“So the mob method is out. Your wisdom teeth aren’t coming in? Like at all?”
Eric runs his tongue around his mouth for effect. “No.”
“Okay. Well, I still don’t think Children’s Tylenol PM is a very good measure of how narcotics affect your thing.”
“Narcotics? I’m not sure I’m all that excited about where this seems to be heading.”
“Relax. I don’t mean like, black tar heroin. There are lots of substances that are legal and safe that we can get our hands on.”
I don’t see my brother’s car speeding by, and I wonder if that means he’s home already.
“It’s not for me, it’s for a friend.”
“That glasses kid?”
“… No.”
“Really? Cause you pretty much have like one friend.”
“If somebody wanted to really get knocked out, like, there’s no way they could stay awake. Not enough to kill anybody or get anywhere close—”
“Pussy!” Tits says.
Tits is standing over a laptop on a stool in our garage. When I came in the laptop was playing a tinkly GarageBand rhythm and my brother was howling into a microphone hooked up to the laptop in his best imitation of all the scream-o bands he likes and Tits and his other friends were looking at each other and nodding like “YES, THIS IS IT.”
“Six Valiums. Or as we call it, Alan’s mom’s lunch.”
“Fuck yaself!” Alan says from where he’s slumped in the corner in his green hoodie that says THE WORLD’S BEST FUCKING SKATERS.
“Or, you know what? Oh… shit,” my brother says. “Follow me. ONE MOMENT, CUNTS, ONE MO-MENT!” he screams to his buddies in his soccer hooligan voice. He drops the mike on the concrete garage floor.
“Hey!” Alan yells. I guess it’s his microphone.
My brother goes into the house, and I follow him. On the stairs, he says: “One week they’re like, egging your friend’s house like a baby, next week they’re scoring drugs from you. THEY GROW UP SO FAST!” He punches the wall.
Ow,” he says.
My brother’s room is a refrigerator compared to my room. My room’s over the garage and insanely warm even with the air full blast. My brother also keeps his room surprisingly clean, for someone with so many personality problems.
“This is NOT where I keep my stash. So if you ever go looking for my stash, don’t look here, because this is NOT where it is.” He goes to where he keeps his stash: third drawer down underneath a Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions blanket we got for Christmas the year the Suns almost beat the Bulls. I was a very heartbroken six-year-old after they lost and more or less quit liking sports. Same thing happened when it turned out Spider-Man’s Peter Parker was actually a clone and had to go into exile: I was hurt and abandoned comics. I get burned and swear off whole parts of my life. I miss comics more.
He reaches down past the blanket and pulls out a Ziploc bag containing two big pills. He says: “Roofies.”
I don’t respond, but I try to make my face say, “Jesus, I know you are a dissolute behavior problem, but come on, we used to take baths together, and now you’re in possession of the date-rape drug.”
“Fuck you! I don’t use them. I’m not a fucking rapist.”
I make a point not to change my expression.
“Some dude paid me for something else with a bunch of stuff, and this was some of the stuff! Anyways, you asked! You think I need roofies? YOU need roofies. Date rapist!” He throws the baggie at me. I don’t catch it and it hits the floor.
“Think of it this way: by you buying them, nobody who will actually use them will buy them. I mean, nobody who will actually use them for date rape.”
The disgusting thing is that from what little I know about them, they are actually perfect for what we’re trying to do.
“How much do you want?” I say.
“Take them,” my brother says. “Merry Christmas.”
I bend down and pick the baggie up off the floor. As we’re leaving his room, we hear Eric shout from down the hall: “Oh, for PETE’S sake.”
My brother looks over and sees Eric sitting on the floor of my room cross-legged, playing Xbox.
“If you’re gonna rape your friends, you should get female friends,” my brother says. “You’re a real sick fuck.”
“It’s called… roprophinol.” I stopped by the computer in my dad’s office to go online and look up the actual scientific name before pitching it to Eric. I’m probably still pronouncing it wrong.
“The date-rape drug.”
“Well…”
“That’s worse even than the baseball bat!” Eric goes to throw the controller in anger, then thinks better of it and sets it on the carpet in front of him.
“No it’s not! If you think about it, it’s actually pretty perfect. No human being stays awake through this.”
“Right. It’s the date-rape drug.”
“It wasn’t DEVELOPED for that, it just so happens that that’s what some people… some really bad people… use it for. We could use it for good, here!”
“What good? I keep forgetting what exactly is supposed to be good about this. Either I fall asleep, and my life is abridged in this one little place, and it’s true, yes, I can be unconscious, or I just suffer through it awake, or God knows what else, really, since my brain chemistry is undoubtedly… different.”
I shut my bedroom door and come inside and sit down. “I guess all that’s, like, fair. Completely. But all this is about is testing the limits of your… thing. Finding out what there is to find out about it without us being, like, scientists. I mean, we could go to scientists, but, like we’ve talked about…”
I think both of us get visions of The Man, in his black suit and dark glasses, transparent and unkillable.
“You say that it’s not a power, that it’s just this thing, but we don’t know that. We don’t know anything, really. Listen, if you’re scared…”
“I am definitely not afraid.”
“Okay. I don’t like it either. I don’t like it that it’s, like, for date rapists. Freaks me out just holding them.”
“Them?”
“Yeah, there’s two.”
Eric picks the controller back up, thwaps it against an open palm.
He says: “I have an idea to mitigate the creepiness: we both do one.”
“Ha.”
“I’m serious. I’ll take one if you do.”
“Dude.”
“Come on. It’s for science.”
And that’s how it ends up that the first drug I ever do in my life is a roofie with my best friend in my bedroom above the garage, late afternoon on a Friday with my brother still howling away downstairs.
We get cans of Dr. Pepper from the kitchen. We crack them open. Back in my room, Eric turns on the TV. A movie about frat boys trying to see boobs is playing on Comedy Central.
“So we just like, let them dissolve?” I say.
“I don’t know. We should ask your brother.”
I put mine in my Dr. Pepper can and Eric does the same. He swishes his around like you see rich guys swish drinks in cartoons. We watch a few minutes of the frat-boy movie. The frat boys are at the bank applying for a loan, which is somehow convolutedly an important step in getting to see boobs.
“Waiting for mine to dissolve,” I say.
“Me, too,” Eric says.
