Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  It was only after my final hospitalization, at Hopkins, that I realized through my own research, meeting a benzo survivor in Boulder who would become a good friend and advisor, and connecting with online support groups that I needed to be rid of psychiatric medicine or I would never get better.

  Which had brought me to this impasse: only one week free from all chemicals for the first time in years, I’d rekindled the most acute benzo-withdrawal symptoms and unstoppered the toxic backlog that infused my brain and nervous system, leaving me enraged, delusional, hallucinating, rudderless, and floppy-infant weak, awash in a confused depression, prone to internal psychotic meanderings, and filled with self-animus so paranoid and acid that I kept hearing sirens (“They’re coming for me”) when I lay my head on the pillow each night. I brimmed with burning, unremitting muscular pain from head to toe and an impulse to self-annihilate so strong that I had to start each morning by looking in the mirror and saying, “I promise not to kill you today,” keeping knives and ropes and other potential implements of death as far from my person as possible.

  I had never been so terrified. The final medicine I’d stopped had been a powerful tricyclic antidepressant, nortriptyline. Nortriptyline is a chemical descendant of Thorazine, the notorious antipsychotic originally applied as a surgical antihistamine, to prevent a sudden drop in blood pressure called surgical shock.1 You’d not be reading this book if it weren’t for Thorazine, for it was this drug that in 1954 launched the modern era of psychopharmacology—psychiatry’s medication of mental illness through chemical agents touted as “specific antidotes to mental disorders,” e.g., antipsychotics, antidepressants, and antianxiety pills.2 Until then psychiatrists had had their Freudian therapy, straitjackets, ice-water baths, padded rooms, ice-pick lobotomies, insulin comas, electroshock, and even tooth- and organ-removal,3 but with Thorazine they latched onto something more legitimizing: a pill, a specific pharmaceutical “cure” much like the penicillin discovered decades earlier that revolutionized modern medicine. As my “cure,” nortriptyline, wore off, I began to feel that a dark shadow stood in the corner of my room each night, silently observing, sucking away sleep, encouraging my death. All the fine hairs on my body would stand up with gooseflesh as I willed it to disappear.

  It was as if, as William Styron wrote in his masterpiece memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, “many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries.”4 I’d visited Bureau of Land Management open space in the foothills west of Carbondale the previous weekend with my two roommates, waiting at their truck with Clyde while they finished a trail run, shivering with despair. I had the hound on a twenty-foot length of climbing rope, and headed into a fairy ring of oaks near the parking lot to hang myself. I needed to do it quickly, before my friends returned. I had the noose tied, Clyde’s leash-rope over a stout limb biting into my neck as I leaned into it and began to see stars. Then I realized that without his leash Clyde would run off. We were in rocky, scrubby, ridgy terrain home to bears and mountain lions, and cattle ranchers who shoot nuisance dogs. Clyde whined beneath the trees as he tracked my every move, his big brown eyes liquid with confusion. He deserved better than this. I undid the noose and headed back to the truck in tears, rubbing Clyde behind his lop ears, sobbing as I gushed apologies: the horror of doing this to him, an abandoned puppy whom I’d adopted from the shelter. The horror of being left alone that way. Yet, I wanted to die; I fixated on this one idea as a solution to end my pain.

  The next day I took four carloads of belongings to a thrift store in nearby Glenwood Springs, giving my possessions away so that my friends and parents didn’t have to dispose of them later. I considered hanging myself from a bridge over the Crystal River near our home, but dismissed the idea because, on the level of pure vanity, I didn’t want my fat, bloated corpse swinging there for everyone to see. Neither did I want my bad juju haunting this singular spot over the river’s unsullied wavelets, the twin-summited Mount Sopris framing the southern horizon beyond—a summit I’d not stood on in two years.

  Andrew had stepped into the car that morning not knowing any of this.

  The first stirrings had begun when I picked him up where he lived, at the efficiency apartment I’d once rented in Carbondale. It was a bright, woody, ell-shaped add-on that my friend Lee, a climbing buddy I’d known since New Mexico, had originally built for his aging mother. Inside, I’d seen my old desk jammed under a window in the northwest corner beneath the windows. I’d left the desk for Andrew when I moved back to Boulder in 2005. (I’ve lived in Boulder most of my adult life, and hold two degrees from its university.) From 2003 until leaving Carbondale, I’d entertained grand notions of writing a novel at that desk. The truth, however, was that I’d come home from work, chew Vicodin ordered off the Internet (opiates had inspired the great poets, had they not?), sit at the computer trolling climbing forums and doing zero writing, and then pop one of my various daily benzo doses, guzzle red wine, and play Halo 2 until I nodded into narcotized sleep, too pasted to fold out my futon. Spike, my black Maine coon cat, would crawl atop my belly and we’d both awaken with the night terrors and screaming fits I had around 2:00 A.M. as the benzos wore off, as I leapt up choking and bellowing, wondering who’d left the lights on. The desk, so cheap, so nondescript with its flimsy black metal and crappy wood laminate, reified those wasted hours. It brought home how little I’d cared for myself.

  And so, I’d fixated on the desk. And begun to resent Andrew for having it: that sonofabitch—he had “my” desk. Never mind that I had a perfectly serviceable look-alike from Target, the writing station at which I now sit. Andrew’s desk had a sliding keyboard rack—I needed it! Everyone needed it! Shit, famine babies in Africa needed it! My mind was so fragile, so Byzantine in its psycho logic; no other path threaded the rat maze. I’d have to go buy another desk exactly like this one if I were to fix the world again. But I was too brittle even to conceptualize driving, solo, the fifteen miles to the Glenwood Springs Walmart to buy a replacement. I could barely go to Carbondale’s grocery store without breaking down, sweating and shaking and sprinting for the exit. No way then could I venture into Walmart’s vast, booming warehouse space under those white fluorescents, which worsened the ongoing “nothing is real” symptom of derealization, flattening the world into two dimensions. And my voice was a hyperventilated wheeze: How even to inquire where the office furniture was? And how to comprehend a two-page assembly printout well enough to put a desk together? At that point, I could barely get through the jokes page in Maxim.

  When, a few days earlier, I’d told my mother how poorly I felt post-nortriptyline, she’d e-mailed back that “it was too early after benzos to stop the final medicine,” meaning she felt that I was still too fragile. (I still deal with a protracted post-benzo-withdrawal syndrome that ameliorates in barely perceptible increments; more on that later.) By way of a response, I’d plunged my right fist through my iMac, shattering the screen with one punch. I was at my office at Climbing, fumbling through the days, shying away from coworkers, doing line-editing work while lying flat on the floor because a therapist had told me it was impossible to hyperventilate in this position. (She was wrong.) I wanted nothing more than to be free of all medications—now—and my mother’s response had enraged me beyond all logic. My boss and I, to explain the spider-webbed computer screen to our IT department, had to dissemble my knocking over the computer while reaching for a mug of coffee. I remember the texture, a garish slab of high-September sun invading my office’s east-facing windowpanes and how easily my hand breached the glass; the lack of pain; how easy it was to destroy.

  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 easi
ly 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 fuck
ing 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.