"I Was Roofied At Work"

Fall 2012 Article 6 October 2012 "I Was Roofied At Work" R.J. Green Iowa State University Chelsea Parks Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ethos Part of the Higher Education Commons, and the Journalism Studies Commons Recommended Citation Green, R.J. and Parks, Chelsea (2012) ""I Was Roofied At Work"," Ethos: Vol. 2013 , Article 6. Available at: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ethos/vol2013/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Publications at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ethos by an authorized editor of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact . “I WAS ROOFIED AT WORK” A personal essay by bartender R.J. GREEN DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION CHELSEA PARKS I used to sling drinks at a notoriously sketchy bar in Campustown. In the six months I spent working there, I knew five people who were roofied—including myself. One dead winter weekend, I let two lady coworkers off early and made them drinks. At the end of the bar were a few of the older creepy skeezeball-types you find prowling the college bars in search of impressionable (read: drunk) tail. The girls went to dance and I almost always set any untended drinks behind the bar as good practice. ‘Almost’ being this night. At last call, one of the drinks was too full to throw down the sink. “Bottoms up!” I thought. I’m a big guy—210 lbs at 6’4”—and if there’s one thing a decade of college affords you, it’s an alcohol tolerance. Not even five minutes later, there was a crescendo of ringing in my ears, coinciding with black slowly creeping in from every corner of my vision until reality was a blur at the end of a tunnel. The last thing I remember is starting to fall over. Apparently, I hit the floor, tried to get up, pinballed around behind the bar and spent the next hour alternating between throwing up in the urinal and sink in the bar bathroom. I say apparently, because I have no recollection of this. Nor do I remember being carried to the car by our head of security, or my roommates carrying me into the house and onto the couch, or my subconscious waking me up and putting my finger down my throat hourly until 7 a.m. I’ve overserved myself plenty of times, but never blacked out before. I have a photographic memory, and I remember every second of drunken haze I’ve ever experienced. Except this one. I woke up at 3:00 p.m., but to me, it’s like I fell through a twelve-hour time portal in the bar floor that transported me to my couch. I still thought I was falling, so I whipped the blanket off my head to the surprised stares of friends and roommates. The last few paragraphs are their accounts of that night, I don’t have any. I called the first nurse and told her I still had 10 | ethosmagazine.org ..there was a crescendo of ringing in my ears, coinciding with black slowly creeping in from every corner of my vision until reality was a blur at the end of a tunnel. really bad ringing in my ears, no equilibrium and black spots in my vision. “Honey,” she said, “sounds like you drank something with GHB [a common anesthetic date rape drug]. It’ll take at least a day for the symptoms to go away, maybe a week. It sounds like those girls are lucky you drank it before they did.” I’m still not sure how those guys planned on getting a vomiting, comatose girl past three surly bouncers without eating a platter of knuckle sandwiches, but I’m glad I jumped on that grenade. I can’t imagine how I’d have reacted if I was their size.  (...truncated)