Why Opiates are Bad

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was in Tampa working as a bartender, and drinking an unfathomable amount of liquor per night on a thyroidic, weakened liver. I was hung over and I needed to be not hung over, so I went to my sister's medicine cabinet in her bathroom, the hot pink one with the Disney accouterments, and pulled out the freshly-prescribed bottle of pills she was using to assuage the pain of back injury. They were called Lohr tabs and she seemed to be okey-dokey every time she was on them. She plucked all her eyebrow hairs out when she was off them, but on them she was right with the world.

I guess you could call them "horse pills" because they were pretty large. They were generics and of a pasty consistency, the kind of pill that's made from powder mashed into shape under great pressure. I took two, which was a dicey choice. My liver did the same thing with drugs as it did with alcohol--I took half of what you took and got royally fucked up. But I had suffered so many consecutive hangovers by that night that I would take anything to feel okay, and though those medicines were born from some machine in some lab in some town that was not Tampa and had nothing to do with me, and though I still had some scrap of a feeling that taking drugs was wrong from some teacher or parent lecture at some point in my past, those medicines had grouped, landed in my sister's pill bottle and consistently made her pain disappear before my jaundiced eyes. It was safe to say they were meant for my mouth on that night.

I lay in my dent on the couch, the hangover dent, and waited under a chenille blanket for the tab to kick in, assuming that when it did, my headache would go away and I would feel sort of "out of it." I had no idea that when it kicked in, I would feel such...warmth. I didn't expect to feel so hugged, so held by the universe, so sexual and so beautiful. I had no idea I would feel, for but a few fleeting hours, right as motherfucking rain.

The next day, I plucked all my eyebrows out.

***

I recreationally indulged in some drugs not long ago when I happened upon two chaps cutting up a mound of white on a crystal cake server at a party, and they offered, so why not? Assuming it was cocaine, why not? But it wasn't cocaine. It was oxycontin, and it fucked me up for days, not because it wasn't fantastic, but because people die snorting oxycontin and people get addicted snorting oxycontin. I decided right then and there to stop with the drugs. To my credit, I've been exposed to drugs, and offered drugs and haven't taken them. No shit, I'm almost an adult.

But yesterday, I got nicked by a car while out on a run. It sort of bashed into my knee while I was trying to negotiate crossing the street--the little green "walk" man was clearly illuminated, but I got nicked, nonetheless. The driver couldn't really speak English, so I wasn't sure whether he was angry or caring, but he was nice enough to stop, so I just sort of ran on. It wasn't until I had showered, gone to the market and returned that I realized I had really hurt myself. My knee started to throb.

Now, my medicine cabinet is full of all sorts of things not artificially created in a lab. I have one bottle of aspirin that doesn't dwindle, and the rest of the cabinet contents are herbs, fibers (very important), vitamins and supplements. I took more aspirin than recommended for the leg pain, but it didn't work. I took some more, and when that didn't seem to dull the pain, I was left with nothing more than herbs and supplements as pain reducing choices. It was then that most retarded idea dawned upon me:

I have drugs all over my house.

They fall out of my personal spaces--the red box that housed the mask daddy bought me in China, the box I put jewelry and notes from past lovers and used ticket stubs from really excellent movies into. Drugs fall out of those boxes all the time. I don't take them, but they fall out and have to be thrown away before Murph ingests them and dies. Seroquel and Vicodan and Paxil and blah, blah blah. Perhaps there are some Lohr tabs there. I just know there are.

I had to upend just about every personal memory to find the tab, but in the corner of the red mask box, in a little bag, chipped and pathetic looking was a pill with the tell-tale shape. I hadn't forgotten its shape. How could I forget that right-as-rain shape?

I swallowed it with trepidation, for I was too old for such shit, but my leg was fucking killing me. I watched some fuzzy non-cable television prostrate on my dentless couch and waited for it to kick in, uncomfortable because I never sit down any more.

A half hour later, my leg didn't hurt so much any more. A few minutes after that, I was met with warmth, not the same soul-sealing warmth I had experienced that night in Tampa, but a definite right-as-rain feeling. I could only enjoy this peace for a few more minutes, because on the other end of the rightness was the burning urge to get my ass to the Jack in the Box around the corner immediately. I limped there, stoned out of my melon, and ordered some sort of crispy spicy chicken sandwich only after having quizzed the acne-pocked but totally fuckable Armenian girl behind the window on each menu item, its merits, its faults, whether or not it had good energy etc. She recommended the spicy chicken thing, for which I am glad.

I should mention that the Jack in the Box was closed to regular customers, because while writing this story, I was too embarrassed about that detail to include it in my first draft. When a detail is too embarrassing--you must write it. I walked through the drive thru. I did.

I ate my sandwich outside on a soiled picnic table. It probably took hours to consume it, and I think this not because I was so aware of time passing, but because the beverage I balanced on my knee, my ghetto fabulous ice pack, was totally warm when I finished. I have to say that I remember each bite was a delight. I thought of the mother father earth God while I ate it, and how in its (the God's not the sandwich's) infinite wisdom, it had brought me that powder to assuage my knee pain, that cute Armenian girl to tolerate my weirdness, and that wonderful sandwich to enjoy on a hot LA night under the moon. I made love to that fucking sandwich.

Today, of course, I'm paying. I had to throw the tweezers in the garbage to stay away from my eyebrows and the knee is bad again. Also, there's the problem of the mound of processed junk food in my colon, gurgling and popping as it passes through, leaving behind a snail trail of monosodium glutamate and the irritated blisters of soon-to-be polyps that will eventually kill me. This is why opiates are bad--the aftermath.

Comments

Posted by: ineptmule at October 4, 2006 06:29 AM

Posted by: Mugglenet at October 4, 2006 12:56 PM

Post a comment