by Matt Samet
Benzos and weed, they didn’t feel so different. With both, that initial message that the world was a warm, secure, glowy place and that I was safe in my body was impossible to ignore. I could see why the psychiatrist had urged caution: Notwithstanding the chemical component of addiction, on a purely psychic level if you pick up that smooth, laidback, easy-listening station over the airwaves once you’ll want to tune in again, even if in trying to banish anxiety forever you end up worsening it beyond your darkest imaginings.
CHAPTER 7
With the benefit of hindsight, my first experience with benzodiazepine withdrawal came in Italy and Greece, in the summer of 1995. I’d been taking too many pills, and then ran out. I’d been living in Torino (Turin) in northern Italy that spring semester, junior year, for a study-abroad program, but had come mainly to be with my girlfriend, Luisa, an Italian five years my junior. I’d met this lovely girl with bright brown eyes, a rich laugh, nose ring, and dark, lustrous hair at a Christmas dinner at my father’s over winter break 1993–94. Luisa lived with close family friends in Albuquerque as an exchange student. As dinner ended, I’d asked Luisa—bored to death, she said, in Albuquerque—if she wanted to ski in Taos, and we’d hit it off on the slopes: my first “date” in five years. Smitten not only with her but certainly also with the notion of female company, once she returned to Italy I’d begun sending Luisa frankly embarrassing missives that professed my infatuation. We started talking weekly by phone. She must have felt something, too, because she agreed to a one-month Eurail trip in the summer of 1994 despite having spent only one day with me. Never mind that she had a boyfriend, who came stumbling into her house drunk and peevish the day I arrived in Torino. By the time Luisa and I hit central Europe, midway through our trip, I’d convinced her of the superiority of the American male. It was either that backrub in Berlin’s Tiergarten or the white wine straight from the bottle one night in Prague’s Centre Plaza, but I’d convinced her in my own awkward, fumbling way.
Before I left for Italy, I’d visited the psychiatrist in Boulder to stock up on Paxil and Ativan. He wrote a prescription for sixty Ativan, but the two-milligram size this time, with the idea that it would be easier to travel with fewer pills that I could break in half. I must confess that, with the Ativan, I’d begun to blur the distinction between use and abuse: I’d horde pills the first few weeks of each month, and then wash down one or two a night with wine over the final week. (I dozed through more than a few survey classes the day after my one-man “parties.”) It was just like it had been with food: Deprive myself five days out of seven, then indulge to excess the other two. By then I had so few panic attacks that I felt comfortable monkeying around with the pills—I’d even gone off Paxil once or twice, when I didn’t feel like I needed it. An improved diet helped as well: I now tried to eat three square meals a day.
That spring in Italy, however, I had had a panic flare-up—heart palpitations, sleeplessness, and night terrors. It would be easy to blame living in a foreign city, or to blame struggling with a new language and culture shock, but that just wasn’t the case. I lived only two blocks from Luisa and her family in central Torino, renting an attic room from a mother-and-daughter pair who happened to be friends of Luisa’s family. The Italians took great pains to include me in their lives and to help me learn the language. Luisa’s parents also had ties to the climbing world—Luisa’s father, Luigi, was the director of an Italian publishing house—and he and Luisa’s mother, Sandrina, had introduced me to the Torinese climbing community. I had regular partners whom I’d meet weekly at a giant artificial wall at the Palazzo a Vela velodrome or with whom I’d load into tiny Euro-sedans and zip up to cliffs in the nearby Alps. Sandrina loaned her two-door Renault to Luisa and me, and we took weekend trips to Finale Ligure, a spectacular place with pocketed bellies of white limestone dotting lush canyons above the Riviera.
The real problem was that I was starving myself again. The Italians are small, thin hobbit-people, the climbers even more so, and with my thick musculature I’d garner the occasional blunt but well-meaning, “Sei un po’ più grosso di noi Italiani, pero scali come un animale!” (“You’re a little bigger than us Italians, but you climb like a beast!”) This only fueled my Climborexia. My main partner was a sometime motorcycle racer, Freddino, a thin man with a moustache who drove like a maniac on the autostrade and loved a cliff called Campambiardo, a gneissic plug levering out over a chestnut-covered hillside in Val di Susa. Freddino lived in an apartment building with his extended family and seventeen adopted stray cats, and peppered his speech with colorful, made-up slang like “tanardi” (little cliff critters, like chipmunks). Freddino, at age fifty, could climb 5.13 and had legs twiggy as an ostrich’s. “Ciao, big!” he’d say when he greeted me. “Ciao, strong American boy!” It was the only English he knew. With Freddino, I onsighted my first European 8a (5.13b) at a crag called Donnaz in Val d’Aosta, an overhanging face tilted out over an ancient Roman viaduct.
On the hungriest nights I lay awake in bed, the attic ceiling close above as predawn trolleys clacked and echoed along the cobblestone canyon of Via Carlo Alberto outside. Heart palpitations came in waves, quieting only after half an Ativan and a ball of mozzarella scavenged from the kitchen. I was in Europe, the birthplace of hard sport climbing, and I needed to perform, which meant staying skinny. And I was climbing harder than ever: I’d redpointed a 5.13d, a few 5.13c’s, and was routinely onsighting routes up to 5.13b, which among Torino’s rock jocks conferred an intoxicating semistardom as L’Americano forte (“the strong American”). The study-abroad program demanded little more than reading art-history books and visiting local castles, so I had plenty of time to frequent the cliffs. One day amidst this manic climbing fest, I became so malnourished that, as I lowered off a 5.13, I could feel my heart squirting dull, barely-there beats, then pounding fiercely to catch up. Thudda-thud … retreat … pause … pause … pause … THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD. Frightening stuff—a group of us were up at the shadowy black shale plug of Gravere high in Val di Susa, springtime cherry blossoms on the breeze, larch and chestnuts budding along an aqueduct below. My Italian friends talked frichettone, climber slang, at the base of the wall, oblivious to my plight. Postcard-perfect Alps shimmered snow-covered across the way, mammoth waterfalls spilling from their flanks. Was I finally having that heart attack? Were these mountains the last thing I’d see? But never: What, exactly, was I doing to myself? I snuck off to pop an Ativan, as I’d learn to do all too covertly and well, returned, and tied back in, setting off up another climb, now feeling a druggie’s indifference toward my shaky hands and erratic heartbeat.
When the semester ended so, too, did the Ativan, but I didn’t think much of it. I’d never felt any cravings back in Boulder, but then again, I’d never had 120 milligrams of Ativan on hand either, nor taken the pills so regularly. Luisa had final examinations at liceo (preparatory school), so I booked a two-week solo trip to the Greek island of Corfu to give her space. I left Torino that night by train, in a sleeping car on the fourteen-hour voyage south to Brindisi, from where I’d ferry across to Greece. I hadn’t taken an Ativan in a few days, but brought along a final pill I’d set aside “just in case.” (This straggler had turned to dust by the time I left Europe a month later, bounced around by my travels.) Growing ever more “off” as the train jostled south, I felt a febrile and altogether foreign agitation peak somewhere around the middle of the Boot. It was an acute restlessness, my toes clenching and legs twitchy, thoughts racing, a tight band across my forehead and itchiness over my skin, and a close, sweaty feeling of doom: a longing for something lost that I’d not known I had—GABA-ergic dampening of the brain’s excitatory neurotransmitters. I couldn’t place my anguish; it was something new to me. I’d chain-smoked Marlboro Reds my first two months in Italy, trying to fit in with Luisa and her hipster friends, but found that they made it hard to breathe while climbing. However, twenty cigarettes a day don’t just let go of you, and I’d gone through a week of spacey
, light-headed, dissociated nicotine withdrawal, which had felt physically similar—yet less calamitous. When the train pulled in, I stumbled around Brindisi in a fog, killing time, waiting for the overnight ferry to Greece, wary of the street thieves said to haunt the port alleyways.
On Corfu during the next two weeks, I’d return from snorkeling in the Ionian and lie on the sand, feeling surges of palpitations and a heavy fatigue I chalked up to too much sun. But this didn’t explain why I felt so edgy in a place that was tranquility itself, or kept having nightmares haunted by gray, gnashing-mouthed ghosts—if I slept at all. Only the cider I swilled each night with a group of traveling Texans brought fleeting calm: alcohol, the cross-tolerant downer, affording temporary relief to down-regulated GABA receptors. Random clouds of depression darkened my days. One evening, I’d become stranded far south of my hotel when my moped went kaput on a rough dirt track. I wheeled it to a taverna and asked the owner for assistance, and then ordered a Greek salad while I waited. I sat alone at an outdoor table under a trellis cloaked in grape vines, bathed in golden Mediterranean light, eating fresh, homegrown vegetables and feta cheese, pouring olive oil harvested from the surrounding grove onto dark artisanal bread, listening as the taverna owner made phone calls to track down the moped-rental guy to come make the necessary repairs. I’d just spent the day on a pristine, empty beach under gauzy June skies, reading trash fiction and snorkeling. Nothing should have been the matter; I should have been perfectly content, taking a pensive island repast like some character in a Henry James novel. But instead I felt a vast emptiness, as if everyone I loved had just been machine-gunned in front of me. Off under an olive tree, ducks milled about in a wire cage. A Greek family stood over them as their toddler son fed bread crumbs through the holes. The ducks darted about pecking at the crumbs, trapped in their cage going nowhere while the kid giggled and pointed and his parents applauded the spectacle.
The dumb, stupid, useless ducks, I thought, taking another bite of cucumber. That goddamned idiot kid and his asshole peasant parents.
We’re all doomed.
It felt like some dark, hope-gobbling demon had taken up residence in my skull. The ducks were trapped in their cage, the kid was trapped in his infantile ignorance, his parents were trapped in blind love for their idiot child, and only I could see the truth of these matters. Unbeknownst to me, I was in the throes of classic benzo withdrawal, with all the symptoms: anxiety, tremors, sleeplessness, nightmares, agitation, hypersensitivity, depression. The darkness was not my own—normally, I’d be happy to watch a kid feeding ducks; I used to do the same at a pond with my grandparents in Virginia. And likewise unknown to me, by getting hooked and stopping abruptly—a cold turkey that jacked with my GABA receptors—I’d set the stage for potentially more severe withdrawals down the road. It was like the first ripple above a suboceanic earthquake: at first glance a nonentity, but as other ripples press behind it and the wavelets speed toward shore, they merge to form a dark, killing water wall, the sum having become more than its parts. That June in Corfu, I was coming off five months of semi-nightly Ativan use, and the symptoms did not improve for weeks.
I should have stayed away, but I didn’t. That’s the thing with drugs: You know that they’re bad, you know that you shouldn’t get in too deep and that they never, over the long run, make your life better, but you can’t overcome your urges with reason. The pills and I, we came to love each other too much. It would be this way for years, getting worse and worse and worse. During my senior year in college, a climbing buddy brought me in on a “thing”: A guy he knew was getting blue ten-milligram Roche Valium brought up from Mexico by the trash bag. Only $2 a pill. The first time I bought ten, mostly out of curiosity. I knew Valium by reputation only, and decided to give it a try. The Valium was sludgier than Ativan in that I couldn’t do much more than veg in front of the TV after taking one; however, on those nights I fell asleep without a lick of anxious preoccupation, climbing muscles taut and tired turned to carefree jelly. Then I bought twenty, or maybe it was fifty, or perhaps one hundred, or perhaps twenty then fifty then one hundred. With the backward thinking that ensnares so many pillheads, I rationalized that a medically sanctioned, FDA-approved, factory-produced chemical had to be much less dangerous than street drugs like cocaine and ecstasy, which I’d always been too timid to try. Hell, you could even see the milligram count printed on the pill, and meter your dose accordingly. I’d found the secret loophole! I had the golden ticket! These pills were fun! As fall semester wound down, I noticed that one pill no longer cut it, so I’d take two or three or four on weekend nights, usually alone. Pill abuse is funny that way—it’s much more antisocial than other drugs. There is no tribal ritual, no sneaking off to do rails in a bathroom stall with your buddies or passing the communal bong. It’s just you and your vial and a glass of water, and whatever hermetic stupor that follows. I liked to slide Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons into my Walkman, stretch back on my futon, wash down the Valium with white wine, and drift into dreamless sleep as the concertos rolled over me. I’d skitch through the week taking just one or one-half pill every night, to round the edges off. A few other climber friends got in on it, and we took to calling the pills “Blue Notes.” One buddy kept them in a wooden bowl like Halloween candy, up on his countertop for anyone to sample.
It didn’t seem like a big deal.
I visited Luisa in Italy over Christmas break 1995, smuggling thirty Valium in an Ativan bottle. By the end of the first week, I was down to ten pills, wondering just where they’d gotten to. Meanwhile, the Valium had begun to have a curious, unpredictable, paradoxical effect: The more I took, the more crazed I’d sometimes feel, spiked by an uncomfortable mania and then creeping dread as the Valium ebbed away. Benzos can have this so-called paradoxical stimulant effect, which includes symptoms like hallucinations, nightmares, insomnia, irritability, and aggression. Attacks, including assault and even homicide, have been documented, perhaps due to the “release or inhibition of behavioural tendencies normally suppressed by social restraints,” theorizes Dr. Ashton.1 That is, you’re both disinhibited by the pills, like an alcoholic after his tenth shot of Jack, and pressurized by the adverse reaction. One morning amidst this chemical typhoon, Luisa dragged me to Balôn, a gritty bazaar near Porta Palazzo in Torino’s baroque city center. I loathe crowds, so dropped four Valium before we went, thinking it would help. A half-hour in, moving from stall to stall as Luisa hunted for the secondhand clothing she and another friend would resell, I began to shudder. Tics and spasms coursed along my neck and shoulders. Our breath steamed into the smog, thick with the aroma of roasted chestnuts from the many street vendors.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“You’re shaking all over. Are you cold, amore?”
“I … I think it’s this Valium,” I said. Luisa knew what I was into—I’d slip her a pill here and there if she asked—but she didn’t know how deep. I had thought these frissons somewhat chic back in Boulder, almost a druggie merit badge (Valium has myorelaxant properties, so it’s not surprising that its withdrawal creates these tics), but now in front of my Italian girlfriend I realized I look like a sad, creepy spastic.
“Well, you need to stop,” she said. “I know people here. You’re acting very weird, Matt.”
“I know. I—I’m just so fucking anxious. Hold on…”
I excused myself to find a restroom, ducking into a café in the Moroccan quarter at the edge of the market. Inside, amongst men in fezzes clustered around little granite tables sipping tazze of black espresso, I ordered a tea, thinking it might calm me. The barista asked if I wanted milk or lemon.
“Si-si-si-si-si!” I said distractedly. Yes-yes-yes, whatever.
“Tutte e due?” she asked. You want both?
“Si-si-si-si-si!”
“Va bene. Come vuole.” She gave me a look, just as my arms flapped upward in a breakdancer wave and my head gave a quive
ring wobble. Standing at the counter, I poured the milk into the tea and squeezed the lemon over it. As the citrus hit the liquid, the milk curdled into unappetizing globules: a bad chemical reaction. I looked down, saw the barista watching me with her eyebrows raised, and then drank the tea down in a single slurp. I paid up and left. I rejoined Luisa on the cobblestones and didn’t take another pill for the rest of that day.
The Valium ran out midway through the third week, at a snowbound rifugio high in the Dolomites. Luisa and I would snowboard all day, take a SnoCat back to the rifugio at night, eat a gourmet dinner, and then collapse into bed, warm beneath a heavy duvet. Then suddenly, one evening I wasn’t sleeping. I rolled over in bed and looked out the window. An ancient fear emanated from the limestone spires that towered in the night, black daggers etched against the starry firmament. The next day I told Luisa I felt like “everything was all wrong” but I could not for the life of me figure out why.
“Maybe we haven’t had enough fruit or vegetables,” she said. “Vitamins or something. We’ve been eating only pasta and cheese.…”
It was possible. I ordered extra orange juice with breakfast, but up on the slopes the doom sensation came right back. We ducked into a lodge—another orange juice—but the world still shimmered with menace. The fear felt externalized, cosmic, alien—a sinister cloud that both surrounded and targeted only me, that no one else could see or appreciate. The other skiers looked pinch-faced and hostile, their polyglot chatter too harsh and brittle, the sun too bright, the slopes too steep, too blindingly white, the air too thin. By the time we drove back to Torino a day later, I had to keep the car window open on the autostrada to let in fresh air despite Luisa’s protestations. The next day I was so visibly anxious at the Milan airport, making frequent trips to the bathroom, that an undercover security specialist pulled me aside for questioning. I took my final half-pill on the flight back to America, tumbling in and out of troubled mini-naps as the plane bopped over the Atlantic. I’d cached fifty “welcome home” Valium under my bathroom sink back in Boulder. If I could just make it there, everything would be alright again. That night at the condo, I gobbled five pills, drew a bath, and dove back into the sewer. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons sounded even sweeter for my reunion with the Blue Notes.