The typical protocol will say that the eligible volunteer must be within 10% of his or her ideal weight. The way they determine this is by measuring the width of your elbow joint with a caliper to get your frame size, and then look on a chart to see how much space you should take up. If you're skinny, you'd better not be "big boned, " because if you are, you have no right to be so thin, and you won't qualify. Likewise, if you're short and fat or tall and skinny, forget it. I have just enough meat on me to not look funny, so I always get through this particular hurdle. I tried to put on pounds once with those protein milk shakes that athletes drink, but they only gave me the job of passing bigger turds.

One of my drug studies was at the Clinical Pharmacology Unit in Ben Tucker Memorial, which is no longer owned by the hospital, but by an independent firm that underbids the competition to get its experiment contracts. They hire their own non-union staff, cater their own meals, and buy supplies on their own. It's been this way since a few years back, when some Kuwaiti sheik bought out every hospital in town and then trimmed some of the fat from his empire. I only know this because I've got two sisters who are nurses, and they're always going on about how it's all going to the dogs.

For these health care professionals, science is just a job, and they have an interest in doing it as cheaply as possible. This becomes most apparent at meal times. I remember that only meat eaters like myself were allowed into that particular experiment. One guy I used to chat with there had lied to get in, and always tried to eat as little meat as possible. He would slip me the Salisbury steak, and I'd toss him a wad of macaroni in return. Once a nurse spotted us and threatened to dock our pay if we did it again. She watched us like a hawk after that.

Another thing that galled us was that the staff had come to a decision about the food because of endless complaints, and they had switched to a different (and much better) caterer. However, my study had begun several months earlier, and they had to keep every new group of volunteers on the same horrible diet till the study was complete, so as to preserve the consistency of their data. This would not have been so bad, except that there were newer studies happening there at the same time, with the guinea pigs color coded in hospital scrubs of various colors.

The dining room where we ate became more crowded after a nurse made a new dinner announcement: "Pfizer guys, time to eat!"

About a dozen men hurried in wearing blue pajamas, and sat down to open the styrofoam trays that had been laid out at certain tables for them. These fellows had just checked in, and were having their first meal in the unit. My vegetarian buddy, wearing bright orange pajamas exactly like mine, waved to a guy that he knew who was settling down a few feet away from us.

"Nice blues," he said.

"Yeah, thanks. I see they gave you the orange, so if you escape, they can spot you real easy," quipped his friend. "They make the chain gang wear the same color."

"Is it true they've got gun towers on the roof here?" I asked.

"Hey, you never know," Blue said with a smile. "When are you guys getting out?"

"Tomorrow morning, between nine and eleven," said Orange. "They told us it should go quickly but they don't want to promise... Oh, my God, what's this?"

The man in blue pajamas had broken the flow of ideas with a harsh physical maneuver: he had opened the top of his food tray. Our eyes fixed onto on the lively colors of a rectangular square of lasagna, a heavy slice of apple pie with big, clumsy crumbs and a dollop of whipped cream lying across it and raisins peeking out from its cinnamon-laden guts, then to a cluster of steamy, peppered chicken slices that gleamed with an ample moisture originating from within the pale meat itself, and finally some thickly buttered snow peas that held themselves with a firmness that told the hungry viewer in no uncertain terms that they had been living, growing vegetables mere hours before offering themselves up to be devoured.

We then turned our heads back to the barren fare we'd been picking at from our own table. The macaroni shells took up most of each tray, and had on them just enough grease to help them fall away from each other, and not form a single cake. When eaten, these cheeseless things resisted the teeth far beyond the point where an Italian family would discuss whether the pasta had been pulled from the pot a moment too soon. This stuff had merely been softened enough for digestion to happen without major gastric distress, and with a complete omission of the flavors one would find in imported, or even a regular name brand macaroni. Another pocket of the tray held spinach from a can, a food familiar enough to the reader to go without description. Lastly there was the meat loaf, with representation from both the animal and vegetable kingdoms, in such a mixture that would evade any ingredient name such as beef or rice. This was "meat product," and it had some gravy on it.

We in the orange pajamas looked at our plates, and our stomachs spoke together, saying that they didn't like being treated this way. A young nurse kept eyeing us from nearby as she locked the stainless steel refrigerators while sipping her cup of normal, caffeinated coffee. I always miss the coffee. Our noses were brought back to the other table by wonderful smells.

"Relax, man," said the blue guinea pig as he cut into the lasagna with the side of his fork, "eighteen more hours, and you'll be out there, having fun with your paycheck --what are you doing, the blood thinner? --eighteen hundred? --and I'll be in here with the needles and the TV set. What's the first thing you're going to eat?"

"You're right," I said, "it's best to think about the real world. I'll be getting a double espresso, first off, then I think I'll get lunch out at one of those Ethiopian places near the university. The injera really fills you all the way up, and the spices are very special. Ever tried it?"

Blue nodded that he had, but I sensed that he had no immediate need to remember. The other became interested, and said that he should discover East African cuisine sometime soon. The conversation wandered from one of the city's exotic eateries to another as everyone ate. As we gathered up walked our trash toward the garbage can, I mused, "If this was a nice restaurant, and I was finishing up like this, I might go outside and light up a nice cigar."

My dining companions of both colors shot me an urgent look, and discreetly glanced in the direction of the nurse. She hadn't heard the remark.

"Careful," said my companion in orange when we got to the TV room, "a friend of mine slipped up one time, when he was being interviewed by a rookie doctor. She asked if he was a smoker, and of course my man says 'No.' But then he goes, 'I did smoke a cigar a few weeks ago after I ate,' and she cut the dude right out of the study. He was out nine hundred bucks on one lousy cigar. That's nine beans!"

Almost every guinea pig in the room was a lean young fellow in orange like myself, since our group had just finished our dreary meal. There were also a few guys in green who were trying out a new antidepressant, but they simply stared at the monitor with their usual serene expressions. They had barely said a word between them since I was admitted a week earlier. "Brain sluts" are pretty disgusting, when you stop to think about it, becoming retarded for money like that.

We had walked in on the middle of the six o'clock news. "They stuff their faces for science!" The news woman announced like a bad actress, trying to generate an amazed voice. "Chomping down ten thousand calories a day, and getting paid to do it, in a new obesity study at Tucker Hospital, when we come right back!" The chubby face of a blond woman shoveling ravioli into her mouth, briefly flashed on the screen, and for another moment, we saw a close-up of a man's bearded face consuming some sort of milk shake, then wiping his mouth with a tired expression.

"Here I am starving half the time, and eating dog food the other half, and they're getting paid to pig out? It's too much," I said.

"--and in the same building, no less," another guy remarked. "Maybe there's more to this study than they told us. They might be studying the extent to which people will tolerate lousy food, while we're all really getting a placebo in the arm."

The news program came back on the air. "Breakfast consisted of two sausage sandwiches with eggs, hotcakes with butter and syrup, and several servings of hash browns," the reporter said as a long table filled with food appeared on the screen. "That was for starters. As the day waddled on, the 10 volunteers in this scientific experiment also packed away chicken, jumbo-sized cheeseburgers, French fries, two pints of ice cream and eight ounces of cashews, for a whopping total of 10,000 calories."

We had become silent, with our sullen faces fixed on the monitor. "The experiment is not to find out who's the biggest pig," the voice continued’ but rather to study a hormone called leptin (the Greek word for thin), which is thought to be an important regulator of body fat." The scene broke to show a doctor measuring the fat on a woman's arm with a skin fold caliper.

"They're making sure she's fat!" yelled a thin man. "But we had to prove we were skinny!"

"And they make us get skinnier!" shouted another. The news person went on about how mice lost weight when they were injected with the new hormone, how a third of the US population is obese and chunkiness is getting more common, and how they needed more time to figure out what leptin is about and how they can make money on it. The din remained fairly loud as the camera went from scientists in white, to white rats, and back to the scientists again.

"Hey, Yo! Look! Check it out!" shouted one of my orange buddies from the window. "There she is! That's them!" The rest of us were momentarily confused, and not happy to be distracted from such a stimulating program, but we soon understood that he had spotted the face-stuffer study, through the window of its research unit three floors below and across a wide courtyard. "I thought they looked familiar," he continued. "Let me go get my specs."

He rushed out to his bedroom and came back with a small pair of opera glasses. Guinea pigs occasionally include this in their personal travel kit in case there's a dormitory full of cute nurses nearby, or just to people-watch the sidewalks down below.

We formed a group beside the window, and our attention was split between the fish-tank image of the other window, some fifty yards off, and the TV screen with its talking heads. The guys started passing the glasses around, trying to determine what was on the dining table in that happier place that was so close and yet so far away.

"I see French fries... I think that's spaghetti... What's the guy eating? Pancakes? No, waffles. They're giving them waffles!" When my turn came, I watched the awful spectacle of a lady in an easy chair, biting into a big, sloppy sandwich on a kind of bread I recognized. "Hogg's Deli. She's eating a spicy chicken hog!"

This meant that the researchers were ordering food from around the neighborhood. My absolute favorite lunch item, in the entire world, perhaps, is found at Hogg's, where they carve out the inside of a loaf of homemade bread, stuff it with a delicious assortment of peppered-up chicken, blue cheese dressing, and other salad ingredients, and then serve it up with some long roasted peppers. The bread arrives slightly moist with water from their steam table.

All of the guys who lived in the area knew what a spicy chicken hog was. One put his hands to his temples and started saying, "Shit. Oh, shit!" We started getting really excited.

The news person was still speaking. "Dr. Wendy Thayer, director of clinical Research, says that she's been very discreet about the study which pays its subjects $250 per day, because 'We were afraid that we'd be overwhelmed with calls from people who wanted to participate.'"

Upon hearing this, everyone started getting up, yelling at the top of their lungs, and slamming their fists down on the furniture. The door of the TV room had been open all this time, and so the sounds were easily heard from twenty paces down the hall at the nursing station. Now a nurse arrived, and not a popular woman, but a narrow-minded one who seemed to have made a career move from a day care center. She was a no-sense-of-humor, school-marmish pain in the ass who couldn't find your vein with a road map. For the most part we ignored her, or simply minimized interaction with her. Most of the guys in this study were a dozen years her senior, and several were far better educated.

"OK guys, you know the rules." she proclaimed. "I'm gonna start docking paychecks if you don't quiet down!"

Everyone turned and faced her at the same moment. There were a few seconds during which no one spoke, but we all stared straight into her face, and the sounds we made were chairs suddenly being pushed against tables, a book falling to the floor, and some long, disgusted groans coming from the hollows of our stomachs. As it happened, the whole group was standing.

The nurse's face lost its air of authority, and then her expression turned to actual fear, I suppose because of all the bodies and the raw displeasure aimed at her. She stepped backward, bumping into the door frame, and started to say "Umm, umm..."

I could not control the peal of laughter that forced its way out of my lungs. I felt as though someone were holding me down and tickling me and I was trying to wiggle free. Then I wanted to stop laughing, but it kept getting worse, and more hysterical after each time I paused for breath. I wanted to leave the room, but the nurse was standing in the doorway, not yet running away, and I didn't want to give her the impression that I was advancing upon her. I felt someone slap me on the back, and all at once everyone in the orange pajamas burst out laughing in a single roar, and even the brain sluts added a feeble nodding to their vapid smiles. The unhappy woman took off down the hall, and opinions differed as to whether she'd had a short cry. One couldn't be sure.

In the end she half-heartedly tried to fine us twenty-five bucks apiece, but we were able to talk the more mature director out of it. After leaving with our pay envelopes, we walked down to the face stuffers' ward and tried to get in to ask questions and sign ourselves in. They were somehow expecting us by then, though, and they kept refusing to buzz us in. I wandered off with two Belgian guinea pigs to introduce them to spicy chicken hogs, and they gave me the rundown on lab ratting in their country. They told me that when they go home to Brussels and talk about our horrible drug study food, nobody ever believes them. Finally we said goodbye, and I went to visit my bank.