Death Grip (22 page)

The pills had made me slow, portly, irascible, and unpredictable, yet somehow this was not evident to the person who most needed to see it. I continued climbing halfheartedly, even as I grew weaker, plumper, and more logy. In photos from that epoch my facial features appear blurry and diffuse, eyes dull like a drunkard's, the edges softened by chemicals. I'd always used the climb
Sprayathon
at Rifle as a fitness benchmark: If I could redpoint this 5.13c, I was in fighting form.
Sprayathon
has a leap move down low that I never missed, but in summer 2004 I could only stick the jump one time in four. My timing was off, my commitment was nil, and the black hand of fear pressed me hard back toward earth. I redpointed
Sprayathon
only once that year, and by a hair's breadth at that. All the years of pushing myself on the rock and all the pills and drugging had burned out both body and brain. I'd lived too long in extremity.

Finally, predictably, came injury. In September 2004, my then girlfriend Kasey and I drove up to Independence Pass, a series of granite crags and boulders along a winding mountain byway east of Aspen. Kasey is a tall, pretty, sandy blonde, with an incisive wit; a volleyball player and strong climber who used to routinely upstage me at the bouldering gym. She has talon fingers that clamp down on holds I can barely see. This day we started at a twenty-five-foot fin along the Roaring Fork River called the Jaws Boulder, a highball face by the parking lot. I'd done its primary route before, a 5.11 called
Jaws,
and warmed up on it. At the crux twenty feet off the ground, as I reached with my right hand for an incut edge, my left hand rocketed off a tiny crimp. The smooth granite was covered in morning dew, the moisture having caused me to lose purchase. I gave a brief, surprised whimper and then launched sideways and out, trying to twist midair and get my feet under me, but the fall was too violent. I missed the one crashpad and landed sideways in a bowl of rock and roots exposed by the river. I lay there panting and sputtering as Kasey rushed over. Before I'd started up
Jaws
, she'd asked me if I wanted a spot, but I'd been too arrogant to accede. I'd been highballing for years, done problems orders of magnitude more difficult.
Bosh—why would I need a spot now?
I paid for my hubris: I had to crawl to the car, lamed by a cracked tibial head and damaged IT (iliotibial) bands on both legs. I remember a nurse weighing me on a follow-up visit to the doctor's a month later, as she asked if I was on any medication. (“Um, ten milligrams of Paxil and three milligrams of Klonopin a day.”) I weighed 196 pounds. I'm only five-six. She gave me a look. I knew that look—it was the same one the pharmacists reserved for me when I came in a few days early to refill my benzo prescription, if I needed it before a trip. It's like they're looking right through you, seeing some truth you've obscured from yourself.

I was no longer a climber. I was a junkie. I was the excrement of society. Sometimes, however, you need to get dipped head to toe in feces before you break down and shower.

That November in 2004, I clogged my literal bowels up with Vicodin. It embarrasses me to write about this incident, but this shame, this low point, is what made me turn my life around. A friend, Luke, and I had gone to the midnight release of
Halo 2,
down at the Sam Goody store in Glenwood, but I began to feel queasy as we waited in line with a slew of hyper twelve-year-olds and their mothers. I'm not sure how many Vicodin I'd taken that evening, but probably at least five. My gut had torqued into knots; something pressed on my bladder, causing a constant feeling of a need to pee. Then I couldn't pee at all. Back in Carbondale, alone in my efficiency at 1:00
A.M.
, my bladder had swollen but I couldn't make myself go, no matter how long I stood over the toilet. I ran the water in the sink, hoping it would send a subliminal message—
trickle, trickle, tinkle, tinkle.
Nothing. The pain grew sharper, a lancing spear. Growing desperate, fearing my bladder might burst, I called the hospital in Glenwood. The ER nurse said it might be a kidney stone, but that she couldn't diagnose me over the phone and that I should come on in. No way, forget it, too embarrassing. I'd sort this out myself. I had to pee so badly, the fluid was now bubbling around within my belly. Then I remembered an old summer-camp prank: the hand-in-the-warm-water trick you'd pull on sleeping kids to get them to urinate in their bedrolls. I stripped down, stood in the shower, and turned the water on as hot as I could stand, letting it run over my fat body, trying to think “fluid” thoughts. A little pee trickled out, then a little more, then a small, steady stream of yellow spinning down the drain. But my bladder still sent bolts of pain through my viscera.

If this all sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. But this is how drugs reduce you; they turn you into a buffoon.

Then—
WHOOM
—I doubled over with peristaltic spasms. I had to move my bowels, and
now
, but that felt blocked up, too. I made it to the toilet just as more spasms convulsed me, but whatever had lodged up there wasn't budging. Having no other choice, I reached behind, stuck two fingers up my backside, and pulled myself apart as another spasm rocketed through my guts. With a horrible ripping noise and caustic burning all through my rectum, something the size of a geode dropped into the toilet: a fecolith, a ball of hardened shit. And behind that, a torrent of urine. Now, if you've ever had your hand up your own ass, pulling it apart to pass a huge, stinking, calcified ball of excrement, then you have known rock bottom. Even if you never tell another soul, a crime has been committed. Nobody was doing rails off my erect penis and neither did I have a gun to someone's head demanding money for crack—the only victim was myself. But that barely matters
because there was still a victim
. No matter how much I washed my hands that night, I could still smell the abasement—stale, brown, heavy with indole, a grim reminder of my vile labor. That's the real definition of drug addiction: giving birth to a shit baby, over and over and over again. Only you're too high, self-destructive, and feckless to care for the baby, so you abandon it on the doorstep at your coworkers' or parents' or friends' house to take care of until their fingers and hands and arms turn brown with shit, too.

I had better things to do than birth shit babies. I had better things to do than root through the chaos of my closet, beneath the ropes, cams, bolts, and rock shoes I'd so carelessly scattered in disorganized druggie heaps. To snort around like a truffle hound for the big Vicodin bottle, which I'd hide from myself each night while buzzed in the hopes that I'd not find it the next evening. To stand abashedly in line at the City Market pharmacy once a month and shell out ninety dollars for Klonopin and another fifty for Paxil. To have wasted all those hours chasing down weed, driving to a friend of a friend of a friend's house and having to patiently abide the labyrinthine ramblings of whatever shady dealer lurked therein, eyes black-rimmed and glassy, while he weighed your glassine bag on a little scale. I had better things to do than to be so dependent. Climbers are strong, free-willed people, and climbing is a sport that fosters those traits. But I'd let myself become the opposite. This had to change.

It took time to start cleaning up. I'd been at it way too long. I reduced but wasn't able to totally quit Vicodin for another couple of months; meanwhile, my benzo dose continued to climb: four milligrams of Klonopin every day. That winter, a thick slab of dread descended with each snowflake that landed outside my windows, a terror so palpable I was the first, before Lee, to shovel the walkways, driveway, and sidewalk after each snowstorm, as if the white, fluffy powder had brought pure evil with it. I often wondered if I might not just up and die of this bizarre, mounting fear. Around Thanksgiving, the Klonopin stopped working and the psychiatrist switched me to a new pill, Xanax XR, a time-release form that looked like a swollen blueberry: four milligrams a day, working on subreceptors unaffected by Klonopin and buying another month of temporary relief. Because I hate swallowing big pills, I'd often chew the Xanax and end up inadvertently flooding myself with benzodiazepine, dropping into a stuporous evening nap then resurfacing icy cold and shaky. Some nights, when the Xanax and Vicodin narcosis wore off, I'd wake up screaming; the cat would jump off my chest and run under the futon. I'd later read on the Web that mixing benzos and opiates gives a heroin-like high, and my head was often on my chest before the Xbox, a junkie on the nod.

Enough was enough. This had to be rectified. I was only thirty-three. I could not do this any longer. The drugs had to go—the benzos, too.

Four milligrams of Xanax didn't sound like much. I'd been taking ninety milligrams of Valium in 1996 and survived a cold turkey off what I mathematically surmised to be twenty-two times more of the drug. I wonder how optimistic I might have felt had someone pointed out my fuzzy math. I wonder what my reaction would have been had they pointed out that a single milligram of Xanax equates to
twenty milligrams
of Valium and that I was on the equivalent of eighty milligrams of Valium a day, every day, and had been for some time.

 

PART THREE

THE LAST MILLIGRAM

 

CHAPTER 9

Four milligrams a day, Xanax, January 2005:

“You're
chewing
?” It's my psychiatrist on the phone. I stand beneath the Highway 82 bridge over the Colorado River in downtown Glenwood Springs, in a redbrick pedestrian zone lined with tourist bakeries, bars, and boutiques. It's a dishwater-gray Saturday and my father has ducked into a bookstore for
The New York Times
. Cars and semis rumble past overhead, kicking slush over the guardrail where it slops to earth, forming raw, sooty ridges. My dad flew out from Baltimore one day earlier, after I'd confessed everything to him and my therapist, unable to take the anxiety and the drugging anymore. I also called Kasey, in Boulder. She's finishing up a graduate degree in journalism and now, perhaps, has a lens through which to understand my cracked behavior.

That Friday, my father and I visited the Glenwood ER, where the doctor offered a prescription for the opiate antagonist Naltrexone to wean me off Vicodin. I sat in the waiting area afterward spacing out on a bright-blue aquarium full of exotic fish, holding the prescription, weighing the pros and cons of taking yet another drug as the creatures brushed against the glass. At only two pills (twenty milligrams) of Vicodin a day, it seemed simpler just to taper, but first I needed to tell my psychiatrist everything because I wanted his help quitting benzodiazepines, too.

“Not to get buzzed, no … I—I have trouble swallowing, Dr. Porridge, especially later in the day when I'm more anxious, so sometimes I chew the Xanax just to get it down,” I say. I know this sounds a little lame, but it's the truth.

“And you were abusing Vicodin, too,” he says flatly. “Look, Matt, I could get into a lot of trouble over this. I'm supposed to be seeing you in my office, not just consulting over the telephone.” He's on his speakerphone; his voice has a metallic echo to it. Because I've lived on the West Slope for the past three years, most of our check-ins have been via telephone, with the occasional sit-down in Boulder. He pauses as I collect my thoughts; he's jotting notes.

“Why? You weren't prescribing the Vicodin. And I never abused the benzos you gave me.”

“I'm not sure I'm able to believe you right now.…” His voice has a hard edge.

“Well, it's true, Dr. Porridge. I'll admit it—I did smoke pot for many of those years, and was taking Vicodin the last two winters. But I haven't smoked pot in a year, and the Ativan, the Klonopin: I took exactly what you prescribed. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“I always wondered why your anxiety kept getting worse, why the pills stopped working. Look, Matt, you lied to me.”

I pause to let this sink in. Technically, he's right—it was a crime of omission.

“Yeah, I know. I am sorry. I really am, Dr. Porridge, but I'm telling you the truth now. And I don't know if the other drugs caused all this anxiety anyway, at least, not totally.” My voice wavers. “I feel like it's something else … something we missed. I— And I really
did
take the benzos as prescribed. I don't know how else to say it.”

“Look, Matt, it's highly likely that you were abusing the benzos,” he insists. “They would still be working otherwise.”

The doctor feels that I've violated his trust. His voice is strained, angrier now.

“I didn't,” I say. “I don't know what else to say. I abused the other drugs, but not the Xanax. I really do have trouble swallowing big pills. I—I didn't know you can't chew them up.”

Then it hits me: Would he go so far as to fire me as a patient? I think back to 1996 and the Valium psychosis. I can't go through that again. He can't just cut me loose.

“You're not going to stop prescribing are you?”

“Not now, Matt, I'm not. But I might need to refer you to another psychiatrist who can see you in person.”

Not good. What if the next doctor refuses to prescribe benzos, knowing my history? Then what? Another cold turkey? Left to have seizures, dementia, to languish in a mental hospital half-psychotic like Barbara Gordon in
I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can
?

“But what if that doctor won't help?”

“I'm not sure, Matt. That will be for you and him to figure it out.”

Dr. Porridge is going to fire me, to leave me to die insane on the streets. The Greyhound bus depot is here beneath the overpass. I picture myself bivouacking there at night, wandering the bricks by day plagued by Reploids, bearded, natty, piss-stained, badger-eyed, shouting gibberish and panhandling tourists.