My cousin Alissa, who had recently graduated from UM with a creative writing degree and was still figuring out what to do next, invited me to go backpacking. Almost completely ignorant of backpacking, I said yes, and on a Saturday afternoon a couple weeks later, jumped in her car for the drive to Glacier National Park.
Eight hours later, I could feel the seam joining the wall of the tent to the floor along my back and legs. We had pitched it on the ground next to the Granite Park Chalet, which was closed for the season. I was grateful that Alissa had invited me to go to Glacier with her boyfriend, Whitney, and another friend, Allison, but as the fourth person squeezing into a three-person tent, I felt a little like maybe I shouldn’t have come along. I hadn’t slept all night; I just kept wishing I could close my eyes once, then open them to find it was morning. There was no moving without pushing everyone else around. If this was what camping was like, I was pretty sure I didn’t like it.
Alissa had rented the tent from a gear shop in Missoula, but I think if they saw what we were doing to it, they’d probably halt rentals. I couldn’t believe the sidewalls of the tent could handle the pressure we put on it. From the outside, it must have looked like a nylon sack holding together a pile of people at the bottom.
As soon as I could see light through the roof of the tent, I unzipped my borrowed sleeping bag and shimmied my way out the tent door. I put on my shoes and walked away, into a dizzying 270-degree panorama of mountains with glacier-cut stripes sweeping horizontally across their faces. This is what I hadn’t seen as we’d hiked up to the chalet in the dark the night before.
I had tried to be helpful, even though I didn’t know how to light a campfire or set up a tent, I didn’t have a proper backpack, a flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, or a compass. I had no idea what to do if I got lost, saw a grizzly bear, or had to take a crap. I had just followed everyone up the switchbacks north of Going-to-the-Sun Road and tried to act like I knew something about what I was doing.
I waited for everyone else to get up and out of the tent as the sun gradually warmed me enough to take off a couple of layers. After breakfast, we hiked northeast over Swiftcurrent Pass, and at the crest, the horizon fell away into a three-thousand-foot green gorge with three lakes along the bottom. I set my foot on a rock and stared. It was like a painting. My heart pounded.
After a few minutes and a few photos, we turned to go back the way we came. Then I lit a cigarette on the trail in one of America’s most beautiful and flammable national parks. Everyone looked at me like I had just pissed in the punch bowl at a wedding—especially Allison.
“How long have you been chain-smoking?” she asked.
I was embarrassed. “Three and a half years,” I said. “It makes not drinking a little easier.” I thought about putting out the cigarette and admitting that I was an idiot. But I told them to go ahead and I’d catch up, as if that would reassure them that I wouldn’t light the largest forest fire in the history of Glacier. I had no idea what I would do if I did spark a fire. It wasn’t like I had a fire extinguisher in my backpack. I held my cigarette really close to the trail, hoping the wind wouldn’t blow an ember onto a pile of dried pine needles and make me the biggest asshole in Montana.
I caught up with them a few minutes later, and after a quick snack of stale Corn Nuts, Allison and Whitney filled their water bottles directly from a stream coming down the mountain. They said they were immune to giardia. I did not want giardia. I did not fill my bottle.
Then there was a mountain goat, and everyone got excited. I tried to act cool, as if I walked to school with mountain goats every day back in Iowa.
We started up some switchbacks that led to a lookout building at the top of a small peak. It was warm as I plodded up the all-rock trail, one step at a time. I peeled off my jacket, then my sweatshirt. Up and up, my stomach rumbled and my feet hurt. Finally, I reached the top, a few minutes behind everyone else.
The building was a weather observation station, tied to the top of the rocky ridge with tension cables. The wind whipped around us. It was cold again. Are we on top of a mountain? I thought, but I didn’t ask anyone. If we were, it was the first mountain I’d ever climbed.
Whitney pulled a prescription bottle from his pocket and pulled out a joint out. He smoked most of it and gave Alissa a puff. I figured it was okay to light a cigarette now. I made Alissa take my picture, twice. I smiled big, but only on the inside.
Could I come back here? What does it take to be a person who does this stuff every weekend? Can I be in the mountains again, and breathe the air, and feel small?
The next Friday, I stood on the front porch of my apartment on Front Street in another cold cloud of cigarette smoke and self-doubt. As usual, I watched all the other students come and go, wondering how I’d gotten so old in less than a year.
Who says I have to get this sobriety thing right the first time? Lots of people get second, third, and fourth chances, especially celebrities. They treat rehab like it’s junior high detention. Look at Robert Downey Jr., for God’s sake. What’s the big deal? You fall off the wagon; you go back and get some more treatment. They keep this up for years, back and forth. Why can’t I do that? I mean, the pull is there, the gravity. Who could blame me? The people who really care just say shit like, “Oh, it’s so hard for him,” when you screw up. And when you go back to rehab again, they say, “He’s really trying.”
I tried—and didn’t fail—my whole first semester at UM. I was miserable, but I didn’t fail. I barely made my student loan money last the whole semester, budgeting just enough for cheap cigarettes. Nicotine gave me a tenuous grip on sobriety. I lost weight and looked skinny, maybe unhealthy. I booked a flight back to Iowa just before Christmas, a couple of days after my last class.
My final night in Missoula, I spent the last of my cash on a delivery pizza, large, and ate the whole thing by myself. The next morning, I got on my first flight of the day and immediately felt a fever coming on. Free of the stress of that first semester, my body relaxed into a crushing head cold.
Back in Iowa, I slept late and snuck out of the house to smoke cigarettes in the front yard. And I started to notice something different about my mom.
Every night of my life before she went to bed, my mother would take a bath and put on her pajamas. She would nestle herself next to the arm of the couch, feet curled up underneath her, with her rosary and a single can of Bud Light. Just one beer, as she silently said the rosary and watched the weather forecast for northeast Iowa. Every night, just her, Jesus, and the weatherman, having a beer and some Hail Marys.
She’d nod off about ten times before she’d finally go upstairs to bed. I never saw her drink more than one beer at a sitting—except once at a wedding. I think she had two, but I can’t be sure, because I was on number eight or nine by then.
Then when I became a certified fuckup alcoholic, she quit that routine. I noticed one night when I was in the basement doing some laundry. There was no beer in the mini fridge, the one they used for Diet Coke and bottled water because the well water was brown. But I saw a couple of twelve-packs shoved in a back corner beneath a table, under some old towels she used to dry the dog off after a bath.
“Oh, yeah,” my dad said. “She hides the beer when you come home.”
“No shit?” I asked.
“Yeah, I don’t know.” He shook his head and chuckled.
“Jesus,” I said. “Does she think I’m going to freak out and start pouring it all down my throat?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, shrugging.
“I’m twenty-three years old, Dad. I can go buy a case of beer if I really want to drink.”
Back in Missoula that spring, I spent late evenings sitting on the filthy couches in the crumbling newspaper office in the basement of the J-school, correcting punctuation, grammar, and spelling, and smoking cigarettes with a couple of the other late-night staffers. On Thursday nights, we got to watch three or four Renaissance Club kids in full armor beat the shit out o
f each other with fake swords.
One Thursday at about midnight, I walked home from the newspaper office under a full moon. The whole city had been dusted with snow. I crossed the Madison Street Bridge, and for once the icy Hellgate Canyon wind didn’t try to rip my jacket and face off. I glanced up to see Mount Sentinel and Mount Jumbo lit up, their snowy peaks reflecting the light of the moon. I stopped and let out a breath. I had not been more tired, depressed, or lonely in a long time. There was no going back to my life in Iowa, but I wanted to be in those mountains. I wanted to follow the backpackers and mountain bikers and kayakers and skiers, rambling among the ghosts of old miners and loggers and Salish and Kootenai Indians.
SORRY
AFTER ANOTHER COLD WALK TO the grocery store, I stood in the soda aisle, gauging whether the taste of a twelve-pack of soda was worth the pain of carrying it the three-quarters of a mile home. Ten minutes later, I was struggling down Front Street with about eighteen pounds of liquid—the soda plus a gallon of milk.
I had four plastic sacks on one hand, and two more, plus the gallon of milk, on the other. As I got closer to my apartment building, I could see four guys walking through the parking lot, crossing right in front of me. They were probably headed downtown for a night out. I hoped they’d just ignore me, but as I got closer, two of them looked up. I said, in an assertive but friendly tone, “What’s up, guys?”
A couple of them nodded, and their friend asked if I needed some help.
“No, that’s cool, man. I got it,” I said, knowing that drunk college guys didn’t have much of a reputation for helping other guys carry their groceries.
“No, man. I’ll help you,” he said. “I can carry your bleach.”
“It’s actually milk,” I said. “That’s okay, really. I got it. I’m just right here.” I pointed up to my apartment, literally about ten steps away.
“No, man, come on. Let me help,” he said, reaching for the milk.
Rather than have him tear it out of my hands, I held it out for him, knowing full well what would happen. He took it, and I stepped onto the first stair.
I heard my gallon of milk explode on the asphalt, then laughter, then footsteps running off.
I unlocked my door and carried the rest of my groceries inside, wishing I had a gun. Instead I grabbed my pack of cigarettes and a hammer and went back outside, my heart pounding and my jaw clenched. I hoped the guy would come back to the building and cross in front of my door. I rehearsed in my head the best way to hurt him without killing him. Arm, leg, balls.
If that asshole knew how much it took me to get a gallon of milk home. I don’t have any friends, or a car, or money. I’m almost a year sober. He has no idea what that’s like.
I neared the end of my cigarette and slowly realized that if that asshole knew half the things I had done while drinking, he wouldn’t feel the slightest bit bad about smashing my milk. If the world was at all fair, I’d had that one coming a long time.
A few weeks before college graduation, I came home drunk and sprayed my roommate with a fire extinguisher as he slept. He was the third person I’d sprayed with a fire extinguisher. I set our couch on fire a few weeks later, on purpose. I spent hours trying to talk a girl into having sex with me one night when all she wanted to do was sleep. I used up ninety-six eggs on my friend’s car one twelve-degree night—they froze—when he refused to drive to the casino with me at 2 a.m. In high school, I spray-painted the f-word on a few farmers’ propane tanks out on gravel roads. I probably hacked off their mailboxes, too. I ran my truck into the cable that held up the light pole for my high school’s baseball field, causing about $1,000 in damages. During my first DUI arrest, I insinuated that I’d had sex with the arresting officer’s wife, among other things that eventually led him to slam me into a wall inside the police station. Once, I hit a car in a McDonald’s parking lot and then left. I drove my truck through many people’s yards, mostly going after their trash cans. I stole someone’s car and joyrode it over several stop signs before parking it in someone else’s front yard, wiping my fingerprints off everything inside, and running off. I figured out, with the help of a guy who owned an auto body shop, how to get $1,600 from my car insurance company. Then I spent the money on booze and left my car the way it was after I’d driven it off the icy road and into the ditch on the way to the casino. I reported my mountain bike stolen, making $1,200 in insurance money for booze, and found out later that it really was stolen. I threw up on a booth and myself during the dinner rush at a family pizza place. I called my best friend a loser to his face for no reason. I stole five or six cases of beer from the restaurant I worked at in high school. And that’s only what I can list in five minutes.
Over time, I started to understand why bad things happened to me. They say your luck gets worse and worse as you keep drinking. Lots of people believe in different religious or spiritual systems of good and evil, where you’re repaid for bad things either during your life, during an afterlife, or during reincarnation. I didn’t have a name for it; I just recognized that when I was bad to people, whether I meant it or not, whether I was sober or drunk, bad things happened. The universe found a way to kick my ass. And sometimes it was a literal ass-kicking.
The first time I ever got the shit beaten out of me, I don’t really believe I deserved it. I was a sophomore in college and had just moved to a new apartment. It was three blocks from campus and two blocks from my favorite bar, where everyone figured I was twenty-one. This particular night, I was just about to leave the bar when a waitress asked me if I wanted some free shots. She had been trying to sell these dollar shots of schnapps in test tubes all night, and she had a few left over after the bar closed. I shot about eight of them in a row while trying to talk her into going home with me. When she kindly declined, I said good night and walked out into the street.
Some sort of race riot seemed to be going on. Black guys and white guys were pounding on each other all over the street. A few weeks earlier, some sort of rumble had happened at a club across the street between the rugby team and some gang members from Waterloo, and this may have been a continuation of that.
I saw this white guy named Tyson getting shoved around by five or six black guys in the middle of the street. I had met Tyson through a coworker, and we chatted occasionally, but we never got much closer than that. I should have just walked down a block and over to my house, but instead I walked straight into the chaos.
All I remember after that is a black guy punching me in the face. The next thing I knew, some huge white frat guy was dragging me off the street into Tony’s, the club where everything had apparently started, and asking the bouncer for some ice. I had pissed my pants, I guess, or maybe I had fallen into a puddle, and blood had spattered all over my shirt.
James was the frat guy’s name. He said his dad was an anesthesiologist or something, and he knew a broken nose when he saw one. He was going to take me to the hospital. I would rather not go to the hospital, I told him, but he wouldn’t listen. He said a bunch of black dudes had been kicking the shit out of me. I told him I supposed it didn’t really matter if they were black or white. My lip was swelling up. I made him stop at my house and get a disposable camera.
At the hospital, I asked the nurse to take my photo, for my own personal evidence. There were a couple other bloody white guys there, and a cop, who asked me a few questions about who had beat me up, none of which I could answer. “Some black guys,” I said. “That’s all I know.” Does that help? I’m sure you’ll have them tracked down in an hour or so, sir. I had no idea who they were, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to go to bed.
The nurse started messing around with my nose in the X-ray room, and when I lay down on the table, facedown, I left a pool of blood the size of a dinner plate.
I couldn’t really sleep that night. I called my dad at work at six in the morning and told him what happened. He asked me what I was doing in the middle of something like that, and I tried to downplay it with a joke.
/> My mother took it less well, worrying about brain damage. I thought it was kind of funny. I thought it made me tough. But that was really early on in my drinking career. I didn’t deserve it in the way I deserved it a couple of years later, after I had stacked up some real bad karma.
One of those times was in Ottumwa. It was the violent and necessary end of my third and final RAGBRAI trip, the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, seven days and 475 miles that took us from the Missouri River to the Mississippi River. The ride passes through about fifty different small Iowa towns every year and brings about twenty thousand cyclists with it. Some are serious, but some are like my team, the Bloody Choads, who drank our way across the state, treating RAGBRAI as our own spring break, only in the middle of the summer.
My night in Ottumwa had been going okay. I’d been able to convince a septuagenarian farmer in the last town, Albia, to drive me thirty minutes there after I’d been drinking all day. He threw my bike in the trunk of his car and drove me to my destination, where I promptly bought him the three beers I had promised him at some dive on the west end of town.
A few hours later, I met up with my teammates at the American Legion, where they had set up camp, and we went to a bar packed with people. I bought some guy a shot of tequila, and he paid me back with three more in the next ten minutes. It was enough to just about send me to the floor.
I left the bar a few minutes later, staggering all over the downtown sidewalks and totally unable to find the parking lot of the American Legion. I had not been that drunk and still standing in years—maybe ever. I got drunk three or four days a week, I blacked out, I threw up, but I almost never staggered. My body was shutting down.
I stopped at a pickup truck where some younger folks were drinking and asked for directions, and one guy stepped forward and said that since I was one of those bike riders, I needed my ass kicked. I said that no, I didn’t, that I’d like to just find where the American Legion was.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 6