Happy Mutant Baby Pills (4 page)

THREE

Junkle

Pastor Bobb had me cut my teeth on tests. Simple Q&A. Meat and potatoes stuff.

I AM A:
(select gender)

MAN
seeking
WOMAN

WOMAN
seeking
MAN

There were no other options. Gay, obviously, was not on the radar. Even though there was something gay-esque about the weirdly rouge-y male models they used for the “regular guys” in the hand-holding photos that garnished the Dating Q&A. Did couples really walk in meadows? Share ice cream cones? Stroll on the beach? My life had certainly been an aberration, but then, this wasn't Junkie Singles. (“Junkles!”
I just want a man who won't steal my wake-up!
) There was no doubt a gaggle of Christian dope fiends as well. That hadn't occurred to me. Though soon enough it would.

Meanwhile, I was living in a Tulsa halfway house and crafting Q&A in the Christian Swingles Center, just down the street from Oral Roberts University, about which all I know is that its founder used to heal sickly Christians on TV. “Touch the screen, my lambs! Touch the screen!” And once, in the eighties, he climbed a tower and announced to his flock that God would call him home if folks did not send him eight million dollars. He climbed back down with $9.1 million. Because that's how things happen when you love the Lord. He wanted to build a 900-foot Jesus. Who didn't? I certainly didn't wonder about it at the time. What I wondered was what his parents were thinking naming their little boy Oral. Did they even know it was one of Freud's classic developmental stages? Maybe his brothers were Oedipal and Anal.

My first big breakthrough was the slogan. Or tagline, in the vernacular. The
hook
. We'd been asked to come up with something that would capture the heart and soul of what Christian Swingles stood for. I finally hit on
Find God's match for you
. To me, it was horrible. When you thought about it. So horrible that it was kind of perfect. If you couldn't find a match, then, it surely followed, God must not have wanted a match for you. God must want you as lonely, miserable, and hopeless as you probably were in the first place if you came looking for a life partner—or a
life
—at a Christian dating service. I honestly thought the slogan was cruel, but Pastor Bobb said he'd be the judge of that. And he judged it to be perfect.

“Son,” he said, “the Lord truly gave you a gift. You are a regular Louis L'Amour. The man wrote nine hundred seventeen books that we know of, and every one was like poetry. Now let's us put our heads together in fellowship.”

He pulled me aside, out of ear-range of my co-scribes, so close I could feel his salt-and-pepper mustache against my earlobe. Up close he was minty. But you could smell the nicotine underneath, which made me like him more. When he put his hands on my shoulders, they stank like rancid Pall Malls.

“Lloyd, we need a new mission statement, and I think you would be just the man to help get what we are trying to do here down on paper.”

“Mission statement?”

“You know, somethin' that says, ‘Come on in!' ”

B
ut I should back up. Give you a little more about where I was. I'm no storyteller, after all, I'm a side-effects man. I write the stuff on the little piece of paper nobody reads when they pick up their prescription. I'm good at lists—arranging the bad things on them in such away that the bad of
this
cancels out the bad of
that
, and what could have been scary sounds benevolent. But arranging isn't the same as describing. Or telling a story. Still . . . let me at least set the scene. The Christian Swingles Center was actually in a strip mall, two deceptively spacious floors wedged between a Hoover vacuum outlet and a party supply store. (Into which, during my entire, brief stint in Oklahoma, I saw not one potential partier stroll. Nor did I see much of Tulsa. We lived next to the Oral Roberts campus, walked to the mall.) Outside, cars and sidewalks were clogged with a lot of hefty Christians. The O.R. food was on the starchy side. Maybe that was one way the college administrators hedged against the wanton sex that plagued so many other, secular campuses. If you keep the coeds plumped and the boys logy on carbohydrates, there aren't going to be many premarital sex problems. For all I know the churchgoing cooks mixed Depo-Provera in the mac and cheese, just like the chow boss in the pen.

The only tourist attraction I saw in Tulsa was the Golden Driller. The Golden Driller is a seventy-six-foot, 43,500-pound statue of an oil worker. Of course we went there to look at his crotch. We being Jay, the natty content manager—who insisted the Driller had been built by a closet queen named Mervyn Phelps—and Peter Riegle, the overall content director and the first real genius I ever met.

You could stand right underneath the Driller and look straight up to where the rig jockey had, apparently, been gelded. Ken doll smooth.

M
aybe it shouldn't have been amazing that Jay and Riegle, the two other guys at Church Sex Central (as we sometimes called the place), were stone addicts. (I recognized them, the way addicts do, the way werewolves, when in human guise, are said to be able to smell each other across a crowded train station and recognize their kind.) Jay wouldn't talk about his personal life. Well, not that much. He alluded to “pierogi nights,” shared an apartment with his mother, and had—he said—undergone extensive, if unsuccessful, “de-gay-ifying” at a number of Christian enterprises set up to combat “the homosexual lifestyle.” About which all he said was “I looked at a lot of pictures of Taylor Swift. Which was supposed to turn me straight but didn't. Though she is adorable.”

Riegle, meanwhile, had a wife at home with jaw cancer and a cerebral-palsied 29-year-old daughter they'd raised together and still took care of. He was slightly stooped and had an air of long-suffering dignity about him. (Which, he later explained, got people to trust him. That was just human nature.) But what made him more amazing, actually heroic to me, was something called the safe harbor clause, tucked away in an obscure addendum to the Lifshitz brothers' quarterly report.

I didn't even know what a safe harbor clause was, but you know as soon as you read a couple of sentences what it's supposed to do. Listen:
Any statements in this news release that are not statements of historical fact may be considered to be forward-looking statements. Written words, such as “may,” “will,” “expect,” “believe,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “intends,” “goal,” “objective,” “seek,” “attempt,” or variations of these or similar words, identify forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements and forecasts involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the near future.

Something about this doublespeak—how it used English in such a bold and flagrantly misleading way you kind of couldn't help
believe
it—was strangely inspiring. So much more artful than my most sugarcoated “may cause kidney failure” side-effect blather. What the statement said, essentially, was that everything in the corporate report was bullshit; but if you didn't believe it, it was probably because you lacked faith. What made Jay and Riegle even stranger and—to me—more impressive is that they both still believed. Then again, I was never sure if the two of them shared a deep personal faith—or if they were laughing in my face.

“You can't fight Satan single-handed,” Riegle told me, his gaze meaningful, though his pupils were pinned to the size of periods in a newspaper from the stuff we'd just shot.

Jay was, as ever, more snarky about it.

“The devil loves the Church, but we're gonna show him the door,” Jay said.

“You really believe that?” I asked.

“It's from the brochure I did for newcomers to Pastor Bobb's first ministry, back in Toledo,” he said. “But don't ask questions like that. Judge me by my acts. Paul 5:33 or Timothy 3:35. Or Bob 7:11 . . . or something. . . .”

W
e stood facing the giant Driller, whose enormous but curiously flat package loomed overhead. The three of us had shared a bag of Okie Powder, heroin of a consistency, taste, and potency I had never experienced before. It was the kind of high that came accompanied by painful whistling in your ear. You half-knew you were giving yourself brain damage, but it was so good you figured brain damage was a fair price to pay. As long as there was enough brain left to feel the dope that was doing the damage. We'd driven over in Riegle's Saturn, whose interior smelled like candy bananas, thanks to the air freshener Pastor Bobb kept stocked in all the Swingles cars. We didn't talk much on the way over, until the khakied Riegle suddenly smacked the wheel as we came in sight of the sun-blocking oil-worker statue.

“You know what? It is damn exciting to be in on the ground floor of something. I mean, Christian Swingles,” he said, before repeating the words slowly, like they were savory on the tongue. “Christian Swingles. Tell me this is not exciting.”

“Be more exciting, Pastor gave us stock,” Jay snarped.

Living in Tulsa was a little like still being in prison, except you could send out for ribs. And they had the giant Driller.

“But hey,” Jay continued. “Let us all behold one of the wonders of the world.” He gazed up in mock (or so I thought) awe at the massive miner. “The wonder being how did the Driller drill without a penis?”

“He's a good Christian boy,” Riegle said. “He doesn't need a penis.”

Looking at that massive Ken-dolled crotch, we all knew what he was talking about.

That morning I'd cracked the Swingles mission statement Pastor Bobb had asked for. Which turned out to be a little harder than just “Come on in!” I'd been looking for something that showed solo seekers this was the right place for them. That being a Christian single was okay. The subtext being: help lonely Believers out there accept their intercourse-free lifestyle. It took me a while, but I found a way. The words came to me while sitting in a broom closet, rolling my sleeve down after a mid-morning pop. Sometimes it was like that. I'd close my eyes, apply my lay hands to the keyboard, and take a smack nap while the words just fluttered out of my fingers in perfect formation. Like the Lord was moving through me. If there was a Lord. And if people were what he moved through.

It's not easy being a Christian singleton.

In today's anything-goes, whatever-feels-good world, there's a question every unmarried person of faith must face: How to live the way Jesus wants us to live? How to stay pure at a time when, everywhere we turn, it seems some new form of salaciousness, devilry, or outright sin has overtaken our so-called popular media. Temptation is rampant. And those of us trying to live a clean, Christian, values-based life can sometimes find ourselves feeling all alone.

Finally, there's a place where young, single Christians can find others who love the Lord just as much as they do. Finally, there's Christian Swingles.

Praise the Lord. Together.

Join today.

I “fellowshipped” on this with Jay and Riegle after fixing again—a special treat for a special occasion!—in a men's room stall in the Denny's down the street from the office, then went back in and hammered out the kinks. Jay lay on top of his desk and dangled one stonewashed jean leg off the end of it.

“There's only one thing lonelier than a horny twenty-eight-year-old Christian,” he said.

“Yeah,” Riegle interrupted. “A horny twenty-eight-year-old gay Christian.”

Riegle, who was tallish and balding, did not always look at you when he spoke. He kept sunglasses on so he could nod off without drawing attention to himself on public transportation, and sometimes forgot to take them off. But just when you thought he was down for the count he'd blurt out something to let you know he'd been there all along.

“A gay twenty-eight-year-old who's so deep in the closet he thinks sex is supposed to smell like mothballs.”

“Faith,” I said, feeling proud of myself, “can be a trial.”

“You mean an opportunity,” Jay corrected me. “Man does God's work because God's not doing it.”

“Really?”

“Gotcha!” Jay cackled, but in a nice way.

Did I mention Jay's features were so regular he might have been a composite of TV commercial dads? He looked like the friendliest salesman in the Sears hardware department. “You'd never know I was a homo,” he liked to say, “unless you asked.” He confided that he preferred men of color. “Obama sticks,” he called them. Which I found vaguely offensive, but he insisted it was in the nature of an homage. “Someday you'll meet Dusty, and you will see exactly what I mean.”

It wasn't the first time he'd mentioned his special friend of color, Dusty. Who sometimes sounded made up, sometimes sounded real. (Later I found out the truth.)

Pastor Bobb either didn't know or didn't care about his un-Christian sexual bent, but Jay said the pastor both knew and cared, believing exposure to all the hetero Christian spirit in the Swingles Center would work magic on his “tendencies,” make them “withered as the dugs of Satan.” One of the Pastor's favorite, if most inexplicable, expressions.

FOUR

Normal People! Doing Normal Things!

All around us on the walls of the Swingles Content Break Room hung health-bookish posters of wholesome guys and gals smiling at each other with shared faith, eyes unglazed by anything as base as lust. The couples in the posters took picnics, canoed, and sang Christmas carols. They wore colorful shirts. Sometimes, we'd all fix in the office—I'd never done social heroin before Tulsa, but shooting up together was what we did instead of bowling. After hours, Jay, Riegle, and I would amble into the snack pantry and stare up at those posters. The clear, doubt-free, Jesus-loves-me gaze of the believers answered all the questions we might have had about what to write, or how to write it.

The big issue with Christian daters was sin. Old-fashioned sin, like drinking and smoking. But you couldn't just come out and ask,
Do you drink?
At least Pastor Bobb didn't think so. The idea was to appear accepting, when what you were really doing was trying to let your applicants relax enough to hang themselves with the truth.
It's okay, we're just asking
was the tone we were going for. No judgment. Not
Do you smoke?
or
How do you feel about smoking?
but
How often do you smoke?
Give me a medal for that.

The answers were:
Never.
On occasion
.
Frequently. Whenever I can
. Fucking genius. The loveliness of that.
Whenever I can
was Jay's idea. “Don't make it a negative,” he explained, “except for believers. Let Satan show his hand.”

We went the same route with boozing.
How often do you drink?
Really. What kind of party ferret is going to answer
whenever I can
on a Christian dating site, unless it's Christian Alcoholics? (Which, by the way, is not a half bad idea. One more reason to feel bad about not having money is not being able to immediately invest it in your own brilliant ideas before somebody steals them.
Results not guaranteed for all participants.
)

I wanted to believe there was some guy out there—or some woman—who was going to answer, proudly,
whenever I can
when asked how often they drink. Somebody who
wanted
to come off like a drunk so they could meet somebody just like them. Maybe drive drunk to church together. If somebody picks you after a deal-breaker like that, how could they not be perfect for you? Juiceheads for Jesus.
The Double J's. Results may not be typical, and are not guaranteed.
“No two experiences are alike.” Like I say, I would have invested.

W
e had to wear white shirts and ties to work, but Pastor Bobb was so pleased with my contributions that one day he said I could take off my tie. I said I preferred to leave it on. Pastor Bobb just winked at my pals in Creative, Jay and Riegle, told them to let him know when they de-Jewed me. It was such a disturbing thing to say, I couldn't even say why it was disturbing. I preferred keeping my shirt and tie on because I had learned that the best thing, if you were doing heroin in the normal world, was to blend in. Especially if you were newly released from an institution.

Theoretically, I was supposed to report to a probation officer and take random pee tests. But somehow—well, probably because of Pastor Bobb and his Colson connections (nothing was ever formally acknowledged)—I was spared that indignity.

More than once, I had a conversation with Jay, how it was he could shoot heroin and consider himself a Christian.

“Simple,” he said. “It's not a drug when it's medicine.”

“Wouldn't it be easy to just get a script for OxyContins?”

“Oxys don't mortify your flesh,” he said, combing his long brown hair and then checking his tortoise shell comb for whatever it is people check their combs for.

“Mortify your flesh?” It wasn't that I didn't think I heard right, I just wasn't sure I understood. Or I
thought
I did, but wasn't sure I wanted to.

“The spears that pierced Jesus's side,” Jay said, pulling out a syringe and waggling it in front of my nose like a stage hypnotist. “What we're doing is an homage to the suffering of our Lord. It's like being a flagellant, except we're not marching down the street whipping ourselves in some procession; we keep it private.”

“That's right,” Riegle agreed, putting down the Bible he'd been reading. “My drugs are between me and Jesus. Plus, heroin helps me stay faithful. I'm a lot nicer to the missus and my daughter when I'm opiated. How can you fault something that makes you a better Christian? I go home and change the dressing on Betsy's tumors, then make sure my Liza is tucked nice and comfy in her crib. Liza's a grown young lady. In a crib. You don't think that hurts? You don't think any man might buckle, faith-wise, after the Lord deals him a hand like that? The cancer? The palsy?” His voice grew TV emotional. “Imagine a man seeing his pretty little girl lolling her head, looking up at him with those darling beautiful cow-eyes, not even capable of saying ‘Daddy.' ” Always a pause in the same place. “Well, I'm okay with it. Heroin and Jesus make it okay.”

This was the best part about working on the dating site. A lot of times what we did in the Creative Room was just talk. We could do all the writing we needed to do in half an hour. The days took on a rhythm. At least once or twice a day I'd find myself going back over Riegle's safe harbor clause. It was still remarkable to me. The nakedness of
forward-looking
.

I'd spent so much of my “professional life” trying to find a way to couch scary, nasty facts in some less-than-ball-clutching way. Riegle went one step further, just saying everything was great, making whole-cloth blue-sky projections out of whatever shabby numbers were being disguised as fiscal triumph. I had to admit, I was in awe. To say so much, in such a way, without saying anything. By now I'd memorized it.
There are a number of factors that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially, including, but not limited to our ability to: attract members; convert members into paying subscribers and retain our paying subscribers . . . maintain the strength of our existing brands and maintain and enhance those brands and our dependence upon the telecommunications infrastructure and our software infrastructure. . .

It was almost mystical. No matter what the subject at hand—in this case, the flesh-mortifying qualities of piercing your vein with a needle full of dirty opiate solvent—I found myself going back to the safe harbor clause.

Riegle changed the subject—this is how junkie conversations went—to his favorite pet peeve.

“You know what I hate? I hate those movies where people about to fix up shoot a little splash into the air.” Here he'd wield his needle, then point it down—not up—and spritz straight into the cotton, right in the spoon. “Waste not, want not. You just know that whoever wrote those shoot-in-the-air scenes was never a dope fiend. 'Cause if you're a dope fiend, you always know you're going to run out. And the last thing you're going to do, if you actually have a rig full of heroin, is squirt some of it up in the air, unless you plan on sucking your carpet fibers later. Which you will. When you need the stuff.”

Here Jay would jump in.

“Need ‘the stuff'? Oooh, Riegle, I love it when you go all Street Hype!”

But I'd always steal the conversation back. I felt like a little kid nagging his daddy to tell him his favorite story. I couldn't stop.

“Tell me again, how'd you come up with
forward-looking?”

“You're still obsessing on that? I keep telling you, all quarterly reports have fine print explaining, basically, that being optimistic is not the same as lying.”

“But it sounds like such bullshit. It doesn't even try
not
to sound like bullshit.”

“Exactly,” he'd say, voice lowering two registers by the time he eased the needle out of his arm. “Bullshit is okay if everybody agrees to believe it. That's what corporate reports do. I learned that in law school.”

“Wait. You went to law school?”

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. Anyway, I'm gonna keep my cotton here. You keep yours over there. I don't have a single disease. I don't even have cavities. But looking at you, no offense, I feel like I could get bad teeth even sitting next to you.”

“That's nice,” I said. “Thank you.”

I tried to play it off as good-natured office joshing, but I'd spent so much of my life trying to “look normal” in job situations—and I
was
normal, except for the heroin—that whenever he teased me I cringed. Not only because I hadn't been to a dentist for the greater part of ten years. The junkie mind-set was perpetual catastrophe. Things made you jumpy. But were you jumpy because you needed heroin? Or did you need heroin because you were jumpy?

Jay (ever-compassionate in Thy sight, oh Lord) always defended me from Riegle's mild attacks.

“Don't listen to Miss Jesus-pants,” he would butt in. When Jay got high he liked to put on his Enya CDs, which Pastor Bobb considered devil music. “We're all good soldiers here. No cause for Son-of-Godly snark.”

“You know Jay and me were bunkies,” Riegle piped up. “In college.”

“State College, as in the State of New York. Sing Sing.”

The day I found this out, before I could even register my surprise, Jay further lifted the top of my brain off, suggesting we knock over a pharmacy. I had him repeat himself three times to make sure he wasn't kidding. And when I finally did agree to listen, I expected him to punch me in the arm and say, “Gotcha!” Instead, he and Jay pulled up chairs around the snack table and peeled the lids back simultaneously on a pair of Dannon yogurts.