Apr 2, 2008

Eureka!

I finally, not on my own, but finally stuck a move on this problem I have been working on for weeks. It's tough, you get pretty spread out leg-wise then have to pull up on a hold that is out far to your left. Apparently, if I had had my hand out one more inch the hold gets a lot stronger and now I can pull myself up and transition into a small dyno up to a flake and then continue the traverse. Unfortunately, I need a mat because the traverse gets sketchy there and I don't want to fall and hurt my ankles or something.

Fortunately, I have some work - just some internet stuff but it is a very welcome windfall. Between that and hopefully getting a part-time or full-time job, maybe the disney digitization job I will be putting money into my bank and be able to buy myself a crashpad AND start going to the climbing gym so I can work on some upside down stuff. Moving out would be nice too, but climbing first!

I just finished reading Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. It is his account of his son's meth addiction. I've gone through sort of the reverse situation with my dad and it has been painful reading but also helpful and soothing. One of the little points Sheff makes is that, since addiction is such an unrecognized disease people hide the addicts in their family, and instead of getting the support of say someone with a family member who has cancer people generally get no support. When I was in school, some people in our small town definitely knew, but I was ashamed. I never felt like it was my fault that my dad was a heroin addict but I also knew it was something to hide. No one ever said, "David (my dad) has a disease, and he needs treatment." Of course many people do not believe this, but Sheff and the research on this matter hold up very strongly. Heroin is bad, but Meth is worse in terms of what it does to your brain and serotonin levels.

If you don't want to read about this stuff, by all means stop. It isn't super happy or necessarily something you want to know about me, but it feels good to write about.

My father started using drugs pretty seriously as a teenager. He was a child prodigy on drums, jazz musicians would travel to Albany to witness his skills, and on some level I think he was ashamed to play rock music. He couldn't play in any of the clubs at that age and in that location. His mother had Huntington's disease which is a degenerative brain disease and is easily passed from mother to child. It is one of the few diseases that is a dominant genetic trait, meaning that generally if your parent has it you have a 50% chance of having an untreatable and nasty disease. Her condition was actually fine when David was young but around his early twenties things got much worse. No one really knew what was wrong, but she began to act very erratic, cooking spaghetti for hours, beating some of her other children, and so on. His dad's reaction to everything was to keep things normal and act as though everything was okay. It was a massive denial and is something he regrets deeply now. David was the only one who acknowledged it and ended up having to tell his three younger sisters that there was something very real wrong with mom and that their dad didn't want to deal with it.

I wasn't there, but in my eyes this was the moment that killed my dad. I'm sure that not meeting his potential weighed on him, but I understand what it is like to go through something like that at a young age. I know deeply what it is like to suddenly have way more responsibility than you are ready for. Ironically enough, my dad's position as a young man mirrors what I went through as a teenager.

Someday, I want to write a novel based upon my family's story from David onto my family. I do not think it will be easy, but the story is very compelling and bizarre.

My dad went on to be one of many supremely talented musicians with a huge substance problem that prevented him from making it in a large way. He toured, made money, but eventually was relegated to playing sets with local bands for shitty covers. Any drummer who ever saw him was impressed, and it was in those moments that my dad seemed momentarily free of everything that held him down in his daily life. I'm not too sure that he felt it, or would acknowledge it, but he was free then, more free than on heroin or codeine or coke. It wasn't the whole set, or even every set but sometimes in the middle of a drum solo as his drumstick slammed into a cymbal his eyes would open just a little more and a small smile would cross his face.

Many times as a child, and even now I've thought about whether I did enough. I was only twelve when things got bad. David had overdosed in the past, and no one really knows the total, but up until then he had kept it out of the house. Like all addicts he started out saying he was deathly afraid of needles, but one day after he picked my sister and I up from the bus stop and drove us home he went into the bathroom and didn't come out. He had been very argumentative in the car, but he was probably anxious to get his fix. After waiting awhile and then asking if he was okay, I went outside and climbed onto our old rocking chair with the red paint flaking off to peer into the bathroom window. There lying face down on the floor with his beret on the floor next to him was my dad, a needle in his hand, and a bag on the floor. I didn't panic. I honestly, do not know if I would handle that same situation as well today as I did when I was a child.

Something clicked in my head, and suddenly my only focus was on that moment and fixing that situation. I went inside to my little sister Emma, and told her to go play with Anna our neighbor. She knew it was serious but I wanted to shelter her from whatever was happening. Then I called my mom, who was at work and she called the ambulance. I ran down the street to intercept my friend who was coming over. It was a cold dry day in the middle of January. I ran in my t-shirt and saw him riding his bike past the fire station. I said, "I can't hang out Brooks. I'm sorry." He was a little mad, but I had other concerns. I ran back to my house, only a short distance to find the ambulance there, and my dad being pulled out of the house on a stretcher.

He went on to go to rehab, relapse, and then clean up after having been kicked out of the family and divorced. Sometimes Emma and I would see him, or he would come to the house. He overdosed again, and after that I was done with my relationship with him. I had court mandated therapy with him, but after I turned sixteen I stopped that and had virtually no contact with him until he died when I was nineteen. There were moments where I could look at him as though he was a complete stranger, and there were others where I loved him with all my heart.

At times, as an underachieving "intelligent young man" I thought what would my life have been like if my father wasn't an addict? What school would I have gone to? Would I write regularly instead of this intermittent bullshit? Would I be exactly the same and just have a less compelling excuse? It doesn't matter, it is what it is. I am who I am because of what I have been through and I am proud of my identity and where I am in life.

I didn't intend for this to turn into a spontaneous rehashing of my dad's overdose and death but it helped. Thanks.