Happy Mutant Baby Pills (3 page)

B
ut enough! Let's settle down and spit out the palette cleanser. It's time for the entrée.

ONE

Christ-Work

I was shooting dope at Christian Swingles, a faith-based dating website where I worked in Tulsa. We didn't have coffee breaks at 10:45, we had prayer moments. With a muffin cart. If you think it was easy doing heroin in that situation, well—you'd be absolutely
right
. What a nest of freaks! The good kind. But I can pray to Jesus with a little smack in me. With a little more I can even believe. Opium of the people, on opiates.

This was the dawn of online dating. So I wasn't cranking out my usual side effects, pharma-copy, gold scams, or sex-toy banter. Christian Swingles was weirder. At least for me. (Not being a Christian.) The genius of the site was that it was about so much more than Christ-loving singles. It was about
a way of life.
The dos and don'ts of Jesus-centric singledom. I'm still afraid if there is a hell, I might go there for this. But let me walk you down the path of perdition. No one starts out in hell; they have to do something to deserve it. You have to put in the
work
.

The owners, naturally, were two Jewish guys. Eddy and Teddy Lifshitz. (They swore their cousin was Ralph Lauren—“The schmuck got Goy surgery in Tijuana, after his name change, and then tells Oprah, ‘My given name has shit in it?' ”) The brothers Lifshitz cut their teeth on J-Dreemz—the first Jewish dating site (and ultimately BlackBerry to JDate's iPhone). Just because it was owned by Hebrews, however, did not mean the owners wanted anything less than absolute authenticity when it came to Christ-friendly content. (The brothers strove for equal authenticity in their later ventures: Interracial Daters, Black Love, Cantonese Seekers.) Swingles content was half Bible-dating behavior, half typical faux-dating quiz questions. But the man in charge was the real deal, an actual former air force chaplain named Bobby Bobb.

The silver-haired Pastor Bobb was hired by the Lifshitzes themselves to run the place. (I remember the first time I saw the brothers, two thin-lipped hunched young men who might as well have been wearing yarmulkes and talliths. They looked like they'd just stepped from the Wailing Wall to the “Loving Hall”—the short corridor behind reception, where hung framed photos of successful Christian couples, newlyweds who met in Christian Dreemz-land, and pictures of Jesus: the ultimate Christian single.)

Anyway, I started working for Swingles after I met a volunteer from Prison Fellowship, Chuck Colson's group. (Colson, for you under-forties, was one of the Watergate burglars. Watergate was . . . well, why bother? That's why God made Google. Let's just say it was back when they used to prosecute presidents for crimes. Not for secret bombing or lying the country into war or anything like that. For breaking into a hotel room. Then lying about it. You'll notice, presidents don't break into hotel rooms anymore. The system works!)

After serving Nixon, Colson found the Lord in a minimum security federal penitentiary in Maxwell, Alabama, and decided to spend the rest of his life “giving back.” As Chuck put it in his 1983 book
Loving God
, “Though folklore has it that minimum security prisons, like the one I was in, are full of wealthy ‘white-collar criminals' doing a few months of ‘easy' time . . . well, that's just not true!” Chuck knew what it meant to be down. Chuck was giving back.

How I got to the federal pen isn't much of a story. After getting fired from my last job, when that guy Dreek snitched me off, I was flying from New York City to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for my mother's funeral. I forgot I had a syringe in my sock. Crime doesn't get much more glamorous. Because it happened at an airport, it was federal. (Thinking about it now, I don't actually want to shoot heroin—I just want to stick a syringe in my
eye
.) I didn't even make it to the metal detector. As I was standing in line, shoeless, an adorable, floppy-eared beagle puppy padded over on the end of a long leash.

Had I been paying attention, I'd have seen the other end of the leash was in the hand of some yoked flattop in a DEA T-shirt and reflector shades. (The Jerry-Bruckheimer-let's-hire-Henry-Rollins-to-play-a-DEA-agent look.) Instead, I had my nose buried in a copy of
Naked Lunch
. I know, I know. It's a cliché. But for me, somehow,
Lunch
is always vaguely reassuring, a warm bath for the brain, in times of trouble. Not that times were that troubled. I was going to my mother's funeral. I hadn't seen mine in a decade or two. But still . . . I saw that cute little pup sniffing up to my shoe, and I thought, before I even realized I was a fucking idiot, that the God of unhappy boyhoods had sent a little Snoopy to cheer me up. After which, of course, Snoopy sniffed the syringe in my sock, and no amount of explaining could make Bruckheimer Reflector Shades believe it was mom-grief.

Of course, there's a drug for that too. Viibryd. An antidepressant, a
grief-fighter.
It gets me misty-eyed just thinking about it. The sheer paradox. Listen:
Antidepressants increase the risk compared to placebo of suicidal thinking and behavior (suicidality) in children, teens, and young adults. Depression and certain other psychiatric disorders are themselves associated with increases in the risk of suicide. Patients of all ages who are started on antidepressant therapy should be monitored appropriately . . .
The beauty of
that
. You take the stuff for grief, and it makes you suicidally grief-stricken . . . Mission accomplished! It's the Möbius strip of symptom and relief. I have the condition, I want to get rid of it, so I take the medication to make it go away, and—Pfizer meet
Job
!—inflict upon myself the exact thing I want to eradicate.

Other people have prayers, mantras, affirmations . . . I have occasional side effects
.
In the case of Viibryd, it's the last few torments that resonate:
Unusual changes in behavior.
Yes!
Disturbing dreams.
Thank you!
Sudden violent thoughts
? Hallelujah! Could anything be more human than unusual changes in behavior, disturbing dreams, and sudden violent thoughts? It's almost reassuring. Viibryd has taken the very qualities that separate us from animals and turned them into . . . side effects.

When I was being led away by the Bruckheimer shades guy, after having my freedom puppied at the airport, I found myself repeating to myself:
Disturbing . . . Sudden . . . Violent
. . . So what if I'm the only one who knows this is poetry? I let myself murmur, under the stares of other travelers, as the stalwart DEA badged a path through lines of passengers and bulled me through, in handcuffs. He was snickering. (
Disturbing . . . Sudden . . . Violent . . .
I was also the only one who knew this was prayer.)

DEA shades man sat me in a little room with fluorescents, table, and chairs—very
Law & Order
. He would not buy my grief defense, even after I dragged up my dead mother and marched her out to try and get some official sympathy. He might have bit—I could tell he was on the fence until he jammed my sleeve up (the left, as it happened: my shooting arm) and found a few hundred years' worth of tracks. For some time needles had been hard to get, and it looked like I'd been trying to shoot up with a piano leg. “Unless you got some kinda arm Ebola, lady-pants, you're goin' away. And I mean federal.” The lady thing, I was to learn, is something law enforcement types seem to enjoy. Especially the prison guards. Feminization. Maybe that's how they deal with their grief. Maybe we should all be given Viibryd at birth.

TWO

Terminal Island

So, it's two months later, and I'm in the kitchen at Terminal Island, daydreaming about Mexican tar and shoving chipped ham down my pants. That was the thing about kitchen jobs: you could boost some food, then trade it on the yard for party snacks. And the snack I wanted was still tar. I'd gotten clean, by accident, and the worst thing was—worse than kicking in the penitentiary (you want to talk about anal leakage!), worse than the cramps, worse than the knee pain, worse than not sleeping for weeks . . . worse than all of it were the emotions. I was moody as a fourteen-year-old bulimic girl. My nerves were exposed. Every memory had me weepy.

Adjusting the lunchmeat in my starchy, state-issue tighty-whiteys—there were freaks in there who would have paid extra if they'd known where I'd stashed the ham—I suddenly remembered my grandmother's hands. Grandma Essie had acromegaly, which made her hands and face swell to monster movie proportions. (Google Rondo Hatton. The Creeper.) Essie's jaw and forehead were bad enough, but the way her brows puffed out . . . she'd spank me for BO, and it was like being beaten by a Cro-Magnon bluehair. “Filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy.” But, yes, what made me think of her were her hands. Always damp. Meaty. Like the treats between my legs.

See, I don't really want to relive this stuff. Thoughts think themselves. Heroin makes them do it. The heroin knows that if I feel bad enough, if I work myself into a state, then I will do it. It wants me to. (That's what they say at the meetings I go to, “First you take the drug, then the drug takes you.” They serve animal crackers and Sanka. But hey! They keep me coming back. And it beats watching
Judge Judy
reruns.)

So I'm standing there in the kitchen, in this acro-lunch-meat-Grandma dope jones, when suddenly the Lunch Boss, this fat ex–Wall Street guy named Sid, tells me I have to mix the “Clear”—this nutrition drink the government has started giving to prisoners, to help meet their nutritional needs. It's really Kool-Aid, except they can't put color in, because then it will look like pruno (that's jailhouse hooch, made from fermented fruit, for you innocents). I don't quite understand it myself, but colored Kool-Aid is banned at all federal institutions. What we do serve, instead, is this Clear shit—colorless Kool-Aid with protein and calcium powder. Except the protein and calcium powder they put in isn't really protein and calcium powder. They added a pinch of Haldol. Not a lot, of course. To taste. Just enough to keep things “low level,” in the words of Sid. (Haldol, for you non-antipsychotic meds takers, is the granddaddy of “chemical chains,” soul-numbing drugs favored by institutions whose job is to keep actual psychotics from hurling themselves off walls or listening to the voice of Elvis tell them to strangle orderlies. Side effects:
blank facial expression, discoloration of eyes, compulsive movement of jaw and mouth, wormlike tongue-darting, a brown tint aka “shit-eye” coating the vision, erections that last for hours
, etc. Pretty much heaven on earth. And no, I didn't write these. Some other side-effects pro had the privilege.)

We mix in just enough Haldol to keep things “low level.” That's what the Lunch Boss said. I was mulling on that when I felt a hand on my shoulder—nothing like Grandma's beef slab—and turned to see the man I would later come to know as Pastor Bobb. For a minute, he let me take in his steel blue eyes, chiseled beak, and white crew cut. The only problem was his skin, which looked like it had been buried for a year and dug up. But somehow the muddied complexion only complemented the impact of his stare. It was either acne scars or battery acid that healed up smooth.

“Son,” he said, without so much as a hello. “Are you of the Jewish persuasion?”

“Not me, my daddy, sir.”

“Why, that's a good thing. Now tell me, son, how are you, in general?”

“In general, great,” I said, raising my voice over the sudden din of an industrial mixer. “I'm in a federal prison making lunch.”

Pastor Bobb chuckled as if he'd practiced chuckling.

“Well, I hear you know a thing or two about writing?”

“No disrespect, pastor, but what if I do?”

“If you do,” he chuckled again, “then it is that much more tragic that you are standing here with pig meat in your drawers.”

“How did you know?”

“Son, I was down while you were still boosting Slurpees from the 7-Eleven.”

Before I could respond—assuming I could—Pastor Bobb extended his hand.

“My name's Pastor Bobb. And if you don't mind me asking for a sample, I think I'd like you to come work for me.”

“You want some chipped ham?” I was a little disoriented by the whole exchange.

“No, boy, I want me some writin'. Write me a little bit on Jesus. Imagine you're a young buck trying to impress a girl with how much you love the Lord. Run with it!”

He clapped me on the shoulder, then leaned in close and spoke in a low voice.

“You do this right, you won't have to be peddlin' no ham to convicts.”

Then he winked, the way people wink on TV shows. Pastor Bobb was one of those people who always acted like he was on TV. And not just because he had his own show. I have a theory that people in America learn how to behave by watching TV. You just pick the character you want and do what they do. Pastor Bobb seemed to have learned from Sheriff Andy on
The Andy Griffith Show
. (You kids, Google. It's Old, Weird America.)

“What would you write if you wanted a little Christian gal to love you for the rest of your life?”

Luckily, one of the Native Americans had just smoked up in the sweat lodge—they had one at all federal pens—and was too stoned to make his way to the canteen. Stoned enough to trade me two balloons for all my lunch meat. It was one of those good deals in life that sometimes happen. There's no rhyme or reason. Unless, of course, it was my Savior looking out for me. Without me even knowing I was saved.

For me, Jesus isn't just the Lord. He's my buddy. He's a pal. I would like to go bowling with Jesus. Maybe go fishing. I bet, if you're like me, you think Jesus would even be fun on a date. You, me, and Jesus. On the roller coaster of life. He is always with us. Because that is what being a Christian is. I love you, even though I do not know you, if you love Jesus the way I do!

Then I signed it:
See you in Church. Your buddy, Buddy.

Almost as if he knew, Pastor Bobb sent a guard down to collect my effort the second I'd finished. Twenty minutes later, another guard told me to roll up. I'd done nine months on a two-year jolt. But I didn't ask any questions until I found my newly free ass planted in the back of Pastor Bobb's Escalade. Terminal Island had disappeared behind us in the rearview before he uttered a word. “Son,” he said, “you have a future in Christ.”