Read Online Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl - Free Book Online

rid of the buttons!
    It must have been my chortling—though I’m not usually a chortler—that made her whip around. We were the only two, in the highway darkness of the bus, who had our overhead on. “The fuck you doing?” she said. I saw her entire face full-on for the first time and thought the word “vulpine,” though I have never used it before or since. Little black-bagged fox eyes burned out through her black bangs like those of a wary prisoner peeking through the bars of a cell.
    â€œAre these all blank?” I asked her.
    She snatched the cards out of my hand without answering.
    I didn’t react. “No judgment, I’m just saying. You must know a lot of people with issues.”
    She blew the bangs out of her eyes and kicked her legs off the seat and onto the floor with what was either energy or violence. (I guessed you’d have to get to know her to find out which was which.) The soles of her boots made a sticky sound when she picked them up again after five seconds and folded herself back onto her seat. A smell came off her like carnival mustard, perspired-in leather, and dill. The scent was dark, possibly tainted. And did something to my heart the minute I breathed it, made me have to gasp for two breaths in a row, gave me a jolt in my testes that felt like love.
    I hovered, like some kind of zoner perv. When she finally looked up, her cracked-glass green eyes and giant pupils showed themselves then disappeared again, back to her notebook. Our eyes held long enough for me to study the bags beneath hers. Dark blue Samsonites, from debauchery or pain or just staying up late, like some Paris existentialist sandwiching Sartre and Camus in the forties. Of course, I was done. That was it. Those bags were like matching brands that made love and pity impossible to separate. I was not usually a hallucinator. But for one bright flash, headlights flooded the window and I made out words under each of her eyes. FUCKED UP under one, COME ON IN under the other. (A counselor once told me I was addicted to women who needed help. He sent me to SLAA. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Where addicts relapsed with other addicts in meetings. (A cringe across a crowded room . . .) Where there were women who needed help in ways I had never conceived of. I’d wandered in to experience the miracle of recovery, the terrible joy of “slipping,” and the liberation that comes right after both. Until you surrender, if you’re lucky, and you remember who’s holding the wheel. Let go, let God.)
    Go Greyhound and leave the driving to us!
    A jingle, for some reason, that reminded me of my all-time favorite pharma-slogan: At Parker-Stephenson, we make drugs for people who need them.
    I had an empathic moment, as I settled in beside her, where I felt my bus-mate’s internal struggle. Could sense her assessing. He’s an asshole, but he’s kind of an interesting asshole. Outside, we passed a neon Sleepy Bear in a nightcap, sleepwalking with his arms stretched out before him. The legendary Travelodge logo. MOTEL—18 MILES.
    â€œI don’t send these,” she continued, possibly deciding it was less awkward speaking to me than ignoring me the entire ride.
    â€œYou don’t send them. I get it. Because it is my fucking business, why do you have them?”
    â€œBecause I wrote them.”
    â€œYou wrote them?”
    Instant hostility. I was smitten. Another word I’d never used before. Wouldn’t go near. Actually kind of hate. Things were changing!
    â€œWhy? You don’t think I can write?”
    Something in my heart smoldered, though it may have been my left ventricle, set twitching by heroin depletion. Or an endocarditis flare-up, fallout from a long-ago case of cotton fever, when a fiber from the dirty Q-tip fluff I was sucking coke-and-dope through ended up in my heart. (My temperature spiked to 105. Nothing a bathtub full of ice cubes