I blame it on Todd
Winter in Massachusetts. On Saturdays, in my younger years, I normally went out with my friend Todd. He was into skiing and winter sports, snowmobiling, anything that involved “powder,” as it were.
It wasn’t my thing, winter activities, of any kind. Still, I liked the company, and riding around in his slick Infinity to look at new sleds and skis in those lodge stores, about two hours up north, if only to get out of the house during another miserable New England winter, was something I enjoyed.
Once, Todd and I smoked a joint on the way to get his car serviced, but before we toked up, we stopped at Dunkin Donuts for iced coffees. It was summer. I must have been about 21 years old.
I drank that iced coffee so fast, not realizing how much caffeine was in it — I wasn’t a regular coffee drinker at the time — and combined with the marijuana, it sent me into a full-blown, terrible panic attack, something I had never experienced before.
The next thing I knew, an ambulance had arrived and I was taken to the hospital.
The hospital bed was uncomfortable. I had a tube coming out of my arm, and my testicles were all sweaty. My father’s were too, I assumed. I would’ve bet anything on it. As much as I wanted to separate myself from my family — “I might be from them but not of them” — I couldn’t escape the sweaty balls commonality.
“Your father gets that, too,” my mother once said, unprompted, after she saw me with my hand down my pants.
My whole family was there — my parents, my brother and my sister, all huddled around me as I lay in the hospital bed with black char all over my lips.
When a drug overdose or a suspected drug overdose happens, they’ll give you this black char to drink. And you have to keep drinking it — and it’s completely repulsive — until all the drugs are out of your system. The black char slowly sucks the drugs out like it’s some medical vacuum cleaner.
Not only was I feeling awful and vulnerable, but I was also completely embarrassed. It was the first time I had seen all four family members at once appear deeply concerned for my wellbeing.
To add insult to injury, my brother’s friend Jim, a firefighter and EMT, was one of the people who happened to be working that day and brought me to the hospital.
Years later, I ran into Jim at a bar. We shared a drink and he told me the story of how he could hear my parents, before they came inside the hospital to see me, bickering outside, as he looked down on them from the open second-floor window.
“I knew it was them,” he said with a laugh.
“Sounds about right,” I told him, and took a sip of my beer.