Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

  Other people have prayers, mantras, affirmations . . . I have occasional side effects. In the case of Viibryd, it’s the last few torments that resonate: Unusual changes in behavior. Yes! Disturbing dreams. Thank you! Sudden violent thoughts? Hallelujah! Could anything be more human than unusual changes in behavior, disturbing dreams, and sudden violent thoughts? It’s almost reassuring. Viibryd has taken the very qualities that separate us from animals and turned them into . . . side effects.

  When I was being led away by the Bruckheimer shades guy, after having my freedom puppied at the airport, I found myself repeating to myself: Disturbing . . . Sudden . . . Violent . . . So what if I’m the only one who knows this is poetry? I let myself murmur, under the stares of other travelers, as the stalwart DEA badged a path through lines of passengers and bulled me through, in handcuffs. He was snickering. (Disturbing . . . Sudden . . . Violent . . . I was also the only one who knew this was prayer.)

  DEA shades man sat me in a little room with fluorescents, table, and chairs—very Law & Order. He would not buy my grief defense, even after I dragged up my dead mother and marched her out to try and get some official sympathy. He might have bit—I could tell he was on the fence until he jammed my sleeve up (the left, as it happened: my shooting arm) and found a few hundred years’ worth of tracks. For some time needles had been hard to get, and it looked like I’d been trying to shoot up with a piano leg. “Unless you got some kinda arm Ebola, lady-pants, you’re goin’ away. And I mean federal.” The lady thing, I was to learn, is something law enforcement types seem to enjoy. Especially the prison guards. Feminization. Maybe that’s how they deal with their grief. Maybe we should all be given Viibryd at birth.

  TWO

  Terminal Island

  So, it’s two months later, and I’m in the kitchen at Terminal Island, daydreaming about Mexican tar and shoving chipped ham down my pants. That was the thing about kitchen jobs: you could boost some food, then trade it on the yard for party snacks. And the snack I wanted was still tar. I’d gotten clean, by accident, and the worst thing was—worse than kicking in the penitentiary (you want to talk about anal leakage!), worse than the cramps, worse than the knee pain, worse than not sleeping for weeks . . . worse than all of it were the emotions. I was moody as a fourteen-year-old bulimic girl. My nerves were exposed. Every memory had me weepy.

  Adjusting the lunchmeat in my starchy, state-issue tighty-whiteys—there were freaks in there who would have paid extra if they’d known where I’d stashed the ham—I suddenly remembered my grandmother’s hands. Grandma Essie had acromegaly, which made her hands and face swell to monster movie proportions. (Google Rondo Hatton. The Creeper.) Essie’s jaw and forehead were bad enough, but the way her brows puffed out . . . she’d spank me for BO, and it was like being beaten by a Cro-Magnon bluehair. “Filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy.” But, yes, what made me think of her were her hands. Always damp. Meaty. Like the treats between my legs.

  See, I don’t really want to relive this stuff. Thoughts think themselves. Heroin makes them do it. The heroin knows that if I feel bad enough, if I work myself into a state, then I will do it. It wants me to. (That’s what they say at the meetings I go to, “First you take the drug, then the drug takes you.” They serve animal crackers and Sanka. But hey! They keep me coming back. And it beats watching Judge Judy reruns.)

  So I’m standing there in the kitchen, in this acro-lunch-meat-Grandma dope jones, when suddenly the Lunch Boss, this fat ex–Wall Street guy named Sid, tells me I have to mix the “Clear”—this nutrition drink the government has started giving to prisoners, to help meet their nutritional needs. It’s really Kool-Aid, except they can’t put color in, because then it will look like pruno (that’s jailhouse hooch, made from fermented fruit, for you innocents). I don’t quite understand it myself, but colored Kool-Aid is banned at all federal institutions. What we do serve, instead, is this Clear shit—colorless Kool-Aid with protein and calcium powder. Except the protein and calcium powder they put in isn’t really protein and calcium powder. They added a pinch of Haldol. Not a lot, of course. To taste. Just enough to keep things “low level,” in the words of Sid. (Haldol, for you non-antipsychotic meds takers, is the granddaddy of “chemical chains,” soul-numbing drugs favored by institutions whose job is to keep actual psychotics from hurling themselves off walls or listening to the voice of Elvis tell them to strangle orderlies. Side effects: blank facial expression, discoloration of eyes, compulsive movement of jaw and mouth, wormlike tongue-darting, a brown tint aka “shit-eye” coating the vision, erections that last for hours, etc. Pretty much heaven on earth. And no, I didn’t write these. Some other side-effects pro had the privilege.)

  We mix in just enough Haldol to keep things “low level.” That’s what the Lunch Boss said. I was mulling on that when I felt a hand on my shoulder—nothing like Grandma’s beef slab—and turned to see the man I would later come to know as Pastor Bobb. For a minute, he let me take in his steel blue eyes, chiseled beak, and white crew cut. The only problem was his skin, which looked like it had been buried for a year and dug up. But somehow the muddied complexion only complemented the impact of his stare. It was either acne scars or battery acid that healed up smooth.

  “Son,” he said, without so much as a hello. “Are you of the Jewish persuasion?”

  “Not me, my daddy, sir.”

  “Why, that’s a good thing. Now tell me, son, how are you, in general?”

  “In general, great,” I said, raising my voice over the sudden din of an industrial mixer. “I’m in a federal prison making lunch.”

  Pastor Bobb chuckled as if he’d practiced chuckling.

  “Well, I hear you know a thing or two about writing?”

  “No disrespect, pastor, but what if I do?”

  “If you do,” he chuckled again, “then it is that much more tragic that you are standing here with pig meat in your drawers.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Son, I was down while you were still boosting Slurpees from the 7-Eleven.”

  Before I could respond—assuming I could—Pastor Bobb extended his hand.

  “My name’s Pastor Bobb. And if you don’t mind me asking for a sample, I think I’d like you to come work for me.”

  “You want some chipped ham?” I was a little disoriented by the whole exchange.

  “No, boy, I want me some writin’. Write me a little bit on Jesus. Imagine you’re a young buck trying to impress a girl with how much you love the Lord. Run with it!”

  He clapped me on the shoulder, then leaned in close and spoke in a low voice.

  “You do this right, you won’t have to be peddlin’ no ham to convicts.”

  Then he winked, the way people wink on TV shows. Pastor Bobb was one of those people who always acted like he was on TV. And not just because he had his own show. I have a theory that people in America learn how to behave by watching TV. You just pick the character you want and do what they do. Pastor Bobb seemed to have learned from Sheriff Andy on The Andy Griffith Show. (You kids, Google. It’s Old, Weird America.)

  “What would you write if you wanted a little Christian gal to love you for the rest of your life?”

  Luckily, one of the Native Americans had just smoked up in the sweat lodge—they had one at all federal pens—and was too stoned to make his way to the canteen. Stoned enough to trade me two balloons for all my lunch meat. It was one of those good deals in life that sometimes happen. There’s no rhyme or reason. Unless, of course, it was my Savior looking out for me. Without me even knowing I was saved.

  For me, Jesus isn’t just the Lord. He’s my buddy. He’s a pal. I would like to go bowling with Jesus. Maybe go fishing. I bet, if you’re like me, you think Jesus would even be fun on a date. You, me, and Jesus. On the roller coaster of life. He is always with us. Because that is what being a Christian is. I love you, even though I do not know you, if you love Jesus th
e way I do!

  Then I signed it: See you in Church. Your buddy, Buddy.

  Almost as if he knew, Pastor Bobb sent a guard down to collect my effort the second I’d finished. Twenty minutes later, another guard told me to roll up. I’d done nine months on a two-year jolt. But I didn’t ask any questions until I found my newly free ass planted in the back of Pastor Bobb’s Escalade. Terminal Island had disappeared behind us in the rearview before he uttered a word. “Son,” he said, “you have a future in Christ.”

  THREE

  Junkle

  Pastor Bobb had me cut my teeth on tests. Simple Q&A. Meat and potatoes stuff.

  I AM A: (select gender)

  MAN seeking WOMAN

  WOMAN seeking MAN

  There were no other options. Gay, obviously, was not on the radar. Even though there was something gay-esque about the weirdly rouge-y male models they used for the “regular guys” in the hand-holding photos that garnished the Dating Q&A. Did couples really walk in meadows? Share ice cream cones? Stroll on the beach? My life had certainly been an aberration, but then, this wasn’t Junkie Singles. (“Junkles!” I just want a man who won’t steal my wake-up!) There was no doubt a gaggle of Christian dope fiends as well. That hadn’t occurred to me. Though soon enough it would.

  Meanwhile, I was living in a Tulsa halfway house and crafting Q&A in the Christian Swingles Center, just down the street from Oral Roberts University, about which all I know is that its founder used to heal sickly Christians on TV. “Touch the screen, my lambs! Touch the screen!” And once, in the eighties, he climbed a tower and announced to his flock that God would call him home if folks did not send him eight million dollars. He climbed back down with $9.1 million. Because that’s how things happen when you love the Lord. He wanted to build a 900-foot Jesus. Who didn’t? I certainly didn’t wonder about it at the time. What I wondered was what his parents were thinking naming their little boy Oral. Did they even know it was one of Freud’s classic developmental stages? Maybe his brothers were Oedipal and Anal.

  My first big breakthrough was the slogan. Or tagline, in the vernacular. The hook. We’d been asked to come up with something that would capture the heart and soul of what Christian Swingles stood for. I finally hit on Find God’s match for you. To me, it was horrible. When you thought about it. So horrible that it was kind of perfect. If you couldn’t find a match, then, it surely followed, God must not have wanted a match for you. God must want you as lonely, miserable, and hopeless as you probably were in the first place if you came looking for a life partner—or a life—at a Christian dating service. I honestly thought the slogan was cruel, but Pastor Bobb said he’d be the judge of that. And he judged it to be perfect.

  “Son,” he said, “the Lord truly gave you a gift. You are a regular Louis L’Amour. The man wrote nine hundred seventeen books that we know of, and every one was like poetry. Now let’s us put our heads together in fellowship.”

  He pulled me aside, out of ear-range of my co-scribes, so close I could feel his salt-and-pepper mustache against my earlobe. Up close he was minty. But you could smell the nicotine underneath, which made me like him more. When he put his hands on my shoulders, they stank like rancid Pall Malls.

  “Lloyd, we need a new mission statement, and I think you would be just the man to help get what we are trying to do here down on paper.”

  “Mission statement?”

  “You know, somethin’ that says, ‘Come on in!’ ”

  But I should back up. Give you a little more about where I was. I’m no storyteller, after all, I’m a side-effects man. I write the stuff on the little piece of paper nobody reads when they pick up their prescription. I’m good at lists—arranging the bad things on them in such away that the bad of this cancels out the bad of that, and what could have been scary sounds benevolent. But arranging isn’t the same as describing. Or telling a story. Still . . . let me at least set the scene. The Christian Swingles Center was actually in a strip mall, two deceptively spacious floors wedged between a Hoover vacuum outlet and a party supply store. (Into which, during my entire, brief stint in Oklahoma, I saw not one potential partier stroll. Nor did I see much of Tulsa. We lived next to the Oral Roberts campus, walked to the mall.) Outside, cars and sidewalks were clogged with a lot of hefty Christians. The O.R. food was on the starchy side. Maybe that was one way the college administrators hedged against the wanton sex that plagued so many other, secular campuses. If you keep the coeds plumped and the boys logy on carbohydrates, there aren’t going to be many premarital sex problems. For all I know the churchgoing cooks mixed Depo-Provera in the mac and cheese, just like the chow boss in the pen.

  The only tourist attraction I saw in Tulsa was the Golden Driller. The Golden Driller is a seventy-six-foot, 43,500-pound statue of an oil worker. Of course we went there to look at his crotch. We being Jay, the natty content manager—who insisted the Driller had been built by a closet queen named Mervyn Phelps—and Peter Riegle, the overall content director and the first real genius I ever met.

  You could stand right underneath the Driller and look straight up to where the rig jockey had, apparently, been gelded. Ken doll smooth.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have been amazing that Jay and Riegle, the two other guys at Church Sex Central (as we sometimes called the place), were stone addicts. (I recognized them, the way addicts do, the way werewolves, when in human guise, are said to be able to smell each other across a crowded train station and recognize their kind.) Jay wouldn’t talk about his personal life. Well, not that much. He alluded to “pierogi nights,” shared an apartment with his mother, and had—he said—undergone extensive, if unsuccessful, “de-gay-ifying” at a number of Christian enterprises set up to combat “the homosexual lifestyle.” About which all he said was “I looked at a lot of pictures of Taylor Swift. Which was supposed to turn me straight but didn’t. Though she is adorable.”

  Riegle, meanwhile, had a wife at home with jaw cancer and a cerebral-palsied 29-year-old daughter they’d raised together and still took care of. He was slightly stooped and had an air of long-suffering dignity about him. (Which, he later explained, got people to trust him. That was just human nature.) But what made him more amazing, actually heroic to me, was something called the safe harbor clause, tucked away in an obscure addendum to the Lifshitz brothers’ quarterly report.

  I didn’t even know what a safe harbor clause was, but you know as soon as you read a couple of sentences what it’s supposed to do. Listen: Any statements in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be considered to be forward-looking statements. Written words, such as “may,” “will,” “expect,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “intends,” “goal,” “objective,” “seek,” “attempt,” or variations of these or similar words, identify forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements and forecasts involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the near future.

  Something about this doublespeak—how it used English in such a bold and flagrantly misleading way you kind of couldn’t help believe it—was strangely inspiring. So much more artful than my most sugarcoated “may cause kidney failure” side-effect blather. What the statement said, essentially, was that everything in the corporate report was bullshit; but if you didn’t believe it, it was probably because you lacked faith. What made Jay and Riegle even stranger and—to me—more impressive is that they both still believed. Then again, I was never sure if the two of them shared a deep personal faith—or if they were laughing in my face.

  “You can’t fight Satan single-handed,” Riegle told me, his gaze meaningful, though his pupils were pinned to the size of periods in a newspaper from the stuff we’d just shot.

  Jay was, as ever, more snarky about it.

  “The devil loves the Church, but we’re gonna show him the door,” Jay said.

  “You really belie
ve that?” I asked.

  “It’s from the brochure I did for newcomers to Pastor Bobb’s first ministry, back in Toledo,” he said. “But don’t ask questions like that. Judge me by my acts. Paul 5:33 or Timothy 3:35. Or Bob 7:11 . . . or something. . . .”

  We stood facing the giant Driller, whose enormous but curiously flat package loomed overhead. The three of us had shared a bag of Okie Powder, heroin of a consistency, taste, and potency I had never experienced before. It was the kind of high that came accompanied by painful whistling in your ear. You half-knew you were giving yourself brain damage, but it was so good you figured brain damage was a fair price to pay. As long as there was enough brain left to feel the dope that was doing the damage. We’d driven over in Riegle’s Saturn, whose interior smelled like candy bananas, thanks to the air freshener Pastor Bobb kept stocked in all the Swingles cars. We didn’t talk much on the way over, until the khakied Riegle suddenly smacked the wheel as we came in sight of the sun-blocking oil-worker statue.

  “You know what? It is damn exciting to be in on the ground floor of something. I mean, Christian Swingles,” he said, before repeating the words slowly, like they were savory on the tongue. “Christian Swingles. Tell me this is not exciting.”

  “Be more exciting, Pastor gave us stock,” Jay snarped.

  Living in Tulsa was a little like still being in prison, except you could send out for ribs. And they had the giant Driller.

  “But hey,” Jay continued. “Let us all behold one of the wonders of the world.” He gazed up in mock (or so I thought) awe at the massive miner. “The wonder being how did the Driller drill without a penis?”