing, into raves, and I joined them in a shared nihilistic pre-graduation maelstrom. While they took party drugs, I'd down Valium upon Valium until I felt disinhibited enough to dance, loose-limbed, freaky, and high. At concentrated doses, benzos get you off, and drug addicts have been known to shoot them, combine them with other pills such as opiates to enhance a euphoriant effect, and/or use them to come down from other substances. (In a 1995 paper, Ashton estimated that between 30 and 90 percent of polydrug abusers also abuse benzos.
2
) At these megadoses, I'd become as chummy as the raver kids rolling on E, bopping about hugging each other with their pacifiers, stuffed-animal backpacks, and glow sticks. The Valium also gave me the trots, and I'd spend as much time in the bathroom as dancing, which was probably just as well. “You dance like an animal,” Luisa told me one night at a Denver nightclub. She'd come to Boulder for a few months and here I was gobbling Valium like Tic-Tacs, half-soiling myself as I flailed around the dance floor like a coyote in a snare.

Brilliant.
I was starting to hate myself. My climbing fitness had lapsed into disrepair (I felt like a slug on the rock), I was half-assing my studies, I spent most of my time either partying or sleeping it off, and I'd begun to lose precious muscle weight—I had the slack skinniness of a drug addict. One night that March, I went over to visit friends at their town house in Boulder, where they kept the Valium out in a bowl. I'd taken a few pills at home and more when I got there. Seventy milligrams, eighty, ninety, one hundred? Who knew … Nuked out of my skull, I smoked half of one friend's bag of pot to prove to him that I could worship Jah like Bob Marley. But my buddy soon tired of my antics and went to bed, taking his weed. Another friend and I stayed up slugging wine, and then I spotted a half-dozen napkin rings on the counter by the Valium—black, red, orange, yellow toucan napkin rings in a cute little row. They spoke to me; I had to have them … in the biblical sense.