I spent many hours at Delta Drugs filing paperwork, conversing with clients, reading magazines, standing around doing nothing, ordering supplies and taking deliveries. I got pretty good at pouring cough syrup into bottles and stocking empty shelves.

At the time, I was a frustrated and confused young malcontent with a lot of emotional baggage to carry around and a real chip on my shoulder. When I wasn’t working at the pharmacy, mostly what I did was smoke dope. Lots and lots of dope, and hash, too, if could get my hands on it. At that age, my entire existence centered on getting high: anywhere, anyhow, anytime.

I could drink like a fish back in those days, too. I’d often wake up and have to go to work with a colossal hangover. But I was young and indestructible. Or so I thought.

One day, something happened at the pharmacy that changed my life forever. A drug rep who knew my dad pretty well made an offhand comment that if a person was so inclined, he could replicate a heroin high by taking two prescription drugs together: Didrex and Talwin. I have no memory of how that subject fit into the context of a sales pitch, but immediately my ears perked up. I pretended not to listen.

Didrex is a little pink diet pill used to treat the morbidly obese: speed, in other words. Talwin was one of the most powerful painkillers on the market. It was prescribed for patients in the final stages of terminal cancer, among other things. Naturally, I looked all this up in the handy pharmacist’s directory, the PDA. I mulled the information over for a few days before I decided to take action – as soon as Miss Mary wasn’t around.

My dad would often take a nap on his couch around lunchtime, before Hawkins began the afternoon rush. Roscoe snored like a demon when he slept, too: A mighty, resonant snore that reverberated throughout the pharmacy. The noises which emanated from his open mouth were downright inhuman.

It was embarrassing sometimes when clients came walking into the store, but also very convenient for the purposes of my little scheme. Mary had taken the afternoon off. To get my hands on the ‘class 3’ drugs – including Talwin and Didrex – I’d have to cross Roscoe’s line of view as he lay on the couch in the break room. Once the thunderous snoring began, I knew it was time to make my move.

While Roscoe snored away, I crept silently across the threshold and found the alphabetized narcotics exactly where they should be. I carefully opened the childproof lids and poured out five or six pills from each bottle – not enough to arouse suspicion – and immediately swallowed one Didrex and one Talwin.

The rest of the afternoon was a joyous, profoundly moving experience for me. My head felt like it had separated from my body and the rest of me was gliding around on a cloud of orgasmic ecstasy. Suddenly, everything was incredibly interesting. My eyes were a virtual TV camera, observing the world from outside of my physical body. I fell deeply in love with all of our clients, and gave each one of them my undivided attention as I carefully filled their bags.

I immediately understood every person who came through that door with an overwhelming sense of clarity and compassion. They were my brothers and my sisters. I tried not to stutter or shake too much as I engaged them with a newly enlightened, purely loving perspective.

And I giggled like a schoolgirl all the way home.

Roscoe didn’t have a clue, or at least he never acknowledged it. Even though he was normally completely paranoid, I think he cut me some slack because he assumed that I could be trusted. He deduced that I must be able to keep my mouth shut since none of the shit that went down at the pharmacy ever got back to my mother.

Like the time when Roscoe decided to take a “long lunch.” An hour or so later I answered a pathetic knock at the back door and was shocked to encounter one of my dads’ female customers dragging him through the doorway and into the break room. She propped up my dad as if he were a wounded soldier being hauled off the battlefield. Patricia was a pretty, young, married woman I recognized as one of our Medi-Cal clients.

They struggled to the couch together. Roscoe was huffing and puffing, his body slack. His eyes were wide with fear.

“I was having chest pains…” he offered between gasping breaths.

It was pretty obvious what had happened, but I wasn’t going there. We wound up closing the store for the afternoon and I never said another word about it. Roscoe steadfastly refused to be taken to the ER, but he did stay home and lay in bed for two days. My mom was none the wiser. She waited on him hand and foot the whole time. Who knows what excuse he gave to her?

The upside for me was that I got to drive my dad’s bright red Porsche 944 thirty miles to work for the rest of the week while Miss Mary and I tenuously ran the show at Delta Drugs without a pharmacist. Needless to say, I took the long way home each night.

The happiest day of my young life came when Roscoe called me into the break room and offered me a promotion. Previously I’d been in charge of ordering all of the floor merchandise for the drugstore; the ‘over-the-counter’ stuff like cough drops, aspirin, antacids and delousing kits, in addition to all the soda, pastries, candy and sundry items.

“Son,” he said as he lay prone on the couch, a cigarette perched between his fingers, “Miss Mary’s gonna be gone more often now. She’s too busy with her studies at CSSB, so I need you to take over all of the ordering duties. Can you handle that?”

Now I would be in charge of ordering the meds, too – including the narcotics! Sweet. I struggled to suppress the demonic laughter welling up inside me.

I peed my pants a little.

“Yes sir,” I replied without missing a beat. “I believe I can, sir.”

I romantically refer to this period of my life as the ‘Halcyon days.’

Or should I say Halcion days? Halcion was the name of an incredibly potent sleeping pill that Roscoe prescribed to himself. The FDA eventually took it off the market, and for good reason: they were basically ‘knock-out’ pills. I prescribed myself a few Halcion as well. There was no way in Hell you could stay awake for more than an hour if you took one of those things, no matter how hard you tried. If you took two Halcion, you’d simply black out and remember nothing from the night before. That was unnerving, but it didn’t slow me down.

In earnest, I set about sampling every prescription painkiller, muscle relaxer and sedative I could get my trembling little fingers on: Percodan, Percocet, Darvon, Tylenol with Codeine, Robaxin, Flexaril, Xanax, Oxycodone, Seconal, Demerol. Not to mention the infamous Darvocet N-100’s favored by Hawkins. Those were actually pretty mild compared to a lot of the other stuff that was on the market. Valium I enjoyed quite a bit: the wonder drug that works wonders! Sometimes I ordered whole bottles for myself. Roscoe never noticed. He was too busy trying to run the store and keep his secret life in order. I was a like a wolf in the henhouse.

Quaaludes serve no actual medical purpose. They’re classified in the PDA as ‘hypnotics,’ which in medical terminology simply means they fuck you up for no good reason. Big round white tablets they were; with a dividing line down the middle and “Lemon 714” embossed on one side. That’s how I knew it was the real thing: Lemon was the lab that exclusively manufactured methaqualone.

Pharmaceutical Quaaludes were the most amazing drug of all: they made me feel as if I was floating around the store on a warm, fuzzy cloud of transcendent love. Talk about an out of body experience! I never wanted to come back from Quaalude-land.

I soon discovered that Didrex went with just about everything, too. I could cut it with any number of different pain meds and have a nice, energetic buzz all day. I felt like a scientist. I was able to experiment by balancing the uppers with the downers, mixing and matching to the point of alchemy. The days and weeks spent working in that miserable ghetto went by in a beautiful, pain-free blur. In time, I was able to handle my intake like a pro – or at least like my dad and Hawkins. Finally I saw where they were coming from. The tedium of working at the pharmacy was much more tolerable while under the influence of heavy narcotics. It was downright blissful.

I became very conscientious and systematic with my new habit, careful not to overdo things and take so many pills that I couldn’t function. I felt like part of THE TEAM, and I began to bond with my father like never before.

Until that fateful day when Denise came barging through the door, concerned over her boss’s current state.

“Does Doctor Hawkins need a refill?” dad inquired. “Tell him I’ll send it right over.” He was squeezing his coffee cup so hard it looked as if it was about to shatter.

“No, Roscoe,” Denise replied balefully. “He going home. I think he having problems with his crazy ass wife again, too…he be trippin’ hard today; you shoulda seen him…”

It was apparent that Hawkins was beginning to crack. This was not a good sign. The end was nigh. I ran to have a look out the back window just as Hawkins was pulling away. I peered through the metal bars as his gold Porsche 928 sped by me in a cloud of dust.

And that is where things stood on that golden fall day in 1986…