by Jerry Stahl
“No wonder you want to kill him.”
“Not kill him. Necessarily. Wait . . . He also said he was going to give me fifty thousand dollars for my ‘contribution to the company,’ and he didn’t give me a dime. P.S., he got a bonus that year of 4.7 million. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part, I found out after I started doing research on him, is that Dow is probably responsible for destroying, murdering, fouling, poisoning, and generally future-fucking more of the planet than just about any company you can imagine, outside of Monsanto. And I made that lying psychopathic zillionaire sack of shit look enlightened. It makes me want to start purging again just thinking about it.”
Done talking, she took a deep breath and began to backstroke naked across the skanky carpet. She stopped in front of an outlet, popped in a Febreze plug-in, turned around, and positioned her feet high and flat on the wall so the chemical fragrance from the device—something called Berry Bunch, though it smelled more like cough syrup—would flow directly inside her.
“The man raped you?”
“They’re all rapists,” she said.
“Who?”
Her voice went flat as she recited. “Dow, Monsanto, Johnson and Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, all of them.”
“I get it. But come on.”
“Come on, what? Like corporations can’t rape? They’re human, aren’t they?”
As she spoke, she continued to work that fumy, mutagenic cloud into her sex. She might as well have douched with slime from Love Canal . . . She closed her eyes and continued dreamily. “They rape everybody.”
“Maybe,” I said, playing along. “But somehow I doubt I’m going to get pregnant.”
She stopped slathering and regarded me. “Oh, you will.”
Dead serious now, she reached up and touched my belly. “Only you won’t be having a baby. Maybe you’ll have a little tumor. A nice little brainstem glioma. Or a schwannoma. Doesn’t that sound cute? Schwannoma. Kind of ethnic . . . like stuffed grape leaves. This could be the moment, right now, when you start growing your own brain-baby. Who knows? You might even have triplets . . .”
She giggled and moved her hand down to my balls, then up to my chest, and then farther north, to where my brain is supposed to be. Nora was not, normally, this playful. “Sometimes, I think of the defect as a little creature with a baby around it. And sometimes I think, Maybe the baby is the defect!”
I looked at her, and I saw her face the way it must have been before . . . I remembered my first glimpse of her, this tough little bus stray with the sullen pout and the attitude and the outsize breasts she seemed intent on hiding under her ratty army jacket, like concealed weapons. It seemed to me like she’d been five different people since then: the hard-ass chick, the victim, the junkie (well, all junkies are victims, until they steal your checkbook and make you one), the criminal (ditto), and, now, the R-PEA: the Radical Pregnant Environmental Activist.
“The child I’m carrying? Just one of millions of citizens of earth who’ve been exposed and never had a chance, never had a goddamn say in the matter.”
“I get it, N. The Dow guy fucked you in the flesh. The other ones are genocidal criminals who did you—and are still doing everybody else—from their country clubs, or wherever, without even knowing what they’ve done. It’s a little shrill, but I get it.”
“Shrill? Fuck you. When’s the last time you watched somebody die from something you did? Probably never. These guys do it nonstop and it never even affects them.”
The base reek of the motel room combined with the industrial sprays and “air freshener” she’d unleashed. It smelled like some perfumed farm animal being burned on a stake, fur and all, three inches in front of me. She placed her hands on her rounded-if-you-squint belly, the way pregnant women do, and gave me a look so single-minded it was like having a laser aimed directly through my unibrow.
“You know what I’m going to do. I’m going to have the baby. And then, you know . . . ”
“No, I don’t know.”
A rare and beautiful smile. “I’m going to make it an event. I’m going to show it off.”
“To who?”
“His creators. If this were NASCAR, I could have a sponsor’s patch on every deformity, one per tumor. Monsanto. Johnson and Johnson. Merck, Bayer, Kellogg’s . . .”
I had to interrupt. “Kellogg’s? Now you’re telling me Corn Flakes will kill you?”
“Well, they’re processed, but that’s a different issue. FDA doctors found mold on them. Aflatoxins.”
“Mmm. I bet the kids love ’em.”
“You think this is funny?”
“Okay, okay . . . So then what?”
She reached in the bag again, felt around, pulled out a cherry Nutri-Grain bar and ripped off the wrapper. Shoved it in her mouth and kept talking. “What do you think? FDA crushed the research. It spends most of its resources spying on whistle-blowers. Hard to get a lot done when your resources are expended reading real-time e-mails. Mmmm!” She licked her lips and smiled. “My favorite flavor, Red Dye Number Two. But hey . . .” She dabbed a splodge of jelly from her lip. “I like the taste of cancer.”
THIRTY
Almost Like Happiness
After a month or two Nora started to show. We were like a regular little family, or would be until little Mothra was born. After that, Nora’s plans veered macro: into global techno-chemical reform and worldwide notoriety, among other things. Though she was never absolutely specific about how she was going to bring the world’s attention to young Mutando. She just believed.
Thanks to network TV employment I was able to rent us a little house in Echo Park. CBS wanted more “extreme stories.” I said, “Cool.” It was like being paid to think up fucked-up shit, the one skill I’d acquired cranking out pharma-copy. Because, really, what else did mainstream old-time network-watching America want on a Thursday at 9 p.m.? No problem at all, provided I didn’t bring Nora back to the set, and risk her reverting back to klepto-adolescence again and ganking another prop. For better or worse, no possible episodes of the shock-the-masses Vegas murder series compared to what was happening, in real life, at home.
It’s funny, really, how you can get used to anything. How quickly the unutterable becomes ho-hum. But maybe that’s just “acceptance.” Like they say in the twelve steps and all. I’d climbed them once. Before I’d slid back down. And made my way back up again. Then slipped, then—you get the picture. In the end, I acquired a deep and abiding understanding of the immortal words of Jonathan Swift: “Climbing is performed in the same position as crawling.”
The first thing we did, after slapping a mattress down on the bedroom floor, was ring it with as many appliances as possible. (Somehow the gesture felt oddly empowering, like heating the pool before you drown in it.) Electric blankets, a pair of microwave ovens, a WiFi router, a cordless phone and cordless phone base, both our laptops (recently “borrowed”), both our BlackBerrys (ditto), and a gaggle of old-school cells, iPhones, and Androids we’d been up able to pick up here and there. Of all the women in the world, I’d ended up with the one who slathered on sunscreen before she went to bed. (Sometimes my own luck scared me!) It was disorienting, at first, but she wanted that retinyl palmitate and oxybenzone to soak through her epidermis overnight, into her system. “Total hormone disruptor,” she said—excited about it—when she saw me watching.
You know about this stuff, right? Don’t tell me you still sleep with a digital clock? Electric blankets? With your computer and an iPhone charging next to the bed? Might as well camp out at Three Mile Island. And that’s just radiation and electromagnetic node scrambling! There’s so much EMF exposure in the average American home that boatloads of citizens stagger through their lives nauseous and dizzy and don’t even know why. (That’s how it feels to be us!) Even as we speak, the Pentagon is allocating entire wings to the development of an airborne microwave crowd-con
trol weapon code-named “Active Denial”! (Perfect! Who thinks up these names? Who gets that job?) And I’m not even talking about the lung-destroying aluminum silicate dispensed by unmarked jets crisscrossing United States skies like white icing on a coffee cake. You don’t believe me, go outside and look up. Check out the chemtrails.
I didn’t know any of this stuff until Nora told me. I wasn’t in active denial, I just didn’t care. Didn’t Lenny Bruce say, “No self-respecting junkie lives long enough to die of anything legal”? Or was that early American opium fan Ben Franklin?
But now it wasn’t about us. It was about new life! The new life Nora was bent on creating. Whose origins, despite her explanations (or justifications) remained as cryptic and miserable as her intentions were “noble.”
This, by which I mean Nora’s pregnancy and her attendant efforts to, for lack of a better word, “influence”—though the better word may be “mutate”—it had crossed the line from possible side effects to probable monstrosity. And, like I say, after the initial shock, the revulsion—not for her, okay, but for the very idea of what she was trying to do—the whole thing began to feel like some kind of sick, if visionary, semi-credible science project.
Because I was writing for TV, I got into the Writers Guild. This meant health insurance. I actually wrote four more episodes after “King Baby,” the mogul-in-diapers story. My favorite was “Fancy Pants,” about a sex change that goes bad when the surgeon has an epileptic fit and leaves the job half done. This motivated the patient, forever doomed to limbo between pre-op and post-op, to take up the scalpel against successful transsexuals, for whom he/she harbored deep and unsettling jealousy. They made me a sex monster instead of a woman, which is what I am.
Years ago I read an interview with Samuel Jackson in which he confided how he’d learned to be an actor: “I used to be a drug addict.” (I’m paraphrasing.) “Being an addict teaches you to say what you need to say to get what you need to get.”
I explained to the (partly intrigued, partly creeped) staff how fly-by-night sex-changers sometimes used storage lockers to perform the operation. How these “surgeons” stuff the “female portal” with a toothpaste tube and suture it with piano wire “for shaping” while it heals. Then, after five days or so, the “mangina” is unsutured, the wires removed, and voila! Ernest, meet Ernestine! (Fun fact: Time of death—always important—was determined by the dead he/she’s pubic hair. People think your beard grows after you die. Actually, your skin contracts, pushing the follicles out. Fresh-shaved pubes make it easy as pie for the CSIs to calculate time of death. One wonders how many future murderers will try to foil the investigators with high-end merkins. Look it up.)
Wannabe gender-flippers who couldn’t afford the full enchilada—man-to-woman variety—had to settle for injecting silicone into their cheeks and buttocks; the ones who couldn’t afford silicone would shoot motor oil. That’s one of the things I loved about the show: you always learned something. It was rewarding to write dialogue that would stand the test of time. Like this one (not to brag) for Billy Petersen: So how’d your fingerprint end up on a three-day-old vagina? Not everybody can grow up to be Nicholas Sparks.
The WGA insurance only covered spouses, not girlfriends. A term, naturally, that Nora hated. She preferred “unmarried humans.” Or something. It depended on the day and the drug. (What didn’t?)
I was ready to pull the trigger. Get hitched. It seemed so wrong I couldn’t stop myself. But Nora wasn’t having it. Marriage wasn’t part of the game plan. She was adamant: “I am not going to end up like some fanny pack with tits.”
The woman could turn a phrase.
We were actually on our way to an OB/GYN in the Valley she had found online. Nora wanted to stop at Pink’s, on La Brea. The famous hot dog stand. She was vegetarian, but Pink’s chili cheese dogs constituted a necessary violation. You probably know of the potential health dangers associated with MSG. I had to learn. In wieners monosodium glutamate is used as a flavoring and labeled as an excitotoxin, meaning that it stimulates sensitive neurons. Ever the nutritional pollutant expert, Nora laid it out: “That’s what makes MSG so headachy. It’s like your brain is so buzzed it wants to vomit.”
We’d just scored, so we both felt loose. It was always an “up,” visiting Luz, the Mexican lady who sold us dope. She dealt out of the two-room apartment near USC she shared with her mother, her grandmother, three sons, and a cousin from Guatemala, who served us frijoles. Maybe it was the family feeling, but Luz’s dope was always a soporific. No rush, but relaxing as a massage from Jesus.
It was hard to worry about hot dog toxins, standing on the corner of LaBrea and Melrose and breathing in face-blasting gusts of hot bus exhaust, Nora being the only Pink’s patron who stepped to the curb to breathe fresh diesel. I had to pull her back, discreetly, in case she got gas-dizzy and staggered in front of a Mercedes crossover. (Speaking of mutants.) They were showing up all over Los Angeles.
“Sir, are you a sex offender? Stop harassing that woman!”
I’d know that voice anywhere. Sure enough, I turned around to face Jay, my fellow Christian Swingler. I hadn’t seen him since Tulsa, when his cop boyfriend, Dusty, managed to extract me from the back of that police car. Jay looked exactly the same, except for missing an arm.
THIRTY-ONE
Nugger
Jay wore a blue blazer, the cuff of the left sleeve pinned over his heart, as though pledging eternal devotion. The weird thing wasn’t his missing arm. It was the fact that he was wearing a sport coat. It was 101 in LA. Global toasting.
Jay saw me clocking him and smiled.
“Pastor Bobb caught me with my hand in the till.”
“What about Riegle?”
“I was holding the till,” a voice said.
I turned and there was Riegle. He too seemed exactly the same.
“But you’ve got both arms!”
This from Nora, sinking her teeth into her chili dog. I saw her the way my old friends must have seen her: a no-nonsense twentyish box of sauce in black bangs and office clothes. She was dressed for the first appointment with the ob-gyn. All drugsters figure coming off straight will get them more pills.
“Long story,” Riegle said, waggling both arms. “I found a photo of the pastor. With a young Christian girl.”
“How young?” Nora wanted to know.
“Young enough for the pastor. Old enough to need the money.”
Nora nodded, conceding a little half smile. “Been there.”
She fit right in.
We retired to eat our dogs and catch up in Jay’s car. (A Saturn, of all things.) The encounter seemed entirely random. In retrospect . . . well, what good is retrospect?
Jay managed fine with one hand. “All worth it for the handicap sticker,” he said. “Plus, nobody wants a Saturn. They stopped making them in what, ’09? Parts rare as dinosaur bones.”
“That and the fact we ‘produced’ an accident report.” Riegle made air quotes. The only person I knew who could do them and not look lame. It’s like we’d seen each other yesterday. “In the database, it turned out this Saturn had been in a flood. Completely immersed. They would have given it away.”
Once they were satisfied Nora was bent—I couldn’t have been prouder—Jay pulled down the visor, behind which he’d stashed a row of loaded syringes. “Look at Lloyd, all wifed up!” He stopped and shook his head. “Who’da thunk it? Good thing there’s par-tay supplies.”
“One place they never look,” Riegle shrugged. “Behind the visor.”
Nobody was going to look twice at four well-dressed white people in a beige sedan. No paranoia about getting off while mobile. Jay asked us to look away while he loosened his belt and fixed somewhere that required lowering his pants. There were public shooters, and there were privates. Jay’s privates were private private.
When we were all nice—well, Nora and I were already nice, but
we got nicer—Jay parked the Saturn in an alley behind a storefront synagogue, near Fairfax, and told Nora how much he liked her. A sentiment I took to be only partly opiate-fueled. “And he does not like a lot of women,” Riegle was quick to add. The upshot of all this let’s-catch-up smack-lubricated bonhomie was that Jay and Riegle offered to get us a marriage license. All we had to do was find a Kinko’s. They’d handle the rest.
“WiFi and a printer,” Jay said. “You don’t even need two hands.”
Nora’s sneer was amiable. “But just in case, you have an extra one, right?”
I thought Jay was going to slap her. His face went purplish-red. Riegle stayed blank. I noticed a pair of Hasidim who had to be melting under their fur hats and fur-collared overcoats in equatorial West Hollywood. They didn’t notice us and kept walking, fully engaged in the Talmudic puzzler of the day.
Nora reached into Jay’s jacket and around his back. She didn’t pull out his hand when she found it. (Taped ingeniously over his tailbone.) Not at first. She just looked him in the eye.
“What are you, some kind of nugger?”
“Helps with the suits,” Jay said. “Everybody likes a veteran.”
“Live every day like it’s your second-to-last,” Riegle added. “Maybe I’ve only got one wing, but I get ’er done! Folks appreciate that.”
I was the only one who didn’t know what a “nugger” was.
“Slang for amputee,” Jay explained. “If you happen to live in a hobo camp.”