Death Grip (8 page)

Bitchin'.

Mistake. Highland was prison brutal, the halls echoing with the catcalls of the toughs, the rules, boundaries, and allegiances not immediately clear to us newcomers.

Bitchin'.

That first morning I came in through the northeast entrance in my trench coat and “turd-burglar” sweat pants, which had ripped along the seat and which I'd safety-pinned back together, though you could still see my skivvies. I had no idea that each doorway and hall belonged to a certain clique, and that it was best to be selective about where you entered. The halls were jammed, dimly lit, a flood of backs and faces and arms and legs, teeming, vari-ethnic cadres, and booming shouts—a florid chaos so unlike the quiet, orderly Academy.

“See that little motherfucker?” I heard someone say behind me as I punted through the door, eyes glued to the linoleum. “The one with the Mohawk? I'm gonna kick his ass!” The laughter rolled as he and his crew watched me shuffle by.

Bitchin'.

I continued along to the principal's office to get my student ID. The first thing the principal told me, noticing the Charged GBH cutout on the back of my coat, was, “We don't dress that way at Highland. Don't wear that to school tomorrow.”

Bitchin'.

I'm not sure how many days passed before I stopped showing up, but it was no more than a week and change. A mutual friend of Jeff and mine, Josh, shared two classes with me. We all knew each other from skating at the Four Hills ditch, a smooth-sided concrete sluice in the foothills. Josh let me piggyback on his locker and showed me around school, but there was only so much he could do. Even when I was given an assigned locker, I kept my books in a duffel bag. I lugged the bag from class to class, wary of being in one spot, at the locker, in the halls. I would hold my bladder for as long as I could, terrified of heading solo into the bathrooms—the things you do during your first month at a penitentiary.

“I, too, remember feeling that initial fear and shock when we arrived,” Jeff wrote in his e-mail, “almost like we'd just landed in prison. Right away it made quaint the little pranky, play-punk stuff we did at the Academy, like slam dancing in the auxiliary gym to a ghetto blaster.” The difference was, Jeff endured while I gave up. Those four times getting jumped coupled with Highland's charged, cusp-of-violence atmosphere had conjured in me a critical mass of anxiety—a sick, nauseated bolus that coiled somewhere below my heart. Hypervigilant, scanning for threats, uncomfortable everywhere but home, I'd even taken to carrying a weapon, a butterfly knife with duct-taped handles. I could, in the safety of my own or a friend's house, whip it out and
click-click-click
the blade into place with a hoodlum's flourish of hand. But the likelihood of me stabbing anyone was less than zero. If confronted, I'd surely bobble the knife and see it plunged into my Adam's apple.

Lunchtime was the worst, as I knew almost nobody, didn't want to wander with Jeff and the other punk kids off campus into the sleazy hinterlands near Central Avenue (old Route 66), and was unable to brave the cafeteria. During that hour the various tribes would break off to occupy dominions across the campus, and as fights erupted—seemingly a daily occurrence—the hordes sprinted to encircle and enthusiastically jeer each drubbing. I'd try to find some inconspicuous corner of lawn where I could choke down a sandwich, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing, slouched against my duffel bag, sidestepping the scuffles: a walking mark. The last straw was what I perceived as another hallway threat—this from the biggest, meanest punk-rock kid at school. I'd been heading to class with Jeff and thought I'd heard the guy say something menacing about my safety-pin earring, but it's doubtful he was even talking about (or to) me, or maybe it was just a compliment. By then I was barely sleeping, locked in a dizzy gray-black fog that smudged day into night. I wanted to be a real punk rocker but didn't have the chops to survive at the “cool school.” My perceptions were skewed; the bitchin' punk-rock adventure had become psychological torture.

My parents had always hated the punk-rock thing, and now I get it. I see kids today with black leather jackets and Mohawks, purple hair and Goth eye shadow, tattoos and piercings, and I feel for them. My folks dreaded being in public with me: the comments (“I'd never let
my
kid have hair like that,” “Look at that little faggot,” “Is that the last of the Mohicans?”), the cross-eyed glances, my own jitteriness in anticipation of the myriad predictable barbs.

Not surprisingly, when I stopped attending Highland, both parents launched in with the “Why do you listen to that terrible, angry music?” spiel. I'm sure they, like anyone with a foundering child, needed a ready scapegoat, but it's not as if a song or two had single-handedly derailed me. As far as I recall, none of the bands I listened to—not Black Flag, MDC, Corrosion of Conformity, the Exploited, the Sex Pistols, Operation Ivy, Poison Idea, Suicidal Tendencies, Killing Joke, Minor Threat, the Misfits, the Angry Samoans, or D.O.A.—had a song called “Get jumped four times, transfer to a scary high school, become agoraphobic, and drop out!” It doesn't work that way, and what a crappy song that would be anyway: The title alone takes more time to say than most punk songs are long!

That final day at Highland, I took myself to the school counselor's office, feigned stomach pain, and called my father to come pick me up. Jeff accompanied me, trying to talk me back into the fray, but I was having none of it. “I would go away to a class and return and you were still there waiting,” he wrote me. “[It was like,] ‘Come on, kamikaze brother, we've got punk-rock shit to do out here!' Why won't you leave?” I must have waited three hours while my dad wrapped up things at work, my duffel bag at my feet, eyes glued to my boots, not even getting up to use the restroom. I didn't care; I had to get away from Highland before somebody killed me. It was pure animal terror. Over the next two weeks I refused to leave my bedroom, making half-baked efforts to keep up with my studies remotely but soon giving up even on that. I drew the blinds, left my bed only to visit the kitchen and the bathroom, and slept as much as possible. I'm sure my folks thought I was on drugs—the change had, from the outside, been as sudden as if I'd gotten hooked on methamphetamine. But I wasn't on any drugs, not even pot. As Jeff put it, “Before then, you always seemed so happy-go-lucky, if restless, so this kind of paralysis came on abruptly.”

When anxiety and panic set in, it's often that way.

As the weeks passed and my options dwindled, my parents enrolled me in the Challenge Program, one of those outpatient programs for troubled teens, popular in the 1980s. Here I would remain for five months, two weeks of that as an inpatient, until fit to be released into the world again.

 

CHAPTER 4

Being locked away in a mental hospital: It's not the same as driving past one on the highway or even popping in to visit your mother. When someone else holds the key, everything changes—you cannot leave until
they
say you can. So you do what they tell you to do, and you act like you like it.

The Challenge Program was housed in a school/outbuilding behind Memorial Hospital, part of a gloomy complex at Central Avenue and I-25 that opened in 1926 as a tuberculosis sanitarium but had earlier served as a railroad hospital for employees of the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.
1
Today the grounds are empty, enclosed in chain-link fence and on offer for $4.6 million, which buys you the school, a tiny power plant with a creepy smokestack, and the vacant horror-movie hospital with its rows of blank windows, gray gargoyles, and two-plus acres of sloped, wooded lot. Here Albuquerque drops toward downtown and the Valley along Central, the city's main artery of funkness, sleaze, and skeeve. I entered Challenge as an outpatient, meaning I showed up at 8:00
A.M.
and left at 5:00
P.M.
Mornings were spent on lessons: English and literature with one teacher, math and science with another, with a half-hour break between.

Because so much of the program centered on exercise, we all wore mandatory sweatpants, so there we were during mid-mornings on our walks: a motley pack of sweats-wearing fuckups shepherded around the local streets, our blue Challenge Program T-shirts on for identification. Afternoons were dedicated to exercise—karate, aerobics, weight lifting, yoga, runs around parks, the occasional hike—and individual, group, or art therapy. When I showed up still wearing my turd-burglar sweats, I was told that wouldn't fly. My mother bought me a pair of fuzzy, blue terry-cloth sweats that were too long, so I cut the cuffs away. The sweats looked tattered like the Incredible Hulk's jeans shorts after he transforms. With those pants on, acne spattered all over my face, and my Mohawk half grown in, I looked as ungainly as I felt.

My favorite instructor, a man who became my friend, was John, our math teacher and also the director of Challenge's outdoor program. His uncle was Warren Harding, who in 1958 had become the first to conquer Yosemite's 2,900-foot monolith El Capitan, the most famed cliff in the world. Some afternoons, John would let us “builder” on the outside of the school. (“Buildering” combines “bouldering” with “building.” You seek bouldering-type challenges in the urban environment, from cracks between buildings, to sequences along flagstone walls, to minuscule solution holes—air pockets—up concrete.) Our goal was to circumnavigate the school using a two-inch-wide decorative ledge. We'd shuffle along with our butts pressed out, faces flush to the stucco exterior. Because the traverse crossed over irrigation pipes and big metal sprinkler heads, we'd take turns spotting each other. The most technical bits came when transitioning around the outside corners; you would lean off a window well with one hand, reach the arête with the other, then, as if slow dancing, navigate your pelvis around the bend. I mastered a move—a sort of two-handed vice-grip press on each side of the corner—that held me in place at the crux, poised between “sending” (success) and falling. With form-fitting, specialized rock shoes, which have soft, sticky butyl rubber, the traverse would have been a snap. But we all wore running shoes, which would slop and roll on the ledge. One day a kid careered off at a bad angle and rolled his ankle, putting an end to buildering, which for me had been the highlight at Challenge.

Around this time, my mother enrolled me in the New Mexico Mountain Club's (NMMC) introductory rock-climbing course. She knew that I'd always loved climbing, going back to those earliest Sandias sessions. And starting at age twelve, I'd done at least one week's worth of roped, technical mountaineering and rock climbing in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains of Washington State, where I'd visit my father's college roommate, Bob. A kind, patient, bald-and-bearded mountain man, Bob was my first mentor. He and I, and sometimes his girlfriend and my father, would pile into Bob's eggshell-blue VW van and putter along Washington's tortuous mountain byways to a hotel or trailhead bivouac, and then predawn start on some snow climb, epic hike, or semitechnical peak. I'd even tried Mount Rainier at age thirteen but had turned around two hours shy of the summit due to exhaustion. Bob would pack great, fatty mountain food—Toblerone chocolate, salami, cheeses, and Cotlet fruit bars—that we nibbled on for energy. We'd return from our missions sweaty, depleted, and ravenous, splitting a bag of Fritos or Cheetos as we rallied back to Bob's home outside Olympia. It was from him that I'd first learned to self-arrest on snow, barreling feetfirst, face-first, then headfirst upside-down on a steep slope facing Mount Rainier as I mastered digging in with my ice axe. It's almost impossible to convey the specialness of those early adventures, up among dark, fluted ridges of granite and volcanic rock, skyscraper-high above deep, evergreen-filled valleys, Bob out of sight on a ledge above, the rope snaking upward through protection points as he coached me through the tough spots. Every child should be so fortunate.

I'd return from Washington raving about how much I loved climbing, mourning as I realized it would be another year before I could do it again. My parents had researched local courses at my behest, but you had to be at least fifteen, and there were no rock gyms yet. Skating, meanwhile, was becoming an ever-leaner gruel. During my sad, final semester at the Academy, I'd gaze up from campus at the Sandias with an ache in my heart, at the coruscated pink panels and spires and ramparts in the upper heights only miles away, so close I felt I could touch them. I'd memorized the names of the most prominent cliffs: the Shield, the Needle, the Thumb, massive formations high as the Burj Khalifa and wider than the Hoover Dam. It was up there that I felt I belonged, looking out from some aerie onto the city's flattened grid, safe from the phantoms of random malevolence that roamed Albuquerque's streets.

Other outdoor sports get you out into nature and away from the vicissitudes of civilization, but climbing is the only one that also puts you
above
them. The higher you climb on a peak or big wall, the more your focus on the endeavor becomes total, and the more any life stress drops away. It's why I still do it. For me, climbing is life as it's meant to be lived, in tune with the rhythms of the planet—the flux of the sun, wind, and storms, the flourishing and withering of deciduous plants that spring from the cracks, the changes in air currents—and the true length of the day in rarified places far from mankind and his imbecilic divertissements. There is no feeling of satisfied-tired like the one you get after a full day pushing yourself on the rock. Plus, the kinesthetics of the movement are addictive. In the book
Jerry Moffatt:
Revelations
, an autobiography by the top English climber Jerry Moffatt, he shares an anecdote that shows why, to a diehard, climbing is not just sport but lifeblood. Living in caveman squalor in a dingy barn-squat one summer on pennies a day, so that he and a friend could climb nonstop at a nearby crag, Moffatt and company finally take a break one morning and set out to see a BBC Radio 1 traveling roadshow. “There was a couple of open-sided vans with presenters inside, their voices booming out on loudspeakers. They were talking rubbish, but the huge crowd of kids still cheered in all the right places,” writes Moffatt. “Some crap band played a song and everyone clapped. They stood around drinking Coke and eating sweets. What were all these kids doing here, I wondered.”
2
The climbers promptly turn around and hitchhike back to the cliffs, climbing that very afternoon even though they'd planned a rest day. Once the sport sinks its claws into you, it's like that: Everything else is revealed as crap.