Happy Mutant Baby Pills

Author:Jerry Stahl [Stahl, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Crime, Thrillers, General
ISBN: 9780062288042
Google: mjuvQ2JdDqgC
Amazon: 0061990507
Barnesnoble: 0061990507
Goodreads: 17349041
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-TWO

Fix

At Fix, when we finally got there, I could barely make out the fair-trade coffee list, because the image of my victim’s large-pored cheeks and shiny glasses overlaid the words. I brain-sprayed men’s room murder details over everything. My victim’s pleading eyeballs gazed up at me from rows of blueberry muffins and chocolate croissants. B-movie psychosis.

I went with Zoka from Seattle. Brew of the day! Nora ordered an iced triple Americano into which she ripped open and dumped an aquarium bottom of NutraSweet.

She must have been dumping her ninth packet when I asked her about it.

“Sweet tooth?”

“Aspartame. Donald Rumsfeld’s cash cow for Searle.” She gave a little half smile without looking up. “You should really know about excitotoxins. The side effects are amazing. Like mad cow but faster. Turns your brain to mush and fumes. The shit’s illegal in Europe but Americans can’t say no. Better a cerebral hemorrhage than cellulite thighs.” She raised her eyes and took in the legion of tattooed Hollywood creatives. Wallet chains clanked on chairs when they got up to plug in their Macs, grab more coffee, or talk out a scene. Inked up as they were—and they were all inked up—only Nora had that German shepherd, baring its fangs. Daddy’s girl. That was Nora’s and Nora’s alone. I watched her watching them until she suddenly turned to me and said, “What do you make of this scene, anyway?”

“Are you crazy?” I took a scalding gulp. “Living in Echo Park, banging out cool-ass webcasts, maybe being in a band?” I let my fingers lightly drag across my mouth, as if touching the great delight of the life I was badly describing. “Wiping soy foam from your near-beard after a sunset latte . . .”

“Is somebody just a little judgmental?”

Ooof! She was right. Who the fuck was I? King of Anal Leakage? In this world of alienation, was my dirty secret that I just wanted to belong? To be part of a tribe. Corny McCornball. The problem is that the junkie tribe is a whole other category. Even though, here in Echo Park (gentrified gang-land, more or less) I now owned the requisite face fur, my people were fiends, not hipsters. I could have been pigment-free at an albino-convention. It wouldn’t have mattered. This was Hollywood. These people wanted to be “in the room.” I never set foot in a room I did not want to crawl out of immediately. Because, call me sentimental, just being human feels like a front when what you are is a two-legged need machine.

But hey! The great thing about being a junkie? (Or a degenerate gambler, or drunk, etc.) It shrunk ambition down to manageable doses. Heroin made for mindful and effective ego-management. “God, just let me get through the next five minutes. . . . God, don’t let the fucking security guard wake up. . . . God, just don’t let that skeek with face sabs have AIDS. The problem now—heading into the coffee shop (which actually seemed pretty cool, half inside counter, half metal tables on a fly-plagued patio)—was that I was low on junk.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.