Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  This heinous crime is important only insofar as the murderess also saw the same psychiatrist I first saw, “Dr. Salami” we might call him, a child specialist one building over from my father at UNM’s medical center. I read about her in the paper, recognized my doctor’s name, and asked him during session about the pretrial evaluation, but he couldn’t tell me much. I saw the shrink at least once a week, at my father’s insistence. After elementary school, I’d skip latchkey camp at the YMCA to accompany my dad to his basement office in the Tumor Registry, and then hasten through a creepy, echoing concrete underpassage that linked the two buildings. Ducts, water pipes, and spindles of wire ran in great cablings along the walls, hissing, thrumming, seeping clear liquors—alive and tactile like the set pieces in Alien or Eraserhead. In there alone or hearing foreign footfalls resound through the gloom, from around the hall’s single corner, I’d feel nervous electricity in my gut. I’d dare myself not to run, but it was rare that I didn’t at least break into a canter. I dreaded the visits, loathed talking about myself and about how my parents’ breakup made me feel (quite obviously, rotten), but I ran toward the sessions nevertheless just to flee that hallway. After my behavior mark at school had fallen from a “plus” to a “check minus,” my father left me little choice. If I agreed to see the doctor regularly and earned at least a “check plus” two quarters in a row, my dad would buy me the video-game system I’d been lusting after. It was for a $299 Intellivision, then, that ten-year-old me sold my soul to psychiatry. I’d wait in Dr. Salami’s antechamber, and then he’d come out with his beetling white eyebrows and lead me to an interior therapy room; the room had one-way glass so parents could observe the sessions, though I’m not sure my father ever came.

  I can’t recall the specifics of our conversations other than the pageantry of the dialogue, a superficial level I fought hard to maintain. An only child, a lifelong introvert, I like keeping my thoughts for me. With the doctor, I’d playact interactions amongst a family of interracial dolls who cohabitated in a dollhouse and who, when I handled them, would turn on each other with feral alacrity. I’d open the house on its central hinge, the doll children would swarm from their rooms to exchange fisticuffs in the kitchen, and the two parent dolls would decamp behind a locked bedroom door to shout at each other. The doctor would watch the fracas without comment, jotting his notes. Then I would pummel a giant foam Weeble in the corner, something I could have done at home for free with a pillow. Later, the doctor would report my progress back to my father.

  It was a charade—a sick, expensive charade. I know my father only wanted to help and that, being a doctor himself, it was natural to refer me to the appropriate specialist. But I see these visits as the touchstone, the early conditioning that led me to seek out, blindly trust, and believe the therapists and psychiatrists who would come to oversee my near undoing. In time, in any case, my behavior grades improved and my father, as promised, bought the Intellivision. The video games kept me out of trouble for a few years, until I turned thirteen.

  Every teenage boy needs his thing, and mine was skateboarding. Other than earning A’s, I had never been good at anything until I found skating. Actually, I was no good at skating either; I just liked it. At the peak of my powers, the best trick I managed was the infamous seven-foot acid drop off the bell tower on the UNM campus. I’d skate along the stucco rampart that housed the bell, fall through the ether, and then land on a riser, my knees jarring with the impact. I never progressed beyond acid drops, concrete ditches, parking garages, or streets to half-pipes or swimming pools, but it didn’t really matter: Skateboarding meant freedom. Had there been climbing gyms back then, I’m sure I would have found my true calling earlier in life.

  As an early teenager, being a skatepunk was all the identity I had, and I ran with a crew of likeminded friends. I’d tried my hand at team sports, but could never align with the competitiveness, the players’ egos, and the rabid, frothing, win-at-all-costs coaches. I just don’t care about winning. You win one game, and then it’s back to square one with the next—and what difference does it make anyway? Soccer I quit after transferring from the fun, recreational American Youth Soccer Organization to a team in the more martial Duke City Soccer League, where the coach, a porcine, buzz-cutted ex-Marine, nicknamed me “Ernie” and kept me perpetually benched. Basketball I bailed on after only three practices, terrified of the nutso coach who kept spittling, “Are we having fun, everybody?” in our faces during huddles. Wrestling I was miserable at, winning two matches in sixth grade but just barely, and another in eighth grade against a developmentally disabled kid who would have made mincemeat of me had his reaction time matched my own. I also tried track—the 600-meter—and won a few, sad white fourth-place ribbons. Later I went out for cross-country, at the private school I attended, Albuquerque Academy, but my knees filled with fluid—the painful Osgood-Schlatter syndrome—from pounding the dirt trails. I even tried playing the guitar, and would spend summers at Hummingbird music camp in the Jemez Mountains. That didn’t take either: I have no rhythm, talent, nor a willingness to perform. I hate reading music and I have sausage fingers that are better suited to rock climbing.

  I’d become a bit of a rebel, perhaps because of the stuffiness of the Albuquerque Academy where I attended grades six through nine. I’d left public school after fifth grade for this elite institution two long city-bus rides across town, in the wealthy Northeast Heights. The Academy was a landed, quiet, serious space with vast soccer fields, tennis courts, grassy quads, and porticoed walkways. It was a school at which our exuberant sixth-grade English teacher leapt up onto his desk mid-soliloquy, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and where a prim system of lights—green, amber, and red—mounted on the walls let you know how much time remained per period. It was a place of privilege and of classical education for the city’s wealthiest children; a preparatory school for future Ivy Leaguers. It was a separate reality, a mini-university with buildings that smelled of book-binding glue, tweed, floor wax, and notebook paper, and where docksiders and Izod Lacoste alligator shirts were worn without irony.

  I spent three years there as “class scholar,” banging out the highest grades by the one-tenth of a decimal point that separated me from the pack, though my efforts soon left me weary, burned out, and tired of all the studying and myriad rules and contrived, faux–East Coast pomp and ritual. My three closest friends and I (all children of divorce, it turned out) took to skateboarding in eighth grade, started listening to new wave and punk rock, wore loud-patterned board shorts, and had our ears pierced. The teachers despised our otherness—we stood out, sassed off, but still earned top marks. One day a math teacher, a fading Southern belle, passed us loitering in the hall and said, apropos of nothing, “You boys will never amount to anything.” Maybe not, but how I chose to look had nothing to do with it: I’d become a skatepunk not because I fancied myself as opposed to anyone else, but because that’s simply one place where outliers end up. As a teenager, then, at an age where physical appearance is everything, I expressed my outlander status by sticking out, not disappearing as I tend to do now. However, sporting a Mohawk haircut, safety-pin earrings, leather combat boots, a trench coat, and torn punk-band T-shirts makes you an easy target, whether that’s your goal or not.

  It all began to unravel at the Academy in autumn of eighth grade, when, in the heedless, destructive way in which teenage boys undo things, a skater friend, Sergio, and I took a purple El Marko marker to the yellow locker bays in our building. The facility was pristine, still smelling of fresh paint and virgin carpet, only in its second cycle on the campus’ new middle school. We didn’t write “suck me” or “dog balls” on the lockers; no, we wrote people’s names, thinking ourselves clever and not realizing that the El Marko was permanent. This the middle-school disciplinarian, also our math teacher, took as a personal affront. The crew-cutted and wattle-necked Mr. Sandwich turned stoplight red and screamed in our faces as Sergio and I sat in his classroom after school, s
pittle flying, eyes bugging, forehead veins popping as he hollered about “vandalism” and “hooliganism” and “disrespect.” By way of punishment, he took us out to the track, plunked down on the bleachers, lit a cigarette, primed his stopwatch, and put Sergio and me through windsprints.

  The next year was little better. I made sure to overstay my welcome at the Academy, so that a transfer halfway through freshman year became inevitable. That October of 1985, two of us “liberated” cans of the spray-on athletic adhesive Tuff Skin from a gymnasium storage closet and spritzed it through ventilation holes in the PE lockers. The adhesive turned the clothes inside into sticky, starchy planks. Just for good measure, we did this a few times. I remember sitting sheepishly before the upper-school disciplinarian, Mr. Buck, with his Harry Potter glasses and THE BUCK STOPS HERE placard, and being told that we would need to come to school one weekend and weed planter beds. My buddy and I pulled up thistle and tumbleweeds, and then I told my parents that I could not stay at the Academy. Some of my grades had even dropped to Bs for the first time in my life. I was rapidly going off the rails.

  * * *

  Not this again. Not another “street fight.” Wading through my first semester of ninth grade, hating life at the Academy, I’d been jumped for the fourth time in as many months. Fact: Going around the streets of Albuquerque dressed like a punk rocker will get you jumped. Sergio and I had learned this the hard way, paddling along Twelfth Street down in the Valley, when a road crew of juvenile-detention inmates surrounded us with shovels and pickaxes and tried to take our skateboards, the ringleader punching me in the mouth and knocking me to the pavement. A small band of us had learned this at the underage nightclub The Big Apple, when two packs, of jocks and metalheads, converged on us in the rear parking lot over a minor verbal misunderstanding. And I’d learned it again just two blocks from my mother’s home, skating alone behind Jefferson Middle School one night when a dozen barrio kids chased after me, trying to steal my deck. There was always an edge of mortal peril to the attacks, an undiscriminating, many-on-few bloodlust forged in the city’s hot, dusty crucible. Kids get stabbed and shot in Albuquerque, so I always tried to cut and run. I’m strong, but not street tough. I didn’t grow up in the crack-shack ghetto but instead in middle-class neighborhoods in the Northeast Heights, the wealthiest quadrant in town. It barely mattered, because the weirdness goes down everywhere. Albuquerque has a well-merited reputation for crime, racial tension, and random violence—it’s an economically and ethnically mixed, sun-blasted, windswept Southwestern mini-megalopolis split by two major interstates—a smaller Los Angeles where evil happens quickly and without apparent motive. (As one friend who also moved away, to Texas, put it, “I hate coming home. Everywhere I go, I feel like I’m looking over my shoulder.”) The city’s dark undercurrent seeps into your soul, even those of children.

  Now, the one time we victims outnumbered our attacker, he had to be some armed sociopath older and larger than ourselves with the saucer eyes of a panicked horse. Mean as a rattler, impervious to reason, an unfeeling killer from some cold, alternate universe. Another thief of skateboards, a creature of the night just like we fancied ourselves to be when we’d steal out of our parents’ homes to hit the silent streets.

  We liked to do this: sneak out after midnight, rendezvous, smoke cigarettes, drink watery beer, and pop ollies and try wall-rides and acid drops on lots, stairwells, and parking garages where we’d be chased off by day. Night skating was the best. The air had cooled, the asphalt had hardened, and there was no one about to call the police, no cars in the way or grumpy old codgers hollering abuse from their driveways. Our favorite was to street-luge from the four-way intersection at Constitution and Washington boulevards. The streets dropped precipitously to the west, north, and south, all with run-outs onto flatter spans. We’d tighten our trucks with a skate key so the boards wouldn’t wobble, lie feetfirst on our backs or face-first on our stomachs, and then bomb down the tarmac, backyard fences whipping by, the asphalt a black blur but inches away, praying a car didn’t turn in from a side street. I stood up a few times and realized, from this higher vantage, how fast we were going: thirty mph, maybe more near the bottom. Had you hit gravel or gotten mired in pothole filler, it would have been curtains. Constitution ran out by the Safeway next to Aspen Plaza. We’d coast to a stop there on moon-bright nights of boundless possibility, skid plates grinding as the boards’ noses came up, happy to be alive in our private playground, feeling the hermetic specialness of the slumbering city.

  But now: “Give me your fucking skateboards!” this madman shouted. “You think I’m fucking around?” He held a length of PVC pipe high in one hand, a switchblade extended in the other. He wore a denim jacket with an AC/DC logo on the back and tight black jeans: the metalhead uniform.

  “I’ve got my bat … and I’ve got my knife … and I’ll fucking kill you!” he continued, advancing on us four wee skatekids.

  We’d seen him in the distance, a tall figure with a wild tangle of dark hair, noodling around a bus stop along Lomas Boulevard by the Bernalillo County Medical Center, kicking over newspaper-vending machines and then weaving an erratic path along the sidewalk, orange with pools of nocturnal halogen. One among us, Owen, had skated past the guy on his way to our meeting point at the Albuquerque Indian Hospital, on UNM’s medical campus. Owen said something about “a weirdo down the road,” but we didn’t think much of it. Down the road meant somewhere else. Flapping about in our trench coats, we lit up Kools, trying rail slides on parking blocks, oblivious as our attacker advanced through the night. When he suddenly emerged from a pine grove on the lawn, I saw the PCP glaze to his eyes and felt my heart skip a beat.

  When bad things go down like this—when you’re confronted with a physical threat—the “fight-or-flight” reaction kicks in. A primitive, automatic, animal survival mechanism, fight-or-flight activates at the first perception of peril as an azure spot—a brain-stem nucleus called the “locus coeruleus”—sets off a series of physical reactions.2 The locus manufactures norepinephrine (aka noradrenaline),3 which is a neuropeptide or neurotransmitter, a message-relaying, mobile protein molecule found throughout the brain and body, and one key to fight-or-flight. At essence, neurotransmitters are the intermediaries between the 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) in our brains, where they relay chemical messages across inter-neuron gaps called synapses, and between all the neurons found throughout our bodies. This transmittal happens when a message travels from each pre-synaptic neuron along a single axon; these axons, of varying lengths, then branch into many terminals from which the neurotransmitter “jumps” to specific, mirror-image receptor sites on the membrane of the post-synaptic neuron. (The neurotransmitter does so by traversing a twenty-nanometer gap called the “synaptic cleft.” Received impulses enter the post-synaptic neuron via dendrites.) As Robert Whitaker frames it in his excellent exposé of modern psychiatry, Anatomy of an Epidemic, “A single neuron has between one thousand and ten thousand synaptic connections, with the adult brain as a whole having perhaps 150 million synapses.”4 Untold neuron-to-neuron transactions are going on at any given time—the human brain and nervous system are immeasurably complex.

  Meanwhile, neurotransmitters are called either excitatory (activating) or inhibitory (inhibiting) in their action, in that they either encourage the post-synaptic neuron to carry out a specific task or they prevent it from doing so. Excitatory neurotransmitters activate the brain by causing neurons to fire, releasing neurotransmitters that then carry the message to other neurons in a kind of domino effect, while the inhibitory ones call a “cease-fire” that stabilizes or calms the brain—though some neurotransmitters carry out both functions. (Neurotransmitters also regulate our bodily functions—they course throughout the immune and endocrine systems, guts, lungs, heart, and so on, and can communicate with cells and organs.) At essence, neurotransmitters serve as chemical mediators of our emotional reality: As Richard Restak, M.D., writes in his examination of anxiety, Poe�
��s Heart and the Mountain Climber, “all [emphasis added] mental processes result from the release of neurotransmitters from billions of cells in the brain and the reception of these chemicals by billions of other cells.”5 And, as Paul Foxman puts forth in Dancing with Fear, neurotransmitters translate our emotions, feelings, and every thought—even unconscious ones—into “physiological changes.”6 Without neurotransmitters and receptors, we would just be switched-off computers.

  In a fight-or-flight situation, then, activating neurotransmitters such as epinephrine (adrenaline), norepinephrine, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), and serotonin flood the bloodstream.7 More specifically, the adrenal glands release epinephrine as the sympathetic nervous system (SNS)—one branch of the body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS)—fires, the so-called “adrenaline rush” during which your muscles tense, sight and hearing sharpen, breathing and heart rate quicken to take in more oxygen, and your posture becomes defensive. It’s the process by which, as Foxman writes, “your body becomes charged and energized to protect itself”8—either through battling the threat or fleeing it. Only the triggering of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), the SNS’ counterpart, brings you back down. (The PNS controls salivation, lacrimation, urination, digestion, and defecation,9 and is like the “brakes” to the SNS’ “accelerator.” Think about the last time you were confronted with some danger, and the almost holy calm that washed over after the danger had passed: That was the PNS bringing you back to baseline.) The two complementary systems have long helped man to survive—to recognize and then confront and/or evade imminent threats. I would later have a therapist frame fight-or-flight this way: When man was both predator and prey, roaming the steppes and hurling spears at antelope, we evolved the response as a safeguard against creatures like saber-toothed tigers. These days, however, because we have few natural enemies—other than each other—fight-or-flight is almost an anachronism.