“You sure they’re tranquillizers?” he asked. “I don’t feel anything.”
It had been roughly 20 minutes since Brian took the two little blue pills I’d offered him. We were lounging on the couch at his girlfriend’s house, drinking her father’s beer and eating snacks.
A Celtics basketball game played on the huge television. Her parents were out of town and she was out with her friends, leaving us to our delinquent male devices.
Brian and Leigh had started dating roughly six months earlier, shortly after the start of our junior year of high school. Brian and I had grown up just houses apart on the same street in a typical middle-class Des Moines neighborhood. Brian’s dad was an ex-Air Force captain and the head of security at a local college. Mine designed bridges for an engineering and architecture firm. A third buddy, Pete, lived across the street, halfway between Brian and me. His dad was a senior manager for the local electric power utility. The three of us frequently hung out together. On this night, however, it was just Brian and me.
Leigh’s family was relatively wealthy, and it was reflected by the upscale neighborhood, sprawling house, and luxurious furnishings. The professionally landscaped property sat on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Des Moines River. The picture window in the family room faced the back yard and afforded a panoramic view of the wooded river valley below and farm fields beyond.
Since he started dating Leigh, Brian had become increasingly “uppity.” He had accompanied her family on a ski vacation to Colorado over the holidays, and now considered himself a bona fide “ski bum.” He spoke enthusiastically of “moguls” and “back-scratchers” and “daffies.” Leigh had given him a brightly colored, absurdly expensive ski jacket for Christmas, and he wore it everywhere. The front zipper was adorned with a half dozen lift tickets.
Brian also had a steady new supply of trendy prescription drugs pinched from Leigh’s mother’s medicine cabinet. He casually dropped pharmaceutical names like “Quaalude,” “Darvocet” and “Percodan,” as if they were brands of soft drinks or candy bars.
None of this sat well with me. Prior to entering the public school system in junior high, I’d been educated at parochial schools. I still attended catechism class one night a week. While I’d been mildly corrupted by my new secular school surroundings, I was still a Catholic choir boy at heart. Deep down, Brian’s new elitist attitude and trendy prescription drug hobby pissed me off.
The third member of our neighborhood trio, Pete, had lost his father a year earlier to a sudden, unexpected heart attack. His mom, after grieving for several months, had recently begun dating again. She also must have been going through menopause, because scattered haphazardly throughout their house were pill bottles labeled “estrogen.”
Responding in anger to Brian’s aggravating new behavior, I’d concocted a sneaky, underhanded, spiteful plan. I was in the process of carrying it out.
Over the course of the previous few weeks, I’d secretly stolen twenty or so estrogen tablets from Pete’s mom’s pill bottles, a few at a time. I was gradually feeding them to Brian, telling him they were prescription downers.
“I don’t know what else they could be – Christ, they’re prescription,” I replied. “Hell, the label even said ‘Do not take with alcohol or operate motor vehicles’ and all that other drug interaction disclaimer shit.”
Brian shook his head and said, “You positive? Man, I’m not feeling even the slightest buzz.”
“Really? I’m a little buzzed.” I tried to sound convincing. “Maybe it’s because you took them on top of all that chips and dip you ate. Here, take a couple more.” I dug around in my pocket for the bottle.
It might have been my imagination, but I thought his voice sounded a note higher than it had the previous week. As I shook a couple more pills into the palm of his outstretched hand, what I really wanted to say was, “Gee, Brian – you seem a little light in the loafers tonight. Are you feeling … pretty?”
(c)2011 Thom Burns
No comments:
Post a Comment