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

couldn’t turn right around.) I’ve always had a dream of finding another soul I could share my life with. Another artist. But greeting cards! Maybe there was a benign force that ruled the universe.
    Or not.
    I asked her how she even got the idea and her tone shifted completely. She spoke almost shyly—“you really want to know?”—in an accent I couldn’t place. Maybe southern. Maybe Pittsburgh. I said I did, I wanted to know , and she gathered her black-jeaned legs back under the seam-ripped seat and started. Her voice was deep and throaty. Either from whiskey and cigarettes, in which case it was permanent, or maybe it was temporary, from heroin. An opiated croak.
    Smack shrinks your pupils the size of pinpricks. Super black. It’s like there’s an ant hole in each eyeball, right under the tombstone, but you never see any ants. They’re invisible. Sometimes it feels like they’re crawling into your eyes. On cocaine they crawl back out and burrow under your skin. Coke bugs! But when you’re dope-sick, or even just a little needy , your eyes go the opposite way. They pie-plate, widen right up to old-school acid size. Except it’s not from taking acid. It’s from not taking heroin—or whatever opiate du jour you were talking about. Or weren’t talking about, in my new friend’s case. Because, from the beginning, what she was talking about and what I thought she was talking about seemed to be circling each other. But that voice!
    â€œLike, somebody will ask me how I’m doing, okay, and every time I try to tell them, to really tell them, instead of laying out some happy horseshit, they say the same thing: Hang in there! Do you know how much I hate that? How fucking patronizing that is? But it’s like I don’t hate them , I hate myself , for letting myself think I could trust them. You know what I mean? Sometimes people even send that card, the one that actually says Hang in there! You know, with the picture of the cute kitten hanging on to a branch? It makes me want to puke.”
    As she spoke she broke a Necco Wafer I’d given her between her thumbs, into smaller and smaller pieces. A feat, I realized when I tried it later, that required a level of tensile power I didn’t have.
    â€œBy the way, I kind of invented this whole style,” she said after a little while.
    â€œWait. What? Hang in there, baby ? But I, like, remember them from the eighties. Hold old were you, five?”
    I didn’t want to call her a liar. I wanted to believe everything.
    â€œWell, reinvented. The concept, I mean. I, like, gave them a new iteration. It’s a long story, okay?” Now she sounded hostile again, like she had at the beginning. “The point is, I got ass-screwed out of the credit. Out of the money, too.”
    Iteration? Ass-screwed? I already loved her vocabulary.
    â€œThat sucks,” I trotted out.
    She glanced—maybe glared—straight up at me through her bangs and spat out her words. “You think?”
    T here’s a special tang to long-distance bus air. Low-end life and death. Human detritus, confined night-stinks, exhaustion, and plain exhaust. Someone had either passed gas in a nearby seat or passed on earlier in the evening and begun to rot.
    I turned around and saw no one awake. Then noticed a shiny pair of aviator glasses a few rows back. Facing me. What little light there was, from the passing cars and roadside lamps, flared on and off the lenses. There’s something scary about glasses, when you don’t see the eyes. Spectacles had a large square shaved head, trim goatee, and—strangest of all—suit, shirt, and tie, not the least bit loosened. When he saw me he crossed his large hands carefully and laid them on his chest, both forefingers pointing up and out in my direction, here’s-the-steeple style. A gesture meant to convey something, I was certain, I just wasn’t sure what. The