Happy Mutant Baby Pills Read Free Page A

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