Death Grip

by Matt Samet

  I considered this, said nothing.

  “It says here on your chart that you’ve had some problems with prostatitis this spring—why do you think that is?” he asked.

  “I dunno. Drug stress, maybe. The Valium.” I’d gone through a period of burning, syrupy micturition—I was practically urinating salt crystals, the pain so sharp it made my eyes tear up as I swayed over the toilet. Antibiotics had followed, coupled with more self-prescribed Valium.

  “I would say so. Think of what those things are doing to your body. All that partying, all those pills. You were killing yourself slowly, man, whether you admit it or not.”

  “To be honest, I never really saw it that way,” I said. “I didn’t know you could get addicted. I was just taking them because it was fun, because they killed my anxiety for a while.”

  “Until you’re hooked,” he said.

  “Until you’re hooked…” I agreed.

  “Look, Matt. I’d like you to go to NA—Narcotics Anonymous. If you don’t, I promise you I’ll be seeing you back here in five years. And neither of us wants that.”

  “No, no. We don’t.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know. I don’t want to come back either.”

  “Will you sign this paper agreeing to go to a meeting, and then we’ll let you go?”

  “Okay. Fair enough.”

  I signed; I complied. Then I packed my overnight bag and had them buzz me out of the ward. I bounded down the stairs and out onto Mapleton Avenue, into a gauzy spring afternoon with cotton-candy clouds and Cezanne blue skies. So enamored was I with my newfound freedom that I walked the entire three miles through town and surprised Luisa back at the condo with a big, wet kiss. And I did, as promised, attend that NA meeting. But despite showing up at the time and place listed in the newspaper, I found myself sitting in an empty room up at Wardenburg Health Center on campus. “Hi, my name’s Matt and I’m an addict,” just doesn’t have the same ring when there’s no one to hear you. I’d been in this room before, two years earlier, in my hopeless-virgin period for a “Meeting and Dating on Campus” seminar in which, save the instructor, I’d been the only attendee. I hated this room. Fuck this room. I could see the Flatirons outside tilting above Boulder, calling me to climb. I sat there for fifteen minutes and then got up and left.

  Fuck this shit and fuck NA, I thought. I’m going home.

  CHAPTER 8

  Thudd-idd-bupp.

  Luisa can’t sit still either. It’s late March 1996, spring break, two weeks after the Mapleton Center and we’re at the City of Rocks, a backwater state park near Silver City, New Mexico. She’s agitated, biting her fingernails, smoking cigarette after cigarette in the Golf’s passenger seat beside me. Luisa is anxious, she tells me, nearly as anxious as myself, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. We have a CD in, the Jesus and Mary Chain, unfurling slow and electric into the cool desert night. We’ve come here via Albuquerque, where we stopped for my father’s fiftieth birthday party. When he began to mention me in a toast, I frowned and waved at him to stop: No one needs to hear about your druggie asshole son. Luisa and I headed south, spent two days climbing outside Socorro on the dark andesite of the Box Canyon. When I pushed myself on a 5.12+ top rope, I felt a sharp ache radiating from my weary prostate, a watery acid-flashback feeling, leaping jitters, spastic muscles that made my movements staccato and chaotic. This will go on for months, almost every time I touch the rock; calm remains elusive. GABA receptors de-invert but slowly.

  A full moon rises to paint liquid chrome over the stone gargoyles that surround our campsite, welded-tuff penitentes beetling from the desert like fern buds, a rock “city” replete with corridors and plazas and boroughs and suburbs, a maze with its thousands of boulder problems. The problems have neither names nor ratings, chalk from the few passing climbers carried off by the winds that have sculpted the blobs. I took magic mushrooms here once when I was nineteen; a buddy and I wandered around giggling and bouldering. As the psilocybin reached its peak, I’d been trying to summit a freestanding globe of rock. I had my hands on razor crimps in the Northwest Territories, but couldn’t elevate my hips past the equator—I had no idea what my feet were doing down in Patagonia. I fell and fell again until I found a tiny sliver of rock to paste my right foot on out near the Cape Verde Islands. My spine and knees were young then, malleable and strong. My friend spotted distractedly, laughing away at God-only-knows-what. There were other times like this, other drugs, other rocks. It was all part of the culture.

  “I never told you this,” Luisa says, “but I didn’t flush away that Valium like you asked me to from the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “I just couldn’t, you know?” She lights another Marlboro.

  “You couldn’t? I told you to, baby.” I didn’t want the temptation when I returned home, and furthermore had grown paranoid about having illegally obtained drugs in the house. Too many people, from my therapist on down, knew. Luisa would take a Valium here and there, and she knew which dresser drawer I’d hidden the pills in. But had she really…?

  “Look, amore, I was taking more than you thought.”

  “Why, Luisa? Why? You saw what I was going through. Why would you do that?”

  “Non lo so. It was just so awful having you in the hospital with those stupid people locking you up, and I couldn’t sleep. I was all alone in this fottuto condominium in fottuto boring Boulder…” One evening when Luisa had visited the ward, fellow CU student C was bantering with a psych nurse, trying to explain to her who Vladimir Lenin was apropos of some political rant. The nurse, a ruddy, dead-behind-the-eyes blonde, just kept repeating, “I’ve never heard of that one, but I know John from the Beatles!” Luisa’s face fell as she overheard this tableau, as she turned to me and whispered, “We need to get you away from these people. They’re crazy—the staff, I mean.”

  “How many?”

  “Two or three a night.”

  “For how long?”

  “At least that whole week. Okay, two weeks, magari tre…”

  “Jesus, Luisa. I wish you hadn’t.” I take her hand; I know exactly what she’s feeling.

  In time we go to the tent. I’d like to think it’s the full moon that keeps us up that night, but the following evening—the new moon, under the Milky Way and a brilliant glaze of stars—we’re no less wired, even after a long day wrestling gargoyles.

  Thudd-idd-bupp.

  “Matt, Luisa viene su a Torino con Sandrina. Arrivano fra poco.”

  It’s Luisa’s father, Luigi, calling from their country home outside Bagnolo Piemonte, a mountain hamlet southwest of Torino. His baritone booms across the line. Luigi is six foot five, 300 pounds, a man to be taken seriously. I’m living in a working-class slum on Torino’s western edge, renting a one-room apartment up four flights of marble-gloss stairs. I’ve come here after graduation to be with Luisa, to make a go of living in Italy; Luigi has given me a job translating his magazine’s Web site into English. It’s June 1996, and the Web is taking off. I commute to work on a bright-orange mountain bike, dodging Fiats, Lanzas, Mercedes sedans, trolley cars, Moroccan windshield-washer kids with squeegees and buckets, the deep-ebony African women, prostituted by the mafia, who haunt the paths of vast Parco Pellerina; inhaling clouds of diesel exhaust; getting drenched by Italy’s frequent downpours; showing up to work sweaty and disheveled, so unlike my fashionista coworkers. On the nights I can’t sleep—and there are many—I stand on my front balcony overlooking my street. The block across the way is prewar construction, two-story villas with classical red tile roofs in stark juxtaposition to the nondescript box in which I’m living.

  “Tutto bene, Luigi? Non c’é problema?”

  He pauses, sighs. I don’t like this.

  “Si, si. Tutto bene, Matt.”

  “Luisa sta bene? Cos’é successo?” Luisa’s okay? What’s happened?

  “Ti spiega tutto appena arriva.”

  “Okay.” She will explain everythin
g once she arrives. Some minutes later Luisa sounds the buzzer.

  “It’s me,” Luisa says, just those two words, flat and emotionless.

  I buzz her in and unlock the apartment door. Footfalls echo up the stairs and then she stands before me in well-worn jeans and her favorite white blouse, proffering a red leather puppy’s collar and a matching leash, tears sliding down her cheeks. That collar shouldn’t be empty—there should be a wee, wiry-haired black Spinone in it.

  “Lolita died,” Luisa says, and just like that I take her in my arms and we’re sobbing into each other. At some point I’m on the bed, punching the wall, screaming, “No No No No NO!”

  Lolita is a pound dog only two months old, a squeaky ball of unadulterated sweetness. We’ve had her two weeks, brought her home and washed the pound funk off her in the kitchen sink, had our happiest day in months with her at a cliff near Bagnolo. As we climbed on rough gray gneiss above a roaring streamlet, Lolita wandered about sniffing wildflowers, recoiling as honeybees buzz-bombed her black gorilla nose. “Le api, Lolita! Le api!” Luisa said. “Stai attenta a le api!” and Lolita looked up, her brown eyes bright. She knew her name after only two days. I climbed a 5.12d onsight that afternoon, moving well for the first time in the post-Valium washout, and Luisa fared nicely on an overhanging 5.11. I felt poised, able to puzzle through sequences before my fingers gave out, moving smoothly from hold to hold as if I’d grabbed them all my life. Gilt late-afternoon sun sliced in across the Alps, and you could taste honeysuckle on the air. I’d shaken all my psychiatric meds, including the Serzone and BuSpar the shrink had tried me on after the Valium debacle. The former, an antidepressant, made me spacey and “Ser-zoned”; it has been pulled from various international markets amid allegations of liver damage that included deaths. The latter, a non-benzo anxiety drug, did precisely nothing; warm milk would have been more effective. I’d been glad to leave the orange bottles behind when I left the United States. It felt like starting a whole new life, one free of chemicals.

  Lolita was not so lucky. In Bagnolo that evening, as Luisa prepared to empty a can of wet dog food into a bowl, Lolita sniffed out a similar bowl of insecticide gel on the kitchen floor and mistook it for her meal. By the time Luisa noticed what was happening, Lolita had taken a few bites.

  “It was so bad, amore, so so so so bad,” Luisa is telling me. “Papá and I loaded her on the moped and rushed down to the veterinarian. Her eyes had rolled up and she was shitting everywhere and foam was coming from her mouth, and it was so bad oh so b-b-b-.…” Luisa is sobbing again; so am I. Nothing will fix this.

  “The vet got her on the table and she was still alive, still breathing.…”

  I can picture little Lolita on the steel examination table, her chest madly inflating and deflating like a bellows, her pink cow belly rising and falling too quickly, and then not at all.

  “But it was too late,” Luisa says. “It was too late to save her. She’d eaten too much poison.”

  Thudd-idd-bupp.

  We’re in downtown Ljubljana, Slovenia’s green, charming, hilly capital, and the camper van—Luisa’s grandfather’s diesel Ford furgone—is parked somewhere far away. We’re walking along the emerald curl of the Ljubljanica River, looking for video-game stores. I’m obsessed with finding Doom II for my laptop. “It” is on me again, a terrorized searing, an interior chemical simmering that has spread to without, and I’m hoping the distraction of the game will help. I don’t say anything to Luisa other than that I’m feeling woozy from the heat, from low blood sugar, from the previous week’s climbing frenzy at the limestone horseshoe of Misja Pec near the Croatian border. We’ve come to Slovenia to escape Torino at peak summer heat and to forget the pain of losing Lolita. On a rest day from climbing we ventured to the coast in Croatia, fresh off the Balkan War. We found a rock beach with shelves of black limestone stair-stepping down to the Adriatic, its flat slate-blue plain spreading to the horizon. Fences warning of land mines and unexploded artillery beyond enclosed us on either side: SWIM ONLY HERE. The Croatians seemed jumpy, their pain like the raw nerves of an exposed tooth. We passed bombed-out skeleton towns en route to the sea, the rubble heaped in barrows beside the road.

  Luisa and I duck into a department store and buy Chupa Chups lollipops. We take the suckers to a park bench and something—either the pacifier effect or the sugar—brings me down. For a moment. Then the menace returns: As we walk, I can feel it radiate from each sweat-glossed brick in Ljubljana’s medieval labyrinth. We drive south that evening toward another climbing area in the Jovian Alps. We stop at a village café for cappuccino. Inside, the locals have flowing beards, long teeth, and names like Drago. They eyeball us, say something about “due Italiani,” and I think that they want to kill me and rape Luisa. I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. I’m completely out there, fucked up and paranoid.

  I’m not sure why the Valium withdrawal has returned, and so fiercely. It just has. We had a little fun the first week at Misja Pec: Luisa “borrowed” a vial of liquid Tavor—Italian lorazepam—from her parents’ medicine cabinet and we’d sip it at night in the van. If I’d been thinking, I might have realized that even a few days taking lorazepam would zero out the withdrawal clock. But I am a pillhead—I probably wouldn’t have cared. You should know that about me: For years and years, if I saw something in your medicine cabinet and knew it would get me off, I’d “borrow” it. If I saw the droopy-eye icon, any prescription ending in -pam or -cet or -din or -done, if I saw that admonishment not to mix the medicine with alcohol, to drive, or operate heavy machinery, I would “borrow” a few pills or perhaps more if I thought my crime would go undetected. And if I knew you’d just broken a leg or an ankle but didn’t really like those “pain pills that give me a bad stomachache,” I’d hound you for leftovers until you forked over the bottle. This is how pill junkies operate. Never mind that I usually had pills of my own: Yours were always better.

  Thudd-idd-bupp.

  Here’s a surprising thing about Italy: For all its Kafkaesque bureaucracy and old-world stodginess, they have lax pharmacies. The doctor issues a prescription and specifies the dosage, then you take that slip of paper to the pharmacist, he stamps it, fetches your pills, and then hands back the prescription. So, unless the doctor has specified, say, “No more than two refills,” you can take that same paper to as many different pharmacies as you like—unless and until the day a pharmacist takes a closer look and sees a telltale proliferation of stamps, and reclaims the scrip. At which point, of course, you just return to the doctor for a “refill.” Luisa’s aunt is a general practitioner, and I mention one night when we visit their apartment that I’m having trouble sleeping. It’s October; I’ve been in Italy since June.

  “Prenditi questi,” she says, handing me a prescription. “Sono un po debole, pero ti aiutano ad adormentarti.”

  Take these. They’re a bit weak, but they will help you get to sleep. I look down: Ativan, one milligram, box of twenty pills, refills not specified. Bingo! Because I have Slavic features—thick stubble and a hard Russian jaw—and because Torino is overrun with barely tolerated Eastern European immigrants, I send Luisa to the pharmacy for me. How many times? Three, four, five, six? At some point, they reclaim the prescription, but by then it’s February and I’ve decided to leave anyway. I’m out of money, my entry visa is expiring, it’s clear that my job is thanks mainly to Luigi’s generosity, and I miss Colorado. I’ve spent the last two months holed up at Bagnolo, renting the studio apartment downstairs from Luisa’s family’s place. I’m living in a converted livestock-feeding area: a mangatoia. It’s frigid up there, hard against the Alps, but kerosene for the heater is expensive. It’s cheaper to buy jug wine, roll up in a blanket, and swill—and take Ativan. I’m ruddy-cheeked, depressed, and fat, and Luisa has taken to calling me biscottino (“little biscuit”) when she comes up to visit and sees me festering, sloshed in my bedroll. We have another black Spinone now, Magó, and I take him on runs past the eleventh-century ca
stle up the road and on into the foothills, along winding tracks sheathed in frost and littered with fallen chestnuts. My legs are heavy, clumsy, slow; I wheeze with effort. Three days a week I drive to Torino in a beater Peugeot, arriving late after the best parking near the office is taken. I’ll often park on a side street, a dirt strip without streetlights that’s used come night by i tossici (junkies), by le troie and their johns. Dirty hypodermics and thousands of frozen condoms full of rotting jism crackle underfoot. There’s no avoiding them. Crunch-crunch-crunch, I slog toward work. Everyone, apparently, has his vice.

  Thudd-idd-bupp.

  Rifle, Colorado, spring 1997. I’ve ended up on Colorado’s Western Slope, house-sitting for a climber couple, two friends who’ve traveled to Australia. One has gifted me twenty Valium, leftovers from a trip to Thailand. The pills are gone in a week; I need melatonin to sleep. Luisa comes out for a month and we take a walk down to the Colorado River one afternoon, down by the “Dumpster Barbecue” rest area. I feel crazed, scared, nervous about being out and about in a town full of what I perceive to be predatory rednecks, even though the hoariest locals roaring by in jacked-up F-250s don’t, I’m sure, spare us a second glance. I’m paranoid is what I am—benzo paranoid. In time it dissolves.

  That July I climb my first consensus 5.14, a route that all climbers who have redpointed it consider to be inarguably of that grade. I’ve met my lifetime goal; all the starving and striving and training have paid off. It’s a hundred-foot route called Zulu in a giant upside-down bowl named the Wicked Cave. The climb takes its name from two spectacular back-to-back “dynos,” or dynamic leaps, between volleyball-sized holes. You need to be as tall, strong, and dynamic as a Zulu to execute the moves, is the idea. I climb it on my fourth afternoon when a cold front comes through. On my second day of effort, I made it two-thirds of the way up but was too pumped—my forearms flush with blood and lactic acid—to stop and clip the bolts. And so I gunned it for thirty feet, sprinting from hold to hold hoping to reach a better stance. I wanted so badly to climb 5.14, I was willing to take that risk. Groaning with fear and exhaustion, my elbows chicken-winging skyward with imminent muscular failure, I finally fell, dropping sixty feet into the trees, snapping branches. So much force was generated that I burned the sheath of my rope as it zipped through the carabiners.