by Matt Samet
Four milligrams a day, Klonopin, March 2005:
I’ve stopped taking Vicodin. I cut slowly over a month, five milligrams a week until the final week when, using a sharp, redwood-handled steak knife, I quartered the pills the final three days. Then nothing. Zero. It’s gone, over; I barely miss the opiates and, other than a few weeks of agitation, I detect no lasting damage. Compared to benzos, opiates are dead-easy to quit. Weed is dead-easy to quit. Alcohol, the same. I feel happier, lighter, less sludgy, and am even climbing again. Still I move tentatively, afraid to push myself, succumbing to odd waves of vertigo and a hopeless, shaky feeling at cruxes. Down in Glenwood I attend weekly, therapist-led meetings with other addicts, most of them grizzled Western Colorado alcoholics. There’s a girl in there, eighteen, tall, beautiful, brunette, coming off crystal meth. She sobs one day during group, telling us her dentist said she might need dentures because all her teeth are rotted out.
“Eighteen is way [sob] too [sob] young [sob, sob, sob] for dentures,” she’s saying. “I wish I’d never touched that stuff. My teeth are all fucked up and I ain’t even twenty.”
Optimistic given my own rapid progress, I tell her that it will all work out and that she’s young enough to turn it around. I’m thirty-three, I say, and I’ve pissed away almost more years drugging than she’s been alive, but I still feel hopeful about the future.
“Yeah, well, age ain’t nothing but a number,” the girl says, blowing her nose. “Eighteen years starts to sound like a lot when you’ve been smoking meth the last five of them.”
Kasey and I drive to California over spring break. We make it to Ibex, Utah, the first night, out in salt pans in the West Desert along U.S. Route 50. I’ve climbed here twice before, in this vast no-man’s-land of scrubby mountains, endless basins, and milk-blue skies. Ibex is known for its varnished, wind-hollowed red and brown quartzite boulders, the best ones a tumble of blocks—some large as office buildings—beneath a three-hundred-foot cliff that lords over a dry white lake bed. It’s a harsh, isolated, elemental place, like so many of the great climbing areas. Ibex’s wind is ripping, driving silt into the tent, howling around the scoops, whorls, and bevels that it’s carved into the biggest boulder, the Red Monster, above us. I unroll my sleeping pad and an orange bottle falls out: Vicodin, one of the mini-stashes I’d hidden from myself back in Carbondale.
“Hey, babe, look at this,” I tell Kasey. “Vicodin.”
Her face goes blank. “I thought you quit, nuggins,” she says.
“I did,” I say. “I really did. I must have had these stashed away—stowaways, it looks like. Umm, whoops?” Her face falls again; Kasey is not psyched.
It makes me nervous having these semi-licitly-obtained pills in the car. And besides, for all intents and purposes I’m clean—the psychiatrist has applauded my recovery efforts and finally conceded that the benzos are drugs of “use, not abuse.” Great news! I look forward to a similarly smooth transition off Klonopin. I’ve informed my doctor that I’ll cut a half to a quarter milligram every two weeks, which means I’ll be free of the benzos by October. He agrees that that’s a solid plan. By headlamp in the bluish gloom, I peel off the Vicodin label, take a piece of athletic tape from my climbing pack, write on it, and slap it on the bottle. As Kasey and I leave for Bishop the next afternoon, I cache the bottle in the Red Monster, inside a chalk-lined crack that climbers thrust their hands into where I know someone will find it.
“Vicodin painkillers,” is what the label says. Then: “Help yourself, as I no longer have any need for them.”
Three and a half milligrams a day, Klonopin, late March 2005:
The first cut is the biggest and establishes the pattern: Two days after each reduction begins one week of worsened symptoms, including curious spates of hyperventilation, drowsiness, and toxic naps from which I wake up hypothermic. Then a return to “normal”—i.e., the standard benzo roller coaster, like an old acquaintance whom you publicly tolerate but have secretly always loathed. Kasey and I are in the lower Owens Valley, at a dystopian desert junction where Route 395 from Bishop meets Route 58 to Barstow. Power lines swing low as a windstorm builds. Trash and dust blow around as we pull into a convenience store to gas up and make a left toward Joshua Tree, where we’ll meet Michael Reardon. I’ve been panting the whole way from Bishop where, two nights earlier at Kasey’s grandfather’s trailer, I first took a half pill instead of a whole one at bedtime. I know that I’m overbreathing and I know that it makes me anxious, but I’m powerless to stop. Breathing exercises don’t even dent the pattern. Harley bikers are about, gangbangers creeping in boomcars, sun-dried meth-heads in greasy flannels and with hammerhead-shark eyes. I’ve never liked California—the aridity, the random nutjobs, the Road Warrior vibe—even as I appreciate its wealth of superb granite cliffs. We’re in Kasey’s Elantra, “Lani,” a brown plastic triceratops our mascot on the dashboard. I play with the toy as I wait for her to return from the restroom, its black eyes staring back, revealing nothing.
Three milligrams a day, Klonopin, April 2005:
I’ve made another big jump, a half-milligram cut, feeling positive, bolstered by a new SSRI antidepressant, Lexapro, which has helped temporarily with the breathing, letting my body assume a natural rhythm. The benzos are down to three times a day—morning, noon, and night—and after a rough first week, I actually feel better than I did at higher doses. Could it be that each cut will be easier, as I come closer to zero? I have no reason not to think so, and my psychiatrist still feels that I’m tapering at a reasonable rate.
I’ve flown out to meet Michael Reardon in LA, and then we’re off to Joshua Tree National Park again, an otherworldly, wind-swept plateau of the eponymous dream-trees, of endless tan domes and gritty boulders popping from springtime tracts of yellow and purple wildflowers. We barely rope up except for longer climbs. Michael runs through his multiple-route free-solo circuits, which he does as comfortably as laps at the pool, while I join him when I’m feeling it, one of us sometimes climbing right above the other, cracking dirty jokes, feeding off each other’s raucous energy. I notice that I solo better before noon, after the first Klonopin or the second, but that I need to ease back later. One afternoon, just past this window, we head to Clean and Jerk, a sixty-foot 5.10 on a formation called Sports Challenge Rock. Two guys rest below the shady north face; they wear giant Everest-climber backpacks, an overkill of equipment for this puny cliff, helmets on though they haven’t yet roped up. Safety nuts, in other words. Michael pulls out the video camera as I start unroped up Clean and Jerk, as we both shout “Cali extreme!” and make ironic shaka-brah hand gestures. I realize that I’m shaky and that it’s a little late in the day—and I’ve only done this climb once, two years earlier—but I free-solo anyway. Halfway up, the crack esses through a smooth bulge, forcing awkward body positions. I quiver, slowing as I fuss with fist jams and foot smears, as Michael continues filming. “You doing okay, brotha?” he asks at one point. “Sure, sure,” I say, but as I look down thirty, then forty, then fifty feet to the ground, I can see that the other two climbers have packed up and left, unwilling or perhaps unable to witness whatever finale.
Two and three-quarters milligrams a day, Klonopin, May 2005:
I’ve given notice at work, having stepped down from editor to senior editor as I prepare to detach from the publishing world. It feels like the right decision, one that should ameliorate stress and anxiety, and as soon as my tenure is up I’ll move in with Kasey back in Boulder and work as a freelancer—a quieter, simpler life.
Kasey is interning at Boulder’s newspaper and is sent to do a human-interest piece on the Humane Society of Boulder Valley shelter. She sends me an e-mail entitled only, “Can we get him?” with a link to a photo. It’s of Clyde, one of two brown brindled puppies (his sister is Bonnie), rescued siblings listed as “Labrador/pit-bull mix.” There he is, a tiger-striped, two-month-old furball with a fat pink belly, a white blaze on his chest, wide brown eyes, and velvety ears. A hundred fif
ty bucks, including shots and neutering. I don’t even think, just type “Yes!” and with that we have Clyde. When Kasey brings him out to Carbondale the next weekend, I have to carry him through the talus below the cliffs, as he keeps slipping between the rocks and tripping over his pedestal paws. He whines when we’re up off the ground until he figures out he can crane up and see us. After which Clyde scoops out a hole, curls into a ball, and takes a long puppy siesta.
Two and a quarter milligrams a day, Klonopin, June 2005:
To stick to my self-imposed schedule I must make this cut, even on holiday on Kalymnos, a mountainous Greek isle covered in perfect bands of gray, orange, white, and beige limestone. Things have started to become, well, difficult, an intimation of some storm brewing over the horizon. I’m moving at the same pace, keeping my chin up and focused on the end goal, but I’m beginning to think that quitting benzos this final time might be harder than I’d originally thought. (As I’ll learn later, from anecdotal experiences shared on a Yahoo group, each taper is often more difficult than the one/s prior.) Back in Boulder, Kasey has found us a place, one half of a duplex at Fifth Street and Alpine in far west Boulder, the last tumbledown rental on a block of redos and scrape-offs beneath Mount Sanitas. It has two bedrooms, a big picture window in the living room that reveals the First Flatiron in profile—a thin plane of sandstone slicing the horizon. There is even a backyard for Clyde, though the fence is low and we have to electrify it. I like where the house is, so close to trails and the rocks, and how the thin slits of window in the two bedrooms give east past the city onto the Great Plains. But something about it also feels ominous, like bad things have happened or might someday happen here.
Now in Mediterranean climber paradise, I need to cut again, even as I know it will leave me jelly-limbed and noncombative on the harder climbs, less able to enjoy Kalymnos’ amazing three-dimensional routes on stalactites and “tufas” (extruded vertical dikes) overlooking the glaucous Aegean. I’ve given up coffee and chocolate, as they’re too stimulating, and have to leave Kasey to do the shopping in the narrow-aisled grocery stores in Kalymnos’ port, Pothia. The crowds are too much; I’m too edgy. The Greek sounds like bursts from a machine gun. I feel infinite sadness.
Depression becomes despair one hot afternoon at a cliff called Kasteli, where Byzantine castle walls sit crumbling atop an exposed spit of maritime limestone. Kasey wants to try a few climbs here, but too tired to climb myself I come out merely to belay. You can hardly see civilization, tucked into a nook on the back of the hump, overlooking a deep-blue channel and the neighboring isle of Telendos, which broke off from Kalymnos in an ancient earthquake. I say little, holding the rope, lowering Kasey after each climb, sweating behind my sunglasses. By now she knows how anxious I get, but also, frustratingly, that she cannot help. We leave as the sun drops behind Telendos, casting orange light over the weathered crags of white stone. As we pass the neck of the spit, from where you can scramble up to the castle, I consider having a look. I’ve always done things like this, loved exploring. But this evening I can’t bring myself to walk the extra hundred feet to the ruins.
Who is this person? I wonder, and: When did I stop being curious about the world?
And then it hits me: It’s not me; it’s the pills. I have them in my climbing pack, the whole goddamned bottle. What might happen, I ask myself, if I simply hurled these fucking things into the ocean? Will I wake up tomorrow back to my old self again?
How lovely that would be. How linear and tidy. How convenient. But then something stops me, an interior voice saying, “You don’t want to do that. You don’t want a repeat of 1996. You cannot afford to go crazy again. You really aren’t that strong.”
Two milligrams a day, Klonopin, Carbondale, Boulder, mid-June 2005:
I’m not sure if it’s the hammer through the countertop or my fist not through the wall that will end up costing me more, though both happen in the same few cursed seconds. Kasey and I have returned to Carbondale to pick up Clyde at Lee’s and pack up my things, and I’ve just finished a frustrating phone call. I’m starting to have no brakes on my emotions, feeling more suffocated, both physically and emotionally, by the day.
“You should see your dog,” Lee told me when I phoned from the Front Range a day earlier. “It’s crazy, but he looks totally different, like his legs got longer and his face has changed. I’m not sure he’s a pit bull. Man, you gotta see Clyde—it’s hilarious!”
And Lee’s right—in just the three weeks that we’ve been gone, Clyde has gone from a fat little dumpling to a stilt-legged adolescent with a werewolf snout. He still has his floppy ears and soft brindle coat, and his feet are still huge, but it’s clear that Clyde is some other breed. Clyde is out in the yard playing with Lee’s Australian shepherds when I go berzerker, so he doesn’t have to witness my apoplexy like Kasey. I’ve just called the local motorcycle shop to see if they’ve been able to repair a Chinese motor scooter I bought some months earlier. The scooter is silver, cagey, plastic bodied, more often than not broken, and I’ve been embroiled in an ongoing saga of ordering parts from the scooter company, taking them down to the shop where the scooter has become derelict-in-residence, and trying to get the thing running again. I’ve spent $300 already trying to maintain a $1,000 scooter, and now it’s still broken and not yet ready to move to Boulder. This trifle triggers a wrath attack well beyond any normal proportion.
I hurl the phone against the kitchen floor but that doesn’t break it. I’m screaming it—“Fuck, fuck, Fuck!”—as I fetch a hammer we’ve been using to pull picture hangers from the walls. Kasey stands to the side mutely, wondering where this is leading. I place the phone on the countertop and rail down hammer blow after hammer blow, but I’m too frantic to aim properly and strike it only after a few attempts. Meanwhile, I’ve punched a ragged hole in the countertop—on move-out day. This infuriates me all the more, and I turn around and punch the wall, right on the stud, which resounds with a dull crunching noise as something gives in my hand.
I can’t breathe, I’m anxious all the time, everything is broken, and I must punch this wall again. Then Kasey is behind me, clutching my arm as I recoil for a second blow, yelling, “No, Matt, no, no, no, no, no!”
I crumple to the floor, sobbing while Kasey holds me. She will tell me how frightened she was that day, as if I might have harmed her, and I will apologize profusely and tell her no, no, no, no, no, I will only ever hurt myself. The counter will cost $800 to replace, which I’ll pay to Lee over two installments. My right pinkie finger, meanwhile, has sustained a spiral (boxer’s) fracture. I don’t get it looked at until two weeks later, by which time the bone has already healed crookedly. It dangles askew like a torn battle flag; to this day the finger aches whenever a storm front is coming.
One and three-quarters milligrams a day, Klonopin, Boulder, July 2005:
“I really think we should head up here, into this chimney,” I tell my friend and climbing partner, Lizzy.
We stand below the north ridge of Spearhead, a 12,575-foot granite wedge in a tarn- and tundra-stippled alpine basin beneath Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park. I’ve climbed some of Spearhead’s more difficult east-face routes before, thin slabs of burnished knobs and wavy stone cut by fingertip seams. Because of the peak’s altitude and pointy summit, you want to be up and off by noon, before the thunderstorms build. Today we’ve come to simul-climb a 5.6, the North Ridge, which I should be able to do even with my splinted right pinkie since the low-angled rock means you barely need your hands.
“I’m not sure. Look … here, the description says start in a ‘left-facing corner’ and head into a box feature, which to me looks like this crack out right,” Lizzy says. Lizzy is a strong climber, an attentive listener, an intense and thoughtful writer with curly brown hair, often died henna red, who once worked birthday parties as “Frizzy the Clown.” We’ve been friends for five years.
I’m not convinced. “I don’t know—that’s not much of a corner, and then h
ow do we get back to the ridge?” I ask. “I’m pretty sure the upper pitches are right on the edge”—where the east face meets the north.
Lizzy looks down at a xeroxed guidebook page again, looks up at the wall, scratches her head. We walk back and forth a couple more times between the route I think we should take and Lizzy’s selection. I had been hesitant about coming, worried about the breathing troubles and how they’d affect me on the approach hike, but it’s July—the time to climb in the high country. And besides, my psychiatrist, concerned about my rising anxiety levels, has just added a “mood stabilizer,” an expensive antiepilepsy medicine named Trileptal that has helped with my breathing, if only because it sedates me. The doctor is prescribing “off-label,” exploiting a legal loophole through which doctors can prescribe a drug for conditions other than the one it’s indicated for. I feel mixed emotions about adding another medication when all I want is to quit Klonopin, but Dr. Porridge insists that I need to approach the taper from a “place of strength.” We’ve also reverted to Paxil from Lexapro, as the Lexapro stopped working—“pooped out,” in the doctor’s terminology, as psychiatric medicines are known to do. I’m on 12.5 milligrams a day of Paxil XR, a time-release version.
Because of my finger, Lizzy will take the lead position, placing the gear as she climbs and making the route-finding decisions. In the end I defer to her when she says she wants to start out right, where the climbing looks steeper and more interesting. We can, she points out, traverse left to the ridge once we’re up a few hundred feet.
Lizzy starts up a thin crack midway along the north face, placing small cams; around eighty feet she slows to pass a black water seep oozing from a steep layback crack. She hollers down to be careful on the wet rock, and then continues. Soon Lizzy hits the end of the rope, tied in at my harness, and I start climbing. We move in unison: I adjust my pace to match Lizzy’s so that no extra slack enters the line. I’m in approach shoes, a hybrid between a tennis shoe and rock boot with climbing-rubber soles. They slip a little on the water-washed granite. The climbing is harder than I’d bargained for—5.8 or even 5.9—but by relying on my left hand and staying over my feet, I skitch up the layback without falling. Four hundred feet up we enter an obtuse gully-like depression right of the ridge. I call up to Lizzy, 150 feet higher on a big ledge, to ask if she doesn’t want to head to the ridge now, but she says we should climb higher first. We have only one piece between us, a wired nut thirty feet below Lizzy. She heads right on her ledge, the rope running along the lip.