Happy Mutant Baby Pills

by Jerry Stahl

  Her hand on my thigh was not even surprising.

  “You must have had such an interesting life . . .”

  In fact, my interesting life was waiting for me back in the Prius. Or so I hoped. I had this sinking feeling Nora would wander off and do something majorly regrettable. But I couldn’t think about it. Not then. Intros were made to the staff: three preppy writers who looked like they were about to cry, plus a director who rattled off his name and credits with a sharky glean in his eye—no doubt confusing me with someone who could possibly help him. I went a little overboard elaborating the ins and outs of baby-men. “The big thing is thumb-sucking—look for a groove over the thumbnail!—or, more obviously, a tell-tale reek, from full-time Depends aficionados.”

  None of the writers said much. The way they stared, I realized they had no idea who I was. A couple of the writers, I realized, must have thought I was some kind of Dirty Diaper Fetishist, a Spokes-Perv, here to plead for some network respect. The third writer seemed weirdly beaten. But when the director, asserting his territory, said the whole thing sounded far-fetched, I dipped into the factoid pile and marched out a few of the ones I’d laid on Bea. I later learned that the Writers Guild allows one “outside writer” a year, and potentially, I was it. Naturally, the director had a girlfriend he wanted to lay the gig on. Everybody wants to look powerful. Especially guys who don’t have any power.

  Anyway, I was semi-obsessing on Nora, what she was doing back in the car, if she still was in the car. I was hoping she hadn’t wandered into anything fatal, while at the same time I had to focus on sealing whatever kind of half-ass deal I could come up with here. To my surprise, Bea chimed up before I had to tap dance. “I think Lloyd can bring something fresh. To the show.”

  It happened so fast, I was almost disappointed I didn’t have a chance to talk adult babies again. I was feeling chatty. Maybe everybody likes to be an expert once in a while. But no such luck. Before you could say pervin’-for-dollars, I had a job.

  When I went back to the Prius, Nora was gone.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Nasty Klepto

  Two hours later, I found Nora in an empty soundstage, sitting by a pile of bloody towels, fondling a discarded Hoover attachment with what looked like a human heart clogged in the business end. (Speaking of Aztecs.) A single spot from a ceiling beam lent her a dramatic, almost Pietà-like intensity.

  She waggled the vacuum cleaner tube at me as I approached. “How cool is this?”

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s a prop.”

  With this she stood up, wrapped the heart in a scrap of towel, and put it in her pocket.

  “What isn’t, baby?”

  We made our way through the lot, past a pair of faux bomb victims moving their face-gauze aside to chow down on tacos. No doubt a special, special episode, Nora said, miming the universal TV announcer guy voice. Nora wanted to stop and grab a bite, but I balked.

  “Why not? They can afford it,” she said.

  “I know they can. But I can’t afford for that fucking heart to fall out of your purse. For no apparent reason, they kind of gave me a job. And I don’t want to blow it ’cause I showed up with a kleptomaniac.”

  “Like they’ll miss it.”

  I held her arm lightly—but firmly—as we passed by the food truck.

  “You think those are cheap? How do you know they’re not using it in the next scene? How do you know the prop master doesn’t live for the chance to discover something missing? So everybody can be a suspect and he gets to look like there’s a reason he has a fucking job?”

  “Prop master? It’s all sex with you, isn’t it?”

  I waved to Bea, who saw me passing by with Nora. She motioned us over, but I gave her a little wave and kept going. Then I realized she was waving to the woman behind me, an ex–assistant coroner who had popped her head in during the meeting and introduced herself. I couldn’t remember her name. She was the actual forensic expert, a woman who’d been to an actual crime scene. She told a story about finding a woman with a shoe inside her, a Brooks Brothers topsider, and I’d zoned out. I kept walking.

  The whole thing with the baby-men and the script I was supposed to write and Bea the Exec Producer’s manicured plump but lovely hand on my thigh . . . All I needed was for the fake heart to fall out of Nora’s purse. To end up in CSI jail. I don’t know much about job interviews, but I know it’s much easier to look enthusiastic on heroin. Looking responsible is a whole other can of pharmaceuticals. And I did not happen to have them.

  We stopped for a second while Nora dug the car keys out of her purse. (Literally a shopping bag, from Vons. She saw Cat Power carrying one in Spin.) The heat in Santa Clarita was so intense it looked like the ground was quivering. I wished I’d worn underwear, but the last time I remember seeing any they were somebody else’s, in a Spanish laundromat—Ola, Lavandería!—spinning in a dryer window. Stealing wet clothes from a dryer is the safest way I know to get yourself a fresh wardrobe. Guaranteed clean. Most folks like to stroll outside for a smoke rather than sit there watching their shit spin. Tweakers excepted, of course. Tweakers will sit down in front of a dryer and keep pumping quarters in the slot just because it’s deeply entertaining and cheaper than cable. It’s what their brain wants them to do. (The way crackheads carpet-mine, speed freaks spin dry when they’re spun.)

  “Can you imagine working here?” Nora said when I finally got her in the car. “All you have to do is think up a bunch of really weird shit and write it down.”

  “I won’t have to think it up. I’ll just have to remember it.”

  “Oooh, listen to you!”

  We’d parked in the sun. The seat of the car felt like molten lava. It didn’t bother Nora but had me grabbing newspapers off the floor to slide onto the seat and stave off second-degree ass-burn.

  That was when I saw a pair of burly guys in tight blue shirts making their way toward us and decided to just start the car.

  “Nora, don’t turn around. Just stick the heart somewhere nobody can find it.”

  “What?”

  I hadn’t noticed the iPod buds in her ears. She didn’t have an iPod two minutes ago.

  “Nothing,” I said, easing up the aisle of parked cars and pickups, rolling down the hill from Santa Clarita Studios—not, you know, fast; we didn’t want to look like people trying to make a getaway after a heist. Just a Normal Couple in a Normal Car so we could head back to the 5, a Normal Freeway. Ideally, unobstructed by authorities. I didn’t know if there was a line beyond which studio security couldn’t arrest you. It was not exactly like Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw making a run for Mexico in The Getaway. All I knew was if you made it a hundred feet from a supermarket, security couldn’t touch you.

  When we were safely back on surface streets, no one authoritative in the rearview, I started speaking again. “I knew this three-hundred-pound dealer, Mexican cat, who used to dress up in diapers and let his girlfriend use him as a couch. He’d be on hands and knees, pulling balloons of tar out of his socks, while she’d be up there in a polyblend nighty reading Variety. I guess she was an actress.”

  “So . . . the guy had some kind of bowel problem?”

  “Of course not. You’re missing the point. Homeboy was an adult baby. He liked to suckle mamá and wear Depends. But for some reason he also found it relaxing to act like a human end table. Among friends, I mean.”

  It took a lot to rattle Nora, but she was, in this instance, at least mildly perplexed. “Why are we even talking about this?”

  “Because you asked,” I said, trying not to grind my teeth while being blown sideways as I passed a double-wide, nearly sideswiping an Exxon truck and hurtling us both into a fiery, Michael Bay inferno. “I have to give them an adult baby treatment.”

  She just looked at me.

  “A treatment. Like an outline. Make up some cool murder stuff, make up some gangster napp
y freak, and find a way for the CSIs to solve his murder.”

  “Then you write the script?”

  “Ideally, yeah.”

  She thought for a moment, rolling the window down and putting her face out of it. “Then maybe we start working.”

  “On the script?”

  “On the murder part.”

  Did you ever meet somebody who either had no sense of humor or was never serious, you couldn’t tell which?

  I’m not saying Nora was a liar. I’m saying she didn’t always tell the truth.

  So, back in Harold’s apartment . . . No, wait. I should, I suppose, tell you what happened to Harold. I keep wanting to, but at the same time I don’t want to dwell. Part of me just wants to say we now had his credit cards, not to mention his car. Leave it at that. But how we got them probably does bear explaining.

  “He’s not doing too well” is what Nora said when we walked in and found our junk-friendly host lying facedown in the little place between the bed and the wall. This was a day or four ago. She’d wrinkled her nose and taken off her T-shirt. Indoors, she preferred to go shirtless. “He smells a little dead.”

  “Harold just does this,” I said. “If he were dead, he might smell a little better.”

  “Then let’s trick him out, Mr. Forensics.”

  “Trick him out how?”

  I knew where she was going, but I don’t have to tell you I didn’t want to go there.

  “How do you think? We do him up in diapers and baby bonnet, get some little crack ho in here . . . you know, a real strawberry, make him go goo-goo ga-ga. See how it plays out.”

  I sat down on the twin bed closest to the door, suddenly tired. Not from driving sixty miles, or pitching to a producer, or stressing over groceries and dope, but from the effort of not thinking about everything I’d done—that we had done, Nora and me—the stuff that happened but that we didn’t talk about. The effort of suppression is taxing enough, but when it’s married to an effort not to admit that you’re suppressing anything—to having to deny that you’re in denial, so that you can’t really admit that you’re denying anything, you just, I don’t know, banish the shit you don’t want to think about from inside your head altogether. It’s like holding down the handle on a toilet so the toilet keeps flushing. It doesn’t work. At some point, inevitably, even if the handle’s down, nothing’s flushing. In fact, just the opposite.

  But the effort can take it out of you.

  While we were arguing—or I was arguing—over the wisdom of spending the evening shoplifting Depends and petroleum jelly, not to mention a baby bonnet—assuming we could even find one big enough for a big-boy junkie in the immediate vicinity—Nora stormed into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Super-Nutritious Celebrity Placenta

  I checked on Harold—still numb but no longer drooling. Maybe beyond drooling. I didn’t want to know. We’d decided to keep him that way, happily semicomatose, until whatever happened happened. Not knowing what else to do, I turned on the TV. I didn’t want to watch TV. Who did? But I was in a motel room and there was a television. So I turned it on and, after a bit of fuzz and blur, there was January Jones on The View talking about placenta snacks. Made from her newborn baby boy’s placenta.

  “Animals eat their placenta. Why shouldn’t people?”

  Whoopi Goldberg made a silent-movie “shocked” face. January joined in the audience’s laughter. Unfazed. “I call them happy pills. I’ve got a placenta encapsulation specialist. He cleaned, cooked, dehydrated, and ground my baby’s into perfect capsules. I was working again, with my old body, less than a month after my baby was born.”

  Which is when, without thinking about it, I dropped to my knees and started studying the floor to see if we’d dropped anything. Carpet-mining, not to get technical. The nagging side effect of crack use. But in this case—me being a garden-variety heroin enthusiast—a more methodical pursuit. We’d run out of drugs and I was scouring the floor to see if we’d dropped any. This is when I saw the big faux leather bag under the bed. I didn’t recognize it, but then, in this kind of motel, you were bound to find all kinds of things. If you were non-germaphobic enough to actually get down on the floor voluntarily. As opposed to involuntarily, or Harold Style: facedown and fancy-free on the moldy carpet.

  I yelled, “Nora! Hey, Nora, I found something!” But she was still in the shower. The bag was out of reach. I had to move to the other side of the bed and reach past Harold, who didn’t seem to mind. He might have done something in his pants, or else he hadn’t changed them in a while. Maybe both. (Old-school hopheads swear a layer of filth “keeps the high inside.” But mostly, when you’re jonesing, your skin hurts. Water hurts. Plus, junkies are busy guys ’n’ gals. Who has time for hygiene?) Anyway, I knew from experience you could bend Harold like a pretzel and set his face on fire and he wouldn’t mind. Worse than breathing Harold, I had to breathe that rug. God knows what nasty, fucked-out, sex-twisted monstroids had shed skin, barfed, farted, fornicated, wept, shot up, or all six simultaneously on the floor in a fiend palace like that.

  Anyway, I pulled out the bag, unzipped it a little, stuck my hand in, and screamed. Loud. Due to skracking pain when a mousetrap snapped and nearly took a fingernail off. Not that I minded the pain. I was too excited. Anything worth rigging a mousetrap to protect was bound to be good. Drugs? Money? I ripped it off and went in. And what treasure, you wonder, did I find? Let’s just say it was so surprising I took the time to dig a pencil stub out of the motel desk drawer and write it all down. Of course I had no paper, so I had to unwedge the “CHECKOUT BY NOON” card from its frame on the door. It had been a while since I’d been the kind of diligent scribe who walked around with a notebook. Even when I did, I wasn’t exactly jotting down ideas for haikus. I wasn’t jotting down anything, except the occasional phone number, or smudged out WHY? Which is why I stopped carrying notebooks at all. But forget all that. When I saw what was inside I wanted to inventory. Not because the contents meant something, but because, at first, they didn’t. Basically, it was a bunch of products with no outward relationship to one another.

  Roundup weed killer, Phisoderm face wash, Clearasil acne cream, Gatorade, Rust-Oleum, Diet Coke, and Axiron testosterone enhancer. (The latter boasting my all-time fave product warning: Discontinue if you see signs of advanced puberty in a child. (Unless, you know, you want to speed things up. Then Ax-up, tiger! Turn that tweener into a teen!)

  Before I could complete my inventory, out popped Nora, one towel wrapped beneath those breasts of hers and another around her wet hair, lending her a Cleopatra look. A ridiculously buxom yet dainty Cleopatra. When she saw the open bag in my lap she stopped. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Before I could answer she got a crazy expression on her face, then whipped the wet towel off her head and across my face. I could handle the towel smack, but the crazy scared me.

  “Jesus Christ, Nora!”

  “Fuck Jesus Christ. What the fuck are you doing, going through my shit?”

  “Your shit? I found it under the bed.” Then I picked up the Roundup. “What? You boost this? Weed killer?”

  “Not just weed killer. The CIA used Roundup in Colombia against the FARC, when the radicals were making money taxing coca. Monsanto directions say don’t spray from more than ten feet up. Glyphosates are not good for humans. From that high, it drifts onto other crops: beans, corn, coffee. Food and subsistence for whole villages are wiped out. But you know what’s worse? CIA mixes it with Cosmo-Flux. An adhesive, like? Makes the shit stick to leaves. Except it doesn’t just stick to leaves. It sticks to kids. Who can’t wash it off ’cause they can’t use the water. You want know what happens to babies marinated in CIA herbicide? Check Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. Now Monsanto’s going to make sure we eat it, too. Varietal GMOs.”

  I waited patiently, until she was through. “So that’s a ye
s? Why are you stealing weed killer?”

  “I’m not planning on selling it.”

  “Then what?”

  She didn’t explain any further. Instead, she moved closer. Let the second scrabby motel towel drop to the carpet. Then, naked—be still my heart! (she owned the last of the Seventies Playboy bushes)—reached into the bag with her eyes still on mine and grabbed the first incongruous product her hand fell on. Axiron. She broke the seal, pulled out a blister pack of twelve pills, thumbed out a couple, and popped them in her mouth. I could see from the empty slots that she’d already gobbled a few. I like to think I’m fairly unshakable. But this shook me.

  “Nora . . . What are you . . . ? I mean . . . you wanna tell me what you’re taking?”

  She dry-swallowed without making a face, like a professional. Had no problem talking. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re fucking insane. That shit’s not gonna get you high. Not to mention the fucking side effects. You’re not supposed to even touch anybody after you’ve held a pill in your hands. You have any idea what it can do to your reproductive system?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, smiling—there was that gold tooth again—“I do.”

  “Sure about that? They don’t put everything in the commercials. If that stuff came near a baby girl, she’d be menstruating by five. And it does things to fetuses the Discovery Channel won’t even show.”

  The smile got brighter. She actually giggled. A total first. “I love that you know that, baby.”

  Nora thumbed out another pill and rubbed it over her belly, making an X. Then she dry-popped that one, grabbed the Rust-Oleum, snatched the pillow off the bed, yanked the pillowcase away, and bit the lid off. She shook the can until we could hear the little ball bouncing around and sprayed inside the pillowcase until it was stained bloody brown. After that she bunched it up, pressed it to her lips, and took a deep breath. I’d never seen a huffer use a pillowcase. For that matter I’d never known a junkie who huffed. Life was full of happy surprises. Nora mega-inhaled a few more times, dropped the pillowcase, and gave me a bleary grin. Red spray circled her mouth. She looked like a woman who’d put her lipstick on drunk, if her lipstick came out of an industrial spray can and stopped oxidation. The stuff stank so much I could feel my own brain cells dying. I’d sniffed glue as a kid; the high was like being hit in the head with a brick. Rust-Oleum was similar, if you traded the brick for a monster truck tire, and it backed up over your skull.