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Shelf Life (1995)

John Clayton Heinz

    That cliché of time grinding slower when you’re falling is pretty accurate.
    I know, because I’m experiencing it now. The context—my mother’s kitchen Wednesday morning, white cabinetry and glass-top table and red faux-Spanish tile—stands stock still, while my mind races to try and make sense of what’s happening and why. How. My body, meanwhile—all the senses that would normally induce me to move or react, to alter the downward projection and potential for serious harm or even death—also ceases to function. I’m lost in the moment, now I just have to go with the flow.
    I’m falling backward from standing straight up on top of the kitchen counter.
    As usual I’d been digging into the murky recesses of our family-medicine-cabinet-cum-coffee-accoutrement-storage: a corner of the kitchen boasting everything from street-grade morphine syrup to General Foods International’s Café Vienna, and the focal point of my entire life since spring.
    The idea that the more interesting contents therein share space with our pedestrian hot-beverage paraphernalia—mugs, sugar, filters, the ubiquitous Folgers jar—has not yet struck me as odd. Years later, I will question Mom’s logic here, but for now my entitled pubescent self takes it at face value; the kitchen is, after all, where our amber plastic vials have always been kept, from house to house throughout my childhood.
    It is to Mom’s dubious credit that the narcotics are kept up high, out of a short person’s sight and tucked where they require a modicum of initiative for an enterprising teenager to locate—three shelves up from the Goofy Band-Aids, to be precise.
    The cabinet—the right answer to so many wrong questions—sits wedged between the stove and refrigerator.
    First I reach up and swing open the door.
    On the bottom shelf, an amusing ruse: the mugs and coffee stuff (pink packets, green stirrers, red Folgers). On the second shelf, sundry potions and lotions, and the Disney bandages. (How the box got here is a mystery—no member of the family likes cartoons, and not even my 10-year-old brother would use one under duress.)
    I’m able to focus on the Band-Aids box while spinning backward off the counter nanoseconds after registering the pain of my seared left foot, which I’d solidly planted on the “fr” electric stovetop coil someone thoughtfully abandoned after turning to medium-high—not hot enough to turn orange, but not cool enough to be standing on, either.
    On the third shelf houses a vaguely medicinal and reparative hodgepodge that, to my knowledge, no one ever touches—pink calamine, blue milk of magnesia, brown hydrogen peroxide—all very colorfully receding from my view in a blur as I plummet backward toward the red tile.
    It is the fourth shelf, however, where shit starts to get a little useful. Among the potions and lotions and tablets and caplets stocked here are some well worth poaching, as I’ve discovered through extensive self-diagnosis: Robitussin DM, Nyquil, and way in the back, shrouded in darkness, the fourth shelf’s pi ce de résistance—750 sweet milliliters of that liquid morphine, mysteriously prescribed to one virginia arana from a pharmacy in flushing ny, and bearing an expiration date that falls squarely within Reagan’s first term. My best guess is that Ms. Arana worked for my parents in some household capacity back before I developed cognition, but who can be sure? God knows why the woman ever needed enough morphine to take down a yeti, but that’s hardly my business. She could be my saucy Latina birth mom, for all I know.
    There’s quite a lot of syrup left, but I want the contents of that bottle to last at least until I go to college, so I only use it on very special occasions: gymnasium dances, post-exam-week decompression, that Friday night I convinced Geoff Greenspun during a sleepover to join me in a basement jerk-off session to my stepfather’s descrambled Spice at Night channel. That night, we felt no pain.
    Speaking of which, why was the fucking burner on? Was it going all night? Or did Mom’s troglodytic boyfriend, Martin, fry an egg and forget to shut it off before lurching off to work? Regardless, the flat metal spiral was totally hot, and it took my distracted brain multiple seconds to realize that radial-stripe grill marks were being sizzled into my sole. The delayed agony was intense, and it sent me flying off-balance from the high counter, setting my slow-mo reverie into course.
    Falling backward about four feet above the tile, my right arm flails out before me like a zombie’s, fingers stretched toward the cabinet’s highest shelf. There, a trove of prescriptive bliss lies compiled—nay, hoarded—over years and years, the collective result of a few lifetimes’ worth of exaggerated aches, pains, sprains, and breaks; spates of (utterly fictional) migraine headaches and (largely actual) suburban hysteria. My mother, the unquestionable pirate captain of all this booty, has seemingly sought an illicit scrip—with unexplainably high refill count—for every trip to a doctor since 1980. There are so many pills, caplets, and capsules that my dipping these past several months has made nary a noticeable dent. Or if it has, she’s not telling. The real explanation, probably, is the simplest one: Her own dippage is so frequent and haphazard that it thwarts any half-hearted attempt at loss prevention.
    Mom’s supply is staggering.
    The Valium selection alone comprises a dizzying array: The oldest vials feature yellowing, typewritten labels actually spelling out the marketed name: valium. Each pale yellow tablet here sports a nifty cutout “v.” There are a handful of these bottles, and two, inexplicably, are from Italy. These are pre-divorce and long expired. The rest were administered by some gullible Florida shrink. The newer bottles all say diazepam, which is just another name for Valium, according to my new good friend Mr. Harold M. Silverman’s The Pill Book, 5^th Edition, which I lifted from the Barnes   Noble at the mall back in May.
    Chronologically, the Valiums change color, from light yellow to a dusky pink to gray and then back to yellow, the the “v” disappearing from all the later models. They’re the easiest to crush of all the meds; I’ve been known to sneeze out a fucking rainbow at the most inopportune moments. This scenario is fairly difficult to explain to, say, class president Kimicho Tukikana sitting to my right in AP English, or class slut Sharon Sharma doing her nails across the aisle from me in the back of the school bus. While these two girls are nothing alike, my gaffe begets the same facial expression on each.
    There are far more Valium/diazepam bottles than any other drug, but the Codeines run a close second: There are Tylenol 3s and 4s—big, chunky white horsepills not fit for inhalation (trust me on this—attempts have been made), but good for a general numbness when you need to keep motor skills intact. Two are my limit for these, though—otherwise, big-time nausea. Apparently Mom was also prescribed pure Codeine, for some reason, in December of 1989. Initially a 20 count, there were eight upon my discovery, and currently, ahem, only five remain. I’m trying to pretend they don’t exist for now.
    There are Darvocets, Vicodins, Demerols, Ativans, phenobarbitals, Seconals, hydrocodones, Ritalins, and Halcions. Clonazepams, lorazepams, diazepams, and alprazolams. All the ’pams. That last one, which I guess most people call Xanax, is my favorite. Tiny, gray, football-shaped bliss. Antianxiety and the solution to 15 years of problems, basically. There are several batches, about 300 footballs total.
    Mom.
    Petty, bourgeois, totally functional addict. Country club drunk, the kind who will never admit defeat. I tend to think that beneath her current of denial, she’s aware I forage these shelves. My guess is she appreciates the company. In time I’ll probably blame her for everything—isn’t that another cliché?—but for now I’ll just ignore her. What I would like to know is how she pulls it off. My mother is the Imelda Marcos of pills, and her collection must have taken—still must take—sustained, rigorous effort. Doctors upon doctors upon stories upon lies upon pain.
    What does she tell them? And are they expensive? Is Aetna really covering all this with no question? Is Martin—the personification of blissful ignorance on the regular—aware? Is Mom, like me these last six months, to some degree constantly high?
    Will the pills turn me into her one day—hysterical and oversensitive, prone to superficial violence and bad decisions? They are, anyway, the reason I stood barefoot on a fucking stovetop, and therefore also why I’m about to make a teen-sized indentation in the kitchen floor. They explain so much about my mother’s behavior over the years, but for every question they answer, another glops together.
    Will I survive the fall? Will it leave me brain-damaged and strung to life by a pullable plug? Or will I merely lose consciousness, only to be found with my hand lodged firmly in the kooky jar? Will my pink and gray and pale-yellow answers be dashed to bright-light waking memories and anxiety-ridden fever dreams? Will the jig be up?
    Somehow during my descent these questions register. From the fifth to the first, the shelves all fall away—my narcotic pyramid in reverse: the bright blue and orange cold-syrups, the cartoon-colored bandages and the red jar of coffee, the bone-colored mugs. It all recedes in gorgeous, cinematic slow-mo, and at this early juncture I only feel a little pain from my foot burn—a distant, almost pleasantly distracting sting.
    Whatever slight burning sensation has at this point managed to trek the synaptic path from sole to brain utterly evaporates, however, when my head hits the floor.
    My skull cracks the tile first, a split second before my back, ass, and legs slam into formation behind it. My head bounces once, twice, as the rest of my body ripples down like some retro-spectacular break-dance worm. My vision inkblots as both arms land last, above my head, the left palm slack and open and the right still clutching a now-empty 60-count Xanax vial.
    I’m able to discern the footballs it held scatter across the red tile like Honey Smacks: under the glass-topped wicker table, under the stained oak bureau housing the kitchen TV, into the baseboard heating vents below the bay window that looks out onto our sloping backyard, layered in dead leaves. Those vents get so hot...yet another place in this booby-trapped kitchen a poor boy can burn his foot. Skirting the tenuous edge of consciousness, immobile on the floor now, I wonder: When those tiny pills melt and steam away, will the people breathing the air in this house all mellow the fuck out?
    The pain in my skull spreads down my neck and upper back like a blood puddle in a gangster movie. It’s among the worst I’ve ever felt, and somehow, somewhere, a glimmer of raw pride burns at that. I groan in agony but manage to smile at the absurdity of my situation. I’d be laughing maniacally if I were physically able.
    Then suddenly the room changes.
    I sense that a person has entered the kitchen. My vision’s still black-blotted and quavering, but I blink through it and coil my beat-up head to the right, pupils focusing on a 10-year-old boy’s impassive, upside-down face looming over me.
    “Brandon,” I croak, my voice barely audible.
    With his dark-green TMNT backpack dangling from one hand, my little brother just turns and walks away, yanking open the door that leads out to our garage.
    “We’re gonna miss the bus,” he says blankly over his shoulder, before pulling it shut and disappearing from my steadily clearing view.

(adapted from The Overdose, a novel)

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