by Jerry Stahl
Dedication
For Elizabeth
Epigraph
People are too durable, that’s their main trouble. They can do too much to themselves, they last too long.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One
Prologue
One: Christ-Work
Two: Terminal Island
Three: Junkle
Four: Normal People! Doing Normal Things!
Five: Crime Spree
Six: Riding the Dog
Seven: Daddy Ink
Book Two
Eight: You’re So Pretty When You Breathe Through Your Mouth
Nine: Was I the Creepy Stranger?
Ten: I Guess This Is What They Call Pleasure
Eleven: Words Made of Cheese and Blood
Twelve: Bad Houdini
Thirteen: Bus Station Toilet Killer
Fourteen: Nora Funk
Fifteen: The Usual Motel
Sixteen: Fresh Dead Man Shit (Memory Issues)
Seventeen: Pre-Occupied
Eighteen: “You Can’t Do a Gangster Lean in a Prius”
Nineteen: Prayer of Affirmation
Twenty: Temporary Blonde
Book Three
Twenty-One: Party Time
Twenty-Two: Fix
Twenty-Three: Burned Baby Toys
Twenty-Four: Taser Happy
Twenty-Five: Sunshine and Buttercups
Book Four
Twenty-Six: Mrs. Santa Claus Has This to Say About Fellatio
Twenty-Seven: Nasty Klepto
Twenty-Eight: Super-Nutritious Celebrity Placenta
Twenty-Nine: The Final Solution, Horizontal
Thirty: Almost Like Happiness
Thirty-One: Nugger
Thirty-Two: Agenesis
Thirty-Three: IHOP Men
Thirty-Four: We Only Want What God Wants
Thirty-Five: The Non-Interferon Treatment
Thirty-Six: Tumor Daddy
Thirty-Seven: Secret Bible
Thirty-Eight: Let’s Review!
Thirty-Nine: End Times
Forty: New Life
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jerry Stahl
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book One
Perhaps all pleasure is only relief.
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
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.
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!)