For most of my using life, alcohol was enough for me. If a couple of Valium or some painkillers came my way I was delighted, but a plentiful supply of booze was really all I needed to render life tolerable.
Then, slowly, something changed. Whether pilfered from other peoples’ medicine cabinets or cajoled from unwitting doctors and dentists, those little orange bottles with the sleepy-eye sticker on them began to exert a greater and greater pull on me. If a friend remarked absently that they’d just had some dental work done, my heart would skip a beat. I was turning into a pill head.
As I progressed in this direction, the way I looked at a bottle of pills changed as well. Early on, a bottle with ten pain killers that someone had forgotten about in the back of their medicine cabinet was a cause for unalloyed celebration. But soon – much too soon – ten pills wasn’t such great news anymore. After all, I’d be done with them in a day or so, and I’d need more.
It was around this time, when orange bottles had begun to be the beacons by which I navigated my life, that a friend – and fellow pill-head -- told me a story. A story that he’d heard from another friend of his, who I’ll call Carl. Carl was at his dentist’s one day, getting a routine cleaning. And like any good pill-head in a dentist’s office, he was pondering his options, wondering what kind of song-and-dance story he might try in order to get a good prescription while he was there.
Then something came up in the reception area, and both the dentist and his assistant left the room.
“Carl was sitting in that dentist’s chair for two minutes,” my friend told me, “when he suddenly noticed a bottle on the table right in front of him. One of those white plastic bottles they use for really big prescriptions.”
I knew what those bottles looked like. You always saw them on the shelves behind the pharmacist at the drug store. They were big enough to hold hundreds of pills. Thousands even.
“What was in it?” I asked.
“Carl sat up in the seat and squinted to read the label,” said my friend. “Percodan.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “Just sitting there? What did he do?”
“Carl was going to work right after the dentist,” my friend said, “and had his briefcase with him. He listened hard to make sure the dentist and the assistant were both down the hall, and then he reached for it. It was full! He stuck the whole thing in his briefcase.”
Unbelievable, I thought. What chutzpah! By this point, I was so excited for Carl – even though I’d never even met him -- that it might as well have been me who was in that dentist’s office. After all, a jar of pills that big would solve all a person’s problems. There’d be no more worrying about where the next pill was coming from. One could go on for weeks and weeks without a worry.
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“Carl was so pleased with himself,” said my friend, “that he didn’t even open the bottle till he got to work. He said just knowing it was in his briefcase was satisfying enough. Finally, when he got to his office, he pulled the thing out, and unscrewed the lid. Know what was inside?”
“What?”
My friend gave me a broad smile.
“Teeth! A whole mess of rotten old teeth.”
I haven’t spoken to the friend who told me that story for some time (though I hear through the grapevine that he might be in recovery himself). But the image of that big white jar has stayed with me: A curiously apt symbol of the fact that no jar of pills is ever big enough. That even the biggest of them really only hold what that one did.