also tempered with fear. She never knew anymore whether she’d be seeing me for the last time. All she could say was, “Okay. I love you, Josh.”
I kissed her quickly, avoiding her eyes as I strapped on my Glock 45-caliber handgun and grabbed a wad of cash from our safe, and muttered, “Love you too.”
I opened the door and heard, on my way out, “Be safe. Come home soon.” I left for The Library, a topless bar owned by my father, to meet Chris and get the party started.
Lisa spent the next three days upset and increasingly resolute. This certainly wasn’t the first time she’d seen me pull this kind of stunt, disappearing for days, but this time, for some reason, it felt different. This time, she was convinced, would be the last. Because even if I made it home alive, Lisa was determined to end the madness. Her resolve grew stronger with every passing day: If I wouldn’t agree to get some professional help for my drinking, she was prepared to leave me.
SIDEBAR:
There wasn’t much I could say.
I would be going to work soon
and knew he would leave the
house anyways. It was a cycle
that happened over and over
throughout the years to where
we were just going through
the motions. It was a no-win
situation. I felt like I had lost a
part of who I was during this
time and I was done.
Meanwhile, Chris didn’t stay at The Library with me but a couple of hours. Responsible to the core and loyal to my family, he was sure to ask me what my plans were – was I headed home, too? I told him I would be, just so that if Lisa asked him about me, he could report honestly that I’d been planning to return home soon. I knew that if Lisa really wanted to find me, she would. She was a natural detective, and she knew all my favorite haunts.
I spent the next 24 hours hitting several casinos, eventually growing bored enough to call a few party friends and make a plan to meet up at Cheetahs, and then Crazy Horse 2, both strip clubs, both perfect places to disappear with my friends and drink. Now don’t get the wrong idea here, strip clubs aren’t that glamorous, and our wives had been there many times with us. I was buying, so it was a hard offer for my friends to refuse, and none did. By November 26 – day three of my run – I was a complete mess and it was finally time to crawl home.
I had timed it just so that when I arrived in the middle of the night, Lisa would have left for work already, and she wouldn’t have to see me like this – beaten up, depressed, broke, and reeking of alcohol and strip clubs. I had convinced myself that carrying a handgun was a matter of necessity; it was essential, in my line of work, and in a city this tough, to protect myself. But if I’m being honest, I was terrified of the hallucinations that plagued me every time I drank or took drugs. They took the form of dark, haunting shadows moving around the room and around me, paralyzing me with fear. Wearing the gun gave me an irrational sense of comfort.
But as I entered our home and crawled onto our couch, confronted with depression and loneliness as real as our furniture, as well as a troubled sense that I’d done irreparable damage to Lisa and our marriage, that gun gave me comfort in a new way. It offered a way out. I was my own enemy, I knew that, and here, face to face with my enemy and with no one to stop me, my way became clear. I had struggled for years with the temptation of suicide, and on this night, I thought, maybe the madness could finally end. I began to sob from utter despair, now believing there was nothing I could do to improve this situation but end my own life.
My next memory is of sitting on the couch with my Bushmaster 223 AR-15 assault rifle in a sort of trance, resigned to ending my life as quickly and efficiently as possible. I had spent over an hour cleaning, oiling, and reassembling the firearm. It was my process of honoring the weapon and preparing for death—the Samurai’s “way of the warrior,” or bushido. Yet I was ashamed of what I had become.
Hallucinatory shadows darted around me, clambering around the house, making ominous sounds and whispering terrible things to me. I took my weapon in my hands, sprang from the couch, and began walking the house, breathing heavily, clearing it room by room, and pointing the muzzle of the barrel into the darkness. My martial arts training was kicking in, and I was going through the motions, but what I was chasing, I still don’t know.
Why am I doing this? I asked myself, looking down in confusion at the rifle in my hands. What am I doing? There’s no one here. I then began thinking about turning the gun on myself. Am I really about to shoot myself with my rifle, in our home, so that Lisa can find me?
Lisa had been cleaning up my messes for years. Did I really think that killing myself this way, so that she could find me in a bloody mess on our floor, was going to help her?
I was so disgusted with myself, and full of fear. The hallucinations taunted me again, and I screamed a terrified, “Aaaahhh!”
The full force of what I’d planned to do hit me like a sucker punch. I dropped to the floor, letting go of the rifle, and cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. Can’t I kill myself the right way? I wondered. Could I do anything right?
SIDEBAR:
Over the course of the weekend, I
had grown stronger in my resolution
that I was done. I didn’t want to lose
Josh but I could no longer go on
feeling the way I did. I wanted to be
happy again, and those days were
few and far between. It felt like the
only time I was happy was at work
and I was tired of the worrying about
Josh and whether he would end up
dead, in the hospital or in jail.
After a long time spent crying on the floor of the hall, an idea occurred to me like another sick voice in my head. My martial arts training was so refined that I could do it myself, through autonomic control.
I could meditate deeply with extreme focus, which I had done many times before. But this time, if I could meditate deeply enough to block out physical pain and tap into energy, I could also reverse the process and shut down my body, depleting it of energy using those same methods. This last, deep meditation would just go deeper than I’d gone before. There would be no blood, no mess to clean up. Clean and efficient. This was my way out.
I crawled on my hands and knees into our home office, then
