by Jerry Stahl
Nora just smiled.
It took me a while to get back into Christian con man humor. But Nora kept right up.
Jay and Riegle claimed they were here, in LA, to make some kind of deal. A reality show. Based on Swingles. My alma mater. “Simple concept,” Riegle told me. “We follow six clients: three men, three women. From filling out the form online, to face-to-face chat, to first date, to picking a restaurant, to—”
“Sodomy,” Jay intoned, going full silver-tongue. “For the righteous few.”
THIRTY-TWO
Agenesis
Hollywood Kinko’s packed its own kind of inky desperation. “Half the people here are running scams,” Riegle told us, under his breath. “The ones who aren’t are printing band flyers. Or programs for one-man shows.”
Jay went right into it. “Listen, people, I had a really dysfunctional family . . .”
Meanwhile Nora stooped beside each machine and breathed. “Positive ions,” Riegle said when he saw her doing it. “Weird high.”
Nora gave him a little you-have-no-idea-who-you’re-dealing-with smile. “You want a high,” she told him, “get down on the carpet, take a breath. There’s chemicals in those fibers that give babies glow-in-the-dark transgender genitalia. Tiny hermaphrodite night-lights.”
I waited for her to march out the good news—she was going to be a mom. I wondered if she’d also mention the target she’d painted on her womb. I’m not just having a baby, I’m harvesting birth defects for my mutant chemical-bred capitalism love-child. But Jay had his own surprise. Before he told us, he checked out a tall Asian man with a slight stoop browsing inspirational business books, then lowered his voice. “I got you guys a present.” Every three feet there was another poster of Larry the Cable Guy, leering like an inbred pedophile over his trademark slogan: GET ’ER DONE. It made me miss the Hang in there, baby! cat.
Still looking around, Jay slipped Nora a copy of Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World—the same tome the Asian man was browsing—except this copy had an envelope sticking out of it.
“You’re giving me this book?”
“Jesus was a closer,” Riegle said, then rolled his eyes like a fourteen-year-old girl.
“Weird tick in a straight middle-aged guy, huh?” Jay whispered, sotto voce, when he noticed me noticing. (It was true; I didn’t remember Riegle eye-rolling move back in Tulsa.) “Our friend’s gone a little Clarabelle.”
Riegle ignored him. “The book you have to pay for. We’re giving you the envelope inside it.”
The Asian man was joined by an even taller older woman with striking white hair, dressed all in black, down to shiny patent leather heels. Possibly his mother. Or an elderly dominatrix. She appeared to be buying inspirational books for him. He had to be forty. The world felt so full of unspoken mystery, I wanted to lie down, but that was probably just my blood sugar. Or the brown sugar Riegle and Jay’s dope was cut with. I could taste it in my mouth after we geezed. It was like shooting up a Cinnabon. At least shooting up sugar didn’t give you cavities. It’s all about the silver lining.
I wanted to know more about the reality show. If they’d hired writers yet. Reality shows needed a lot of scripting. If the subject was Christian Swingles, who better than a former Christian Swingler?
Riegle feigned shock. Though mercifully, he eschewed the pre-pube eye-rolling move. “Why, I believe this man is asking for a job!”
“You’ve been disgraced,” Jay said. “We all did some soul-searching, after your pharmacy trouble. You’d have to change your name.”
The idea seemed to make Riegle happy. “We can do that. State papers are nothing. What would you say to Chad? Or maybe Melvin.”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel Chaddy or Melvinish.”
“That’s the idea, son. Keep them guessing. Anyway, Pastor Bobb won’t be any the wiser unless he comes to visit, and he doesn’t travel much now.”
“Why not?”
“Ankle bracelet. Disagreement with the authorities.”
“Should I ask?”
“Oldest beef in the book. Pastor B thought the child was over seventeen.”
“He also thought said child was a boy,” Jay added happily.
“Sounds like somebody set him up.”
“Now why would anybody do that?”
Riegle’s girly eye-rolling returned. By now I was getting used to it. (God knows what new tics I might have acquired since last we met.) “Sometimes you’re a little slow, aren’t you, buddy?”
“I’m an addict. I’m professionally impaired. So how’s your wife? Any better?”
“She passed.” For a second, he reverted to the distant, hangdog manner I’d remembered from our time together on the job. “The bone cancer. Tumors ate her for breakfast. Started with her jaw.”
“Was she taking Vidaza?” Nora chimed in.
After this I half-expected her to ask if there were any leftovers in the medicine cabinet. Riegle studied her.
“My mother had cancer,” Nora explained, before he could ask. I wondered, again, if she was going to share the news about our little science project. Deliver her fetal manifesto. Surprisingly, or not, she didn’t.
Riegle ran a pink tongue over his upper lip and went on with his story. “We had a neighbor girl, Suze, come in and help out. Turns out she was pregnant. She was feeding Marie—my better half—the pills when I was at work and she was too weak to unscrew the bottle. Suze even gave her baths. Cleaned her.”
I knew where this was going. But Nora couldn’t wait to get there. “How’s her baby?”
“That poor squib. Its legs alone . . .” Riegle stopped and sighed. He stared at a poster of a middle-aged white man in a short-pants Kinko’s uniform. Let Kinko’s rock YOUR website! Then stared back at me again. “Suze was Pentecostal. Foursquare Gospel Republican. Thought prenatal care was satanic. When I finally read the side effects on her cancer meds, my stomach sunk. I didn’t know whether to tell the girl or not. Dreaded it. I thought she’d cry, or come at me. But I had to let her know.”
“Know what?” Nora was enthralled. Though I had a feeling she already knew the answer.
“Know that just touching those meds could taint her baby’s DNA. Malform the little thing. Make her special needs. But guess what? Suze was calm as toast when I told her. She just smiled. Got all peaceful and inside her self. “God’s will be done.” That’s what she said. And sure enough . . . He sighed.
“Sure enough what?” I said.
“Sure enough, you couldn’t really call the legs on that unfortunate little fella legs. They were more like cocktail shrimps, sort of veined and pinkish, curled under. One had a shell on the end. You ever see Turtle Boy? Kind of like that.”
“Agenesis.” Nora pronounced the word like it was common as ketchup. “Fetal limb anomalies.” I could see she was excited. One more defect to hang on the mutant baby tree.
(And yes, I know how callous this sounds. All I can say, in my defense, is that, while I knew, logically, that this baby was on the way, that it was real, that it was, as they say, in the mail—it just never felt that way. The notion of an actual baby remained abstract. The pregnancy, on the other hand, was vivid.)
Jay came back over with a small stack of stapled documents. “Could have gotten her Blue Cross. Right, Riegle?”
“Could have, if her brother and father weren’t law enforcement.”
“Wow,” I said, “I don’t remember you two being such cyber-pirates.”
“When the wife went into hospice, it was just me and the computer.”
That’s when I remembered his daughter. Her palsy. He must have seen the hesitation in my eyes. Wanting to ask, but not to know. “She’s gone too,” he said, in a kindly way, as if trying to spare me any awkwardness. He said the words, then began staring off. I could tell he wasn’t at Kinko’s anymore. His body might have been si
tting at the rental PC nook. But he was back in the dark days, with his dying wife. He took a slow deep breath, as if smelling the sickroom again. In five minutes he’d said more about his family than he had the entire time we’d worked in Tulsa.
Riegle was just one of those guys. Old-school.
THIRTY-THREE
IHOP Men
“You’ve got some tricky friends,” Nora said, when we were back home, setting up our bedroom appliances for the night.
After the business at Kinko’s, the four of us made plans to meet up for a pancake dinner. Both Jay and Riegle were IHOP men. The envelope Jay gave us was stuffed with gift cards: a bunch from Pep Boys, Walgreens, American Apparel, Trader Joe’s, even two from urgent care facilities, for $500 apiece, which impressed Nora to no end.
“A gift certificate to the emergency room. Awesome.”
Once Nora was safely under my WGA insurance umbrella, she could get an MRI a day, sometimes three, and plenty of X-rays. She didn’t want diagnoses; she craved radiation. And doctors were only too happy (the ones who didn’t throw her out of their offices). Between appointments there were tanning salons. And psychiatrists. “If I take more antidepressants will I get more antidepressed?” She wanted to lay in what she could before she started to show.
She loved to share her research: “Paxil babies had holes in their hearts. It was almost poetic.”
At home, after a day in Santa Clarita discussing murder by neo-Nazi twin experiments, including involuntary scrotal implants (Is that a turtle in your bag or are you glad to see me?) by sexual misadventure while wearing a Winnie the Pooh suit (at a plushy and furry convention), or fatally sabotaging a pair of “Smother me, Elmo” panties . . . our ongoing natal experiment began to seem—how else can I put it?—reasonable. I knew enough about perversion to milk it. But Nora! Nora! A whole other side of her emerged as she prepared to become a mother. Even a chemically challenged one.
In the beginning, the idea of deliberately ruining a child, sight unseen, baby unborn, made my stomach churn. But more and more, the whole thing began to make sense. And more than that, it began to seem meaningful, necessary!
For a Side-Effects Man, this was heady stuff. Inhuman as it may sound. (Though, to see it as Nora saw it, what she and I were doing would save lives, shock the world into some kind of sensibility.) Normally—and this was part of the P.R. I was working on—normally, the drug’s efficiency was the point and the side effects the unavoidable price you paid for it. Now, my friends, the side effects are the point!
There was more, about how she obviously wasn’t taking testerone for increased muscle mass or to stay virile after seventy. She was taking them to demonstrate, for all the mothers and fathers out there, the genital havoc these products might wreak on the offspring of any female unfortunate enough to come in contact with them. In other words, for her, the side effects weren’t on the side. They were the main dish. Pharmaceutical-wise, you might say, the journey was the destination. (On second thought, I’d probably cut that line.)
Whenever we got high, she’d give me the details all over again.
Regardless of how conflicted and uncomfortable I was about aiding and abetting a mother-to-be’s drug use, by now she’d already done half the sprays and solvents in the household cleaning aisle, along with enough of the Physicians’ Desk Reference to fill the trunk of a Buick, and God knows what else, so there was no point being squeamish.
To hear her tell it, which she did, like I say, every time we got loaded, there would be cameras standing by to document the birth, media representatives of every stripe, all on hand to record the epic little monstrosity she was going to deliver as part protest, part living guerilla theater and performance art, part beyond-anything-the-world-has-ever-conceived fuck Amerika anticorporate statement.
Designed—this is Nora, in imaginary press release mode—to wake the country up to the dangers which we breathe, absorb, consume, and ultimately pay for with our money, our lives, and the well-being of our unborn children.
I’m not making a statement, I’m making a baby. (That was my kicker.)
Baby Mutando would spring forth as the logical outcome of glandular capitalism. Except the system isn’t amok at all: It’s all perfectly controlled. Pollution, illness, defects, deformity, and despair are not the accidental fallout of corporate America, they are the deliberate product.
Sound bites are us.
If she was high enough, we’d rehearse.
THIRTY-FOUR
We Only Want What God Wants
Yes!
Nora was obsessed with the ribbon of juvenile pituitary adenomas that lay across the southwest like a Miss America sash.
It amazed me, after a while, how one puff of tar off a sheet of tinfoil could send her to Rachel Maddow Town. One measly shot transformed her into the anticorporate, household-toxins-centric Angela Davis of her generation. Except that Angela Davis was (justly) famous and celebrated. And nobody (at least so far) had heard of Nora but me.
Once Nora got insurance and began seeing doctors for a living, we decided to mix shooting with smoking. Chasing the proverbial dragon left her just as voluble as fixing. Our fave new spot to get off was medical building parking lots. A rolled-up straw in her mouth forced her to pensive silence. She’d fire the Bic, run it under the tinfoil, and watch the tar run like a black teardrop while she filled her lungs. Begin talking as she emptied them.
“Every disease”—SMOKE IN—“deserves a treatment”—SMOKE OUT—“and every treatment deserves a profit. I mean, there’s the military-industrial complex, right? Arms makers”—SMOKE IN—“collude with governments to start wars so they can”—SMOKE OUT—“sell arms. Same with Halliburton and”—SMOKE IN—“Blackwater or Xe or Academi or whatever the fuck it’s called now. Start another war”—SMOKE OUT—“charge for the mercenaries.”—SMOKE IN—“Why should the medical-industrial complex be any different? Generate a disease, mop up on treatment and pharmaceuticals. Like Monsanto. Developing Roundup to protect soybeans from pests. Then developing Roundup-resistant strains of soybeans. Then coming out with a stronger, faster Roundup—which everyone who grows soy now absolutely needs—to deal with that. Fucking”—SMOKE OUT—“capitalism. Create a need, then sell the solution. Then create a bigger need, then jack up the cost of dying from it. Kiss me!” SMOKE IN.
The impressive thing was how she could turn it on and off. With me, Nora was who she was. All ten versions. But she could walk into a waiting room full of moms in Burbank and fit right in. We found a Catholic hospital where they didn’t do the testing we’d had done at Cedars-Sinai. Nora had major chameleon skills. “We only want what God wants,” she told the nun who took our forms. Sister Mary Carrie. (Really.) Nora asked if they got to pick their own nun names. She said she’d have picked the same one. Then drifted lightly off.
“We have to go in now, darling. When we’re done with Dr. Nelson we’ve got Dr. Cornfeld.”
“Yes, Lloydy.”
Lloydy? This was as happy as I’d ever seen her. Unless the sap was an act, pregnancy agreed with her. I don’t think it was just the thought that she was carrying a deformed little corporate Antichrist. I think she enjoyed it.
“One more hit.”
Big inhale. Then she’s off again.
“The thing is”—SMOKE IN—“in case there’s any disease we don’t cause with our own consumption, or get from eating and drinking, or from using all the shit we buy that we think we can’t live without, the government is happy to help out. I’m talking chemtrails.”—SMOKE OUT. (I never saw anybody who could hold smoke in her lungs as long as Nora. She said it was from hiding from her father in the bubble bath when she was little. By the time she was ten she was a regular little Criss Angel.) SMOKE IN—“You can see them up there, blasting from jets. Spraying barium and aluminum salts, polymer fibers, thorium, and silicon carbide out of their ass into the atmosphere. Into our lungs, our skin. Government-made
, to make living Americans sick and unborn Americans defective.”
COUGH, COUGH.
Kiss.
“I know what you’re thinking, Lloyd.”
“What?”
“How can I invest in some of THAT?”
Nora humor! And more to come: “From each according to their disabilities, to each according to their disease.”
Nora got more bombastic, the bigger (and more multiply polluted) she got. She was morphing into an industrial-strength incarnation of herself. Doing insane combinations, like bath salts and oxys—Florida speedballs. It was all very Geek Love. But I admit, the bath salts scared me, after the Miami face-eating thing. (It wasn’t that I loved my face. I just have a fear of teeth.) This jolted me out of baby obsession. Instead I stayed up all night worried she might go love-cannibal. But all she did was sweat, then freeze; her incisors started chattering, then she dropped to the floor, where I realized it wasn’t chattering teeth. She was convulsing. Going full floppy-fish. I used to get that when I over-smoked crack. One minute you’re rushing, enjoying your heart attack, the next you’re bouncing on the bathroom floor, trying to reach the heroin-streaked tinfoil on the sink, flick the lighter.
Hold the tinfoil tube in your mouth, hold lighter steady. SMOKE IN. Don’t die. SMOKE OUT. Breathe.
Is . . . that . . . a . . . crumb in a corner?
Euphoria is the best side effect in the world. You’re still you. But you’re happy about it. Comfortable in your own clammy skin.
After I blew tar in her mouth, I waited till she calmed down to take her temperature. All her thermometers were rectal. (First time at the new girlfriend’s place? Take a thermo tour!) When I asked Nora about it—never mind the snooping—she was blithe as Audrey Hepburn. If Audrey had had rectal fever issues but was totally okay about it. “But darling, why shouldn’t everything be fun?”)