by Jerry Stahl
Depends. Because this is America, damn it!
Then again, maybe the macho thing is wrong. Maybe—I’m just spitballing here—maybe you make it more of a convenience thing. Or—wait, wait!—more Morning in America-ish. More Reagan-y.
Take two: America, we know you’re busy. And you don’t always have time to pull over and find somewhere convenient to do your business. With new Depends, you can go where you are—and keep on going. DEPENDS—because you’ve earned it. Subtext, of course: We’re Americans! We can shit wherever we want!)
Ironically, because of my own decade and a half imbibing kiestered Mexican tar, I got some kind of heinous, indestructible parasite. Souvenir of Los Angeles smackdom. For a while I had a copywriting job in downtown LA, five minutes from MacArthur Park, where twelve-year-old 18th Street bangers kept the stuff in balloons in their mouths. You’d give them cash, then put the balloons in your mouth. If you put them in your pockets, the UCs would roll up and arrest you before the spit was dry. Keeping it in your mouth was safer. Unhygienic (parasites!), but on the plus side, visit any LA junkie pad, and there was always something carnivale about the little pieces of red and blue, green and yellow balloons all over the place. Like somebody’d thrown a child’s birthday party in hell and never cleaned up.
But now—call it Narco-Karma —I have to give myself coffee enemas every day. Part of the “protocol” my homeopath, Bobbi, herself in recovery, has put me on for the parasite situation. Bobbi also does my colonics . . . She likes calypso music, which I find a little unsettling. Though Robert Mitchum singing “Coconut Water” while I’m buns up and tubed is the least of my issues. Bob knew his calypso. (Check out Calypso—Is Like So! liner notes by Nick Tosches.)
Like I say, part of my job is recon. And I’m not going to lie, just thinking about that killer Crohn’s copy makes me a little jealous. The subject, after all, was shame. What does some pharma-hired disease jockey know about shame? Did he have my mother? Scooping his stainy underpants out of the hamper and waggling them in his face, screaming she was going to hang them on the line for all his friends to see? (No, that’s not why I do heroin. Or why I ended up in side effects. Whatever doesn’t kill us just makes us us.)
For one semester I attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I studied advertising with Joe Sacco, whose legendary “Stronger Than Dirt” campaign, arguably, sheathed a proto-Aryan superiority sensibility under the genial façade of Arthurian legend. (For you youngsters, the ad featured a white knight riding into a dirty kitchen on a white steed.) White Power might as well have been embossed on the filth-fighter’s T-shirt. See—excuse me while I scratch my nose—there’s a connection, in White American subconscious, between Aryan superiority and cleanliness. “Clean genes,” as Himmler used to say. Tune into MSNBC’s Lockup some weekend, when the network trades in the faux-progressive programming for prison porn. Half the shot-callers in Quentin look like Mr. Clean: shaved head and muscles that could really hold a race-traitor down. Lots of dope in prison. But—big surprise—the fave sponsors of Lockup viewers, to judge by the ads, are ExtenZe (penis size), UroMed (urinary infection), our old friend Depends (bowel control), and Flomax (frequent urination). The Founding Fathers would be proud. Once they hosed off.
You think junkies don’t have a conscience? All the snappy patter I’ve cranked out, and you know what made me really feel bad? Feel the worst? Gold coin copy. People are so dumb that when they buy gold—a hedge against the collapse of world markets!—they think it matters if it comes in a commemorative coin. A genuine re-creation of an authentic 18-something-something mint issue Civil War coin with our nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, on one side, and the Union flag on the other. Worth 50 “dollar gold.” Yours for only $9.99. The “dollar gold” was my idea. I don’t even know why. I just knew it sounded more important than “dollars.” Later, in the running text under the screen (known as flash text in the biz), I misspelled gold as “genuine multi-karat pure god.” I think this was my best move. Not that I can take credit. Just one of those serendipitous bonbons you get when you type on heroin. In an effort not to fall off my chair, I’d type with one eye closed, as if I were trying to aim my fingers the way I aimed my car, squinting one-eyed over the wheel to stay between the white lines when the world went tilty.
So now now now now now now what do I do? I mean—shut up, okay?—I did leave out a key detail. Like, how it all ended?
Okay. Let me come clean. (So to speak.) I got caught shooting up on the job. Dropped my syringe and it rolled leeward into the stall beside me, where my archrival, Miles Dreek (can a name get more Dickensian?), found it. And, long story short, ratted me out. I couldn’t even plead diabetes, because the rig was full of blood, and everybody’s seen enough bad junkie movies to know how the syringe fills up with blood. (Generally, on film, in roseate slo-mo, dawn-of-the-galaxy exploding-nebulae-adjacent scarlet, which—come on, buddy—does not happen when Gramps drops trou and Grandma slaps his leathery butt cheek and sticks in the insulin.) That was my first experience of needles: Grandma spanking Grandpa and jabbing the rig in. Grandpa had it down. The second his wife of sixty-seven years geezed him, he’d pop a butterscotch Life Saver and crunch. Hard candy! Sugar and insulin at the same time. A diabetic speedball. These are my people!
But wait—I was just getting busted. At work. (People think only alcohol can give you blackouts. But heroin? Guess what, Lou Reed Jr., sometimes I think I’m still in one . . .)
I remember, right before the needle-dropping incident, I was just sitting there, on the toilet, with a spike in my arm, Lenny Bruce-style. Suddenly I jerked awake, feeling like one of those warehouse-raised chickens, the kind photographed by secret camera in Food, Inc. on some infernal industrial farm, feet grafted to the cage, shitting on the chicken below as the chicken above shits on it.
You don’t think they should give chickens heroin? Don’t think they deserve it? Well, call me visionary, but if they’re already pumping the poultry full of antibiotics and breast-building hormones (rendering, they say, half the chicken-eating male population of America estrogen-heavy, sterile, and sporadically man-papped), then why not lace the white meat with hard narcotics? Chicken McJunkets! Whatever. Give me one night and three dime bags and I’ll Don Draper a better name ... Or I would, if I had a place to live. Right now I have enough to stay at this hotel, the Grandee (an SRO) for a couple more weeks. After that I don’t know . . . The guy behind the cage in the lobby looks liver yellow. Doesn’t talk much. But never mind, never mind . . . Me being here has nothing to do with heroin. Just bad luck. But weren’t we talking about heroin chicken? Believe me, plenty of clean-living junkies would hit the drive-through—provided Mickey D could take those damn other drugs out of his birds. Hormones, antibiotics, beak-mite repellent . . . No thanks! That stuff could kill you.
But enough! Let’s settle down and spit out the palette cleanser. It’s time for the entrée.
Praise for Happy Mutant Baby Pills
“Gleefully morbid, ribald, absurd, and wildly funny, Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a crazy gem of a book. Stahl’s world-view is so hopeless that he’s hopeful, if that makes any sense. It’s like he comes full circle, just happy to take one more jaundiced breath in order to write one more mad-cap sentence, though he does delight in letting us know that the light at the end of the tunnel of the American dream is an onrushing train.”
— Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir!
“Jerry Stahl is one of our last defenders against the darkness and Happy Mutant Baby Pills is a deeply funny and devastating warning label for the world we live in, a world that is ultimately, as Stahl brilliantly demonstrates, one giant side effect.”
— Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“A dope-fueled hellride to the black heart of New Weird America. Stahl turns his satirical scalpel on Big Pharma, environmental contamination, conspiracy theorists, the Occupy movement, CSI, Christian swingles, and adult babies, eviscerating our silly/scary society in searc
h of its soul. Profoundly disturbing, profoundly funny, and profoundly moving.”
— Richard Lange, author of Angel Baby and Dead Boys
“No one can make me laugh while kicking me down the dark tunnel of self like Jerry Stahl.”
— Marc Maron
About the Author
JERRY STAHL is the author of the narcotic memoir Permanent Midnight, which was made into a movie starring Ben Stiller, and Perv—a Love Story, both Los Angeles Times best sellers. He has written extensively for film and television, most recently for the hit series CSI. His much-anthologized fiction and journalism have appeared in Esquire, Details, Playboy, Black Book, LA Weekly, and Tin House. He lives in Los Angeles.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
PRAISE FOR
Plainclothes Naked
“[Stahl is] the new king of black humor…. Plainclothes Naked [is]a hallucinogenic potboiler.”
—New York Post
“Plainclothes Naked is vile, scurrilous, depraved…and hilariously funny. Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer Prize or be shot down in the street like a dog, as he’s clearly a menace to society and a traitor to everything you thought you believed about America.”
—Anthony Bourdain, author of Bone in the Throat and Kitchen Confidential
“Absurdist postmodern pulp fiction…. [It] will unplug your mind.”
—Elle
“Stahl has nerve, heart, a language of his own, and a ghastly, riotous humor that burns brightest just as the executioner offers the last cigarette.”—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life
“Gripping and powerful.”
—Mirabella
“A radical weave of outrageous humor and fascinating weirdness…. Plainclothes Naked is so amazingly beautiful—and so shocking—Stahl should finally earn his own entry in the dictionary.”
—J. T. LeRoy, author of Sarah
“Raw and devilishly raunchy.”
—Vanity Fair
“It is one thing, fine and rare, to write from the heart. It is another thing, finer and rarer, to write from the secret unutterable chambers of the heart. Jerry Stahl, whose words are as cool and deadly striking as a cottonmouth, does just that. No one who reads him will remain quite the same.”
—Nick Tosches, author of Dino and Trinities
“Bare-ass hilarious…. A wonderfully sick comic masterpiece ofthe hard-boiled genre.”—Paper magazine “Jerry Stahl’s writing is like comic machine-gun fire. Plainclothes Naked is a page-turner and a page-burner. Fans of noir, fans of comedy, fans of great writing can unite on this one.”
—Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man
“Brutally compelling.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A nasty, delicious sour ball of a world where the bad guys are good and the good guys are freaks. Jerry’s a great wordsmith—very dark and very funny.”—Eric Bogosian, author of Mall [Stahl’s] brilliantly demented riffs beg to be read—or screamed—aloud.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Also by Jerry Stahl
Permanent Midnight
Perv—a Love Story
Copyright
PLAINCLOTHES NAKED. Copyright © 2001 by Jerry Stahl. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © May 2009 ISBN 9780061956775
Version 07122013
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