Happy Mutant Baby Pills (7 page)

TEN

I Guess This Is What They Call Pleasure

Or maybe . . .
fun
? Is that going too far? It was all such foreign territory. The snappy patter. The out-of-nowhere joy of it! I remembered my championship line from Christian Swingles. (And yes, there's nothing classier than quoting yourself.)
Sometimes we wait for God to make the next move when God is saying, “It's your time to act!”

This was more intense than sex. More unlikely, at any rate. For the second time, after our “strange” exchange, I found myself cracking open a silence born either of implied intimacy or complete disregard.
Maybe
she hated me.
Maybe
she hated me and wanted to fuck me.
Maybe
. . . you get the picture. The scenarios were endless. And therefore meaningless. So I plunged on in. Where was she going to go? We were on a fucking bus.

“So . . . you invented the cards? Reinvented. Gave them a new look. Whatever . . .”

“I took the concept. Made it more now-ish.”

“Now-ish. Right. And some boss-type guy stole your idea?”

“You calling me a liar?”

“What? No! I'm
commiserating.
”

“Exactly. He screwed me. Trust me on that. I got fucked. Nothing I could do.” She sounded angry about it, as if somehow I were in on this travesty, and she resented me for it. “Now I just want to go after him.”

“To get the money?”

“I just told you. I'll never get the money. I just don't want him to be happy. I don't even want him to be unhappy. I want him to be destroyed.”

“What do you want to do to him?”

“I want to fuck with him.”

“How?”

“The worst way you fuck with anybody. You can think about it but you'll never guess.”

I flashed on “creepy-crawly.” The Manson Family's favorite pastime. Imagine it, insane strangers could be clawing at your carpet right now. Licking your sheets. They did all that shit before the corny stuff, like murdering and writing “PIG” in blood on the wall.

There were so many things I could have said, at that moment. Words of caution. Concerned, reasonable words. Because, for some irrational reason, this was someone I cared about. Despite the fact that we'd just met. I hardly knew anything about the woman, but I already knew enough to know there were things I didn't want to know. (In other words, she was a total stranger about whom I was likely delusional; for whom, not to flatter myself, I harbored huge and inappropriate emotional expectations.)

S
o, out of all the things I could have said, I said the thing that, I hoped, could make her like me. I didn't think it out of course. But that's what I was doing. I said, “Do you know anybody in LA?”

She asked, “Why?”

I said, “Maybe we can hang out . . . So, what did you say your name was?”

“Nora,” she said, like she was ashamed of it. “My mother wanted me to be an old lady.”

We didn't speak for a while after that. But I could tell she wanted to say something. Finally she put her cold hand on mine and turned to me.

“You were right, what you thought before.”

“About what?”

I could tell she was used to guys staring at her enormous breasts instead of looking her in the eye. So I made a point of not staring at them. I was, as of that moment, an eye man.

“About the guy trying to murder me,” she said. “You heard right. He's back there, right now. Looking at us. He probably wants to murder you too.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why do you think? Because you're with me.”

ELEVEN

Words Made of Cheese and Blood

Think of all the great murders you've seen in TV and movies. The entertaining death you were raised on. Bullets, bombs, knives, arrows. Janet Leigh in the
Psycho
shower. Sonny Corleone machine-gun twitchy at the toll booth. The shoot-'em-ups. The throw-'em-downs. The great Danny Trejo in
Machete
.

Our entire EIC (Entertainment-Industrial Complex) exists as one giant instructional murder video. And we haven't even talked about the specialty items. The master courses. Gourmet murder shows. . .

I know, I know. I was trying to come up with shit to say to the
CSI
people. I was, niche-wise, the designated “edgy” guy, which meant, in my experience, serving up the comfortable cliché: the most beloved commodity in Hollywood. Safe Edge . . . Don't get me started.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. See, a weird thing happened when we got to LA. We got a little turned around at Union Station. I'd never been there, but I had seen it already, in the first half of a William Holden double bill on AMC. In
Union Station
(Paramount, 1950), the future dead alcoholic portrays a railway cop whom Joyce Willecombe, played by the world's most forgettable actress, tells about the two very bad men on her train. Joyce is the secretary to a rich man named Henry Murchison (Herbert Heyes), whose blind daughter, Lorna, has been kidnapped and held for ransom. The station has been chosen as the site of the drop! (Despair in film noir is always cool.) Why this (albeit slow-moving) classic has not been excavated and remade with Ryan Gosling is beyond me.

Then again, what do I know? I'm no movieland obsesso, just a guy who's killed a lot of time loaded in front of the TV. Now,
pharma
trivia—whole different deal. Ask me anything. Did you know marketers invented irritable bowel syndrome because crippling diarrhea sounded too low-end? (No pun intended.) Or that Lomotil, an early treatment, contained atropine? About which narco-titan William Burroughs waxed eloquent in the fifties as a cure for drug addiction. Though, until his final dose, Big Bill himself ended up in Kansas on methadone—originally called Dolophine, named for Adolph Hitler by kiss-ass Nazi chemists seeking cheap, synthetic morphine for wounded Wehrmact.

I would argue, if I were the type who argued, that pharmaceuticals provide the secret history of Western civilization; and, pharma-copy, my default niche, will someday be recognized as the representational literature of the twenty-first century. Future archaeologists (assuming there's a future) will dig through our detritus and find more pill bottles than books, iPads, or Kindles—life, in America, now being something you treat, not something you live.

What are we now, but our symptoms?

I
once had to meet a connection at an all-night poetry slam at Bergen Community College. I had to sit through his “set” before I could cop. Freestyle. That was edgy, too. I know, because he snapped his fingers between lines. The dealer's name was Bondo and he spoke with a questionable Nuyorican accent. Questionable, because I happen to know he came from Akron. I still remember his highlights.

Is the definition of literature “nothing I actually read”?

SNAP!

Would the Bible still be holy if it had been written in bum dandruff?

DOUBLE SNAP!

Hemingway on Twitter. @BIGPAPA. Roof of mouth itches. Loading shotgun. Like I told Fitzgerald, always keep Mama Twelve-gauge cleaned and oiled!

SNAP-SNAP-BOOM!

The next day I wrote a campaign for Prostex that began:
If Jesus had lived to be sixty, even He would have needed prostate relief.
It went nowhere. But did failure mean you couldn't be proud?

TWELVE

Bad Houdini

Union Station
had a bang-up ending. I won't ruin it for you. Union Station itself (the train and bus station, not the movie) also starred in
Collateral
, (Tom Cruise's greatest role! He's great when he plays dark!) and some odd bits of
Star Trek: First Contact
, which I saw in a motel room in Tulsa when I had to stay out of the Christian Swingles Office and away from my apartment, for reasons that have long since escaped me . . .

I had no luggage, and neither did my new friend and confidante, the runaway greeting card innovator. She nudged me when the man with the shiny glasses got off behind us. “He's going to follow us,” she said. “The man who screwed me owns a lot of companies. He's powerful. He doesn't like trouble. That's why.”

“Why what?”

“Why he sent this freak to assassinate me.”

We stood and watched the man who'd steepled his fingers at me walk our way. He kept walking, right past us. But Nora only sneered. “He knows what he's doing.”

“So do I. I'm going to the little bus riders' room. Try not to get assassinated till I'm done, okay?”

“You think that's funny?”

She went wide-eyed. In all our hours together, I'd seen nothing like this. Since Tulsa she'd been a mask of brunette disdain. Now she was clutching my wrist with two clammy hands. (And they were both hers.)

“Don't go.”

“I have to go,” I said. Then I quoted myself. Well, my “work.” Listen:
Still ashamed to wear a diaper? Imagine the shame if you don't.
(I won't lie, I still love that.) “Seriously,” I said, “I have to, you know
. . . know
.”

“The man is in there . . .” she whispered, and made a steeple with her tiny, nail-picked fingers. I turned in time to see the big man disappear into the men's room. “Please, Lloyd.”

It was the first time she used my name. I grabbed her and kissed her and she whispered, “Do him. For me.”

I quickly let her go. This is the kind of line you hear in movies. The kind that stops you, makes you wonder if it's just a line.

I could tell by the way he was walk-running that Steeple Man really had to go. You don't walk that way unless you've hit the urgent stage. Bad enough to pop sweat. When every step is organ-churning torture. In which case all you care about is removing the ferret teeth from your bladder. Our man could have used some Flomax.

I followed him into the men's room, where the smell of Lysol and piss-cake industrial-strength cleanser was eye-watering. We interrupted an argument between two overweight, older gay guys washing their underwear in the sink. (They might not have been gay; they might have just been friends with a taste for eye shadow.) They barely took notice of us. A man wearing a pimp hat in a Hoveround scooted in a minute after me and
that
got the pair's attention. “Honey,” said the larger queen on the left, “you are
so
Herman Cain. So how does one relieve himself in that thing?” Hoveround didn't answer. Instead he tugged his hat down low, hit his toggle switch, and backed out the door. “
Quel snob!
” the second mirror-gazer snipped.

Meanwhile, the large bespectacled man from the bus gave no indication that he sensed me behind him. I hadn't planned on doing harm. I hadn't planned. I just grabbed his shoulder bag out of his hands as he turned to hoist it on the stall door hook. He was too surprised to react. Or not surprised at all. Up close, his skin shone some strange shade of yellow. I thought black albino. Then, Bhopal. Side effects of the gas leak at Bhopal: thousands dead, children blinded, a generation (this got little press) born a strange shade described in Hindi as
vameesa
, which translates roughly as “glowing egg yolk.” (Did I think this then, or am I thinking it now? But Bhopal was in 1984, which would have made him twenty-eight, and he might have been twice that. Maybe he was just African American and jaundiced.)

I hissed at my target, going all Jason Bourne, trying to work up an anger I didn't really feel. Even my voice got deeper. “Why are you following us?”

I could hear the foot-traffic outside hocking and scraping by. The sink queens giggled. I made out “That is so old school!” Were they talking about us—me and Steeple in the stall? He'd switched glasses. His eyes darted, rabbitlike, behind yellow aviator shades.

“Take my wallet—just go,” he pleaded. “Leave me alone.”

Two envelopes stuck out of the slide-in pocket of his backpack. I grabbed them. (When had I become a backpack snatcher? What was
that
a side effect of? For that matter, what was making my hands itch? Was it the cumulative skank of the bus station toilet stall? Had I touched my face? The average human being touches their face ten times a minute. I remember that from
Contagion
, the virus movie with Matt Damon and Elliott Gould. The Dream Team! Would I be sprouting a face rash?) Why was it Lysol smelled nastier than whatever nastiness it was supposed to sanitize?

Inside the envelopes were greeting cards. The ironic kind. The kind Nora said she created.

“It's my mother,” the man said, voice higher than I'd expected, making no remark about my presence in his stall. “She has the female cancer. Why are you . . . ?” He gave up and pleaded, “Listen, I really have to . . . you know . . . pinch a loaf here.”

He unbuckled and yanked down his pants. Right down to his shiny calves. Why do some men go calf bald? What is that a side effect of? Pants friction? Without thinking about it I pulled out my paper-clipped flash-wad. A fifty in front and back. Nineteen singles in between. (You never know when you have to impress a date.)

“Wait,” he said, sheepish, unleashing a dainty fart, his face disbelieving and horrified. “You ain't gonna watch, are you? Man, I had enough of that in Attica, you know what I'm sayin'?”

I knew what he was sayin'. He was about to go penitentiary-style. He
knew
how
to go penitentiary-style.

While he was speaking I pulled off the paper clip and straightened one end so it stuck out like a pointy muzzle. Then I poked him in the ear. Right in the hole. I saw Charles Bronson ear-prang a Filipino in one of the
Death Wishes
. “You've been following us. Why?”

“Following? Oooof. I don't want to . . . you know, in front of you. I told you, I had enough of that.”

He didn't even curse. Maybe he was Christian. Could that be, a churchgoing hit man? Nora said he must have been sent by the man who—

“Ouch . . . Please!”

He tried to push himself up off the seat and his glasses flew off. I paper-clipped his eye. To do it I had to think of Nora, her little foxlike face when she didn't think I was watching.

I held my arm out, poised, to poke him again.

“One more time, why are you following us? I don't want to hurt you. But I will.” (Jesus, is it possible to talk, when you're about to hurt somebody, without sounding like outtakes from a generic action movie? Is that how we learn how to do this shit?)

“W-why would I follow you?”

I poked him again.

“Agggghhh . . .”

“Wrong answer.”

Haven't you always wanted to say that? Seriously, is that all crime was now in the twenty-first century—getting to star in your own movie?

Now I saw the tears. He went so weak in the face I forgot how big he was. I stood in front of him, I now realized, in the jailhouse love position. We both noticed at the same time. Crotch to kisser. I backed away, as far as I could. Which was about two inches before my back hit the stall door. “Put your feet up, on the seat,” I whispered. “So no one can see.” He did. And then—he couldn't help it. He just—as they say on the Fleet enema box—“evacuated.” (In my free time I used to study the competition.)

I'm going to stop now.

There are smells we naturally, maybe instinctively, spare each other.

So just remember one of them.

Aaaagghh.

(Maybe that is the definition of civilization: not shitting in each other's faces.) “I swear,” he said, between birth-grunts. “I am not following you. I don't even know you. Now please. May I . . . This is humiliating.”

“You just happen to have her cards?”

I heard scuffling outside. The last thing I needed was to be Larry Craiged. Bus station men's room sex makes airport men's room sex seem suave. And I wasn't even a senator.

He acted confused. “Whose cards?”

I pulled out the proof and waved it around. He snatched it and opened it, putting a finger to the bottom under
Birthdays are for forgetting
.

“This is for my mother. She's old, but she's sharp. Still has a sense of humor.” He tried to talk normally, but his ear was bleeding and he kept his hand pressed over his eye. I had to give him points for maintaining while he talked. Even with his strangely high voice. “What are you doing, son? I
bought
these. Look, here's another one, for my sister.”

He started to reach for the bag and I parried with the clip again. It had a clump of bloody wax stuck to the end. I poked him a little one. A lobe-shot.

“Shit. You doing it again!”

He started to pull his wallet out—slow—like a shirtless perp on
Cops
.
Look, it ain't a gun, officer!
(And yeah, I know a guy who writes Reality TV dialogue. Don't kid yourself.) With one hand my stall partner managed to open his wallet and slide out a picture of a woman who might have been him in a bad wig, their faces were that similar. Except she was eightyish, massively sucked up, and smoking a cigarette in a holder with the IV drip in her arm. “That's Moms, her first chemo,” he said, and chuckled sadly. “Had to slip that little nurse thirty bucks to take a break so Ma could light up.”

“Loved her Luckies, huh?”

I grabbed the wallet and checked out his driver's license, visible behind a little plastic wallet window. “Sargent Haddock of Soup City, Georgia.”

“That's me.”

“Really? Soup City? This has to be a phony. You paid good money for a fake ID and they gave you Soup City?”

“My name really is Sargent.”

“What?”

It was as if none of my words had receptors in his head. “My name is Sargent Haddock.”

“Just put the fucking picture back,” I said.

I could hear Nora's voice in my head.
He's here to kill me.
It didn't seem like it. He didn't seem like the type. But—

Aaaghh. Ooomph. His voice got even higher. “Aw jeez, son.”

He tore off some bus station toilet paper—no doubt knowing I'd look away. I waited a suitable time. I didn't want to see any . . . business. Downstairs. I know, I know, I've written everything from dildo ads to
Hustler
copy, but some things, like I said before, how to put this?
. . . I have boundaries now, Oprah!
Everybody's got their limits. I stood there, staring at his shiny tassel loafers (oxblood), not raising my eyes until he spoke. Someone had scratched “DBL NUGGT” at the bottom of the metal stall separator.

“Okay, done,” he said sheepishly, wiping himself. When our eyes met again he said, “Do you even know that young girl?” There was some decent, southern softness in his voice. He sounded authentically shocked. I had no answer and just wanted to go.

I saw myself from above, like you read about in near-death accounts. Or on Ketamine. Looking down, I saw a guy facing another guy in a stall. Reality was sinking in as the thrill of helping a girl I might get to love receded.

The stink was stripping the stars from my eyes.

What he said took a while to sink in. Then it steamed me.

“What do you mean, do I know her?” I clip-feinted at his eye and he juked. “Do
you
know her? Or is it like on TV? You get a photo and location and just show up to blank them?”

“Say what?”

“I guess that's part of it, right. Not admitting you're a hit man.”

“Son, you—

“Would you fucking flush?” To stay my gorge, I thought of the side effects of Sumetra, a “critical foot-fungus fighter.” That was another triumph—giving athlete's foot gravitas. Making it “critical.” Some schmuck scratches his toes and he feels like an executive. It's a
critical situation
. Too bad the price of pill-killing the itch was “possible thrush, ringing in the ears, occasional dry eyes, and an inability to tear.” There it is. You don't need to scratch, but you can't weep anymore, either. Life's a trade-off.

“Boy? Boy! You're talking to yourself.”

I came back from my babbling reverie and there was Sargent the Steeple Man, trying to squidge his pants on (without getting off of the seat). It was like bad Houdini.