I was young. I was naive. 

I was face down in the bathtub, naked, with my face pasted to the drain. 

That's what I remember of my first encounter with a powerful prescription drug. Some day, I figure, somebody will search through my past in an effort to find something to discredit me, so I might as well get my most embrassing moment out in the open. 

I had just moved away from home in West Palm Beach to attend college at the University of Florida. There a few months, I began to feel twinges of pain in one of my teeth, and the pain persisted enough so that I contacted a dentist. 

He gave me an initial look and said he wanted to do a more in depth look the following week. The pain had gone away, so I had no problem with waiting. 

But a few days later, on a Saturday night, the twinges of pain came back with a vengance. Ever see those cartoons where a person's face throbs with pain? That's how my face felt. (I would later learn I needed a root canal.) 

All my life, I had been pretty much pain-free, never breaking any bones and suffering real pain only once -- when a friend threw a baseball straight up as high as he could in the air and I, only 10 years old, tried to catch it and did ... with my eye. 

But the pain I felt that Saturday night was far worse. The time was 2 a.m. when I drove to the emergency room. The guy at the counter said he could get me a doctor, but I'd save a lot of money if I called my dentist at home and got a prescription to hold me over until Monday. 

So I summoned up my courage and woke my dentist by calling from the payphone in the emergency room. He immediately prescribed an antibiotic and a pain killer that also had a sedative mixed in. This would be the first pain killer with a narcotic I would take in my life. 

''Drink a lot of liquid with the pain killer,'' he said. 

And I did. 

And then I went to bed. An hour or so later, I awoke needing to use the bathroom because of all the liquid I had drank beforehand. But when I got ready to move, my arms and fingers seemed heavy like logs. And I was tingling. 

''So this is what it feels like to be on drugs,'' I said. 

I forced myself out of bed and into the bathroom to stand in front of the toilet. That was the last thing I remember doing before waking a short while later, face down, in the bathtub, my right face cheek pasted to the tub's drain. 

As soon as I realized where I was, I realized what had happened. The drug had caused me to pass out, and I fell sideways into the tub. I started laughing out loud as I peeled my face off the drain and felt the rose pattern of the drain imbedded on my cheek. 

As I stood to walk back to my room, I felt myself starting to black out again. I thought momentarily of crawling on all fours back to bed, but I was too proud for that. That's when I came up with an ingenious idea. 

''I'll run real fast,'' I said. 

I ran alright. A few steps. 

As the world began turning black, I literally jumped for my bed. The next morning, my roommates woke me. 

Only the top half of my body had made it into bed.