Happy Mutant Baby Pills (2 page)

Well, that's it. Once the Dino flashback kicks in, I'm cooked. Forget the job interview. I'm like Biff in
Death of a Salesman
, grabbing a fountain pen and running out of the office. Except I run straight to the bathroom and pull a syringe from my boot. Minutes later, before the needle is out AHHHH YESS-S-S-S-S-S-S, Thank you, Jesus!. The mommy-tits-amore image furs and softens at the edges. Until—MMMMM, lemme just dab off this little kiss of blood—what began as horror morphs into suffused light, savaged memory softened by euphoria into benevolence, into some slightly disquieting, distant image . . . Mom is no longer doing a dirty can-can in the living room, entertaining a twitchy peeper in government issue . . . Now—I love you, Ma, I really love you!—now her legs simply float up and down in downy silence. My mind has been tucked into bed. A loving hand brushes my troubled little brow . . . Heroin's the cool-fingered loving Mommy I never had. But everything's all right now . . . My memory's parked in the very last row of a flickering drive-in, with fog rolling in over all the cars up front. I know what's on the screen, and I know it's bad—is that a knife going into Janet Leigh? But—it . . . just . . . does . . . not . . . matter. It's still nice. Really nice. (Provided, that is, I don't pass out in the men's room, they don't end up calling paramedics, and I don't wake up chained to the hospital bed. Again. In California they can arrest you for tracks. Those fascists!)

And now—oh, God, no! No! Here comes another memory. STOP, PLEASE! Why does my own brain hate me? I'm picking my son up at preschool, and I'm early, and I've just copped, so I go in the boys' room. And—NO NO NO
NO
!—I come to—you never wake up on heroin, you just come to—to screams of “Daddy, what's wrong?” See my little boy in his SpongeBob SquarePants hat, his mouth a giant O. He's screaming, screaming, and—what's this?—my ratty jeans are already at my ankles and there's a needle in my arm and my boy's teachers and the principal of the preschool are hovering over me like a circle of disapproving angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and—

And I hear myself, with my child looking on, like it's some kind of aw-shucks normal thing, saying, “Hey, could you guys just let me, y'know . . . just give me a second here?” And, in front of all of them, in front of my sweet, innocent, quivering-chinned son, I push down that plunger. And suddenly, everything's fine. Everything's awful, but everything's fine . . . My little boy's horrified coffee-brown eyes glisten with tears. Good-bye, little Mickey, good-bye . . . My wife will get a call from family services. I'll be leaving now. Hands behind my back. In cuffs. All I remember is the officer's name: Branderby. His sausage-and-pepper breath. I manage a little wave to Mickey, who gives me a private little wave back. In spite of everything. I'm still his daddy. For years afterward, I have to get high just to think about what I did to get high. But it's okay. Really.

It's.

Fine.

Heroin. Because once you shed your dignity, everything's a little easier.

W
here was I? (And yes, maybe the dope did diminish my capacity for linear thinking. So what? Let's see you count backward from yesterday to What-the-fuck-happened?) When my boss moved to pharmaceuticals from “marital aids,” I followed. (He insisted on the old-school term his father used: marital aids. Instead of the more contempo “sex toys.”) We'd been taken over by a conglomerate. I cut my teeth on Doc Johnson double dildos (“For ass-to-ass action like you've never dreamed of!”) and Ben Wa balls (“Ladies, no one has to know!”). Then it was up (or down) the ladder to men's magazines, romance mags, even a couple of
Cat Fancy
imitators. Starting in back-of-the-book “one-inchers” for everything from Mighty Man trusses to Kitty Mittens to X-Ray Specs (a big-seller for more than fifty years). When I tried the specs and—naturally—they didn't work, my boss said, with no irony whatsoever, “We're selling a dream, Lloyd. Did you go to Catholic school?”

“Metho-Heeb,” I told him.

“What's that, kid?”

“Half-Jewish, half-Methodist, and my mom did a lot of speed.”

“Well, lucky you,” he said. “Me, I was schooled by nuns. But when I put on those X-ray specs, I swear, I could see Sister Mary Theresa's fong-hair.”

W
hile cheesy, this is a serious, high-stakes business. To stay on top of the competition, you have to know what's out there. Like, just now, on
The Dylan Ratigan Show
—What great hair! Like a rockabilly gym teacher . . . too bad he quit—I caught this commercial:
Life with Crohn's disease is a daily game of What if . . . ? What if I can't make it to—
Here the audio fades and there's a picture of a pretty middle-aged brunette looking anxiously across a tony restaurant at a ladies' room door . . . The subtext: if you don't take this, you are going to paint your panties.

Listen. I spent a lot of time watching daytime commercials. I had to. (Billie Holiday said she knew she was strung out when she started watching television. And she didn't even talk about daytime!) Back when it was still on, I'd try to sit through
Live with Regis and Kelly
without a bang of chiba. Knock yourself out, Jimmy-Jane. I couldn't make it past Regis's rouge without a second shot. At this point he looked like somebody who'd try and touch your child on a bus to New Jersey.

Is it any accident that so much contempo TV ad content concerns . . . accidents? This is the prevailing mood. Look at the economy. Things are so bad you don't need to have Crohn's disease to lose control. But worse than pants-shitting is public pants-shitting. Americans like to think of themselves as mud-holders. You don't see the Greatest Generation diapering up, do you? (Not until recently, anyway.)

Junkies may be obsessed with bathrooms, but America's got them beat. So many cable-advertised products involve human waste that you imagine the audience sitting at home eating no-fat potato chips on a pile of their own excretions.
Ad Week
put it on its cover: “American Business Is in the Toilet.”

But the real big gun in the BFS (Bodily Function Sweepstakes) is Depends. Go ahead and laugh. These guys are genius. Why? I'll tell you. They know how to make the Bad Thing okay. (Just like heroin!) Listen:
Incontinence doesn't have to limit you. It all starts with finding the right fit and protection. The fact is, you can manage it so you can feel like yourself again.
(Oddly, I used to lose bowel control after I copped. I'd get so excited, it just happened. So I'm no stranger to “manpers,” as we say in the industry. They could ask me for a testimonial. Though, in all honesty, if it were my campaign I'd have gone with something more macho. Something, call me crazy, patriotic.

Depends. Because this is America, damn it!

Then again, maybe the macho thing is wrong. Maybe—I'm just spitballing here—maybe you make it more of a convenience thing. Or—wait, wait!—more Morning in America-ish. More Reagan-y.

Take two:
America, we know you're busy. And you don't always have time to pull over and find somewhere convenient to do your business. With new Depends, you can go where you are—and keep on going. DEPENDS—because you've earned it.
Subtext, of course: We're Americans! We can shit wherever we want!)

Ironically, because of my own decade and a half imbibing kiestered Mexican tar, I got some kind of heinous, indestructible parasite. Souvenir of Los Angeles smackdom. For a while I had a copywriting job in downtown LA, five minutes from MacArthur Park, where twelve-year-old 18th Street bangers kept the stuff in balloons in their mouths. You'd give them cash, then put the balloons in your mouth. If you put them in your pockets, the UCs would roll up and arrest you before the spit was dry. Keeping it in your mouth was safer. Unhygienic (parasites!), but on the plus side, visit any LA junkie pad, and there was always something carnivale about the little pieces of red and blue, green and yellow balloons all over the place. Like somebody'd thrown a child's birthday party in hell and never cleaned up.

But now—call it Narco-Karma —I have to give myself coffee enemas every day. Part of the “protocol” my homeopath, Bobbi, herself in recovery, has put me on for the parasite situation. Bobbi also does my colonics . . . She likes calypso music, which I find a little unsettling. Though Robert Mitchum singing “Coconut Water” while I'm buns up and tubed is the least of my issues. Bob knew his calypso. (Check out
Calypso—Is Like So!
liner notes by Nick Tosches.)

Like I say, part of my job is recon. And I'm not going to lie, just thinking about that killer Crohn's copy makes me a little jealous. The subject, after all, was shame. What does some pharma-hired disease jockey know about shame? Did he have my mother? Scooping his stainy underpants out of the hamper and waggling them in his face, screaming she was going to hang them on the line for all his friends to see? (No, that's not why I do heroin. Or why I ended up in side effects. Whatever doesn't kill us just makes us us.)

For one semester I attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I studied advertising with Joe Sacco, whose legendary “Stronger Than Dirt” campaign, arguably, sheathed a proto-Aryan superiority sensibility under the genial façade of Arthurian legend. (For you youngsters, the ad featured a white knight riding into a dirty kitchen on a white steed.) White Power might as well have been embossed on the filth-fighter's T-shirt. See—excuse me while I scratch my nose—there's a connection, in White American subconscious, between Aryan superiority and cleanliness. “Clean genes,” as Himmler used to say. Tune into MSNBC's
Lockup
some weekend, when the network trades in the faux-progressive programming for prison porn. Half the shot-callers in Quentin look like Mr. Clean: shaved head and muscles that could really hold a race-traitor down. Lots of dope in prison. But—big surprise—the fave sponsors of
Lockup
viewers, to judge by the ads, are ExtenZe (penis size), UroMed (urinary infection), our old friend Depends (bowel control), and Flomax (frequent urination). The Founding Fathers would be proud. Once they hosed off.

Y
ou think junkies don't have a conscience? All the snappy patter I've cranked out, and you know what made me really feel bad? Feel the worst? Gold coin copy. People are so dumb that when they buy gold—a hedge against the collapse of world markets!—they think it matters if it comes in a commemorative coin. A genuine re-creation of an authentic 18-something-something mint issue Civil War coin with our nation's greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, on one side, and the Union flag on the other. Worth 50 “dollar gold.” Yours for only $9.99. The “dollar gold” was my idea. I don't even know why. I just knew it sounded more important than “dollars.” Later, in the running text under the screen (known as flash text in the biz), I misspelled gold as “genuine multi-karat pure god.” I think this was my best move. Not that I can take credit. Just one of those serendipitous bonbons you get when you type on heroin. In an effort not to fall off my chair, I'd type with one eye closed, as if I were trying to aim my fingers the way I aimed my car, squinting one-eyed over the wheel to stay between the white lines when the world went tilty.

S
o now now now now now now what do I do? I mean—shut up, okay?—I did leave out a key detail. Like, how it all ended?

Okay. Let me come clean. (So to speak.) I got caught shooting up on the job. Dropped my syringe and it rolled leeward into the stall beside me, where my archrival, Miles Dreek (can a name get more Dickensian?), found it. And, long story short, ratted me out. I couldn't even plead diabetes, because the rig was full of blood, and everybody's seen enough bad junkie movies to know how the syringe fills up with blood. (Generally, on film, in roseate slo-mo, dawn-of-the-galaxy exploding-nebulae-adjacent scarlet, which—come on, buddy—does not happen when Gramps drops trou and Grandma slaps his leathery butt cheek and sticks in the insulin.) That was my first experience of needles: Grandma spanking Grandpa and jabbing the rig in. Grandpa had it down. The second his wife of sixty-seven years geezed him, he'd pop a butterscotch Life Saver and crunch. Hard candy! Sugar and insulin at the same time. A diabetic speedball. These are my people!

But wait—I was just getting busted. At work. (People think only alcohol can give you blackouts. But heroin? Guess what, Lou Reed Jr., sometimes I think I'm still in one . . .)

I remember, right before the needle-dropping incident, I was just sitting there, on the toilet, with a spike in my arm, Lenny Bruce–style. Suddenly I jerked awake, feeling like one of those warehouse-raised chickens, the kind photographed by secret camera in
Food, Inc.
on some infernal industrial farm, feet grafted to the cage, shitting on the chicken below as the chicken above shits on it.

You don't think they should give chickens heroin? Don't think they deserve it? Well, call me visionary, but if they're already pumping the poultry full of antibiotics and breast-building hormones (rendering, they say, half the chicken-eating male population of America estrogen-heavy, sterile, and sporadically man-papped), then why not lace the white meat with hard narcotics? Chicken McJunkets! Whatever. Give me one night and three dime bags and I'll Don Draper a better name . . . Or I would, if I had a place to live. Right now I have enough to stay at this hotel, the Grandee (an SRO) for a couple more weeks. After that I don't know . . . The guy behind the cage in the lobby looks liver yellow. Doesn't talk much. But never mind, never mind . . . Me being here has nothing to do with heroin. Just bad luck. But weren't we talking about heroin chicken? Believe me, plenty of clean-living junkies would hit the drive-through—provided Mickey D could take those damn other drugs out of his birds. Hormones, antibiotics, beak-mite repellent . . . No thanks! That stuff could kill you.