Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

  I was an idiot when I banged into the station’s men’s room. I was a murderer when I staggered out. (Not that one trumps the other, or that they’re mutually exclusive.) Endorphins overwhelmed me. But that might not have been the thrill of murder. That might have been relief from having peed. I’d had to go so badly my knees were shaking. I had to pee a lot. The aforementioned Flomax was indicated, but (occupational hazard) I knew too intimately the things that could happen if you took it. I stopped, tried to take an honest breath, and then heard, in Bill Kurtis reenactment-sequence voice-over: To his friends he was known as a quiet, determined industrial writer. To the police, and the public at large, he was soon to be known as the BSTK. The Bus Station Toilet Killer.

  FOURTEEN

  Nora Funk

  It was dusk when we left Union Station: the thirty-eight minutes when LA is actually pleasant. We didn’t speak for a while. Until my companion in death piped up. “You know,” she said, as if rewarding me with something of herself, “my name is actually Nora Funk. No, really. My father’s name was Funk. He was a manic-depressive shit, and this didn’t make him any happier. But he’d never change it. Too depressed . . . ‘Hey, do you smell something funky?’ Really great, growing up with that.”

  I was so moved by this, this little bit of human conversation (as if what had just happened hadn’t) that I could barely speak. Instead I just held her hand. And I’m not a hand-holder.

  For no reason we headed to Spring Street. A long walk, in silence after that. “Did you?” she finally began. But she didn’t need to ask. I didn’t need to answer. We both knew.

  Neither of us looked back. Like Lot and his wife leaving Sodom. Or was it Gomorrah? Either way, neither of us turned into pillars of salt. Though I won’t lie, the thought crossed my mind—maybe instant salt pillar was not a bad way to go.

  It was only by chance that we ended up at City Hall, in front of which, in a downtrodden not-quite-park area, a hundred or two buzzed silhouettes bumped and hopped around a drum circle. Nora and I strolled past the drums to a kind of public chat-fest—by the City Hall steps—on the subject, it took a minute or to discover, of Middle-Class Debt Forgiveness. At some point Nora had taken my arm. The thrill of her touch dizzied me. The pleasure was almost embarrassing. Yet I felt like I’d be giving up all my power to even acknowledge it. The speaker, a teachery, thin-haired white man, sitting cross-legged in jeans, crocs, and sun hat, kept punching his fist into his hand. “We need to get a plank together, people, or we will squander the moment.” The human microphone (as I soon learned it was called) picked up his words. Repeated them: “We need to get a plank together, people, or we will squander the moment.”

  The speaker waited patiently for the echo to die. Then spoke another sentence. He had a way of hitting certain words, plank, debt, squander, so you knew exactly what the “take-away” was. Not that everybody was taking it away. The mood was one of festive menace. The sky had that chemical pink flush it got sometimes before dark. (I remember reading once that, before the death camps, when Nazis had to just drive around gassing Jews and gypsies in the backs of trucks, with hoses running from the exhaust pipe to the back where the people were, they called the corpses “tarts,” because their faces turned scarlet, as if lipsticked, after they died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The sky over Los Angeles at certain times blasted the same quality. Poisoned to death but pretty. When ugly would have been so much more appropriate. And less disturbing.)

  Someone in a Noam Chomsky mask under a black zip-up hoodie kept interjecting the words “fuck jerky” into the debt-relief presentation. Eliciting a wan smile from the cross-legged speaker, who said “I understand” in Chomsky-man’s direction, and then launched wearily back into debt forgiveness and infrastructure-investment job solutions. The crowd turned and waved their hands angrily in his direction. “Self-censorship is not self-censorship” is how the professor wrapped up. “Why don’t we think about that?”

  The human microphone repeated this, and Security, a large-shouldered Latina with flat Mayan features, led ur-Chomsky off to one side, leaving him with a pat on the back.

  I had not, at that time, even heard of Occupy Wall Street. This was its early days, and I wasn’t exactly up on the news. Then the Chomsky guy ran up to me. “Hey, Lloyd! Lloyd the Roid, is that you?”

  I recognized the voice. Adenoidal, snarkastic, but kind of pleady and needing-to-be-liked at the same time. With a Pittsburgh accent. “Harold?”

  “Lloyd the Roid,” he repeated.

  Harold was an old side-effects pal and junkie (maybe ex-junkie; maybe, people can change, right?). I’d heard he had somehow broken into TV. We weren’t close, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be the person Harold knew. Me, as I was, instead of the new, still uncomfortable, post-murder me.

  Harold prattled nonstop as we turned onto Fifth and Main, where the tents looked more ragged and improvised then the ready-mades in Occupy LA. At one time you could buy a human soul on Fifth and Main. Never mind the Mexican tar and fish scales, as old-time crackheads referred to their brain-crusher of choice.

  Harold lifted the mask. Without it, he looked as he had always looked, like a fluey Orlando Bloom. Still talking. (The way he was talking: fast, flicking spittle, mouth loose at the corners, I began to suspect he wasn’t ex-everything.) He had theories, too. “No one at Occupy opted for refrigerator boxes. You notice? That’s the difference, see? On Skid Row they do what they have to do. Back there”—he thumbed over his shoulder, toward City Hall—“those kids do what they want to do. Sleeping bags? That’s really being down with the people.”

  “Just ’cause they’re getting laid,” Nora shrugged, “doesn’t mean they’re not serious.”

  I watched her as I had been watching her, wanting to shake her, shout in her face. Do you know what I just did for you? I FUCKING KILLED A MAN! After, I might have added, standing there while my victim took a dump. One more thought to block. Along with one I was already wrestling with: were there surveillance cameras in the bathroom? I’d made sure to close the stall door behind me so that, to the casual traveler in need, it just looked like the stall was occupied. I blinked back the memory as we walked together. The questions. The turmoil. Why it was troubling that there was no blood. Had I pricked some life-sustaining cerebral bubble, bloodless and fatal? Did his memories vanish when I paper-clipped his brainpan? If so, maybe I should take a stab at my own.

  There was a minute there when I honestly believed I was beyond heroin. I had a reason not to use, because of love. But because of love—when had this melodrama set in?—I had done something that made heroin necessary. If it wasn’t Shakespearean, maybe there was after-school special potential. Or at least a cocktail napkin, my favorite pre-Reddit content delivery engine.

  Harold must have been talking the whole time. But I tuned back in as we walked away from the enclave of protest and waded deeper into Skid Row. Now, he told us, he was part of the Bruckheimer team. JB maintained a phalanx of consultants, all, he sniffed, “suckling at the teat of show business.” At first his floral hard-guy style rang TV schizophrenic. But he made sense. “Ex-cops, ex-DEA agents, ex-coroner’s assistants, ex-you-name-its, these guys are all on the payroll. A writer has to write a kidnap-the-baby scene, you bring a guy in there who’s done baby kidnappings. Maybe you bring the baby. You have to understand movie and TV execs.” He went on, leading us from City Hall around the block, where he flagged over a squat Cholo, who looked right and left and plucked a few spit-sopping balloons out of his mouth. “Showbiz guys just want to be in a room with somebody who was once in a room with somebody real. Whole lot of law enforcement and military bag the government pay grade to come and be experts in Hollywood. Drink with the stars.”

  “We don’t drink,” Nora announced. I’d only known her since Tulsa, and I could already tell when she didn’t like people by the sneer in her voice when she talked to them. And I heard that sneer when she talked
to everybody. Including, half the time, me. We passed a soiled refrigerator box, caved in on one corner, with screams coming from it. No one seemed to care. Nora made as if to stop and I took her arm, not roughly, but not casually, either. Like I knew my way around. Like I was some kind of Skid Row pro.

  “Oh, honey, are we protecting me from these dirty men?”

  I didn’t mind the insults from Nora. Like I say, I had feelings for her. Though not having had feelings for a while, I wasn’t sure, at first, what they were.

  FIFTEEN

  The Usual Motel

  I should probably skip the part where we end up in a motel room for three days, shooting speedballs and watching MSNBC. Nora said she wanted to lick Lawrence O’Donnell’s forehead. To show him her respect. Harold explained his whole Chomsky “fuck jerky” thing as a way of keeping some levity in the proceedings. The trouble was, Occupy America didn’t have any Yippies.

  “So,” I asked Harold, running bleach through the needle, rinsing it at the roachy motel sink, “you’re going to be the Jerry Rubin of your generation? You’re not even a ninety-nine percenter. Are you? You must have Bruckheimer money.”

  “I got a little Fuck You account. Nothing major. Only Bruckheimer has Bruckheimer money. Bruckheimer doesn’t ask about my politics, and I don’t tell him.”

  “Then basically you’re just being a dick out there. Fucking with other people who are struggling, willing to transcend trendy ironic hipsterism and be sincere.” Even gowed on smack I was disgusted. And junkies, let me tell you, aren’t disgusted by much. But Harold looked so hurt, I didn’t press it. A guy wants to put on a mask and be a douche bag to people trying to change the fucking world and stop corporations from screwing them, who am I to judge? Especially when he’s paying for the drugs.

  It’s not like I was lifting a finger to stop the foreclosure of human souls. Looking interested was part of the dynamic of free drugs. You learned all kinds of things you didn’t want to know that way. I once sat and listened to a legless Vietnam vet in a SF hotel sing new lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” for three hours, because he was giving me free speedballs. After the “Battle Hymn” he moved to “God Bless America,” which in his condition came out “Gommessamekka.” I had to listen, then sing along, then listen, then sing along some more. And didn’t mind a bit. I was bored, I was hoarse, I was losing my family and wasting my entire fucking life, but I was high.

  So I ignored Harold’s public dickishness. Just let it go. I remembered now how my ex-coworker got maudlin when the opiates faded—that he was just lonely, and no doubt self-conscious about a toast-colored lip herpes. The Chomsky faces made him comfy and anonymous among the Occupy Crowd. Where everybody else was in V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks.

  “So, you know Bruckheimer, huh?” Not that was I even semi-interested, but I needed to keep Harold engaged. We had nowhere to stay, besides this motel.

  “Yeah, I met him,” he said. “Once. I got the call. It was exciting. But I was worried, too. ’Cause I thought it was a CSI thing. Back then CSI Vegas was super hot, and JB and the genius who dreamed it up—dude was a jitney driver on the Strip, regular guy—were all over the news.”

  As he talked he turned the red balloons the dope had come in inside out, smearing any residual tar on the edge of his spoon. “They shot the show out of a studio in Santa Clarita, so I figured I’d have to go to Santa Clarita. Where all the white supremacists live. You don’t want to be a black kid wearing a hoodie in Santa Clarita. Up there, Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have made the news. They got guys wear white hoods to pick up Bud and chips at the 7-Eleven. But turns out they weren’t calling about a CSI-type deal; it was something else. So instead of having to suck fumes up the 5 from LA, this one day I got to go to Jerry’s office in Santa Monica, a converted airplane hangar with some kind of World War One plane hanging from the ceiling by a wire. The way the place was set up, the Sopwith Camel, or whatever it was, dangled right above the guest waiting area, over a big white couch low to the floor. So low you couldn’t turn your head without bumping your kneecaps. Plus you knew, under the Airplane of Damocles, if there was an earthquake you’d be the first to go. The wire would probably snap and you’d be splacked underneath, one of those embarrassing deaths, you know? Like the guy who jumps out of a building and pancakes another guy taking a leak when he lands. Die with a dick in your hands, where’s the dignity?”

  “Depends whose dick,” I said.

  “Your own, obviously.”

  “Obviously.” The last thing I wanted was to annoy Harold. I remembered my mission. “So, uh, why were you seeing Bruckheimer again?”

  “Well, it was kind of just that one time. And not just Bruckheimer. Michael Bay was there. You know, the Transformers guy? Bad Boys One and Two?”

  “All classics,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said, “Bay wanted to hear about self-heating shaving cream. The kind that gets hot on your face? It’s a chemical thing. I guess he wanted to use it in a script.”

  “And you know about it how? You were a chemistry major?”

  “My father invented the shit. He flunked out of dermatology school. Came up with hot gel and sold the formula to Gillette. It was my first techno-copy. Dad made me write it thirty-seven times.” Here he recited, voice dope-froggy like a white James Earl Jones. “The heat source in the new self-heating shaving cream is a chemical reaction involving hydrogen peroxide and a reducing agent. A small polyethylene bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide is placed inside the aerosol can, followed by a propellant. Not only is it safe, it’s convenient, and saves more time for the things that matter . . .”

  I chimed in: “Cut to fresh-shaved handsome guy smooching his pretty girl.”

  Harold snorted—that’s how he laughed. “Go ahead, laugh it up, big shot. I think Bay actually wanted my father. But when he Googled thermal shaving cream he got me.”

  Nora didn’t say anything. Just sat on the second bed, watching us talk. At first I thought she was sulking. But it seemed more than that. For all I know she was mourning. But I couldn’t ask. Something about her kept me off-kilter. From the minute we met, we went from total strangers to sharing some kind of secret life together. So secret, now that I thought about it, even I wasn’t sure if this was true, or in my head . . . When she got off on dope, her face softened a little, so she just looked angry. Not sad. But she wasn’t talking much now. No sooner was the needle out of her arm than she lit a Tareyton and aimed a she-sneer at us. Nora not saying anything could fuck with you more than somebody else saying something. I couldn’t help but admire Harold, his ability to stay chemically oblivious.

  “I’m impressed that you remember all this,” I told him. “The polyethylene especially. Who remembers polyethylene?”

  “I did,” Harold said, “and it’s a good thing. From that one little question I got in as a consultant. Became a forensics cosmetic specialist. Kind of invented the field. I guess you could say I’m the go-to dye guy. Before moi, somebody wanted to stage a death by makeup, they’d cook up some nonsense about arsenic-laced pancake powder, tainted dandruff shampoo, stuff like that. Me, I took it to the next level. Chemicals I used? All FDA approved. That’s the kicker. Ingredients are all right there on the Health & Beauty aisle. One time I even came up with the idea for hair tint that gave you scalp Ebola.”

  Nora perked up. “There is such a thing?”

  Harold smiled crookedly. Proud. “That’s exactly what Marg Helgenberger said. The victim was normal one day—a week later, his gray was gone, but so was the flesh over his brain. How can you not love show business?”

  Nora scowled at me when Harold wasn’t looking. When she spoke to him her voice was pleasant. As pleasant as Nora could be when she was trying to be pleasant. “So, Harold, you don’t do any actual work work?”

  “I don’t dig ditches, if that’s what you mean.”

  Harold chuckled again and lick
ed the tip of his needle. I’d never seen anybody do that before, and it made me a little sick. (He had other creepy habits, like lubricating his non-reusable plastic needles with earwax every time he reused them. The last thing I wanted to think about was ears, or earwax, with the image of that bloody paper clip still fresh in my brain. But none of this mattered. Harold had the heroin.)

  Somewhere outside a guy screamed in Spanish. Harold leaned forward and lowered his voice, as though international makeup killers might be listening in to see what he was up to. “You don’t think what I do is work? Well, let me tell you a secret. You know what’s harder than coming up with cool ways to fuck somebody up via hair and skin care? Trying not to fuck yourself up with hair and skin care. Example. Let’s say you wanna dye your hair. Let’s go blond, America! Well, like it or not, you’re going to be splashing on everything from Diaminodiphenylamine to Chloro-2-Aminophenol to Acid Orange 24. Stuff’s banned in Europe, but over here, thanks to the chemical lobby, you can soak your head in that swill till your brain swells up like a marinated elephant spleen. Won’t even take you long. Drip a little red solvent number one in your ear, you’ll be aphasic and walking sideways before anybody can admire your new look. Happens all the time. Open secret. Your big health and beauty corpos keep a fund for shutting up folks who just wanted to get their hair shiny and ended up with festering scalp cankers the size of frogs.”

  He laughed again, while Nora studied him with an expression I couldn’t quite peg. Harold laughed a lot when he was high, before throwing up and passing out and weeping about how it had all gone wrong, in no particular order. The man could go catatonic fast.