Death Grip (3 page)

Now in the car with Andrew, desk-obsessed and nauseous with anxiety, I'd felt the ride out go from bad to worse. I was barely able to hold up my end of the conversation as Andrew made small talk, the kind so easily shared among climbers—which Rifle routes he was trying, upcoming road trips. I'd grown ever tetchier, ever more envious of his perfect health and his goddamned desk, the nauseating, withdrawal-induced current that arced along my spine, thrumming in a rising crescendo. Strong sun beamed in unfiltered by clouds, sluicing across the Flat Tops to fluoresce their autumnal quilt of aspen yellow and scrub-oak purple, filling eyes insomnia-raw with photonic sand, amping my rage. Clyde, a year and a half old and brimming with puppyish angst,
woo-woo-woo'ed
from the backseat, writhing about and trying to nose through the gap.

As Andrew recalls, I'd been “on edge” the whole morning, my voice angry when I shooed the dog back as we wound our way up Colorado Road 217, an idyllic byway that enters the canyon past a state fish hatchery. Each time, Andrew said, that I told Clyde to “get back” my voice had a harder edge. Like me, Clyde is a New Mexican (from Taos), and as a rescue dog, has his own anxieties. He must have been cut loose by a highway, because he flips out on certain roads or when we pull over in a strange place. Clyde had been with me through the horror of the previous year, and it was his photo—not my then-girlfriend's—that I displayed most prominently in my hospital room at Johns Hopkins.

Andrew and I stopped to pay our day-use fee just inside the canyon mouth, where an information table for the day's event had been set up at a kiosk. There a coworker manning the table said simply, “Samet…!” It was too much to hear my cursed name. Other climbers milled about; they all hated me. They all hated “Samet”: of this I was certain. I'd been off course—or as climbers say, “off route”—for years, an elitist prick at the rocks, penning snarky columns in the magazines and at times being too harsh, in print, on fellow climbers, but without the self-deprecation you need to pull it off. And
everyone
knew this; the whole world knew it and stood united in monolithic opprobrium. So what was I doing here, displaying myself like some three-legged freak so my enemies could mock me? I could picture it now: I would Jumar but a few feet up
Sprayathon
, dangling there too exhausted to continue, and someone would drive by and see me twisting in the breeze like a piñata.

“Hey, isn't that Matt Samet?” they might ask their friends. “I hear he used to be some sorta hot-shit climber. Wow, look at him now … he's so fat he can't even get up the Arsenal using Jumars. What a jackoff.”

You see, these are not normal thoughts. But I no longer controlled my mind, and Andrew was beginning to sense this. I had the final eruption after we pulled away from the kiosk.

“I remember this,” he later told me. “You pounded on the steering wheel really violently, five, ten times—while still driving forward. It was just complete, pure rage. Then you ripped off both turning/wiping levers.” I can remember howling a single word—“Fuck!”—repeatedly as I snapped the levers from the steering column.

What a cloddish word: “Fuck.” Still, I could do no better. When a pumped (tired) climber snaps, frustrated, to the end of his rope after falling off some Rifle crux, that's usually the first thing you'll hear:
“Fuckkk!”
Our juvenile, fuck-filled tantrums had been so frequent the first two years in the canyon that local picknickers and fishermen had complained to the city about the influx of “foul-mouthed rock rats.” We came from Boulder in import sedans, using loud power drills to install the expansion bolts that protect the climbs, taking up the parking spots, hurling F-bombs. Imagine that: a bunch of skinny college-town weirdos in pink tank tops and garish spandex tights, hanging off the walls and screaming “Fuck!” like petulant middle-schoolers. Until climbers showed up, the canyon had been a quiet, cool summer repair for the busted shale-mining town of Rifle. By the mid-1990s, it had become
the
place to sport-climb in North America, and I'd been on the scene since the beginning, starving and striving and screaming with the best of them.

Andrew recalls what happened next: “You swerved to the right, and I felt like you were trying to drive us into the river.” (I don't recall intending to do so; anyway, the river is barely three-feet deep come autumn.) I jumped out, Clyde yowling from the back, his nose greasing the glass. I began to mill around in the pullout. Andrew leapt out to console me, and I growled at him to “get the fuck away from me.”

Apparently I said this a few times, with enough ferocity that Andrew did precisely that.

Andrew then crossed the road, going over by the base of the Arsenal to give me space. I paced about agitated, gaining fury, beating my car with feet and fists. I pounced on the Golf's rear bumper, kicked at the back windscreen, punched at the safety glass, hoping it might swallow my arms and bleed them out. The glass barely flexed; the rage needed another outlet. Two friends drove by, perhaps only half-seeing what was transpiring or lacking a ready context for it. They gave a little wave and continued up canyon. Andrew waved back like everything was okay, hoping it soon would be. It was then that I found that bottle, an empty Corona down in the reeds.

I broke the glass on a gray chunk of limestone, took up the largest shard, staggered back up on the road, knelt in the dirt, and began cutting at my wrists. I was like a kettle at high boil: The steam has to gush out or the whole thing will blow. Andrew screamed, “
No
!,” and ran over. He bear-hugged me from behind. Andrew enclosed my hands in his own, trying to prize away the glass.

“I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't be here,” I kept saying.

Then: “Where were you?!” I yelled at him. “Where were you where were you where were you?!”

It was a disingenuous accusation, leveled at Andrew in particular simply because he happened to be there. His bad luck: He would have to serve as proxy for those friends and family members who'd failed to believe the profundity of my struggle, who'd let me wander into the wilderness sick and crazed to die alone.

“I'm right here,” he said. “I'm here now. I'm here right now. Stop it, Matt! You need to stop! I'm here now, I'm here for you.” And he was.

I craned around wildly, catching glints of the Arsenal from behind its roadside screen of slender elms. The trees had turned yellow-gold with autumn's apogee—not that I cared, about the damned, beautiful trees or the climbs behind them. Nine years earlier, I would routinely climb these routes in running, not rock, shoes. I'd been such a prickish, competitive lout that I made a point of doing so when I saw someone failing on one of the climbs. One day in 1997, sporting an early-spring wine gut, wearing garish yellow MC Hammer pants and a monster-truck cap, and half-covered in mud (I'd fallen into the creek), I'd walked up without fanfare and done the very overhanging 5.12
+
Vitamin H
in blown-out New Balance running shoes before one such suitor. This was the kind of Dadaesque stuff we'd do. Another buddy, Charley, had done the same climb naked with a watermelon hanging off his harness. And another friend, Steve, had climbed out an eighty-foot overhang called
Pump-O-Rama
, in the Arsenal's guts, wearing a tutu and high heels. Now I pushed two hundred pounds, a sad, crazed, hobbled, fatty. Karma is a cruel mistress.

I shook Andrew off and flung the bloodied glass into the reeds. My left wrist seeped sorry serums, dewing there in gashes and clots. I'd done some damage, but not enough even to leave scars. I'd been cutting, recalls Andrew, like I was “trying to saw through a rope with a dull knife.” And as any climber knows, you never cut the rope.

Another “
Fuck
!” Then as suddenly as it began, it was over; the fire left my body.

Andrew drove us back to Carbondale. I was too depleted, too unreliable to drive. We drove slowly, unable to use the turn signals, the wiper blades locked at 3 o'clock on the windshield then occasionally going into spasm before freezing back in place. We said little, Andrew worried that one wrong word—hell, even a frisson of the wiper blades—might trigger another episode. We came to Glenwood Springs and drove over the Colorado River, heading up-valley toward Carbondale and Aspen, the dark green waters slow and languid below. Then Andrew informed me that he was taking me to the hospital.

“No, you aren't,” I spat. “If you drive toward the hospital, I will jump out of this fucking car.”

I meant it; to prove my point, I opened the door as we poked along in traffic. I knew I was being unfair: I'd saddled Andrew with a tremendous burden, and his response was of course the most logical one—if a friend is suicidal, you take him to the hospital. But I also knew what would happen there, because I'd been through it a year earlier: They'd refer me to a psych ward, lock me up on a seventy-two-hour hold, and pump me full of pills. Even though I knew the position I'd put Andrew in, I refused to let him deliver me back to my tormentors. Death would be preferable. I would not swallow another pill.

“I'm sorry, man. I really am,” I said without affect. My voice oscillated between a flat trauma monotone and an anemic whisper—Styron's “ancient wheeze” of depression. “But I can't let you do that. I'm this way
because
of the psychiatrists, and if I go back this will never end. They will put me back on meds and zero out the clock again. I just can't let you take me there. It would be the end of me.”

Andrew looked at me, a fellow climber, and I could see that he believed me. The Matt he'd known for the previous two years lay somewhere beneath the pain. And the
real
Matt would never act this way; Andrew had spent enough time with me on rock to know this. On dangerous or “death” leads there is a shared faith between partners; the belayer (the climber securing the rope) needs to believe just as much as the climber that the outcome will be favorable. If it is otherwise, the belayer's fear permeates the leader, and the endeavor—and the partnership—will crumble. Two springs earlier, Andrew and I had climbed a death route in Eldorado Canyon, outside Boulder, called
High Anxiety
, a fussy, difficult-to-protect 5.11 up red-brown dihedrals (open-book–shaped corners). As I stemmed, opposing my feet on two walls at the crux, placing RP nuts a quarter of the size of a pinkie nail for protection, Andrew held the rope expertly, only occasionally voicing encouragement. If I fell in the wrong spot, I'd break my legs … or worse. I could feel his
belief
in me vibrating along the cord, just as he believed me now even if this day would so punish Andrew that he couldn't climb for a week, his back muscles locked with residual stress.

“Okay, Matt,” he said. “But we need to find a way to keep you safe.”

“I know, man. I know…” And we did.

Andrew and I reached a compromise: I would call my father, and my family and I would sort out the situation. I shut the car door. This day, at least, there would be no more hospitals, no more psychiatrists. Back in Carbondale, Andrew dropped me off at home and then called other friends to come over for lunch so we could debrief. Four of us sat at the table eating bread and slurping yam soup while I assured them I would not harm myself again.

“Well, you're a pretty clever guy, Matt,” one friend, Jeff, said. “I'd hate for us to leave here and then you go and try something like this again.”

“I won't, Jeff,” I said. “I promise.” I could see in his half smile that he didn't quite believe me. I explained the situation as best I could, emphasizing that I could not return to the doctors. I laid out the specifics to strengthen my case. Barely anyone around me knew what was going on. It was too complex, too convoluted, to be elevator chat, so I mostly kept mum about my situation; besides, I needed
time
more than I needed friends' well-meaning platitudes in order to heal.

I'd taken my final dose of nortriptyline only a week earlier, a twenty-five-milligram capsule washed down after dinner. Psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins had prescribed the pill to treat major depression, though it had served mainly to mask anxiety caused by the cessation of benzos nine months earlier. That last nortriptyline brought to a close a checkered fourteen-year history with crazy pills: Had I been lucid enough to do the math, I would have realized I'd been on thirteen psychiatric medicines in as many months. Now I'd entered a rawer, more fragile epoch, the underlying benzo withdrawal kicked into hyperdrive by this final chemical insult. The worst, ongoing benzo symptom had been hyperventilation, which left me wheezing, irritable, and in physical distress. The overabundance of CO
2
set my muscles on fire, and only increased the constant, black, gut-piercing terror. I couldn't walk up hills, and could spit out only three or four words at a time, punctuated by flurries of weird, shallow, triplicate yawns that worsened as my nortriptyline dose declined. I slept with my mouth duct-taped shut and nostrils opened with breathing strips to promote diaphragmatic breathing, in the hopes that my body might find equilibrium. It didn't, and would not for some time. I was not safe out in the world, but neither did I have real refuge—especially not in my bedroom, alone with my ex-junkie's guilt and self-hatred. I needed time, distraction, and somewhere to lie low, but it wasn't happening. No one would let me. I'd tried to tell a few friends, family, and coworkers of my plight even as some urged me to “get help,” “go back on the meds,” and exploit my “support network.” But the support network—of therapists, doctors, and hospitals—had, through chemical paternalism, helped orchestrate this undoing. In fact, the only people who'd verified the reality of my experience were people who'd been through it themselves, ex-patients and survivors of benzodiazepines. It hadn't been the doctors. It was as if I had vertigo after an hour strapped to a merry-go-round, but everyone I lurched toward for help asked, “How can you have vertigo? I don't see any merry-go-round.”