Death Grip (23 page)

“I— You can't do that, Dr. Porridge. I'm totally hooked on these pills.”

“Well, Matt. I'm really angry.…”

“Look, Dr. Porridge, I'm
sorry
I didn't tell you everything, but you have to believe me now that I want to get clean. And that I didn't abuse the benzos—they just stopped working on their own. I'll come out to Boulder for an appointment and we can talk about it face-to-face.”

He pauses. Then:

“Okay, Matt. Okay … well, we can't have you chewing Xanax anymore. I'm going to switch you back to Klonopin, and I want you to start going to NA or some sort of substance-abuse therapy.”

“I'll try that. And yes, I'll go to a meeting.” Relief … He'll help me. NA seems like a small price to pay.

“Let's see … at four milligrams a day of Xanax, that's … Okay. Four milligrams of Klonopin, starting tomorrow. I'll call it in to your pharmacy. Would you like the name brand or the generic?”

“Generic is fine. And I'll find an NA meeting and let you know that I'm going.”

“You do that. And we'll check back in next week. I'll have my assistant set it up.”

“Good-bye, Dr. Porridge.”

“Good-bye, Matt.” He sighs, hangs up.

My father comes out of the bookstore, the
Times
tucked under his arm. He seems out of his element, with a bewildered owl look in his eyes that's only enhanced by his bifocals. I'm his only child and he's never been around drugs, has in fact devoted his life to researching the deleterious effects of cigarette smoke on the heart and the lungs, and on the health of others through secondhand exposure. He keeps calling the Vicodin “Hycodan,” and I can tell that it troubles him—a hyperintelligent man used to dissecting, comprehending, and then resolving complex problems—to feel so powerless. His son, a drug addict, is in pain and will be for some time, and there's nothing he can do. Until now, he's had no idea how many pills I'm taking or of what variety. The fear, the concern, are written in his eyes; they mirror my own misgivings.
When will I feel normal again?
And:
How much longer must I withstand this terror?

Years, it will turn out. It will take me years to heal from the greatest damage, that caused by the benzodiazepines. Each benzo has its specific action on GABA subreceptors, and the abrupt, one-day changeover from Xanax to Klonopin comes as an exquisite torture, a new level of terror in the frozen heart of winter. Carbondale turns white under its blanket of snow; the world screams at me, as if all objects are audibly decomposing, hissing, steaming, streaming into comet tails of oblivion and I evaporating along with them, sleeping only a few hours a night and suppressing my panic at work through sheer force of will. I contract the stomach flu somewhere in there and, febrile and fragile, spend an hour on the phone with Kasey, sobbing because I don't want to die by age thirty-four like my uncle the heroin addict. I take walks with Lee or short, faltering jogs, my feet crunching in the snow, wind howling, blue-white spindrift and strange arctic halos coming off Mount Sopris. As tired as I feel, it's impossible to sit still. I've been surviving on turkey burgers, grilling them up in a panini press, but the grill's remnant odor of old, cold grease permeates the efficiency and turns my stomach. I picture a slab of dead, flaccid flesh when I walk through the door, and soon the sight of the grill alone is enough to trigger a panic attack. Next door, Lee practices “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano; I can hear it through the wall. He's good, very good, but Beethoven's elegiac notes coupled with the turkey-grease smell conjure nothing but entropy.

Four milligrams a day, Klonopin, March 2005:

I've stopped taking Vicodin. I cut slowly over a month, five milligrams a week until the final week when, using a sharp, redwood-handled steak knife, I quartered the pills the final three days. Then nothing. Zero. It's gone, over; I barely miss the opiates and, other than a few weeks of agitation, I detect no lasting damage. Compared to benzos, opiates are dead-easy to quit. Weed is dead-easy to quit. Alcohol, the same. I feel happier, lighter, less sludgy, and am even climbing again. Still I move tentatively, afraid to push myself, succumbing to odd waves of vertigo and a hopeless, shaky feeling at cruxes. Down in Glenwood I attend weekly, therapist-led meetings with other addicts, most of them grizzled Western Colorado alcoholics. There's a girl in there, eighteen, tall, beautiful, brunette, coming off crystal meth. She sobs one day during group, telling us her dentist said she might need dentures because all her teeth are rotted out.

“Eighteen is way [sob] too [sob] young [sob, sob, sob] for dentures,” she's saying. “I wish I'd never touched that stuff. My teeth are all fucked up and I ain't even twenty.”

Optimistic given my own rapid progress, I tell her that it will all work out and that she's young enough to turn it around. I'm thirty-three, I say, and I've pissed away almost more years drugging than she's been alive, but I still feel hopeful about the future.

“Yeah, well, age ain't nothing but a number,” the girl says, blowing her nose. “Eighteen years starts to sound like a lot when you've been smoking meth the last five of them.”

Kasey and I drive to California over spring break. We make it to Ibex, Utah, the first night, out in salt pans in the West Desert along U.S. Route 50. I've climbed here twice before, in this vast no-man's-land of scrubby mountains, endless basins, and milk-blue skies. Ibex is known for its varnished, wind-hollowed red and brown quartzite boulders, the best ones a tumble of blocks—some large as office buildings—beneath a three-hundred-foot cliff that lords over a dry white lake bed. It's a harsh, isolated, elemental place, like so many of the great climbing areas. Ibex's wind is ripping, driving silt into the tent, howling around the scoops, whorls, and bevels that it's carved into the biggest boulder, the Red Monster, above us. I unroll my sleeping pad and an orange bottle falls out: Vicodin, one of the mini-stashes I'd hidden from myself back in Carbondale.

“Hey, babe, look at this,” I tell Kasey. “Vicodin.”

Her face goes blank. “I thought you quit, nuggins,” she says.

“I did,” I say. “I really did. I must have had these stashed away—stowaways, it looks like. Umm, whoops?” Her face falls again; Kasey is not psyched.

It makes me nervous having these semi-licitly-obtained pills in the car. And besides, for all intents and purposes I'm clean—the psychiatrist has applauded my recovery efforts and finally conceded that the benzos are drugs of “use, not abuse.” Great news! I look forward to a similarly smooth transition off Klonopin. I've informed my doctor that I'll cut a half to a quarter milligram every two weeks, which means I'll be free of the benzos by October. He agrees that that's a solid plan. By headlamp in the bluish gloom, I peel off the Vicodin label, take a piece of athletic tape from my climbing pack, write on it, and slap it on the bottle. As Kasey and I leave for Bishop the next afternoon, I cache the bottle in the Red Monster, inside a chalk-lined crack that climbers thrust their hands into where I know someone will find it.

“Vicodin painkillers,” is what the label says. Then: “Help yourself, as I no longer have any need for them.”

Three and a half milligrams a day, Klonopin, late March 2005:

The first cut is the biggest and establishes the pattern: Two days after each reduction begins one week of worsened symptoms, including curious spates of hyperventilation, drowsiness, and toxic naps from which I wake up hypothermic. Then a return to “normal”—i.e., the standard benzo roller coaster, like an old acquaintance whom you publicly tolerate but have secretly always loathed. Kasey and I are in the lower Owens Valley, at a dystopian desert junction where Route 395 from Bishop meets Route 58 to Barstow. Power lines swing low as a windstorm builds. Trash and dust blow around as we pull into a convenience store to gas up and make a left toward Joshua Tree, where we'll meet Michael Reardon. I've been panting the whole way from Bishop where, two nights earlier at Kasey's grandfather's trailer, I first took a half pill instead of a whole one at bedtime. I know that I'm overbreathing and I know that it makes me anxious, but I'm powerless to stop. Breathing exercises don't even dent the pattern. Harley bikers are about, gangbangers creeping in boomcars, sun-dried meth-heads in greasy flannels and with hammerhead-shark eyes. I've never liked California—the aridity, the random nutjobs, the
Road Warrior
vibe—even as I appreciate its wealth of superb granite cliffs. We're in Kasey's Elantra, “Lani,” a brown plastic triceratops our mascot on the dashboard. I play with the toy as I wait for her to return from the restroom, its black eyes staring back, revealing nothing.

Three milligrams a day, Klonopin, April 2005:

I've made another big jump, a half-milligram cut, feeling positive, bolstered by a new SSRI antidepressant, Lexapro, which has helped temporarily with the breathing, letting my body assume a natural rhythm. The benzos are down to three times a day—morning, noon, and night—and after a rough first week, I actually feel better than I did at higher doses. Could it be that each cut will be easier, as I come closer to zero? I have no reason not to think so, and my psychiatrist still feels that I'm tapering at a reasonable rate.

I've flown out to meet Michael Reardon in LA, and then we're off to Joshua Tree National Park again, an otherworldly, wind-swept plateau of the eponymous dream-trees, of endless tan domes and gritty boulders popping from springtime tracts of yellow and purple wildflowers. We barely rope up except for longer climbs. Michael runs through his multiple-route free-solo circuits, which he does as comfortably as laps at the pool, while I join him when I'm feeling it, one of us sometimes climbing right above the other, cracking dirty jokes, feeding off each other's raucous energy. I notice that I solo better before noon, after the first Klonopin or the second, but that I need to ease back later. One afternoon, just past this window, we head to
Clean and Jerk
, a sixty-foot 5.10 on a formation called Sports Challenge Rock. Two guys rest below the shady north face; they wear giant Everest-climber backpacks, an overkill of equipment for this puny cliff, helmets on though they haven't yet roped up. Safety nuts, in other words. Michael pulls out the video camera as I start unroped up
Clean and Jerk
, as we both shout “Cali extreme!” and make ironic shaka-brah hand gestures. I realize that I'm shaky and that it's a little late in the day—and I've only done this climb once, two years earlier—but I free-solo anyway. Halfway up, the crack esses through a smooth bulge, forcing awkward body positions. I quiver, slowing as I fuss with fist jams and foot smears, as Michael continues filming. “You doing okay, brotha?” he asks at one point. “Sure, sure,” I say, but as I look down thirty, then forty, then fifty feet to the ground, I can see that the other two climbers have packed up and left, unwilling or perhaps unable to witness whatever finale.

Two and three-quarters milligrams a day, Klonopin, May 2005:

I've given notice at work, having stepped down from editor to senior editor as I prepare to detach from the publishing world. It feels like the right decision, one that should ameliorate stress and anxiety, and as soon as my tenure is up I'll move in with Kasey back in Boulder and work as a freelancer—a quieter, simpler life.

Kasey is interning at Boulder's newspaper and is sent to do a human-interest piece on the Humane Society of Boulder Valley shelter. She sends me an e-mail entitled only, “Can we get him?” with a link to a photo. It's of Clyde, one of two brown brindled puppies (his sister is Bonnie), rescued siblings listed as “Labrador/pit-bull mix.” There he is, a tiger-striped, two-month-old furball with a fat pink belly, a white blaze on his chest, wide brown eyes, and velvety ears. A hundred fifty bucks, including shots and neutering. I don't even think, just type
“Yes!”
and with that we have Clyde. When Kasey brings him out to Carbondale the next weekend, I have to carry him through the talus below the cliffs, as he keeps slipping between the rocks and tripping over his pedestal paws. He whines when we're up off the ground until he figures out he can crane up and see us. After which Clyde scoops out a hole, curls into a ball, and takes a long puppy siesta.

Two and a quarter milligrams a day, Klonopin, June 2005:

To stick to my self-imposed schedule I must make this cut, even on holiday on Kalymnos, a mountainous Greek isle covered in perfect bands of gray, orange, white, and beige limestone. Things have started to become, well,
difficult,
an intimation of some storm brewing over the horizon. I'm moving at the same pace, keeping my chin up and focused on the end goal, but I'm beginning to think that quitting benzos this final time might be harder than I'd originally thought. (As I'll learn later, from anecdotal experiences shared on a Yahoo group, each taper is often more difficult than the one/s prior.) Back in Boulder, Kasey has found us a place, one half of a duplex at Fifth Street and Alpine in far west Boulder, the last tumbledown rental on a block of redos and scrape-offs beneath Mount Sanitas. It has two bedrooms, a big picture window in the living room that reveals the First Flatiron in profile—a thin plane of sandstone slicing the horizon. There is even a backyard for Clyde, though the fence is low and we have to electrify it. I like where the house is, so close to trails and the rocks, and how the thin slits of window in the two bedrooms give east past the city onto the Great Plains. But something about it also feels ominous, like bad things have happened or might someday happen here.

Now in Mediterranean climber paradise, I need to cut again, even as I know it will leave me jelly-limbed and noncombative on the harder climbs, less able to enjoy Kalymnos' amazing three-dimensional routes on stalactites and “tufas” (extruded vertical dikes) overlooking the glaucous Aegean. I've given up coffee and chocolate, as they're too stimulating, and have to leave Kasey to do the shopping in the narrow-aisled grocery stores in Kalymnos' port, Pothia. The crowds are too much; I'm too edgy. The Greek sounds like bursts from a machine gun. I feel infinite sadness.