Happy Mutant Baby Pills (13 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Taser Happy

How to put this? I began to love everything I didn't know about Nora; in my experience, the second, deeper phase of, really, pardon my melodrama, “falling for somebody.” Loving the things that don't add up, the missing years, the hinky bits. Which, if you are a stable, non-turmoil-driven type of human, makes no sense. Is actually
disturbing
. But you didn't see my dream-date rejigger that Taser gun. Like a pro. See, there are so many things to be addicted to, why pretend you are addicted to dope? Come on! Why be so limiting? What dope fiends are really strung out on are situations. Generally, bad ones. Painful ones. Ones that, with no solutions that aren't awful, can only be endured. And only with heroin. Create the need, supply the solution. That way dope is not just a habit. It's a survival tool . . . Then again, maybe the core addiction is talking about addiction. Narco-narcissism. A habit that's no fun for anybody.

A
fter Susie shuffled off, Nora opened up about the niceties of Tasering. “Each time you fire, you have to wind up and repack the electrode wires. That's the downside, and you have to stick in a new gas cartridge each time.” In another era she might have been describing how to bake a cherry pie. But not in this one.

Just then the deputy sheriff started to make noise. He'd been still, aside from his nasal mewling
.
I'd forgotten he was any more than furniture until Nora barked at him. “Shut it, pig-ass!” Then, brightening, she continued: “Susie left her panties.”

I hadn't noticed, what with the armory of Amazon paramilitary accessories on hand to admire. (At what point, pardon my sidetrack, had civilization decided to sell face-scorching chemical sprays in the same venue as organic baby powder? How did the world get so wonderful so fast?) Nora shoved the noticeably damp skimpies in the deputy's mouth and then stepped back to Taser him again.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Theoretically, I should be hitting him with gas canisters. Poetic justice. But gas canisters have a nasty habit of releasing gas. Not so great in a small room. So I went with Taser.”

“Nora,” I said, hearing how ridiculous the question sounded even as I uttered it, “you're not really just a ripped-off greeting card writer, are you?”

“Is anybody just one thing? I got the idea at Occupy.”

“You're telling me you didn't get the idea until we got to LA? That wasn't your plan all along?”

“I'm not telling you anything. You're hearing things.”

She was right. What I was hearing was that I had somehow ended up with a mysterious junkie waif with iffy greeting card credentials who might have been black ops. What were the odds?

“Anyway,” Nora said, “I still have something I have to do. I mean, the main thing.”

“What's that again?”

Changing the subject, she read from a square of print stamped on the butt of the Taser. “The purpose of the nonlethal weapon is not to inflict pain; it's to avoid confrontation.” I restrained myself from saying I liked the writer's style. Another doomed DeLillo with a day job.

“Mission accomplished.” Nora aimed me one of those dark half smirks that, for her, passed as a smile. Then she slipped out the fork she'd been keeping up her sleeve, stretched toward the cop, and planted it in his ribs. “Okay, he's done.”

I
thought about the coffee shop across the street. Imagined the legions of writers, paid and otherwise, who'd never even been bitch-slapped and were banging out action movies, thrillers, mysteries, violent crime fantasies of every stripe. Yet here was real-life terror: not just the muffled screams, soilage, and writhing of the shocked and re-shocked policeman, but the screaming in my own heart—which always beat faster the less heroin it had been fed—while I watched, and wondered, as the bard said,
What the fuck?

L
isten. Some people play sports and some people watch them. We grow up, here in America, watching death. Our favorite form of recreation. Death-watching. Violence-savoring. All Nora and I had done was turn professional. Join the big leagues.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them the dark wood grain in the walls had begun to quiver. Nora shoved the panties deeper in the deputy's mouth and zapped him again, on his testicles. This time, mysteriously, there was no blood, just instant, jellyfish-like puff. He breathed through his nose with what sounded like tremendous effort.

“Did you know octopi express mood by changing color?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice astonishingly normal, at least to me. “It's a hormonal thing.”

“I don't think this is hormones,” she said, raising a hot pink faux-lighter in front of her and spraying an orange stream in the deputy's open mouth. The pepper juice hit his gums with a soft sizzle.

This time I had to pull away. If he sneezed we'd both go blind.

Later, when Officer Pike went skunk and sprayed nonviolent protestors at UC Davis, I remembered Nora's prescient spritz. At the time, all I said was “Jesus, baby, you're giving him the combo platter.”

Nora wiped her eyes. “Tasers are more nineties. Like billy clubs. Rodney King shit. But I'm sentimental. And don't call me baby.”

“My bad. Do people die with Tasering?”

“Down south. Mostly. Hang on.” I loved watching her concentrate, the way she chewed her lip, removing a bushy metallic claw from the deputy's ballooning testicles, rewinding the connector wire. The deputy convulsed briefly, collapsed as if he'd had his plug pulled, then re-convulsed.

I looked away again, talking just to talk. “What do you mean, only down south? You mean, like, in the ball area?”

“Close. I mean in Texas. Some naked freak named Eric Hammock got shocked twenty times by cops in Fort Worth. He died in custody.” She fiddled with those bushy claws on the end of the Taser wire. “In South Carolina, Maurice Cunningham was Tased nonstop for two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Died of cardiac arrhythmia. Law enforcement always blames PCP, but the real blame is the Taser. He just lasted that long 'cause of the shit he was on.”

I hadn't realized the deputy was listening. That he could even hear. His face went slack, then he seized, then he went slack again. His pube hair had stopped smoking and he'd wet himself. He smelled like a burned baby toy.

“Pork roast,” Nora said, with no humor whatsoever.

After that we just stood there. Finally Nora broke the silence. “Sometimes I want a cigarette.”

I grunted agreement. I really wanted to ask how she'd become a Taser pro. But it seemed, I don't know, wrong to keep chatting. Nora leaned over the deputy's face and whispered, “I don't want to talk about that. What I want to talk about . . . what I want to know? If I put a Taser to your eye, told you I'd pull the trigger unless you got on your fucking knees and sucked my partner off . . . what do you think you'd do?”

Another eternal question.

But was it
political
?

The deputy sheriff writhed. He moved only his head as Nora eased him off the bed. Onto the floor. Giving him the chance to crawl.

“All right, then, deputy, do a knee-walk.” To my horror, he started toward me. A lost manatee. Outside, an ice cream truck tinkled. The street echoed with a tinny, brain-scraping “To Dream the Impossible Dream.” Followed, inexplicably, by “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“Now who's the filthy whore?” Nora said. “Does that turn
you
on, Officer? Does it? Pussy-ass bitch! You like hearing that?”

The little yelps from his throat had gone all Blue Angel-y. I'd begun to worry about neighbors. “We have to get out of here. Somebody's bound to, I don't know . . . We should probably—”

“Right,” Nora said. “We should dress him.”

“Dress him?”

She nodded toward the stack of paramilitary gear. “Technically, you'd say accessorize. I'm not talking about clothes.”

As far as I was concerned, the whole situation had begun to curdle. “Nora, look at the guy, okay? His balls are the size of grapefruits. I can't tell if he's crying or his eyes are bleeding. You really want to—”

A knock on the back door stopped my whinging. “Hold that thought,” Nora said.

“You're leaving?”

I was already paranoid. Now my paranoia had a scenario. The thought that she might leave and I'd be caught flat-footed with a sack-damaged cop and a Taser in my hand was more than I could handle.

Nora saw the look in my eyes and stopped. “Jesus-Pesus, relax, would you? We're almost done.”

“We're going to have to move the body.” I tried to keep my voice even. But my tongue got sockish, the socky feeling accompanied by sensations of dread and suicidal ideation.
I react, therefore I am.
I was so weirdly crazy about this person—but she scared the living piss out of me. At what point had true love become indistinguishable from a death wish? More importantly, when would I stop repeating the question?

“More like manipulate than move,” Nora said. Then she corrected herself, playing idly with the officer's left ear. “Just help me pose him.”

“What?”

She put a finger to her lips—the one that just touched the riot cop's scarlet lobe. She sniffed and twisted her lips up in calculation, like a sommelier putting on a performance. “Wait a minute . . .”

“Now what?”

I thought she was going to say something, make a pronouncement. Instead she left the room. Marched to the front door, singing like a housewife in a fifties TV show. “Coming!”

Alone with our captive, I felt a sudden sense of connection. We were, after all, two guys. The bond of manhood, such as it was.

For no reason beyond not wanting to keep staring at the deputy, I kneeled and picked his pants off the floor. Felt for the wallet. I saw him flinch. Doesn't matter if you're wide-eyed or in the depths of a shock-induced fear coma. You see somebody going through your shit, you react.

“Don't worry,” I said, “I'm not going to steal your plastic and charge some dope rims.” I thought of the Prius. “On my car it wouldn't matter.”

What I did, in fact, was check out his driver's license and his Fraternal Order of Police card. Both of which bore the name Oswald Jesus Fernando Pessoa. Confirming the suspicions I couldn't admit I had.

“Jesus, you're not even
him . . .”

Not only was our fried friend not from Oakland, he wasn't even a real cop. He was LATP. Los Angeles Transit Police.

But I couldn't focus on that. Couldn't quell the stomach-clutching suspicion that, for the second time, I let myself be lured into a murder or, in this case, at least a Guantánamo-esque kidnapping. (Could you call it kidnapping when you didn't take the victim anywhere? Is there a different name for that? Forced babysitting, with a side of imprisonment and torture?
Oh man.
)

I could feel the panic flip a switch in my mind. Heard my brain click into Pacifica Radio late-night discussion mode. Strangely, I never thought philosophically, except in panic situations, when reality was so brain-explodingly fucked that my mind began broadcasting some mash-up of Noam Chomsky, Alan Watts, and Gary Null, product of the countless nights I'd staggered through insomnia, letting KPFK in LA, WBAI in New York, or KPFA in San Francisco marinate my waking nightmares. Listen, it's Alan Watts:
Are men merely two-legged empires, dumb with exceptionalism and brute entitlement? Or are they fury-driven juntas and jihads, mobile terrorist cliques intent on destroying everyone who isn't them? Is self-hate just narcissism with its pants on backwards? Or is narcissism just fascism made personal?

Watts liked to say he was a Buddhist who liked double martinis. Enough gin and anybody could be one with humanity.

TWENTY-FIVE

Sunshine and Buttercups

Without heroin, even sunshine and buttercups felt oppressive. And this—where I was now—was hardly buttercuppish.

Voices from the next room brought me back, over the muffled groaning of the shocked drooler in front of me; I felt the damp puke-inducing suction of my hand over his mouth. His lips pressed into my palm like pallid suckerfish. I thought my stomach was going to suicide out of my face . . . Have you ever been alone with a man you've just seen shot with something? Who isn't dead but isn't moving much? Who's just . . . sort of . . .
there
?

Nora popped back into the bedroom, waving a pamphlet. “Jehovah's Witnesses, look!” She read from the cover. “ ‘All Suffering Soon to End.' I don't know about you, but
I
feel better!”

She handed me the pamphlet. Cartoon seekers stared earnestly off the cover, walking into a bounteous cartoon valley. “I could have talked to those kids all day. I love their suits. But we've got work to do!”

What kind of woman could savage a man with 150,000 volts, then turn around and talk theology with thin-tied visitors, come to make known the wonder of Jehovah's love?

My kind, apparently.

I
t all happened fast after that. I managed to get the tactical vest, riot helmet, and utility belt onto the weirdly buff but porcine naked body. Our guest did not seem to spare himself pies or barbells. I had to tell Nora that he might not even be Bergstresser after all. That, in fact, his name was probably Pessoa. But as soon as I opened my mouth, Nora cut me off. “Can you smell those scorched pubes?”

Hoping she wouldn't say “I love the smell of scorched pubes in the morning,” I mumbled noncommittally, “Not really.”

Nora sniffed again. Instead of quoting Coppola, she said, “Well
I
can. I wouldn't get near that pus nest without a Neosporin bath. Unfortunately all I have on me is Purell.”

“That's okay.” I played my manly card. “Purell is like rubbing penicillin on your hand. It doesn't actually do what you think it does.”

“It covers the smell better than penicillin.”

I couldn't argue with that.

Nora helped me yank the jumbo baloney arms and legs through the straps of his bulletproof vest. Our friend was not exactly lively, but he wasn't catatonic, either.

“He may be in a shame coma,” I said. “I think I've seen that on
Law & Order
.”

“You watch that crap?”

“Just for the commercials,” I lied. Why tell her I needed to go numb sometimes, when drugs weren't enough? With enough narcotics, you could learn things from Sam Waterston's eyebrows.

Another fun fact! A while back, some DIY-ers attempted to Taser themselves, following the Internet-touted belief that it was a kind of at-home ECT. Do-it-yourself electroshock. For those seeking all the well-known benefits: relief from severe depression and a sense of baseless and short-term-memory-challenged well-being. Ironically, electroshock's possible side effects were small potatoes compared to what could happen on its pharmaceutical cousins. What they used to call “chemical chains”: your stelazine, your thorazine, all the heavy 'zines.

There was some power drooling, involuntary twitches in hands and feet, even the odd bladder control adjustment—but no suicidal ideation, no sudden anger. (And if drooling, twitching, and pissing yourself don't make you suicidal, then you know you're cured.)

I realized I was babbling, but she seemed interested.

“I swear, if somebody had the money, I'd advise them to invest in an infomercial and sell home ECT kits.”

Nora raised her eyes from our friend on the floor. She adjusted her wig and dabbed foam from his mouth with Susie's panties, after she had yanked them out of it.

“You're serious?”

“Why not? I once did a promo for an electroshock clinic. It was a testimonial from a ‘satisfied customer' on the other end of the treatment.”

“A real person?”

“Well, sort of. I lined up a perky ‘actor-impersonator' type. She had that sort of early Goldie Hawn fizz.” I made my voice girly and gave her a sample: “
I won't lie, I thought ECT was just something from
The Snake Pit
, but then I heard my sister-in-law say it worked for her . . . Now I feel like life can be joyful again. Thank you, Dr. Mason!
Then her kids come on, four, five, and six, all blond, in matching sweaters and holding hands. They chime in, in unison:
Thank you, Dr. Mason, for giving us back our mommy.
Then a big hug, and out. Cute as hell. Mason was the crook who ran the place. The kicker is, he wasn't even a doctor.”

“Even if he was, I can't believe any program would want electroshock as a sponsor.”

“Right you are. None did. The fucker's check bounced, too. He tried to pay me off in Ultrams, these non-opiate painkillers they sell online, which actually
are
opiates, just really shitty ones, so I just took his car. Bent fuck like that, he's not going to go to the authorities.”

When we were done paramilitarizing our friend in law enforcement, Nora tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned just clamped her hands on my shoulders and her mouth on my lips. Pressing hard. I was so far from thinking about sex at that moment . . . but at the same time, in a room with Nora, I was never
not
thinking about sex.

I had kind of killed for this woman. Not kind of—who am I kidding?—I'd offed a man in a public toilet. (Looks good on any résumé.) And now we were in a room where the only panting was coming from a riot-geared nude law enforcer.

But what did I know? Once again, I wanted to say something, that I'd seen the wrong name on the cop's driver's license. But before I could, there was that clamp action. Mouth to mouth. I needed to say something anyway. It was eating at me.

“Nora, listen . . .” The words jerked up hot in my throat and out of my mouth. Projectile verbiage. “We need to talk.” How many times had I heard that from a woman and cringed? (Whether in real life or on film, it's never good.) An Obama bobblehead by the bed looked at me like it knew everything. A judgmental bobblehead.

“Throw me down,” Nora croaked.

“What?” (You never know when lust will strike. It's like epilepsy.)

“Throw you down where? Here?”

By way of answer, Nora yanked her T-shirt over her head. She raised her arms, exposing half-moons of sweat. For some reason I had to fight the urge to jam my face in her armpit. Good fucking God, was everything a drug when you didn't have drugs? I wanted to breathe her fumes like they were carbon monoxide coming out of a '73 Camaro and I was in a garage trying to off myself. In a
good
way. Sometimes—and I don't know why this is—you can be strung out like the proverbial lab rat, and not have heroin for a while, and not even notice. Then, just when you think you're out of the woods, you get the first twinges, the first skrank in the back of your neck. The first judder in the bowels. At which point you'd shoot shoe polish in your eyes, if it brought relief—or plunge your face into the armpit of a woman you were insanely crazy about. Just because you could. And it might block out the looming pain. Don't ask me to make sense. It was all just happening.

“Come on, damn it!”

Nora stripped fast, inches in front of me. I kept glancing over her bony shoulder at the pie-eyed “policeman” on the bed. He'd graduated from grasps to grunts. The ascent of man. I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to think about him. Mostly I didn't want to inhale him. He'd had some kind of
release
. (Did I mention this already? It's not something you forget.) It smelled like he'd shit beef starch—another reason I took the Nora underarm plunge. I'd never done one before. (I've since learned it's a “Euro thing.” Your Euros love their odors.) But at that moment, surrounded by heinous sensory input, my face did my thinking for me. The last image to scrape my eyeballs was my own mouth, open wide, like a thirsty dog's, reflected in the black Plexiglas of the deputy's riot helmet. Then blackness. Not damp, dank, pungent blackness, like you might expect. More air freshenery. Aluminum-silicate dry and deodorized, chemically floral blackness. Not that Nora was particularly hygienic, but she used five deodorants, all packed—in retrospect—with enough aluminum to make her brain crunchy. (I'd seen on the Discovery Channel how, when they did autopsies on the brains of dementia sufferers, the scalpel literally scraped metal aluminum bits. Cerebral fallout from a lifetime of Reynolds Wrap, aluminum pots and pans, and the aforementioned super-dry deodorants. They might have had crunch-brain, but damn it, they smelled like Glade!)

Nora grabbed me by an ear and yanked my head out of her pit.

I raised my eyes and saw she wasn't looking at me. She was staring past me, at the mirror, while the policeman quivered sporadically.

She squeezed my ear in one hand while the other snaked between her legs. What I saw, when I think about it, stuns me to this day. But wait . . .

That boyish waist, those enormous breasts, her pale, blue-veined sweat-shiny eggshell skin, and that one double nipple-ringed nipple.
Why two-in-one?
I wanted to ask, but didn't. I still wanted to ask about the German shepherd ink, too. The daddy thing. But not now. Never
now
.

Our captive stayed propped up, limp, against the bare double mattress. Over the blond pouf of her wig my eyes caught his. His look of dumb animal pain hit me like some strange passion-accelerant. I grabbed Nora and half pushed, half fell over the scrote-scorched victim, onto the bed above him.

With her left hand, just the forefinger, Nora tugged up the top of her slit, exposing a purply clitoris so large I wondered if she might be a hermaphrodite. It was shocking, hot, and
National Geographic
–worthy all at once. With her right hand, she began slapping the marshmallowy protuberance, as if it had disobeyed her, accompanying each smack with a moan so stark and personal I felt like I was eavesdropping.

To keep my skull from imploding, I stared away from Nora, to the law enforcer. His Plexiglas visor was raised, and as I locked into his cowlike eyes, I felt myself flooded with a weird affection. Not just for him, but for the squawking grackles outside, for the irritating one-song warble of the ice cream truck, for the whorls in the bedroom wood, which formed eyeballs that regarded me like they knew things . . . Just wanting Nora—wanting something that wasn't a drug—was such a novelty, such a world-changingly unlikely circumstance, I was afraid to breathe for fear it would all turn out to be some near-death hallucination. (A junkie, on some level, lives his whole life as a near-death experience.) But I looked again, and it was real.

Biting her lip, Nora stopped slapping herself and grabbed my hand, exposing herself completely, using me to rub her slick SeaWorld clitoris. When she mumbled, I knew she wasn't speaking to me, and I didn't care. I don't even know how I ended up inside her. Somehow I just was. Only—how to say this?—it did not feel like fucking so much as swimming. I'd never encountered a hole so capacious. She began touching herself again, yanking her sex upward, squeezing her yawning slit tight as she alternately thrummed her circus clit and tugged it with abandon. When I started to actually move, she whispered huskily, “Don't!” She just wanted me to hold still while she worked herself around and above me, her intensity and focus more beautifully obscene than whatever frantic faster-harder I'd imagined. Just holding there, not moving at all, scorched me more than anything in my life. And when I thought I couldn't get harder, Nora let go of herself, rubbed her sex-soaked hand in my face, smelling faintly of dirty soy sauce and iron, then reared back and, with no warning whatsoever, reached past me and backhanded the semicomatose cop across the face. And did it again. We went from zero to cop-smacking and fucking at the same time. The whole thing—I don't know if it even counted as sex. It was some other dimension, I sensed, that could have gone on with me or without me. I was along for the ride. Which, had I had an ego, might have stung it. But ego was gone. There was a sizzling in the back of my skull. Until, in a voice that might have belonged to a talking animal, Nora screamed, “
Yes-s-s!
. . .” and the officer, or whoever he was, made a noise like a man swallowing a can opener, pitched forward, spat blood on both of us, and died.

After that, things got strange.