The first time we met, your dispensary was half liquor store and half college drug store: gobs of hair products, racy magazines and condoms for sale, and lots and lots of beer. I bought some gin and picked up all that stuff: predrugs and postdrugs and mouthwash that turned my teeth brown even though it was blue. I said it scared me; you said the surgeon was protecting me. A couple years later we tried out assorted hormones together . . . well I took ’em, but you handed out the first try, then the second with a noncommittal expression, looking me right in the face. By the time I finally got some that didn’t give me a lightning-white eye ache, you were calling me by my first name. Not that we’d had any conversation, mind you, but you were getting to see my life even though I didn’t get to see yours. Our pharmacy, yours and mine, was edged out of the drugstore-now-full-time-liquor-store into the newer, biggerand-not-better superdupermarket that shares the same acre of asphalt. Now the medicines are doled out in plastic bags hung on long rods like so much dry cleaning, each containing a long skinny bag stapled over with pages and pages of warnings: blah blah blah or death, that’ll be $100 please. Later, there were some itis-es, a couple Z-paks, an inhaler. Then we got around to the nicotine patches, which frankly didn’t work all that well. I need to have my lips sutured shut and some kind of Zen patch stapled over my brain. Still, you handed over the keys for me to open the NOT ALLOWED, STAFF ONLY cabinet by myself, to support my intention. Nice. One busy Friday night, I pushed a script for narcotics across the counter in my freshly casted arm. I’d scored a filet I could cut with one hand and some tonic with which to dilute a little gin and wash down the Vicodin, because my doctor—my boss—said I could. And I paid for the whole shootin’ match at