Joshua Lyon - Pill Head

This is why people OD on pills,

and jump from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Anything to feel weightless again.

THE HANDSOME FAMILY

The medicine cabinet is your best friend.

I dont call that medicine,

I call it too much of too little, too late.

HERMAN JOLLY/SUNSET VALLEY

We cannot learn without pain.

ARISTOTLE

I WAS FEELING NO PAIN .

I cared about nothing but this.

It wasnt just an absence of pain. It was warm waves pulsating through my muscle and skin. Breathing was hard, my chest felt weighted down by my own rib cage but I didnt panic because its impossible to feel anxiety about anything when every inch of your body is having a constant low-grade orgasm.

I dont know how long I lay there on my bed, watching the blades of my ceiling fan slowly turn, lazily spinning tufts of dust before they floated down through the air around me like so much gray snow. Through half-lidded eyes I watched Ollie, my cat, go ape-shit chasing the dust balls, and it took every ounce of strength to turn my head toward the other side of the bed. I lifted an arm, ran my fingertips along the wall until they hit the mattress. I studied the blank wall. Its surface was pebbled under the paint. Id always thought it was smooth. I got a sudden craving for an Orangina and, with a herculean burst of energy, sat up. Ollie freaked at my sudden movement, his eyes bulged out of his tiny skull and he went tearing out of my room in a manic frenzy. I heard him skid down the hallway, claws slipping on wood.

My skin itched. Everywhere. I stuffed my hands down the back of my shirt, pulled up my jean cuffs to get at my ankles, dug around the insides of my thighs. My fingernails sent jolts of red electricity down to the bone, but any discomfort washed away before it had a chance to really set in.

I kicked a pair of flip-flops out from under the bed and left my apartment. The usually harsh, trash-filled street looked soft as a meadow, and the light of the setting sun felt like a warm glow coming from inside me instead of the sky. In the bodega I found the Orangina and wandered up and down each aisle three times, picking up a bag of pretzels, putting it down. Opening the freezer, then shutting the door. Mr. Clean and I shared an intimate, prolonged stare. The cashier gave me a knowing smile and handed me my change.

Back upstairs I collapsed on the couch. Ollie dove into my lap, stayed there, warm against my stomach, writhing, trying to get closer. I reached for the TV remote, but it was a good six inches out of my grasp so I gave up. I felt my head roll back and hit the back of the sofa as another wave hit me, then I said out loud to Ollie, to myself: This is what Ive been waiting for my whole life.

Three Vicodin. That was all it took.

I was in love.

In the summer of 2003 my coworkers at Jane magazine and I began receiving massive amounts of email spam offering up Valium, Xanax, and Vicodin with No prescription needed! I kept hitting delete until the words actually sunk into my brain. It couldnt be that easy. My own physician wouldnt even prescribe a sleeping pill for a flight I had to take in the weeks immediately after 9/11. (In his typically reserved way, he told me to practice deep breathing and maybe have a cocktail, but no more than one.) So, strictly in the name of journalistic curiosity, I convinced my editor to let me try to buy these pills online. I wanted to see if it was just a scam or if it really was that simple to get controlled substances without a doctors prescription. Everyone in the officeparticularly the fashion and art departmentsloved the idea and seemed unusually eager to hear the results. The story got approved as a small front-of-book piece in our pop culture section. Even better, I was given a $600 drug budget, courtesy of Fairchild Publications.

The Xanax and Valium were easyI just had to fill out an online form. In the section where I had to explain why I needed the drugs, I wrote that I traveled a lot for work and I had a fear of flying. Within forty-eight hours I had two FedEx packages waiting for me on my desk: one with thirty brand-name Valium (the beautifully designed kind with the negative-space V in the center of each pill) and the other containing thirty alprazolam, the generic equivalent of Xanax. The two lots ran me $312 together.

The Vicodin order included an extra step: one of the online pharmacy staff doctors was going to call me for a consultation. I was also supposed to provide a phone number for my primary physician. I gave them a fake doctors name and an unused telephone line at my office.

Their doctor called me first thing the next morning. The conversation went like this:

You called to order Vicodin?

Hey, yeah, I, um, just had my appendix removed. I dont have insurance and your Vicodin prices seem pretty cheap.

Yes, we do have good prices. Well send it right out. Do you want thirty, sixty, or ninety?

Ninety, of course. And it was a good price, only $223.

The third package arrived the next day. I wrote up a quick 250-word blurb about how frighteningly easy it was to order meds online, making a joke about slurring my words a lot ever since, and took the bottles home. It was a Friday, and they might have remained in the bottom of my underwear drawer forever if I hadnt received a frantic phone call from my editor around 8:00 p.m. I panicked when I saw her number on my cell phone screen, thinking that something disastrous had happened at work, especially since I knew that she was supposed to be at her place on the Jersey shore that weekend.

What are you going to do with those pills? she demanded as soon as I picked up the phone.

I dont know, I said. Give them away? I hadnt thought about it.

I spent the entire train ride out here imagining you facedown on the floor somewhere, she said. I can just see the headlines now: Magazine kills editor. Its the last thing we need.

It was nice to know where I stood in the scheme of things.

Dont worry, Ill get rid of them, I said.

Promise? she asked. Flush them down the toilet.

Yes, I promise, I sighed, but it was already a lie.

I have a problem. When someone tells me not to do something, I immediately go out and do it. Its an anti-authority streak that has been in me pretty much since birth. It first reared its head in my Montessori school when we grew a large crystal made from Epsom salt on a string. We were told not to touch it, but it ended up in my pocket. When it was discovered missing we all had to sit in a circle on the floor and received a stern, yet oddly sympathetic speech (a trademark Montessori method) about stealing. Our teacher told us all to reach into our pockets, see if it was there, and come clean if it was. I slipped my hand inside my red Garanimals shorts and felt the smooth sides of the crystal, with its comforting, sharp points. I kept my hand tightly clutched around it. It was mine now.

When I hung up with my boss, I pulled the bottles out of my bag and stared at them. The labels were pathetically generic and looked like theyd been created on a typewriter. The originating pharmacies were located in Florida, Arizona, and Colorado, and the addresses felt strangely cold: for some reason Florida Drive just screamed unmarked storefront with the blinds closed shut, located in a partially deserted strip mall, an empty soda can rattling around the parking lot, pushed by the wind.