I believe the Statute of Limitations has passed the point where it is now safe for me to admit that as a much younger man, there was a very brief phase where I “experimented” with drugs. I’m not talking about anything crazy, but yes, I dabbled with the sort of mind-altering substances that every average American teenager tries—alcohol, marijuana, hashish, hash oil, Xanax, Vicodin, Adderall, Valium, codeine, cocaine, methamphetamines, LSD, mescaline, magic mushrooms, PCP, Ecstasy, DMT, amyl nitrite, opium, heroin, peyote, and enough Special K to knock a racehorse flat on its ass.

But these days I’m more sober than a humble tree frog, and for many good reasons. I have a son to raise, I have a felony record, I have a post-brain-surgery seizure condition, and I simply can’t afford good street drugs anymore.

Because I’m scrambling pell-mell into my drooling, diaper-wearing, senile dotage but still want to outlive anyone who has ever so much as thought something negative about me, I pay off my health insurance’s yearly deductible very quickly and then elect to subject myself to every astronomically expensive medical test under God’s Yellowy Sun. Over the past twenty months this has included a colonoscopy, a heart catheterization, and—earlier this morning—an endoscopy to get at the root of whatever painful abdominal condition it is that has repeatedly sent me writhing to the floor in pain and praying to a God in whom I don’t believe.

And after all three of these procedures, upon waking up from an unconscious state so deep and slackened that I’d allowed people to stick tubes up my ass, down my gullet, and through my wrist leading all the way up into my heart, I’ve been such a charmingly easy-going, lounge-lizardly Vegas comedian, you wouldn’t even know it was me.

All three times, the common factor was that I’d been injected with Propofol, an intravenous sedative which achieved worldwide ignominy last summer for killing Michael “King of Pop” Jackson and thereby postponing the intergalactic “comeback” tour which he’d hoped would make people forget that he’d displayed his striped penis to a Rainbow Coalition of young boys.

Recreational usage of Propofol is rare and confined mainly within the medical profession, where it is much easier to obtain than, say, on Avenue D in Manhattan or the corner of Pico and Vermont in LA. There have been other deaths linked to its abuse, but not involving anyone as important or universally loved as Michael Jackson.

I arrived at the endoscopy center at 7AM this morning and signed a waiver stating that I wouldn’t hold anyone responsible if the anesthetic were to, oh, cause brain damage, cardiac arrest, stroke, or death. The nurse gingerly instructed me to lay on my side as she injected the magic potion into my hand. I felt a chilly sensation creep up my arm.

Next thing I knew, I opened my eyes and my gastroenterologist was telling me he found no ulcers or tumors but that I had a slightly elevated degree of stomach acid. I joked that I no longer did acid, and we all had a jolly good laugh at my lighthearted frivolity and all-around childlike playfulness.

For the next few hours, as had been the case during my previous two experiences with Propofol, I was scattin’, rhymin’, be-boppin’, skiddly-bop-doo-dah-yah-in’, snappin’ my fingers, makin’ puns, and oozin’ more charm than I had cumulatively oozed in my non-Propofolic lifetime. I was feelin’ no pain, and the world around me was feelin’ that I was feelin’ no pain. I even left an atypically generous tip to the waitress at Cracker Barrel. Unlike alcohol, which always made me belligerent, or downers, which always made me sluggish, I was as smarmily free-and-easy as Richard Dawson during the peak of his Family Feud-hosting days. This is the most pleasant drug I’ve ever done, and I can see why Michael Jackson liked it so much. It served as a chalkboard eraser wiping away all the distasteful and repulsive character traits that have pockmarked my wretchedly diseased ego.

I’m now six hours post-injection and the drug is starting to wear off. But before we start hating each other again, I want us to remember the good times.

-JIM GOAD

POSTED SIMULTANEOUSLY ON JIMGOAD.NET

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