I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (30 page)

“Mishka, you are almost done!” She looked stunned. “You have only five miles left!”

I'd already run more than a marathon? I was tired, and I was ready to be done, but I wasn't dying. I could do this.

After less than a year of sobriety and only nine months of running, I completed my first ultramarathon. Izgi was there to take my picture as I ran across the finish line. I'd never even run a marathon, but I was learning that you had to dream big.

We stuffed ourselves after the race, then I folded my tired legs into my little car. We talked and laughed the entire drive home, blinking in the spring sunshine. While I had been running, the clouds had lifted.

CHAPTER 10

Longest Day

A
lcohol is an excellent aggregator. When you are drinking to excess, every problem, great and small, seems to fall under the same umbrella. I can't keep a job because I'm a drunk. I'm out of shape because I'm a drunk. I am depressed because I'm a drunk. I have a short fuse because I'm a drunk. My apartment is an indoor slum, a buffet of filth, because I'm a drunk. I can't be counted on for basic social niceties, like saying good-bye or responding to emails or sending a note when your father dies or not mortally wounding your liquor cabinet and stealing the expired Vicodin from your bathroom and pissing my jeans on your couch, should you foolishly allow me to crash at your house for a night, because I'm a drunk.

When you stop drinking, those collected problems scatter. Getting sober is like knocking a jar of your sister's tiny colored glass beads off the arm of the couch. The instant the jar shatters, the beads flee like they have been imprisoned. Sure, you can clean up a big clump of them pretty quickly, but for the rest of your life, you will be finding them between the seat cushions, under the couch, stuck to your feet, sometimes even carrying them into bed with you.

Things went south with Izgi. There was no screaming, no throwing of dishes, no infidelity. There were just fewer shared laughs, fewer shared smiles, fewer shared looks, fewer connections. We talked about it. Izgi and I were each hard-pressed to find something the other had done wrong. Neither of us even raised our voices. Still, there was a shared unease, a mounting sense that, time and again, we were out of sync.

One Friday, that spring, we fought. Our first fight, a big fight, a sad fight. On Saturday, we had the best day we'd ever had together. On Sunday, I packed up the few clothes that I had kept in a bin at Izgi's Soho apartment—the Mishka Box, she had called it—while we both held back tears. Then I drove back to Brooklyn. The least dramatic good-bye I could remember—no threats, no concerned neighbors, no cops. Still, it hurt like hell.

That's how life goes sometimes: don't do anything wrong, do everything right, fail anyway. It was the first breakup I'd ever gone through without the solace of that tireless listener, that bottomless well of comfort, that sympathetic devil: alcohol. It was rough. Izgi was at the center of my new life. But I wasn't a drinker, so I didn't drink. I was a runner, so I ran. I ran as I had before, in the shoes Izgi had bought for me, wearing the shirts Izgi had bought for me. But now I put on sunglasses before long runs so people couldn't tell I was crying.

I ran the North Face trail marathon through the wet Virginia heat only a month after my first ultramarathon. Two weeks after that, a 50K in Montreal, wincing with each step. Two weeks after that, I got in my car at 4:15 a.m. after my shift at Beauty Bar and drove up past Ithaca for the Finger Lakes 50K, a gorgeous single-track trail through quiet forests into broad, sunny cow pastures, the sky exploding blue overhead. Another 50K a month later. Then another two weeks after that. And various local 10K races scattered throughout the summer so I would qualify for the New York marathon the next year. Longer than my punishing first run less than a year earlier, 10K races now seemed so short they hardly
even registered in my head. I'd nap on the couch at Beauty Bar for forty-five minutes after closing, bike up to Central Park to race, then bike home and collapse after twenty-four hours on my feet.

I made every mistake possible. I drank too much water, I didn't drink enough water, I drank too much Coke at an aid station and gave myself heartburn. I didn't eat enough, I ate too much, I didn't eat steadily over the course of the day, I wolfed down M&Ms at an aid station and barfed. I got blisters on my heels, I got blisters on the sides of my feet, I got blisters between my toes. My toenails turned black and fell off, grew back, and fell off again. My chubby thighs chafed, my balls chafed, my butt cheeks chafed, my nipples, my underarms,
everything
chafed. I got terrible gas one race and thought I could stealthily squeak it out, a little here and a little there. When the song on my iPod ended, I could hear other runners laughing at me as I farted audibly with each step, like I had a duck in one shoe and a frog in the other. Little by little, though, I started to figure it out.

“My body is a monster driven insane,” I heard Nick Cave sing for the first time when I was fifteen. For years I had let my body run wild. Now, like a jittery, wild mustang, it needed to be broken. It needed to be exhausted, punished even, then dominated and mastered. It had to learn to go when I told it to, faster, faster. It turned where I wanted—the long way home, not the short way—and only stopped when I was ready. It had to serve me. But then, as with a horse, I had to care for it.

My counselor had been carping on about all kinds of self-stuff. Self-care. Self-love. What was next, self-fellatio? The problem with America wasn't that we didn't love ourselves enough, it's that we loved ourselves too much. Still, I knew what he was getting at: if you showed a little care and cleaned your kitchen once in a while, you inevitably hated your apartment less. And maybe even felt a little better about your life.

It wouldn't be capitulating to treat my body like my other mode of transportation, my car. Don't waste time, energy, or money on
frivolities—car washes and bumper protectors and new floor mats. Just the bare minimum: check the fluids regularly, keep it fueled, and do the necessary maintenance. And if I intended to race the old, high-mileage shitheap, well, I needed to be vigilant about caring for it. I even came up with some rules for running.

Never get hungry
. Whenever you're offered food, take it—not a lot, just a little—and keep moving. If you waited till you got hungry, then it was too late. You'd either gorge and get sick to your stomach or feel nauseated and continue not to eat, making the nausea worse. Calorie shortage manifested mentally before it did physically. Depressed? Having a rough day? Ready to quit running forever? Eat something, and watch your worldview swing around. But what goes up, must come down. If you ate a handful of Skittles, you would rocket up, then come crashing down. If you drank a Red Bull before the race, you'd be crawling by the end. I ate white foods—oatmeal, bagels, bananas, cubed potatoes, potato chips—as they padded your stomach, were easy to digest, and were quickly converted into sustained energy. Caffeine was fine, but only for the last quarter. Sugar was only for the last gasp.

Never get thirsty
. Every time you thought “Should I drink?” you should drink. Every time you didn't think about drinking, you should drink. Peeing took valuable time, but it took less time than dealing with a muscle cramp. Drink water, warm not cold, and
water
, not soda or juice or any kind of fancy fuel. You could drink that, too, but you had to drink water. And salt. Mix an untasteable amount in your water, or steal a couple of packets from your local McDonald's and rub some on your gums at the aid station. Like it was the good old days and that salt was pure, flaky cocaine.

Never get lost
. Each race was long enough without tacking on bonus miles. Never turn down help. A cookie or a chip or a smear of Vaseline or even a hug might keep you going. Never tough it out. That minor chafing or hot spot or little grain of sand in your shoe at mile four might end your race at mile twenty-four. Never give yourself an out. If you said you'd run halfway and then evaluate
it, you'd drop at the half. If you said you'd see how you felt, you'd drop when it got dark or when it got cold or just when you got tired. When you lined up at each race, you had to tell yourself that if you bled from every pore, if your feet broke off and you had to run on your splintering shinbones, if monkeys flew out of the sky with AK-47S that shot ninja swords, you were still finishing that race.

Never, ever give up
. To be a runner, you had to listen to your body, and you had to ignore your body. Can't run anymore? Walk till you can run again. The race ain't over. Can't walk anymore? Stand till you can walk again. The race ain't over. Can't stand anymore? Sit down, lay down, vomit in the grass, cry and curse God and tear out your hair. Then stand up again. The race ain't over. The race ain't over. The race ain't over.

I had blown off seeing the therapist once I'd hit the six-month mark and had my exit interview with Project Link. But I forced myself to start going again. “Be your own father,” the narrator in
Invisible Man
had said. I started with a new counselor, Chris.

Chris didn't do anything. Each time I came in and sat down, he asked me how I was doing. Fancy, expensive PhD hanging on the wall, just to be able to ask me how I'm doing?

We talked about the band. We talked about running. We talked about my job. I felt bad because we never talked about how Chris was doing.

“We can talk about me next week,” Chris said with a grin as I was leaving.

I showed up in a snit one day and questioned aloud why I was even there. It was one thing to say you were an alcoholic in a bar. The solution there was to have another drink. Saying it in a doctor's office was much scarier—the solution there was to never drink again. I'd been careful not to cross that line and cop to the “A word” with Chris.

At my worst, it was still debatable whether I was an alcoholic. I knew from the Twelve Steps that alcoholics were supposed to be powerless before alcohol. I'd never been powerless. Or at least I hadn't consistently been powerless. I had turned drinks down sometimes, or only had one or two, and had sometimes gone days or even weeks without drinking. It wasn't war all the time. I'd always known people who drank more than me, people who were worse drunks than I was, people in deeper trouble. And I had stopped without rehab or AA. Alcoholics weren't able to do that.

“You keep asking me about my life, and I've kept bouncing it back to you,” Chris said. “You really want to know about my life?”

“If you're going to tell me how you're an alcoholic and AA saved your life, then start crying and try to hug me, I
will
punch you, Chris.”

“Relax. Nobody's punching anybody. I'm gonna tell you about a friend of mine. Guy I grew up with in Stuytown. Ernesto.”

I perked up. I loved hearing about the carnage of others' lives.

“This guy Ernesto, we went to school together. Pretty good ball player, point guard. I could get around him sometimes, and I could shut him down sometimes because I worked harder than anybody out there. You know, short kid disease. But when he committed and really drove to the hoop, he was unstoppable. Ernesto didn't drink every single night or always get shitfaced. But if he could, he would. He didn't black out every single time, but if there was nothing standing in the way, he did. Bad shit didn't happen every single time he blacked out, but sometimes it did.”

“I know plenty of guys like that.” Big deal.

“We went to different schools but sort of kept up, you know, pickup games in the summer. And we both wound up back in the city after school. Ernesto didn't always drink in the morning, but sometimes he did. I think he wanted to more than he did. He just . . . seemed to have a hard time being happy without alcohol. With it, he was the king of the world, you know, life of the party,
girls hanging all over him. Still, any given day, at any given time, he would rather be drinking.”

I rolled my eyes. “And then one day he woke up, and he was dead. Moral: don't drink. The end. Very sad, Chris.”

“Nah, he's still alive. Doing fine.”

“So now he's a custodian and you're a doctor. I saw that Afterschool Special, too.”

“Am I telling this story or are you?”

“Sorry. I'll let you finish.”

“No, it's cool; you want to be the doctor, you can be the doctor. So, Dr. Shubaly, do you think Ernesto is an alcoholic?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Yeah, he's a fucking alcoholic.”

Chris nodded but didn't say anything.

“So what happened to Ernesto? What's the moral? You're a shrink; there's gotta be a moral.”

“No moral, Mishka. There is no Ernesto.”

I flushed.

“Aw, fuck off, man.”

“I can't diagnose you, Mishka. You're the only one who can make that call.”

I suddenly felt very small and very scared.

“Okay. Fine. So I'm a fucking alcoholic. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I don't care either way. You want to take it back? I won't tell anyone.”

“No. Fine. I'm a fucking alcoholic. The worst thing is true.”

“Mishka, this isn't bad news. Or even news. From what you've told me, you've been an alcoholic for a long time. What's changed is that now you're facing it. You're climbing out.”

I hated Chris. I hated him for getting paid to listen to me bitch and complain. I hated the way he spoke, his carefully calibrated mix of “street” and the bullshit lexicon of “steps” and “progress” and “self-care.” I hated the careful little traps he laid that I blustered right into. And I hated him for being right.