Abe and the Percocet

In my senior year* of college, I had an abscessed tooth.

I still have no idea what the word "abscessed" means, but at the time it meant extremely painful, filled with puss and preventing me from eating steak. 

It was the year of our Lord 2000.  I had recently become married and I worked part time at a call center where I enjoyed speaking to irritated people.  

It was a life that dreams are made of.**

My tooth, it hurt. It hurt bad. Real bad. Well, not necessarily the tooth itself, but rather the nerves just below the tooth. 

I called my dentist and he arranged to meet me at his office at 9:30 in the evening. He was a very kind dentist without much of a life.

Our eyes met across the dentist's office parking and it was then that I knew that this would not be the romantic encounter that I had planned.

Dr. Holliday*** drilled a hole in my tooth and allowed the puss to drain.  He then took the puss, put it in a ziplock bag and proceeded to dump it on his head.*****

I left the office with a smile on my face and a brand new prescription for percocet. I was to return the following day after work for the finishing touches.  

At this time of my life, I was a fairly heavy abuser of Hostess fruit pies. I am not proud of this and it is difficult for me to talk about to this day.  I ate these fruit-filled piles of processed sugar like they were going out of style.***** Cherry was my favorite. That morning I had two of them.  I figured I deserved them both; I had definitely endured two fruit pies worth of pain.

I sat in my call center cubicle, awaiting a call from someone who would undoubtedly yell at me about something or another, when my tooth began to throb. Pain radiated from that one spot in my skull into every morsel of my body.******

That bottle of percoset sat on the corner of my desk and I glared at it longingly.  I had taken one of those saintly pills the night before and it had eased me to sleep.  I assumed it was time to take another, but this pain was breathtaking. Was one enough? I mean, I had always taken aspirin in pairs.  And I always ate Doublemint gum in pairs.******* What would be the harm in taking two percosets at once?  

No harm. That was the answer I rationalized in my peabrain.

I downed the percosets and sat back in my chair, waiting for sweet relief to take hold of my morsels. 

Relief came and it came swiftly.  I looked at my computer screen and it began to unfold into tiny particles.  The particles then danced across my desk and onto my lap.  I stood up and tried to wipe them off to no avail. 

I glanced at my coworker sitting across the room.  She was wearing a string bikini and a grass skirt.  It was not Halloween.  She weighed close to 300 pounds. ********

The room began to spin.  And when I say it began to spin, I mean it appeared as though I was standing in the one stationary spot in the room and everything else was rotating around me.  It was as though I was in the very center of the universe.  It was all at once exhilarating and terrifying. 

Suddenly, I felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. I yanked off my headphones, stepped onto the spinning floor and ran sidewards to the bathroom.  I did not make it, but fortunately I made it to the large garbage can in the hall. 

Now, under normal circumstances, I would have remembered that I had eaten two Hostess cherry pies earlier that morning, but this was not "normal circumstances".  I was totally and completely drugged out of my brain and so when I saw dark red fluid oozing out of my mouth, I thought for sure that I was vomiting up blood.

I began screaming.  People in the hall stopped to check on me.  I was screaming.  "I AM VOMITING UP BLOOD!  I AM VOMITING UP BLOOD!"  Soon, there was a large congruency of coworkers staring at me while I shrieked with my face in a garbage can. When it was over, I collapsed in exhaustion and laid in the middle of the hall, my eyes looking at the ceiling; it was still spinning. 

My boss came into the hall and helped me back to my desk where I sat with my head between my legs.  I thought I was dying.  I had just vomited three pounds of blood.  It was only a matter of time. ********* 

I told my boss that I needed to drive home and he told me that he would not allow it.  He called my wife and she agreed to come pick me up.  He walked me down to the lobby and out to the lawn where he laid me down and sat with me while I admired the muscles that the birds were exhibiting in their weight lifting session.

My wife finally arrived and with much head shaking and embarrassing laughter, she loaded me into the back of her car and drove me home.  I graduated from college a week later and left that job forever. 

*I say "senior year", but in reality my senior year lasted roughly three years.

**The dreams of a hobo. 

***Odd, but appropriate coincidence.

****At least this is what I remember him doing. I had a lot of laughing gas at the time.

*****I think Hostess fruit pies actually went out of style in 1983, but nobody bothered to tell me.

******If the body was broken into "morsels". 

********That is how it was meant to be eaten, right?

********In real life and not a drug induced hallucinations, she weighed more like 250. 

*********"Time" a relative term. I mean, we are all going to go eventually. 

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 >>The Blog O' Cheese will be on hiatus until later in the month.  It may or may not be updated.  It will if you get lucky.  (No, not that kind of lucky, pervert.)