by Matt Samet
A month later I’d reached nine pills (ninety milligrams) a night on weekends, with maintenance doses in the twenty- or thirty-milligram range during the week. A few close friends were into clubbing, into raves, and I joined them in a shared nihilistic pre-graduation maelstrom. While they took party drugs, I’d down Valium upon Valium until I felt disinhibited enough to dance, loose-limbed, freaky, and high. At concentrated doses, benzos get you off, and drug addicts have been known to shoot them, combine them with other pills such as opiates to enhance a euphoriant effect, and/or use them to come down from other substances. (In a 1995 paper, Ashton estimated that between 30 and 90 percent of polydrug abusers also abuse benzos.2) At these megadoses, I’d become as chummy as the raver kids rolling on E, bopping about hugging each other with their pacifiers, stuffed-animal backpacks, and glow sticks. The Valium also gave me the trots, and I’d spend as much time in the bathroom as dancing, which was probably just as well. “You dance like an animal,” Luisa told me one night at a Denver nightclub. She’d come to Boulder for a few months and here I was gobbling Valium like Tic-Tacs, half-soiling myself as I flailed around the dance floor like a coyote in a snare.
Brilliant. I was starting to hate myself. My climbing fitness had lapsed into disrepair (I felt like a slug on the rock), I was half-assing my studies, I spent most of my time either partying or sleeping it off, and I’d begun to lose precious muscle weight—I had the slack skinniness of a drug addict. One night that March, I went over to visit friends at their town house in Boulder, where they kept the Valium out in a bowl. I’d taken a few pills at home and more when I got there. Seventy milligrams, eighty, ninety, one hundred? Who knew … Nuked out of my skull, I smoked half of one friend’s bag of pot to prove to him that I could worship Jah like Bob Marley. But my buddy soon tired of my antics and went to bed, taking his weed. Another friend and I stayed up slugging wine, and then I spotted a half-dozen napkin rings on the counter by the Valium—black, red, orange, yellow toucan napkin rings in a cute little row. They spoke to me; I had to have them … in the biblical sense.
“Hey, Bucko,” I said. “Watch this! I’m gonna screw me some jungle bird.”
I fetched three rings, sat on the couch, unzipped my corduroys, took out my unit, and started racking the toucans along it. I recall standing up and somehow dancing about with the birds impaled like a child’s stacking ring toy.
“Mrrrpphh, grrrgle, grrrgle, garg,” I kept saying. “I’m a respectable toucan, and you must take that out of my mouth right now! I insist! How dare you?!”
And: “My name’s Toucan Sam and I’m a filthy, feathered slut-boy.”
And: “Hey, my beak hurts!”
And so on.
“Jesus, Bela,” my buddy kept saying, using one of my nicknames. “You’re out of your fucking gourd!”
We doubled over, tears of laughter running unchecked down our faces. Nothing had ever been as funny; nothing ever would be again. Finally, when we could stand straight and breathe, I zipped up and replaced the napkin rings on the counter, back where they belonged. I woke up the next day on my friends’ couch soaked in drool, clearing away sleep sand and peering toward the kitchen. I could see them up on the counter, those toucans looking back at me with wide, accusatory eyes.
Oh, no. Had I really…?
Yes, apparently I had.
I leapt up, filled the kitchen sink with soapy water, and threw in all the toucans, unsure with which three I’d consorted. I scrubbed and scrubbed, and then scrubbed some more with a bristle brush. People put fancy cloth napkins in these things, napkins that they then held to their lips, and I’d had them on my cock? What kind of deranged druggie pervert was I? Just as I was setting the rings to dry on a dishcloth, my friend M walked in to make coffee.
“Hey, Matt, what are you doing with those napkin rings?” she asked. “My mom gave me those for Christmas.”
I had no ready answer. And then it hit me: The drugs had to stop. That very day, I quit cold turkey. As with climbing, as with starvation, as with everything I’ve ever done, it had to be all or nothing—in fact, from all to nothing in one fell swoop to create the biggest seismic ripple yet.
* * *
Have you been pursued across the galaxy by creatures called Reploids? Have you felt the earth rush, with the mass of each atom, up through the soles of your feet until it feels like your phalanges have been pulverized inside your shoes? Have you felt the ground turn into Jell-O, so that each step feels like pulling your foot from a molasses swamp? Have you had the world come at you in cubes, frames, and impossible Lovecraftian geometries, all objects both living and inanimate become square edged like in the old Max Headroom cartoon? Have you been sure that no matter where you stood it was a psychic North Pole, the globe dropping away and the planet poised to spit you into space? Have you had everything you say and hear spoken sound, echoingly, like it was piped through a culvert? Have you not slept for days? Had tremendous difficulty eating or swallowing? Heard your name called from random spots in the sky? Felt glassy arthritis shards coursing through your arteries? Had your hands and feet go cold, as if frostbitten, and tingle numbly with parathesia? Seen the veins shrink into your arms like earthworms drying on a hot summer sidewalk? Been confused as to where you are and precisely which day it is?
I pray that you haven’t, nothing of the sort. Because that would mean that you’ve endured benzo-withdrawal psychosis, which hit me like a shovel to the face after going cold turkey off Valium. I went clinically loco only two months shy of college graduation—precisely because, as Dr. Ashton wrote in one paper, “Toxicity and Adverse Consequences of Benzodiazepine Use,” “Abrupt withdrawal from high doses [of benzodiazepines] can cause a severe reaction, including convulsions and psychotic episodes.”3 The insanity climaxed the second day after stopping. Luisa lay asleep in the bedroom while I jittered on the living room couch, parsing the box for a Mega Man X video game as if this might hold the key to my deteriorating mental state. It had come on quickly, like food poisoning. The night before, Luisa and a friend and I were supposed to attend a punk show in Denver, but I kept waffling about going until finally I’d decided I was too agitated to leave the condo. I felt like I had influenza of the soul. I’d stayed up all night as my thoughts became more pressurized, spitting about the room like deflating balloons. I looked down at the box again. Mega Man, it seemed, had to battle rogue robots called Reploids before they destroyed all things decent in the universe. I couldn’t stay here in my dim condo with this video-game box spawning Reploids. I had to go for my morning run.
I laced up my shoes and headed out the door along the Boulder Creek Path, the main bike trail through town. I jogged east toward a vast wetlands, and then hooked south into a neighborhood along an offshoot called the Skunk Creek Path. Like climbing, running had long been a balm against anxiety. I would run at night, in the snow, in the rain, in the wind until my eyes stung and endorphins wrote over any angst. I even ran in Torino where the air was filthy with pollution and diesel exhaust, and you’d get odd looks on the sidewalks as if you were a felon fleeing some crime. This morning it wasn’t working: The farther I ran the more convinced I became that the Reploids lurked within the next pedestrian underpass. My feet hurt—terribly—as if my bones were made of fine china, and I could feel the thunder of each footfall clear up to my femurs. Reploids. Too much white sun, buds on the trees, no leafy screen of shade. Reploids. The concrete like a soupy tar pulling at my Nikes. Reploids. Then, from the ether, my name called out: “Matt!” “Matt!” “Matt!” Reploids, careering through space in a crystalline satellite or here already, phasers humming, set to “Kill Matt.” Reploids. “Matt!” “Matt!” “Matt!” Thoughts become gluey and tangible, every last syllable (Rep.Loids) and letter (R.E.P.L.O.I.D.S) fat on my tongue as I whispered them into the day. Was I an insect? A dying mantis curled in on itself, vulnerable, sun-blanched, missing a leg—Reploid fodder ripe for the harvest? “Matt!” “Matt!” “Matt!” I’d run a little, take off my sunglasses, pu
t them back on, rub my brow to wipe away Reploids, walk, run, walk, run, sunglasses, Reploids, insects, Reploids, turn around go home NOW ask for help YOU’RE NOT THINKING CLEARLY SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH YOUR BRAIN.
Reploids. Back at the condo. Reploids. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the Mega Man X box, there on the coffee table. What if they saw me looking? What if they knew?
“Luisa, baby, I— I— Something is … I can’t think like I’ve gone crazy like you’ve all gone crazy. I can’t see very well my head hurts so bad we need to I—”
“Slow down, Matt, slow down.” She was making coffee in the kitchen, barefoot in her shift, plunging a French press and looking at me quizzically. So beautiful, like a ghost clad in white, brown tresses spilling over her gown but also slipping away behind a separate frame that radiated from her person.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. I tried to run. I … I’m hearing voices.”
“What? You are? What’s going on?”
“I didn’t sleep and I came out and tried to go for a run to calm down. But it’s not working. This is like a bad acid trip or something. Worse, though—WORSE! Fuck, I’m all fucking jacked up. I feel like I’ve been poisoned!” I’d had LSD, which I’ve taken probably ten times, backfire twice on me in high school, but this felt way worse—somehow more permanent.
“We need to get you to your therapist,” Luisa said. “I can’t fix this.”
I let her lead me to the phone, where I called Jack. I was to see him at 1:00 P.M. up on campus. For some reason, I remember the exact hour of our rendezvous.
“What’s going on, Matt?” was the first thing Jack asked. We sat in a third-floor room in a building on campus, more albino March sun streaming in. Too much of it, so thick I could smell it.
“Something seems wrong, Jack. Like everything’s coming at me in frames or like I’m going crazy or something. I—I keep hearing my name called out, too, but then nobody’s there.” I described more symptoms and noted that they had been mounting over the past day. The voices had been haranguing me as I shuffled up Colorado Boulevard to the appointment: “Matt!” “Matt!” “MATT!”
“It couldn’t be Luisa, could it?” he asked. “This sounds almost like a psychotic episode.”
“Wait, what? Luisa could make me go psycho?”
“People can have a strong effect on each other sometimes,” he said. “But this sounds like something else.”
I considered that: a psychotic episode. Naïve then to the real meaning of the word psychosis, I immediately conflated psychopathic (suffering from an antisocial personality disorder) with psychotic (deranged in thought, out of contact with reality).
“You mean, like I’m going to run out and kill people?” I asked. I pictured myself as some sort of Norman Bates, thought of the kitchen knives back home, shuddered, imagined running a butcher’s blade into the soft flesh of Luisa’s stomach, a blood amoeba seeping across her shift as she clutched at the wound.
“No, no, not at all. That your thinking is distorted, and it sounds like you’re having hallucinations. We need to figure out why.”
I thought some more, or tried to. I was ashamed of all the Valium I’d been taking, but perhaps it was time to confess on the off chance there was some connection.
“Look, Jack, okay, one thing, just one more thing. I—I was taking lots of Valium over the winter, but I stopped a few days ago because I wanted to clean up. I just wanted to think straight again, to get back into climbing and graduate. So I stopped the pills. But that’s over now, so I’m not sure it even matters.”
Jack looked at me. He knew something.
“Valium? How much Valium, Matt? Where were you getting it?”
“Just some guy had it … a friend. Sometimes up to nine pills, usually three or four. Between four and nine pills a night.”
“What size pills?”
“The blue ones.”
“The ten-milligram pills?”
“Yeah.”
“And you just stopped? Cold turkey? You didn’t taper them off?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to be done with it. I was disgusted with myself.”
Jack gave a long, slow exhale.
“Matt, we need to get you to the hospital right away,” he said. “Look, you can’t just do that. You will have psychosis like what you’re feeling now, or have seizures and die. This is extremely dangerous.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
With Jack’s explanation, the Reploids finally retreated: The madness had a source.
By 5:00 P.M. I was in a ward of a psychiatric unit for the second time in my life, behind locked doors, diagnosed and observed. The taxi ride to the hospital, a two-mile straight shot down Ninth Street, had been fraught with chaos and confusion, as if Boulder had become a giant tunnel or sepia inversion of itself. I sat in the backseat kneading my fingers together, trying to keep up with the cabby’s banter, sputtering out nonsense like “Your job must be hard”; I could still hear my name being called from side streets. At the ER they checked my vitals—all okay—and then committed me to the Mapleton Center beneath Mount Sanitas. This hospital, this mountain and its sandstone spine, and the neighborhood surrounding would become important again in 2005. Living at Fifth and Alpine just blocks from the Mapleton Center, I would go into a benzo-withdrawal fugue a final time and be committed back on the unit.
I wish I could regale you with lurid tales of depravity at Mapleton, of hissing pipes and peeling paint and steel bars on the windows, of rubber rooms and wild-eyed patients hurling feces at Nurse Ratched, of the lights flickering when they ran the electroshock machine down in the basement. But the truth is that Mapleton, like most psychiatric wards, was a holding pen, as bland and purgatorial as an airport terminal, with rotating staff too brusque, indifferent, or harried to remember your name. It was a place intended only to stabilize you before your final destination, be it home, jail, a halfway house, or the state mental institution. (These days, insurance companies don’t much like to pay beyond three days for psych-ward stays, so the pressure’s on to de- or re-medicate you quickly and shove you out the door.) I remained five days at Mapleton, coming out of my fog a little on each. On the bad nights they gave me 0.5 mg of alprazolam—Xanax—so I could sleep, but otherwise they just observed. My brain remained hypersensitive; it recoiled from all stimuli. I wept openly during the inevitable confessional phone call to my father and when Luisa came, sad-eyed and silent, to visit, but otherwise tried to avoid feeling anything. When they brought in some felonious street tough, bloodied and reeking of gin, who’d tussled with a cop, I avoided the newcomer. When a manic, motor-mouthed gnome-man began shouting into the patient telephone that his lawyer was “Gerry Fucking Spence and he knows I’m not crazy and he’s going to fucking well get me out of here!” I crossed the ward and shut myself in my room. When a kindly grandfather type, who’d committed himself because he had anxiety issues over his failing health, confessed his fears during group therapy, I had to excuse myself. I couldn’t have these impressions entering my mind, where they’d linger and take form like golems.
Two other CU students were in there, C and J. C was over-the-top manic, and would walk around reciting grandiose business plans. He’d developed an obsession with opposites, and wanted to create a line of computers called “Drool Bottoms” to compete with laptops. He had shaved his head, and had a video of the process that I couldn’t bring myself to watch. C also had a VHS cassette of old Schoolhouse Rock! videos, the educational animated shorts that ran on ABC in the 1970s and ’80s. “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” played in the dayroom, the music tinny on the institutional TV/VCR combo. I could almost taste each note, and flinched from the dough-faced train conductor linking “conjunction” cars on the cartoon tracks. The jingle, simple and repetitive with Louie Armstrong–style crooning, sounded unnaturally slowed; it filled me with revulsion, as if it were slime in my eardrums.
In time, there was nothing to do but release me. A
social worker sat with me in the discharge room, reviewing my file.
“Look, Matt, you’re clearly a sharp guy,” he said. He spoke plainly and openly, unlike the cold, arrogant Dr. Whateverthehell who’d vetted me a half-hour earlier with his “Um-hmms” and “I sees” and his fancy pen and reductive symptomology checklist.
“CU student, As and Bs, journalism major, Italian girlfriend, a climber. You’ve got lots of good stuff going on,” the social worker continued.
“I guess.”
I held a slim book in my hand, Camus’ ruminations on the absurdity of life and its connection to suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus. I’d been struggling to read the book on the ward, my concentration diffracted by withdrawal. I’d reached the part where Camus dismisses suicide as an option, and then given up.
“Good book,” he said. “I read it a long time ago.”
“Yeah, I—”
“You’re not thinking of killing yourself, are you?”
“No, no. Not at all.”
“Okay, good. We just need to make sure of that. But with these drugs, with this Valium, you know you were doing exactly that, don’t you?”