Happy Mutant Baby Pills (8 page)

THIRTEEN

Bus Station Toilet Killer

Our neighbor one stall over, who sounded like he'd once had his throat cut, kept repeating, “Co'se ah got
me
a phone, suckah. Whatchu think, ah'm talkin' to y'all on mah dick?” I had the feeling he was a white man.

Everything I didn't want to think was backing up. Was I doing this for love? Or was I doing this because I'd started doing it, and it felt even worse to stop than to keep going; because I knew, if I wanted to see her again, I'd have to do it. Because I wanted love. Why did it stink worse after he flushed? Somewhere there was a metaphor, but who had the time?

“Come on, boy!” Words skritched out of him. Like a trumpet player playing a mouthpiece. “Do you
know
her? She could be troubled. I got a daughter myself . . .” His voice trailed off.

I reached past him and he juked. Like I was about to re-gouge him, instead of what I was really going to do. “Flush again,” I said. He did, over his own shoulder, an extraordinarily Plastic Man–like maneuver, without taking his eyes off me. I half-expected an elbow in the mouth, and braced myself. But he just pleaded some more; this man with thighs like barkless sequoias. Now I wished I
had
looked—maybe he was gelded. But what did
that
look like?

Aaaggh.

“Before you showed up she kept staring at me,” said the man I'd just stabbed in the head three times. With my killer paper clip. The only weapon I had, which he knew I was crazy enough to use, to draw blood. Even if he knew jiujitsu, he knew he couldn't make a move without a stab in the eye. (At that moment, I saw myself on film. A hard guy.) But that wasn't it. (Of course.) He was not still there because he was scared of me. He was there because he was concerned. Which was much more startling. And weirdly embarrassing. All at the same time. Because he had empathy. For me. It was like the end of
Gandhi
, when Sir Ben Kingsley forgives the man who shot him. “Son. I swear on the eyes of my children, only thing I know about that gal is that we came in on the same dang bus.”

“You came to kill her,” I said. How much did I want to believe? Need to.

His mouth formed an oblong O, and that's when I noticed the caterpillar mustache. Yellow gray. A little lip-sweater. Forget jaundice. Now I wondered if he was a Jackson White. One of those Jersey Pine Barrens people. I'd read about them. They had yellowy skin.

I think, looking back, that what spooked him was realizing I believed what I was saying. And if I did, if I was
that
off, then there was no choice. He had to just try to get by me. Maybe he
was
trying to get by me. Okay, maybe he was trying to kill me. (Later I found a knife in his shoe. He didn't go for it. But still . . . ) He said, “May I be excused now?”

I wouldn't step out of the way. He tried to get by and I whipped up the now-bent but surprisingly unbroken paper clip. I didn't stab him so much as he jammed his head onto the thing. His left temple absorbed the wire. At just the right spot. It just went in, all the way to my fingertips. (I thought, inappropriately, of the phrase “balls deep.”) There's always some secret meridian, the one movie martial artists tap to kill enemies with lethal stealth. (Like the five-point-palm exploding-heart technique, or whatever Tarantino called it, in
Kill Bill
. Daddy David Carradine was more upset that the sensei had shown it to his babymama, Uma Thurman, than the fact that she was going to use it against him. Families!)

Remarkably, there was no blood. He just slumped over. But not all the way. Then he coughed softly, covering his mouth—his last gesture oddly genteel, considering what was going on in the rest of his body. In movies, killers and cops always touch the neck to see if there's a beat. I didn't touch him.

I wanted to feel something. I mean, after what I'd done. But really it was like I'd gone from watching tennis on TV to picking up a racket and playing. I'd gone pro. Crossed from the American pastime of watching people killing people to killing someone myself. At least I wasn't just another schmoe in front of the TV.

I took his wallet to make it look like a robbery.
Double Nuggets!
But I killed him for her. That much I knew. Just like I knew this was a thought I never wanted to think again; I needed to concentrate on what this got me—not what it took away. (I'm a murderer? Really? A thought you don't want to think. Unless you're on
Lockup
, on MSNBC weekends. And want to impress the audience.)

I was hooked. And heroin wasn't even the problem. (No, the problem, apparently, was that every line I wrote sounded like a movie trailer.)

Still. They say a jolt of energy rushes from the victim the instant they're killed, right into the killer. A rush supposedly stronger than crank and crack combined. It had something to do with Bordos and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But I guess I was too dead to feel it.

Does everybody have a dark truth? A thought they don't want to think? That thinks
them
? If you watch the Lifetime network, do you become the Lifetime network?

I stood up and the room began to spin. (It's a cliché, but it happens.) For a second I forgot my victim.
There's
a word you want in your curriculum vitae. Had I gone this far in life without leaving victims? Or was it just that they weren't dead? I braced myself, pressing my hands against the strangely moist wood stall to keep from whirling down.

Had I just killed somebody? The jolt came like the boom after lightning. Count to five for every mile. The stall slammed into me and I got an icy shiver down to my prostate. Maybe this was the alleged death rush, just a little delayed

Still.

It felt good to be crazy for a reason. It felt rational. It was a relief. Almost a perfect moment, in the Hemingway sense, except that, me being me, I had to pee. (I know my liver is “compromised,” so my kidneys “do double duty.” Ever read a dialysis brochure?
The kidneys are responsible for filtering waste products from the blood. Dialysis is a procedure that is a substitute for many of the normal duties of the kidneys.
) So I did something maybe worse than murder. Not that I intentionally desecrated a dead man's body. He didn't feel like a corpse yet. Later I found out he was a bus driver. Riding back after a run. Deadheading.

Pee-wise, I'd reached red alert. The sweating and panting level. Where you hope you don't run into anybody you know because you know you look insane, hopping by with a wave because you really have to go.

This is when I did have an Out of Body–slash–Reality Crime Show moment. Except instead of looking down from the ceiling and seeing myself, I saw the reenactment, starring an actor who tried to tell himself this was almost like real acting. I imagined the camera on the guy playing “me,” then I had a flaming sword of an insight. This is what I was: I was the writing equivalent of a reenactment actor. Were all the side effects on bottles—unexplained emotions, odd physical manifestations—like my own serial novella?

I'd hoped—to be honest—that murder would obliterate lesser obsessions. But it was just the opposite. Instead, murder became the thing I could not think about. In fact—didn't see this coming—I discovered that the only way to banish a truly horrible obsession (to stop perseverating, in the language of the trade) was to find something more heinous to obsess about.

I
could not delude myself into thinking that describing side effects or composing medical and sex-toy copy was anything like real writing. Like it was some hipster thing. (I knew what was in the mail: I would lie in bed with my eyes open at feel-like-shit o'clock. Imploring myself.
Do not think about
Double Indemnity
!
If I closed my eyes, Nora's face would superimpose itself on Barbara Stanwyck's. Except Barbara Stanwyck at least pretended to be love-struck and sultry. Nora was hot by default. She went to the opposite field. She gave the impression there were great secret depths of hotness within her. But she wasn't giving it up. I saw my future and I didn't care. Nose pressed to the glass of love. Trapped outside, then trapped inside.

Another night terror. Was little Lloyd maybe just in love with longing? Just to have an emotion? The right emotion can haul you out of a habit. If you really feel it, just wanting to fuck somebody bad enough to stop heroin makes stopping heroin possible. It's not really planning ahead. It's like Gerald McBoing-Boing drawing a hole, then jumping in it. Does anybody remember Gerald McBoing-Boing? I imagined not just fucking but being with Nora, and that got my arrhythmic heart pounding even harder. More arrhythmically. (Street drugs were different. Nobody needed to publish a list of cocaine's side effects. Wondering if you were having a heart attack was the whole point.)

All this I thought—
feel
like I thought—in a jumble as I banged out of the stall. The Sink Queens had departed. I remember staggering past an impeccably styled Hispanic man, tie tucked between his shirt buttons as he applied blue-black shoe polish to his receding pompadour. When I looked back, from the door, he was washing the black off his hands. I thought, with a pang of compassion,
If it rains, he's fucked.
At least he had a reason to live in Los Angeles.

I
was an idiot when I banged into the station's men's room. I was a murderer when I staggered out. (Not that one trumps the other, or that they're mutually exclusive.) Endorphins overwhelmed me. But that might not have been the thrill of murder. That might have been relief from having peed. I'd had to go so badly my knees were shaking. I had to pee a lot. The aforementioned Flomax was indicated, but (occupational hazard) I knew too intimately the things that could happen if you took it. I stopped, tried to take an honest breath, and then heard, in Bill Kurtis reenactment-sequence voice-over:
To his friends he was known as a quiet, determined industrial writer. To the police, and the public at large, he was soon to be known as the BSTK. The Bus Station Toilet Killer
.

FOURTEEN

Nora Funk

It was dusk when we left Union Station: the thirty-eight minutes when LA is actually pleasant. We didn't speak for a while. Until my companion in death piped up. “You know,” she said, as if rewarding me with something of herself, “my name is actually Nora Funk. No, really. My father's name was Funk. He was a manic-depressive shit, and this didn't make him any happier. But he'd never change it. Too depressed . . .
‘Hey, do you smell something funky?
' Really great, growing up with that.”

I was so moved by this, this little bit of human conversation (as if what had just happened hadn't) that I could barely speak. Instead I just held her hand. And I'm not a hand-holder.

For no reason we headed to Spring Street. A long walk, in silence after that. “Did you?” she finally began. But she didn't need to ask. I didn't need to answer. We both knew.

Neither of us looked back. Like Lot and his wife leaving Sodom. Or was it Gomorrah? Either way, neither of us turned into pillars of salt. Though I won't lie, the thought crossed my mind—maybe instant salt pillar was not a bad way to go.

It was only by chance that we ended up at City Hall, in front of which, in a downtrodden not-quite-park area, a hundred or two buzzed silhouettes bumped and hopped around a drum circle. Nora and I strolled past the drums to a kind of public chat-fest—by the City Hall steps—on the subject, it took a minute or to discover, of Middle-Class Debt Forgiveness. At some point Nora had taken my arm. The thrill of her touch dizzied me. The pleasure was almost embarrassing. Yet I felt like I'd be giving up all my power to even acknowledge it. The speaker, a teachery, thin-haired white man, sitting cross-legged in jeans, crocs, and sun hat, kept punching his fist into his hand. “We need to get a plank together, people, or we will squander the moment.” The human microphone (as I soon learned it was called) picked up his words. Repeated them: “We need to get a plank together, people, or we will squander the moment.”

The speaker waited patiently for the echo to die. Then spoke another sentence. He had a way of hitting certain words,
plank
,
debt
,
squander
, so you knew exactly what the “take-away” was. Not that everybody was taking it away. The mood was one of festive menace. The sky had that chemical pink flush it got sometimes before dark. (I remember reading once that, before the death camps, when Nazis had to just drive around gassing Jews and gypsies in the backs of trucks, with hoses running from the exhaust pipe to the back where the people were, they called the corpses “tarts,” because their faces turned scarlet, as if lipsticked, after they died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The sky over Los Angeles at certain times blasted the same quality. Poisoned to death but pretty. When ugly would have been so much more appropriate. And less disturbing.)

Someone in a Noam Chomsky mask under a black zip-up hoodie kept interjecting the words “fuck jerky” into the debt-relief presentation. Eliciting a wan smile from the cross-legged speaker, who said “I understand” in Chomsky-man's direction, and then launched wearily back into debt forgiveness and infrastructure-investment job solutions. The crowd turned and waved their hands angrily in his direction. “Self-censorship is not self-censorship” is how the professor wrapped up. “Why don't we think about that?”

The human microphone repeated this, and Security, a large-shouldered Latina with flat Mayan features, led ur-Chomsky off to one side, leaving him with a pat on the back.

I had not, at that time, even heard of Occupy Wall Street. This was its early days, and I wasn't exactly up on the news. Then the Chomsky guy ran up to me. “Hey, Lloyd! Lloyd the Roid, is that you?”

I recognized the voice. Adenoidal, snarkastic, but kind of pleady and needing-to-be-liked at the same time. With a Pittsburgh accent. “Harold?”

“Lloyd the Roid,” he repeated.

Harold was an old side-effects pal and junkie (maybe ex-junkie; maybe, people can change, right?). I'd heard he had somehow broken into TV. We weren't close, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be the person Harold knew. Me, as I was, instead of the new, still uncomfortable, post-murder me.

Harold prattled nonstop as we turned onto Fifth and Main, where the tents looked more ragged and improvised then the ready-mades in Occupy LA. At one time you could buy a human soul on Fifth and Main. Never mind the Mexican tar and fish scales, as old-time crackheads referred to their brain-crusher of choice.

Harold lifted the mask. Without it, he looked as he had always looked, like a fluey Orlando Bloom. Still talking. (The way he was talking: fast, flicking spittle, mouth loose at the corners, I began to suspect he wasn't ex-everything.) He had theories, too. “No one at Occupy opted for refrigerator boxes. You notice? That's the difference, see? On Skid Row they do what they
have
to do. Back there”—he thumbed over his shoulder, toward City Hall—“those kids do what they
want
to do. Sleeping bags? That's really being down with the people.”

“Just 'cause they're getting laid,” Nora shrugged, “doesn't mean they're not serious.”

I watched her as I had been watching her, wanting to shake her, shout in her face.
Do you know what I just did for you? I FUCKING KILLED A MAN!
After, I might have added, standing there while my victim took a dump. One more thought to block. Along with one I was already wrestling with: were there surveillance cameras in the bathroom? I'd made sure to close the stall door behind me so that, to the casual traveler in need, it just looked like the stall was occupied. I blinked back the memory as we walked together. The questions. The turmoil. Why it was troubling that there was no blood. Had I pricked some life-sustaining cerebral bubble, bloodless and fatal? Did his memories vanish when I paper-clipped his brainpan? If so, maybe I should take a stab at my own.

There was a minute there when I honestly believed I was beyond heroin. I had a reason not to use, because of love. But because of love—when had
this
melodrama set in?—I had done something that made heroin necessary. If it wasn't Shakespearean, maybe there was after-school special potential. Or at least a cocktail napkin, my favorite pre-Reddit content delivery engine.

Harold must have been talking the whole time. But I tuned back in as we walked away from the enclave of protest and waded deeper into Skid Row. Now, he told us, he was part of the Bruckheimer team. JB maintained a phalanx of consultants, all, he sniffed, “suckling at the teat of show business.” At first his floral hard-guy style rang TV schizophrenic. But he made sense. “Ex-cops, ex-DEA agents, ex-coroner's assistants, ex-you-name-its, these guys are all on the payroll. A writer has to write a kidnap-the-baby scene, you bring a guy in there who's done baby kidnappings. Maybe you bring the baby. You have to understand movie and TV execs.” He went on, leading us from City Hall around the block, where he flagged over a squat Cholo, who looked right and left and plucked a few spit-sopping balloons out of his mouth. “Showbiz guys just want to be in a room with somebody who was once in a room with somebody real. Whole lot of law enforcement and military bag the government pay grade to come and be experts in Hollywood. Drink with the stars.”

“We don't drink,” Nora announced. I'd only known her since Tulsa, and I could already tell when she didn't like people by the sneer in her voice when she talked to them. And I heard that sneer when she talked to everybody. Including, half the time, me. We passed a soiled refrigerator box, caved in on one corner, with screams coming from it. No one seemed to care. Nora made as if to stop and I took her arm, not roughly, but not casually, either. Like I knew my way around. Like I was some kind of Skid Row pro.

“Oh, honey, are we protecting me from these dirty men?”

I didn't mind the insults from Nora. Like I say, I had feelings for her. Though not having had feelings for a while, I wasn't sure, at first, what they were.