by Jerry Stahl
“You’re going to have to be very careful,” she whispered, easing herself down until her wet lips just grazed his mouth. “Any violent movement could rip your stitches.”
Manny breathed her in, then extended his tongue, and she let him taste her. He tried to crane upward, and she placed a firm hand on his forehead.
“What did I say about your stitches? Listen to your nurse, Detective. No straining.”
She lowered herself again, gauging pressure, so that she could rock gently backward and forward on his face, all the while holding the IV arm with one hand and making sure he didn’t try to crane upward with the other.
“Oh, baby, this must be so hard for you.”
“Mmmmmppphhh….”
She eased herself up, out of licking distance, and ran her finger over her sex. Her voice was a breathy whisper. “A man like you wants to be in control. That’s what being a cop’s all about, right? Control’s just another drug you can’t give up. You can’t give it up, can you, Manny? But you want to. You know you want to….”
Manny stared up at her, transfixed. His thumb began to throb.
“Are you going to torture me?”
“Is that a request or a question?”
Tina laughed and eased herself backward, careful not to touch him above the waist, where he’d been shot, where his ribs were wrapped tight, where the late Lipton’s liver rested in its home away from home. Then she leaned down and kissed him, still talking softly. “Is this torture, Manny?”
She slipped her tongue in his mouth and planted one hand on his shoulder, reaching back to angle his cock between her legs. She threw back her head and shivered as she took him inside her.
“Come on, tell me” she murmured, digging her nails into his collarbone. “Is this torture? Huh, Manny? Is this torture, you big bad cop….”
“You fucking bitch,” he hissed through the sweat already running down his face. His kick was coming on by the second, the pain mounting even as the groaning pleasure ignited his psyche. The words poured out of him in a mindless rush, “I want to fuck you until I die…I fucking love you….”
But Tina kept teasing. She pushed herself steadily up and down, never letting him all the way in. She stopped before her ass collided with his thighs, at once careful and reckless, driving him crazy by her own control. She’d push him to the brink, then slide back up, shimmying from side to side, all the while keeping her two eyes locked on his one.
“Is this torture,” she kept repeating, timing each languid murmur to her downward thrusts. “Is this torture?”
Until, losing himself in the rhythm, in brute mortality, Manny forgot where he was. He abandoned all awareness of fresh stitches and drainage tubes and wounds still suppurating under gauze. He gave in and plunged upward, gone, until he opened a seam of flesh over his liver and cried out—“FUCK!”—and stopped completely, paralyzed by the blade of white-hot pain that impaled him like a jailhouse shank.
“Be careful,” Tina whispered, and held still, only her beautiful small breasts rising and falling as she breathed. Manny wanted to run his tongue over the sheen of sweat on her body. He wanted to roll her over, to pin her down, to be the man. But he was helpless. She’d made him that way.
Tina lowered her face to his, so close he could see the flecks of blue and copper that shimmered in her green irises. “I know what you want, but you can’t have it right now, baby. Right now I am fucking you,” she chanted, “I am fucking you….”
She repeated until she lost herself, and slammed down all the way, filling herself with every inch of him, and Manny let out a scream that made her clamp her hand over his mouth, come back to earth, and whisper, “I’m sorry….”
But it wasn’t pain that sent him out. It was something else. Something darker. The delicious, guilty, counter-to-everything-he-though-the-knew-on-the-planet pleasure of surrendering control. This was, he knew beneath all consciousness, more dangerous than any narcotic. If he let go, like this, then surely the world would fall away. The earth would crack open and swallow him. It was that wrong. And he no longer cared. He gave up and savored the long, slow fall into the wet unknown….
When he jerked back to consciousness Tina was riding him. And there was nothing he could do. Tears streamed down his face from his one good eye. The pain was a family of blood-red rats strangling on barbed wire under his skin.
“You…can…kill…me,” he heard himself cry, through clenched teeth, and something in the way he said it touched her in a place she’d never allowed anyone to touch. It was as if they’d left sex behind. Gone beneath it. The same delirium drove them both: love broken down to naked need, to jagged symmetry, the perfect insanity of passion between a woman like Tina and a man like him….
Then Tina cried out his name, and she came with a kind of shuddering, perfectly still, drawn inward by a climax so strong as to paralyze her. She bit her lip until it bled, and released a long, low “Yes-s-s-s-s….” Manny watched her, some desperate question stamped on his face. He fucked through the pain, toward the one thing that could consume it. Until Tina kissed him, let him lick the blood off her lips, and held his face so she could see it when he arched his back and shot whatever he had left of himself inside her.
“My…whole…life,” Manny muttered when it was over, breathing so hard his bandages popped apart.
Tina laughed, taped him back up, and slid sideways onto the hospital sheets. Careful not to press his wounds, she stretched beside him, nuzzling as close as she could, her lips pressed against his throat.
“Christ, I need a cigarette.”
“You don’t wanna know what I need,” Manny replied, and looked miserably at his gauze girdle. “Hell on earth doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on down there.”
“All right then,” said Tina, swinging into professional nurse mode. “Take a couple of those Toradols. I’m also authorized to give you Chlonodine, as required.”
She stood up, pulled open the nightstand drawer, and removed a mini–Dixie cup containing three chalk-white tablets.
“I hate Chlonodine.”
“In that case you should take some. It lowers your blood pressure.”
“I know what the shit does.”
“You’re an expert, I forgot. So you should know that when you lower your blood pressure, you reduce the discomfort of withdrawal. I’ll leave some Xanax, too.”
“I can’t stand Xanax.”
“Perfect, I’ll leave three of those. And, in case you convulse, there’s Tegretol.”
“Are there any shitty drugs you’re forgetting? Why not throw in whippets and airplane glue, and we can have a party?”
“Fine.”
Tina’d pinned her hair back up, and was already stepping into her nurse’s uniform. “If you OD it’s no problem, the ICU’s one floor down. We can make you a happy cabbage.”
“Right,” said Manny. “Speaking of human vegetables, if I don’t get out of these restraints, I’m gonna need a diaper.”
“Actually, you had one until yesterday.”
Manny cringed, and Tina patted his hand. “Don’t worry. It only makes me love you more. See you later.”
She headed for the door and Manny called to her. “Tina, come on!” He tried to keep the pleading out of his voice. “You’re not just going to leave me strapped down like this?”
She paused and made a show of considering. “Doctor would be very mad.”
“I’m sure,” he said miserably. “Would you just fucking get over here?”
“So much for postcoital glow.” Tina took her time undoing the leather restraints at his hands and ankles. “I may never see you so lovable again.”
“I don’t know,” said Manny weakly, when he could move his limbs, “that was amazing. I never…I mean, I’ve always been the fucker.”
“Trust me, honey, you still are.”
Manny waited until Tina closed the door, then shut his eye. He felt dizzy, ready to throw up, and completely in love. His own good luck scared
him.
EPILOGUE
Manny’s last morning in the hospital. Tina, pushing an empty wheelchair (the hospital’s insurance required all departing patients be rolled to the curb), walked into his room just as a pink-faced, Jerry Falwell–looking fellow was walking out with a manila envelope.
Manny stood by the window, idly fingering the gouge under his eye patch where Zank’s crack pipe had burned out a hollow of flesh.
“Time to go,” Tina called, breaking his reverie with a bite on the back of his neck. “You’re a free man.”
Manny turned. No matter how many times he saw her in her nurse’s uniform, the sight scorched him.
“I hate to leave,” he said. “I was starting to dig the place.”
“Checkout time’s eleven, Stud. Who was your visitor?”
Manny hadn’t decided whether to tell her, but one look and he knew there’d never been any question. He just had to lay it out.
“A guy from the RNC. The Republican National Committee.”
“Right…. What did he want?”
“What do you think?” Manny paused, felt for the fresh scar on his belly, and started up again. “You know, I never realized, but when you really look at Mister Biobrain, up close, Bush is totally leering at his own equipment. Marge has a weird expression, too, like she’s being goosed from the other end. ‘It looks like an odd party.’ That’s what this guy said when I showed it to him. I don’t know if that’s Republican for ‘perverted,’ or if that’s just how guys who went to Andover and Yale and work in ‘deep politics’ talk.”
“Deep politics?” Tina didn’t look happy.
“That’s who Marge was dealing with. He’s some kind of operator. And he was fucking sharp. I thought I recognized him from CNN, maybe MSNBC, but I didn’t ask. Anyway, he said the smiley-face might have been drawn on the photo, not on George. ‘We can bring people in to prove his testicles were undecorated.’ He actually said that, like we were already in an impeachment hearing. You would have loved listening to him. ‘We can show the photo was tampered with, but that doesn’t buy us much. It’s still the President’s genitals, eye-level with a lady who’s not his wife. One wrong move and we’re looking at Scrotum-gate. That’s the last thing our country needs. We had just about enough of that from Mr. Clinton, thank you.’”
Manny rubbed his one good eye, which throbbed from all its new responsibility.
“Did you tell him?” Tina asked.
“Tell him what? That that ‘lady’ used to be my wife? He probably knew anyway. He had all the angles.” Manny imitated the man’s genteel delivery. “‘If it turns out he did draw the little face on himself, that’s a different kind of trouble. Then we’re into abnormal behavior. Like Dick Morris and the toe thing. Or else it just looks juvenile, and we’re back to the frat boy issue….’”
Tina squinted at him. If he was pinned, she’d spot it. Codeine would teeny up the pupils every bit as much as heroin.
“You haven’t relapsed, have you? You seem a little chatty. You’re doing voices.”
“Give me a piss-test, Sweetheart. I’m eight days off everything but Advil and ginger ale. Did you know they bring twelve-step meetings to the liver ward? N. A. or the highway.” He massaged his temples. “I’m kind of in shock that it’s finally over. The guy came here to deal. So I made a deal.”
Tina tried to read his face but couldn’t. Since the morning he rolled out of surgery, they’d spent hours together every day. They’d made love whenever they could. Talked about everything in the world. The only secret left between them was the future.
Manny suddenly took her by the shoulders.
“Listen, Tina, they offered money.”
“And?”
“I said no.”
“You said NO?”
After all the times she’d fucked with his head, she wondered if now he was fucking with hers. Either that or he was going Marvin on her.
“Look,” he went on, “I’ve thought about it. If I wanted cash, I could have sold the photo through Roos’s buddy, to the highest bidder. But it’s too messy. Once that picture hits, everybody’s going to try and trace it back. Like Deep Throat. Besides, there’s more important things than money.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Tina replied. “I’ve never had any.”
“Well, you could.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean,” Manny said, “is how would you like to be the wife of a Congressman?”
“WHAT?”
“I need to explain? Marge was planning to use Mister Biobrain to get into Congress. There’s going to be a new seat from Upper Marilyn County. Some redistricting bullshit. And thanks to some backroom deal between parties, the Republicans own it.”
“Manny—”
“Just listen.” He moved a hand to her face, ran a finger over those cheekbones that still made his mouth dry. “Turns out Marge already let the big boys know she had a picture that would fuck their world. God love her, she told W.’s pals that unless they put her in Congress, she’d tell stories about her and the leader of the free world that would make Bill and Monica look like Fred and Ethel. Her bad luck, when I let the heavies know that I had the picture, well…let’s just say they trust me more ’cause I’m a man. And I wear a badge.” His grin was ambiguous. “Anyway, now she’s fucked, and I’m in.”
Tina started to speak, and Manny pressed a finger to her lips. “Before you say anything, there’s something else. As part of the deal, I can’t fix any of this.”
He pointed to that pocket of seared flesh under his eye, then tapped his eye patch. He finished by raising his still bandaged fist, Black Power–style.
“It’s sick,” he said, but not unhappily. “They had their way, they’d chop off the rest of my hand and fit me with a hook. They want to play up the ‘personal sacrifice’ angle. NOBLE COP WHO GOT MAIMED IN THE LINE OF DUTY. Do the John McCain thing. The more I’ve sacrificed, the more people will love me. ‘There aren’t a lot of heroes, Detective Rubert, but you’re one of them.’ The guy actually said that. He also said they’d keep my thumb on ice—they can do that—and pay for any kind of surgery later, after I’m established. They’ll put the money on account with whatever doctor I want.”
Manny knew how this must sound. But he wanted her to know everything good, bad, and unconscionable.
“If it’s okay with you, I’m gonna lay my surgical gift certificate on McCardle, let him get a new face. Maybe he can turn over a new leaf and go for Sammy Davis this time. I’ll give the business to Roos. I owe both of ’em. Anyway, the Democrats aren’t even going to field a candidate, so it’s a lock. In a couple of years, a Senate seat comes available. Who knows? In a decade or two, we could be banging in Lincoln’s bedroom…. Of course, if you say yes, you’ll be married to a mutant. But what the hell.”
For a long moment, Tina didn’t say anything, then she smiled and slipped her hand between his legs.
“I can handle the mutant part, baby, but I never had you pegged as a Republican.”
Manny shrugged. “Life’s a compromise,” he said, and dropped into the wheelchair for the long ride out.
Continue reading for an excerpt from Jerry Stahl’s novel
Happy Mutant Baby Pills
Available November 5 in trade paperback and e-book
Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects, and his job is “to recite and minimize—sometimes by just saying them really fast—other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable.” The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical.
Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hack work and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help
.
Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora’s grand scheme to horrify the world, to exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.
Stahl’s gleefully twisted, maniacally brilliant prose, will delight, appall, and prove, once again, that Stahl is “a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso”
Prologue
Once upon a time, I was a fucking maniac.
Not, mind you, that I have since morphed into the spawn of Mr. Rogers. It’s just—how can I put this without sounding like a douche (the eternal question)—there were years so weirdly searing, so down to the bleeding toes of my soul draining, I found myself putting words on a page at a time when I could barely string a series of sentences together, trying to GET IT ALL DOWN, to get it, you know, right, so that when things got better—because I had to believe they would, they fucking had to—I would have a digital memory, some kind of record, however short, however unflattering, if not (occasionally) outright embarrassing; something to call up, in trying times, to help me feel grateful, however out-of-control fucked life might seem, that it’s no longer as bad as, you know, that... (In much the same way horrific drunks whose “friends” video them taking their clothes off on the subway singing “Tiny Dancer,” or all-but-raping a mentally challenged cousin in a Burger King, will have that moment, or those moments, preserved for eternity, on hand when needed, to remind them, when things go south, that, if nothing else, they’re not as far south as they were, back in the dark days, when they were Elton John-ing or cousin-raping or generally making regrettable spectacles of themselves.) (Or sending regrettable e-mails. The worst! How the Internet has provided all new humiliation-delivery systems. Your whole mentally challenged Tiny Dancer party can go viral.)
Until, of course, the banner day—O Gratitude!—when something happens and—like that!— you realize the Burger King years were a season in paradise, subway shame a MacArthur grant compared to the level of demoralization you now feel. The particular demoralization that comes from thinking you were out of the woods, and then the woods turn out to be a park, and the park’s in front of the Petrified Forest. Which is full of man-eating boars. Who only eat men who look like you. Or something. You get the point.