Happy Mutant Baby Pills (6 page)

Book Two

Women have a feeling that since they didn't make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them.

DIANE JOHNSON

EIGHT

You're So Pretty When You Breathe Through Your Mouth

I did not know romance was in the air when I stepped aboard. But the more I looked at her, mouth-breathing, under a dark blue babushka pulled tight over thick black hair that plainly didn't want to stay in there, the more . . . I don't know how to put it, the more her face became beautiful underneath the wrapping. (Even though, feet to the fire, I couldn't say that I'd really seen it.) Became everything I wanted before I even knew I wanted it. Choose your cliché.

I couldn't even tell you why, maybe it was FMD—Film Noir Disease— but I pegged her for a woman on the lam. I didn't even know if people still said “on the lam.” But she had that about her, whatever you call it. Running away. On a trip that wasn't planned. Maybe not entirely unexpected—but not planned.

There was something remarkable about her, but I couldn't place it at first. Then I realized—she was sucking her thumb. It was almost shocking. I thought of Carroll Baker in
Baby Doll
. Sleeping in a crib. Wrongly alluring in infantile sex-wear. Sweaty Eli Wallach having his way with her. Or did I dream the sex-wear and crib stuff? As if she saw me staring, she tugged her thumb out from between her teeth. This was when I realized she hadn't been sleeping, she'd been reading. Face pressed into the bus window, over a paperback I couldn't make out. The cover was dark. Then I saw that it wasn't a book-book. It was a bound notebook. Not one of those moleskins, which everybody bought because they thought it turned them into Hemingway. But a generic brand. Its cover some kind of shiny fake. But big enough for her hand to disappear inside. So she could write without her seatmate knowing either what she was writing or that she was writing at all. My future friend did not acknowledge me, so I (quietly) rifled her bag. I wondered if she was “journaling.” But she didn't look like somebody who'd use that word. Unless she was mocking it.

The first card had a picture of a respectable suburban lady nailed to a crucifix on the front. Inside was
GET OFF THE CROSS, WE NEED THE WOOD.
Happy Mother's Day!
It was unsigned.

There were more like that. Theme cards. All unsigned. A bulldog on the end of a chain, snarling up at a mailman, said
BOUNDARIES.
Try some, just as an experiment . . .
Another showed a meadow of wildflowers, in bloom, tinted blue. A barbed-wire fence cuts through the middle of the flowers.
You call it a restraining order. I call it tough love
. The last, another showstopper, had nothing on the cover but Marge Simpson, arms outspread.
You can't get rid of the button-pushers, but you can get rid of the buttons!

It must have been my chortling—though I'm not usually a chortler—that made her whip around. We were the only two, in the highway darkness of the bus, who had our overhead on. “The fuck you doing?” she said. I saw her entire face full-on for the first time and thought the word “vulpine,” though I have never used it before or since. Little black-bagged fox eyes burned out through her black bangs like those of a wary prisoner peeking through the bars of a cell.

“Are these all blank?” I asked her.

She snatched the cards out of my hand without answering.

I didn't react. “No judgment, I'm just saying. You must know a lot of people with issues.”

She blew the bangs out of her eyes and kicked her legs off the seat and onto the floor with what was either energy or violence. (I guessed you'd have to get to know her to find out which was which.) The soles of her boots made a sticky sound when she picked them up again after five seconds and folded herself back onto her seat. A smell came off her like carnival mustard, perspired-in leather, and dill. The scent was dark, possibly tainted. And did something to my heart the minute I breathed it, made me have to gasp for two breaths in a row, gave me a jolt in my testes that felt like love.

I hovered, like some kind of zoner perv. When she finally looked up, her cracked-glass green eyes and giant pupils showed themselves then disappeared again, back to her notebook. Our eyes held long enough for me to study the bags beneath hers. Dark blue Samsonites, from debauchery or pain or just staying up late, like some Paris existentialist sandwiching Sartre and Camus in the forties. Of course, I was done. That was it. Those bags were like matching brands that made love and pity impossible to separate. I was not usually a hallucinator. But for one bright flash, headlights flooded the window and I made out words under each of her eyes.
FUCKED UP
under one,
COME ON IN
under the other. (A counselor once told me I was addicted to women who needed help. He sent me to SLAA. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Where addicts relapsed with other addicts in meetings. (A cringe across a crowded room . . .) Where there were women who needed help in ways I had never conceived of. I'd wandered in to experience the miracle of recovery, the terrible joy of “slipping,” and the liberation that comes right after both. Until you surrender, if you're lucky, and you remember who's holding the wheel. Let go, let God.)

Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us!

A jingle, for some reason, that reminded me of my all-time favorite pharma-slogan:
At Parker-Stephenson, we make drugs for people who need them.

I
had an empathic moment, as I settled in beside her, where I felt my bus-mate's internal struggle. Could sense her assessing.
He's an asshole, but he's kind of an interesting asshole.
Outside, we passed a neon Sleepy Bear in a nightcap, sleepwalking with his arms stretched out before him. The legendary Travelodge logo. MOTEL—18 MILES.

“I don't send these,” she continued, possibly deciding it was less awkward speaking to me than ignoring me the entire ride.

“You don't send them. I get it. Because it is my fucking business, why do you have them?”

“Because I wrote them.”

“You wrote them?”

Instant hostility. I was smitten. Another word I'd never used before. Wouldn't go near. Actually kind of hate. Things were changing!

“Why? You don't think I can write?”

Something in my heart smoldered, though it may have been my left ventricle, set twitching by heroin depletion. Or an endocarditis flare-up, fallout from a long-ago case of cotton fever, when a fiber from the dirty Q-tip fluff I was sucking coke-and-dope through ended up in my heart. (My temperature spiked to 105. Nothing a bathtub full of ice cubes couldn't turn right around.) I've always had a dream of finding another soul I could share my life with. Another artist. But greeting cards! Maybe there
was
a benign force that ruled the universe.

Or not.

I
asked her how she even got the idea and her tone shifted completely. She spoke almost shyly—“you really want to know?”—in an accent I couldn't place. Maybe southern. Maybe Pittsburgh. I said I did,
I wanted to know
, and she gathered her black-jeaned legs back under the seam-ripped seat and started. Her voice was deep and throaty. Either from whiskey and cigarettes, in which case it was permanent, or maybe it was temporary, from heroin. An opiated croak.

Smack shrinks your pupils the size of pinpricks. Super black. It's like there's an ant hole in each eyeball, right under the tombstone, but you never see any ants. They're invisible. Sometimes it feels like they're crawling into your eyes. On cocaine they crawl back out and burrow under your skin. Coke bugs! But when you're dope-sick, or even just a little
needy
, your eyes go the opposite way. They pie-plate, widen right up to old-school acid size. Except it's not from taking acid. It's from not taking heroin—or whatever opiate du jour you were talking about. Or weren't talking about, in my new friend's case. Because, from the beginning, what she was talking about and what I thought she was talking about seemed to be circling each other. But that voice!

“Like, somebody will ask me how I'm doing, okay, and every time I try to tell them, to really tell them, instead of laying out some happy horseshit, they say the same thing:
Hang in there!
Do you know how much I hate that? How fucking patronizing that is? But it's like I don't hate
them
, I hate
myself
, for letting myself think I could trust them. You know what I mean? Sometimes people even send that card, the one that actually says
Hang in there!
You know, with the picture of the cute kitten hanging on to a branch? It makes me want to puke.”

As she spoke she broke a Necco Wafer I'd given her between her thumbs, into smaller and smaller pieces. A feat, I realized when I tried it later, that required a level of tensile power I didn't have.

“By the way, I kind of invented this whole style,” she said after a little while.

“Wait. What?
Hang in there, baby
? But I, like, remember them from the eighties. Hold old were you, five?”

I didn't want to call her a liar. I wanted to believe everything.

“Well, reinvented. The concept, I mean. I, like, gave them a new iteration. It's a long story, okay?” Now she sounded hostile again, like she had at the beginning. “The point is, I got ass-screwed out of the credit. Out of the money, too.”

Iteration? Ass-screwed?
I already loved her vocabulary.

“That sucks,” I trotted out.

She glanced—maybe glared—straight up at me through her bangs and spat out her words. “You think?”

T
here's a special tang to long-distance bus air. Low-end life and death. Human detritus, confined night-stinks, exhaustion, and plain exhaust. Someone had either passed gas in a nearby seat or passed on earlier in the evening and begun to rot.

I turned around and saw no one awake. Then noticed a shiny pair of aviator glasses a few rows back. Facing me. What little light there was, from the passing cars and roadside lamps, flared on and off the lenses. There's something scary about glasses, when you don't see the eyes. Spectacles had a large square shaved head, trim goatee, and—strangest of all—suit, shirt, and tie, not the least bit loosened. When he saw me he crossed his large hands carefully and laid them on his chest, both forefingers pointing up and out in my direction, here's-the-steeple style. A gesture meant to convey something, I was certain, I just wasn't sure what. The bus was a little like prison, where every gesture had to be interpreted. Was that nod from the con with the cross and swastika on his neck meant to convey
Jesus loves you
or
I'm going to hike your legs up and shank you in the shower while I fuck you
? (The latter, by the way, was something no one said to me the entire time I was behind bars. Though I could not, I will be the first to admit, stop dreading it.)

In the slow strobe light of the highway it was impossible to tell if he was deep black or an albino. Just that there was something strange about that square head, and the big face so set and hard that the finger church and the light dancing off his aviators were the only signs of life. The rest was pure dead menace.

My new almost-friend and heart's desire caught me staring and pulled a loose, chewed-on cigarette from her jacket pocket. Flipped it in her mouth. I waited, with some kind of fascination, to see if she was actually going to light up. Then she took it out again, plucked a shred of tobacco off her pouty lower lip and put the cigarette back in her pocket. She started to say something. I assumed it would be about the prince of men I'd just been staring at. But each time I thought she was going to speak, she stopped herself.

NINE

Was I the Creepy Stranger?

Something irregular and beautiful was happening outside. Yellow lightning. Burning veins in the sky. It made me conscious of my own non-burning veins. They hadn't been fed in a while. My seatmate, whose name, I realized, I still didn't know—possibly because I hadn't asked—raised an eyebrow at me, then faced the window. She seemed, on first view, the kind of young woman who didn't care all that much about her appearance. After even a sneaky glance—all I'd allowed myself, out of some sudden flush of discretion—it seemed unlikely those breasts could have sprouted without surgical assistance. But what did I know? I was never one of those guys who drooled over giant bra-stuffers. The truth (possibly more mortifying) is that I was not one who went after any “type” in particular; no, my kind of girl, from teen-hood on, was any girl who liked me.

It's like, we were connected. But not. Had not even exchanged names.

Was I the creepy stranger who wouldn't shut up—or was I acknowledging a deep and unexpected soul connection? And when, exactly, had I started channeling Oprah?

“You saw Lurch, right?” she said. “The creep with the glasses?”

“Hard to miss.”

For a second she didn't say anything, then she did.

“Ever think somebody was trying to kill you?” She spoke without turning toward me, just as some hyped-up semi went flying by what felt like inches from our window. The truck had a high-pitched, unsteady whine that faded in its wake.

“Somebody's trying to kill you?” I said over the noise. “Does this have something to do with ‘Hang in There'? The kitten on the branch? Your
iteration
of it?”

Now she did turn around. Fast and accusatory. “What? Are you giving me shit?”

Oh man. I
knew
what she said. But maybe I didn't. Or maybe she didn't want to say it just then. Maybe all life, when you boiled it down, was a series of wrong assumptions. Mine anyway. I just didn't want to be an asshole. Anymore. I'd been off drugs for what seemed like ages—at least a day and a half. Drugs made Lloyd feel like an asshole, and Lloyd needed more drugs to deal with that. Especially when Lloyd was trying to say no to drugs. When Lloyd had promised himself he wasn't going to do drugs anymore. Which of course just made Lloyd—
e-nough
!

If she hadn't been there I would have banged the heel of my hand off my forehead. Screamed at myself to shut up or stop in much the same manner that famed TV reverend Peter Popoff smacks seekers' foreheads and yells, “Heal!” when he strong-arms their maladies by letting the Holy Spirit hammer through him.

“So,” I said, wading into the sullen silence that had descended after the freak lightning and my apparent misunderstanding about why someone was trying to kill her. (It's the little things.) “Are you suing? Do you have any kind of plan?”

“Plan?” The way she squinched her face sideways made the word seem vaguely degrading. “That's a strange idea. But I
like
strange, if you know what I mean.”

“
Strange
,” I said, blocking the words with my fingers in the air before I realized the assyness of it, “
when what you want is an adventure you've never had before.
Then you show a photo of some girl face down on a bed, crying.”

She sat up straight. “You could do it that way. Or have that same photo with text across the top:
MAKE A NEW MISTAKE!
”

“Wow!” I wasn't normally a
wow
guy, but I meant it. “Did you just come up with that?”

“It's what we're doing, isn't it?”

We weren't touching, but my skin could feel her skin buzzing.

Everything had happened so fast—the whole exchange—we both kind of froze in place, eyes straight ahead. She may have half-smiled. I didn't want to ruin the moment and check. Sex was something you didn't care about when you had dope—and used to kill the pain when you didn't. Kick-sex was fairly uncelebratory. You—if you were a man—came in seconds. And you could come often. Over and over. You just couldn't come much. The operative term is “air popper.” It didn't even feel good. It was relief, not pleasure. Like so much of life. (Well,
my
life; a junkie's life.)
But.
With this person I experienced something. Something unfamiliar. Like that weird yellow lightning. Like chemical refineries that flared in the night, toxic birthday candles lighting the sky right and left for miles.