I suffered a slight break in my arm a month ago. But that’s not important. What’s important is that I was given a prescription for Vicodin.

The Vicodin made me feel like everything was gonna be all right — until I couldn’t breathe. It’s one of the potential side effects of Vicodin, and I’ve always been a sucker for side effects.

So, I stopped taking the Vicodin, but kept it around in case I ever learn how to put things up on eBay or buy an artificial respirator.

Then, last week, my wife, Gina, pulled a muscle at the gym. She limped in, plaintively asking, “Do you still have that Vicodin?” Indeed, I did, and since, by law, medical prescriptions can be shared by spouses, I felt no guilt in giving her a pill.

At this point, let me state for the record that I love my wife and think she’s top-notch.

But, it turns out, I really love her when she’s on Vicodin.

So funny. So relaxed. So pleasantly out of it. We had rented “Finding Nemo” that day, and I first suspected I was dealing with a new and improved Gina when she asked, “Hey, when are we going to watch that movie about the little fish?”

The real proof, however, came after I’d noticed that the cat’s litter box was in desperate need of cleaning. Our cat’s had a history of “accidents,” so I quickly emptied the box into a plastic bag. But it was late, and freezing out, and I was already in my jammies. The last thing I wanted to do was go out to the dumpster behind our building, where, at night, I believe there are monsters.

“Why don’t you put the bag in the kitchen and take it out in the morning?” I thought I heard Gina say.

“You’d be OK with that?” I tentatively asked.

“Sure, it’s late, and freezing out, you’re already in your jammies, and I’d feel really guilty if it turned out you were right about the monsters,” she said.

Any married man knows how wonderfully out of the ordinary this exchange was. My wife was, without annoyance, excusing me from a chore AND allowing a bag of cat feces to spend the night near the refrigerator.

And that’s when the thought entered my mind: Is it possible that I could become addicted to my wife being on Vicodin?

Indeed, in the following days, I kept asking Gina how her pulled muscle was and then, without waiting for a response, casually suggesting, “Maybe you should take another Vicodin.” After her muscle healed, I found myself thinking, to my horror, of making abrupt stops when we were driving in hopes that she would suffer whiplash. O tell me! Are these not the telltale signs of a man addicted to his wife being on Vicodin?

Of course, I didn’t want my wife to actually get addicted to the drug, what with the high cost of treatment centers. So I started considering ways to get Gina to take Vicodin unwittingly. My friend Jim suggested I secretly grind up Vicodin into smoothies — and Jim, it must be said, has a girlfriend who always seems very relaxed.

After hearing Jim’s idea and then getting a few smoothie recipes from him, I went home and began to consider whether this plan could perhaps be wrong. But then, interrupting my thoughts was the arrival of my wife, bursting through the front door in a foul mood — grumpy, exhausted, mad at the world and madder at me.

As she stomped around the apartment, a realization came to me. “Wait a minute, This is the woman I love.” Immediately, I threw my Vicodin into a trash bag, which I placed on the kitchen floor near the refrigerator. And when the sun came up in the morning, I took it down to the dumpster.

(Mark Bazer can be reached at mebazer@yahoo.com.)
(C) MARK BAZER
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