Happy Mutant Baby Pills Read Free Page B

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