Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  For years, I couldn’t talk, I spritzed. Who knew?

  This prologue—for lack of a better word—comprises (compresses?) the febrile spray of what I thought were life’s worst moments, PPA—Preserved Personal Archaeology™— jittery hieroglyphics that, when deciphered, fill twenty pages unlike the rest of the book but necessary to it, a borderline-personality palette cleanser for the more traditional narrative to come.

  Nobody sets out to write the world’s longest cocktail napkin. But Jeez, Beaver, I thought I’d hit bottom. A good place to start a book. But bad place to start a life. The problem, as the great Hubert Selby liked to say, is that the bottom is bottomless. In other words, I thought I was fucked. And it turned out I didn’t even know what fucked was.

  Your indulgence, then. The waters calm considerably after the opening storm. The storytelling settles into sanity, as sanity itself, by degrees, becomes a far shore, forgotten and unseen, like land itself after years at sea.

  (How creepy was that? I used to write greeting cards. Sometimes I relapse.)

  I could have just said, after the prologue things calm the fuck down.

  But let’s start with a joke: Bad penny, she always turns up. (I didn’t say it was funny.)

  This was one of my most popular campaigns, back when the porn business was referred to as “adult films.” Not that I’m a porn guy. I’m not. Anymore. I’m the kind of writer you don’t hear about. The guy who always wanted to be a writer—who read the backs of cereal boxes as a kid, dreamed of being Ernest Hemingway, then grew up and wrote the backs of cereal boxes.

  You don’t think about the people who write the side-effect copy for Abilify or olestra ads . . . It’s not as easy as you think. You need to decide whether “anal leakage” goes best before or after “suicidal thoughts and dry mouth.” I take a ribbing from some of the guys at the office—which, I have to admit, gets to me. They know I’ve been working on a novel, but it’s been a while. I guess I should also admit that the heroin helps with some of the shame I feel about writing this stuff. Or life in general. I’m not, like, a junkie-junkie. I use it, I don’t let it use me. And I’m not going to lie: it helps. It’s like, suddenly, you have a mommy who loves you. You just have to keep paying her. Not that life was bad, either. I made a living, and not a bad one, considering. When I got my MFA I thought for sure all I had to do was start writing stories and things would just kind of take care of themselves. I realize now that it probably wasn’t smart to use my “craft” to make my living. “Don’t use the same muscle you write fiction with to pay the rent,” my professor and thesis adviser, Jo Bergy, advised. (Jo writes a lot of YA stuff. Her alter ego/heroine is a unicorn named “Teensy.”) Of course I ignored her. I wanted to be a writer! In New York! But gradually, as the years passed, the bar for what passed for writing got a little lower while the pay, occasionally, got a lot higher. Why is that? Why should I be paid more for vibrator copy than my searching and personal novella about growing up the son of a blind rabbi and his kleptomaniac adulterous wife in Signet, Ohio? Sure, I placed a few “chunks” of the book as short stories in the beginning. That’s what made me think I could do it. Though why I thought the three free copies from Party Ball Magazine, or the two hundred I got from Prose for Shmoes, a hipster “web-lit” site out of Portland, was going to make a dent in my living expenses, I don’t know. I had some hopeful correspondence from The Believer. But ultimately they ended up printing the letter of protest I wrote when they rejected my twenty-first submission. Again, the drugs helped. I feel a terrific sense of shame about my whole life situation. I see other people my age, and way younger (which kills me), making big money doing screenplays, snagging memoir deals based on tweets, and here I am bouncing around from Porn Dog to New Media Guy to Uh-Oh Boy—industry lingo for Side Effects Specialists—aka SESSIES.

  And yes, just thinking about this, the knife-in-the-chest regret I feel at chances blown, assignments fucked up, books unwritten or written badly . . . public scenes (more than once involving knee-walking, twice on a plane) when I was, you know, more high than I thought I was, it all twists me up. On smack, sometimes, you feel so perfect, you just assume everything you do is perfect, too. And when you remember, and the remorse kicks in, it’s like a razor-legged tarantula crawling upside down in your heart, cursing you in dirty Serbian for being a lame-ass dope fiend who blew every chance he ever had and ended up in the world of incontinence wear and catheters. (Referred to, among pharma-hacks, as “dump lockers” and “caths.”) Well, do a little heroin and you can remember the good things. On smack, everything feels good. I would gladly slit my own throat, attend the funeral, and dig my own grave if I could do it all on decent dope. As William Burroughs once opined, “It’s not the heroin that kills you, it’s the lifestyle.”

  But we were talking about the good things!

  Like, not to brag, it was my idea to refer to the discharge from the rectal area as “anal leakage” rather than actual “intestinal discharge.” Which technically (if not linguistically) speaking are two different things. My thinking was—and I said this to Cliff and Chandra, the husband-wife team who took over the agency—my thinking was, bad as “anal leakage” is, at least it’s vaguely familiar. Tires leak, faucets leak; it’s round-the-house stuff, and we all have anuses (ani?). But discharge is never good. Try to think of one situation involving discharge from your body that is not kind of horrible. Perhaps, hearing about my life and “career,” you think they sound pretty horrible. Or maybe you’re thinking to yourself: okay, he has some problems, he’s had a bumpy career path, but he doesn’t seem like a heroin guy.

  Exactly! It’s no big deal! Everybody has their little rituals. Miles Dreek, the other SESSIE, walks in with his spirulina and hemp protein smoothie and gluten-free bran muffin every morning. When I come in, I have my own stations of the cross. I go to the men’s room, cook up a shot up in my favorite stall, grab coffee in my ironic Dilbert mug, and amble back to my cubicle, where the latest batch of American maladies awaits. Today, for example, is Embarrassing Flaky Patches Day. I watch the moving drama the clients have already filmed, showing a nice white lady with other nice white people in a nice restaurant, and listen to her VO: It was a weekend to relax with friends and family. But even here, there was no escaping it. It’s called moderate to severe chronic plaque psoriasis. Once again, I had to deal with these embarrassing, flaky, painful, red patches. It was time for a serious talk with my dermatologist.

  Here’s where I roll up my sleeves. (Well, at least one of them—ha-ha!) From a roster of heinous side effects I start cobbling together the Authoritative-but-Friendly PSE (possible side effects) list. HUMIRA can lower your ability to fight infections, including tuberculosis. Serious, sometimes fatal, events can occur, such as lymphoma or other types of cancer; blood, liver, and nervous system problems; serious allergic reactions; and new or worsening heart failure.

  I had me at cancer! Seriously. I don’t care if bloody images of Satan bubbled up on my flesh, I’d have to do heroin just to stop worrying about the lymphoma and heart failure I might get for taking this shit to get rid of them. That’s the dirty little secret of TV medicine spots. We start off with a bible. A Side Effects Bible. Basically a collection of horrible possibilities. Which it is our job to recite and minimize—sometimes by just saying them really fast—other times by finding language that can render them acceptable. Whatever revulsion-neutralizing pap they come up with to help sell it, there is no chance in hell the people who write it would go near the stuff.

  Of course, people will tell you heroin is bad. But let me tell you my experience. If you take it for a reason, and you happen to have a reason every day, then it’s not exactly addictive behavior. It’s more like medicine. Or a special survival tool. For example, there may be a thought that crops up in your head. (We’re only as sick as our secrets!) Like how, lately, I have this thing, whenever I see a pregnant woman, especially if she’s, you know, exotically beautiful, or has dimples, where I just sort of see her
in stirrups, giving birth, sweaty thighs wide open, the doctor and nurses with their masks on, the doctor reaching in, up to the wrists. It’s better if it’s a female doctor. I don’t know why; I’m not proud of any of this. Once there’s the actual pulling out of some bloody placenta-covered little screamer, I’m out. I’m not sick. But still I think about—this is really not cool, really not something I want to think I’m thinking about—but nonetheless, what I think about, almost against my will, is how her vaginal walls— for which the Brits have the singularly disturbo term “blame-curtains”—no, that can’t be right—will just be vastly . . . open. I remember it from when my ex-wife gave birth to our son, Mickey. (She left me years ago; now she’s running a preschool for upscale biters. And biting’s a syndrome now; Squibb R&D has some meds in development. But never mind. Kids’ drugs take a tad longer for the FDA to rubber-stamp.) Anyway, I just picture the gape. As riveting as Animal Planet footage of boas dislocating their jaws to swallow an entire baby boar. (The same arousal, it goes without saying, does not apply during a caesarean; I’m not an animal.) But still . . . When my thoughts—how can I put this?—veer in this direction, some non-wholesome wouldn’t-want-to-have-my-mind-read-in-front-of-a-room-full-of-friends direction (if I had a room full of friends), I need something to get rid of the thoughts. I need the heroin.

  Worse than fantasies are memories. Which may, arguably, qualify as disguised fantasy. Didn’t George Bernard Shaw say, “The only thing worse than recollecting the things I did as a child is recalling things I did as an adult”? Or was that Cher?

  I actually started writing in rehab. (My first one. I’ve been in eleven. Or eight. Three in Arizona.) And it was awful. The writing, I mean. Rehabs are rehabs. (Work the steps, help do dishes, share the bathroom with a weeping record executive.) We were supposed to paint a portrait of ourselves in words. I still remember my first sentence: “I AM TAPIOCA TRAPPED IN ARMOR!” Followed by: “Little Lloyd” (that’s my name; well, Lloyd, not Little Lloyd). “Little Lloyd has cowered continually, long into adulthood, at the memory of deeds perpetrated on his young unprotected self, scenes of unspeakable humiliation.” Which—can somebody tell me why? Freudians? Melanie Kleiners? Bruno Bettelheimies? Anybody?—barge into my psyche at the most inopportune moments. Imagine a big-screen TV that turns on by itself and blasts shame porn to all your neighbors at four in the morning. Like, say, I’ll be at a job interview, talking to some wing-tipped toad named Gromes about my special abilities recounting the consequences of ingesting Malvesta, a prescription adult-onset acne pill (glandular swelling, discomfort in the forehead, bad breath, strange or disturbing dreams), when I’ll suddenly be overcome with memories of my mother paddling around the house with her hands cupped under her large blue-veined breasts as our record player (ever heard of those?) blared Dean Martin. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore! She’s high-kicking while our mailman, a long-faced Greek with a nervous twitch, peers in the window. And Mom knows he’s there. I’m four and a half, waiting to get taken to kindergarten. Mom’s supposed to drive me, but instead she starts screaming over the music: “Why don’t you play? Why don’t you play?” It makes me anxious. Should the mailman be looking in the window? Where is his other hand? What happened to his bag? I mean, Jeez! Not even five, and I already need a fix.

  Well, that’s it. Once the Dino flashback kicks in, I’m cooked. Forget the job interview. I’m like Biff in Death of a Salesman, grabbing a fountain pen and running out of the office. Except I run straight to the bathroom and pull a syringe from my boot. Minutes later, before the needle is out AHHHH YESS-S-S-S-S-S-S, Thank you, Jesus!. The mommy-tits-amore image furs and softens at the edges. Until—MMMMM, lemme just dab off this little kiss of blood—what began as horror morphs into suffused light, savaged memory softened by euphoria into benevolence, into some slightly disquieting, distant image . . . Mom is no longer doing a dirty can-can in the living room, entertaining a twitchy peeper in government issue . . . Now—I love you, Ma, I really love you! —now her legs simply float up and down in downy silence. My mind has been tucked into bed. A loving hand brushes my troubled little brow . . . Heroin’s the cool-fingered loving Mommy I never had. But everything’s all right now . . . My memory’s parked in the very last row of a flickering drive-in, with fog rolling in over all the cars up front. I know what’s on the screen, and I know it’s bad—is that a knife going into Janet Leigh? But—it . . . just . . . does . . . not . . . matter. It’s still nice. Really nice. (Provided, that is, I don’t pass out in the men’s room, they don’t end up calling paramedics, and I don’t wake up chained to the hospital bed. Again. In California they can arrest you for tracks. Those fascists!)

  And now—oh, God, no! No! Here comes another memory. STOP, PLEASE! Why does my own brain hate me? I’m picking my son up at preschool, and I’m early, and I’ve just copped, so I go in the boys’ room. And—NO NO NO NO!—I come to—you never wake up on heroin, you just come to—to screams of “Daddy, what’s wrong?” See my little boy in his SpongeBob SquarePants hat, his mouth a giant O. He’s screaming, screaming, and—what’s this?—my ratty jeans are already at my ankles and there’s a needle in my arm and my boy’s teachers and the principal of the preschool are hovering over me like a circle of disapproving angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and—

  And I hear myself, with my child looking on, like it’s some kind of aw-shucks normal thing, saying, “Hey, could you guys just let me, y’know . . . just give me a second here?” And, in front of all of them, in front of my sweet, innocent, quivering-chinned son, I push down that plunger. And suddenly, everything’s fine. Everything’s awful, but everything’s fine . . . My little boy’s horrified coffee-brown eyes glisten with tears. Good-bye, little Mickey, good-bye . . . My wife will get a call from family services. I’ll be leaving now. Hands behind my back. In cuffs. All I remember is the officer’s name: Branderby. His sausage-and-pepper breath. I manage a little wave to Mickey, who gives me a private little wave back. In spite of everything. I’m still his daddy. For years afterward, I have to get high just to think about what I did to get high. But it’s okay. Really.

  It’s.

  Fine.

  Heroin. Because once you shed your dignity, everything’s a little easier.

  Where was I? (And yes, maybe the dope did diminish my capacity for linear thinking. So what? Let’s see you count backward from yesterday to What-the-fuck-happened?) When my boss moved to pharmaceuticals from “marital aids,” I followed. (He insisted on the old-school term his father used: marital aids. Instead of the more contempo “sex toys.”) We’d been taken over by a conglomerate. I cut my teeth on Doc Johnson double dildos (“For ass-to-ass action like you’ve never dreamed of!”) and Ben Wa balls (“Ladies, no one has to know!”). Then it was up (or down) the ladder to men’s magazines, romance mags, even a couple of Cat Fancy imitators. Starting in back-of-the-book “one-inchers” for everything from Mighty Man trusses to Kitty Mittens to X-Ray Specs (a big-seller for more than fifty years). When I tried the specs and—naturally—they didn’t work, my boss said, with no irony whatsoever, “We’re selling a dream, Lloyd. Did you go to Catholic school?”

  “Metho-Heeb,” I told him.

  “What’s that, kid?”

  “Half-Jewish, half-Methodist, and my mom did a lot of speed.”

  “Well, lucky you,” he said. “Me, I was schooled by nuns. But when I put on those X-ray specs, I swear, I could see Sister Mary Theresa’s fong-hair.”

  While cheesy, this is a serious, high-stakes business. To stay on top of the competition, you have to know what’s out there. Like, just now, on The Dylan Ratigan Show—What great hair! Like a rockabilly gym teacher . . . too bad he quit—I caught this commercial: Life with Crohn’s disease is a daily game of What if. . . ? What if I can’t make it to— Here the audio fades and there’s a picture of a pretty middle-aged brunette looking anxiously across a tony restaurant at a ladies’ room door . . . The subtext: if you don’t take thi
s, you are going to paint your panties.

  Listen. I spent a lot of time watching daytime commercials. I had to. (Billie Holiday said she knew she was strung out when she started watching television. And she didn’t even talk about daytime!) Back when it was still on, I’d try to sit through Live with Regis and Kelly without a bang of chiba. Knock yourself out, Jimmy-Jane. I couldn’t make it past Regis’s rouge without a second shot. At this point he looked like somebody who’d try and touch your child on a bus to New Jersey.

  Is it any accident that so much contempo TV ad content concerns . . . accidents? This is the prevailing mood. Look at the economy. Things are so bad you don’t need to have Crohn’s disease to lose control. But worse than pants-shitting is public pants-shitting. Americans like to think of themselves as mud-holders. You don’t see the Greatest Generation diapering up, do you? (Not until recently, anyway.)

  Junkies may be obsessed with bathrooms, but America’s got them beat. So many cable-advertised products involve human waste that you imagine the audience sitting at home eating no-fat potato chips on a pile of their own excretions. Ad Week put it on its cover: “American Business Is in the Toilet.”

  But the real big gun in the BFS (Bodily Function Sweepstakes) is Depends. Go ahead and laugh. These guys are genius. Why? I’ll tell you. They know how to make the Bad Thing okay. (Just like heroin!) Listen: Incontinence doesn’t have to limit you. It all starts with finding the right fit and protection. The fact is, you can manage it so you can feel like yourself again. (Oddly, I used to lose bowel control after I copped. I’d get so excited, it just happened. So I’m no stranger to “man-pers,” as we say in the industry. They could ask me for a testimonial. Though, in all honesty, if it were my campaign I’d have gone with something more macho. Something, call me crazy, patriotic.