Monkeying Around in the Pharmacy

     The old white tiled floors in the pharmacy were in desperate need of a dope monkey's efficiently rhythmic  sweeping mojo, and I won't hesitate to brag when it comes to my sweeping abilities. I am a bad mamba jamba with a broom, any shape any size or quality, it doesn't matter much.  I believe the two jobs I had prior to the pharmacy(keep in mind that I am still 16  yrs old as junior year begins)  were mowing neighbors lawns that began around age 12, and after that I got a job at 15, as a bus-boy in a local all-u-can-eat pizza place which I lost (would be re-hired off and on there over the next few years) due to my spontaneous excursion to the west coast that  previous summer.  A new saga rooted by this fresh line of pharmaceutical work was about to unfold. The bliss from discovering new drugs were continually being launched into new cosmic levels of giddiness as I experimented with various multitudes of whatever  drugs you want to imagine exists.  It was quite normal that I would show up  to the pharmacy blazed off my ass, I worked the front counter's cash register, and I managed to just get by for about a month or so here at this particular job. I could've stolen money from the till, but that wasn't what I was interested in, I was dead set on the drugs.  Every night as the minutes were breaching forward, slugging towards the store's closing hour, began to warp parallel with time's sweet pace into a swift  gallop full ahead, I was about to hit another chemical-time-space trifecta,  because my floor sweeping duties were right around the bend! The standard wall clock's plain boring and uniformly black hands were made into something fantastically  spectacular to me simply because I knew 'what time it was!'  In my dope-addled mind this ignited a feverish excitement as my imagination coursed images of the vast selection of pilled-out aisles that I would soon be exploring.  Each night I was given a span of ten to twenty minutes which really depended on how I paced my broom-men-ship.  My opportunity had come, and it came over and over again with each shift I worked.  Each pill stolen ten more were added the next shift, whole bottles were then added, I couldn't contain my greed. This was an overwhelming paradise that any dope fiend couldn't possibly manage properly.  The first day I worked there I was given this task since I was the new guy, and naturally it became one of my regular closing duties. I  never had to seem over-eager because no one else wanted to do it, and so it naturally fell upon me. I loved it!  I was given this shit task and secretly celebrated inside every time.  By this point in my life I had drank plenty of times, smoked a hell-a weed, tried coke, tripped on a lot of acid, but hadn't yet gotten into pills very much. I remember having to ask this chic who was a senior which particular pills were the most recreational, therefore I could narrow down what I was looking for during my twenty minutes of sweep time. She told me to look for Valiums, Soma, and some others. The others I don't remember mainly because I know I tried them and quickly realized that they weren't recreationally cohesive to the chemicals I really enjoyed. Thank God she didn't mention oxycontin or any of the other opiates that I learned about years later.  If she had I may have gotten strung out on opiates a year or so earlier. This year was especially  dedicated to Valium and Soma, and it  took over my life very quickly. Valiums basically made me feel inasanly drunk and I would binge on them for days. Some people would pass out once they ingested benzos (valiums, klonipns, Xanax, are some of the commonly abused benzos, I would get into the others later that year) but I was a maniac that stayed up mixing them with weed and alcohol, frying up food at three in the morning, passing out with peanut butter and tortillas, or be seen running naked down the street underneath the pitch black sky.  My skinny teenage body illuminated by headlights of some very surprised cars that passed by. They also began my deep run of trips to jail that occurred usually at least once every couple of months, and every now and then I would make two trips in a week. This newly found pharmaceutical grade intoxicant also began my visits to the hospitals. I specifically remeber one day that my mom tried in a new strategy in all of her frustrating attempts to get me to straighten up. She brought me to a drug and alcohol counselor in order to get me some help. I was such a smart-ass know-it that I frustrated her and she told my mom and I that eventually I would experience jails, hospitals, or death. The worst scenario would consist of me causing another to die if I didn't get my shit together.  I totally ignored any advice or warnings continuously over and over again for too many years, and in the same strange measure it was the correct amount of time for me to experience enough pain to where eventually I would truly hunger for God. My compulsive need to alter my reality was insane, what would it take for me to change? Many years of being dealt the same consequences for my rampages, and then the omnipotent intervening hand of God.  In a disturbingly desperate state I simply had to cry out to HIM, and oh how HE knew my heart.  It was a sad heart but one that still maintained this foreign flavor of hope which still lingered, a taste that longed for a deeper purposed life than the hedonistic state to which I was currently enslaved.