I kept it hush-hush, because I had tried twice previously this month and failed, but I’m in the Parexel Clinical Research unit right now in Middlesex, England. It’s the standard deal with me and drug trials- I swallowed a cupful of experimental pills and have allowed nurses to draw blood from my veins over and over again for two days. In exchange for this glamorous activity, I am to be paid £2,200, which is today $4,326 yankee dollars (€2,766 in Euros, if you’re an exchange rate nerd. I don’t know how many Swiss francs, but I’m betting it’s right around CHF 4,400. First person to post the amount in Yen wins a prize), and a fabulous amount of money, especially for a poor Texan boy who has been subsisting on beans-on-toast and the weekly treat of a Domino’s pizza for months now. Especially because, the circumstances of this particular study dictate that I shan’t see a dime of it until mid-August, merely a week or so before we return to America and convert to dollar bills.

Isn’t it exciting to read about how much money I’m gonna have? Why, we’ll be able to live in an apartment when we get back to Texas!

Anyway. Yes. So it’s this again. I am on drugs. They are boring, but less boring than others I have done, where there are no side-effects at all. Instead I am (redacted because I could actually be kicked out if someone from the staff googled and found this). It is strange and terrifying. Actually, it is not, I just said that because I couldn’t say what it actually was, and I wanted you to imagine something weird, like a little Dan growing out of my shoulder. The side effects are very mild and merely help pass the time a little.

The real tragic side effect of this place is my bunk-mate, whom I’ve dubbed that dutch dickhead. I do not know his name (I do, actually, I saw it written down just now. But he remains as I have named him) but I have heard his voice all day. He is on the phone five feet away from me, holding conversations that any reasonable man would want to keep private. Man, does this guy hate his girlfriend. He calls her, yells at her, gets too angry to yell anymore, and slams down the phone, then paces around the room. Over and over again, this is what he does. He swears at her in a strange medley of English and Dutch, and makes everyone in the room uncomfortable.

But I will know this man for many weeks. The terms of this study go that I check in every Monday morning, hang out and let ‘em have some blood, then take their boring drugs on Tuesdays, at which point I will spend hours being stuck like a pincushion by nurses. On Wednesdays, I do nothing but allow them a bit more blood, and leave every evening at twenty after ten. This will be repeated every Monday-Wednesday for the following four weeks. I will hear this man flirt with his new girl next week, then hear him passive-aggressively pout on the phone the week after. On week four, he will have phone sex at midnight with the woman at whom he is now swearing in that strange Dutch/English hybrid, and on week five they will argue about whether or not he really promised to use his check to take her to Brussels or not with his £2,200.

But me, I will not know how that ends. Our tenure as bunk-mates will be at its end at that point. When this is over, I will have to wait until I am riding public transportation in Austin to hear a strange man yell at a woman who is not there right in front of me.

Meanwhile. Parexel in England is very much like PPD in Austin, in terms of the fellow inpatients. Perhaps a slightly higher proportion of student-y types, and the poor foreigners are from all over the European Union, rather than merely Mexico. I am a novelty, as it has been many years since another American has checked into this facility. I am famous. america dan, the volunteer outreach coordinator has taken to calling me. The men- it is all men, except the nurses- talk extensively about the women with whom they intend to have sex upon their release, and they expect that the paycheck they’ll receive in August will facilitate this. Many of the men are actually boys, because it is 2008 which means you are old enough to participate in a clinical study even if you were not yet born when the first batman movie was released. I am an old man by comparison, the second oldest in my room (of six). That Dutch Dickhead is fifteen months younger than I am. Factor my age, my blatant American-ness, and the fact that I’m now the guy who has done more studies than anybody else in the facility (oh, but it hasn’t been that many, except I remember on my first time in remarking at the gentleman who had previously done ten, while this one marks the ninth time I have dosed), and I become very strange to everyone I meet. It is wonderful. I find them all very strange, as well. Finally, we understand one another.