Try every day. Staying sober alone wouldn’t cure me. It wouldn’t fix the eyes that saw only ways for things to go bad, wouldn’t correct the mind that sought out negatives and magnified them, wouldn’t cut the endless loop of death-and-failure pornography churning round in my head. Just staying sober wouldn’t give me the big life I had dreamed of as a kid. Bukowski had “DON’T TRY” engraved on his tombstone. Well, fuck you, Chuck. I would try every day. It didn’t matter at what. Try at everything, try at anything. I had let that little muscle atrophy, the trying muscle, and I needed to build it back up. Little things, like not jerking off for a day or doing more than fifty push-ups in a row, and bigger things, like trying as hard as I had to make my relationship with Izgi succeed, and even bigger things, the biggest.
That last one, that was it. It was true, what I had told Luis. You had to dream big. You had to try. Luis and I signed up for our first fifty-mile race together, only four weeks away: Virgil Crest, a rugged ramble over hilly, single-track trail, with over ten thousand feet of elevation change, including up and down a ski hill twice. We talked to other runners who had done it, picked their brains about the course, and compared training strategies. It wouldn’t be easy, but it wasn’t impossible. My father had never run fifty miles. I would.
I’d had some pain on the side of my left knee running down the hills at Green Lakes, but it went away after a couple of days. Two weeks later, at the Groundhog Fall 50K in Pennsylvania, my knee got so bad that I had to walk the last five miles. It was bizarre. I could charge up the hills, but the minute I tried to descend, I felt stabbing pain about an inch to the left of my knee, like someone was knifing the air next to my leg. That couldn’t be good. Nerve damage? The phantom pain throbbed through the night. The next day, I couldn’t put any weight on my left knee without it buckling. I picked up a brace at Duane Reade and forced myself to rest.
Two days before the Virgil Crest fifty-miler, I got jumped by three guys at Beauty Bar. I managed to land correctly when we hit the concrete—on top of them—and didn’t further injure my knee. Still, two miles into Virgil Crest, I could no longer run. Luis stuck with me, determined not to leave me behind.
Fifteen miles into the race, I couldn’t walk. Luis hadn’t dressed for the weather so I handed him my black long-sleeve shirt, one that Izgi had given me. I dropped out, the first time I’d had to do so. My first DNF ever. I was crushed. It was clear that I wouldn’t be running again for a while. I had the cold, shitty winter ahead of me. It felt like alcohol was tenting its fingers in anticipation, waiting for me to come crawling back.
For a few days after the race, it was hard to walk. There was no question: I had to stop running completely. I missed several expensive races I’d signed up for. With running, my anti-alcohol, out of my life, I had lots of time to reflect on why I had found a home in alcohol. Closing down the back bar by myself one night, I caught a whiff of Jameson as I was wiping down the necks of the bottles. It was more than some exotic perfume; it was like the scent of a girl’s hair mixed with her sweat, like a rabbit’s trail to a hound, like blood to a shark. I could pop the speed pourer out of the top and take one huge, incandescent swallow from the bottle. Who would know? It’s not like I had to worry about Izgi leaving me now. I was alone and angry. If I couldn’t run, why not drink?
My cravings for alcohol were unexpected and intense, like a visit from a succubus. Different drinks appeared before me in succulent, pornographic detail. A frosty Sol longneck, a voluptuous lime crammed rudely into its top; a salty dog, grapefruit juice gaily pink like a child’s dress, salt on the rim sparkling like rock candy; an unadorned measure of scotch in a highball, honey from enchanted bees swirling around a single ice cube.
As I’d promised myself I would, for every drink I conjured, I recalled an equal and opposite hangover. There was a direct line between that alluring first drink, the retching hell the next morning, and the half life I’d lived. I could not let myself forget vomiting off the side of an escalator in the DC train station, the spatter getting louder and louder as the escalator carried me higher and higher; laying on the bathroom tiles in Allison’s apartment, freezing and sweating, then frantically pulling my boxers down and sitting on the toilet, liquid shit splattering the bowl and my bare ass, then, as the smell hit me, vomiting onto my belly and crotch; hunching over a stranger’s toilet, expelling undigested alcohol, then chewed-up food, then bile as my stomach, my esophagus, and my throat convulsed in staccato rhythm like some terrible engine run dry of lubricants and tearing itself apart. What would come up next? A kidney? My testicles? Little bits of my soul? An old rubber boot?
When I slept, I was plagued by dreams of the drughole. There was a space between the pipe that heated my room and the plywood loft I’d built for my bed. Whenever I’d gotten too fond of a drug, I threw it down this hole—the drughole—so it was no longer accessible, though not lost forever. The thought of digging through the dust- and lint-covered cardboard boxes—one actually labeled “DEPRESSING EX-GIRLFRIEND HELL”—under my loft was enough of a deterrent that I wasn’t about to go in there after them. (Eventually, of course, I had moved the dead amps and broken guitars and boxes of unlabeled crap and, yes, snorted the contents of every baggie, vial, or little twist of plastic I found under there.)
Now that I couldn’t run, the drughole occupied increasing psychic space in my idle, depressed dreams. One night, I dreamed I stretched its narrow, splintery plywood opening like taffy and crawled into that rabbit hole, which was, of course, cavernous and filled with many wonders. There were Vicodin the size of cheeseburgers, Opana the size of ottomans . . . it was heaven. One rolled toward me, and I tackled it, then fell to the ground with it, gnawing on the corner like a rat.
I awoke with a lingering, mournful sadness, as if I’d been dreaming about the first girl I’d ever loved. I knew I was slipping.
For those who suffer from it, “depression” has ceased to be an accurate word for the malaise. It calls to mind the unhappy-faced blob with a dark cloud over it from that Zoloft commercial, which is distant in essence from the quietly writhing despondency I know. David Foster Wallace, who in the end learned more about depression than he could bear, called it “a black hole with teeth.” That’s pretty dead-on. But this concept—an absence so severe it manifests as a malign presence—is hardly new or limited to Wallace. It appears in The Neverending Story as “The Nothing,” an all-consuming void of darkness. And in Spirited Away, it’s No Face, a monstrous shadow that, once invited into a home, devours everything it encounters. Falling into this hole is not just feeling blue or bummed out. It’s nihil and nadir. It’s acedia.
Searching for the perfect word for this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it’s an antecedent to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world; you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.
Still, there was one more layer to this black hole in my head. It’s a French word, originating from oublier—to forget—and literally meaning “the forgotten place”: the oubliette. The oubliette was a specific kind of dungeon created in the Middle Ages, one where the only entrance was a hole high in the ceiling. There was no way out. The hapless captive was tossed in, the door was closed, and the prisoner was left, alone with his sin or perceived sin, to go insane and slowly wither away and die. It was a life sentence, solitary confinement, and a death sentence. The oubliette was called “the forgotten place” because it was reserved for prisoners so low that their captors wished to forget them. That for me was the final element: it’s a man- and God-forsaken black hole with teeth where not only are you staring into nothingness, not only is it slowly consuming you, not only does no one seem to know or care, but if they ever did find out, they would try with all their might to forget you.
When I was young and fell
down this well, I’d try to comfort myself by imagining some outrageous good fortune: winning the lottery or saving the life of some modern-day princess or just stumbling on a trunk of cartoony jewels like Scrooge McDuck’s. As a teenager, I would conjure up the next Girl Who Is Going to Save Me and hold her face out toward the darkness like a candle. As I got older, my concept of escape matured. At the end of my drinking days, my reliable pick-me-up was envisioning my suicide.
I would ensure that my death wasn’t the frightful mess my life had been. In the fantasy I finally settled on, I’d pawn a couple of guitars and buy a scrip of Opana, some speed, and a tarp. I’d snort the speed and go through all my shit—my books, my scribbled-in notebooks, my cassette tapes, all that crap. I’m hideously disorganized and still have boxes I haven’t unpacked from three or four moves ago. I’d go through all of that shit, throw out everything I could, and organize my entire house, then clean it, a thorough top-to-bottom scrubbing like I was moving out and absolutely had to get the security deposit back. I’m a slob, and people have been cleaning up after me my entire life. No more!
When the place was totally clean and everything had been dealt with, I’d lay the tarp on my mattress and lay a blanket my mother made when I was a kid down on top of it. That way, when I was discovered, there wouldn’t be any mess to clean up—they could just gather the tarp up by the corners and lug my body off to Potter’s Field. I’d cut up three pills of Opana into one long, thick serpent of a line. Then I’d swallow all the remaining pills and quickly snort the line. The shit I snorted would knock me out before my stomach could get upset and I could vomit. It would also prevent a last-second change of plans. I’d just drift away like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. Comforting, isn’t it?
There were no angels. Survival came down to me. Drag myself out of that hole, or topple headlong into it, it was my call, and mine alone.
I’d been humbled in so many ways. Getting so out of control I’d had to quit drinking forever. Being shamed by the doctor at the STD clinic. Forcing myself to apologize, not to one friend or a couple of friends, but to lots of people, even a few I didn’t really know. Going to therapy—therapy!—and admitting I was an alcoholic. I had subjected myself to humiliation after humiliation, and each had come with a reward, or at least an alleviation of pressure. What was one more?
I forced myself to ask Chris to refer me to the staff psychiatrist. Dr. Beeder was a small woman with straight brown hair and owlish glasses. I didn’t want to be medicated into idiotic bliss, I told her, but my relationship with suicide didn’t strike me as normal. It slipped unnoticed into my head. I’d only realize I’d been planning to die when Freshkills booked a decent gig, and I’d think, Okay, I’ll wait until after that.
She wrote me a scrip for something she said wouldn’t change who I was. “You’ll still be you, just maybe ten to fifteen percent better. Ironically, it may make you feel more like yourself.”
I hesitated for a minute outside the pharmacy. Really? Antidepressants? Shit, I’d taken every drug I could think of to not feel like myself. Why be such a pussy about taking something to feel like myself? It worked. Like she said, not a lot, but a little. Enough.
I went back to Sofia, the sports doctor who had coached me through my shin splints. After listening to me describe my current symptoms, she spoke.
“I told you to stretch. Did you stretch?”
I looked at my feet. Of course I hadn’t.
“So here we are,” she said.
There was nothing wrong with my knee, she said, but I had acute iliotibial band syndrome.
“Sounds tropical,” I said. “Is it fatal?”
She swatted me, then explained. In ITBS, the long band of muscle that extends from your hip down to just below your knee becomes so tight that it rubs painfully on the bony protrusions of your knee. Rest and physical therapy should take care of it, but, Dr. Sofia warned, it might bother me for the rest of my life.
I found a physical therapist in my neighborhood, Eva, a redhead with cutting blue eyes who had run for the Polish national team. Two weeks into physical therapy, my left leg stopped hurting. With Eva’s tentative permission, I went out for a short run. It was miraculous! I was cured! I wanted to throw down my knee brace and burst into song. Then I felt a familiar pain outside my right knee. By the time I got home, I could hardly walk. The next day, Eva began treating my right leg.
For the next six weeks, I went to physical therapy four times a week. It was painful and time-consuming and hardly encouraging. I stretched daily and spent many a night lying in bed with a bag of frozen peas strapped to my leg, wondering if Izgi missed me, wondering if Allison ever missed me, wondering if anyone ever missed me. Eva dug her sharp elbow deeper and deeper into the flesh of my right thigh, but still I couldn’t run for more than a few blocks at a time.
I’d signed up to run the NYC marathon for Luis’s charity, but when the race rolled around, I’d run less than ten miles total in the preceding two months. Eva stopped just short of absolutely forbidding it.
“You shouldn’t do it,” she said. “I’m telling you not to do it. But I know you. So if you do it, do not run. If you feel pain, you must stop. If you don’t stop, you’re going to undo all the work we’ve done here.”
The morning of the marathon, I allowed myself to run over the Verrazano Bridge and then forced myself to walk. People were cheering but also kinda looking at me like, “What’s your problem, man? Run!”
By the time we got to Manhattan, I was in the back of the pack with the absolute beginners, a seventy-year-old Buddhist with a long white beard and a guy with one leg. The last ten miles, my leg was in agony. But I finished . . . behind Meredith Vieira, Jared from Subway, and the Chilean Miner, who had been able to do more training underground than I had above. I did beat Al Roker. Big whoop.
I redoubled my efforts at rehabilitating my stubborn leg. I did a series of painful stretches daily and iced my leg so long and so frequently that I gave myself frost burn. Most importantly, I took three weeks of total rest. When the oubliette came for me, I closed my eyes and imagined myself running through a moist, verdant tunnel of foliage with Luis, both of us laughing at some filthy joke.
Slowly and carefully, I began to run again. One mile. One and a half miles. Two miles. Three and a half miles. Five miles. Eight miles.
I went down to Mexico in January to stay with my uncle Albert, the same uncle who had invoked my mother’s wrath by slipping me a couple of rum-and-Cokes at a family reunion when I was nine. Albert used to work all year long in northern Canada so he could go on an epic bender each winter in Mexico. The previous year, he had bottomed out, and the town where he had run amok became the town where he had gotten sober.
I slept on the floor in his tiny casita on an air mattress. He went to his meetings, and I ran. One day on, one day off, stretching my IT band hard several times a day. I didn’t know what I was running from. I didn’t know what I was training for. I didn’t even know who I was. I didn’t know why running was good for me, but I knew it was good for me, so I ran.
I had let myself get out of shape, and building my endurance back up in the blazing Mexican sunshine exhausted me. Nightly, I plunged to the bottom of an ocean of sleep.
One night, I dreamed that I had returned to our family home in Canada. I lived in a cave under a bridge with my mother and father and my four brothers. We dressed only in leather made from the skins of animals we had hunted or trapped. But our living, our way of life, our reason to exist was the enormous marlin that swam in the river under the bridge. My brothers and I fed our family by leaping onto the backs of these giant sailfish, twenty or thirty feet long, wrangling them toward the shore like marine cowboys, then slitting their throats with our wooden-handled scimitars, butchering them, and smoking the flesh. It was, at once, infinitely strange and infinitely familiar. My people had lived this way since the beginning of our history. Our purpose was narrow—we had been created to eat the marlin, as the marlin had been created to
feed us—but we fulfilled that purpose to perfection. I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do. For the first time in my life, I belonged. There was so much love radiating from my heart that my chest felt hot. I was truly happy.
I awoke from the dream with a succinct epiphany, the reason why my father and I couldn’t get along: he had been the first person to disappoint me and the first person to express disappointment in me.
Dreams were meaningless, just the brain idling, I told myself. As emotionally stirring as my dream had been, it was just the detritus in my head: part coward’s fantasy of being macho, part white boy’s fantasy of being “Indian,” part modern urbanite fantasy of returning to savage nature, 100 percent pure jumbled fiction. But I’d encountered many truths in fiction, perhaps more than in any other genre or even in my real life. The first to disappoint me; the first to be disappointed in me. Was my pickled brain even capable of manufacturing such a tidy, fortune cookie explanation? It was like a Möbius strip cut out of a page of One Hundred Years of Solitude, shorter than a joke, denser than a black hole.
This couldn’t be the incantation that would cleave the heavy chains apart, spring the rusty old locks open, could it? There was something to it, more than just poetry. Was it even true? I had worshipped my dad, been fascinated with the hair growing out of his face, the smell of his pipe, his sweat. How had he disappointed me? Maybe by allowing himself to be henpecked, always evading my mother with jokes or just kowtowing when she was mad? No, there was something before that. A big disappointment, maybe the biggest. He didn’t like me.
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