Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  Half an hour later I walked into my mother’s room, escorted by hospital security. Apparently they took threats very seriously there. The doctor was nowhere to be found. I heard later that they had sequestered him in a completely opposite wing of the hospital and that all personnel had been instructed to say that they didn’t know where he was. The idea that a full-scale cover-up of a doctor’s whereabouts had been launched because of an angry phone call that I had made, which had also sent said doctor to cower in a corner somewhere, filled me with a bitter joy.

  My mother saw me and half smiled before waving one rice-papery and blue-veined hand and saying, “Oh, this is ridiculous,” in the frailest voice I’d ever heard her use. Over the next few hours she went through moments of absolute clarity, and then she would seem to float away again. When she was present we talked about common things. There was no sense of urgency to the visit. I told her I loved her before I left, and that I would see her in the morning. It was odd; that was something my family just didn’t say to one another, not ever. The words felt awkward coming out of my mouth, and I was almost glad when she didn’t say it back but instead nodded.

  The next morning the phone rang. It was the doctor’s assistant, who had taken to calling me, as it was made clear that my mother’s doctor would no longer have any contact with me. She let me know that in the night, my mother had slipped into a coma. They were recommending that I move her into hospice. Hospice. Let’s talk about what the word hospice means. It means, in short, the place you go to die that isn’t your home. Hospice is essentially a hotel for the old and sick who check in to die with the comforts of pain medication and professionals monitoring their last moments to make them as comfortable as possible. Hospice is what happens when the machines making a person live are removed and they don’t die right away. For the people who need hospice, I’m sure it’s great. To hear the word hospice when you are being told that is where your mother should go is awful. It is one more step into the stark and frigid reality that very soon, you will have no parents left in this world.

  She was taken off of machines and moved that day. I was with her almost constantly after that. The afternoon of the twenty-second of May, around five thirty P.M., I squeezed her hand and told her I would be right back, and left to go in search of food. I posted up at Sharky’s, a local bar and grill nearby, and sat down to have a sandwich. The air was soft, a little cold. I finished eating in peace. I felt slightly less tense after taking my insulin and leaving the restaurant. I was driving back to the hospital when my phone buzzed. It was a text message. My cousin Bebe had arrived at the hospital that day. Bebe and her brother Jon are arguably the only sane, not-drunk people in my family. It baffles me, in fact, that they have turned out so incredibly normal, considering how everyone else turned out, including me. Bebe and I have always been fairly close. I paused at a stop sign to check the text. Bebe was texting me to tell me that my mother was dead. She had breathed her last while I was busy shoveling a fucking fish sandwich into my mouth. I hadn’t been there.

  I arrived at the hospital and walked into the room. Bebe walked toward me and grasped me in a massive hug. “Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks, Bebe, that’s nice of you to say.”

  I felt like I was in slow motion, like I was some humanoid robot version of myself that had had all the emotional parts removed, as I walked toward my mother.

  When people die, even if they haven’t been dead for long, they stop looking like themselves. The muscles of their face relax so much that they look like a bad sculpted rendition of the person they once were. The dead also release everything in their system. Complete core-dump evacuation, so the room was none too fresh, and all I could think was how much she would have hated that there were people there to see her like that. I have no idea how much time had passed before they came to take her down to the morgue. I don’t even remember how I got home that night. I know that that was the beginning of a two-and-a-half-year relationship with insomnia. I would not know a good night’s sleep for a long time.

  chapter tweleve

  You know, if I were to die right now, in some fiery explosion, due to the carelessness of a friend, that would just be okay.

  —SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

  I buried my mother on May 26, next to my father, in St. Vincent Cemetery. I received a number of phone calls, letters, and flowers. I responded to about half of them. On the morning of June 5 I left for San Jose to start training at a well-known gym there. My friend Paul Buentello was preparing for a big fight there, and I was flying out to help him. I was also flying out to get away from Pennsylvania, to get away from death. Little did I know, you really can’t outrun that shit.

  Training in San Jose was awkward. I was surrounded by incredibly high-level athletes—some are now belt holders in various organizations—and there I was, barely coming back to train, thirty pounds lighter due to muscle loss, and a complete head case. I no longer slept. I was lucky if I got three hours of actual rest in a night. Most nights I would go on these walks and just . . . walk . . . all night. Otherwise I would end up lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, just swirling through my unbearable fucking existence, and sort of really get into being a complete misanthrope. I had created this entire fashionable character around my frozen core. I was an abysmal person. Amy hated me. That was fine by me, because I hated myself. I was running from every responsibility and shirking everything, and I couldn’t handle the sound of her demanding and disappointed voice anymore, so I just shut her out. I ignored her calls, which meant I didn’t talk to my sons very often. I just felt like I had no purpose or place. I had no idea who I was. God I was a miserable piece of shit. Because I wouldn’t sleep, I would frequently just pass out wherever I was. Sometimes on the mats at training, which really earned me the respect of the other fighters. Makes your training partners think a lot of you when you show up and give less than 50 percent. It didn’t help that everyone treated me like I was made of porcelain because of the scar, until one day when Paul Buentello, who was a huge Mexican heavyweight originally from Amarillo, Texas, and I were sparring. Paul was my closest friend out there and kept me going when I easily could have just slipped away. I still talked to Justin, but Justin expected more of me, wanted me to care about my life, my training, my health, and I just couldn’t live up to that. Not now. Paul let me be fucked up, but he also yanked me back in line before I went over the edge. Paul and I were moving around, and Danny Acosta, one of the greatest combat sports journalists out there, was sitting by the ring watching us, waiting between interviews of the various fighters who would be fighting on an upcoming stacked card. One of the other fighters called out, “Hey, Paul, be careful, man, that guy had heart surgery.”

  It was serendipitous. Right as I turned my head away to tell the guy to shut the fuck up, Paul landed a haymaker of a right-hand square to my sternum. The thud was unbelievable, and Danny’s eyes went wide instantly as the force drove me back. As a journalist he reports on what he encounters, but he had not wanted to watch a guy die in the ring today. Paul stopped for a minute, then grinned through his mouth guard and shouted, “Yeah, he can fucking take it!” as I laughed. Danny exhaled a sigh of relief. So we continued.

  The night of June 22, a few of us went out for food and then headed over to Paul’s after-party. He had just knocked out his opponent, so we were fit to celebrate. I couldn’t tell you everything that we did. I know that that evening bled into the next morning and established a series of bad habits. Something broke in me as I figured something out. Alcohol made the ghosts disappear. Alcohol in abundance made me comfortable with not caring—in fact it facilitated it and even coaxed out a smile or a laugh. That night I tapped into a genetic pattern that had been set for me long before. That night I fell in love with booze. The very next day I boarded a plane to Pennsylvania to see my kids, my half-assed attempt at being a better father, and to handle some things. I reeked of alcohol even still when I landed. Amy’s anger with me broke long enough f
or her to try to reason with me; she tried to convince me to care enough about myself to not die and leave my kids fatherless, like I was. . . . I stayed only long enough to see them; I had already mentally had one foot back on a plane to leave since the minute I landed. I flew from Pennsylvania to Austin to continue training. Or at least that is what I told myself.

  I holed up at Randy’s gym during the day, and at night I went out with Randy. Randy had a massive personality, and everyone in Austin seemed to know him. He was big, black, and muscular and wore crazy silver rings on his fingers and leather jackets. He drove big trucks or motorcycles. I mean, everything about Randy was larger than life. I liked going out with him a lot; it meant a ton of liquor and no responsibility to entertain anyone. I had been avoiding Justin. I mean, I had seen him, hung out with him briefly, but he was always trying to protect me or get me to do healthier things that didn’t involve drinking, and I didn’t want to go there. Plus I could feel him wanting to ask me, for real, how I was doing. I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t sleeping, that I hadn’t cried, and that I didn’t give a fuck about anything, including me. He wasn’t going to let it go like I was hoping, and one night he cornered me. He pulled me aside at the gym, put that dark-eyed glare on me so I couldn’t flinch, and shot me straight through my fucking core.

  “You know, Mark, it was in this gym that I saw you nearly kill yourself because your passion for your sport was so strong. Now I just see this sad excuse of a guy going through the motions. You look like absolute shit. You roll in here with black circles under your eyes, you smell like you’re half-cooked on last night’s booze still. . . . What do I have to do, man? I am scared for you, Mark, I am scared for you. I miss my friend. . . .” Justin had one of his massive hands planted directly over the scar on my chest and was pushing me backward in something between a pulse check and an outright shove. I did what came naturally at the time. I brushed his hand away and turned my face away as I muttered, “Well, don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

  Justin didn’t give up that easily. He followed me and reached out to hug me. His eyes were starting to well up. Tenderness was a direct threat. The only key that was left to that massive safe I had sunk deep into the sand at the center of myself, that safe that contained all my pain, all my sorrow, all my fear, was honest kindness. This bore the horrific potential to unlock all of that. I couldn’t do it, not now. So I did what I was taught to do by my father. I reacted defensively and with hostility. “Justin, dude, get the fuck off me. I’m fine.”

  Justin pulled away, hurt and angry, and just shook his head. “Wow. I love you, Mark. I hope you figure this shit out.” With that he grabbed his gym bag and walked out, wiping his eyes.

  A few nights later Randy and I went out. I had met a bartender the night before and had gone home with her. A doe-eyed young thing who was equally as fucked up as I, but who had enough of a vocabulary and an interest in music to keep my attention for at least another go-round. It also helped that she was a bartender, so I saw the writing on the wall: she was never going to tell me to stop drinking. Her age and lack of education also meant that she was never going to expect much of me. We had gotten up late that afternoon and gone for food, and then for drinks before she went to work. By the time Randy and I met up, I was already on one. The unreal horror of my drinking was that I never could black out. I never forgot. I remembered everything. But I tried really hard to forget. Randy and I met up at her bar, a crusty, smelly dive located on South Congress. We stayed there for a while and then drove over to another bar.

  Randy was liquored up when we left the first place. His driving inebriated wasn’t something I gave two shits about at that time; in fact I would have driven myself if he had handed me the keys. I was on a piss-in-the-eye-of-destiny warpath, just daring the universe to kill me, almost asking for it. I was a type 1 diabetic post-open-heart-surgery patient who had just buried both of his parents that year, so a DUI seemed almost laughable. We stayed at the second place just until I knew that the bartender was going to be off in a few hours, and we decided to head back to the first bar. The route from the bar we were at to her bar was a straight shot and then a quick right into the parking lot. Randy and I climbed into his massive Dodge Ram truck and headed down Congress. Suddenly Randy turned down a side street. I looked around, confused. . . . This wasn’t the right way. “Hey, man, you turned too—”

  Suddenly I was in the air. For a split second I was almost comforted by my weightlessness. The shrill crunch of metal against metal was the soundtrack to my brief flight before my head made contact with the windshield, shattering it completely. I landed on the hood of Randy’s car and looked up to see the back end of a Jeep inches from my face. I had no idea what had happened. All I knew was that it felt like someone was pouring warm water over my head and face, and my eyes began to sting. I was asking, with squinted eyes, “Hey, man, Randy, what is going on . . . why is there warm water on my face?” I laughed. . . . Suddenly, sirens . . . I laid my face on the warm hood and closed my eyes. . . .

  In the emergency room the nurses were rushing me along, asking me questions. Had I had anything to drink that night? I laughed again. They asked me if I was on any other drugs; I told them insulin and “awesomesauce,” then I laughed again. They cut my shirt and shorts off, and I asked what was pouring all over my face. . . .

  “Mr. Miller, you have been in a very bad car accident. You were not wearing a seat belt and you went headfirst through the windshield. You have some very serious cuts on your head and face. We are going to have to use a brush to pull the glass out, and you are going to need stitches. Do you understand me so far?”

  Fucking whoa.

  “Yeah, I understand. I’m cool with it. Stitches don’t bother me, but I wish you hadn’t cut my clothes though, I liked them. . . .”

  The doctor pointed to a soggy brick-red pile of rags and said, “I don’t think they were salvageable anyway, sir.”

  They picked glass out of my face and head, and stitched up chunks of my eyebrow and my scalp. I was put through a CAT scan, and it was determined that I had a minor concussion and a bunch of small cuts and bruises. They wanted to keep me overnight for observation. I had no fucking interest in staying overnight in a hospital. None. I didn’t have my insulin, my phone, nothing. All of it was in a bag in the crushed remains of the car. Against their strong recommendations that I stay, I checked myself out. They asked me if I had anyone who could come and get me. I tried to remember Justin’s number. The only number I could remember was the bartender’s. So I called her.

  “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning, where are you? I thought you stood me up! I’ve been calling you all night.” Her voice had no concern in it, just mild irritation.

  “Well, I was kind of in a bad car accident on the way to the bar, so I’m at the hospital now. Can you come and get me?”

  I slept at her house that night, went to sleep almost right away, real healthy for a concussion victim, I know. The next morning I was standing by the wreckage of the truck, which had been towed to a parking lot on the other side of town. She stood close by, fidgeting with her car keys and smoking nervously. She kept muttering, “Jesus Christ . . . ,” over and over again.

  The car was completely crushed, and there was blood on the hood. I picked through glass to retrieve my bag and phone, which were both unharmed and sitting on the floor. I pulled my Humalog pen out of the bag, attached a needle to it, and took a lap around the car so I could quickly take a shot in my abdomen without her watching (I hate when people watch me take shots). As I stood, pulling off the now-used needle and repacking my pen into my bag, she asked, “Can I get you anything? I mean, shit . . . You had a really fucked-up night. . . .”

  “Yeah. Drive me to a liquor store.”

  chapter thirteen

  I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

  —C. S. LEWIS

  I was lying on my back insid
e the sweltering apartment of this bartender who was too young for me, who was not good for me, and I was hungover, again. I needed to get out of Texas.

  After the wreck, Randy and I were estranged from each other. It wasn’t his first DUI, and I didn’t want him to have to take the fall for all of my medical bills. Truth be told, we were both at fault to some degree. He should never have driven, but I should never have gotten in the car. Hell, I should never have gone out with him in the first place. I was still light-years away from being healthy, but I was not interested in being close to anyone who wanted to suggest that I should somehow look beyond the fact that he was driving the car and instead place the onus on myself. I didn’t want responsibility for anything. Away from responsibility and feelings was the direction I was moving, not toward.

  Amy had shifted from hating me to full-on trying to reason with me, which only meant that she was genuinely scared. The marriage failed. We didn’t work as a couple. But there was no denying that we were, and would always be, close whether we liked it or not. We had three children together; there was no avoiding it. So she was launching a full-scale attack on my ego in order to try to scare me back into living healthy. I heard a lot of “Oh, great job, Mark, I’m sure drinking excessively and partying with little girls is a great way to ensure that you will come back to fight. Just brilliant.” I hung up on her a lot. Mostly because I knew she was right.