Death Grip: A Climber's Escape from Benzo Madness - Hardcover

CHAPTER 1
 

It’s best to begin at the end: the last withdrawal, the final sucker punch to the kidneys. I was sick, you see; so, so sick. I’d been driven to madness by withdrawal from legally prescribed psychotropic agents, all while being told that the insanity was my own. The scary thing is, my story is not an anomaly.
One clear, sterile autumn morning—September 2006, to be exact—a hand not my own but that belonged to me smashed a beer bottle against a rock in Rifle Mountain Park, in Western Colorado. It hunted a shard of glass. The hand, once rough with climber callus and ropy with vein, had withered sickbed soft and pallid. Now it had designs—a theatrical slashing at the wrists—on its paranoid and bloated host. The hand couldn’t have picked a more apt arena, for it was here in limestone-lined Rifle Canyon that I’d peaked as a rock climber, where I’d starved down to my lowest “fighting” (well, climbing) weight and pushed my body the utmost. It was in fact along the ceiling of the gloomy gray amphitheater above, an upside-down bowl we’d named “the Arsenal,” that I’d once done some of its hardest routes in running shoes, foreswearing the special sticky-rubber rock boots that climbers use for precision footwork.
Rifle Canyon is known as an international destination for “free climbers,” who ascend via their fingers and toes, the rope there only to safeguard a fall. The canyon is a lush riparian defile—at the narrowest bend, you could toss a tennis ball across, the cliff walls leaning in so close that there’s barely room for the river, a footpath, and a graded dirt road. Rifle can be a bright place when the sun’s slanting in, but in the steepest caves that house the most difficult climbs it’s usually blanketed in shadow. Like tethered newts wearing seat harnesses, climbing shoes, and waist-bags of gymnast’s chalk to dry their hands, rock jocks slither toward the light only to lower off and do it again. Their goal might be a 5.13 or a 5.14, technical grades given to climbs well past vertical in which the holds shrink to the width of doorjambs and grow ever farther apart, sometimes so distant you have to leap in key, or “crux,” sections. These tiny holds, in the climber’s isometric battle against gravity, re-form your mitts into workman’s hands. Over time, your digits might curl with arthritis and gnarled, swollen knuckles. In clinging for dear life, you restructure your very anatomy.
When I first visited Rifle in 1991, I was an emaciated, self-obsessed nineteen-year-old would-be rock star. I was young and brash, coming up through the difficulty grades, and I wanted to be the best. It never occurred to me that fifteen years later I’d be genuflecting desperately in the same roadbed. It didn’t occur to me that I’d be in the throes of protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal, a syndrome that, in the words of one survivor, “brought the strongest man in the world to his knees.” I had no idea that the sport that had cured an agoraphobia born on the streets of my hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico, would turn on me, growling, like a beloved dog gone rabid. It never occurred to me that self-starvation in the name of performance rock climbing would lead to panic attacks, which would in turn help sow tranquilizer and drug addiction, which would in turn lead to a ferocious withdrawal and post-withdrawal syndrome complicated by misdiagnoses, overmedication, hospitalization, and an attendant leper’s bell of bizarre, nutso behavior. I couldn’t have known that “psychopharmacology,” a profit-mongering psychiatric pseudo-science predicated on bombarding emotional anomalies with chemicals, would almost kill me. I could never have known driving into Rifle that first time, a September night in 1991, and seeing the undercut walls arc toward the full moon like silver parabolas, that I would find myself kneeling atop the hardpack, not wanting to live anymore but still not convinced that death was the answer. I could not have known that the one friend with me that day—Andrew, a fellow magazine editor and Rifle junkie—would have to run across the road and prevent me from opening my veins.
As a teenager I’d seen some poor, deranged sod do this down in Albuquerque. He’d opened his wrists in Summit Park, a shady square of grass near my mother’s home by the University of New Mexico. Three friends and I were skateboarding around a concrete loop that encircled the park’s central playground, and I’d noticed the man, raccoon-eyed and wild-haired, slumped against a cottonwood eating watermelon. We looped around again, paddling under a hot dappling of July sun, avoiding alluvia of gravel. We passed the man a second time, but now I noticed something off about his “watermelon.” I looked closer, saw how the watermelon was in fact the man’s two forearms wet with blood. He held them and a gleaming blade before him, alternately slashing at each like a fisherman cleaning carp.
“Hey, man,” one of us said, as our little band stopped by his tree. “You need some help?”
The man stared at us blankly, said nothing, and then stood up unsteadily and ran off into the neighborhood. The cops came and we helped them search, following the man’s gore trail along the sidewalk until we found him cowering behind a hedgerow. I remember wondering what would drive someone to such a ghastly and public act—how could life become so unbearable? Only thirteen then, the worst of the anxiety storm still before me, I vowed never to be “that guy”—to force some unsuspecting other to witness my self-murder.
As I now did to Andrew.
I’d pulled the bottle from a crease off the shoulder, where we’d screeched to a halt in a pullout along Rifle Creek only thirty seconds earlier. (Much of this is reconstructed from Andrew’s memory, for the obvious reason that my own was compromised.) We were: me; my brindled, Bengali-striped, eighty-pound Plott hound, Clyde; and Andrew. We’d driven out from our homes in the mountain hamlet of Carbondale, an hour away, in my silver VW Golf, a climber car in stage 4 disrepair. I’d first met Andrew in 2005 when he was an intern at Rock and Ice, where he stayed on as associate editor. Andrew is tall, thin, dark-skinned, half-Arab, with a strong wit and iron fingers to match. I shouldn’t have come with him to Rifle that day. I should have been home in bed, rigid atop the sheets, vibrating, staring at the ceiling, sweating, “resting,” waiting for the seconds to congeal into minutes to congeal into hours until I could steal a few hours of nightmare-haunted sleep. But a coworker at Climbing, Rock and Ice’s main competitor but a block away in Carbondale and where I now—somehow, barely—held an editorial job, had shanghaied me into replacing old protection bolts during a Climbing-sponsored event. And so I’d come out, fearing all the while that being back in my old stomping grounds thusly compromised might trigger an epic blowout.
And now I ate my “watermelon” and forced Andrew to watch.
I’d called Andrew and asked him to come in part because I thought having a friend there might anchor me. The last time I’d visited Rifle, that spring of 2006, I’d been in the grips of a similarly stark terror. Only four months out from my last dose of benzodiazepine after seven continuous years on the drugs, I was so dizzy, fearful, and winded (among dozens of other troubling symptoms) that I’d not made it more than halfway up the warm-up, a climb I’d done hundreds of times before. I was so weak I could barely shuffle down the canyon road without wheezing, as a friend, Derek, and I walked from one wall to the next. It had been a horror, a disaster, a demoralizing failure. The climb whose protection bolts I was supposed to update this day was called Sprayathon, a severely overhanging 5.13c. (Fifth-class, or roped, technical rock climbing, is subdivided by the Yosemite Decimal System, originally designed to be a close-ended scale from 5.0 to 5.9 but that now goes to the mathematically improbable 5.15. At 5.10 and above, the YDS further subdivides into the letter grades “a” through “d”—5.10a, 5.10b, 5.10c, 5.10d, 5.11a, etc.) Andrew would go first and get the rope up, and then I would use mechanical ascenders called Jumars to reach the old bolts and, with a cordless hammer drill, replace them. The reality, however, was that I had to crawl up the stairs to reach my bedroom, rented from friends back in Carbondale. If stairs were too much, hoisting my fat carcass up a taut, free-hanging 10-millimeter rope was going to be impossible. At my physical peak in the nineties and early aughts, I could run laps on Sprayathon, and even used it as a warm-up when I was trying a 5.14, Zulu, down the road. Sprayathon had always been a handy benchmark of personal fitness, and for a time I’d been one of the stronger climbers in the canyon.
Now, however, I couldn’t get up Sprayathon on Jumars, and I’d tried to tell that to my coworker at Climbing. But like most everyone around me he just could not or would not believe me.
“Don’t worry about it, Matt,” he’d told me. “I know how hard you climb.”
I didn’t bother mentioning that he’d described another person: the Matt before benzodiazepine withdrawal.
By all outward appearances, I looked normal … enough. Overweight from inactivity, sure, with a comically “pregnant” stress belly; and downtrodden, my eyes perpetually glued to the floor. But not nearly as sick as I felt. It would have been better had I had a compound fracture: splintered bone poking through the skin. A tangible, relatable malady that elicit...