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Thing is, I didn't do drugs. Stimulants, okay: caffeine, booze. But not one bong hit or acid tab or peyote button; never once did I geez or trip or snort Bolivian marching powder. You'd never find me pulling a Leo DiCaprio circa Basketball Diaries, ballsy Leo eradicating his heartthrob image giving mouth-whoopee in a grotty pay toilet for a taste of the white rock. Or that scene in Trainspotting — Ewan McGregor shitting in a bucket and screaming bug-eyed as a freak-o plastic baby crawled across the ceiling — it mesmerized me because I could draw no correlation to my own life. I may as well have been watching two bulb-headed aliens screw; that would've left me with the same disassociated outerspace feeling, as if a metal plate in my skull were pulling in video signals from another planet.

Why didn't I get into them? Nancy Reagan had nothing to do with it; the barrel of that particular dogmatic revolver wasn't aimed at my generation.

The more likely truth is, I'm the sort of asshole who gets stuck in ruts.

Take this example: my father came home after a hard day at the drill press with his hair

stinking of burnt steel, grabbed barley pops from the Amana and, because he wasn't in the mood to drink alone, and since I was sixteen with a scraggly beard, handed one off to me. Labatt 50: coal miner's beer. Bluest of blue-collar brands. So I'm thirty-one, work in a cube and still drink it.

What I'm saying is, it was a matter of circumstance. If my Dad had come home from the carnival's Pop-A-Shot booth and split a joint with me, I'm sure I'd be sparking spliffs and tripping to the psychedelic cover art of a Molly Hatchet album these days.

All told, I'm pretty damn fortunate.

Which made my situation two months ago all the more implausible. I found myself in the bathroom of my shitty efficiency with a needle jutting out of my sun-starved ass. It was full of yellow fluid that could've been rendered hog fat or vitamin-rich piss but was in actuality a cocktail of testosterone ethenate and Equipoise.

I hit the plunger. Three cc's of dubious-quality narcotics saturated my fatty tissues. Sweaty and tweaked out, I wandered my kitchen wondering if I'd die. What a treat I'd make for the boys in blue who found me: rigid and pasty with my skivs wadded 'round my ankles and a ginormous honkin' needle flagpoled from my keister.

Can you envision a more ignoble death?

on a dog's breakfast of pills and injectibles. Testosterone levels: off the charts.

But I've got . . . tits.

Soft, sorta floppy. Left one a touch bigger than the right. Tits. A pendulous set of man-cans. I bought a bunch of tight, white undershirts to flatten them down: girdles for the bosomy gent.

Most alarmingly, of course, are my nuts. What nuts? I'm considering hiring a crisis negotiator to talk them down from my abdominal wall, where I assume they've retreated. Atrophied so badly, they're two BB's from a kid's Red Ryder gun rattling around in there.

You know how amputees suffer from phantom-limb syndrome? I'm plagued by phantom-testicle syndrome — every so often I'll reach between my legs searching for those apricot-sized lumps only to find nothing. I'll be rooting around, gasping, freaked out and thinking that like a vestigial tail they've shriveled away. Only once I've located a token raisin through that wrinkled turkey wattle am I able to breathe again.

Why keep it up, you ask? I told you: I'm the sort of asshole who gets stuck in ruts.

Here's another reason: the juice works.