A Rough Start to a Long Career

My first trad gear purchase was a nut so small it appeared, to these virgin eyes, to be strung with no more than a Les Paul little E.
“Would you like to see something?” asked the clerk from behind the register.
“May I see that little nut?” I asked, and pointed with an arm that still felt like I slept on it funny.
“Sure. Finishing touch on your rack is it?” asked the clerk.
“Nope, just starting it, my rack,” I said. The clerk narrowed his eyes and adjusted his glasses in the ensuing awkward silence.
He cleared his throat, “Have you checked out this book? It came out a year or two ago.” He slid over a copy of John Long’s How to Rock Climb!
“No, I haven’t. Is it good?”
“It’s worth reading for sure.”
“In that case, ring it up.”
“You still want the nut too then?” he asked and shook his head no as he held it up like a hypnotist holds a pocket watch.
“The nut too,” I said.

A week prior to this most noteworthy of purchases, I stood exposed before the dormitory urinal and stared with a two-beer buzz into the porcelain fixture’s flushometer where the reflection of my face bulged, funhouse-like, in the curved chrome. I rocked back and forth on my heels shifting the perverted swell to create a giant forehead, huge eyes, and gaping mouth—gosh, with a maw like that I could eat a lot of Doritos. I smiled a monster’s grin and looked left where on the back of the nearby toilet laid a stack of several glossy magazines.

A distinctly non-glossy Campmor catalog, anemic by comparison, printed on nothing but newsprint in black and white, with a touch of green for color, dulled the top of the otherwise vibrant pile. Paramus New Jersey, the brick and mortar home of Campmor, was just a stone’s throw from where I grew up. As a family, we used to make the thirty-minute drive often to take advantage of low New Jersey taxes. Seeing the little catalog there atop the loo must have poked at my sleeping sense of homesickness because I grabbed its budget print on the way back to my dorm room.

I flipped through the little book as I sat on the edge of my bed; green and black line drawings of boots, sandals, and sneakers ran past tempting my consumer’s lust. I could run so much further and faster in a pair of those. Tents and sleeping bags rapt my interest as I daydreamed about where I might use a minus forty sack and single wall bivy. Yeah, Finland. No, Norway, yeah, the fjords of Norway. I turned the page.

A helmet and rope, a handful of nuts and carabineers in perfect line drawn representation met my eye for the first time. There were no daydreams to take me away—I couldn’t even imagine a use for this stuff. A page worth of climbing gear was all there was, and yet this strange gear somehow met my fancy as if I saw a pretty face on the other side of the lecture hall. I was smitten.

A week later I lay on my back after a friend told me how I could earn a few extra bucks. “Here, just take it,” she said.
“I don’t want it. It’s too much.”
“You know you want it.”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Well if you won’t let me lend you some money then you’ll have to sell something,” she said, putting a twenty-dollar bill back in her pocket.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Would you sell your bike?”
“No, I like my bike.”
“Drugs?”
“Not my thing.”
“Your body fluids?”
“Fluids what? Wait—you can sell your body fluids?”
“Yeah, plasma—”
“Blood plasma?”
“Yeah blood plasma, and you should probably stick with that, you’re not pretty enough to sell anything else.”
“Ha, ha, very funny. How much can you get for it?”
“Like, forty bucks.”
“Really? Forty bucks?”
“Yup. No joke.”

The room was large enough to hold twenty others there for the same thing. From my left arm came a plastic tube that snaked like a reddened Krazy Straw into a contraption that separated my blood cells from my clear plasma. Every few minutes the process reversed itself and the plasma-less blood cells were pumped back into my arm, along with room temperature saline, in a procedure that left my arm cold, on pins and needles, and dead feeling.

I tried to forget how my arm felt amid the whirl of the machine. I daydreamed about how good it would feel to have a few bucks and what the windfall would mean for my broke-ass college self’s newfound obsession with a few doodles in a second-rate gear catalog. I am going to be a climber. Until, that was, I began to feel a bit woozy and snapped back to the here and now.

My skin clammed up with a cold sweat, and I became very aware of a persistent hiss in both ears. My arm hurt. On the very limits of my vision’s periphery, a forgot-to-pay-the-cable-bill kind of static fizzle began to march in around my consciousness. Fuck me! This was a bad idea. This machine is sucking me dry. It must be broken; it’s taking too much!

The index finger of my non-dead hand moved across my torso and hovered above a red panic button that, a nurse informed me when the process started, would summon help if needed. I pictured myself on the very edge of consciousness, pushing the button, an alarm sounding, and a smelling salt toting nurse running over to revive my passed out form while all the other donors looking on in disgust. Push it! Just push it all ready! You are dying.

Sheer embarrassment of what might happen kept me from pushing it and my vision tunneled to two bright pinholes of fluorescent light. I was all but gone when the machine clicked, stopped whirling, and a happy electronic tune that signaled the bloodletting was over began to play. The static retreated. A nurse came over and unhooked the works.

“How was that?” she asked.
“No sweat.” I said and gathered my wits.
“You look a little pale.”
“Really? Huh. That’s weird.”
“Would you like a cookie and a glass of juice?”
“Sure I would, thank you.”

The cookie was stale, and the juice watered down, but they hit the spot. I finished eating, wobbled my way to the front counter, cashed out, and walked a few blocks to the nearest gear shop.

Suicide Rock. Twenty feet to my left was that god-forsaken #1 Black Diamond micro-stopper that I’d picked up a decade prior. The one that was never intended to be used for free climbing; the same one that, in fact, was to be used only for direct aid; that I kept on my rack these days more for a joke or conversation starter than anything I would actually spend time with fiddling a home for in some nothing of a crack—the thing wouldn’t hold my ghost in even a short fall.

I knew this now, but the mind does funny things in the moment—I once passively placed my belay device when I ran out of gear. I knew this, yet there that nut was, shiny as the day I bought it, twenty feet to my left in the last usable bit of a petered-out flake, and I, twenty feet to the right, on the terrible nothings of a Suicide slab. Nothing but credit card edges and friction and my mind in the grips of panic, not reveling in the movement or challenge or beauty of the climb, but at the perceived terminus of my short life. Fuck me. This was a bad idea, how did I even acquire that little piece of crap?