by Jerry Stahl
My logorrhea made me nervous. So did global warming, and I didn’t do much about that, either.
(In every apartment, home, or cell I’ve ever occupied, I had the same message to myself taped up over some sink: “SHUT UP ABOUT IT.”)
What had I done in the bus station? What was I doing now? Over the years, in my capacity as SESSIE, I had found myself reading books of quotes and epigrams. “Self-delusion is the key to happiness.” —Voltaire. That kind of thing. I kept them in the bathroom. (Bathrooms, for a junkie, are like church.) These comprised a kind of insight-lite, unearned wisdom in ADD-friendly chunks. Tweet-sized, it turned out.
Standing there—in a strange house, with a strange woman, watching her torment a strange man who, it now occurred to me, might not even be who we thought he was—it further occurred to me, This was my life. I heard skittering under the wooden floorboards and hoped it might be opossums. The babies were adorable. Cuter, for my money, than baby raccoons. Though they were probably rats.
Man! The only pictures I’d seen of the deputy sheriff, he had his face mask on. (Who knew how cute he was?) Which prompted me to mull on yet another gem from my toilet-side Book of Wise Quotations: “Murder is born of love, and love attains its greatest intensity in murder.” Attributed to Hemingway. By way of Werner Herzog? I couldn’t remember. They were both, in their way, heroic confections. The kind of people you want to believe in. Them being them makes us feel better about being us.
Though I’d spent more lost hours curled up with Morning Joe than For Whom the Bell Tolls. A book, if you know a bit about Hemingway, that always seemed kind of stagey. Manly mannish. The Papa movie I want to see is the one about his third son, Gregory, a she-male who—legend has it—bled out in a woman’s jail in Florida after a sex-change operation, wearing a party dress. By some accounts he’d actually changed his name to Gloria. Just so he could get back at Daddy when he died. Who wouldn’t?
TWENTY-FOUR
Taser Happy
How to put this? I began to love everything I didn’t know about Nora; in my experience, the second, deeper phase of, really, pardon my melodrama, “falling for somebody.” Loving the things that don’t add up, the missing years, the hinky bits. Which, if you are a stable, non-turmoil-driven type of human, makes no sense. Is actually disturbing. But you didn’t see my dream-date rejigger that Taser gun. Like a pro. See, there are so many things to be addicted to, why pretend you are addicted to dope? Come on! Why be so limiting? What dope fiends are really strung out on are situations. Generally, bad ones. Painful ones. Ones that, with no solutions that aren’t awful, can only be endured. And only with heroin. Create the need, supply the solution. That way dope is not just a habit. It’s a survival tool . . . Then again, maybe the core addiction is talking about addiction. Narco-narcissism. A habit that’s no fun for anybody.
After Susie shuffled off, Nora opened up about the niceties of Tasering. “Each time you fire, you have to wind up and repack the electrode wires. That’s the downside, and you have to stick in a new gas cartridge each time.” In another era she might have been describing how to bake a cherry pie. But not in this one.
Just then the deputy sheriff started to make noise. He’d been still, aside from his nasal mewling. I’d forgotten he was any more than furniture until Nora barked at him. “Shut it, pig-ass!” Then, brightening, she continued: “Susie left her panties.”
I hadn’t noticed, what with the armory of Amazon paramilitary accessories on hand to admire. (At what point, pardon my sidetrack, had civilization decided to sell face-scorching chemical sprays in the same venue as organic baby powder? How did the world get so wonderful so fast?) Nora shoved the noticeably damp skimpies in the deputy’s mouth and then stepped back to Taser him again.
“I know, I know,” she said. “Theoretically, I should be hitting him with gas canisters. Poetic justice. But gas canisters have a nasty habit of releasing gas. Not so great in a small room. So I went with Taser.”
“Nora,” I said, hearing how ridiculous the question sounded even as I uttered it, “you’re not really just a ripped-off greeting card writer, are you?”
“Is anybody just one thing? I got the idea at Occupy.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t get the idea until we got to LA? That wasn’t your plan all along?”
“I’m not telling you anything. You’re hearing things.”
She was right. What I was hearing was that I had somehow ended up with a mysterious junkie waif with iffy greeting card credentials who might have been black ops. What were the odds?
“Anyway,” Nora said, “I still have something I have to do. I mean, the main thing.”
“What’s that again?”
Changing the subject, she read from a square of print stamped on the butt of the Taser. “The purpose of the nonlethal weapon is not to inflict pain; it’s to avoid confrontation.” I restrained myself from saying I liked the writer’s style. Another doomed DeLillo with a day job.
“Mission accomplished.” Nora aimed me one of those dark half smirks that, for her, passed as a smile. Then she slipped out the fork she’d been keeping up her sleeve, stretched toward the cop, and planted it in his ribs. “Okay, he’s done.”
I thought about the coffee shop across the street. Imagined the legions of writers, paid and otherwise, who’d never even been bitch-slapped and were banging out action movies, thrillers, mysteries, violent crime fantasies of every stripe. Yet here was real-life terror: not just the muffled screams, soilage, and writhing of the shocked and re-shocked policeman, but the screaming in my own heart—which always beat faster the less heroin it had been fed—while I watched, and wondered, as the bard said, What the fuck?
Listen. Some people play sports and some people watch them. We grow up, here in America, watching death. Our favorite form of recreation. Death-watching. Violence-savoring. All Nora and I had done was turn professional. Join the big leagues.
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them the dark wood grain in the walls had begun to quiver. Nora shoved the panties deeper in the deputy’s mouth and zapped him again, on his testicles. This time, mysteriously, there was no blood, just instant, jellyfish-like puff. He breathed through his nose with what sounded like tremendous effort.
“Did you know octopi express mood by changing color?”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice astonishingly normal, at least to me. “It’s a hormonal thing.”
“I don’t think this is hormones,” she said, raising a hot pink faux-lighter in front of her and spraying an orange stream in the deputy’s open mouth. The pepper juice hit his gums with a soft sizzle.
This time I had to pull away. If he sneezed we’d both go blind.
Later, when Officer Pike went skunk and sprayed nonviolent protestors at UC Davis, I remembered Nora’s prescient spritz. At the time, all I said was “Jesus, baby, you’re giving him the combo platter.”
Nora wiped her eyes. “Tasers are more nineties. Like billy clubs. Rodney King shit. But I’m sentimental. And don’t call me baby.”
“My bad. Do people die with Tasering?”
“Down south. Mostly. Hang on.” I loved watching her concentrate, the way she chewed her lip, removing a bushy metallic claw from the deputy’s ballooning testicles, rewinding the connector wire. The deputy convulsed briefly, collapsed as if he’d had his plug pulled, then re-convulsed.
I looked away again, talking just to talk. “What do you mean, only down south? You mean, like, in the ball area?”
“Close. I mean in Texas. Some naked freak named Eric Hammock got shocked twenty times by cops in Fort Worth. He died in custody.” She fiddled with those bushy claws on the end of the Taser wire. “In South Carolina, Maurice Cunningham was Tased nonstop for two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Died of cardiac arrhythmia. Law enforcement always blames PCP, but the real blame is the Taser. He just lasted that long ’cause of the shit he was on.”
&nb
sp; I hadn’t realized the deputy was listening. That he could even hear. His face went slack, then he seized, then he went slack again. His pube hair had stopped smoking and he’d wet himself. He smelled like a burned baby toy.
“Pork roast,” Nora said, with no humor whatsoever.
After that we just stood there. Finally Nora broke the silence. “Sometimes I want a cigarette.”
I grunted agreement. I really wanted to ask how she’d become a Taser pro. But it seemed, I don’t know, wrong to keep chatting. Nora leaned over the deputy’s face and whispered, “I don’t want to talk about that. What I want to talk about . . . what I want to know? If I put a Taser to your eye, told you I’d pull the trigger unless you got on your fucking knees and sucked my partner off . . . what do you think you’d do?”
Another eternal question.
But was it political?
The deputy sheriff writhed. He moved only his head as Nora eased him off the bed. Onto the floor. Giving him the chance to crawl.
“All right, then, deputy, do a knee-walk.” To my horror, he started toward me. A lost manatee. Outside, an ice cream truck tinkled. The street echoed with a tinny, brain-scraping “To Dream the Impossible Dream.” Followed, inexplicably, by “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
“Now who’s the filthy whore?” Nora said. “Does that turn you on, Officer? Does it? Pussy-ass bitch! You like hearing that?”
The little yelps from his throat had gone all Blue Angel-y. I’d begun to worry about neighbors. “We have to get out of here. Somebody’s bound to, I don’t know . . . We should probably—”
“Right,” Nora said. “We should dress him.”
“Dress him?”
She nodded toward the stack of paramilitary gear. “Technically, you’d say accessorize. I’m not talking about clothes.”
As far as I was concerned, the whole situation had begun to curdle. “Nora, look at the guy, okay? His balls are the size of grapefruits. I can’t tell if he’s crying or his eyes are bleeding. You really want to—”
A knock on the back door stopped my whinging. “Hold that thought,” Nora said.
“You’re leaving?”
I was already paranoid. Now my paranoia had a scenario. The thought that she might leave and I’d be caught flat-footed with a sack-damaged cop and a Taser in my hand was more than I could handle.
Nora saw the look in my eyes and stopped. “Jesus-Pesus, relax, would you? We’re almost done.”
“We’re going to have to move the body.” I tried to keep my voice even. But my tongue got sockish, the socky feeling accompanied by sensations of dread and suicidal ideation. I react, therefore I am. I was so weirdly crazy about this person—but she scared the living piss out of me. At what point had true love become indistinguishable from a death wish? More importantly, when would I stop repeating the question?
“More like manipulate than move,” Nora said. Then she corrected herself, playing idly with the officer’s left ear. “Just help me pose him.”
“What?”
She put a finger to her lips—the one that just touched the riot cop’s scarlet lobe. She sniffed and twisted her lips up in calculation, like a sommelier putting on a performance. “Wait a minute . . .”
“Now what?”
I thought she was going to say something, make a pronouncement. Instead she left the room. Marched to the front door, singing like a housewife in a fifties TV show. “Coming!”
Alone with our captive, I felt a sudden sense of connection. We were, after all, two guys. The bond of manhood, such as it was.
For no reason beyond not wanting to keep staring at the deputy, I kneeled and picked his pants off the floor. Felt for the wallet. I saw him flinch. Doesn’t matter if you’re wide-eyed or in the depths of a shock-induced fear coma. You see somebody going through your shit, you react.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not going to steal your plastic and charge some dope rims.” I thought of the Prius. “On my car it wouldn’t matter.”
What I did, in fact, was check out his driver’s license and his Fraternal Order of Police card. Both of which bore the name Oswald Jesus Fernando Pessoa. Confirming the suspicions I couldn’t admit I had.
“Jesus, you’re not even him . . .”
Not only was our fried friend not from Oakland, he wasn’t even a real cop. He was LATP. Los Angeles Transit Police.
But I couldn’t focus on that. Couldn’t quell the stomach-clutching suspicion that, for the second time, I let myself be lured into a murder or, in this case, at least a Guantánamo-esque kidnapping. (Could you call it kidnapping when you didn’t take the victim anywhere? Is there a different name for that? Forced babysitting, with a side of imprisonment and torture? Oh man.)
I could feel the panic flip a switch in my mind. Heard my brain click into Pacifica Radio late-night discussion mode. Strangely, I never thought philosophically, except in panic situations, when reality was so brain-explodingly fucked that my mind began broadcasting some mash-up of Noam Chomsky, Alan Watts, and Gary Null, product of the countless nights I’d staggered through insomnia, letting KPFK in LA, WBAI in New York, or KPFA in San Francisco marinate my waking nightmares. Listen, it’s Alan Watts: Are men merely two-legged empires, dumb with exceptionalism and brute entitlement? Or are they fury-driven juntas and jihads, mobile terrorist cliques intent on destroying everyone who isn’t them? Is self-hate just narcissism with its pants on backwards? Or is narcissism just fascism made personal?
Watts liked to say he was a Buddhist who liked double martinis. Enough gin and anybody could be one with humanity.
TWENTY-FIVE
Sunshine and Buttercups
Without heroin, even sunshine and buttercups felt oppressive. And this—where I was now—was hardly buttercuppish.
Voices from the next room brought me back, over the muffled groaning of the shocked drooler in front of me; I felt the damp puke-inducing suction of my hand over his mouth. His lips pressed into my palm like pallid suckerfish. I thought my stomach was going to suicide out of my face . . . Have you ever been alone with a man you’ve just seen shot with something? Who isn’t dead but isn’t moving much? Who’s just . . . sort of . . . there?
Nora popped back into the bedroom, waving a pamphlet. “Jehovah’s Witnesses, look!” She read from the cover. “ ‘All Suffering Soon to End.’ I don’t know about you, but I feel better!”
She handed me the pamphlet. Cartoon seekers stared earnestly off the cover, walking into a bounteous cartoon valley. “I could have talked to those kids all day. I love their suits. But we’ve got work to do!”
What kind of woman could savage a man with 150,000 volts, then turn around and talk theology with thin-tied visitors, come to make known the wonder of Jehovah’s love?
My kind, apparently.
It all happened fast after that. I managed to get the tactical vest, riot helmet, and utility belt onto the weirdly buff but porcine naked body. Our guest did not seem to spare himself pies or barbells. I had to tell Nora that he might not even be Bergstresser after all. That, in fact, his name was probably Pessoa. But as soon as I opened my mouth, Nora cut me off. “Can you smell those scorched pubes?”
Hoping she wouldn’t say “I love the smell of scorched pubes in the morning,” I mumbled noncommittally, “Not really.”
Nora sniffed again. Instead of quoting Coppola, she said, “Well I can. I wouldn’t get near that pus nest without a Neosporin bath. Unfortunately all I have on me is Purell.”
“That’s okay.” I played my manly card. “Purell is like rubbing penicillin on your hand. It doesn’t actually do what you think it does.”
“It covers the smell better than penicillin.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Nora helped me yank the jumbo baloney arms and legs through the straps of his bulletproof vest. Our friend was not exactly lively, but he was
n’t catatonic, either.
“He may be in a shame coma,” I said. “I think I’ve seen that on Law & Order.”
“You watch that crap?”
“Just for the commercials,” I lied. Why tell her I needed to go numb sometimes, when drugs weren’t enough? With enough narcotics, you could learn things from Sam Waterston’s eyebrows.
Another fun fact! A while back, some DIY-ers attempted to Taser themselves, following the Internet-touted belief that it was a kind of at-home ECT. Do-it-yourself electroshock. For those seeking all the well-known benefits: relief from severe depression and a sense of baseless and short-term-memory-challenged well-being. Ironically, electroshock’s possible side effects were small potatoes compared to what could happen on its pharmaceutical cousins. What they used to call “chemical chains”: your stelazine, your thorazine, all the heavy ’zines.
There was some power drooling, involuntary twitches in hands and feet, even the odd bladder control adjustment—but no suicidal ideation, no sudden anger. (And if drooling, twitching, and pissing yourself don’t make you suicidal, then you know you’re cured.)
I realized I was babbling, but she seemed interested.
“I swear, if somebody had the money, I’d advise them to invest in an infomercial and sell home ECT kits.”
Nora raised her eyes from our friend on the floor. She adjusted her wig and dabbed foam from his mouth with Susie’s panties, after she had yanked them out of it.
“You’re serious?”
“Why not? I once did a promo for an electroshock clinic. It was a testimonial from a ‘satisfied customer’ on the other end of the treatment.”
“A real person?”
“Well, sort of. I lined up a perky ‘actor-impersonator’ type. She had that sort of early Goldie Hawn fizz.” I made my voice girly and gave her a sample: “I won’t lie, I thought ECT was just something from The Snake Pit, but then I heard my sister-in-law say it worked for her . . . Now I feel like life can be joyful again. Thank you, Dr. Mason! Then her kids come on, four, five, and six, all blond, in matching sweaters and holding hands. They chime in, in unison: Thank you, Dr. Mason, for giving us back our mommy. Then a big hug, and out. Cute as hell. Mason was the crook who ran the place. The kicker is, he wasn’t even a doctor.”
