The needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open – air that’s traveled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger’s house. An interesting set of travel supplies indeed. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic – not a word of English. But it’s a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago – an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.
Buck up, laddie. Fortune favours the brave.
What’s inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise – a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle – and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.
It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn’t be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?
What if I died in this shitty apartment in Iowa City? I pictured the landlord stumbling upon my body, rotten and bloated. The newspaper headline: Dumbshit Canadian Found Dead with Needle in Ass.