Death Grip (9 page)

I began climbing regularly at age fifteen. For the first time, I'd found a pursuit that held unadulterated appeal—the competition was against only myself, against my fear and physical limitations. The relaxed, almost transcendental peace I felt at the cliffs, even while I experienced a neophyte's terror at exposure (being up off the ground) and learning to trust the equipment, stood in stark juxtaposition to all the urban anguish that came before. My lowpoint in the Challenge Program came during a two-week inpatient stay that February, which I'd requested to escape ongoing discord with my parents. I'd stand at my window come bedtime, bantering with my roomie, waiting for the L-tryptophan the nurses had given me to usher in sleep. I swayed there looking down across Central to where a gaggle of half-frozen prostitutes gathered under the eaves of Milton's Family Restaurant awaiting johns, their breath steaming into the night. They'd huff into the cupped bowls of their hands and pace back and forth to stay warm. It was then that I vowed to escape this dystopia and dedicate myself solely to my new love, rock climbing. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the NMMC climbing course. It was taught almost entirely by engineers who worked at Sandia National Laboratories and comprised the bulk of the NMMC climbing section. They were a wonky but friendly crew: lots of coke-bottle glasses, tube socks, and groan-inducing puns about the female anatomy.

We pupils began with knot-tying and simulated belay sessions on terra firma, then progressed to toproping, in which the rope is anchored above, meaning you drop only inches in a fall. Toproping is the perfect way to learn the technical nuances of rock climbing, to memorize and apply the different terms for holds—layback, crimp, pinch, fingerlock, Gaston, etc.—the various body positions, and the techniques that let you climb up cracks and overhangs. Climbing gear is expensive, so the club had us use low-cost improvised gear until we were certain of continuing. Thus I climbed in running shoes, a bicycle helmet, my Hulk sweats, and with a “Swiss seat” harness fashioned using twenty feet of nylon webbing. We'd meet on weekends and head for gentle, crystal-studded slabs in the lower Sandias, or out to the dead-vertical black-basalt cliffs near Cochiti Lake or Bernalillo in canyons with Anasazi petroglyphs lining the walls, glum green streams burbling through the depths, and the requisite New Mexico wrecked car or two rumpled in the talus. Slippery beige clifftop silt washed over the rock with each rainstorm, obscuring the white climbing chalk that daubed the holds.

We greenhorns spent hours mastering belaying—securing the rope for your climbing partner. In rock climbing, the “lead” climber goes first, placing protection as she moves and clipping the rope into it with carabiners, or metal snap-links. In what has come to be called “traditional” climbing, the gear is placed in cracks and then removed by the “second” climber, who follows the ropelength (pitch) while the leader belays from above. It's rare that climbers pound in pitons anymore, as nonclimbers might picture with “nails” and “railroad spikes.” Instead we use low-impact passively seated gear such as the wired nuts that slot, like chockstones, into constrictions, or actively placed gear like spring-loaded camming devices (“cams”) on which you retract a trigger to create pressure between opposing lobes within a crack. Belaying a lead climber requires focus and diligence: Assuming her protection holds, she'll fall at least twice the distance climbed above her last piece of gear. That is, a leader who is ten feet above her last protection point will fall a minimum of twenty feet, factoring in two or three feet more for the stretch of the dynamic rope as well as slack playing through the belay device. The New Mexico Mountain Club imposed belay drill upon belay drill until our final test to become certified belayers: catching a hundred-pound rock dropped from a cottonwood in lower La Cueva Canyon. The instructors would hoist the rock with a three-to-one pulley system, making gleeful, almost sadistic comments, and then drop it repeatedly, having us halt it with a hip belay—in which the rope is brought around the waist—and with a Sticht plate, the earliest mechanical belay device. Anchored to a rock beside the cottonwood, we'd feel the terrible forces upon us and the belay system as we fought to check the fall. So much of climbing is built on this elemental trust between climber and belayer, roles we exchange fluidly as we move up a multipitch climb or even while “cragging”—climbing on lower, single-ropelength cliffs. You must place a rightful trust in your partner or the center will not hold. In climbing, you become friends for life with people who, as a matter of course, routinely save your bacon.

*   *   *

I
can't recall the name
of the psychiatrist I saw a few times at Challenge, but he was an old, cold fish whom all the kids hated: pasty and flabby, his mouth full of marbles and ears packed with wax. I'd already begun improving, thanks to the structure imposed by the program, but the doctor nonetheless wanted to try Desipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant like the nortriptyline that was to be my final medicine. The tricyclics are old antidepressants spun off from the infamous Thorazine,
3
a phenothiazine major tranquilizer, or antipsychotic; the major tranquilizers also go by the name “neuroleptic,” which means “attaching to the neuron,” a term coined by Jean Delay and Pierre Deniker to, as the “antipsychiatry” psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin writes in
Toxic Psychiatry
, “underscore the toxic impact of the drug on nerve cells.”
4
Tricyclics come with unpleasant antidepressant side effects including cotton mouth, blurred vision, low blood pressure upon standing (orthostatic hypertension, aka a head rush), sedation, lethargy, blunted emotional response, and suppressed gut, urinary, and sexual function.
5
As I'd find out, they're heavy, dirty pills that give you heart palpitations and fatten you like a veal calf. They are also incredibly difficult to taper. Fortunately, I broke into a rash after one week on Desipramine and we stopped the regimen. What ultimately allowed me to be in the world this time was not a pill but desensitization therapy. In my final month at Challenge, I visited Highland twice with the karate teacher, Gerald, and walked through campus to see that nothing bad would befall me. I'd traded in the punk look, too, for a more incognito skate style: maroon Chuck Taylors, a windbreaker, a flattop hairdo, and simple gold-hoop earrings.

I was lucky I found climbing at this critical juncture. It really could have gone either way. My love for the mountains only deepened after taking a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) Adventure Course in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming the summer after Challenge, and the NOLS Mountaineering Course in the Wind River Range the following summer. I kept signing up for NMMC trips, too, and to this day remember the kind mentorship of its core members, who taught me to lead-climb and passed along hand-me-down rock shoes and lead protection. My parents were behind climbing all the way, happy to see me well again; they gladly dropped me off and picked me up at the club's rendezvous spots in town, and helped pay for the expensive equipment. Soon I made a few friends my own age at Highland who were also into climbing, and we formed a little tribe.

I graduated in 1990, a straight-A student despite missing class more and more to go to the rocks. We would tear out of the parking lot after school or cut afternoon lessons to spend half days on the silent, austere vertical panes of welded tuff in the Jemez Mountains, on the bulging andecite of Box Canyon near Socorro, or bouldering in the Sandia foothills. I never felt totally comfortable at Highland and never did keep a locker—I lugged my duffel bag everywhere and spent lunchtime as far from campus as possible—but I made it through without a single fight. Soon, because Highland was academically so unchallenging, I fell into smoking pot, a daily habit from sophomore year nearly until I graduated. High on the Mexican marijuana that flowed freely through town, I'd either read the
Climbing
magazines tucked into my textbooks or sleep with my head on my desk. In a school where I once saw a fistfight, replete with a WWE body slam, break out during a geometry lecture, the quiet, stoned, straight-A kid in the back of the class was the least of the teachers' worries. My high school years were oddly schizophrenic, split between climbing, constant training (road biking, weight lifting, and pull-ups) for climbing, and smoking weed. A few climbing partners liked to burn as much as I did, and getting high on the way to the rocks, at the rocks, on top of the rocks, and beside the rocks was as integral to a day out as making sure your harness buckle was doubled back. Climbing was still a fringe, counterculture sport, and it wasn't uncommon to smell sweet, skunky pot smoke wafting up below the cliffs. The marijuana dulled our pain receptors so that we could climb until our fingers bled, and imparted that single-minded focus you need to “get into the zone” … if you weren't too hell-baked to remember where the next hold was. It could also make you unreliable, out of it, and hopelessly scared. You never knew which way it would go until you cashed a bowl and pulled on your rock shoes.

In the mid-1980s, a new style of climbing—so called “sport climbing”—was ascendant in America, having sprouted on the welded-tuff formations of Smith Rock, Oregon, and having also trickled over from France. In sport climbing, the emphasis is on pure gymnastic difficulty, the climbs having left the traditionally protected fissures for the smoother, blanker faces in between. As such, climbers install expansion bolts (construction-grade anchor bolts with stainless-steel clipping hangers), often with power drills and on rappel, a radical departure from the “ground-up” ethos that had dominated since the dawn of mountain climbing, when logic dictated that you begin at the bottom and end at the top. In much the same way that snowboarding split from skiing, causing temporary friction on the slopes, so, too, did sport climbing cause feuding in the climbing world. In the 1980s, sport climbers adopted a punk/new-wave style, wearing garish Lycra dance tights, boasting earrings and flashy hairdos, and either going shirtless or sporting neon-colored tank tops; they might even bring a boom box blasting rap or heavy metal to the crags. These “rads” (versus the “trads”) were also known for unapologetic anorexia, in constant pursuit of the perfect strength-to-weight ratio that let them, with less heft to hoist, achieve higher grades. It was considered a badge of honor to be “way honed”—so bereft of body fat that you could see every last rib, vein, tendon, and muscle.

Around that time, my mother and I caught a slideshow from Christian Griffith, a pioneer of sport climbing from Boulder, Colorado. He showed photos and video of a trip he and other Americans had taken to Buoux, France, then the cutting-edge sport “Laboratory” in Europe, and home to some of the first 5.14s. Still wiry to this day, Griffith was open about the radical dieting he saw at Buoux (the Frenchies favored chain-smoking in lieu of food) and his struggle to cut weight to do a 5.13c called
Chouca.
In sport climbing, climbers will rehearse and attempt a prospective climb, or “project,” in hopes of a “redpoint”: a clean, top-to-bottom ascent without weighting the rope. Much as gymnasts rehearse a single routine for a competition, climbers learn, refine, and ingrain each move (the so-called “beta”) such that when that perfect “low-gravity” day comes, when they're feeling snappy and the air is cool, to aid skin-to-rock friction, they put it all together. They might even draw a “beta map”—an informal, hand-sketched topographic outline of the holds and sequences—to study. In trying
Chouca
day after day, week after week, Griffith had taken to starving himself at the cliffs to get leaner; in the throes of his hunger pangs, he'd look longingly upon the plastic bag of dried oats his climbing partner Dale Goddard brought and measured out in precise allotments before each climb. Griffith also took to restricting water, and once even tried
Chouca
in his underwear to cut weight. He would also obsessively tend to his fingers, filing down, gluing, and smoothing them to perfect points that more easily slipped into
Chouca
's solution pockets.

As he gave his slideshow, Griffith pointed out how unhealthy his behavior had been, and that it was phoning his girlfriend and breaking down to eat a couple of “forbidden pastries” one morning that had finally loosened him up enough to redpoint
Chouca
. But I remember thinking, in this first introduction to real, world-class sport climbing, that I, too, needed to get
skinny
if I were to touch the big numbers, 5.13 and 5.14. And I
wanted
it: In the same way that I'd always pushed myself to get good grades and to exercise, so, too, did it go with climbing. In the early days, in the honeymoon phase, I'd climb five or six days a week, rarely taking rest to let my skin and muscles heal. I'd climb with “flappers” (flaps of skin sliced away by sharp handholds) and “splits” (fissured calluses at the creases in the hand), leaving blood on the rock. I'd climb until my fingerprints wore off, leaving only dewy pink flesh. Meanwhile, cultivating an eating disorder—buliramexia, it turns out—was frighteningly easy, like slipping on an old pair of slippers. Though I'd always been obsessed with exercise and my weight, I started getting truly nutso in the spring of my sophomore year, paring my diet down to the bones. I'd have a General Foods Diet International Café Vienna coffee drink for breakfast, a Diet 7Up and miniature box of Red Hots for lunch, a few corn chips once I came home, and as small a dinner as possible.

To cross-train, I rode my father's old Motobecane ten-speed along the ditchbank paths through Albuquerque, cluelessly hammering in the highest gears for a “better workout” even as the crank barely turned on the hills. At school, I took a weight-lifting class after lunch in lieu of PE; my blood sugar precariously low, I'd feel fainter with each set until my hands shook on the bar. I could sustain starvation for four or five days, then would usually, in a stoned, crazed, late-night fugue, raid the kitchen and devour everything in sight: ice cream, juice, cheeses, bread, Grape-Nuts, the frozen bagels my father kept in the freezer. We liked to go to Dunkin' Donuts on Sundays, my father and I, and if I could make it through the week properly starved I'd allow myself one chocolate-chip muffin. This “sin” would then trigger a “fuck-it-I-broke-the-rules” feeding frenzy until I was so stuffed I had to sleep on my side. After every binge, I was back on the rocks or on the bike, burning off the calories, my stomach glazed in sugars and roiling in protest at having been so rudely shrunken then stretched. And so the cycle continued: bleak, hopeless, unending. Self-starvation is a bugaboo—because you need food to live, it places the brain and the body at odds as food, your sworn enemy, comes paradoxically to occupy your every waking thought as your body cries for nourishment. It's a double torture. All you can think about is cramming sugary, salty, crappy junk into your gob, even as you hate yourself for these cravings, even as you starve down to a skeleton but still see a bloated ogre in the mirror, a mind twist called body dysmorphia. I'd prefer a heroin addiction over one to food: Black tar, for example, has no caloric value.