Happy Mutant Baby Pills Read Free

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?”
    â€œMetho-Heeb,” I told him.
    â€œWhat’s that, kid?”
    â€œHalf-Jewish, half-Methodist, and my mom did a lot of speed.”
    â€œWell, 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!