My former-pothead, former-junkie, former–speed freak parents, they’d accidentally overdosed my fish by presenting him to me in a glass full of GHB. Meaning: liquid Ecstasy. Meaning: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. Unfazed, my dad kept drinking even as my pet’s tiny golden corpse bumped and bobbed against his lips. He pinched it out with two fingers and passed the tiny victim to the Somali maid. “To the commode,” he intoned solemnly, “and henceforth to return to the great circle of life.”
