Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

  “He’s a good Christian boy,” Riegle said. “He doesn’t need a penis.”

  Looking at that massive Ken-dolled crotch, we all knew what he was talking about.

  That morning I’d cracked the Swingles mission statement Pastor Bobb had asked for. Which turned out to be a little harder than just “Come on in!” I’d been looking for something that showed solo seekers this was the right place for them. That being a Christian single was okay. The subtext being: help lonely Believers out there accept their intercourse-free lifestyle. It took me a while, but I found a way. The words came to me while sitting in a broom closet, rolling my sleeve down after a mid-morning pop. Sometimes it was like that. I’d close my eyes, apply my lay hands to the keyboard, and take a smack nap while the words just fluttered out of my fingers in perfect formation. Like the Lord was moving through me. If there was a Lord. And if people were what he moved through.

  It’s not easy being a Christian singleton.

  In today’s anything-goes, whatever-feels-good world, there’s a question every unmarried person of faith must face: How to live the way Jesus wants us to live? How to stay pure at a time when, everywhere we turn, it seems some new form of salaciousness, devilry, or outright sin has overtaken our so-called popular media. Temptation is rampant. And those of us trying to live a clean, Christian, values-based life can sometimes find ourselves feeling all alone.

  Finally, there’s a place where young, single Christians can find others who love the Lord just as much as they do. Finally, there’s Christian Swingles.

  Praise the Lord. Together.

  Join today.

  I “fellowshipped” on this with Jay and Riegle after fixing again—a special treat for a special occasion!—in a men’s room stall in the Denny’s down the street from the office, then went back in and hammered out the kinks. Jay lay on top of his desk and dangled one stonewashed jean leg off the end of it.

  “There’s only one thing lonelier than a horny twenty-eight-year-old Christian,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Riegle interrupted. “A horny twenty-eight-year-old gay Christian.”

  Riegle, who was tallish and balding, did not always look at you when he spoke. He kept sunglasses on so he could nod off without drawing attention to himself on public transportation, and sometimes forgot to take them off. But just when you thought he was down for the count he’d blurt out something to let you know he’d been there all along.

  “A gay twenty-eight-year-old who’s so deep in the closet he thinks sex is supposed to smell like mothballs.”

  “Faith,” I said, feeling proud of myself, “can be a trial.”

  “You mean an opportunity,” Jay corrected me. “Man does God’s work because God’s not doing it.”

  “Really?”

  “Gotcha!” Jay cackled, but in a nice way.

  Did I mention Jay’s features were so regular he might have been a composite of TV commercial dads? He looked like the friendliest salesman in the Sears hardware department. “You’d never know I was a homo,” he liked to say, “unless you asked.” He confided that he preferred men of color. “Obama sticks,” he called them. Which I found vaguely offensive, but he insisted it was in the nature of an homage. “Someday you’ll meet Dusty, and you will see exactly what I mean.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned his special friend of color, Dusty. Who sometimes sounded made up, sometimes sounded real. (Later I found out the truth.)

  Pastor Bobb either didn’t know or didn’t care about his un-Christian sexual bent, but Jay said the pastor both knew and cared, believing exposure to all the hetero Christian spirit in the Swingles Center would work magic on his “tendencies,” make them “withered as the dugs of Satan.” One of the Pastor’s favorite, if most inexplicable, expressions.

  FOUR

  Normal People! Doing Normal Things!

  All around us on the walls of the Swingles Content Break Room hung health-bookish posters of wholesome guys and gals smiling at each other with shared faith, eyes unglazed by anything as base as lust. The couples in the posters took picnics, canoed, and sang Christmas carols. They wore colorful shirts. Sometimes, we’d all fix in the office—I’d never done social heroin before Tulsa, but shooting up together was what we did instead of bowling. After hours, Jay, Riegle, and I would amble into the snack pantry and stare up at those posters. The clear, doubt-free, Jesus-loves-me gaze of the believers answered all the questions we might have had about what to write, or how to write it.

  The big issue with Christian daters was sin. Old-fashioned sin, like drinking and smoking. But you couldn’t just come out and ask, Do you drink? At least Pastor Bobb didn’t think so. The idea was to appear accepting, when what you were really doing was trying to let your applicants relax enough to hang themselves with the truth. It’s okay, we’re just asking was the tone we were going for. No judgment. Not Do you smoke? or How do you feel about smoking? but How often do you smoke? Give me a medal for that.

  The answers were: Never. On occasion. Frequently. Whenever I can. Fucking genius. The loveliness of that. Whenever I can was Jay’s idea. “Don’t make it a negative,” he explained, “except for believers. Let Satan show his hand.”

  We went the same route with boozing. How often do you drink? Really. What kind of party ferret is going to answer whenever I can on a Christian dating site, unless it’s Christian Alcoholics? (Which, by the way, is not a half bad idea. One more reason to feel bad about not having money is not being able to immediately invest it in your own brilliant ideas before somebody steals them. Results not guaranteed for all participants.)

  I wanted to believe there was some guy out there—or some woman—who was going to answer, proudly, whenever I can when asked how often they drink. Somebody who wanted to come off like a drunk so they could meet somebody just like them. Maybe drive drunk to church together. If somebody picks you after a deal-breaker like that, how could they not be perfect for you? Juiceheads for Jesus. The Double J’s. Results may not be typical, and are not guaranteed. “No two experiences are alike.” Like I say, I would have invested.

  We had to wear white shirts and ties to work, but Pastor Bobb was so pleased with my contributions that one day he said I could take off my tie. I said I preferred to leave it on. Pastor Bobb just winked at my pals in Creative, Jay and Riegle, told them to let him know when they de-Jewed me. It was such a disturbing thing to say, I couldn’t even say why it was disturbing. I preferred keeping my shirt and tie on because I had learned that the best thing, if you were doing heroin in the normal world, was to blend in. Especially if you were newly released from an institution.

  Theoretically, I was supposed to report to a probation officer and take random pee tests. But somehow—well, probably because of Pastor Bobb and his Colson connections (nothing was ever formally acknowledged)—I was spared that indignity.

  More than once, I had a conversation with Jay, how it was he could shoot heroin and consider himself a Christian.

  “Simple,” he said. “It’s not a drug when it’s medicine.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easy to just get a script for OxyContins?”

  “Oxys don’t mortify your flesh,” he said, combing his long brown hair and then checking his tortoise shell comb for whatever it is people check their combs for.

  “Mortify your flesh?” It wasn’t that I didn’t think I heard right, I just wasn’t sure I understood. Or I thought I did, but wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  “The spears that pierced Jesus’s side,” Jay said, pulling out a syringe and waggling it in front of my nose like a stage hypnotist. “What we’re doing is an homage to the suffering of our Lord. It’s like being a flagellant, except we’re not marching down the street whipping ourselves in some procession; we keep it private.”

  “That’s right,” Riegle agreed, putting down the Bible he’d been reading. “My drugs are between me and Jesus. Plus, heroin helps m
e stay faithful. I’m a lot nicer to the missus and my daughter when I’m opiated. How can you fault something that makes you a better Christian? I go home and change the dressing on Betsy’s tumors, then make sure my Liza is tucked nice and comfy in her crib. Liza’s a grown young lady. In a crib. You don’t think that hurts? You don’t think any man might buckle, faith-wise, after the Lord deals him a hand like that? The cancer? The palsy?” His voice grew TV emotional. “Imagine a man seeing his pretty little girl lolling her head, looking up at him with those darling beautiful cow-eyes, not even capable of saying ‘Daddy.’ ” Always a pause in the same place. “Well, I’m okay with it. Heroin and Jesus make it okay.”

  This was the best part about working on the dating site. A lot of times what we did in the Creative Room was just talk. We could do all the writing we needed to do in half an hour. The days took on a rhythm. At least once or twice a day I’d find myself going back over Riegle’s safe harbor clause. It was still remarkable to me. The nakedness of forward-looking.

  I’d spent so much of my “professional life” trying to find a way to couch scary, nasty facts in some less-than-ball-clutching way. Riegle went one step further, just saying everything was great, making whole-cloth blue-sky projections out of whatever shabby numbers were being disguised as fiscal triumph. I had to admit, I was in awe. To say so much, in such a way, without saying anything. By now I’d memorized it. There are a number of factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially, including, but not limited to our ability to: attract members; convert members into paying subscribers and retain our paying subscribers . . . maintain the strength of our existing brands and maintain and enhance those brands and our dependence upon the telecommunications infrastructure and our software infrastructure. . .

  It was almost mystical. No matter what the subject at hand—in this case, the flesh-mortifying qualities of piercing your vein with a needle full of dirty opiate solvent—I found myself going back to the safe harbor clause.

  Riegle changed the subject—this is how junkie conversations went—to his favorite pet peeve.

  “You know what I hate? I hate those movies where people about to fix up shoot a little splash into the air.” Here he’d wield his needle, then point it down—not up—and spritz straight into the cotton, right in the spoon. “Waste not, want not. You just know that whoever wrote those shoot-in-the-air scenes was never a dope fiend. ’Cause if you’re a dope fiend, you always know you’re going to run out. And the last thing you’re going to do, if you actually have a rig full of heroin, is squirt some of it up in the air, unless you plan on sucking your carpet fibers later. Which you will. When you need the stuff.”

  Here Jay would jump in.

  “Need ‘the stuff’? Oooh, Riegle, I love it when you go all Street Hype!”

  But I’d always steal the conversation back. I felt like a little kid nagging his daddy to tell him his favorite story. I couldn’t stop.

  “Tell me again, how’d you come up with forward-looking?”

  “You’re still obsessing on that? I keep telling you, all quarterly reports have fine print explaining, basically, that being optimistic is not the same as lying.”

  “But it sounds like such bullshit. It doesn’t even try not to sound like bullshit.”

  “Exactly,” he’d say, voice lowering two registers by the time he eased the needle out of his arm. “Bullshit is okay if everybody agrees to believe it. That’s what corporate reports do. I learned that in law school.”

  “Wait. You went to law school?”

  “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. Anyway, I’m gonna keep my cotton here. You keep yours over there. I don’t have a single disease. I don’t even have cavities. But looking at you, no offense, I feel like I could get bad teeth even sitting next to you.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I tried to play it off as good-natured office joshing, but I’d spent so much of my life trying to “look normal” in job situations—and I was normal, except for the heroin—that whenever he teased me I cringed. Not only because I hadn’t been to a dentist for the greater part of ten years. The junkie mind-set was perpetual catastrophe. Things made you jumpy. But were you jumpy because you needed heroin? Or did you need heroin because you were jumpy?

  Jay (ever-compassionate in Thy sight, oh Lord) always defended me from Riegle’s mild attacks.

  “Don’t listen to Miss Jesus-pants,” he would butt in. When Jay got high he liked to put on his Enya CDs, which Pastor Bobb considered devil music. “We’re all good soldiers here. No cause for Son-of-Godly snark.”

  “You know Jay and me were bunkies,” Riegle piped up. “In college.”

  “State College, as in the State of New York. Sing Sing.”

  The day I found this out, before I could even register my surprise, Jay further lifted the top of my brain off, suggesting we knock over a pharmacy. I had him repeat himself three times to make sure he wasn’t kidding. And when I finally did agree to listen, I expected him to punch me in the arm and say, “Gotcha!” Instead, he and Jay pulled up chairs around the snack table and peeled the lids back simultaneously on a pair of Dannon yogurts.

  FIVE

  Crime Spree

  The “job” was simple. Pull up behind a pharmacy in a strip mall on Wiggins and Main and walk in. Riegle broke it down.

  “The owner goes to our AA home group. After the ten-thirty meeting on Friday morning, he fellowships until quarter to two. The place will be closed.”

  “He’s got a year on Friday,” Jay added, with what sounded like sincerity and affection. “We’re taking him out to lunch. So he won’t be back till three.”

  Nobody counted on what happened happening. Though considering the success rate of recovering addicts and alcoholics, maybe we should have. I walked up to the CVS door at eleven on the dot. Only I didn’t need the key Riegle’d slipped me. The door was open. The pharmacist, Sy S., was behind the pharmacy counter, open for business, but he didn’t look well. I knew this wasn’t part of the plan. In the plan, Sy was at his AA meeting. But I could see what happened. Up close his skin shone a little green. He was sweaty. He had his hand over his eyes and he was sitting forward, behind the Plexiglas, looking down. Like he was readying a particularly tricky prescription. I was improvising now. But it felt okay. It felt fine. (That’s F-I-N-E, as Pastor Bobb used to say, in his Aw-Shucks mode: FUCKED-UP, INSECURE, NERVOUS, and EMOTIONAL.) At the last minute I decided to turn around, but it was too late. Sy the pharmacist sensed my presence. He looked up, and right away I knew what happened. He was weeping. Red-eyed. It took him a while to register what was in front of him, and when it kicked in he craned his neck sideways like he was trying to bite his own shoulder. The man had obviously relapsed. I couldn’t say on what, but whatever it was he’d taken too much of it.

  Without knowing I was going to, I crooked my finger and hissed, “Sy! Hey, Sy!” His eyes darted left and right, but he moved forward to the speaking holes in the glass.

  “What is it, Sy? What did you take?”

  “Vicodin,” he said, as though he’d been waiting for the question, visibly relieved that I’d asked.

  “What else?”

  “Adderall.”

  “What else?”

  For the first time, the glimmer of the man behind the red, tear-streaked face revealed itself.

  “Valtrex,” he said, and lowered his eyes. “I got the herpes.”

  “Keep that. Give the rest to me,” I said. “Right now.”

  To my surprise he didn’t slam the window closed. But he hesitated, which is when I pulled out a one-year A.A. medallion and pressed it against the Plexiglas like a detective badge. (You never know when you need one; it’s as useful as a Masonic handshake.)

  “I’m a Friend of Bill. It’s okay. I’m going to give them to a hospital. We distribute meds to the homeless.”

 
“They do that?”

  I nodded. “When they think you’re ready, they’ll be sending you to help guys like you.”

  He handed over the drugs without another word, and then I suggested he should probably open the register and give me the money, so it would look like a robbery and he wouldn’t have to explain why big jars of narcotics were unaccounted for.

  “What big jars?”

  “The ones you’re not telling me about,” I said. “Come on, Sy. This is just one addict talking to another.”

  Again, he handed the drugs over without a peep: the stuff he mentioned, plus two jug-sized jars marked Percocet and Ritalin respectively. Up, down, and in between. I could have used a wheelbarrow.

  I thanked him. “You’re helping me, Sy. You don’t know even know how much.”

  “I am? I’m helping you?” He sniffled and wiped his cuff across his tear-runny eyes.

  “You’re showing me how The Program works,” I said. Which seemed to make Sy unaccountably happy. “Now hand over the money. We have to make this look real.”

  I imagined the shit I’d get from Jay and Riegle when I told them the story. Sy pulled a key from an extendo-chain on his belt and unlocked a drawer under the cash register. From the drawer he pulled out a small satchel. He dumped the satchel out on the counter and handed me four fist-sized rolls of twenties, tens, fives, and ones. I almost wanted to stop and recommend Depakote, drug of choice for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. (Some patients complain of feeling “fuzzy,” a gauze-like patina over vision, and in rare cases a fecal taste on the tongue.)

  “Don’t tell your sponsor about this till tomorrow.” I said. “That’s the tradition.”

  For the first time, Sy looked skeptical. “Which tradition is that?”